Dead Letters to Nietzsche, or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy (Series In Continental Thought)

SERIES

IN

CONTINENTAL

Editorial

THOUGHT

Board

Ted Toadvine, Chairman, University of Oregon Elizabeth A. Behnke, Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body David Carr, Emory University James Dodd, New School University Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University Jose Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University! Joseph J. Kockelmans, Pennsylvania State University William R. McKenna, Miami University Algis Mickunas, Ohio University J. N. Mohanty, Temple University Dermot Moran, University College Dublin Thomas Nenon, University of Memphis Rosemary Rizo-Patron de Lerner, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Lima Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg Universitat, Mainz Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy Elizabeth Str6ker, Universitat Kdlnf Nicolas de Warren, Wellesley College Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University I n t e r n a t i o n a l Advisory

Board

Suzanne Bachelard, Universite de Parisf Rudolf Boehm, Rijksuniversiteit Gent Albert Borgmann, University of Montana Amedeo Giorgi, Saybrook Institute Richard Grathoff, Universitat Bielefeld Samuel Ijsseling, Husserl-Archief te Leuven Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University Werner Marx, Albert-Ludwigs Universitat, Freiburgt David Rasmussen, Boston College John Sallis, Boston College John Scanlon, Duquesne University Hugh J. Silverman, State University of New York, Stony Brook Carlo Sini, Universita di Milano Jacques Taminiaux, Louvain-la-Neuve D. Lawrence Wiederf Dallas Willard, University of Southern California

Dead Letters to Nietzsche; or, the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy

JOANNE FAULKNER

OHIO

o m v E o s i n POESS

»inm

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 www.ohioswallow.com © 2010 by Ohio University Press All rights reserved To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax). Printed in the United States of America Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper °° ™ 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

54321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Faulkner, Joanne. Dead letters to Nietzsche, or, The necromantic art of reading philosophy / Joanne Faulkner. p. cm. — (Series in continental thought; 38) "Earlier versions of some of the material in this book have been published in the form of articles"—Acknowledgments. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8214-1913-7 (he : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-8214-4329-3 (electronic) 1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. 2. Subjectivity. I. Title. II. Title: Dead letters to Nietzsche. III. Title: Necromantic art of reading philosophy. B3317.F337 2010 193—dc22 2009053611

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Quickened and the Dead

vii i

i

n 12

Ontology for Philologists: Nietzsche, Body, Subject "Be Your Self!": Nietzsche as Educator The Life of Thought: Nietzsche's Truth Perspectivism and the Will to Power Of Slaves and Masters: the Birth of Good and Evil Moments of Excess: the Making and Unmaking of the Subject

2 Lacan, Desire, and the Originating Function of Loss The Word that Sees Me: The Nexus of Image and Sign The Nothing as the Reverse Side of Lacan's Mirror Nietzsche Is Dead, Long Live Nietzsche: In Memory of Paternal Ghosts 3 "The Insiders": Nietzsche's Secret Teaching and the Invention of "the Philosopher of the Future" Finding One's Home in the Nothingness of Nietzsche's Text Nietzsche's Excessive Demand and the Question of the Adulterous Queen's Desire High and Low: the Hierarchical Structure of Nietzsche's Texts Inside and Outside: Nietzsche "Incorporated"; or, Who Incorporates Whom in the Act of Reading Nietzsche? The Father's Indulgence of the Prodigal Son: Ambiguity and the Limits of "the Position" 4

The Contagion of Affect in Nietzsche: Klein, Krell, Bataille Doing Time with Melanie Klein: Renouncing "the Bad Breast," Mourning the Loss of "the Good Breast"

15 23 30 35 37 43 57

61 64 69 77 85 90 95 96

"Motivating this Writing . . . Is a Fear of Going Crazy": How Klein Might Read Georges Bataille Sur Nietzsche David Farrell KrelPs "Novel" Approach to Reading Nietzsche 5 Family Romances and Textual Encounters: Sarah Kofman Reading Nietzsche Reading Nietzsche I: Explosions Autobiography and Autobiography: Killing with Words in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat Reading Nietzsche 11: he Mepris des juifs— Nietzsche, Les Juifs, UAnti-Semitisme 6 The Vision, the Riddle, and the Vicious Circle: Pierre Klossowski's Reading of Nietzsche's Sick Body On the Continuity and Disjunction between the Body and Language Exquisite Delirium: The Thought of Eternal Return The Conspiracy of Philosopher-Villains: Nietzsche-Klossowski-Sade From Cannibalism to Voodoo: The Creation and Control of the Subject of Nietzsche's Writing Notes Bibliography Index

103 in

124 127 131 141

149 151 156 168 176 187 200 207

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Earlier versions of some of the material in this book have been published in the form of articles, and I gratefully acknowledge the assistance I received from the journal editors and anonymous readers who contributed to the improvement of this work, through their advice and commentary. The articles in question are: "'Keeping It in the Family': Sarah Kofman Reading Nietzsche as a Jewish Woman," Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 23[i] (January-March 2008): 41-64; "The Vision, the Riddle, and the Vicious Circle: Pierre Klossowski Reading Nietzsche's Sick Body through Sade's Perversion," Textual Practice 21 [1] (March 2007): 43-69 (at www.informaworld .com); "The Body as Text in the Writings of Nietzsche and Freud," Minerva 7 (November 2003): 94—124. I would also like to acknowledge the Institute for Advanced Study at La Trobe University, Melbourne, for their Postgraduate Writing-up Award, which I received in 2006 to support the development of my book proposal; and the Killam Trust for awarding me the Izaak Walton Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta, which supported the writing up of the manuscript. I wish to extend my heartfelt gratitude to my doctoral supervisor, Philipa Rothfield, whose thoughtful engagement with my ideas, pastoral support, rigorous interrogations, and continuing friendship have sustained this project. I am indebted to George Vassilocopoulos for reading and commenting on an early draft of the entire manuscript, and Matthew Sharpe and Ashley Woodward for their valuable feedback on drafts of chapters. Thanks also to David McNeill for allowing me to access some of his unpublished writing, and for provoking a revision of my thinking about the relation between "master" and "slave" morality in Nietzsche's work; and to Daniel Smith, for providing me with an advance copy of his Diacritics article, and prior to that with speaking notes for a paper he delivered in Sydney in 1998, which were

VIII

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

invaluable to me while working through Klossowski's somatic vocabulary. Thank you to the postgraduate community in Philosophy and Gender, Sexuality and Diversity Studies, at La Trobe University, to whom versions of chapters were presented as papers for their colloquia. I am also grateful to Daniel Conway, Rosalyn Diprose, and David Pettigrew for their generous support of this work in doctoral-thesis form, as its examiners, and later as mentors. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, best friend, and tireless reader and supporter of my work, Peter Chen, without whose love, forbearance, and dependable parenting to our children, this book would not have seen its way to completion.

INTRODUCTION

THE QUICKENED AND THE DEAD

Are our most violent poltergeists Books? gnashing their shelves smashing things in the dark they leave a greenish tombish smell on our reading fingers they make us musty and bereft. —Dorothy Porter1 More than most philosophers, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche commands a following of readers who attempt, each in his or her own manner, to perpetuate his legacy. Many of these thinkers have dedicated a great deal of their lives not only to reading and interpreting Nietzsche's texts, but also attempting to actualize "the event" his writings only envisage: the revaluation of values, wherein philosophers forge their truths from strength, rather than in the spirit of life-negation. Nietzsche's writings are attractive to contemporary philosophers for a number of reasons, each of which reflects a different interpretation of what it is to be a contemporary philosopher; or more specifically, a philosopher of Nietzsche's future. Nietzsche is readily appropriated by conservative philosophers, who identify "the leveling" of culture with the attempt to improve access to education for women, ethnic minorities, and those who are otherwise systematically disadvantaged.2 There is thus a conservative strain within Nietzsche's work—for instance, his appeal to Greek culture and Roman Imperialism3—which clearly resonates with an intolerance for the ideal of "equality for all" that many contemporary academics, indeed, many Nietzscheans, would laud.

INTRODUCTION

2.

Nietzsche's "perspectivism" attracts a different constituency of lessconservative readers, attempting to make room for a polyvalent conception of truth in the wake of the collapse of a singular (biblical) authority through which knowledge is grounded. Indeed, in the light of his truth perspectivism, Nietzsche is often remembered as the grandfather of postmodernism by both foes and advocates of this new creed. Thinkers of the Left (most notably the French philosophers Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault) have been assiduous scholars of Nietzsche, drawing from his critique of the metaphysics of presence—this in spite (or perhaps because) of the fact that Nietzsche roundly criticized Socialism, anarchism, and democracy, in favor of a new "cosmopolitan" politics. Surprisingly, for many acquainted with Nietzsche, in recent years some feminists have also utilized his critique of Liberalism in order to promote a "Feminism of difference," 4 which would operate beyond an essentializing discourse on "Woman," or the assumption of a victim status. 5 In the background of the reader's engagement with Nietzsche lurks the Nazi appropriation of his texts: the justification of antiSemitism and a fascist style of government that, in the early part of the 20th century, drew upon Nietzsche as one of its key intellectual figures.6 Undoubtedly, each of these interpretations has a foundation in Nietzsche's text, and so can be elaborated with reference to it. The question remains, How does Nietzsche appeal to so many, with such diverse—in some cases even opposed—interests? And (how) are his readers able to keep their own concerns separate from, and unpolluted by, the threads within Nietzsche's writing that promote a view they would oppose? especially that "dark art" of Nietzschean scholarship, which—however easily it is now denounced—once used his thought to support National Socialism. Since his death over a century ago, Nietzsche has drawn a following that would be the envy of any philosopher, and renown that crosses disciplinary boundaries, extending even beyond the academy. Many of Nietzsche's readers feel themselves sharing an intimacy with him through his writing; that his words appeal to them personally, even exclusively. What is it about Nietzsche's philosophy that generates these effects upon his readers, and allows him to gain a purchase upon them? And how is his text able to attract such a diversity of interlocutors? Nietzsche's philosophy must be read in the context of the profound effect it exerts upon his most committed readers: those who see themselves to fulfill a role that his text indicates, charged with responsibility for nurturing his philosophical and cultural project to its fruition. This book seeks to examine precisely how Nietzsche's reader comes to

INTRODUCTION

3

form an attachment to his texts, to the extent even of becoming his champion against "misinterpretation." Significantly, in virtue of this connection with the reader, Nietzsche's writing enacts what psychoanalytic theory attempts merely to explain: the subject's assumption of its social function. Whereas a growing body of literature charts Sigmund Freud's conceptual debt to Nietzsche, 7 little has been written about what this influence can tell us about Nietzsche's

philosophy. We can read therein precursors to Freud's under-

standing of the unconscious, repression, sublimation, the superego, and the importance of dreams. Yet reading beyond this catalogue of concepts, we find that Nietzsche—always well aware of rhetorical strategy and his engagement with the reader—employed these insights in his writings and did not simply describe or prefigure them. Moreover, alongside his musings about will to power and its vicissitudes, Nietzsche also observed human relationships, albeit in quick aphorisms that are often treated as asides rather than as key to his philosophical approach and message. When he writes in Human, Too Human,

All

"Everyone bears within him a picture of woman derived from

his mother," 8 for instance, Nietzsche calls upon us to reflect not only upon his life or our own, but on the very conditions through which subjectivity comes to be. That the subject is not born of a vacuum, but rather has a prehistory and a relation to others (principally their parents) that characterizes how they are then able to engage with the world, is a knowledge that Nietzsche brings to the writing of his text: not only in terms of its content, but his mode of address to the various subjects who come to read his philosophy. In the light of this, psychoanalytic theory will be drawn upon throughout this study in order to interrogate the relation Nietzsche devises between his text and its reader. Indeed, it will be argued that the relation to Nietzsche is often so pregnant with affect because Nietzsche recapitulates for the reader's subjectivity a role initially played by one's parents. Thinking through Nietzsche's relation to the reader, functionally, as a parental relation allows us to account for the sense of ambivalence often felt by his readers. Who has not cringed upon hearing his or her father or mother speak out of turn, and struggled to establish a distance from these first objects of love? There are, likewise, moments for many of Nietzsche's readers when—notwithstanding their attraction to his writing—he strikes a sour note: through an unkind word about feminists or Jews or vegetarians, for instance. Furthermore, a foremost goal for Nietzsche is to give birth to philosophers in whom he engenders, like any good parent, a range of values, truths, and affects. Reading Nietzsche in terms of the parental role thus helps to explain how the relation to his

INTRODUCTION

4

text comes to be so abiding and formative for the reader, and particularly where they would seem to have good reason to be repelled by him. Curiously, Nietzsche's philosophy especially attracts those whom it expressly excludes: women and feminists, Jewish scholars, and theorists of the political Left. I will argue that such exclusion is in fact key to how Nietzsche's text is able to include (or "interpellate") 9 the reader within its terms. Psychoanalytic theory of the kind elaborated after Freud by Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and, in recent years, Slavoj Zizek, is especially pertinent to examining the intersubjective dynamics of exclusion and interpellation. Drawing upon this theory, then, I will argue that the psychodynamics of inclusion and exclusion—constitutive of subjectivity, and first enacted within the family—is masterfully reiterated by Nietzsche in crafting his address to the reader. The work of exclusion in Nietzsche's philosophy participates in a broader dynamic between readers and texts, which we can figure as a relation of mourning. After Barthes, 10 Foucault, 11 Derrida, 12 and Plato, 13 it is understood that writing is experienced in the absence of its author; and the act of reading involves a necromantic art of resurrecting the author—the particular interpretation constructing a presence in lieu of them actually being able to speak for themselves. Nietzsche's writing exploits this relation of reader to text, by amplifying this sense of loss. Stating that he was "born posthumously," Nietzsche pronounces himself dead to the reader, so that reading his philosophy is tinged with an affect of grief. Hence the title Dead Letters to Nietzsche. The Merriam-Webster's

Collegiate Dictionary offers two

explanations for the expression dead letters: the first refers to a law that "has lost its force or authority without being formally abolished." This meaning, however, belies the real force of the dead letter, which is only apparently dead, but in fact lies in wait for the transgressor, continuing implicitly to check the actions of those whom it proscribes. As with, for instance, the sodomy laws, the dead letter is kept on the books as a reminder to some of their marginality with respect to the rest. Thus, it continues to exert the force of interpellation, and is by no means truly, but only nominally "dead." The second sense of the term refers to "a letter that is undeliverable and unreturnable by the post office." Not only does the dead letter fail to reach its destination, but it also cannot be returned to its sender: it has no place, and is able only to circulate aimlessly. Both definitions apply to the reader's relation to Nietzsche, not only because his text is sown with ambiguously empowered permissions and penalties to subjugate its reader, but also, the reader's address to Nietzsche must always miss its mark. Nietzsche has no fixed address, no position to

INTRODUCTION

5

which he can be brought to account. The best the commentator can do is to mark the address as poste restante, for there are fleeting moments when the interpretation appears "to reach" Nietzsche: to elucidate something of his meaning. Yet, as I will argue, the purpose of his text is principally to incite the reader's attachment, and in order to achieve this it is the reader who, like the dead letter, is displaced: or moreover, must find her or his position in relation to Nietzsche by being in two places at once—both inside and outside, excluded by, his text. In a second sense, the theme of death suffuses the reader's relation to Nietzsche insofar as she or he invokes his name to her or his own ends, thus seeking "to raise him from the dead" in order to do one's bidding. To this extent, again, reading philosophy can be seen as a variety of the necromantic arts. The reader does not simply address a text—a particular configuration of words on a page—but also the phantom author he or she believes to have preceded the text, and who equally is generated by an engagement with it. The reader conjures the author's presence, but only "in spirit." Reading philosophy is like a thought-experiment by means of which the specter of the philosopher, as a unitary will, is produced. The reader is thereby able to set into motion a kind of improvisation upon Nietzsche's philosophy—utilizing it as a tool for thinking about Left politics, feminism, or their own identity, and thereby drawing from Nietzsche judgments that perhaps have only the barest relation to what he actually wrote. Yet by deploying the philosopher's name in support of one's own goal, the reader is still limited to the field in which this name is already received, and indeed, must carry the baggage of past interpretations and "misinterpretations" of his philosophy. Nietzsche's final, immortal power over the reader is this invocation of his name. The "Nietzschean," curiously devoted to overseeing the fate of that name, brings "Nietzsche" back to life, but only as a name, an authority, or the paternal law (which itself is only a dead letter). Thirdly, this book sets out to show how the effect of "quickening" activated in the encounter with Nietzsche works also in reverse: that Nietzsche's writing brings to life in its reader a certain kind of subjectivity, the purpose of which is to service his philosophical task. The rhetorical charge of Nietzsche's writing is to provoke a variety of responses from his audience, each of which performs a different function for his cultural critique and eventual goal of revaluation. Significantly, Nietzsche's readers often model themselves upon a particular ideal proffered by his philosophy, from the rugged philosopher or creative artist, to the noble legislator. And it is their ultimate failure

6

INTRODUCTION

adequately to embody this ideal that gives birth to the Nietzschean subject, in the split between the ideal and the specter of its botched approximation ("the higher type" and its ape "the last man"; "the philosopher of the future" and "the scholar," and so forth). In his Nietzsche-inspired "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats writes: The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast3 its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Nietzsche's philosophy engenders many different responses and identifications not through simple carelessness, but for a reason. For, as Nietzsche saw things, to wake from the nightmare of nihilism indicated in Yeats's poem, humanity's various proclivities would need to have become radicalized. Some types would have to exhaust themselves and dissipate—experience a downgoing, in Nietzsche's parlance—and some would need to come into their own, hence experiencing a culmination of their forces, and "overcoming" the confines of modern subjectivity. Nietzsche attempts with his philosophy to perform the cultural function of precipitating this "rank ordering" of humanity, according to his own array of identifications: from noble to slave, philosopher—artist to last man. By means of its peculiar rhetorical features, Nietzsche's text selects "the quick" from "the dead," deploying its own mobile (zombie) army of commentators to wage his culture war. Dead Letters to Nietzsche addresses itself to the manner in which Nietzsche's texts affect readers in their subjectivity: producing in them a sense of belonging to his philosophical project, and thus investing them with a duty to it. In this book I argue that Nietzsche's text avails itself to the reader as a place in which she sees her most ideal image reflected (as the ideal reader, for instance, or the philosopher of the future). But moreover, Nietzsche's writing invokes in the reader a feeling of excess: of finding oneself outside the text's range, and falling short of its ideal. In comprehending the forces that tend to produce this relation, I draw upon psychoanalytic theory, but I am aware that this use might be viewed by some as contentious. As indicated above, Nietzsche's philosophy, arguably, anticipates psychoanalysis, and so for this reason his text is particularly amenable to its perspective. Yet more than this,

INTRODUCTION

7

the tools psychoanalysis provides are well honed for the kind of relation Nietzsche's text establishes with its reader. For this reason, I ask my readers to put aside reservations about psychoanalytic theory, at least provisionally, for the purpose of what I feel to be a particularly fruitful interrogation of Nietzsche's relation to his commentators. Above all, the book seeks to show that Nietzsche's philosophy incites "the split" (between the ideal and its excess) through which, according to psychoanalysis, subjectivity is constituted. This split is achieved by Nietzsche's constant references to his good and bad readers: to those who fall within his philosophy's sphere of reference, and those whose "bad" interpretations of his writings exclude them from this sphere. Nietzsche's text, it will be argued, thus also presents itself as a place in which the abandoned (or repressed) part of the reader's self is kept hidden, only to be revealed in those most disorienting, uncanny passages of the text with which the reader cannot identify (that are even felt to be dangerous in their ambiguity since they appear to open out to something completely "other"). Particularly the "Nazi" interpretation of Nietzsche exemplifies for his readers this dark and excluded identification: an identification that they both recognize and deny. The book will proceed first by outlining the relation between Nietzsche's philosophy and its claim upon the reader, in chapters i and z. Perhaps more than other philosophers, Nietzsche requires a readership to take responsibility for his project. The purpose of his text was thus in part to recruit the reader to his program of the revaluation of values. Nietzsche's philosophy performs this recruitment—or "interpellation" of the reader—immanently, by the dual means of both its structure and its content. On the one hand, Nietzsche's critique of the mediocrity and nihilism of modern culture is substantial, and continues to resonate with many intellectuals today. These concerns alone apparently motivate his readers' allegiance to him. On the other hand, however, it will be argued that this connection to Nietzsche is also structurally

overdetermined, the reader's place already having been written

into his philosophy. In effect, the text interpellates the reader in relation to various "figures of excess": identifications that are either impossibly ideal or abject, such as "the philosopher of the future," "the blond beast," "we wise ones," or else the slavish "last man." To this extent, readers are initiated into Nietzsche's philosophy by means of its own ideological apparatus, which they internalize through reading his books. In chapter i , this idea will be elucidated with regard to Nietzsche's account of the subject. More than provide a simple explanation of the genesis of subjectivity, by means of the

8

INTRODUCTION

excess remainder, the account of subjectivity also furnishes a specifically "Nietzschean" subject, produced in the relation between the reader and Nietzsche's philosophy. The purpose of chapter i is thus to demonstrate the connection between what Nietzsche says of his philosophy and how he says it: a relation that is not always straightforward, but is ultimately guided by the concern for why he says it. For Nietzsche writes his message strategically, in order to subjugate the reader to his own ends. The recruitment of readers, as agents of his philosophy, is pivotal to the realization of his philosophical project. Chapter 2 continues to elaborate the rhetorical effects of Nietzsche's texts with reference to Lacanian theory. In his seminars and ecrits, Jacques Lacan shows the extent to which the self is already riven by the existence of others: that the subject is not self-contained, but is, rather, dispersed in the world that they inhabit, and through those with whom they live. This living with others that determines subjectivity is, according to Lacan, characterized by a sense of loss—or lack—and a disposition of mourning. Chapter 2, then, develops further our understanding of the interdependency of Nietzsche and his reader in terms of the anxiety and nothingness that characterizes relations to others in general, and is already figured within Nietzsche's writings. The possibility of failure to live up to Nietzsche's demands, and the anxiety such failure provokes, abides within the relation to his philosophy. Chapter 3 considers the impossibility

of the position of "the good reader"

with respect to Nietzsche's philosophy. I argue that this impossibility, far from limiting the text's appeal for the reader, however, is what attracts and binds the reader to Nietzsche. This claim is developed through an engagement with two "esoteric" readings of his philosophy furnished by Stanley Rosen and Laurence Lampert. Rosen and Lampert emphasize the selective conceit of Nietzsche's writing: that many would misunderstand

and become false

prophets of his message, as the price of its reaching only the very few "higher types" for which it was intended. However, it will be argued, because the identification with Nietzsche is always in excess of itself—producing "the bad reader" along with "the ideal reader"—the higher position to which these commentators lay claim is untenable: "the bad reader" merely embodying "the good reader's" projected bad conscience. In chapter 4 the terrain shifts from a concern for the interpellation of the reader, in (Lacanian) paternal terms, to a preoccupation, and identification, with the abject or excluded (maternal) register of Nietzsche. Here I perform a Kleinian analysis of two interpretations of Nietzsche that circulate about

INTRODUCTION

9

the figure of madness: David Farrell Krell's Nietzsche: A Novel, and Georges Bataille's On Nietzsche. The psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein refigures anxiety about loss in terms of the psychic violence the preoedipal infant displays toward its mother. The mother plays the role for the infant of "the container" into which it can project "the bad parts" of itself: those aspects of its experience felt as distressing, or painful. Accordingly, I interpret these readers' relations to Nietzsche in terms of his philosophy's capacity for "containing" readers' "excess," which they can experience comfortably only when encountered in the guise of another. In chapter 4, I argue that by contemplating Nietzsche's insanity and subsequent death, Bataille and Krell displace upon Nietzsche discomfort regarding the possibility of their own madness and mortality. Nietzsche thus "contains" for them these most profound anxieties. Likewise, in chapter 5 I turn to Sarah Kofman's own psychoanalytic engagement with Nietzsche—her interpretation of his corpus in terms of "the family romance"—by subjecting to a Kleinian analysis the relation she enacts to him. In this instance the focal point of her engagement with his text is not madness, so much as the threat of anti-Semitism. I argue that Kofman's own manifest ambivalence about her Jewish identity is modified by the relation to Nietzsche, and especially through her defense of the rectitude of his position toward the Jews. According to my analysis, each commentary outlined above involves a blind spot respecting an abject piece of the self that has been invested in Nietzsche's text, and the attendant negative affect to which the relation with Nietzsche gives rise. Indeed, the intensity of the relation with him is due to this blindness to one's ambivalence regarding such material, and its subsequent displacement onto Nietzsche. Denial motivates the identification with Nietzsche through which the reader is interpellated within his philosophical project. In the sixth and final chapter, by contrast, I examine a commentary that specifically takes account of the constitutive ambivalence of the relation to Nietzsche, and moreover, demonstrates how his text generates this ambivalence in the reader. In Nietzsche

and the Vicious Circle, Pierre

Klossowski characterizes Nietzsche's writing in corporeal terms, as selfconsciously contagious: that is, as purposefully infecting the reader with his own perspective, through a transmission of bodily impulses. However, the centerpiece of Klossowski's text on Nietzsche is his interpretation of eternal recurrence as a simulacrum, through which readers encounter their own negativity in Nietzsche's writing. This simulacrum corresponds to the

IO

INTRODUCTION

abject mother of Klein's account, and, as discussed in chapter 2, Lacan's anamorphic death head—a voracious nothingness that threatens, and so also motivates, subjectivity. By demonstrating the centrality of this ambiguity to the doctrine of recurrence, Klossowski reveals what is at stake for Nietzsche's philosophy, and his cooption of the reader: because the destabilization of the reader's subjectivity is Nietzsche's manner of committing them to him, and thus of securing the longevity (if not immortality) of his project. By exposing the figure of recurrence as Nietzsche's apparatus of recruitment, does Klossowski thereby slip its noose, freeing himself from subjugation to Nietzsche's preordained roles and rank-orderings? The aim of this book, finally, is to propose a new direction for Nietzsche scholarship: one through which readers become more conscious of—and perhaps, then, less susceptible to—Nietzsche's power over them. The first and last question to which this book responds is the very possibility of an equal relationship with Nietzsche; and a more creative, and critical, relation to Nietzsche's corpus.

CHAPTER

1

ONTOLOGY FOR PHILOLOGISTS: NIETZSCHE, BODY, SUBJECT

Philologist

1648. 1. One devoted to learning or literature; a

scholar, esp. a classical scholar. Now rare. 2. A person versed in the science of language; a student of language 1716. —The Oxford English

Dictionary

It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading:— in the end I also write slowly [. . .] For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith's art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento [. ..] this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers [. . .] —Friedrich Nietzsche 1 Everything Nietzsche published, he intended to be read. This may seem a banal observation, yet commentators frequently deem as extraneous and impertinent Nietzsche's more "stylish" prose: whereby he sets a scene for his philosophy, or instructs his reader in the art of reading his books—as in the passage quoted above. As a philosopher who also self-identified as a philologist, Nietzsche was acutely aware of his dependence upon his readers: not only in terms of his reputation, but also the meaning of his philosophy. Nietzsche's writings thus enact a grand seduction of his audience. If they are to be charged with responsibility for the meaning of his works, then they must love Nietzsche—the better to approximate a fidelity to his purpose.

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

12

But the reader's love was not enough for Nietzsche: he wanted to possess them, body and soul. Nietzsche needed the reader to identify with his philosophy, in their very subjectivity For this reason, he could not take the reader just as she or he is: Nietzsche's texts demand of readers that they apply themselves to it—to the extent even of rearranging their "order of drives," or constitution. Accordingly, a principal element of his writing is not only to communicate his ideas, but also to communicate a way of being through which his reader is subjected to, and subjected by, his thought. In this way, Nietzsche's theory of the subject does more than simply explain how the subject comes into being: it also galvanizes a particular mode of subjectivity. Furthermore, other currents of his philosophy contribute to this experiment, whereby his writing exerts a formative force upon its readership. Let us, then, foreground Nietzsche's account of the subject with a consideration of his appeal to the reader's subjectivity, before turning to what are considered to be more "proper" components of his philosophy: his concepts of perspectivism and will to power.

"BE YOUR SELF!": NIETZSCHE AS EDUCATOR "Be your self!" Nietzsche offers this sage—yet, today, relatively commonplace— advice at the beginning of "Schopenhauer as Educator." We can be sure, however, that the meaning of this adage is anything but commonplace for Nietzsche. H e is not reassuring his reader that they should take it easy. We cannot draw closer to this self by consulting a life coach. Still less does he appeal here to an immutable kernel of being that we might call the self, resting like a seed at the core of one's everyday experience. For Nietzsche there is no soul-atom, no unitary monad to which we refer when we speak of the self.2 Rather, this self would be the end result of a difficult labor. Nietzsche's advice is issued as a challenge to the reader to differentiate self from others, and actively to create them-selves in the light of this difference: The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: "Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself." 3 Nietzsche's call to his reader "to be your self," as well as his later directive "to become what you are," 4 are fascinating not only because they gesture toward the more-often neglected (by traditional philosophers) lived experience of the

ONTOLOGY FOR PHILOLOGISTS

13

reader, but also to the extent that these commands are completely empty of normative content. One may say that this is precisely the point: that Nietzsche was not one to prescribe how one ought to live, and that, anyway, one does not "become who one is" by following the dictates of others. Perhaps more significantly, however, by leaving a gaping chasm at the site of the reader's self—that is, by abstaining from telling the reader who they should be—isn't it possible that Nietzsche thus primes his reader for a more radical subjection to his will? More precisely, we could read this content-free imperative "to be your self" as initiating the disarticulation of self in the present through which the self can then be reconstituted for a more 'Nietzsche-an' future. Nietzsche could be read, thus, to enact an intervention in the nihilistic present through the reorganization

of his readers' wills and capacities^ and it is his text that

would achieve such a coup. This permission "to be your self"—taken together with other more-explicit instructions regarding how one should read, how one should philosophize, create art, play music, evaluate life—opens the reader to Nietzsche's subjection of them in their doing, thinking, and desiring, such that even if, as he writes, these elements are "not you yourself," they might as well be. O r at least, in line with his critique of the distinction between "deed" and "doer" 5 we might conjecture that what Nietzsche suggests here is a new mode of doing, thinking, and desiring that would create a better self: a break with present styles of living, led by his interruption of the reader's self-reflection. For it is precisely the reader's doing, thinking, and desiring to which Nietzsche lays claim with his challenge to examine and to become their self, in contradistinction to all with whom they share a world and a time. Bidding his reader to transcend the laziness characteristic of fashionable men, who are turned out like "factory products," Nietzsche gestures toward an alternative future: a future of the artisan philosopher instead of a temporality of mass production, for which there is no future. [H]ow right it is for those who do not feel themselves to be citizens of this time to harbour great hopes; for if they were citizens of this time they would be helping to kill their time and so perish with it—while their desire is rather to awaken their time to life and so live on themselves in this awakened life.. (Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 12,8) In so doing, Nietzsche appoints himself the seer of a future that can only be actualized by his readers, and even then, only by the ones who can envisage a

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

14

future as free and novel as the one Nietzsche foreshadows. This is "judgment day," and only those who subscribe to an open future, rather than the closed circularity and nihilism of everyman's temporality, can truly live. As we shall see, however, such a future falls short of the open insecurity this vision promises to the extent that Nietzsche already underwrites it.6 He could as well ask us, "Have you heard the Good News?," thus heralding himself as a new savior. But if Nietzsche's appeal to the reader to invent a new temporal horizon and trajectory seems vaguely eschatological, the reference point for this quiet revolution is immanent to the reading of his texts. With a view to reevaluating his or her own self and role in human history, the reader should submit to Nietzsche's teaching. For through his account of Arthur Schopenhauer's formative influence upon him, Nietzsche offers himself as educator, benefactor, and even liberator. [Y]our true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be. Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is, something in itself ineducable and in any case difficult of access, bound and paralysed: your educators can be only your liberators. (Untimely Meditations, 129)

What must be understood is that Nietzsche's appeal to this liberated self is not only an antimetaphysical, or deconstructive, gesture (as so many have already argued). But also, Nietzsche sets out here to liberate the reader's self for his own higher purpose. By divesting oneself of parochial commitments, as Nietzsche bids the reader to do, one is opened to a training, or education, that requires a commitment instead to Nietzsche's cultural and philosophical project. The spirit of self-transformation that Nietzsche's philosophy is renowned for promoting, is not simply a mode of freedom, but more accurately prepares the reader for subjugation to Nietzsche. How would such a process of subjugation occur? If we were to take our cue from Nietzsche's own account of the self—as a confederation of diverse impulses or wills—then what is necessary is a reordering of his readers' drives. A reordering, that is to say, which would render them better suited to executing the vision of culture Nietzsche's philosophy foretells. Yet importantly, the process of reorganizing his reader's self, however indifferent to the

ONTOLOGY FOR PHILOLOGISTS

15

individual this would seem to be, is, rather, deeply personal. In order to gain a sense of the exclusive character of this process, it is perhaps best to turn to Nietzsche's own subjection to his philosopher-teacher, as described again in "Schopenhauer as Educator": I am one of those readers of Schopenhauer who when they have read one page of him know for certain they will go on to read all the pages and will pay heed to every word he ever said. I trusted him at once and my trust is the same now as it was nine years ago. Though this is a foolish and immodest way of putting it, I understand him as though it were for me he had written. (Untimely Meditations,

133)

By reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche thus discovered his "true self." Or perhaps, rather, Schopenhauer's writing beckoned to a self that Nietzsche did not even know he had in him. It is by means of a similarly revelatory experience of self-discovery that Nietzsche's readers find in him a teacher and formative influence. Let us keep in mind, however, that if Nietzsche chanced upon Schopenhauer, and upon himself in Schopenhauer, his own reader's reception of him is not left to chance. For Nietzsche anticipates his reader's response to him by building into his philosophy its many trajectories and futures. Nietzsche's philosophy needs to be variously interpreted: if it is to beget a culture, then it must also be able to support a diversity of mutually conditioning—symbiotic—life forms. The interpretation, viewed as an artifact, is symptomatic of the form of life that produced it. Yet for Nietzsche interpretation also expresses the encounter that constitutes life forms: between a will and what feeds it. Nietzsche thus wishes to nourish, with his philosophy, the forms that best promote his revalued future; and to order, or classify the rest—thereby neutralizing their power and domesticating them to his goal. To gain insight into how this is achieved, we will need to review Nietzsche's contention that life is interpretation, and the subject only a particularly limited and mean interpretation of life.

THE LIFE OF THOUGHT: NIETZSCHE'S TRUTH PERSPECTIVISM AND THE WILL TO POWER How did the whole organic process stand itself against the rest of nature?—so revealing its fundamental

will. —Friedrich Nietzsche 7

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

i6

Nietzsche's account of subjectivity germinates in his conception of life as interpretation (perspectivism), and the organism as an arrangement of drives (will to power) that grows and sustains itself by "interpreting" its environment. Life functions only by means of interpretation, converting its environment into something that is of use to it: for instance, air is filtered by the lungs to become oxygen; a plant nourishes by means of digestion; and light is a source of vision only for a creature with an optic nerve. Nietzsche's perspectivism emphasizes the body's role in discourse: it is the principle of embodied interpretation, or the postulate that every truth is constructed within a particular vital milieu, according to particular needs and desires. Our so-called truths reflect what is needed for the species to survive. Nietzsche writes in a posthumously published fragment: "In valuations are expressed conditions of preservation and growth. All our organs of knowledge and our senses are developed only with regard to conditions of preservation and growth." 8 Interpretation thus occurs always from a viewpoint derived from the needs and desires contingent to the organism that interprets. Likewise, Nietzsche understood bodies as "systems" of difference that interpret themselves as a unity. His concept of "will to power" attempts to elucidate the internal processes of all living things and the manner of interaction between organisms. As partner concepts, perspective (truth as "interpretation") and will to power ("that which interprets") are not easily distinguished. For while perspective is the "effect" of wills to power interpreting, it is also the mechanism by which bodies constitute themselves as such. How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without "sense," does not become "nonsense"; whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation—that

cannot be decided

even by the most industrious and most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect; for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner. 9 Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength—life itself is will

ONTOLOGY FOR PHILOLOGISTS

17

to power—: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this. 10 With the concept of will to power, Nietzsche attempts to describe the dynamics between various bodily instincts and organisms. Optimally, the organism is a complex arrangement of forces, which are better able collectively to appropriate—that is, form in their image—whatever surrounds them. The body is thereby a composition of "forces" that have formed strategic alliances with one another, and to map its prehistory, one would have to relate a brutal struggle, literally involving death for some of these forces. According to Nietzsche, the arrangement of drives also necessitates a division of labor between them: active, form-giving force, which compels the allegiance of others that it encounters; and reactive force, which strategically obeys active force in order to obtain sustenance only indirectly, after satisfying the force that commands. Significantly, for Nietzsche perspective (interpretation) and the formation of the body (will to power) are only conceptually separable: interpretation expresses the means by which the drives articulate their relations to one another, and thereby also exercise their power. Nietzsche's concept of will to power, in addition to describing biological organisms, includes within its scope behaviors and events in the different "spheres" of the organic world: animal, political, social, and philosophical (Will to Power, §423, 227). Will to power (as the material struggle of forces) and perspective (as the effect of relations between these forces) become for Nietzsche a substratum for both body and thought. They are two sides of the one phenomenon: life.11 When he turns, then, to philosophy, text seems to have become a visceral remainder. Philosophical texts reflect, by Nietzsche's account, a truth about the philosopher's body, which provides the "real germ of life from which the whole plant has grown" (Beyond Good and Evil, "Prejudices," §6, 13). Yet, even here the relation between body and language is not simple; nor is it unidirectional. As he writes in The Gay Science, "I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding

of the body" (Preface,

$2., 34-5)Philosophy often relates a fantasy of overcoming the body, and this narrative, also, plays a part in the agonistic drama of a body pitted against itself. What we find in the philosopher's language is a movement of both revealing and concealing of the drives. The body, which according to Nietzsche is a thriving multiplicity, is inhibited by "reason," and is thereby forced to conform to

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

i8

a linear and possibly torpid viewpoint. Reason ostensibly provides an imperative that one's thoughts and values should be mutually coherent—or in other words, that one thought should follow logically from the last—but what reason actually provides is the paradigm for what is recognized

as

coherent: there is no coherence in itself, apart from the constraints, or form of life, through which it is perceived. As such, philosophy represents for Nietzsche an egalitarianism of the soul: that is, an attempt to render bodies equivalent to one another, by means of "the impartial" discourse of reason. By devaluing bodily differences—"the passions"—the philosopher attempts to master them. For Nietzsche, conversely, difference is the source of the body's power and creativity. By continually contrasting the healthy body to "philosophy," conceived as a degenerate form of corporeality, Nietzsche promotes a notion of the body as a source of power, figured as difference. Nietzsche charges philosophical thought with the disempowerment and normalization of the body, reflected in the metaphysics inherent in grammar. Philosophy renders explicit "truths," or viewpoints, humanity already tells itself in the very form of language. Language and subjectivity, Nietzsche held, implicitly reduce bodily diversity to sameness: otherwise communication and understanding would not be possible. The root of thought's movement away from bodily multiplicity can be traced to the advent of consciousness according to Nietzsche. He discusses the possibility of a thinking being without consciousness in The Gay Science. Yet, what he describes is not usually considered as "thought" by philosophers, who tend to confuse thought with consciousness and reason: [W]e could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also "act" in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to "enter our consciousness" (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life actually takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however offensive this may sound to older philosophers. For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous?

{Gay Science,

§354, 297) Nietzsche then attributes consciousness's superfluous "mirror effect" to the turn to language: "only this conscious thinking takes the form of

words,

ONTOLOGY FOR PHILOLOGISTS

which is to say signs of communication,

19

and this fact uncovers the origin of

consciousness" {Gay Science, §354, 298). According to Nietzsche, the necessity for communication represents a regrettable "loss of contact" with our individual, bodily being. Such a loss, however, is ambiguously situated in this text. For it is not the case that one once had perfect knowledge of the body, and that language and consciousness then intervened and despoiled such perfect knowledge. Rather, the condition of knowledge is precisely this despoiling; consciousness represents the only means of "knowledge," which Nietzsche defines as essentially a reduction of multiplicity, for the sake of conscious thought (Gay Science, §355, 300). Knowledge is for Nietzsche already the province of the herd animal. Indeed, throughout his oeuvre, the body is figured in excess of our knowledge of it. Nietzsche frequently comments upon the epistemic gap between the body and consciousness. Following Spinoza, he relates that we cannot observe the simplest bodily functions as they occur within us, nor can we understand the vast complexity of our own corporeality with such an inadequate instrument as consciousness. 12 That knowledge in general is limited is a necessary adjunct to Nietzsche's perspectivism because, as finite beings, the needs that determine the truth available to us cannot exhaust all potential aspects of "the thing." But more precisely in the case of knowledge of our own bodies, consciousness necessarily simplifies and conceals in its perceptions of the body. Consciousness exists principally as a simplification of, and mantle for, the body, of which it is merely the most surface aspect. For the sake of the mind's proper functioning, the life of the body must for the most part remain obscure—otherwise, not only would the mind become overstimulated, but also it would cease to perform its vital role as interpreter of bodily needs. And here Nietzsche's dual vocations—as philologist and philosopher—come more apparently to work together. For as with texts, so with bodies, interpretation is a selective process in which the work of excluding superfluous material, or information, is equally as important as including what is relevant. Thus, much of the work of consciousness, according to Nietzsche, is actively to forget whatever does not accord to a simplified schema of what the self is.13 Yet more significantly, in order to know itself—to become self-conscious— the body undergoes a transformation that renders it unrecognizable "as such." "The ideal of the self"—for Nietzsche a very limited aspect of "the whole self" (what he calls "the great intelligence" of the body) 14 —acts as a measure for the selection and interpretation of the surrounding environment and, indeed, of

2.0

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

the body itself. This ideal through which perceptions are mediated is the "I": the subject, or "self" to which Nietzsche appeals when addressing his reader. This subject begins only as a surface projection: the body's interpretation of itself for the purposes of communication—as Nietzsche points out, not only with others, but also within itself. Corporeal differences are thus "subjected" to the need to communicate: language—through the subject—bridges differences, so adhering to the fiction of similarity and exchangeability between bodies in discourse. Nietzsche even suggested that language and morality are promoted by a specific bodily drive, which he calls "the herd instinct" (Gay Science, §116, 174-75). Language "hails" the body by picking out a particular drive within it. The body, in turn, has an interest in acceding to the herd instinct: for without to some extent annulling differences for the sake of communication, there is little chance of the organism's survival. The cost of survival, however, is that this "herd drive" would then suppress and reorganize in its image all other forms of corporeality. By this account, the body is at war with itself: not only because it is essentially an irreducible multiplicity—each element of which must engage in a struggle in order to prevail over the others—but also because of a tendency that conflicts with this multiplicity in order to compose the body as unified. This unified entity is, indeed, a Active account of bodily being. Yet such a fiction, or "untruth," is a necessary "condition of life" (Beyond Good and Evil, §4, 11-2) for the human as "herd animal." In accordance with Nietzsche's doctrine of will to power, the body interprets itself as a unity that takes the form, in language, of the subject. The subject of language opposes itself to the body. Yet subjective being is not opposed to corporeality in any simple sense. Rather, consciousness and subjectivity are the foundational "truths" required by our species in order that its bodily existence is maintained—remembering that for Nietzsche "[t]ruth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive" (Will to Power, §493, 272). In view of the body's need to maintain "the untruth" of subjectivity, might we not venture that the subject acquires (or "returns to") the depth from which it is understood to have emerged, and against which it opposes itself? For the body that resists subjection also comes to be invested in it for the sake of survival, "answering" to the designations by means of which language lays claim to it. The body is here language's coconspirator, harking to its call. We might conjecture, pace Althusser, that language is installed within the subject as the other to whom he or she answers. Yet, clearly, the causality of

ONTOLOGY FOR PHILOLOGISTS

21

this event is paradoxical, for this subject already presupposes language for its existence, and so cannot simply "await" being hailed by the call of language, as if it were walking innocently (though with a guilty conscience) down a crowded street in Paris (Althusser, "Ideology," 162-63). The subject / is itself a linguistic element that gives rise to a particular modality of life: the living body inhabits language through the shifter, I. Yet, as Lacan points out (in apparent agreement with Nietzsche's statements about consciousness), the accession to subjectivity always produces a remainder, or excess, which cannot be neatly incorporated, and separation from which indelibly conditions subjectivity. Interpreting Freud's famous phrase Wo Es war, soil Ich werden (where "it"—the id—was, "I"—ego—should come to be), Lacan affirms the gap between the greater self ("the subject of the unconscious") and the ego "as constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications." 15 By establishing a relation to language, the self is split—severed from the bodily multiplicity celebrated by Nietzsche—but it also comes to be as such. We can reread Nietzsche's invitation to his reader "to be your self!" in the light of this difference between aspects of the self, as an attempt to awaken a sense of this excess—that there is another, vaster self that the regularity of everyday existence obscures. "The self" to which Nietzsche's writing appeals is then supposed to be drawn from this limitless reservoir to which language bars access, ironically, by the language employed by Nietzsche. Nietzsche thereby promises to reunite his reader with a "self" that transcends grammar and a particular historical milieu: a "self" that is not simply installed as a means of communication between bodies. The currency of this call, however, trades on the sense of loss that characterizes human subjectivity—so that Nietzsche exploits the readers' felt disengagement from an unconscious and instinctual plenitude summarized by "will to power," but fails to offer a viable alternative to such separation. By invoking a self that is always already constituted in its relation to language, however, Nietzsche also taps into the hidden and unexpected corporeal depth of language, evidenced in the pleasure that the subject feels respecting his or her subjection. The pleasure of being named—of

being actualized through language—is a pleasure regularly set

in motion by Nietzsche's writing. Yet given his otherwise poor opinion of language and consciousness, how does Nietzsche account for the fact that the body comes to love what apparently disempowers it? Nietzsche's most systematic account of how the subject, as a denial of corporeal difference, is "born of" the body is contained in On the Genealogy of Morals. It is also the work in which we find both an explanation for,

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

zz

and mechanism of, the subjection of the reader to Nietzsche's text. On the one hand, Nietzsche argues that the social requirement to understand and predict one another's behavior suppresses differences between—and, indeed, within—individuals.

Accordingly, language (in this case its exemplar is the

promise) comes to represent a common ground that quite literally erases difference, by altering the way that the body organizes itself (58). For the society that runs smoothly demands not only an ontology of regularity (the institution of "natural laws," like causation), but also a subjectivity

of

regularity. According to Nietzsche, social imperatives penetrate to the very body of the subject, by favoring its conformist (reactive) instincts over the active, "unruly" (and, for Nietzsche, more interesting), drives. On the other hand, however, On the Genealogy of Morals treads a more complex path than to argue, simply, that the advent of modern man depends upon a mere suppression of instinctual strength, and oversimplification of the body. Arguably, there are two narrative threads in Genealogy: one of which appears to follow a clear, linear path, whereas the other loops back upon itself, in much the same way that Nietzsche represents the body to have done in his account of the subject. Indeed, if Genealogy is written as a dual discourse, this should not surprise, given Nietzsche's preference for masks and duplicity (Beyond Good and Evil, 53; 213). If Nietzsche attempted to present "his truth" by means of this text, then it is also likely that he would have protected this truth from what he regarded as the common sensibility of most who would approach his texts. Moreover, in line with the strain within his philosophy that seeks to bring together the body and text—by conceiving of the body as an organism that interprets, and texts as expressive of drives—Nietzsche structured his text so as to attract a particular type, which manifests itself corporeally as well as textually. His writing would resonate with this "type," even at the level of sensuality and desire. It is now a truism of Nietzschean scholarship that, although readers often describe the encounter with Nietzsche as intimate, for some this intimacy indicates a real connection to his philosophy, whereas others are merely seduced by the masks and "trappings" that populate his texts. The figures of "will to power" and "eternal recurrence" exemplify this difference: whereas for some they operate as tropes that indicate a movement of feeling [Gefiibl] that might be shared by the (better) reader, for the majority they are to be understood literally, and so these superior vicissitudes of the soul are protected from those who would find them strange and even threatening. For this reason, Genealogy contains both "a truth" and a fairy tale. Predictably, the fairy tale is the best known,

23

ONTOLOGY FOR PHILOLOGISTS

and most-often related, of these textual levels. I will, then, commence the section that follows by sketching the common interpretation of

Genealogy,

before elaborating the less-accessible, and ultimately circuitous, version of that text.

OF SLAVES AND MASTERS: THE BIRTH OF GOOD AND EVIL As the story goes, the master-type,

or noble, is Nietzsche's appellation

for those who accord with "active force." The noble takes control of and determines his environment through the act of naming, evaluating whatever agrees with his constitution as good, and whatever does not agree—that is, whatever appears base, beneath consideration—as bad. This necessitates an under-class, the slave-type: those "ill-constituted" beings already labeled bad by the master, and upon whom this master will unleash spontaneous acts of cruelty in accordance with a social hierarchy that renders the slave at the master's disposal. Thus, from the point of view of the slave, the master's morality must pose a threat to his existence. 16 The reactive slave evaluates not from his "highest pleasure," or jouissance—which

would involve being able

to lay claim to one's environment, already owned by the noble 17 —but rather, the slave's values are constructed out of a sense of fear and self-preservation, and in inverse relation to the master's values. The slave-type evaluates backward, in Nietzsche's terms, demarcating first whatever intimidates it as "evil," whereas what appears most harmless becomes its highest virtue. By means of what Nietzsche calls "the slave revolt in morality," the illconstituted slave achieves a reversal of all values, and thus triumphs over the master. The master is better constituted as his confederacy of wills (will to power) strikes a productive balance between the active force that commands, and the reactive force that obeys. Conversely, the circuitous process by which the slave moral system develops reroutes the drive so that "life"—that is, difference, power, creativity—is inhibited. This means that in the slave-type the most passive (or inactive) drives dominate and subdue the most active. Like a herd animal, the slave lives so as not to draw to himself the attention of the stronger, better constituted, beast of prey. Thus life in the main is reduced to a mode of self-preservation rather than increase, or greater perfection. The master-type, on the other hand, will come to be "tamed," alienated from his power, through the acquisition of conscience, or more precisely "bad conscience": the feeling of guilt that serves to reign

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

M

in the expression of power. The victory of slave morality is to universalize the viewpoint of the servile, the downtrodden, the victim, and to install this viewpoint in the master, at whose hands the victim had suffered. In grammatical terms, guilt consists in identification with the object of an action rather than its subject, and thus all become passive, so unable to give expression to their impulses. Yet, the conversion of the noble to slave morality is not figured simply in terms of suppression. The twist to the plot of Genealogy consists in the master's coming to be libidinally

attached to

this guilt—taking pleasure in the bad conscience—and thus it is through a positive expression of his impulses that he succumbs to slave morality. The master is accomplice to his subjection. I will return momentarily to the noble's libidinal investment in bad conscience. At this stage I would like briefly to pause and consider the reader's subjection to Nietzsche's text, in terms of how she might encounter this discussion of noble and slave. Nietzsche seems clearly to favor the master type—the one who engenders her environment—over the slave type, presented as a mangled organism. Yet desire for nobility presents itself as a problem in Genealogy: for how are we to negotiate a path from this botched, slave mode of life, back to something more original and pure? Moreover, desire for the place of the noble is often contaminated by ambivalence. The master mode of evaluation may be more direct—a healthier expression of corporeality—yet it also necessitates behavior repugnant to the modern (already servile) sensibility. As indicated earlier, however, ambivalence is vital to the success of interpellation. Whereas the reader finds himself or herself caught between admiration for the master type and guilt at the prospect of inflicting suffering upon another, the interpellation is contingent upon an ambiguous and unstable (and thus incomplete) resolution of such conflict. Indeed, "the success" of the interpellation depends precisely upon the reader's ambivalence toward Nietzsche's most exalted (and excessive) figures, into which she works to propel herself, through identification, in order to assuage the anxiety induced by such ambivalence. The reader might tell herself that a negative response to the noble is merely a hangover from her slave upbringing—that she can work through this discomfort by devoting herself to Nietzsche's works. Or, she might deny the unbridled malevolence that Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote of the noble as "a beast of prey." Yet either way, the noble is the ambiguous object of the reader's aspiration and fear: a figure of excess through which he or she casts subjectivity.

ONTOLOGY FOR PHILOLOGISTS

2-5

Furthermore, the noble is not only the excess of the narrative structure— not strictly making sense in terms of Nietzsche's argument—but also comes to resonate with what the reader identifies as her own excess, or own lost origin. In the first instance, the noble is a glitch in Nietzsche's system: the piece of the puzzle that does not quite fit, or does not make sense. Perhaps this figure is merely remnant of Nietzsche's nostalgia for ancient Imperialism: 18 yet it also performs a function for the text in recruiting readers and advocates. This is because the figure of the noble performs a function for the reader. It represents a glitch in the reader's system, or a stain upon her field of vision, at once fascinating and repulsive. As will be theorized in the chapters that follow, "the excess" figured by the noble reminisces an aspect of the reader that must be discarded and hidden within "the object" (or text) in the very production of her subjectivity. In this respect, the reader identifies with the figure of excess, yet ambiguously, as it represents a lost wholeness and what she must disavow, in order to ensure the integrity of the self. Accordingly, it makes sense that the noble would not tally in terms of Nietzsche's argument, but could only emerge after the historical process of servility had already taken place. In keeping with the logic of excess, the relation of affect with the figure of the noble can be produced only from the slave point of view. As will become clear, the noble is impossible as an event of prehistory since the conditions of its advent arise from within slave morality: and more precisely, from the slave's guilt regarding the noble's possibility. This adds a different inflection, and another degree of complexity, to Nietzsche's genealogical narrative. For if the noble is a product of the slave's guilt—a retroactive projection from the point of view of the victim who imagines herself as the aggressor—then the genealogy must be read in reverse, or even as circular, rather than as a lineage beginning with the master and ending with the tibermensch. It is at this point, then, that we can begin to tease out a second order narrative from Nietzsche's text: a fairy tale whose monsters arise from the fantasies of good, Christian folk. Arguably the most interesting section of Genealogy is also its most oblique. The second essay describes the condition of socialization of the human, who would have to become "calculable, regular, necessary', even in his own image of himself, if he is to be able to stand security for his own future" (58): in order, that is, to have the right to make promises. Nietzsche's variation on the theme of the social contract, therefore, demonstrates what must have occurred before we were able to make a contract in the first place. We must have had to install a

z6

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

sense of the other's well-being into ourselves at the expense of our own "free" expression of power, and this is exacted at the level of corporeality, according to Nietzsche: whereby the body is forced to work against itself, in what must have necessitated an extremely painful and protracted process of shaping the individual as a more or less exchangeable type within the social economy. '"If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory'—this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth." (6x) Only in the context of a social economy of sameness could the notion of guilt arise, according to Nietzsche, out of the concept of debt (the German for both guilt and debt is Schuld) (62—63). Punishment thus consists in the creditor's right to extract from the debtor's body the pleasure of freely discharging one's power at the expense of another. The nature of the economy is that all are exchangeable, a n d t h e juridical system regulates this principle by converting masters into slaves and slaves into masters, in what Nietzsche calls a "carnival of cruelty" (65).19 In order to become a social animal—and thus a regular participant in the economy of the social contract—the master has had to renounce its own stake in life as will to power: that is, the enactment of jouissance

upon

the other's body. For the wielding of force has come to be regulated by the law rather than by individuals, and the master is thus equally subject to law as the slave. This is where we find the subject returning to its bodily depth: for this enjoyment through the infliction of pain upon the other is redeployed to become the very impetus of social behavior. Enjoyment is reconfigured as bad conscience, wherein the persecutor takes her or himself as the object of cruelty. In bad conscience, "will to power" turns in upon itself—makes itself its own victim—in order to practice a cruelty that is not only socially permissible, but also necessary to the formation of the subject. When frustrated, enjoyment that would have been thrust outwardly, and so immediately dissipated, is stored up to create an interior reservoir of pleasure. Accordingly, abstinence also becomes a manner of (ascetic) pleasure, in the realm of sexuality as well as violence: "there is no necessary antithesis between chastity and sensuality; every good marriage, every genuine love affair, transcends this antithesis" (98). Both cruelty and sensuality are allowed to ripen and gather force by means of abstinence. When placed in these terms, it is difficult to imagine a being with the requisite power for greatness in a period historically or ontologically "prior" to the slave moral revolt. The conditions for the body "becoming what it is" are

ONTOLOGY FOR PHILOLOGISTS

2-7

prepared by slave morality; that is, by the body's subjection—and active participation in such subjection—to language. Let us examine more closely the narrative that Nietzsche presents here. For the order of priority, both temporal and ontological, is precisely what he puts into question. In presenting us with a genealogy—a search for origins— Nietzsche reveals the paradox of any narrative of origin: for the narrative must always presuppose its remainder, which is produced "after" the account, retroactively. The narrative of origins is always circular, assuming what it purports to explain. In the case of the conventional myth of origin, the social contract relies upon the existence of an animal that can make promises, and as such can consider the needs of others, and retain an image of itself through time, even to the extent that this ideal determines future events. The social contract anticipates the type of being that it sets out to explain. But even Nietzsche's critique of the social contract—which presents us with the circularity of the appeal to natural law, and undercuts the social contract with his presentation of a man even more primordial than Rousseau's essentially good noble savage—even this critique sets itself within the parameters that it ostensibly seeks to explode. For Nietzsche's good noble is a product of the slave system of evaluation, as its moment of excess. The noble, as the one that created value through the act of naming, could only have been the slave's invention. For, to wield language in positing what is good, he must already have been subject to it.20 The noble is thus the slave's dreamed-of ideal; a remainder produced by the very process of socialization. Are we not, then, all fallen masters when we read Nietzsche's Genealogy* "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny": Does the child become a social being by means of the same painful internalization by which the master becomes a slave? The reader who desires the noble situation might thereby feel contaminated by the slave perspective—reminiscing a great loss of power as the price of knowledge. The hidden truth of Genealogy', however, is that we must first have been fallen masters before owning the capacity to become, or even to imagine, this "original" sense of mastery. Judith Butler argues a similar case in The Psychic Life of Power. In the essay on Nietzsche and Freud, 21 Butler draws our attention to the circular figure of the subject, as a body turned back upon itself,22 but suspends the status of this figure by asserting the counterintuitive hypothesis that this trope "makes no ontological claim" (69). The figure performs its meaning in the circuit, but there is no substance behind this performance; no subject that preexists the figure that pretends merely to represent it. What this figure reveals

z8

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

consists in the subject's circular, or self-founding structure: in a relation of reciprocity, language and the subject establish one another; and together they provide the foundation for all ontological claims. Butler articulates this with reference to "bad conscience" (for Nietzsche synonymous with modern subjectivity): [F]or Nietzsche, the writing of such figurations, and figuration in general, are part and parcel of the "ideal and imaginative phenomena" which are the consequences of bad conscience. Hence, we do not come to know something about bad conscience when we consider the strange figure of reflexivity that Nietzsche offers us. We are, as it were, caught up in the luring effects of bad conscience at the very textual moment when we seek to know what, precisely, this bad conscience is. (69) According to Butler, Nietzsche's insight is that the subject (bad conscience) only becomes a question for us once we are already caught within its circular movement. I would add that once the subject is produced by this self-reflexive moment, it takes on a life of its own, albeit situated within language. The question of bad conscience orients us to and keeps us engaged with language as such, but it does so through the invention of an affective dimension as full and diverse as the bodily multiplicity that Nietzsche's philosophy both describes and initiates. If Nietzsche deploys the question of subjectivity in Genealogy, it is little wonder that this text affects its reader. Because there is no subject apart from the performance of subjectivity in relation to some discourse or other, the subject must continually recapitulate itself by means of subjection. The text activates the reader's desire, which only emerges in relation to language, by posing itself as the perennial question of the reader's own origin as subject. This desire for itself that inaugurates psychic inferiority is not without its corporeal contours. Nietzsche's masterstroke in Genealogy is to demonstrate how consciousness emerges in its opposition to the body, yet remains a mode of bodily enjoyment, albeit differently articulated. With the advent of bad conscience, the drives that once ordered the life of the master-type go to ground, resorting instead to covert means of satisfaction: "as a rule they had to seek new and, as it were, subterranean gratifications" {Genealogy, 84). And Nietzsche's explanation of this process resonates with Freud's account of the vicissitudes of the drives:

ONTOLOGY FOR PHILOLOGISTS

2-9

All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly inward—this

is what I call the internalization

turn

[Verinnerlichung]

of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his "soul." The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited.

(84)

Simply, when we are compelled not to act, we turn the charged drive inward as thought. Subjectivity (the soul) thus constitutes a reservoir for the conversion of active force into an internalized reactivity.23 For Nietzsche, we create an inner world to the extent that we fail to create in the outer world. The expansive economy of "will to power" carves out its new domain within its own flesh as the unconscious, so that an economy of sameness can operate at the level of consciousness. This "economy of sameness," according to Nietzsche, is the domain of the subject and of language. Language, subjectivity, and philosophy—the most exalted achievements of humankind—are thus the outcome of a long and punishing negation and redeployment of the human organism's inner plurality. Yet one would be mistaken to think simply that the history Nietzsche lays forth in Genealogy is to be regretted: that it would be better had the slave never transfigured the moral landscape, or converted the noble to slavery. Rather, that the greatest value is bestowed upon the product of the body's self-effacement demonstrates, for Nietzsche, how "the body" creates. Truth, imagination, philosophy, and value are only possible from the point of view of the slave. The revaluation that Nietzsche incites amounts to yet another slave revolt. Nietzsche may have imagined himself to be like a Greek god, a Hyperborean, and even an Antichrist, but perhaps it makes better sense to think of him as—like Christ—a king of slaves and a founder of cults. 24 This chapter is intended to demonstrate the manner in which Nietzsche's writing promotes a critical philosophy and, concomitantly, a program of recruitment of readers to see through to completion the promises Nietzsche makes of this philosophy. Especially where his most obvious meaning contradicts the subtler currents of the text, Nietzsche engages in a program of subterfuge against some readers, and conspiracy with others, to the purpose of achieving through

these readers—and

by means of their interpellated

positions within his texts—different, but nonetheless complimentary, tasks.

30

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

This argument will be pursued further in chapter 3, wherein I consider some esoteric readings of Nietzsche. In the main, by playing various threads of Nietzsche's texts against one another, the present chapter has demonstrated how his writing produces a textual remainder. This textual excess gives itself to be a pure object, which exerts the force of the sublime upon the reader: thereby capturing his or her desire, such that one recapitulates subjectivity in terms of a relation to Nietzsche's text. These "pure objects"—for instance, "the body" understood as a multiplicity of drives, or "the noble type"— beckon to the reader as objects of desire: states that he would like'to attain. Yet what is attractive about these objects also renders them frightening to the reader. For, they are understood to exist in an incorruptible nook prior to interpretation. In terms of Nietzsche's own critique of truth—whereby there can be no thing in itself; no fact without interpretation (Will to Power, §481, 267)—they are impossible objects. In the final, brief section of this chapter, I wish to interrogate further "the pure object" that Nietzsche dangles before his reader, by way of both carrot and stick. While I will elucidate here the operation of this textual excess within Nietzsche's work, it is worth keeping in mind that Nietzsche's use of this excess prefigures the plotting of desire as rendered by psychoanalytic theory, which will be dealt with in the chapters that follow.

MOMENTS OF EXCESS: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE SUBJECT In keeping with the circular movement of origin and corruption in Nietzsche's texts, the body, as a vision of plurality—caught, as it seems, only with the corner of one's eye—in truth answers (but is not to be reducible) to a desire cultivated by language and subjectivity. Language indicates its origin in a place before its existence. But what must be comprehended is that this scenario is structured already in terms bestowed by language: "the host organism" for a metaphysics of presence. The relation between the body and language emerges as a question only because of a peculiarity of one of its terms. For, de facto, the matter is already organized from the perspective of language, which—in the attempt "to look around its own corner"—appoints itself as chief arbiter, thereby determining the findings in advance of a question having been posed. Language, which essentially organizes, defines itself in opposition to "a disorganized" body, and in this way the body comes to play

ONTOLOGY FOR PHILOLOGISTS

31

the role of its abject term: as what resists the dictates of grammar. The body is conceived as the site of an aporia—or impassable point—which ultimately empowers language, because in it language sees itself reflected as the measure of all things. In terms of Nietzsche's ontology, language exhibits the most voracious will to power, and as such represents the body's overcoming of itself. This aggrandizement of language is hardly surprising, however, as the body is understood only in terms of language in the first place—even, and especially, within Nietzsche's philosophy. Perhaps the conflation of body and language, as text and perspective, is Nietzsche's gift to us as a philologist: he thereby provides a means by which we might rethink subjectivity as essentially a synthesis of—or a point of ambiguity between—the body and language. Such conflation, however, is also moderated by a curious oppositional structure: a rupture that makes all the difference for subjection. The subject must understand itself to have been violently separated from its origin, for such violent separation in fact characterizes

subjectivity. And as we saw

earlier, for Nietzsche the rupture at the heart of subjectivity also founds all knowledge. With this in mind, I will outline Nietzsche's acutely incongruous attempt at metaphysics, which he cautiously frames in terms of

negative

ontology. Nietzsche famously designated as "chaos" all that exists beyond the schematic (Apollonian) idealization of the self, and the equally idealized things accrued through everyday experience. Chaos is supposed to refer to whatever is not already incorporated, domesticated, or organized. Yet, we cannot characterize chaos without bringing it into our own field: which would be to interpret it, to organize it. N o t without a certain irony, chaos, drawn by Nietzsche from the writings of Heraclitus, is then already a positive concept, with the positive quality of infinite mutability. It is almost axiomatic for Nietzsche that nothing can be said about chaos, that chaos discloses the indescribable. Yet, the word chaos already bespeaks the multiplicity of the river that is never the same; or the primordial swamp from which we pull ourselves by our bootstraps. In this way, chaos operates for Nietzsche precisely as the excess that both creates the subject and is its by-product. It is an inconvenient, yet necessary, remainder of his attempt to escape the antinomies of metaphysics. Once "chaos" is revealed to be a positive concept, and so already subject to metaphysical interpretation, we find Nietzsche attempting to gesture beyond the reaches of language by substituting for "chaos" the negative concept of "the abyss." This abyss aligns with many other impressions of the sublime found within philosophical discourse: as the source of all reason and

3

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

2

identity that also threatens to annihilate reason and identity. For Nietzsche, every question posed to a human being—and each response that attempts to take the enquiry beyond its usual terrain—risks consigning the inquisitor to the abyss: that is, to a bodily excess, or destabilization, that would threaten subjectivity. This is why he warns the reader of the dangerous questions and perhapses at the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, and also writes the short and enigmatic aphorism in that same book: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you" (§146, 89). This passage indicates the element of risk that attends any mode of enquiry that draws too near to one's own foundations: simply because what one might find is that there is no foundation, no substantive I upon which experience is grounded. For designated as the abyss, the body signifies for Nietzsche not a multiplicity of forces, but rather a constitutive nothingness. This bodily abyss persists in the subject as an anxiety respecting its identity without which, according to Nietzsche, there would be no impetus for thought. As a life form that inherently poses questions of essence to itself and the world, the human being situates itself anxiously and precariously over an abyss most fecund because of its fundamental indeterminacy and duplicity. All sense of boundary—and so the basis of conscious thought, language, and the subject—is dissolved in the abyssal body. But, at the same time, the abyss constitutes the boundary for language, as the outer space that surrounds it. The abyss laps at the shores of all sense, threatening to engulf it, but thereby providing it with a coastline or definition. It is perhaps not coincidental that, in the quote considered above, Nietzsche articulates this abyssal excess with reference to the Oedipal myth, thus preempting the psychoanalytic tradition that would emerge in his wake. 25 For not only does that story deal with the ultimate social transgression—thereby acting as a cautionary tale to the moral being, know

one's place—but

in

so doing it also deals with what Freud maintained is the subject's ultimate and most obscure desire: to kill the father in order to marry the mother. Nietzsche, then, implicitly refers the reader to what has become the paradigm of "excess" or "the sublime": the child's relation to the mother. Marriage to the mother would here signify a return to a primordial wholeness that is disturbed with the introduction to the scene of the father—representative of language and subjectivity. The relation to the figure of excess is thus always already interrupted, in virtue of the structures by which the self is ordered. By learning his or her relation to the parental figures, the subject comes to

ONTOLOGY FOR PHILOLOGISTS

33

occupy a social role. Yet the process by means of which this occurs involves both punishment and love; pain, abstinence, and pleasure. Love and hatred of the parental figures comes to be felt with reference to the ideal self that, psychically, replaces them. The subject's attachment to its subjection is thus essentially characterized by ambivalence. We can learn much about the manner in which the reader is subjected to Nietzsche's text if we consider the work of ambivalence in the formation of subjectivity. Instances of excess—"chaotic," corporeal multiplicity, and the direct expression of power represented by the noble—promise the reader a return path to what one understands to be the primordial unity. At the same time, however, these figures represent a disturbing surfeit that threatens to undo the self. Likewise, the force of Nietzsche's writing is that it keeps the reader guessing as to her place in relation to it: its polyvalence and duplicity provide a varied topography wherein the reader may invest her hopes and fears. This recalls the ambivalent parent—child relationship described above. For within this triad the means by which one gains recognition, and thereby love, is also the source of privation. Nietzsche withholds the promise of recognition from the reader with his avowal that only a very few will be admitted to his text's inner sanctum. H e thereby awakens the reader's need to be interpellated, and so to negate and suppress whatever does not fit to the ideal promoted by his writing. And Nietzsche's text thus plays the (paradigmatically parental) role of both destabilizing the reader's sense of self and of reorganizing it—providing for them a place (or perspective) from which to speak and interpret. The figures of excess with which Nietzsche intersperses his writings accord to the form of "the pure object," existing prior to interpretation, and for this reason should arouse our suspicion. "The thing itself" is especially excessive for Nietzsche, having already been prohibited by him in accordance with his perspectivism. Nietzsche's use of these figures, then, indicates a rhetorical aspect to his writings—and perhaps even an attempt to dissimulate, or to manipulate the reader, by means of the construction of fictive truths. These so-called truths capture our imagination and our desire, understood not simply as what one wants, but moreover as a relation to the object world through which the self is constructed. The discarded excess and the chaotic plenitude, beyond interpretation, can be understood to coincide: for each is only the surplus product of a so-called repressive process (language, or the subject) that they are deceptively understood to have preceded and provoked. In this respect, the conceptual content of Nietzsche's philosophy is brought

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

34

to bear in virtue of the manner of its disclosure to the reader: through an affectively charged relation to the figure of excess. Nietzsche gives ideas such as will to power, the Ubermensch, chaos, and the abyss to be his philosophical purpose, and the limit points of his theoretical apparatus. In fact they are its points of impossibility. And this impossibility precisely designates the site of the reader's desire, wherein the moment of rupture (separation from a mythical plenitude) that founds subjectivity is most likely to be rehearsed ;

and recapitulated. We have seen how Nietzsche's account of subjectivity is intimately related to the subjugation of his reader. Nietzsche's interest in the genealogy of "the moral subject" thus also serves his concern to generate a following of loyal subjects that might continue his name and legacy. In the chapters that follow, we will proceed to theorize how Nietzsche's various "figures of excess" function as sites of identification for the reader, as well as repositories for the projection of material they would disown. These excessive moments of the text produce for the reader the illusion of a coherent identity that preexists their encounter with Nietzsche, whereas in fact this identity is only a textual effect. This retroactive movement conforms to what Butler designates as the circular figure of the subject in Nietzsche's work, or the circuit of bad conscience: a concept that—caught within its own reflection—is inextricable from what is supposed merely to figure it. Let us, in the next chapter, turn to the theory of subjection as it emerges from Nietzsche and extends to psychoanalysis. As we shall see, accounts of dangerous bodily excess are here integral to the emergence of the superego: the mechanism of interpellation, or socialization of the subject for Freud. Thus we will continue to develop and refine an understanding of subjectivity as a process driven by ambivalence, the better to understand various readers' attachments to Nietzsche.

CHAPTER

2

LACAN, DESIRE, AND THE ORIGINATING FUNCTION OF LOSS

The object is never for [the subject] definitively the final object, except in exceptional experiences. But it thus appears in the guise of an object from which man is irremediably separated, and which shows him the very figure of his dehiscence within the world—object which by essence destroys him, anxiety, which he cannot recapture, in which he will never truly be able to find reconciliation, his adhesion to the world, his perfect complementarity on the level of desire. It is in the nature of desire to be radically torn. —Jacques Lacan 1 There's something very strange in the way Hamlet speaks about his dead father, an exaltation and idealization of his dead father which comes down to something like this: Hamlet has no voice with which to say whatever he may have to say about him. He actually chokes up and finally concludes by saying . . . that he can find nothing to say about his father except that he was like anyone else. What he means is very obviously the opposite. —Jacques Lacan 2 I describe as philosophical everything that tends to mask the radical character and the originating function of loss. —Jacques Lacan 3 If psychoanalysis can teach us anything, it is the formative effect upon the subject of the father's death, the fantasy of which provides the conditions for the emergence of subjectivity. Freud's various parables of parricide and incest (re)enact the experience of rupture that characterizes subjectivity:

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

3*

the radical break from one's original state of coincidence with the mother's body; and the violent overthrow of one's paternal rival—a crime without which there would be no law. The originating function of this crime—for which, as Foucault relates, 4 the harshest punishment is reserved—is of course only imagined. Even if, as Freud contends, this fantasy connects us to our phylogenetic heritage 5 —to actual events of our prehistory—this crime still exhibits the curious structure of having always already taken place. It is the fantasy upon which social order rests; the fantasy of what social order must resist. As such, this primordial fantasy exerts a great deal of power over the imagination. This is the fantasy that keeps the subject in line: law abiding, certainly, but also desirous of the social order not simply out of fear, but because this order reflects back to the subject his "innermost self." The law furnishes the subject with an identity, because it is the structure with reference to which the subject places himself. The paternal law provides the proper name: this is the meaning of Lacan's well-known pun concerning le nom du pere (the name of the father), which is also le 'non' du pere (the father's prohibition). It is the ' n o ' of the father—or the law—that delimits the child's identity, while the parricidal and incestuous fantasy thus represents excess. It is the outside that necessitates the law: that provides its meaning, and generates the anxiety that brings the subject into line. If a writer were to provide an access to this fantasy through his texts, then he might also be able to exert the force of law over his readers, and so have a formative effect upon their subjectivity and desire. In this chapter I suggest that this is how Nietzsche's text operates: that the Nietzschean's relation to Nietzsche is characterized by mourning. The field of Nietzschean scholarship is thus as contested as any last will and testament wherein "the estate" is large—concerning, in this case, the future of Western culture. In grief, one must reconstruct oneself. Mourning is a dual process, first of reconstituting the concrete practices of one's existence and, second, of establishing within oneself a reason and authority to keep living, and to keep writing, in the face of death. What mourning "addresses" is the anxiety generated by primordial loss, and the illusion that one is essentially separated from an original context or knowledge, the inclusion of which would make one whole. The work of mourning is to recover to the self this sense of wholeness—a work that the speaking subject is never able to complete. In relation to the text, what Nietzsche does is to inscribe his own absence within it, thus attracting readers to attend to this loss through mourning. Inspiring a mode of grief,

LACAN, DESIRE, A N D THE ORIGINATING FUNCTION OF LOSS

37

Nietzsche thus sought the reader's recognition; like the superego, he comes to be incorporated into the reader's self, as its guiding principle. At the same time, he also made possible the reader's razsrecognition of oneself in his text, as its necessary element (the one in whom he finds recognition, if only belatedly). In this chapter I wish to address to Nietzsche's text these themes of recognition, death, and absence, in the light of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. I am interested in how the sense of rupture inherent to subjectivity is played out in the relation between Nietzsche's text and its reader. For Lacan, the inauguration to language precipitates an irrevocable break from the body, such that all identity, all desire, and all meaning (even unconscious) is structured in terms of language. To be sure, a relation of absence and presence structures language itself; signifying a loss of being, or a fall from grace of the self-present body. Language promises to provide a way back to the body, but can furnish only body substitutes. In this way, the use of language inherently involves loss—and reading is an act of mourning the death of the author. Enter Nietzsche, who was a writer particularly adept at manipulating that void within the text that orients the subject to speech and, indeed, to one's own subjectivity. After sketching Lacan's account of the subject, I will demonstrate how Nietzsche "staged his own death" in his writing, thus placing the reader in a position of responsibility for his (literary) remains, and in a position of anxiety with respect to his writing such that the reader feels compelled to fill the void, to return Nietzsche to the text. In order to bring out the role of "the excess remainder" in the reader's subjection to Nietzsche, I will first briefly trace out the fate of "the body" within Lacan's language-focused theory of the subject. Let us, then, begin where Lacan's ecrits begin, with the child's reflection in the mirror.

THE WORD THAT SEES ME: THE NEXUS OF IMAGE AND SIGN

Around six months of age, the infant sees its image in the mirror, and understands that image to be itself. This event—seemingly as subtle and transitory as a glance—catalyzes the child's mental, social, and physical development, and brings upon life the seal of permanence that will allow her to participate in the world of things, concepts, and words. It brings to the child an unprecedented sense of wholeness, and a presentiment of the selfmastery that lies ahead. This mirror image contains the germ of a concept

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

3«

of self that endures through time and circumstance, that enables the child to relate to others, and that can be articulated in various situations by means of a realm of fantasy. In his "mirror stage" paper, 6 Lacan relates to his reader the importance of the child's recognition of itself in the mirror, to its own psychic and physical development. He is not the first or only theorist to realize the significance of this event: Henri Wallon, Charlotte Buhler, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are precursors and fellow travelers with respect to his discovery.7 What is of interest in Lacan's formulation of the mirror stage is the pivotal place that it occupies in his psychoanalytic theory, as an event that both galvanizes and renders impossible the internally coherent subject, and a coherence of relation between the subject and its objects. It is, perhaps, equivalent to the discovery of the apple in the garden of Eden, in that it gives rise to human freedom and knowledge, but at the price of a fall to come that will cause the anxiety and alienation characteristic of human desire, with all its vicissitudes of neurosis,.psychosis, paranoia, and perversion. The sense of sight is privileged within Lacan's account by virtue of its ability to represent permanence, in the face of the flux and transience unchallenged by the senses of touch, smell, taste, and sound. Yet it would seem that the human animal is relatively unique in its heavy reliance upon vision, valued for its quality of temporal and spatial abstraction. The crucial difference between human and other animals, according to Lacan, is the biological incompleteness of the human neonate. Curiously, human evolution has favored a verticality of posture over a pelvic diameter equal to the ability to bring infants to full term. This prematurity of birth leaves the infant absolutely helpless and uncoordinated, bereft of any natural (instinctual) means of negotiating a path between its needs and their satisfaction. In Lacanian terms, even at this most corporeal level, the human being is constituted by lack. It is in the light of this fundamental gap in human biology that the mirror image garners its significance, according to Lacan: because by means of this ideal, or Gestalt, the body supplements itself. The gap is provisionally filled by a crystallized and augmented projection—the mirror image as ideal ego—with which the incomplete body enters into (silent) exchange. However, this exchange, between the body and its image, is not free from disputation, and throughout the mirror stage the child is visited with jubilation as well as, toward its climax, fear and alienation. Initially, the disorganized and chaotic nexus of infantile impulses finds the promise of a future unity in its own mirror image. Lacan describes the "startling spectacle" of the child before the mirror:

LACAN, DESIRE, AND THE ORIGINATING FUNCTION OF LOSS

39

Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or a r t i f i c i a l . . . , he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image, (z) What is apparent in this passage is the fascination with which the child views itself in the mirror, as if captured by it. This is because the mirror image initiates a narcissistic relation—or "libidinal dynamism" (Ecrits,

z)—by

means of which the infant's understanding of the objective world arises as an experience of its own object being. The mirror stage supplements the child's incomplete development by providing an ideal of completeness and coordination; yet the libidinal investment in this image also conditions the child's ability to relate to other objects, as increasingly reified instances of the flux of experience. Furthermore, the continuity and cohesiveness that the child finds in the objective world are only myriad representations of itself (as what is fixed in the mirror image). Instead of the fragmented and uncoordinated experience that preceded the mirror stage, the child now comes to exist in an unbroken continuity with its surroundings (and especially the mother), in which its own completeness is reflected. However if the mirror image supplements and unifies, rendering the incomplete organism its dreamed-of whole, it also introduces to the system the threat of destabilization, disintegration, and death. This is because the child only finds its wholeness outside of itself: spatially, in the mirror image; and socially, in the gaze of the other. This situation produces various consequences, felt as deleterious by the proto-subject. First, if the truth of the self is located in a relation with the other, then the coexistence of the ideals of unity and of self-sufficiency—represented by the mirror image—is continuously frustrated, so that to preserve both one must perform the double maneuver of soliciting the recognition of the other (in order to access that unity), while also denying the need for such recognition (thus preserving the illusion of autonomy). This "tug-of-war" between autonomy and unity is evocative of Hegel's discussion of "Lordship and Bondage" in the Phenomenology

of Spirit, wherein the master's freedom is founded only

upon the recognition (and work) that the slave supplies on pain of death. This is an inauthentic freedom, according to Hegel, because if the master must rely on the representation of power within the other (the bondsman), then

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

4°

the master is alienated from himself: he cannot properly appropriate himself, and so is unfree. By contrast, the slave—unable to gain recognition from the master—becomes self-conscious through his own work: "in fashioning the thing, he becomes aware that being-for-itself belongs to him, that he himself exists essentially and actually in his own right." 8 But the essential point is that the slave can only realize self-consciousness through work if this laboring is motivated by "absolute fear," without which consciousness "is only an empty self-centred attitude; for its form of negativity is not negativity per se." (Hegel Phenomenology,

119). For Hegel, only in the face of death can one achieve

self-consciousness uncontaminated by the complacency and alienation that characterizes the Lord's self-knowledge. Likewise for Lacan, the subject only appropriates its "true self" once it can turn away from the lure of recognition that the other provides, and acknowledges instead what is for Lacan a most profound negativity: that the subject essentially lacks, and that there is no object that would complete it. A second, and related, consequence of the alienation of the one's image in the other arises specifically from a difficulty in the relation to the mother. For whereas the mother provides the strongest sense of recognition to the child, thus for the moment completing his or her self, there is a point at which the child realizes that he or she cannot complete the mother: not only that she has desires that the child cannot fulfill, but also that she finds her satisfaction elsewhere (with the father, with siblings, with friends). The asymmetry of their relationship throws the child into a state of anxiety, as the need of reassurance from the mother becomes proportional to the attention she directs elsewhere. But furthermore, the mother's desire, which the child cannot fulfill, is then experienced as voracious, and consequently her jouissance (pleasure or enjoyment) 9 becomes a threat to the child's integrity. Accordingly, if the child is not to become subsumed by the mother (whom he or she understands to be bigger, more powerful, greedier, than himself), he must separate radically from her. To this end, the child identifies with the father, and displaces anxiety, with regard to the mother, onto the symbol, thereby disrupting the intensity of that relation. Ironically, the effect of this assuagement of anxiety by means of the symbol is further alienation from the self, and a sense of nostalgia for the lost oneness with the mother, in whom one's image was reflected. A third consequence of the alienation of self in the mirror stage concerns more directly the reader's interpellation of a subject position within the text, to the extent that she feels herself in her being already to occupy that position.

LACAN, DESIRE, AND THE ORIGINATING FUNCTION OF LOSS

41

According to Lacan, the act of recognition of oneself in the mirror, which characterizes the mirror stage, is actually a

rafsrecognition

(meconnaissance),

in terms of which a gap opens up within the self, between the lived body and this "reified sign," the mirror image, which comes thereafter to organize that body. The mirror image is a precursor to the "I," which is characterized by an emptiness and formality that allows it to stand in for the first-person position of each and every subject. As Richard Boothby writes, the mirror image, or ego, "continually devotes itself to a stereotyped picture of reality, indeed, the tendency toward stereotypy belongs to the very essence of the imaginary function." 10 Against this most austere generality, the body—insofar as it cannot be signified—is felt as dangerous, as there is no symbolic equivalent for it; no means of managing, once and for all, the anxiety to which it gives rise. This moment of splitting inaugurates "the death drive," 11 according to Lacan: It is this moment [at the end of the mirror stage, when the specular "I" becomes a social "I"] that decisively tips the whole of human knowledge into mediatization through the desire of the other, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence by the co-operation of others, and turns the I into that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger, even though it should correspond to a natural maturation—the very normalization of this maturation being henceforth dependent, in man, on a cultural mediation as exemplified, in the case of the sexual object, by the Oedipus complex. (EcritS) 5-6) The mirror stage intervenes to catalyze the child's development, but in so doing establishes an economy of equivalence that estranges one aspect of the body from another. There is thus a certain homology between Lacan's account of the emergence of "the I" through the alienation of one aspect of the body from the rest, and Nietzsche's account of the relation of language and consciousness to corporeality discussed in chapter 1. Indeed, from this point onward, the body articulates a relation to itself that is mediated by language (in which "the mind" is instituted), such that what are thought to be merely physical stages of development (such as puberty) must be negotiated via a psychical apparatus that is installed according to social imperatives (for instance, the Oedipus complex). Accordingly, by means of the mirror stage, the body differentiates itself internally, such that a mind—body dualism

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

42-

comes to dominate the body's experience of itself. Bodily impulses that exceed language—that do not fit the stereotype delivered by the imaginary idealization—are then understood to belong to a quasinoumenal,

abject body,

as opposed to a cultural body that is formed by (and includes) the mind. This corporeal excess is experienced as both external and internal to the subject. First, the pressure of this excess comes to be felt as an ineffable and insistent drive: a necessity for discharge with no object in particular. In this respect, the body is experienced as alien to the mind, and as its incessant obstacle. As Freud related, the infant manages this discomfiting intimacy with the drive only once it learns (perceptually) to hurl the drive from the body, so that a mode of flight can then be employed against it.12 Accordingly, the internal obstacle, or "death drive," is projected out onto the external world, as an incomprehensible and terrifying (uncanny) element of the other, which threatens the integrity of the self. This is what Lacan refers to when he writes of the aggressivity inherent to relations with others, and originating in the mirror stage. Lacan describes this gesture, rather poetically, as "the especial delusion of the misanthropic 'belle ame* throwing back on to the world the disorder of which his being is composed." 13 The most unearthly aspect of the abject other is that it is the subject's own death drive that looks back at him as the threat of death. The dehiscent bodily excess, or drive, is imagined (in dreams, "primitive" mythology, and works of art—for instance, Hieronymus Bosch) as the fragmented body. But in fact, the drive is not of the body qua body, but is, rather, an effect of a failure of assimilation: without the imago formation there would be no acephalous drive. For Lacan, the drive can play the role of a voracious nothingness—or pure negativity, against which the ego protects itself—only after a boundary has been drawn between the one and the many, or the one and the body in bits and pieces [corps morcele] that threatens to undo it. Lacan's specific use of the term drive, understood as a structural element, depends upon a particular reading of Freud's contention, in Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, that the drive exists on the frontier of the body and the mind, and in fact represents the body to the mind ("as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind") (zoi). The drive is representative

of primal force, and is not a primal force

per se. The drive stands in as a signifier for its somatic source [Quelle], which, Freud contends, cannot be known in itself but instead must be converted to the currency of the psyche. Furthermore, like any signifier, the drive is only ever partial, bearing a metonymic relation to its sources and aims: "the drive

LACAN, DESIRE, AND THE ORIGINATING FUNCTION OF LOSS

43

represents no doubt, but merely represents, and partially at that, the curve of fulfilment of sexuality in the living being.5'14 For Lacan the aim of the drive is not the attainment of a totalizing biological function, such as reproduction, even in the act of sexual intercourse. Rather, "the drive is only ever a partial drive" means that it is necessarily inhibited in its aim: its satisfaction does not reach an ultimate goal; instead, by means of sublimation, the drive returns to the circuit of its own production—the erogenous zone (or rim) upon which it supervenes—and is reinvested therein. For this reason, too, the drive is proper to the imaginary system that determines which part of the body is erogenous and which is not: that corporeal reconfiguration which can only occur after the advent of the ego, or imago, by means of which the body narcissistically invests its energy, or libido. The drive, unlike the bodily source, is already structured: it is the trace—or "insignia"—of a body that is for us always in absentia; a constant pressure that both indicates and presses toward nothingness.

THE NOTHING AS THE REVERSE SIDE OF LACAN'S MIRROR

I wish now to provide a rather truncated sketch of three senses in which Lacan's "imaginary" turns upon the nothingness behind the mirror, in order to access a particular connection between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, through which textual interpellation is made possible. As I will demonstrate in the following section, it is nothingness that gives rise to anxiety, and to a certain contact with "the real": that is, the child's unconscious (bodily) excess, remnant of ascension to the imaginary (and ultimately the symbolic). For this reason, nothingness provides various portals for the reader into Nietzsche's texts: as the empty place that awaits the reader's interpellation, to be sure, but also an uncanny element that gives rise to an encounter with the real, understood as the monstrous enigma of the reader's own abject excess. By enumerating the various means by which nothingness is "generated" in Lacan's imaginary stage, I will later be able to demonstrate a concordance between the operation of Nietzsche's text upon the reader, and that of Lacan's mirror. As will emerge, the mirror stage produces the subject's past as well as its present and future, retroactively. This retroactive effect will form the basis for my account of the reader's interpellation of his place respecting Nietzsche's text. The first sense in which there is nothing "behind the mirror" refers to the irrevocability of the mirror phase in relation to anything that may have

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

44

passed before it. As we have seen already, in Ecrits Lacan sketches an order of events that occasions the infant's acquisition of subjectivity and speech. However, already this "order of events" exhibits a peculiar temporality: for time itself begins at the mirror stage. Once I, as "ego," have passed through the looking glass, there is already no passage of return; there is nothing on the reverse side of the mirror. Any preoedipal experience is only grasped as such retroactively, becoming meaningful in terms of the system of differences prefigured by the imaginary, and achieved in the symbolic. In this way, "time" prior to the mirror stage designates the subject's prehistory, and any vestige of preimaginary "experience" is obliterated and rendered merely illusory: a refraction of the mirror, from which all forms emerge. Thus, since there is no past, there is nothing behind the mirror. Temporality loops back upon itself: the mirror stage inaugurates its own past, envisaged as the incomplete body, or the body-in-bits-and-pieces [corps morcele]. This body-in-bits-and-pieces is said to find a certain jubilation in the sight of itself in the mirror, as a unified whole. The subject anticipates itself in this image, prematurely. As I have already emphasized, for Lacan the infant's maturation—bodily and intellectual—depends upon this encounter with the mirror image. Before the child is able to stand alone, when it is barely able to orient itself in relation to its surroundings by touch, sound, smell, the mirror image provides an alluring (and reassuring) contrast to a fragmented, inhuman corporeality: a corporeality that experiences itself as nothingness, as gap. Yet this depiction of the past as fragmented is itself a projection from the point of view of an anxious unity: a unity that does not want to fall back into nothingness. The infant cannot experience its disorder as such, because it was not ordered to begin with. 15 Nothingness, gap, chaos, abyss, are thus only the reverse sides of appearance, and of the mirror. This is the second sense in which nothing is behind the mirror: because the concept of nothing negates "unity," just as unity is determined by the nothingness that permeates it. Nothingness attains its monstrousness only in relation to a whole that is motivated precisely by its inherent vulnerability to diffusion. A third sense in which there is nothing behind the mirror can be understood more literally in relation to Lacan's demonstration of the mirror stage in Ecrits. The difference, he asserts, between the chimpanzee, which is rather more mature in the order of motor coordination, and the incoherent infant—the important difference that will render one a speaking subject and the other a mere ape—is that the child realizes that there is no thing behind the mirror that gives the appearance (that there is no second child),

LACAN, DESIRE, AND THE ORIGINATING FUNCTION OF LOSS

45

and yet is still enthralled by the image. The chimpanzee will pass its hand behind the mirror, and when it is found to be empty, will dismiss the whole experience. The child, conversely, is "captured" by the empty image, which from this point onward becomes a symbol of the self, by which the child organizes bodily experience, relation to others, the meaning of the world. The empty image is a pure Gestalt, a form, always ready to organize an inchoate content that the child is only too willing to give up. The gap between the uncoordinated child and the unified image thus appears to have been closed in this premature encounter. The closing of the gap seems to be evidenced in the child's jubilation at the sight of its image. Yet tragically, the euphoria of misrecognition is where the gap opens: the moment that precipitates the slide backward into anxiety about disunity, the body-in-bits-and-pieces. After the mirror stage, the symbol comes to perform the role that the mirror image initiated. In itself, the symbol is empty: it is a presence that signifies absence. But the emptiness of its structure organizes our world such that, even momentarily, we can reproduce a feeling of jubilation at the prospect of unity, or at least keep anxiety at bay. For instance, the child says Dada because Dada is away, and thus recalls him. The signifier is predicated upon the possibility of absence, and absence gives rise to the signifier. Yet absence, and the anxiety that it arouses, are even conceivable only after the initial organizing gesture of the child's recognition—or misrecognition—of itself in the mirror. There is no sense of absence without the sign, or the image, that stands in for presence and unity. Accordingly, the proper home of nothingness is the symbol that promises wholeness. The three respects, sketched above, in which the mirror stage generates nothingness—as oblivion, fragmentation,

and empty

formality—each

correspond to a particular moment of the reader's relation to Nietzsche's text. First, just as the mirror stage inaugurates time and memory for the infant, Nietzsche's writing produces the reader's identity as a retroactive effect, whereby the reader understands herself always already to have been waiting for the encounter with Nietzsche. The writing provides a framework that reorganizes the reader's self-understanding, but upon ascension to its terms she will always have been as she then finds herself, and the past, prior to this encounter, will have been obliterated (Ecrits, 48). The infant's past, prior to the mirror stage, is remembered only as an abyssal contrast to the unity given in the mirror, and this mirror-effect is experienced again in relation to Nietzsche's writings. The second sense in which there is nothing behind the mirror pertains to the anxiety that attends the reader's

46

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

assumption of the role of "philosopher of the future" or "ideal reader": the threat of fragmentation that is proper to subjectivity. Whereas the child has a sense of having been fragmented prior to the mirror's unifying effect, Nietzsche's text gains a hold upon the reader by strategically constructing the specter of incompleteness corresponding to a failure to comprehend the meaning of the philosophy: the ever-present p h a n t o m , that is, of "the bad reader." Finally, the attraction of Nietzsche's text is related to what the mirror stage accomplishes for the infant, luring him or her with an emptiness that is mistaken for plenitude. The ideal for which the reader strives promises fullness and unity, but can appeal to so many only due to its absolute neutrality or emptiness. Formal emptiness is, indeed, the active ingredient of the symbol: the medium through which the subject understands himor herself. The reader's presence to herself is in this way made possible, ironically, only by the absence (or emptiness) that characterizes the symbol: in this case the philosopher of the future. And as will be elucidated further in the present chapter, Nietzsche's absence from his own text conditions the reader's orientation to his philosophy, creating the sense of a loss the reader must mourn (and ultimately recompense). This coalescence of absence and presence that characterizes the sign creates a morbid anxiety in the child, as it does in the reader: an anxiety relative to what the subject excludes; the corporeal remainder invested in the object. It would therefore be useful at this point to focus upon this anxiety as it relates to language, consciousness, and subjectivity. For Lacan, an interminable exchange of presence and absence occasions the possibility of language as such. The child manages anxiety about his corporeal incompleteness—visited upon him by the threat of incorporation by the mother, the daily loss of feces, or the vulnerability of external genitalia—by appropriating and repudiating the other's jouissance at alternate intervals. This traffic of psychic material produces the subject's relation to its others, but also to itself. Paradoxically, the child attains enjoyment in the image of his own perfection that is reflected in the other's desire, but then finds himself to be thus alienated in the other, and must then abject her. The significance of the image oscillates, in relation to the child, between presence and absence: the reassurance proffered by this representation of the complete self is belied by its status as representation. The child's perceptual experience fails to coincide with the corporeal wholeness furnished by the image. Both spatially and conceptually "a gap" intervenes, alienating the child alternately from her perceptual body and the

LACAN, DESIRE, AND THE ORIGINATING FUNCTION OF LOSS

47

bodily schema that organizes those perceptions. Finally, the violence of the child's relation to its self is defused by the intervention of the sign: by means of symbolization she or he is able to mete out this anxiety so that it no longer overwhelms. The role of anxiety in this schema is twofold. It provides the infant with the requisite incentive to exchange the fullness of the imaginary for the further alienation of the sign; and, in the other direction, it bears witness to the nothingness of a real, unstructured body that subtends (but is excluded from) desire, knowledge, experience. As Freud points out in that work most seminal of the Lacanian appropriation, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," anxiety [Angst] is different from fear or fright precisely because it has no object. Whereas fear refers to something in particular, and fright occurs after an event for which one was not well enough prepared, anxiety is a general preparedness for nothing in particular. It puts the psychic system en garde, and thus "protects its subject against fright and so against fright-neurosis" ("Beyond," 223), or "trauma." In this way, anxiety performs a crucial service of inoculating the mental apparatus against shock. Yet, its function and its intentionality are essentially mysterious: it refers to nothing, but in such a manner as to indicate its very presence. It thus awards nothingness the status of a substance. As Freud describes in The Uncanny, what unnerves the reader of Hoffmann's tale, "The Sand-Man," is the ineffable bedrock of the protagonist's experience that is suggested, but not encapsulated, by the various repetitions of its narrative. What is most unheimlich, is the Heimlichkeit,

or uncanny,

or familiarity, that resides therein, but in a concealed

manner. In a sense, the uncanny thing—the real, or nothingness, that anxiety indicates—1is reserved from experience by the unconscious. In fact, its driving force derives from its inaccessibility to language and the imagination. The real is that impossible yet immanent danger, just out of reach of signification. It is the prohibited corps that exceeds the law (the mother's body; incest), and idealization (the corps morcele), as well as the corpse that signifies that ultimate "beyond"—the body without psyche, reduced to elemental matter. If the unconscious conceals the impossible

real—the

excluded and inaccessible bodily remainder—then, according to Lacan, it constructs such a refuge from chains of signifiers that jar against one another: the dream, for instance, which never strictly makes sense; or the slip, that asserts an embarrassing and subliminal relation. The real also makes itself present by means of the hysterical symptom, which is incomprehensible according to the ordered realms of polite society or medical science. Hysteria

48

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

is the means by which the real finds its way into the symbolic, as rupture, thereby placing into question its all-encompassing coherence. More than the words presented, it is this "hiccough" that is most suggestive of unconscious meaning, which can be glimpsed, but never articulated as such. By means of the sign, the subject of speech is able to negotiate a relation to the real that anxiety indicates, since language shelters, or disguises, the real. Language—a house of veils and mirrors—puts the real at a safe distance. As we saw in the previous chapter, Nietzsche designates the excluded "nothing" by the terms chaos and abyss. This abyssal, chaotic nothingness to which language cannot properly refer generates interpretations and artistic expressions, and so is a seemingly inexhaustible resource for thought and creativity. For Nietzsche as for Lacan, however, our disposition to nothingness is anxious. We build edifices upon the abyss only to conceal from ourselves its—that

is, our own—emptiness. And as with Lacan, this nothingness

conditions the possibility of subjectivity per se: of our owning a perspective from which to interpret. "The nothing," the gaping and incomprehensible wound that looks back at us as the abyss, is that part of the subject that must be invested in the object world in order to establish a vital connection to it. Alenka Zupancic addresses this event when she writes: [T]he gaze is always outside, and constitutes the blind spot of our vision . . . the most important aspect of this account is that the constitution of the dividing line between subject (of seeing, of representation, of knowledge) and the world of objects coincides with a part of the subject-object relationship. In other words, the subject finds itself on the opposite side of objects or things (seeing them, exploring them, learning about them) only insofar as there is a "thing from the subject" that dwells among these objects or things, a fragmentary remainder of subjectivity dissolved into the "stuff of the world" through the occurrence of a primordial severance. 16 This portion of the self, lost irredeemably to the object, is nothing that we can recognize: it is a blind spot that cannot in itself be seen, but rather "the gaze" positions the subject with respect to its object world. Like a phantom limb, it is a piece of the self from which we are separated, but to which we continue to feel adjoined; and that thereby forms the subject's connection to the world. Also like the phantom limb, the gaze is a nothingness constituted by a trauma: as an effect of misrecognition, the gazeconsists of a relinquish-

LACAN, DESIRE, AND THE ORIGINATING FUNCTION OF LOSS

49

ment that we in some way have failed properly to encounter. This phantom limb is the object #, which Lacan defines as "a privileged object, which has emerged from some primal separation, from some self-mutilation induced by the very approach of the real." [Seminar XI, 83). In relation to the object #, we manufacture a sense of wholeness, and thus attempt to maintain an intimacy with whatever of ourselves we have invested in the object. And here, finally, is the fourth respect in which there is "nothing" behind the mirror: it is the nothing that is not reflected by the mirror, but that constitutes the gaze, or perspective. The nothing is the internal obstacle that the ego casts out of itself in order to maintain a sense of inner coherence. It is this abject connection to the self that sometimes renders the afflicted object uncanny, monstrous, or fatally attractive. Lacan approaches this particular incarnation of nothingness most comprehensively in his Seminar XI, with the term anamorphosis,

most commonly discussed in relation to art. Ana-

morphosis refers to the painterly concealment of an image—sometimes to the extent of esotericism (for instance, King Charles I)—such that it can only be rightly perceived by means of the viewer's adoption of an unconventional viewpoint. What does a simple, non-cylindrical anamorphosis consist of? Suppose there is a portrait on this flat piece of paper that I am holding. By chance, you see the blackboard, in an oblique position in relation to the piece of paper. Suppose that, by means of a series of ideal threads or lines, I reproduce on the oblique surface each point of the image drawn on my sheet of paper. You can easily imagine what the result would be—you would obtain a figure enlarged and distorted according to the lines of what may be called a perspective. (85) The anamorphosis is in this sense the very essence of perspective: it represents the viewer's gaze as it conceals itself within the image, allowing the object "to look back at her," or make sense. For Lacan, the anamorphosis gives the lie to the understanding of the field of vision elaborated by Descartes, as organized evenly and geometrically from the point of view of the neutral onlooker. Descartes' model works only if the subject is radically separate from its object, that is, if subject and object exist in distinct fields. On the contrary, for Lacan the subject is implicated in the object of its vision by "the gaze": the portion from which the self is separated, as its condition of emergence as subject.

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

5°

Notably, the concept of the gaze at work here is consonant with Nietzsche's mobilization of perspective in relation to will to power, reviewed in chapter i. The gaze is constitutive of the subject, and of the subject's relation to its world, and therefore cannot simply be isolated and removed from that constellation. As Nietzsche put this, "we cannot look around our own corner" (Gay Science §374, 336). Apart from this theoretical parity, we can also understand the subject's relation to Nietzsche's text in terms of anamorphosis. If in order to respond to Nietzsche's text the reader must invest a piece of herself within it, then the text will take on an uncanny and ambiguous cast. The aspect of the philosophy to which the reader replies—for instance, the elitist strains of his work, or his position(s) on woman—represents back to the reader the piece of herself projected within it so that she may own a position from which to speak in the first place. This ambivalence thus indicates the point at which the subject (reader) and its object (the text) coincide. Similarly, we may also understand the emotionally potent site of Nietzsche's text in terms of the excess remainder, the denial of which constitutes subjectivity. It is those most equivocal moments of the philosophy—in which Nietzsche cannot be pinned down to one or the other position—that attract most attention, not only because of an intellectual curiosity respecting what Nietzsche really thought. Rather, the point of equivocation captures the reader's desire since it represents the site from which the reader looks back at herself, thus articulating her own position with respect to Nietzsche, the object of her desire. This, again, touches upon the earlier discussion of the proto-subject's development in the mirror stage. Recall that when the infant locates itself within the imaginary spatiality of the mirror image, a curious experience of elation and power takes hold. The child feels one with the image, and to coincide with its satisfying completeness. Furthermore, as a corollary to the mirror stage, the child also sees the self reflected in—and coextensive with—objects in the world: objects that are greedily incorporated, and then either retains or rejects. In this manner, the child invests a part of self within each object that only afterward, in the realm of the symbolic, comes to be understood as separate. In order to regard the object at all, the subject needs to find something of himself there that, in the achievement of subjectivity, was alienated from him. This piece of himself is disguised, however, as an incongruous blot that appears to reveal an inconsistency, or lack, within the symbolic system itself. The displaced piece of the subject and symbolic aporia coincide; as the symbolic system conceals

LACAN, DESIRE, AND THE ORIGINATING FUNCTION OF LOSS

51

from the subject her own lack—that is, her own desire. With respect to Nietzsche's text, the reader readily finds herself reflected within it because "reflection" characterizes the subject's essential relation to its objects. This deposit of the self within the textual object, however, is obscured as such: thus it retains its affective intensity, but loses (or conceals) the mark of its specificity to the reader. Lacan's example of Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors illustrates this point nicely. The painting depicts two accomplished renaissance men, their array of worldly things exhibited between them. Yet the viewer is required to distort the main picture to the point it is unrecognizable, in order to perceive an anamorphic skull concealed within the painting. Lacan characterizes the disguised skull—the oblong shape placed in the foreground—as "symbolic of the function of lack," and as a kind of "phallic ghost" (88). As Zizek writes of this lack, "'Phallic' is precisely the detail that 'does not fit,' that 'sticks

Fig. z.ii Holbein, The Ambassadorship. Photo © The National (gallery, Iiondbn.

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

52-

out' from the idyllic surface scene and denatures it, renders it uncanny." 17 The anamorphic image is thus emblematic of that most fundamental lack that arises from castration: it corresponds to a return—or eruption—of the real, prohibited by the father's "no." The subject's perspective—and the subject's desire—is organized around an abandoned (prohibited) object, which is then understood only as an incoherent nothingness: the mother's (abject) body; as well as the subject's own corporeality. The anamorphic image placed in the foreground of The Ambassadors

is a reminder to the viewer of the libidinal

attachment to the object of the gaze; or a need of the object a—the object cause of desire—that orients his relation to all other objects. And as Lacan writes in "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet," the subject is "eclipsed [S becomes $] at the precise point where the object a attains its greatest value" (29). That is to say, the subject fails to recognize himself in the object of his gaze, at the point of his own desire. Such desire can thus only appear to the subject as a blot that mars the perfection of his ideal image. Yet we must not forget that this anamorphic stain symbolizes a further lack that we would like to avoid: not only the mother's prohibited body, or the subject's abjured desire, but also a skull—representing death, a point of finitude through which the subject is most ultimately "eclipsed" (Zizek, Looking Awry, 90-91). The subject converges with its object at the phallic point of anamorphosis. Therein the possibility of death infects all worldly relations and investments, as "the nullity of all terrestrial goods, objects of art and knowledge" (Looking Awry, 90) is revealed. For instance, as one ages, mortality looks back from the mirror: the uncontrollable body in decline is inconsistent with one's idealized corporeal schema. The disguised vision of the skull in The Ambassadors

reflects a lack that, for both Nietzsche and

Lacan, the constitutional instability of the subject produces: an elision of the subject that maintains their relation to the world as desire. In agreement with Nietzsche, for Lacan there is no "soul atom" (Nietzsche, Beyond

Good

and Evil, 19-20), no unified thing that thinks. Nor is there a fundamental signified to which the signifier I pertains, and to which meaning might be definitively bound, or "quilted." 18 Rather, in the Cartesian quest after the essence of subjectivity, the philosopher searches for something that must elude her grasp, because this something is actually no-thing, or an elision that is continually reinscribed as beyond the signifying system in terms of which subjects and objects are constructed. It is in connection with this notion of the subject that is always in excess of the statement, 19 and the specter of death that looks back from the object

LACAN, DESIRE, AND THE ORIGINATING FUNCTION OF LOSS

53

of desire, that we can now return to Nietzsche's text and the reader's relation to it. Nietzsche continuously signals to the reader the likelihood that his philosophy will be misinterpreted: that the text's meaning is not literal, and therefore does not coincide with what is written on the page. In this respect, "Nietzsche" is not within the statement that purports to designate his presence, any more than the " I " is encapsulated by the cogito. The text's meaning always exceeds the text, and the reader's task is to reconstitute the relation between writing and its meaning. Nietzsche frequently elucidates this gap, between the text and its meaning, through the figure of his own person: for instance, with the claim that he was "born posthumously," and that the text's true reader was not yet born at the time of writing. Indeed, he figures himself as an immortal figure, halfway between life and death; or moreover, as coming to life only by means of his death—which is to say, through writing. In this vein, he begins the "autobiography" {Ecce Homo) with the assertion that he lives on his own credit: Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am. Really, one should know it, for I have not left myself "without testimony." But the disproportion between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that one has neither heard nor even seen me. I live on my own credit; it is perhaps a mere prejudice that I live. I only need speak with one of the "educated" who come to the Upper Engadine for the summer, and I am convinced that I do not live. Under these circumstances I have a duty against which my habits, even more the pride of my instincts, revolt at bottom—namely, to say: Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.10 In this passage, Nietzsche attempts to manage the distance between the affirmation of his identity ("I am such and such a person") and the loss of such affirmation at the hands of his contemporaries, who do not understand him. Nietzsche knows, however, that in so doing he chases his own tail: that the pathos for a lost identity is already inherent to the statement as such; that the "I" that speaks always eludes the statement that attempts to pin it down. "I live on my own credit," Nietzsche ironically remarks, indicating that his life

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

54

and identity will be paid in full at some future point, but that in the meantime he must borrow some credibility from the reader. In other words, we must simply take his word for it, that he is "such and such a person." Yet this passage is suggestive not only of a quality owned by language per se—that is, that it stipulates the essences that it is supposed only to name—but also it indicates a peculiarity to Nietzsche's writing that, in its very singularity, deepens this alienating aspect of language in general. As Alenka Zupancic argues, throughout his oeuvre Nietzsche explores the many different levels at which the subject is alienated by language, but is also constituted by language within that alienating gesture. "One of these levels," she writes, is the relationship between the subject as the author of a certain work, and the subject as that which is, so to speak, at work within this very work itself. The paradox consists in the fact that the subject-as-author, (temporally) situated at the beginning of the process/ labor of authoring, is entirely dependent upon the subject who is subsequently going to become the subject of the work-yet-to-becompleted. . . . "To live on one's credit," to pawn something which one does not yet have, and which will only become what it is: that is a poignant expression of the time loop referred to above, as well as a concise formula of what is involved in Nietzsche's theory of the event. {Shortest Shadow, 19) According to Zupancic, Nietzsche takes out credit in order to declare "who he is," since this identity is constructed in the very utterance that presupposes the subject. There is no "Nietzsche" prior to this declaration: rather, Nietzsche is enacted by it, and then slips again into obscurity. He exists always only in relation to the utterance that is "received" (or conversely reenacted; reconstituted) by his reader. Nietzsche's statement, then, that he lives on his own credit, describes a relation of self-reflexivity through language. Yet the preface to Ecce

Homo,

and a general tendency within Nietzsche's work that it summarizes, also indicates a relation to the reader, and not just to himself. In "Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name," Jacques Derrida writes that this passage establishes within Nietzsche a relation to himself of becoming, whereby "[h]e has taken out a loan with himself and has implicated us in this transaction through what, on the force of a signature, remains of his text"21

According to Derrida, Nietzsche involves his readers

LACAN, DESIRE, AND THE ORIGINATING FUNCTION OF LOSS

55

in this transaction by placing them in the role of guarantor for the loan he extends to himself: "He never knows in the present, with present knowledge or even in the present of Ecce Homo,

whether anyone will ever honor the

inordinate credit that he extends to himself in his name, but also necessarily in the name of another. (9, my emphasis)" As Derrida writes, this credit is extended, of necessity, "in the name of another." Already, we can read this remark in two ways. First, "Nietzsche" is this other's name. According to this reading, insofar as the subject is split, Nietzsche is already estranged from himself in the utterance that he speaks. Language necessarily alienates, and so the statement creates two subjects: the subject of the enunciation and the stated subject; or in other words, the " I " that speaks, and the " I " that is spoken. Nietzsche's declaration, that he lives on his own credit, brings forth the difference between these two selves articulated by their relation to language. But we can also read Derrida's insistence that Nietzsche lives on credit that is underwritten "in the name of another" more literally, such that the reader is instrumental to the formation of Nietzsche's identity, or the credibility of his life. Nietzsche beseeches of the reader to bear witness to him as text, and thereby also as man (Ecce Homo translates as "behold the man"). We might understand the text in itself as deficient, requiring that "dangerous supplement," the interpretation, for its completion. But the life, also, must be witnessed, or guaranteed by the gaze of another. If Nietzsche—who declared himself to be "untimely"—inhabited a world of peers that did not recognize him, or, as he wrote elsewhere, had not the ears to hear him, 22 then until someone happened along who recognized him, it were as if he had never existed. Death does not only annul life: it also provides to one's life its seal of permanence, and confers upon "the name" its immortality. It is the life perfected, in which we can finally declare that x was such and such a person. In the case of Nietzsche, who proclaimed that he would not be understood in his own lifetime, death awakens the possibility of recognition. In this light we can also understand the opening sentences of a book which, if not autobiographical, is at least ironically self-referential, The

Anti-Christ:

This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them is even living yet. Possibly they are the readers who understand my

Zarathustra:

how could I confound myself with those for whom there are ears listening today? — Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously. 23

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

5*

It is through the reader's look of recognition—or to employ Nietzsche's metaphor, his ear of understanding—that "Nietzsche" the philosopher can be born, posthumously. Accordingly, the reader who has come to Nietzsche's texts after his death is best suited to interpret his writing. Perhaps, then, it is only once the word has been purged of its vital context, and is no longer measured against the life of its author, that it can speak lucidly as a text. For instance, according to Gilles Deleuze, it is only after Nietzsche's text comes under the charge of the reader's interpretation—in its purity—that it is allowed truly "to live": to become subject to another play of forces, by means of which its complexity is augmented. 24 Thus, the life of his beloved writings—which he called his children—required his own death; his debt paid only once his estate passed into another's hands. For this reason, too, Derrida's statement that Nietzsche's credit is extended to him "necessarily in the name of another" may also be regarded as a warning to the reader. For in writing Ecce Homo Nietzsche attempts to contract out his own immortality to the reader. His word lives on through the reader, to the extent that it will even shape the reader's own identity and desire. In these opening lines to Ecce Homo, Nietzsche invests his death with a significance, and the reader with a purpose: namely, to bring to light his life and thought. In this manner, there is a curious relation between the reader's attraction to Nietzsche and the attraction of Christianity, in that each "movement" gains its energy from the death of its founder. 25 The essential difference—at least in the context in which Nietzsche studies now stands—is that Nietzsche does not redeem the reader so much as the reverse occurs: Nietzsche's sins, and those of his contemporaries, are absolved in the trials through which the text puts its reader. It is the reader through whom Nietzsche is purified; and the reader in whom Nietzsche's word is made flesh. Death engenders an attitude of sanctity with regard to Nietzsche's word, and such an elevation of his word then performs a formative function upon the reader whereby structures that organize the text also organize their desire and identity. To illustrate this, we might understand the effect upon the reader of Nietzsche's death in terms of the death of the primal father. Nietzsche is thereby positioned as performing the function of the superego for the reader. In what remains of this chapter I will elaborate the generative force of the death of the father, as theorized by Freud.

LACAN, DESIRE, AND THE ORIGINATING FUNCTION OF LOSS

57

NIETZSCHE IS DEAD, LONG LIVE NIETZSCHE: IN MEMORY OF PATERNAL GHOSTS In Totem and Taboo, Freud offers his own mythos of the social contract, which is for him founded in an act of parricide. This account of the origin of society portrays men as at first only animals, subjugated to the might of "a violent and jealous father who keeps all the females to himself and drives away his sons as they grow up." 26 The primal event that produces a rupture between this mere two-legged beast of prey and the socialized human being, in Freud's telling of the story, is a collusion among the brothers to murder the father and so gain access to the women and privileges that he had kept to himself. The unforseen yet decisive consequence of this act is a feeling of guilt, shared among the brothers, which leads to the prohibition of the very spoils that had been their goal. They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too. After they had got rid of him, had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify themselves with him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. It did so in the form of remorse. A sense of guilt made its appearance, which in this instance coincided with the remorse felt by the whole group. The dead father became

stronger

than the living one had been—for events took the course we so often see them follow in human affairs to this day. What had up to then been prevented by his actual existence was thenceforward prohibited by the sons themselves. (143, my emphasis) For Freud, society itself comes to be defined in terms of this primordial act of parricide, whereby brute force is replaced by the rule of law. The totem emerges as a symbol of the dead father who, through the totem, watches over and protects the tribe, but only on condition that it is not exploited as a resource (either for food or any other of its products). In this manner, respect for the dead father—and guilt regarding the father's shameful death—come to dominate the social order, such that none of the brothers accede to the rights of the primal father. Rather, his place is kept empty as a symbol of prohibition.

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

5§

It is quite straightforward a matter to understand that, for the primal horde of brothers, the death of the father could strengthen his influence over them at the level of law rather than might. In this case, the brothers do honor to the father's law out of atonement for his murder at their hands, and perhaps also from fear of reprisal. 27 The mortal father is transmuted upon his death to an immortal father: a godlike ancestor, continuous with the moral law. Furthermore, the son's betrayal of the father comes to be written into the myth as preordained by the father, and thus, the murder fulfills a destiny prefigured in law. The act of parricide, as the defining moment of a tragedy, becomes the point of articulation between brutality and culture. Nietzsche's relation to the reader works analogously to this scenario, mobilizing a nebulous sense of culpability for the primal crime through which the law is instituted. For when Nietzsche prefigures his death for us in Ecce Homo, he evokes within the reader a response of guilt that is finely attuned to the superego's melancholy resonance. Nietzsche solicits in the reader a duty to mourn him when he writes: "I only need speak with one of the 'educated' who come to the Upper Engadine for the summer, and I am convinced that I do not live" (217). Here he charges his potential reader with responsibility for his life, as if he could perish at the hands of inattentive (absent) readers. Like God, Nietzsche is dead, and it is we who killed him. But what is more, Nietzsche told us that we should do so. Nietzsche binds us to this act, and therefore to himself, by occupying in the reader's imagination the place of the primal father. Just as (for Freud) the Oedipal complex jolts into wakefulness our genetic heritage of primal parricide, so too Nietzsche's complaints of having been denied oxygen by his contemporaries access, and give significance to, these accretions of instinctual (or more likely, cultural) memory. Accordingly, he places an onus upon the reader to redeem him, to make amends for his death by devoting her life to his philosophy. Like the emergent subject of Freud's Oedipal narrative, Nietzsche's reader can take a symbolic place in relation to his text only once she imagines herself to have killed the father (Nietzsche)—but unconsciously, and while also playing the part of his dutiful child, the ideal reader. In the Oedipal scenario the imagined coup enables the little boy to take the father's name, becoming Mr. Smith for instance, in his stead. This binds the child to the father's law, providing the mandate that attends his masculine identity. Yet the identification with the father cannot deliver all that he had hoped: the child takes responsibility for a symbolic place, in absentia of the one with the right to enjoy it; and the father's privilege of absolute jouissance

LACAN, DESIRE, AND THE ORIGINATING FUNCTION OF LOSS

59

is done away with once and for all. Likewise, the Nietzschean subject is "authorized" to make certain claims with respect to philosophy only in Nietzsche's wake: that is, on condition that she or he continues to refer to Nietzsche, thus keeping in reserve the father's place as the progenitor of a line of thought, as if he were to return at some future time to reclaim it. The force of law issuing from Nietzsche's immortal name is in this sense a negative force, achieved by means of a schism brought down upon the reader. By inscribing into the text a series of absences—the ideal reader who has not yet come to the text, certainly, but also his own failure to coincide with the meaning of his writing—Nietzsche furnished his texts with the requisite mechanisms to bring about his readers' identification with his project. These gaps are like mirrors that stabilize the reader's identity in relation to the text, but ironically at the price of a more permanent instability, continuously repressed so that the relation to Nietzsche may remain unchallenged. These mirrorlike absences signify to the reader a place of fantasy in which to construct an ideal self; yet, there must always remain a degree of uncertainty with respect to whether "I" am the one called to enact the ideal. This book's wager is that the anxiety such uncertainty produces is what ultimately motivates the interpellation. Rupture is proper to subjectivity, and so to the extent that Nietzsche's texts are able to deploy the specter of rupture, they are also able to control and shape the reader. Through the somewhat histrionic enactment of his own death, Nietzsche was able to bring about a psychology of mourning in the reader, whereas his actual premature death elevated him to the status of philosophical legend. His death—and tenyear confinement that preceded it—is often associated with a most ignoble and dangerous appropriation of his philosophy to Nazism, through his sister Elizabeth's Nietzsche-Archiv.

And this most dramatic fall from grace surely

motivates his readers to redeem his name, to give him back to himself. Yet we should not overlook the work that the specter of death does for Nietzsche's appropriation of the reader. His death garners its significance through its being the site of the reader's fantasy, and the construction of his or her subjectivity. Ultimately, the reader must also pay the price for Nietzsche's extravagant, "untimely philosophy": his death tax so to speak. For, like the primal father, Nietzsche was most indulgent in his jouissance at the expense of the other: particularly women and Jews, both of whom he frequently alienated as resources for his philosophy. 28 It is precisely the place of women and Jews in his philosophy—and as heir to his discourse—which has preoccupied much

6o

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

scholarship on Nietzsche over the past decades. The Nietzschean legacy is beleaguered by questions of propriety over Nietzsche's name: the effects of his extravagant discourse, which lends itself to misappropriation. My interest is what takes place once the reader alienates her or his "self" in thefiguresof identification found in Nietzsche's writings. For Nietzsche does not simply provide for the reader worthy ideals: he anticipates the surge of displaced energy that then renders the reader under the text's control, at the level of affect. This is achieved in part, as we shall see in chapter 3, since the reader cannot possibly meet the demands that are made by the ideal with which he or she identifies; and in part because, as we have seen already, the text motivates the reader's guilt respecting the father's death upon which the law, and the reader's subjectivity, is founded. As the myth goes, the reader is destined to disappoint, and even betray, the father. The esoteric readings to which we turn in the next chapter will demonstrate this inevitable betrayal, and the impossibility of relations with Nietzsche.

CHAPTER

3

"THE INSIDERS": NIETZSCHE'S SECRET TEACHING AND THE INVENTION OF "THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE FUTURE 5 '

What Nietzsche says in regard to political action is much more indefinite and vague than what M a r x says. In a sense, all political use of Nietzsche is a perversion of his teaching. Nevertheless, what he said was read by political men and inspired them. He is as little responsible for fascism as Rousseau is responsible for Jacobinism. This means, however, that he is as much responsible for fascism as Rousseau was for Jacobinism. —Leo Strauss 1 Apart from the fact that Nietzsche was not a socialist, not a nationalist, and opposed to racial thinking, he could have been a leading National Socialist thinker! —Ernst Krieck 2 Like a child before the lacanian mirror, Nietzsche anticipates himself in his own writing, the various self-characterizations that he draws providing the Gestalt by means of which his subjectivity is organized. Thus, in writing an "autobiography," Ecce Homo,

Nietzsche makes a wager with himself

regarding his self-identity. What this means is that Ecce Homo

(even more

than his other works) is for Nietzsche a labor of self-construction, involving a feat of the imagination. But as such, Nietzsche's self-construction is also accomplished at the level of "the imaginary." By altering his ideal ego—the imago that represents to the subject its whole, most competent possibility— Nietzsche creates for himself a different destiny, or becoming.

Yet most

significantly, the ideal that he fashions himself is incomplete: in fact, it is precisely its gaps, and the doubts to which they give rise, which signal the promise of Nietzsche's transformation through a relation to the reader, who

6z

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

is thus coopted to his project. The narrative voice employed in Nietzsche's text represents as its ideal a moment of rupture. Nietzsche is this event of rupture from which a future can transpire: "I am no man, I am dynamite" (Ecce Homo, 326), a power of transformation and annihilation. Ecce Homo documents the event of Nietzsche's understanding with himself, and of himself, whereby one self departs and is replaced by another. Like the mirror stage, once he is transformed, there is no history; there is nothing on the reverse side of the mirror through which Nietzsche rebirths himself. "One lives before him, or one lives after him," and this point of articulation—the affirmation "Ecce Homo"—is impassable. If Nietzsche is the breakingpoint of human history—and of philosophy—he gives himself to be, then his offer to the reader is that they become its future. Particularly in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche beckons to the one that understands the tenor of his thought, and bestows upon him or her the privilege of being heir to philosophy's future. Accordingly, it is not only Nietzsche who is altered by the structure of his texts, which usher "the new Nietzsche" into being. The reader also takes up a reflexive position by means of these texts, not simply refining, but also subtly redefining her or his own goals and selfconception in relation to them. In effect, Nietzsche engenders the reader as his own future and salvation: that is, as the future bearer of his name and purpose. This is because, in aspiring to the appellation of Nietzsche's "ideal reader" or "philosopher of the future," or even "Nietzschean," one takes upon oneself a role, and a register of its attendant duties. In similar fashion to the child who adopts his familial and broader social roles by virtue of a reflexive relation to language, the reader also undergoes a process in which the self is first destabilized and then reconfigured according to the terms that structure the text. This chapter will continue to address the question of the reader's part in the construction of Nietzsche's philosophy, and the project of revaluation, by demonstrating how Nietzsche's texts are able to exploit the very mechanisms by which subjectivity is constituted. Drawing again upon Lacanian theory, I will demonstrate Nietzsche's technique of interpellating the reader, such that her part in his philosophical project becomes intrinsic to her identity and desire. Specifically, in this chapter we will begin to understand how "the good reader" constructs herself in relation to the material that she least recognizes as Nietzsche's or her own; that what are considered the most vile "misinterpretations" of Nietzsche's work, as well as those elements of his philosophy that cause the reader most discomfort, perform a pivotal role in

"THE INSIDERS"

63

attaching the reader to him. More precisely, these repudiated remainders, discarded by the reader in the construction of "a good Nietzsche," initiate a desire for him. They are, in Lacan's parlance, the object a {objet petit a] that the subject invests in the world, and that causes her integral connection to it: desire. Interestingly, the manner in which Nietzsche constructed his texts, rhetorically, gains a purchase upon the reader precisely by generating "an excess" of the reader's ideal, which then becomes the focus of her anxiety: this object a that orients a desire for Nietzsche. Nietzsche's double gesture of promoting the notion of the ideal reader, and explicitly stating that most of his readers cannot attain this ideal, creates a hidden reservoir into which the reader may then channel doubts regarding one's fitness for that position. Whatever material accrues to this malignant reserve only deepens the reader's commitment to the idea of oneself as "a good reader," and of Nietzsche as a worthy patron. The thematic of this chapter, broadly speaking, is rupture:

For not

only does Nietzsche figure himself as the point of rupture that will break humanity in two, but the hold he exerts upon the reader also originates in an event of internal rupture, cultivated and exploited by his texts, between the good self, and the bad portion that it rejects (or which simply is not intelligible to the ideal structure that attempts to incorporate it). These two instances of rupture—in Nietzsche and in the reader's psyche—will be connected in this chapter. T h e point of connection is Nietzsche's text, which attempts to divide humanity in two by distinguishing two types of reader: those who come before Nietzsche and those who come after. This division is articulated by how the reader identifies with his text—in other words, how the reader divides herself in relation to the demands of Nietzsche's project. The manner in which Nietzsche divides humanity is thus twofold. Whereas on the surface this proclamation refers to a difference between types of " m e n " — t h o s e equal to the challenge of his philosophy, and those who are n o t — a t another level the annunciation divides each and every reader in two, thus exploiting the schism at the heart of identity itself. This in turn prepares the reader to be interpellated to Nietzsche's project; to play her p a r t according to the imperatives of Nietzsche's text, as either what will prevail or what must be overcome to produce the new human type. Let us begin by considering the intimacy Nietzsche achieves with his reader, paradoxically, by evoking the rupture between himself and his text, and himself and his reader.

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

64

FINDING ONE'S HOME IN THE NOTHINGNESS OF NIETZSCHE'S TEXT The imaginary stage is characterized by an illusion of fullness, the fantasized union with the mother, and a totalizing imago that organizes the infant body. Yet, as was established in the preceding chapter, the imaginary is also haunted by the specter of disruption, separation, and nothingness that are soon to characterize the subject's experience in the symbolic. The gesture that establishes the bodily ego—the child's recognition of itself in the mirror—also creates a schism within the body, by means of which one aspect of the organism is estranged from another. Whatever escapes the imaginary bodily schema—the unorganized remainder—the emerging subject can only experience as a frightening void, or an insistence (drive) that intrudes from "beyond." The imaginary is thus shadowed by a pressing nothingness that resides, so to speak, on the reverse side of the mirror: "nothingness" as the phantom of the corps morcele, the body rent apart within itself; but also nothingness as the empty generality of the symbol, anticipated already within the imago as stereotype; and the obscurity that descends upon any prelinguistic experience (the gap in memory, or trauma, which the subject fruitlessly attempts to fill with the objet petit a). Yet, while the imaginary anticipates the symbolic (just as the mirror image anticipates the subject), insofar as language is essentially characterized by inter subjectivity, the symbolic also maintains a relation to its imaginary kernel: the realm of fantasy, wherein those boundaries that demarcate the subject are drawn. It is this imaginary level of textuality that I would like now to address to the act of interpreting Nietzsche, by interrogating the extent to which Nietzsche's readers find themselves within his writings, in images that he places in reserve for them: "the ideal reader," "the philosopher of the future," "the affirmative woman." The nothingness of a text does not appear only in the battery of its concepts {abyss, chaos, lack, excess,

nihilism).

Nothingness reigns in Nietzsche's writings, structurally inscribed within his texts through his insistence that no one reads him. Nietzsche crafts his textual persona as a lonely and untimely figure: as a man untiringly disappointed in his contemporaries who have all but forgotten how to read. As remedy for such "lack," Nietzsche draws the figure of his ideal reader as a philologist, or studious interpreter, able "to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers" (Daybreak, preface, §5, 5). Alongside this depiction, he also designates a class

"THE INSIDERS"

65

of his readers, in their absence, as "the philosophers of the future." He writes in Ecce Homo: I am one thing, my writings are another matter.— Before I discuss them, one by one, let me touch on the question of their being understood or not understood. I'll do it as casually as decency permits; for the time for this question certainly hasn't come yet. The time for me hasn't come yet: some are born posthumously. (2.59) First it must be noted that at the beginning of this passage, Nietzsche absents himself from, or marks his absence within,

the text. "I am one

thing, my writings are another matter." Thus, he signals a constitutive distance—or gap—between himself and his text: or the " I " that enunciates, and the stated "I." And with the final statement, he designates a temporal distance between himself, and those readers who will only have "arrived" at his text (that is, understood him) long after he is dead. He indicates to the reader that he is not to be found in the text, and then intimates the event of his return—but only to a special reader, one with ears to hear. That is, one better disposed to receive the message of his writings than his contemporaries. The combined statements—that he is not to be found in the text, and the time has not yet come for his proper reception—also indicate a rupture within the present. As Alexander Nehamas suggests, Nietzsche's "philosopher of the future" need not refer literally to one who comes to the text at a certain point in chronological time, any more than "a philosophy of the future," indicated in the subtitle to Beyond Good and Evil, must emerge only after a certain duration. As Nehamas maintains, it is likely that the phrase philosopher

of

the future designates a type, rather than the contingent circumstance of a reader's encounter with Nietzsche's text. Philosophical laborers . . . can fairly be considered philosophers of the past not because they have already existed but because the past has been the primary concern of their thought. Their usefulness is that they make its overcoming possible for the "genuine philosophers . . . [who] are commanders and legislators [and] say 'thus it shall be!'" {Beyond Good and Evil, §211,136). The future, therefore, is the time with which genuine philosophers are concerned, not the time when they existed. 3

66

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

The "rupture" in the present thus indicated concerns a break with a particular mode of philosophizing, and being. Nietzsche claims that he will properly coincide with his text only once his reader departs from what he considers an ordinary mode of reading philosophy. The one who regards his text as pregnant with the future—that is, as offering alternative ways of understanding and evaluating—will experience Nietzsche's own quickening within it. Nietzsche will present himself to them within their reading of his philosophy. In this way, what we find in the above-considered passage from Ecce Homo—structured

as it is by these dual nothings, between Nietzsche and

his text, and Nietzsche and his reader—is a mirrorlike apparatus, by means of which a particular relation between the text and its reader is established in advance of their encounter. In the formal incompleteness of Nietzsche's writing, the reader revisits that anxiety evoked (in the imaginary) by the specter of the corps morcele. In order to stop the gap, and thereby ameliorate anxiety about it, the reader interpellates herself as the philosopher of the future: an empty figure that specifically awaits such an interpellation. The contingent circumstance in which the reader now finds herself—situated, fortuitously, one-hundred years after Nietzsche—only further motivates the identification with this figure; leading the reader to understand herself, according to Nietzsche's prophesy, to occupy a privileged relation to his writings. In this regard, the image of the philosopher of the future plays the part of the specular image that precipitates the subject into language. It behaves as an ideal ego, or as the vacant Gestalt that anticipates the reader's ability. Even if one could defensibly claim to accord with Nietzsche's projected philosopher of the future, such identification is necessarily based upon a misrecognition: that is to say, one becomes the ideal reader only by anticipating oneself as such. Lacan represents this movement with the following diagram (fig. 3.1). The signification [s(O)] is completed, and meaning achieved, only through a retroactive effect in which the subject is stabilized by the big-O-Other (representative of the plenitude that the symbolic order withholds). The ego ideal [1(0)] is produced by means of a circuit that is mediated by signification; and so the (barred) subject [$] understands herself only in relation to the signifying process (be it speaking, writing, or reading) in which she is engaged. As Slavoj Zizek writes, in relation to Lacan's account of imaginary identification,

"THE INSIDERS"

67

Graph II

1(0)

$

Fig. 3.1. Lacan's graph II we are dealing here with the "effect of retroversion"—with the transferential illusion according to which the subject becomes at every stage "what it always already was": a retroactive effect is experienced as something which was already there from the beginning. 4 The philosopher of the future provides the structure for "a transferential illusion," wherein the reader simultaneously identifies with this figure in Nietzsche's text, and experiences the resultant identity as a natural given. The act of recognition thereby generates the identity that it purports merely to find. However, "the transaction" between the reader and the text is not as neat as the above description would imply. For misrecognition entails precisely that one identifies with what one is not: identity requires difference, and is in fact even established in terms of difference. Accordingly, there will always exist a gap between the subject and the ideal with which he identifies; a material remainder that renders the image of the philosopher of the future inconsistent. This inconsistency is reflected in the conditions that Nietzsche sets out for his ideal reader. T h e position of the philosopher of the future is in effect rendered impossible by Nietzsche's—or more rightly Zarathustra's—injunction against disciples. Zarathustra beseeches that his

68

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

followers overcome him: further, that his teaching must be repudiated if it is truly to be learned. Truly, I advise you: go away from me and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he has deceived you. . . . One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil. And why, then, should you not pluck at my laurels?. . . You say you believe in Zarathustra? But of what importance is Zarathustra? You are my believers: but of what importance are all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves when you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account. Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you. (Zarathustra,

103)

All Nietzscheans know this demand, and attempt to take it to heart. Armed with the directive not to become a mere disciple, we elevate ourselves above those who take Nietzsche too literally, and feel embarrassment at others' efforts to attain an intimacy with him (through which they only demonstrate their ineptitude as "true" Nietzscheans). Yet, if we overcome Nietzsche only in order to be better acquainted with him—that is, in order more closely to comply with his desire—surely we are then only more deeply committed to the letter of his text; to an orthodoxy that Nietzsche rejected in advance. As we saw in the preceding chapter, the attempt to occupy the more-elevated position only renders more palpable the difference that divides the subject, between the levels of enunciation and statement. The subject is precisely where it cannot find itself: in the obverse, or the excess, of the position to which it lays claim. The position that one attempts to occupy, as ideal reader and philosopher of the future, is in this way guarded by paradox. One cannot both be loyal to Nietzsche's discourse and embody the ideal that Nietzsche envisaged as the philosopher of the future. One cannot both state that one occupies that position, and at the same time occupy it: the enunciation must always miss its mark. For as soon as the reader attempts to accord to Nietzsche's law, in the manner of a disciple, he falls out of range of the text's address. Instead, one must forget or deny Nietzsche in order for him to return to the text—that is, in order that his word should address the reader specifically.

69

"THE INSIDERS"

The reader becomes worthy of the title "Nietzschean" only once she or he no longer wants it, whereas the reader that identifies with the title can only fall short of that ideal. Accordingly, the one who desires to fill the place for Nietzsche of the philosopher of the future is haunted by the specter of that other, excess self; and identification hovers between inside and outside of Nietzsche's call. It would then appear that by alienating his reader from the ideal to which one aspires, Nietzsche produces precisely the conditions under which the interpellation must fail. By inserting the figure of "the disciple," as an element of doubt that separates the reader from identification with the philosopher of the future, it would seem that he trips up a process of interpellation that otherwise would have progressed smoothly, and in his favor. The reader had found a certain comfort in the place within Nietzsche's text offered by the identification: a comfort for which he or she might then pay with loyalty to Nietzsche. Why, then, does Nietzsche put at risk the reader's good will? What mischief does he enact against the reader's commitment to him? It is in fact my contention that the rupture Nietzsche produces in the reader— between the ideal reader and the one who falls outside his address—strengthens, rather than weakens, the reader's interpellation. To understand the part that self-doubt plays in motivating the reader, it might be of use here to consider Lacan's reading of Hamlet^ who, through Shakespeare's rendition of his story, elevates indecision to a variety of heroism. Here, as with Nietzsche, it is the parent's impossible demand that provides the conditions under which Hamlet's (or the reader's) desire can be determined. And, as with Nietzsche, the impossibility of the demand indicates an overwhelming jouissance

that

the subject—Hamlet, or in this case the reader—cannot own.

NIETZSCHE'S EXCESSIVE DEMAND AND THE QUESTION OF THE ADULTEROUS QUEEN'S DESIRE In the previous chapter we considered the attraction of Nietzsche's writings in terms of the paternal law, theorized by Lacan, and initiated with Freud's foundational myth of the primal father and the band of brothers. According to this viewpoint, the reader that identifies with Nietzsche's project positions "Nietzsche" as the dead father whom he or she—the [guilty] offspring—must mourn, where such "mourning" is constituted by a desire to fall into line with the text. The imperative for the reader, from this point of view, is to earn the

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

70

right to invoke Nietzsche's name—"the name of the father"—and thus also the authority to interpret his texts. I would like now to shift the angle from which this Lacanian treatment operates, such that the relation between the interpellative function and jouissance may be brought out: a relation that is encoded, within the Oedipal scenario, as paternal and maternal respectively. This change in point of view will elucidate the manner in which Nietzsche's text operates at one and the same time as paternal law, and as an overwhelming (feminine) voraciousness that threatens to destroy the reader's identity. At this second level, Nietzsche's text behaves as if it were the reader's internal impediment: thus simultaneously tripping up her or his desire, and setting it into motion. As indicated above, this will be demonstrated with reference to Lacan's treatment of Hamlet, and the insatiable desire of Queen Gertrude that brings the protagonist to fulfill his destiny as bearer of his father's name and purpose. Lacan was very taken with Hamlet because with that version of the story is introduced the question of the subject's relation to the Other's desire; and in particular, the manner in which one's desire can become "distracted and deflected" ("Desire," 15) from its path by the object a: in this case, Ophelia. Hamlet illustrates the manner in which the Other's desire can act as a limit to the subject's desire by disrupting the function of "the Name-of-the-Father" [Nom du Fere], with reference to which the interpellation takes place. On the one hand, one escapes the Other's desire (or the mother's jouissance), by subjecting oneself to the call of signification represented by the father (the Nom du Fere, which, as we saw in chapter 2, is also the Non du Fere: the prohibition of incest with the mother). Yet, the question of the Other's lack—or what the [m]Other wants from the subject—(which Lacan phrases rather enigmatically in Italian, as "Che vuoi?") also disrupts the smooth operation of the interpellation, it would seem, in advance, and even as a condition,

of

its actually taking place. The mother's jouissance acts both to motivate and to impede the subject's assumption of their symbolic role. In fact, as impediment it serves to deepen the subject's commitment to the Name-of-the-Father, because only by means of this "trip"—this question that the subject poses to oneself about desire—is the subject motivated to aspire to its social role in relation to the father. Again, Lacan expresses this point with the aid of a diagram, as shown in figure 3.2.5 As Lacan observes (13), the diagram appears as a question mark, poised above the primary certainty represented in the previous diagram, which had illustrated the retroactive recognition (or misrecognition) of the self, at the

"THE INSIDERS"

71

KO)

$

Fig. 3.2. Lacan's graph III

mirror stage. Where the circuit breaks off, at the place marked ($ 0 o), is the point at which the Other's desire (and therefore one's own being, as interpellated in relation to the Other) is in question: that is, the place designated by the fantasy. "The fantasy," Lacan writes, is located at the extreme tip, the end-point of the subject's question, as if it were its buttress, just as the subject tries to get control of himself in the, fantasy, in the space beyond the demand. This is because he must find again in the very discourse of the Other what was lost for him, the subject, the moment he entered into this discourse. ("Desire," 16) The pleasure that the fantasy provides approximates the fullness of the specular image, with which the child first grasped its "self." The fantasy is, Lacan maintains, the frame of desire: "the space beyond the demand" wherein the subject's relation to the Other is attuned ("Desire," 14). The fantasy attempts to patch up the Other's "lack," which refers to the mother's jouissance. Yet the fantasy also conceals the fact that there is no big Other: in other words, that there is no substratum for meaning per se; no metalanguage that would justify signification, and no hidden plenitude from which the sign separates the subject.

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

72-

And this is where the object a (the other, with a small o) must arrive again upon the scene. At the level of the symbolic, the object a returns as the piece of solder that would mend this short circuit, thus filling the gap created by the question of the mother's desire. The object a3 which situates the fantasy and the subject's desire, stands in the place of the mother's "lack" and so serves to alleviate the subject's anxiety, allowing him or her to pretend that he or she is the object of the mother's desire. 6 In this way, the object a represents a little piece of the mother, and also of the subject, abjured in the fantasy. Lacan writes, "The notation $ [barred subject] expresses the necessity that S [subject] be eclipsed at the precise point where the object a attains its greatest value" ("Desire," 29): and there we have the manner in which the subject invests itself in his world. As was established with our previous discussion of anamorphosis, something of the subject is transmuted in the object #, and it is this piece of self that forms an attachment to it. Through the fantasy, desire is produced; and thereby the subject is able to negotiate its relation to others. The object a plays the principal part in the subject's orientation to others, as "the object cause of desire"—that is, as that part of the subject through which he or she lays claim to the world. According to Lacan, Shakespeare dramatizes this psychic event with the character Ophelia—O-phelia, recalling to Lacan the part of the phallus ("Desire," 20)—who, even in earlier versions, was the "bait in the trap that Hamlet doesn't fall into" (11-12). By not taking the bait, Hamlet keeps open the gap of the [m]Other's desire, inciting its nihilistic voraciousness. In essence, Hamlet thereby refuses his own desire (as Lacan puts it, he "just doesn't know what he wants") (26), understood as a relation that orients the subject to the object world. Hamlet thus also keeps open the question of his own being, or his position in a social hierarchy. For by resisting the fantasy (the relation to Ophelia, who occupies the place of the object a) he refuses to permit the elision of self that the fantasy necessitates. This elision of the self—the barred subject, $—is equal to the subject's investment of itself in the world, such that the attachment to one's objects signifies a relinquishment of the self to them. Hamlet's refusal to accept Ophelia thus also amounts to a refusal of his rightful place within the social order, and a concomitant disengagement from worldly affairs. Hamlet's story is, as Zizek notes (Sublime Object, 120—21), a failure of the interpellation: Hamlet chooses madness over social propriety; the mother's ravaging jouissance over acceptability. To fully comprehend the significance that this has for the reader's relation to Nietzsche's texts, it is first necessary to elaborate the part that the mother's

"THE INSIDERS"

jouissance

73

would play in Hamlet's interpellation, if it were to be achieved.

In Hamlet^ the mother's desire puts the protagonist into a double bind. On the one hand, it is the mother's perverse and incestuous desire for the uncle, Claudius, which causes Hamlet's predicament, whereby he is called to avenge his father's murder. On the other hand, the mother's desire is what prevents Hamlet from carrying out the mandate handed to him in his father's name: it is the Che vuoi? that comes to trip Hamlet's desire, because, as with every little boy, he attempts to insert himself as its answer. Likewise, as object a Ophelia both signifies and is supposed to compensate Hamlet's frustrated (and unrecognized) incestuous desire for his mother. But as the (referred) object of Hamlet's desire, Ophelia is also the object of his derision: upon her is projected all the venom that the situation provokes in him. Lacan is thus able to plot these nodal moments of Hamlet's dilemma according to the language of psychoanalysis: This is our starting point: through his relationship to the signifier, the subject is deprived of something of himself, of his very life, which has assumed the value of that which binds him to the signifier. The phallus [O-phelia] is our term for the signifier of his alienation in signification. "When the subject is deprived of this signifier, a particular object becomes for him an object of desire. This is the meaning of $0a [the fantasy]'. The object of desire is essentially different from the object of any need. Something becomes an object in desire when it takes the place of what by its very nature remains concealed from the subject: that self-sacrifice, that pound of flesh which is mortgaged in his relationship to the signifier. ("Desire," 28) Ophelia is Hamlet's little prize, supposed to recompense him the loss of his mother. But furthermore, as the object a, she might also be understood as standing in for a corporeal sacrifice to language: the bodily excess that could not be subsumed within the ideal ego. In Hamlet, Ophelia's compensatory function is set out overtly at the beginning of the play, when her father, Polonius, reduces Hamlet's unhappiness to his desire for Ophelia. 7 Yet Ophelia is unable to compensate Hamlet because his mother's desire, and the wound it inflicts upon him, exceeds the limits of the transaction. That is to say, Gertrude's husband, Claudius—King of the Realm and symbolic Father—is not Hamlet's "real father," but (at least to Hamlet's mind) an evil

74

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

impostor. 8 Accordingly, the Nom du Fere emanates from a displaced, spiritual realm, and Hamlet must feign madness in order to receive it. Hamlet is thus removed from the world of commerce, which is now a barren place to him, and in this context Ophelia can only represent all worldly detritus: she is a spoiled good, emblematic of his profound disappointment; the promise of fullness reneged. At this point I would like to return to Nietzsche, and the predicament in which we left his reader, caught between the ideal ego and its abject failure. Nietzsche first offers the reader a venerable ideal (in the philosopher of the future) to which she might aspire, and then complicates the identification with his excessive demand upon the reader. By placing alongside his teaching the demand that we renounce it, Nietzsche mirrors the dead king's demand upon Hamlet that he seek recompense for what amounts (for Hamlet) to the mother's sin, but also that he do her no harm. The internal contradiction that organizes the demand, and gives rise to self-doubt, forces the reader to produce the circumstances under which he might better fit the ideal himself. Thus desire—for Lacan, characterized by lack—is inaugurated. At the level of consciousness, the reader fulfills the promise that Nietzsche had anticipated in the figure of the philosopher of the future; however, at the

unconscious

level, the reader is tailed by an inability to deliver this promise, identifying instead with the abject remainder. Yet curiously, that the reader never knows for sure whether she or he is the text's essential addressee or its vulgar interloper, is precisely what binds her or him to Nietzsche. The reader is motivated not only by the positive ideal to which they aspire (the Father's Law), but also, negatively, by the attempt to avoid and conceal an anxiety (the mother's jouissance)

that Nietzsche's

conflicted demand exploits. This is precisely where the Nietzschean's and Hamlet's paths diverge: For in the case of Hamlet, this doubt and anxiety is the place in which he bides his time. As Lacan observes, the madness that he enacts is only feigned ("Desire," 20), and is perhaps even a means to avoid actual madness. The reader, on the other hand, does not dwell in the position of uncertainty, but rather propels herself from it into a deeper commitment to the interpellation. Essentially, to the extent that she believes herself to fulfill Nietzsche's desire for the philosopher of the future, the reader allows herself to be "bought off" with the object #, such that she is able to occupy a "proper place" within his text. Whatever material is residual of the interpellation is returned to the subject as her little prize: for the object a represents both the corporeal remainder that she has had to renounce in order to conform to the

"THE INSIDERS"

75

ideal, and a most desirable morsel, the possession of which signifies her own totality. Furthermore, the uncertainty of one's position vis-a-vis the text is what allows it to subject the reader—to make the reader work toward its ends— since he or she then seeks reassurance from the text that he or she in particular is the one whom it indicates. In this respect, Nietzsche's ambiguous address to the philosopher of the future selects the proper reader by producing the conditions under which the reader will then render himself or herself fit for the interpellation. An analogous instance is the doctrine of predestination in relation to the Protestant. Such a comparison might seem unlikely, given Nietzsche's apparent antipathy for Christianity. Yet like Nietzsche's call to the philosopher of the future, what the doctrine of predestination achieves is an interpellation. That is, it transforms its believers into the type of person worthy of entering the Kingdom of God. The first principle of Protestantism is that the believer does not know whether or not she or he has a place in Heaven. One might think that this would act as a disincentive to moral behavior: that we may as well give up now since all is decided regardless of whether one behaves well or poorly (Zupancic, Shortest Shadow,

42). Yet

what the Protestant does instead is to seek proof in this life that they are chosen by God for the next, and such is believed to be given in success and the recognition of others. The uncertainty of one's position in the afterlife thus motivates the Protestant to work hard, and to do good works: in short, to behave in a moral manner, according to Christian belief. For Nietzsche, too, a provisional failure of the interpellation—that the reader is undecided as to whether or not she or he is called by the text— secures a body of Nietzscheans to him, all eager to prove their worthiness as such. Furthermore, by introducing the specter of "the bad reader"—the one who does not properly belong to the text—Nietzsche provides the reader with the object cause of desire: that is, the object a that comes to pay for the reader's disenchantment with Nietzsche. With his embargo against disciples, Nietzsche indicates a knowledge that, if his text is really to work—that is, to interpellate the reader—then such a reader must not simply fill out the place of a formal symbolic function preordained by the text. Rather, Nietzsche requires the separation that inserts itself between his readers and the symbolic place that his text bids them to occupy because it is this separation—the cumbersome remainder that will not be assimilated to the ideal—which commits the reader to him. The structure of Nietzsche's address to the reader thus invokes the split by means of which the subject is inaugurated. The

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

76

reader is alienated by the text, and in the process a mode of corporeality, or desire, is also inaugurated with respect to Nietzsche's philosophy. I will briefly elaborate this process. As with Lacan's imaginary ideal (or ideal ego) through which the child organizes its bodily experiences, the interpellation of the philosopher of the future (as an operation derived from the original formation of the ego) produces a corporeal excess. This surplus renders the assumption of the ideal inconsistent: it is felt as an impediment to one's ability to occupy the attempted role. In this respect, the surplus functions rather like the mother's jouissance: as "pleasure" marked by "unpleasure" and even danger. For the psychoanalytic account of subject-formation the excess is projected into the object world, and then treated as if it were entirely other. So too, the bodily remainder that interrupts the interpellation must be projected to the outside if the assumption of the ideal is to feel consistent. The flight from jouissance represents the point at which the individual commits to a subjectivity that is defined by paternal law. This excess is the reader's guilty little secret, which she hides even from herself in the object of the gaze: in this case, Nietzsche's text. In practice, this means that the reader may consciously identify with Nietzsche's stated ideal of good readership, but would thereby repress the possibility that she is one of the unworthy, excluded by Nietzsche's writings. At the level of the unconscious, this former possibility is permitted, and doubt about one's position inevitably intrudes upon the reader's cozy interlude with Nietzsche. The reader's guilty little secret—the possibility that she is not one of Nietzsche's chosen few—is projected elsewhere: on Nietzsche's text itself, as well as onto rival interpretations of his work. Moreover, this unconscious investment in the text is supported and augmented by a dual structure of Nietzsche's discourse. That Nietzsche distinguishes philosophers of the future from disciples and apes indicates that not all who answer his call are equal to it. Yet this formal quality does not merely describe a state of affairs respecting Nietzsche's reader. Importantly, the division between "good" and "bad" reader creates the readers that his philosophy purportedly only seeks. Other commentators have addressed the dual nature of Nietzsche's work, emphasizing the manner in which Nietzsche "masks" his text's meaning from those whom he deems unworthy. In general, these readers are uncritical of Nietzsche's attempt to build a mechanism into his writing to rule out the bad interpretation. Rather, by means of a division of the text into an esoteric and exoteric address, commentators such as Stanley Rosen and Laurence Lampert put forward the thesis that not all who read Nietzsche penetrate to

"THE INSIDERS"

7 7

the core of his writings, and that Nietzsche is in this sense protected from the inopportune reader. Certainly, to the extent that those who encounter Nietzsche are made to feel insecure as to their appropriateness as ideal readers and philosophers of the future, a structural provision for selection may exist within his text. However, many of Nietzsche's interpreters—Rosen and Lampert included—take comfort in having been thus "chosen" by Nietzsche, and express complaisance respecting the propriety of this position. Such complaisance indicates an unwillingness (or constitutive inability) to face one's own investment in the bad reading; and that one's complicity in Nietzsche's drama is too readily bought with the object a?

HIGH AND LOW: THE HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE OF NIETZSCHE'S TEXTS They are not free to know: the decadents need the lie—it is one of the conditions of their preservation. —Ecce Homo, 2,72 Thus Spoke Zarathustra—the

book "for everyone and no one"—can be read as

having two parallel meanings, the esoteric and exoteric; and this double structure is represented by the various rhythms of the text: movements of ascent into the heights and descent into the valleys; of silence and volubility. The esoteric level addresses "the ideal reader," that shares his own senses and typology—the one who is "predisposed and predestined" for his philosophy—whereas the exoteric appeals to the common reader, who is unable to read beyond the pretty maxims she can recite by rote, but will never understand. Nietzsche sets out this "program" most lucidly for the reader in Beyond Good and Evil: Our highest insights must—and should—sound like follies and sometimes like crimes when they are heard without permission by those who are not predisposed and predestined for them. The difference between the exoteric and the esoteric, formerly known to philosophers—among the Indians as among the Greeks, Persians, and Muslims, in short, wherever one believed in an order of rank and not in equality and equal rights—does not so much consist in this, that the exoteric approach comes from outside and sees, estimates, measures, and judges from the outside, not the inside: what

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

7*

is much more essential is that the exoteric approach sees things from below, the esoteric looks down from above. There are heights of the soul from which even tragedy ceases to look tragic; and rolling together all the woe of the world—who could dare to decide whether its sight would necessarily seduce us and compel us to feel pity and thus double this woe? What serves the higher type of men as nourishment or delectation must almost be poison for a very different and inferior type. (§30, 42. Emphases in original) In spite of his appeal to the metaphor of ingestion at the end of this quotation, Nietzsche specifies here that his own sense of the terms esoteric and exoteric is structured vertically, and not in terms of "inside" and "outside"—not, in other words, in terms of analogies to digestion or incorporation. The one to whom the esoteric address appeals is, according to Nietzsche, situated at an elevated level in relation to ordinary humankind; whereas the exoteric perspective is perceived from below. In this regard, the esoteric—exoteric opposition appeals to a spatial metaphoric of vision, whereby one term can be understood to occupy a higher, or more "synoptic" vantage in relation to the other. However, according to his most exacting readers, the function of Nietzsche's esoteric address must also be understood in temporal terms, as a somewhat a-historical, or more accurately untimely, perspective: a perspective not limited by the particular prejudices of its time, but instead running counter to them. Laurence Lampert understands Nietzsche's esotericism in these terms in his Nietzsche and Modern Times, wherein he places Nietzsche in the context of a philosophical tradition that has had to deploy "noble lies" in order to conceal from the masses the dissemination of an untimely truth. For Lampert, philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, and Bacon needed to utilize indirect means to articulate to a chosen few truths that their contemporaries would have deemed "unacceptable." [Pjhilosophers have practiced arts of dissimulation that put persuasive speech in the service of their legislative ends; if this is true we have to read philosophers differently, abandoning the notion that—like us—they tried to make everything as clear as possible to everyone, and have to entertain the unpalatable and unwelcome

"THE INSIDERS"

79

possibility that they hid their real meaning and that they had good reasons for doing so.10 In particular, Lampert argues that the philosopher writes a double discourse in order to avoid the persecution of a public quick to punish heresy. Like Leo Strauss, Lampert emphasizes the importance of applying the principle of "charity," thus tolerating apparent contradictions for the sake of appreciating the author's intention. 11 He thereby supposes that each element of the text is necessary to the argument as a whole—that a great philosopher does not make simple errors, and is not limited by the prejudices of his time. Rather, with an understanding of the philosopher's "untimely nature," a strategic double rhetoric is opened to the reader. Lampert makes the case that, given that Nietzsche was a philologist, he was bound to detect this double writing, and thus be admitted to the order of untimely philosophers {Modern

Times,

8). As a philologist, reading for philosophy's hidden meanings, Nietzsche could not help but participate in this esoteric discourse, and thereby perpetuate "the noble lie" that had its first beginnings with Plato. This amounts to the suggestion that the careful reader is apt to succumb to the siren song of philosophy—its hidden call—once addressed by it. Indeed according to Lampert, Nietzsche's seductive aphoristic style will at first sound alien. Only once one has been inducted to the esoteric level of his text—that is, once one is already altered by it—will it seem familiar: "there are, to begin with, no Nietzscheans but Nietzsche" (12). For Lampert, Nietzsche's strange message appears evil only when viewed from the point of view of his contemporaries—precisely because it abuts and rages against that point of view. It is thus necessary for Nietzsche, like his noble predecessors, to introduce his "evil teaching" by means of seduction (12), cloaking its revolutionary aspect beneath a mantle of respectability and necessity. Yet according to Lampert, in his capacity as a philologist Nietzsche also opens the esotericism practiced by his forebears to scrutiny, thus registering a shift in the nature of philosophy, as a public discourse (Modern Times, 9). Lampert's arrangement of the history of philosophy awards Nietzsche the place of remembering to the philosopher his task, to shape (or legislate) the destiny of human being. The philosopher's heresy concerns the transmission of a privileged lineage in a time when all are considered equal. For Lampert, it is not God's dominion that is threatened by Nietzsche's philosopher. Rather,

8o

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

it is the dominion of the common man. And so Nietzsche must "conceal" his message, paradoxically, by shouting it from the rooftops, thus allowing all to conceive of themselves as heir to the philosopher's lineage: [T]he study of Bacon and Descartes opens the road into Nietzsche's true radicalism. They aimed to shelter philosophy from the public and the public from philosophy—Nietzsche aims to bring philosophy out from behind its shelters and to construct a new accord between philosophy and the public. (277) However, this new accord still requires an esotericism that has shifted into the open, such that now everyone believes himself to be its secret recipient. One-hundred years after Nietzsche, this gesture appeals to what Zizek considers the new ideology of our time: that is, cynicism about ideology. This cynicism—which amounts to the belief that there is no ideology, or that ideology has lost its force since we no longer believe in it—is essentially what we might call a category error because, according to Zizek, we identify ideology with what we know—with a set of beliefs—rather than with what we do, that is, with the behaviors that actually structure our social reality. "Cynical distance is just one way . . . to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them."

(Sublime

Object,

33). Likewise, Nietzsche's text espouses selective elitism, which is moderated (and ultimately negated) by its general appeal. Nietzsche's text performs precisely what it denies at the level of knowledge or belief by admitting all to what is professed to be a closed discourse. Lampert would doubtless reply that Nietzsche's elitism must ultimately triumph, as the exoteric dimension of his text deflects those unwanted readers, leading them astray with its myths and shallow nihilism. Yet, in terms of the text's relation to the reader, Zizek's caution still holds. For the effect of Nietzsche's esotericism is that each maintains that he actually conforms to Nietzsche's ideal. The reader thereby positions himself at a level of consciousness, outside of ideology, and considers others to be only in a state of unknowing belief, ideological dupes. At the level of social relations within the community of readers, no one diverges from what Nietzsche's ideology had anticipated; and those who set themselves beyond the ideological effects of Nietzsche's writing do so only in virtue of a function of that very ideology. In effect, all are dupes, regardless of where they place themselves on a social hierarchy coordinated already by

"THE INSIDERS"

81

Nietzsche's text. Any extant differences between esoteric and exoteric reader are leveled by Nietzsche's text rather than activated by it. Of course, for this reason Lampert's inclusion of Nietzsche within a tradition of esotericism that stretched from Plato to Descartes is ambiguous at best, and Nietzsche cannot properly be contained by that tradition—or at least, not for the reasons supplied by Lampert. For while Lampert celebrates the achievement of that esotericism practiced by Descartes and Bacon, this achievement rests upon the fact that—by means of esotericism—they were quietly able to transform the intellectual landscape against which they theorized. After Nietzsche, philosophy's esotericism need not be felt as scandalous. Its great modern practitioners like Bacon and Descartes employed it as the indispensable instrument of philosophy to liberate philosophy from severe religious repression. Much of what their esotericism hides was criminal in their own times but, thanks in part to them, is neither criminal nor hidden in our times. . . . Bringing such esotericism into the open provides a bracing and uplifting perspective on the philosophic tradition, and it enables us to side intelligently with advocates of reason who found it necessary to appear, temporarily, to side with reason's enemies. (Modern Times, 5?) By this reasoning, it would seem that esotericism is a provisional discourse, no longer required in an age where science is now the premiere discourse. However, it is not clear that Nietzsche's esotericism may be rationalized on the same basis. Rather, the purpose of Nietzsche's dual rhetoric is precisely to keep a group of readers in ignorance and to perpetuate hierarchy, and not, ultimately, to disseminate truth, as was arguably the case for both Descartes and Bacon. If Nietzsche is performing his own quiet transformation of the public discourse, then as such it undermines the very concept of public discourse, understood as equal and accessible. In truth, the nobility Lampert attributes to Descartes and Bacon should perhaps be understood as an exoteric ruse for Nietzsche's political project, which concerns a program of social and cultural engineering, or "breeding." Stanley Rosen is more explicit about this role of the esoteric in Nietzsche, stating that his philosophical project requires and reproduces an inequality between those in the know and those who remain in ignorance, corresponding with a necessary social hierarchy (Beyond Good and Evil, §257,

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

82

201). Rosen also adheres to the temporal account of Nietzsche's esotericism, as indicative of an untimely philosophy. According to Rosen, however, this untimeliness furnishes the means by which Nietzsche is able to interpret his reader's soul and thereby control a response to his philosophy. Like Plato, Rosen's Nietzsche places the philosopher atop a hierarchy of being, as the one whose synoptic view can comprehend and access all "types": The philosopher is a double being who dwells within a historical perspective, marked by the decadence of the closing of a historical cycle, and so with access to all of the finite number of types of human soul. This access is the gateway not into historical time, but out of it, to what Nietzsche, following Pindar, calls the land of the Hyperboreans. 12 Accordingly, if there are to be philosophers, then this pathos of

distance,

or distinction between types, is also needed. Nietzsche's task is primarily political, where politics is "understood in the Greek sense as the formation of the soul of the citizen" {Question of Being, 141). For Rosen it is essential to Nietzsche's project—as a politics—that his text is able to gain a purchase upon every man: to access "all of the finite number of types of human soul" (139). If Nietzsche's writings appeal to socialists and feminists as well as conservatives, then it is because his project involves gaining the confidence of the reader—whatever his or her rank ordering—for the purpose of producing the "new human type" (141). Rosen thus suggests that there are different levels of access to Nietzsche's text that accord to the reader's place in the hierarchy of types. To an extent I am in agreement with Rosen here, although I would emphasize the part that Nietzsche's writing plays in generating these "types" in the first place. Nietzsche's belief in the necessity of inequality is represented throughout his corpus, not only in remarks about society (his polemics against feminism, socialism, and democracy for instance), but also in the critique of Darwinism, and the positive biological and social theories that we find expressed in his notes. His conviction that "a pathos of difference" is necessary for the healthy functioning of the social body penetrates his thought to its very core. For this reason, we can understand the esoteric address as a means not only to police the text's borders against unworthy readers, but also to reproduce a social hierarchy that Nietzsche deemed as necessary to the health of culture. Nietzsche replaces the appeal to a divine order as the

"THE INSIDERS"

83

basis of hierarchy with a conception of "type," or physiological difference, through which social difference is naturalized. However, Nietzsche's account of type attempts to shift the criteria by which social worth is measured, in favor of the values declared by his own philosophy. His politics of revaluation thus appeals to physiological difference—figured by Nietzsche in terms of tempo and blood {Beyond Good and Evil, §85, 82; Daybreak, preface, §5,5; Zarathustra,

"Of Reading and Writing," 67)—in order to conceal a textual

mechanism through which type is produced. In this context, Nietzsche's esotericism can be understood in terms of a program of "breeding," and not merely (and perhaps benignly) as a precaution against the persecution of "the many." Nietzsche's response to Darwinism— and to the slave morality from which he understands it to issue—was to develop a hierarchical conception of the body that would ground typological difference. Accordingly, Nietzsche considered the body as a microcosm of his desired social hierarchy: the stronger body (or society) being "a proper arrangement" of different capacities, forces, or types. Nietzsche's texts can then be understood as instruments of selection, ordering not only a hierarchy of men, but even the body of the one whom they affect. Nietzsche wrote sensuously in order to access the reader's corporeality. His texts are written so as to resonate with the reader, at the level of affect [Gefuhl]: to pick out a bodily commonality between himself and the reader for whom the text is intended, on the basis of a shared-body "type." Likewise, Nietzsche understood reading as a diagnostic art through which one gleans the health of the writer. 13 And he was particularly concerned that his own texts should exude "great health," and thus attract the right type of reader: the philosopher of the future, whose task was to legislate for the new humanity. In this way, the text's exoteric veil not only conceals the esoteric register of his writings— rather, in principle the hoi polloi are excluded by virtue of their own affects. The exoteric reader is kept at a distance by her own desire, paradoxically when she desires most to be Nietzsche's special confidante. Put differently, the recipient of the exoteric address desires the wrong outcome from Nietzsche's philosophy. Nietzsche's text is able, at least in principle, to deflect these readers precisely because it makes a place for them within its exoteric orthodoxy. Thus, it relegates them to the decadent masses that the event of revaluation will finally overcome. The idea that Nietzsche's philosophy is unaffected by "the improper reading" has gained a great deal of currency in contemporary scholarship. Like Deleuze's claim that the eternal recurrence permits the return of active force alone (Nietzsche and

Philosophy,

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

84

68-71), there is a confidence among Nietzscheans that Nietzsche's text selects only the best readings, and therefore cannot be implicated by what are widely understood to be bad interpretations: in particular, those proffered by Nazis such as Baumler and Rosenberg. 14 What such a position ignores, however, is the work that the misinterpretation performs for Nietzsche's philosophical project. That the ambiguity of Nietzsche's philosophy makes a place for the inappropriate reading is not only an unfortunate contingency arising from what is otherwise its stylistic necessity, but rather the misappropriation is of a piece with this necessity. For just as "the decadents need the lie" {Ecce Homo, 272), Nietzsche needs the decadent, as "one of the conditions of his self-preservation." What this means essentially is that the creation of new values is preceded, at least to Nietzsche's mind, by the longevity of his name. On the one hand, Nietzsche requires the misinterpretation of his texts as a necessary condition of his message reaching those capable of understanding it. This is simply a matter of strategy. As Lampert points out, 15 faced with the problem of having to reach a particular audience, but not knowing whom one addresses in advance, the writer must encrypt his message such that it is broadcast to all but heard by only a chosen few. On the other hand, however, Nietzsche required the misinterpretation, just as he required the decadent, to bring forth the epoch in which the revaluation of all values could take place. Nietzsche is well aware that there are no heights without depths—that the excluded are required as much as the included, the bad reading as much as the good, because there must be laborers as well as legislators (and not everyone can be a philosopher of the future). 16 If Nietzsche's text requires the misinterpretation, or "excess reader," then it is not so certain that he can escape the disrepute that the most scurrilous misreadings have brought to his name. Although we would like to think that Nietzsche is above what are considered vulgar misapplications of his writings, as Rosen has pointed out already, it is precisely this synoptic vantage that, presumably, would have allowed Nietzsche to anticipate such abuses. In this context, Nietzsche can, at least in part, be held accountable for those readings of his work that take what is merely exoteric to be essential: his invective against women or the Jews, for instance. The distinction between two levels of text does not simply separate two types of reader. Rather, it conforms to a binary structure within the reader: between the manifest self, and material that is denied, expelled, and finally displaced onto the other. In light of this denial and displacement, "the ethical task" of the reader would

"THE INSIDERS"

0

85

then involve taking responsibility for one's own stake in subjection to Nietzsche's text.

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE: NIETZSCHE "INCORPORATED"; OR, WHO INCORPORATES WHOM IN THE ACT OF READING NIETZSCHE? I resign. I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. —Groucho M a r x Nietzsche's writings are fascinating objects of study for psychoanalysis, expressing as they do the contradictory impulses of containment and dissolution. For while on the one hand Nietzsche puts in question the possibility of identity as we understand it—and, in Ecce Homo, the integrity of his own identity in particular—we also find in his work an anxiety about the corruptibility of this "self" by the other. Nietzsche may have anticipated, even welcomed the reader's participation in the production of his texts, but he did not do so without reservation. He desired only to admit "the right sort" of reader to his inner-circle—the secret society of Nietzsche esoterica. Nietzsche's frequent expressions of disquiet about the possibility of being appropriated by the wrong sort of reader signals not only an anxiety about being misread—about the distortion of his texts' meaning—but also, what for Nietzsche amounts to the same thing, a qualm of appetite. What Nietzsche did not want was to be incorporated within the wrong sort of digestive tract, and to have to mix with the filth of common entrails. Above all, he did not want to offend his own senses—to be reduced to "a barrel organ song" within the other's botched interpretation of him. Perhaps we would be in a better position to understand the esoteric address as an effect of interpellation, if we were to read this relation precisely as Nietzsche said we ought not to do: that is, in terms of inclusion or exclusion, rather than height, or an order of rank. For it is entirely possible that Nietzsche concealed the operation of his text upon the reader beneath this interpretative prohibition, and that the text incorporates the reader precisely by appealing to the notion of rank as a lure for their vanity. Literally, the esoteric meaning addresses the inside; by contrast, exoteric pertains to the outside. By signaling two parallel lines of meaning—two lines that cannot intersect—

86

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

Nietzsche appears to evade the danger of corruption that invariably attends interpretation. Incorporation differentiates outside from inside, and so to this extent keeps the self discrete and intact. But its intermediate status signifies an intolerable threat of contamination, whereby inside and outside become confused. As Maggie Kilgour writes: "The idea of incorporation . . . depends upon and enforces an absolute division between inside and outside; but in the act itself that opposition disappears, dissolving the structure it appears to produce." 17 The possibility that an unwanted and unwarranted outside might intrude gives rise to the fear of "an enemy within" that could usurp the authority of the self: then Nietzsche might end up a mere puppet in the hands of exterior agencies, his name signifying a different content to the one he had given it. Yet if one type of reader were already inside, and the other rigorously external, then the proper addressee—the initiate—would

be merely awak-

ened to Nietzsche's call, whereas the amateur could not possibly glean the true meaning of Nietzsche's text. If Nietzsche's texts select their reader, according to a social hierarchy designated by Nietzsche as "proper," then the text must be understood as like a semiporous membrane that allows particles of a certain size to pass, while withholding the remainder. Yet its capacity to do so is always a matter of anxiety for Nietzsche; anxiety that, ultimately, he is able to deflect back to the reader. Considering the esoteric dimension of Nietzsche's writing in terms of a logic of incorporation, the question thus becomes a matter of who incorporates whom. For whereas we might understand Nietzsche to erect boundaries against "the rabble," in actual fact these borders penetrate and organize the reader's subjectivity and desire. To the extent that the reader procures a kind of enjoyment through border patrol of Nietzsche's texts, she or he also engages in a project of self-construction. It would be propitious at this juncture to return to a consideration of the development of the self, articulated as a regulation of material between inside and outside. According to Freud, incorporation is not only the first psychic mechanism, but is also a prime catalyst to the development of culture and language. The oral stage gives way to the anal stage, and later to the latent and genital stages of sexuality—yet it is never dispensed with, but rather acts residually within these subsequent stages. In fact, for Freud oral incorporation becomes the model for the course of development that follows, providing a continuous reference point for satisfaction. As he writes in Three Essays on Sexuality,

" N o one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated

from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can

"THE INSIDERS"

87

escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life."18 Sexuality emerges as an excess of the nutritive capacity—as that "something else" of satisfaction that keeps the child at the breast after its stomach is full—and what Freud designates as the "mind," or "psyche," arises from this excess; from the instance of the body in its enjoyment. Such enjoyment consists in more than the meeting of the organism's most basic requirements: rather, enjoyment arises from the act of incorporation per se, and not simply its "products." The infant is first able to explore its environment by differentiating its inside from its outside (Freud, "Instincts," 199), and then by further dichotomizing the external world into what is edible and inedible—that is, what can be taken into itself, and what must be excluded. Expressed in the language of the oldest—the oral—instinctual impulses, the judgement is: 'I should like to eat this', or 'I should like to spit it out'; and, to put more generally: 'I should like to take this into myself and to keep that o u t ' . . . the original pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad. What is bad, what is alien to the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical. 19 The ego is, for Freud, the gatekeeper that designates what is "good" and what is "bad." It first takes itself as its object, and then identifies with compatible external objects, attaching them to itself by means of incorporation. Freud defines the ego as an accretion of successive identifications, in which the lost object is internalized and represented to the id ("Ego," 453). Yet, it is not entirely clear which is cause and which effect in this chain of events: that is to say, if the identification takes place because the ego must retain its object, or if the object is destroyed by the action of identification itself. At the very extreme, the ego's incorporation of its external objects amounts to a totalizing gesture. The ego wants to incorporate everything within itself, to the extent that the difference between outside and inside would be obliterated, as everything is rendered inside—that is, everything becomes me. Yet the distinction between inside and outside, first made by the primal self, is fundamental. The self is founded upon the split between outside and inside: without the outside, there is no boundary to designate what is inside; and there is no "self." Freud's ruminations about the basis of sub jectivity in the selective gesture (of acceptance or rejection of external objects) recall Nietzsche's understanding

88

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

of interpretation as a mode of nutrition, whereby an organism negotiates its relation to an environment according to a particular rhythm (or metabolism) of assimilation and excretion. Alongside this organic view of interpretation, Nietzsche made extensive use of corporeal metaphors to describe the activity of philosophizing. In particular, he employed reproductive and digestive analogies, both of which are particularly suggestive of incorporation; and developed a typology of philosopher in terms of "incorporative disposition," or digestive capacity. Against the dogmatic philosopher that strives to incorporate everything in his or her path into one, neat theory—and thereby brings on dyspepsia, or indigestion—Nietzsche develops the paradigm of the selective philosopher, who thinks with his nose and tastebuds: thus choosing with the senses what is good for his particular constitution, and eliminating, or keeping at bay, whatever is bad (that is, poisonous, unhygienic, unhealthy). Ecce Homo finds Nietzsche extolling his own olfactory genius: namely, his ability to distinguish between classes of individual. May I still venture to sketch one final trait of my nature that causes me no little difficulties in my contacts with other men ? My instinct for cleanliness is characterized by a perfectly uncanny sensitivity so that the proximity or—what am I saying? The inmost parts, the "entrails" of every soul are physiologically perceived by me—smelted. This sensitivity furnishes me with psychological antennae with which I feel and get a hold of every secret: the abundant hidden dirt at the bottom of many a character—perhaps the result of bad blood, but glossed over by education—enters my consciousness almost at the first contact. If my observation has not deceived me, such characters who offend my sense of cleanliness also sense from their side the reserve of my disgust—and this does not make them smell any better. (233) For Nietzsche as for Freud, oral incorporation is the model for all other modes of interaction (interpersonal, but also textual), as well as modes of pleasure (sexual, intellectual, artistic). The philosopher's task of creating new value is then modeled upon the body's capacity to appropriate (or "introject") what is worthy and good, and to screen out what is bad. In principle, the reader whom Nietzsche's philosophical project admits would share her or his own instincts of selection, or "a digestive capacity," thus promoting those values that Nietzsche would affirm and rejecting whatever tastes sickly or weak. The

"THE INSIDERS"

s9

reader's desire to be one of Nietzsche's chosen few is connected to a willingness to continue his project of the revaluation of all values: itself a process of interpretation, whereby material is ingested or excreted, according to the taste (or "breeding") of the one who evaluates. Considered in this light, Nietzsche's esotericism is not only a mechanism of containment, designed to protect his philosophy from the importune reader. Rather, additionally it provides a genetic element by which the philosophy is able to reproduce itself in the proclivities of the reader. The exoteric/esoteric division does not only select, but it also creates the reader who will then evaluate according to guidelines specified by Nietzsche's writings. Rosen's emphasis on the political dimension of Nietzsche's work is helpful for considering the true strength of Nietzsche's "digestive capacity." For once we consider that Nietzsche's project involves a comprehension of all types of the human soul, it is then hardly likely that he did not "have the stomach" for some of the readers attracted to his texts—and especially those coarser commentators that represent the fascist interpretation. Rather, Nietzsche's political task implicitly involved the incorporation of every human type, including those whom his writings explicitly spurned. Nietzsche valued the kind of constitution that, like the sea, could incorporate all manner of pollution without becoming corrupted. And so, if Nietzsche's texts were to operate as the selective apparatus by means of which the nascent human type is to be formed, then—like Freud's unconscious—it would be required first to affirm every type before subsequently having the power to negate it. Two consequences follow that would disquiet many of Nietzsche's readers. First, Nietzsche's text does not remain unsullied by readers for whom he might have had distaste. Rather, Nietzsche had recognized the possibility that his texts would be deployed for the most unsavory of purposes, by those whose tastes differed from his own. But furthermore, Nietzsche's project even required the misappropriation to occur, to the extent that he had written the text to take account of (that is, contain), and gain a purchase upon, all possible human types. The second unwanted consequence of the expansiveness of Nietzsche's text is that, insofar as Nietzsche anticipated—and even actively encouraged—the misinterpretation, he is implicated by it, and to that extent is also at least partially responsible for its consequences. As Berel Lang convincingly establishes, 20 Nietzsche remonstrated against his potential misuse and yet still chose to keep his text open to the very abuses that he foretold. Indeed, according to Rosen, the bad reader is as much of a piece with Nietzsche's project as the good reader: perhaps not in the capacity of the

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

9o

philosopher of the future, but as the decadent who must "go under" for the sake of the birth of a new type. In this respect, it is not only the affirmative, revaluing interpretation that promotes Nietzsche's political project, but also the most dire and decadent of misinterpretations—precisely by accelerating the process of degeneration that must precipitate (and herald) regeneration. 21 In this way, "the misinterpretation" becomes proper to Nietzsche's text. The outside contaminates its inside, embodying the uncanny remainder of identification: the unauthorized self, from the reverse side of the mirror; the nothingness that looks back, spilling forth secrets buried in one's identification with the philosopher of the future.

THE FATHER'S INDULGENCE OF THE PRODIGAL SON: AMBIGUITY AND THE LIMITS OF "THE POSITION" To the extent that Rosen and Lampert disavow their own ambivalence with regard to Nietzsche's text, they ignore and misunderstand a fundamental element of his philosophy. For ambiguity and ambivalence play a pivotal role for Nietzsche, not only regarding the interpellation of the reader that is the subject of this book, but also with respect to the most substantial lineaments of his thought: perspectivism, will to power, and his critique of philosophy in general. As the esoteric interpreters of Nietzsche would freely admit, ambiguity is necessary to Nietzsche's writings—in order to give them a complex texture, to act as either a deterrent or a decoy for those readers searching for firmer and easier ground. Rosen states, for instance, that "Nietzsche keeps his Grunde secret, not by never mentioning them, but by concealing them beneath diverse rhetorical masks" (Mask, 236). The esoteric reader holds, then, that Nietzsche keeps these Grunde secure for only those worthy of them, thus assuming that there is a substantial quantity—or truth—that remains hidden from the inept reader. For Rosen, the security of such knowledge is guaranteed by the fact that the inopportune reader would be destroyed by it: hence his contention that the elevation of some to the level of philosopher of the future is dependent also upon the destruction—or down-going [Untergehen]—of

those without

the constitution for the revaluation of values. To this extent, ambivalence and ambiguity are essential to Nietzsche's text, but it would seem only in order that the appropriate barriers are erected to those who might contaminate his truths (the hoi polloi, "the herd," or the feeble). The imagery that both Rosen and Lampert borrow from Nietzsche's text

"THE INSIDERS"

91

in order to delineate their own position with respect to him, and his readers, is also revealing in this regard. For the Hyperborean's chief characteristic is that he exists beyond the remainder of humankind. Beyond ordinary prejudices and belief, beyond ordinary perspectives, beyond the meager happiness of the ordinary—beyond even metaphysics—the Hyperborean to whom Nietzsche refers designates a new type, whom he and his readers aspire to be. The Hyperborean inhabits the great heights in precisely the manner that Nietzsche's esoteric reader is supposed to be a creature of the heights, for while "the exoteric approach sees things from below, the esoteric looks down

from

above''' (Beyond Good and Evil, §30, 42. Emphases in original). This "below" and "above" evokes Nietzsche's typology as developed in The Genealogy of Morals, between the noble and slave modes of evaluation: while the slave evaluates in a derivative and secondary fashion, from beneath the pressure and great weight of danger, the noble apparently evaluates freely and originally, from magnanimity and great strength. The noble is the eagle to the slave's lamb; and the Hyperborean, or esoteric reader, after having inherited millennia of the slaves' lessons, is now in a position to be able to appropriate the noble's height and perspective. What these esoteric readers enact, however, is not the discovery of their true identity in relation to Nietzsche's text, so much as an interpellation of a position with which they feel themselves to identify. The Hyperborean type is clearly marked out to Nietzsche's reader as a desirable ideal for identification. Able to breathe a rarefied air, and to brave the colds of a Nietzschean truth, the Hyperborean is sharply distinguished from a degenerate outsider with whom no reader would want to identify: the groundling or dupe seduced by the stylistic masks (the quotable, edifying quotes) of the text, but necessarily misapprehending the true trajectory of Nietzsche's philosophy. Thus, while the text seems to pick out the esoteric reader, speaking directly to him, his subjectivity is in fact incited by the text. And this effect is achieved by virtue of the esoteric-exoteric distinction. As Robert Sinnerbrink points out, "Nietzsche's 'doubled writing' has the extraordinary aim of producing the very readers who would embody its teachings." 22 Besides the interpellation of "the proper addressee," this binary structure of the text also perpetuates the illusion of containment sans remainder: that is, the belief first that only the esoteric reader is admitted to Nietzsche's text; and next that neither "we good readers" nor Nietzsche's text are affected by the misreading. What this belief denies is the permeability of boundary, and possibility of misappropriation, which attends any textual exchange. As

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

92.

the previous discussion established, the rigidity of the categories inside and outside is belied by the fact that the process of incorporation—whether relating literally to ingestion, or interpellation—requires a degree of ambiguity, even if only provisionally. In this case, Nietzsche and his esoteric brood cannot disregard the possibility of contamination by those who approach the text with wrong motives or reasoning. Indeed, this risk is the price of sharing a relation to the text. Yet furthermore, my contention is that at the point of first encounter with Nietzsche—at the moment of the interpellation—a necessary admixture of good and bad, or truth and error, takes place, through which the esoteric reader's position is intrinsically tainted by others' engagements with Nietzsche. And this is because the process of becoming "the good reader" involves an interaction with "the bad reader" within oneself: any weakness or misunderstanding that must be expunged if one is to accord to the ideal of the Hyperborean. Esoteric readers, exemplified here by Rosen and Lampert, refuse the ambiguity of Nietzsche's writings at the level of their own initiation to them. Interestingly, however, this refusal—recapitulated continually throughout their work, in the elusive rhetoric of the Hyperborean—enacts precisely this commerce with the bad reading that the interpellation requires. It is thus specifically in the attempt to distance themselves from "the bad reader" that this attempt is betrayed, and a connection to the uninitiated is preserved. Uncertainty and ambivalence are pivotal conditions of the interpellation; and textual ambiguity not only deflects readers, but it also draws them in. It was on the basis of rhetorical masks that Nietzsche's text first attracted "the esoteric reader," as surely as they had tempted the exoteric reader. All readers begin their association with Nietzsche as a dupe, desiring to be the one to whom his philosophy beckons. In this connection, I would like to return to our earlier analysis of interpellation in terms of Hamlet. Recall that Hamlet recapitulates for Lacan the Oedipal drama, wherein the child finds his social position by extricating himself from the mother and aligning himself to paternal law. Or rather, Hamlet demonstrates the failure of interpellation, whereby the hero refuses to relinquish the mother, and denies the law of the father, and thereby is unable to form a functional connection to the world, through desire. Of the essence to Hamlet's story is his conscious resistance against all worldly commerce. What makes him heroic is his total integrity; his refusal to compromise, to give up a piece of himself so that he can enjoy the recompenses of station and wealth, which are for him merely symbolic. In relation to Hamlet, all

"THE INSIDERS"

93

other characters of the play seem to have sold out on a lie: they are seen to lack integrity, and to have been hoodwinked by virtue of the symbolic power of kingship. Yet Hamlet's heroism is also a kind of psychosis, and ultimately must end in death or maiming, as with the Greek tragedy. Nietzsche's esoteric readers seem to have reserved for themselves a place beyond the commerce with which all others must settle, dwelling in the unearthly land of the Hyperboreans. Like Hamlet, they are without desire since they have the fullness of complete knowledge instead. The esoteric reader has the key to Nietzsche's secret teaching, passed down to him through a lineage that includes Plato, Descartes, Maimonides, and Bacon. Like Hamlet, they have refused compromise, and so retain a position of certainty with regard to the truth of Nietzsche's text (even if, ultimately, the truth is that there is no truth: the truth of castration). That they can bear this truth confers upon them a strength that separates them from their peers, who can only trade in relative truths. Yet the esoteric Nietzschean's heroism is rather hollow and compromised in relation to Hamlet's, because regardless his avowal of separation from the world of commerce, he has had to trade something of himself in order to occupy the position of Nietzsche's ideal reader: a position designated already by the Law of the Father, Nietzsche's text. Hamlet's "position" is no position. His continuance in the narrative is ultimately untenable, and he is put to death because he has no place; he is perennially displaced. Whereas those who identify with the Hyperborean like to envisage themselves as outside the law, and outside society—even outside time ("untimely")—in fact they only occupy a role that is already designated for them as such by Nietzsche's philosophy. They have interpellated a position, and so have engaged in a transaction with the symbolic father, in order to assuage the uncertainty generated by Nietzsche with regard to who is the ideal reader, who the philosopher of the future, who laborer, and who disciple. This uncertainty is the mechanism of their capitulation to the role: they do not dwell in that placeless place—madness—as if they were Hamlet. Rather, they accede to a ready-made identity provided by Nietzsche, and sacrifice to him a part of themselves, access to which is provided in effigy by means of Nietzsche's text. Beyond the interpellation, is there a tenable "position" for the reader that does not necessarily reduce her or him to madness and death? With respect to Nietzsche, does one need to say no to desire—or a relation to his texts—in order not to be dominated by him: that is, to keep one's distance? This is my own question, as Nietzsche's reader, a question that I pose to myself in

94

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

writing this book. The position that I am attempting would involve a concerted awareness of—and response to—the roles, investments, and desires through which "the good reader" constructs herself as such. My critique of Rosen and Lampert must, then, relinquish all claims to objectivity. I am as compromised as they are with regard to the cruder dimensions of Nietzsche's text. My position with respect to Nietzsche is thoroughly mired in ambiguity, because this project has similar motivations to any other relation to Nietzsche, which seeks intimacy with him but is instead met with ambivalence. For the relation to the dupe, the disciple, the mis-reader, are integral to the position of the good reader: and perhaps the reader even finds herself in these relations, disguised within the other whom she abjures. With each attempt to allure a type of reader, Nietzsche compromises his relation to the rest, and so his texts are constitutively duplicitous: enticing some readers as they repel others, but buying off each with the delectable morsel of her abject self that produces a sense of discomfort with regard to his misogyny, or his remnant anti-Semitism, or numerous other opinions calculated to offend and provoke. I will return to a consideration of the viability of "a position" in relation to Nietzsche in concluding this book. The foregoing two chapters have analyzed the reader's interpellation to Nietzsche's "symbolic order" (the paternal law); exploring the extent to which the reader makes a corporeal investment within Nietzsche's text. In the next chapter, I will open up this corporeal investment to further scrutiny, through Melanie Klein's treatment of the subject's formation. Klein develops an account of the psychic life of the infant in its relation to the (voracious) mother rather than the law-giving father, and the repudiated rather than symbolic value. This emphasis brings to the fore the attraction of the abject, and the work it does to draw the reader to Nietzsche. This is particularly germane for understanding commentators' interest in Nietzsche's madness, understood as a trope for the destruction of subjectivity.

CHAPTER

4

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE: KLEIN, KRELL, BATAILLE

We have seen already that the partition of Nietzsche's writing into inside and outside—whereby

a chosen few are apparently always already

admitted to the text, which in turn keeps all others radically exterior—is complicated

by psychoanalytic

considerations

of

the formation

of

(readerly) subjectivity. This chapter will explore further this understanding of the relation of reader and text in terms of incorporation, or digestion: this time with a view to emphasizing the question of contamination, or contagion, between the text and the reader. For the principal difficulty in negotiating relations of "outside" and "inside" is that the incorporative act blurs such distinctions, and invites the specter of the wrongful intruder, or pollutant. Such uncertainty is at the heart of feelings of ambivalence and anxiety respecting the misinterpretation, and tracts of Nietzsche's text that specifically exclude the reader but with which, by virtue of her special relation to Nietzsche, she also feels complicit. Besides a fear of contagion, ambiguity and the porosity of boundary also elicit the fear of madness: for madness threatens to claim the subject once the limits of reason and identity are perforated. In many accounts of Nietzsche, his own madness looms as an unresolved question posed to his philosophy. Was Herr Nietzsche destined to lose his sanity, as a condition of his own dangerous questioning? And does one risk madness in the attempt to follow Nietzsche's path of enquiry, and his revaluation of values? The fascination with madness is a persistent feature of Nietzschean scholarship—even those who do not address it explicitly are often found dabbling in conjecture at the margins of their work, or in personal conversation. The contagion of madness that Nietzsche represents—both fascinating and repellent to his readers—can be approached by means of Kleinian theory since Melanie Klein addresses precisely the question of how the subject delimits itself in relation

96

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

to a significant Other, and how this Other enacts the part of repository for the subject's abjected material. Subjectivity founds itself upon the prohibition of madness, but continues to test and reconstitute itself through a relation to this prohibited surplus "pleasure." With reference to Klein's account of ego development, we will gain an appreciation of the extent to which jouissance (identified by Lacan with the mother) belongs to the child, and is only deflected to the mother in order to alleviate discomfort. In light of this, the interest in Nietzsche's madness can be understood as the reader's attempt to keep her own boundaries intact, while also continuing to enjoy the surplus pleasure that madness represents.

DOING TIME WITH MELANIE KLEIN: RENOUNCING "THE BAD BREAST," MOURNING THE LOSS OF "THE GOOD B R E A S T "

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty. She has folded Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens. — Sylvia Plath 1 Perhaps Klein's greatest contribution to psychoanalytic discourse is her ability to convey the visceral character of the subject's relation to language. Words are devoured and regurgitated along with the mother's body, and the subject's own body alternately swells as it incorporates its objects, and is torn to pieces by them. With a characteristically direct style of expression, Klein conveys better than any other analytic writer the violence, anguish, and urgency inherent to the child's early use of language. Indeed, Klein's approach tracks what is at stake for the child in the use of language—the management of anxiety in relation to the mother's body, which both threatens and nurtures the child. The first acquisition of speech is experienced as a life-and-death struggle between the infant's own and the mother's body, and in order to negotiate its way through this conflict the child must

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

97

participate in a commerce of the grandest passions: love, guilt, hatred, and redemption. In order to develop her own account of early infantile psychology, Klein modified Freud's basic thesis in "On Negation": that the child ingests what it finds to be good, and rejects or avoids what is bad. With this emphasis upon the commerce of objects, in terms of incorporation and excretion, Klein demonstrates a structural hontology between the body and the psyche. From the basic relation between mother and infant—through which the ego and its world is built—Klein develops a kind of parallelism between the psyche and the object, whereby "the ego is incapable of splitting the object—internal and external—without a corresponding splitting taking place within the ego." 2 During the first months of life, when the infant cannot differentiate its mother (or more precisely, her breast) from itself, the mother is experienced as both "good" and "bad." The object is qualitatively split, in accordance with the contents of the infant's experience. Insofar as the breast supplies milk, it is good; but when the infant's hunger is not sated, the breast is bad. This splitting, which Klein designates the schizoid position, results in exaggerated evaluations of the object, in both positive and negative directions. Idealization is bound up with the splitting of the object, for the good aspects of the breast are exaggerated as a safeguard against the fear of the persecuting breast. While idealization is thus the corollary of persecutory fear, it also springs from the power of the instinctual desires which aim at unlimited gratification and therefore create the picture of an inexhaustible and always bountiful breast—an ideal breast. ("Schizoid Mechanism," 182) The good, full breast not only provides nourishment, but also is incorporated by the infant, to form the kernel of its ego. On the other hand, the bad breast does not simply frustrate, but is felt positively to persecute the infant, and so is an object of anxiety for it. The infant "mobilizes" its positive core (the introjected good breast) by exaggerating its goodness through idealization, in order to imagine itself protected from whatever threatens it. It then equates the danger with the persecuting, bad breast, in which all negativity accrues. The mother's body thus mediates all relations to objects, insofar as it represents for the child all that he or she wants and wants to be,'as well as all that the child does not want and repudiates. The greatest good and the worst danger are thereby located in the one object: the mother, both nurturing and

98

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

voracious. The child imagines her to be limitless in her capacity both to love and to consume him. These dichotomies, which have assisted the child in negotiating reality, now begin to run him into trouble. For when the rudimentary ego "introjects" the full breast, it identifies itself with the good associations formed in relation to it. Likewise, by means of repudiation of the empty breast, the ego distances itself from all that is bad. Yet when the child first recognizes that good and bad refer to the same object, questions of contagion and retaliation come into play. Significantly, the source of the infant's discomfort is also the instrument with which it appropriates the good and destroys the bad. The infant imagines itself violently attacking the mother, in order to rid itself of anxiety. Yet, "the destructive instinct," or death drive, comes into play not only in the defensive mechanism of projection, but also in the introjection of good objects ("Schizoid Mechanism," 183). The child violently "robs" the good mother of her contents, and launches attacks upon the bad mother by hurling harmful excrement into her. He thereby also fantasizes himself to have taken possession of her—for the child understands itself to be omnipotent, and so believes all fantasized events to be actualized. In this respect, the mother's body becomes the medium through which the infant manages the products of his own destructive instinct: that is, anxiety. Yet, as the child grows aware that the good and bad mother is one and the same, he also becomes concerned that in the effort to rid himself of the bad, the source of all that is good is soiled, and so further anxiety is then produced. The child's fear of persecution comes to predominate, as he realizes that the mother also exerts a power over him. According to Klein, this creates the conditions in which the schizoid position can be replaced by the depressive position: wherein the child attempts to repair its relation to the mother—to placate her, lest she retaliate and hurl all the child's weapons and excreta back. During this phase, the child "becomes whole," paradoxically, by mourning a loss ("Schizoid Mechanism," 189). The child's mourning signifies the fear of the loss of the mother at its own hands, that he or she may have destroyed all that is loved. But the child also mourns the lost ideal of the perfectly good mother, as he or she must make do with what Donald W. Winnicott names the good-enough

mother,3 or a mother that will sometimes

frustrate the desire for instant gratification. I now wish, briefly, to reflect upon the implications of this account of the prehistory of subjectivity for the reader's relation to Nietzsche's text. The child's fear of persecution by the bad breast, and the retaliation of the mother,

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

99

can perhaps shed light upon the reader's apprehension regarding what they find the most repugnant sections of Nietzsche's writing. If this analogy is to hold, a number of counterintuitive premises (already addressed, to an extent, in the previous chapter) must be entertained. First, that Nietzsche's text is able to perform a formative function for the reader's identity, such that it deeply affects the reader when she or he finds "bad" material within the text—and to the extent that they even feel they must defend themselves against it. Second, that bad material within Nietzsche's text is amplified and reinforced by the reader's own bad material: or in other words, surplus pleasure. The portions of text that contradict the reader's ideal image are not only avoided by the reader, but are also actively exploited, in order to contain a threatening intensity within them. The somewhat precarious solution to this situation is an attempt at reparation of the self through the Other. The good in Nietzsche's text is understood to outweigh the bad, such that a balance is struck. Nietzsche becomes "a good-enough mother" to the reader, which is the only solution possible if the reader is to maintain a relation to his text. This scene is complicated, however, by further consideration of Wilfred Bion's explanation of reparation. Bion develops Klein's account of the relation between the mother and baby, such that (in the best-case scenario) the mother "contains" the child's projected anxiety, before returning it to them to be reintrojected in a modified—palatable—form. From the infant's point of view [the mother] should have taken into her, and thus experienced, the fear that the child was dying. It was this fear that the child could not contain. He strove to split it off together with the part of the personality in which it lay and project it into the mother. An understanding mother is able to experience the feeling of dread, that this baby was striving to deal with by projective identification, and yet retain a balanced outlook. 4 This is a paradigm of communication, according to Bion, and provides a model for the task the analyst performs for the analysand. For Bion, communication originates in what he calls "realistic projective identification" {Second Thoughts,

118), wherein the infant engages in a

"behaviour reasonably calculated to arouse in the mother feelings of which the infant wishes to be rid" (114). T h e mother who allows herself to feel, but is not overwhelmed by the child's fear of dying, is then able to reassure that the child is safe.

IOO

DEAD LETTERS TO N I E T Z S C H E

Yet where the intersubjective process (of containment and modification) between mother and child fails to occur—in situations wherein a mother is despondent or a child especially anxious—the returned material increases in volume and menace, such that the infant reintrojects "not a fear of dying made tolerable, but a nameless dread" (Second Thoughts,

116). That Bion

designates this dread as "nameless" indicates that it is in some sense beyond symbolization, and as such threatens to perforate the child's inner sanctum wherein all that is good is held. This unmodified material is simply

unthinkable,

but how are we to understand thought in this context? For Bion, thinking is nothing other than a mechanism for dealing with frustration brought about by the obstacle of reality when, for instance, the breast is found to be empty. Accordingly, Bion characterizes thought as thoroughly corporeal: as the body's means, on the one hand, of negotiating the demands and limitations placed upon it by other bodies; and, on the other, of self-regulation. Following Freud's contention that the ability to think develops as a means of tolerating the gap between a want and its satisfaction (paradigmatically, when the child fantasizes the presence of the breast as a means of partial gratification), 5 Bion states that a "capacity for tolerating frustration . . . enables the psyche to develop thought as a means by which the frustration that is tolerated is itself made more tolerable" (Second Thoughts,

112).

The ability to think requires a "capacity for tolerating frustration," and, in its turn, frustration becomes more tolerable by means of thought. This mechanism is clearly linked to the absence of the breast where he writes: "If the capacity for toleration of frustration is sufficient the 'no-breast' inside becomes a thought and an apparatus for 'thinking' it develops" (111-12). For Bion, thought is then essentially a kind of absence—or lack—and a thought comes to represent the plenitude of the full breast for the infant. Bion indicates thepossibility, beyond this "realisticprojectiveidentification" necessary for communication and thought, of an excessive, degree of projective identification. What he calls hypertrophic identification

hypertrophic protective

gives rise to mental schism, and in the extreme case mental

breakdown. The infant (or analysand) is unable to tolerate frustration, and the absence of the breast manifests itself within the psyche as "a bad object" (112). The consequent "evacuation," or projection, of the bad breast in this case is understood to achieve the same end as the gratification of hunger (the introjection of the good breast). Thoughts themselves are felt only as unbearable absence, and projection comes to be favored over thought as a mechanism for dealing with frustration. There is, however, an important

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

IOI

difference between these modes of coping: for while with thinking one eventually comes to manage frustration—such that it becomes a species of pleasure, or jouissance,

rather than merely a strategy of avoidance—

projective identification remains caught within a nihilistic economy that the psyche attempts to escape. In terms of this economy, the other's absence can only be understood as a loss of self. "The dominance of projective identification confuses the distinction between the self and the external object. This contributes to the absence of any perception of two-ness since such an awareness depends on the recognition of a distinction between subject and object" (Second Thoughts,

113). In attempting to hurl from itself any

suggestion of frustration, the subject dominated by projective identification loses the ability to differentiate itself from others, as they play the part merely of receptacles and mirrors. Crucially, the individual that is unable to differentiate the self from the Other has not made the shift to reparation necessary for maturation. They thus remain in the schizoid position. The reality principle breaks down and the basis of thought and communication along with it. This psychic configuration possibly describes the situation of

the

schizophrenic, and certainly strikes a chord with the parent who has observed a child in the throes of a tantrum. Hypertrophic projection is also a useful heuristic for understanding phenomena such as racism, at both individual and community levels. However, it is not immediately obvious that it could apply to a textual interpretation—and especially not the philosophical interpretation, which, after all, conventionally positions itself at the pinnacle of thought, understood broadly in terms of rigor, subtlety, and toil. Yet, an intolerance of frustration is evident where Nietzsche's reader projects a discomfort about his philosophy into any particular use of it: even especially malignant interpretations, such as that deployed by German National Socialism. This refusal to encounter the ambivalence of Nietzsche's own position can be understood as a failure of thought—or at the very least, a failed opportunity to think through the implications of Nietzsche's potential proto-Nazism for the reader her- or himself. The hoped-for effect of this evacuation of bad material from Nietzsche's text into the misinterpretation is to secure the text—and thereby the reader, too—from contamination. The questionable aspect of Nietzsche's work is thus contained by the fantasy of the radically separate Other. Yet, according to Bion's account of hypertrophic projection, this other is precisely the product of a confusion of self with Other. The other reader, insofar as she or he is understood to be radically separate from

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

IOZ

the self, is an artifact of the accretion of frustration with Nietzsche's text that must then be projected outward, as a condition of it being attended to at all. Reparation fails to be achieved if Nietzsche is consequently idealized, and the self remains split between "the good Nietzsche" and his evil interpreters. Beyond the concern about Nietzsche's ambiguous politics, hypertrophic projective identification might also account for the interest in Nietzsche's mental breakdown. For madness is repudiated by the ego at the level of its self-constitution as a coherent whole. Madness threatens to undo "the selfcontained" subject, and to return it to primordial chaos. In this way, the subject must continuously reconstitute itself, by recurrently reenacting a refusal of disintegration. T h e allure of Nietzsche's madness is that, through contemplation of it, the reader may explore the most abjected aspect of the self in relative safety. In a sense, the reader is thus able to gain a seeming mastery of the bad breast that had withheld itself from them, thus neutralizing its menace. For this reason, the fascination with Nietzsche's madness appears to be the obverse of hypertrophic projection. Rather than take flight from the abject, the reader keeps it within her or his sphere of introspection. What we most usually find, however, is that the reader will erect self-protective boundaries against identification with madness. By investing only a small, "quarantined," part of the self into the exploration of Nietzsche's madness, for instance, and preserving the greater part of the self sober, for the task of philosophizing. In this respect, then, the reader again retreats to the schizoid position, securing his good core against the bad and mad elements of the text, and duly sacrificing those parts of the self that accord to them, through a pantomime of fantasy comprising the interpretation. The question then arises: Is it possible for the reader of Nietzsche to have "a healthy relation" to his texts? And what would characterize such a relation? In an important sense, perhaps a limited amount of projective identification between Nietzsche's reader and the text is desirable—although of the realistic rather than the hypertrophic variety. After all, recall that for Bion realistic projection is the very condition of thought and communication. A connection is formed between the mother and the infant when it projects anxiety onto her, and she is able to contain and modify it—to render it palatable to him. The mother thus mediates the child's relation to his or her own excess material, silently assuring that it will not rent him or her apart. In the context of philosophical commentary, the affective relation to Nietzsche's text is established by virtue of the reader projecting onto the text discomfiting elements of the self, just as the child presents the mother with unmodified

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

I03

fear. Philosophical thought has served for millennia to work through anxiety about life and death. By means of philosophy, as Nietzsche might say, we balance ourselves precariously upon the abyss, an abyss that represents an abject, unrecognized aspect of the self. The philosophical text, then—like the mother—can manage and transform the reader's anxiety, thus providing a basis for feeling that the reader's own thought is viable. What needs to be taken into consideration, however, is this network of relations—between oneself as reader, the text, and the broader community of readers—if an ethical, or "healthy," relation to Nietzsche is to be achieved. My hope is that if readers attend to the exchange of psychic material between themselves, the text, and rival interpretations of Nietzsche, then perhaps they will also be able to take responsibility for aspects of Nietzsche they would rather ignore, or project into another. This act of taking responsibility might then enable the reader "to manage" the philosophy. Such would involve an acceptance of what they find good, certainly: but most importantly, a different relation to material that is bad. For by virtue of the special relation that the reader shares with Nietzsche, the bad is also her or his own: a constitutive aspect of identity, a concerted awareness of which might help to coordinate a response to it. I will return to this question in the final chapter, but let us now consider two commentaries that orient themselves to Nietzsche through his "madness": Georges Bataille and David Farrell Krell.

"MOTIVATING THIS WRITING . . . IS A FEAR OF GOING CRAZY": HOW KLEIN MIGHT READ GEORGES BATAILLE SUK NIETZSCHE Oh, it is only you, obscure, dark ones, who extract warmth from light-givers! Oh, only you drink milk and comfort from the udders of light! —Zaratbustra, 130 Surely Bataille intended to stir up controversy when he opened his book on Nietzsche: "Motivating this writing—as I see it—is a fear of going crazy."6 One is left to wonder what had induced the threat of madness, and what Bataille thinks might forestall it. Does Nietzsche act as provocation or salve to such a fear? How does writing a book about Nietzsche pertain to his fear

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

104

of going crazy? Reading this opening sentence in isolation, it appears that what had motivated Bataille to write the book was the need to erect a firewall against madness. A meditation upon Nietzsche's philosophy would then appear to secure Bataille from an insanity that imminently threatens him, as if he were saying to us, "I might go crazy, so then I'd better write a book about Nietzsche." Conversely, we could read this statement to suggest that, by following Nietzsche's chain of reasoning, one might be led to a loss of reason: that is, reading Nietzsche, one could go mad, just as Nietzsche did. Bataille would then seem to assume a fairly simple relation between writing and the body; and the philosopher's life and his body of work. Respecting Bataille's commentary, the relation that is in need of analysis above all is that between the text and its reader: that is, what kind of exchange, or intersubjectivity, is involved in the act of reading? Yet, arguably, the central focus and question of the book concerns the relation of the reader to the text, and the body to language. Specifically, Bataille is interested in his own relation to Nietzsche, and the book proceeds as a log of his encounters with the text (xxvi). Given this, the translation of the title, as On Nietzsche,

is strictly

accurate, but also fails to capture the entire resonance of the preposition sur and how it positions Bataille in relation to Nietzsche. 7 Bataille's relation to Nietzsche consists not so much in being a dispassionate scholar, able to gain a mastery (to get on top of) the object of his study, as being implicated by Nietzsche's writing: that is, as having a share (and perhaps an accursed share) 8 in him. "Bataille sur Nietzsche" might then represent the "Bataille" that emerges from his encounter with Nietzsche—indeed, the structure of the book indicates that this might be the case. Yet Bataille also "lives off" Nietzsche. For Nietzsche is his means of writing, of living, and perhaps even of maintaining his own sanity. Bataille is, in any case, best known for his constant flirtation with risk (in his work and his life): for the contravention of social boundaries, and of dichotomous oppositions. He represents a porosity that is disconcerting, even abject: the (infantile) mixing of food and excrement, and of sex with the church. Likewise, it is difficult to categorize his work, which traverses philosophy, theology, psychology, anthropology, literature, and pornography. However, none of these assignations quite do justice to his work, which draws together elements from each of these fields and binds them with a curious amalgam of sensuousness, grief, and celebration. Bataille's writing is not only structurally transgressive, but it also deals with transgression in its content. In this way, what Bataille says is intimately connected to how he says it, as he conveys his

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

IO5

ideas to the reader, in part, as a performance of the principles that his work confronts. Sur Nietzsche is no different in this regard, playing out for the reader as it explicates a conception of Nietzsche's influence upon him: a representation of his own "becoming Nietzsche," or of the dissolution of boundary that, for Bataille, constitutes the possibility of communication between them. The fear of going crazy referred to in the first line of the Nietzsche text thus gestures to a loss of boundary and of goal that Bataille values. For both "fear" and "insanity" signify the merging of self with other, and an intolerable annihilation of self. Whereas, with his conception of "will to power," Nietzsche indicates life's dual movements of growth and appropriation, Bataille (no doubt inspired by Sade) emphasizes the negative movements of destruction, loss and pollution that accompany the interaction of bodies necessary to life. Yet this is not to contradict Nietzsche: rather, Bataille presents Nietzsche's obverse side, most familiar to us in his postcollapse letters and tantrums; the images of him paralytic and drooling; and, even prior to the breakdown, abject in his loneliness. It is in connection with this preoccupation with contagion, appropriation, excretion, and the porosity of boundaries (but also with regard to his invocation of Nietzsche's own distinction, between the whole and partial human being), that Kleinian theory becomes of use to reading Bataille's commentary. Klein's own concern is precisely the subject's (or ego's) relation to its objects, and the manner in which one alternately takes in and pollutes the other in order to manage one's own boundaries. Bataille's text is organized by those dual movements of appropriation and projection, such that it can be understood to represent his relation with Nietzsche, as it would appear in fantasy. Certainly, Bataille is interested in the reader's relation to Nietzsche insofar as it reflects an exchange between them, and he describes this exchange in corporeal terms. For instance, he refers disparagingly to a bloodless mode of philosophizing and reading, opposing it to his own, more authentic bodily engagement with the text: In the helter-skelter of this book, I didn't develop my views as theory. In fact, I even believe that efforts of that kind are tainted with ponderousness. Nietzsche wrote "with his blood," and criticizing or, better, experiencing him means pouring out one's lifeblood. (xxix) Bataille disparages here a use of theory that attempts to protect the reader from experiencing the text in such a way as to be affected by it. Far preferable to the

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

io6

"theoretical approach," according to Bataille, is a helter-skelter movement, which registers different intensities and moods according to the affect that the reader undergoes in relation to the text. Interestingly, here bloodless theorizing threatens to taint, or pollute, the interpretation, as if in theory we were met with a poison, or excrement, or death. Theory developed without reference to the materiality of the text one reads, and its effects upon the reader's own body, would then lead to atrophy of the capacity to experience according to Bataille. Ponderousness taints because it anaesthetizes the reader, materially inhibiting the ability to understand the text sensually. Bataille's own corporeal approach to reading texts concerns one of his central concepts, communication, and he indicates that the book is itself an attempt to communicate with Nietzsche. According to Bataille, an act of communication always involves a moment of the destruction of the self in the other, and vice versa, requiring as it does the perforation of boundaries. Bataille illustrates this point with reference to the signification of Jesus on the cross, whereby the people are brought into a relation with their deity through the mediation of the lacerated body of Christ. He writes: It looks as if creatures couldn't communicate with their Creator except through a wound that lacerates integrity. . . . In this way God (wounded by human guilt) and human beings (wounded by their own guilt with respect to God), find, if painfully, a unity that seems to be their purpose. {On Nietzsche,

18)

Sin and crime are absolutely integral conditions for there to be communion between God and humankind: "If human beings had kept their own integrity and hadn't sinned, God on the one hand and human beings on the other would have persevered in their respective isolation" (18). Communication always involves for Bataille a kind of fall from grace: that is, a removal from ideal conditions that would appear to keep one's identity intact. Indeed, we only realize our identity (or purpose) in conjunction with others, once open to the threat of contamination by their blood and body. Bataille thus characterizes communication as "a risk" that must be taken in order that we are able to overcome ourselves: our existence as ethical, or intersubjective, beings depends upon this risk. '"Communication' only takes place between two people who risk themselves, each lacerated and suspended, perched atop a common nothingness" (20-21). And this nothingness is both a realm of chance—of the generation of possibilities and fates—and a primal condition

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

I07

from whence life first emerges, and to which it must return. Accordingly, it is comparable to the symptom in psychoanalysis, which is a source of pain and anxiety, as well as surplus pleasure: the wound [le blesse] that the psyche inflicts upon the body. The wound that opens up in each participant in the communication permits the flow of material from one to the other, as "movements of heat or light moving from one person to another person, or from another to you" (25-26). He continues: (even as you now read me, the contagion of my fever reaches you): words, books, monuments, symbols, laughter—all these represent just so many paths to that contagiousness, to those impulses. . . . But these burning trajectories only replace isolated humanness if there's some consent, if not to annihilation, then to risking yourself and, in the same impulse, risking other people. (26) Interaction thus necessarily involves a kind of injury: a loss of self to the Other, and opening oneself to the risk of contagion by the Other. Bataille's account of communication as a form of mutual wounding—and especially his model of religious experience—is readily amenable to Klein's analysis of early infantile fantasy. Indeed, he emphasizes that the most devout Christian wants to wound God. He writes, "the mystic's love requires God to risk himself, to shriek out his despair on the cross" (31), so that such love seems to conform to the schizoid organization as Klein designates it in her writings. Bataille characterizes the mystic's attitude to God as a form of sadomasochistic eroticism in which the object of one's desire is brought closer, either by elevation of the lover to the beloved (in ecstasy), or by means of a debasement of the beloved to the level of the lover (whereby God becomes flesh through Christ, whose body is then mortified, nailed to the cross). As Klein points out, the object cannot be neatly separated from the condition of the ego, which precisely is not a self-contained unity, but rather ebbs and flows according to the status of the object in which all good and bad is "located." Bataille then finds the Christian in "the depressive position," atoning for the wound inflicted upon God, for fear of retaliation and, ultimately, of being separated from all that is good in Him. Regarding the reader's relation to the text, Sur Nietzsche

chronicles the

process of reading as a mutual mutilation whereby Bataille opens himself to Nietzsche, and—like a mystic at the foot of the crucifix—exults in Nietzsche's wounds (that is, his madness and "syphilitic" death). Nietzsche thus functions

io8

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

for him as the nourishing good breast, offering him acceptance, and a bounty of material for his own self-fashioning. Furthermore, Bataille conceives of Nietzsche as having sacrificed himself for the sins of his reader, and so renders him as a Christ figure. Bataille's bond with Nietzsche, demonstrated within the book, is given only by virtue of the wounds Nietzsche received at the hands of readers who preceded him: those who condemned Nietzsche to his enduring association with Nazism (xxii). Bataille, like the devout Christian, attempts to partake of Nietzsche's suffering, proclaiming himself to have been addressed personally by Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God (On Nietzsche, 3), and to be "vulnerable to trials and tribulations similar to [Nietzsche's]" (xxi). Accordingly, we see expressed in Bataille's fear of going crazy his fantasy of a shared fate with Nietzsche, who also happens to share with him particular circumstances, such as the loss of belief in God and of belonging. Bataille writes: "My life with Nietzsche as a companion is a community. My book is this community" (9). Specifically, Nietzsche is to Bataille as the mother's body is to the infant: the Other whom he pollutes and pillages, and who mediates his relation to the world and to himself. Of interest from the viewpoint of Kleinian theory is the manner in which Bataille embraces the state of rupture and dissolution that accompanies his relation to Nietzsche's text, and analogously the infant's relation to its mother. For whereas this loss of boundary induces anxiety in the child, Bataille evaluates ambiguity and ambivalence positively in association with both religious experience and eroticism. Bataille attempts through the book to share in his dissolution, and to partake in an exchange of affects with Nietzsche. He understands this exchange as bodily, and his text to be a meeting place for their bodies. And yet the exchange between them is entirely textual, invoking nothing but common words, exchanged and abused by all subjects of language. How, then, are such words supposed to transmit a unique signal, from Nietzsche's text to Bataille, produced by Nietzsche's own body? For Bataille, this exchange is affected in virtue of a position shared between them in relation to God, culture, and the community. One can only understand Nietzsche's thinking if one follows his destiny: that is, his madness. / want to be very clear on this: not a word of Nietzsche's work can be understood without experiencing that dazzling dissolution into totality, without living it out. Beyond that, this philosophy is just a maze of contradictions. (On Nietzsche, xxxi-xxxii)

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

IO9

It is through a certain organization—or more correctly, disorganization—of the body that a perspective is shared, according to Bataille. Insofar as this body can convey its own structure in writing, the possibility exists of sharing the writer's experience. As Bataille avows, Nietzsche wrote "with his blood" (xxiv): therefore, if one reads in a manner that is attentive to this corporeal aspect of the text, then one is ready to receive a bodily pulse that is transmitted through it. Contrary to the usual proclivity of philosophers, Bataille attempts to open himself to these flows, and to the prospect of dissolution, even madness. His text on Nietzsche "celebrates" the fragility of the difference between them by attempting to destroy that difference. Bataille's reading of Nietzsche puts into question the subject's ability to achieve complete autonomy. Rather, identity is constituted by the subject's wounded—and wounding—relation to the Other's body. From its preliminary musings about laceration and ecstasy, to the later journal entries, in which Bataille's relation to Nietzsche appears absolutely (almost abjectly) mundane (84, 97), Sur Nietzsche represents Bataille's attempt to negotiate his relation to Nietzsche, and to measure the effects that Nietzsche's texts have exerted upon his life. Moreover, he goes to lengths to compromise any autonomy he might have owned in the face of Nietzsche's writing, by self-consciously attempting to experience the world as Nietzsche had done: that is, to slip into the depth of madness. Indeed, there is an air of noblesse to Bataille's selfsacrifice in this regard: that he loves Nietzsche's writing even to the extent that he would risk insanity in its name. In this respect, he appears to give himself over, in totality, to Nietzsche. I would like at this point, however, to subject to scrutiny the seriousness with which Bataille seems to regard the claim that those rare readers, able to experience Nietzsche's texts with empathy, in some sense open themselves to the threat of madness. For Bataille appears to retain his sanity in spite of his willingness to put it at risk, and in the face of his own parents' states of insanity, which may have heightened the sense of his own. What, then, had Bataille's engagement with Nietzsche achieved for him, if it did not, after all, send him over the verge? Understanding the failure of Bataille's engagement with Nietzsche to produce the said madness might require an interrogation of his imperative to risk oneself in communication with the other. For implicit to the requirement to risk oneself is a notion of consent. Throughout his writings, Bataille awards a priority to risk, and attempts to exemplify that value. Risk thus assumes the status of an ethical term, a

no

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

guiding principle according to which one should live. But what would "the decision" to risk one's sanity involve? And conversely, what must be withheld of the self, in reserve, for the very contracting of oneself to risk to take place? In other words, "who" stands security for such a wager, if the price is one's very identity? The act of "consenting" to risk would seem to demand a peculiar temporality, whereby the autonomous subject preexists the exchange that would constitute it. If we take him at his word, Bataille may have understood this compact to initiate a retroactive unraveling of the autonomous, conscious self, by reevaluating the connections through which that self was formed. He may have understood the claim that identity is constituted by the subject's wounded—and wounding—relation to the Other's body, to cast into doubt (and thus risk) the subject's ability to achieve complete autonomy. Yet if one consents to risk oneself in the relation with the other, I would contend that there is a sense in which the autonomous subject—the one with the right to give consent—oversees the whole affair, and in this respect does not actually put itself at risk at all. Rather, by means of identification—or a crossing of boundary that Bataille designates as risk—he benefits from risks already taken by Nietzsche (socially, culturally, and pathologically). Bataille did not need to experience Nietzsche's torments and tribulations, as he insists the reader must in order to understand his philosophy, and this is precisely because Nietzsche had already done so for him. In this light, Bataille's relation to Nietzsche is at best vicarious, and at worst vampiric. Far from experiencing Nietzsche's trials in reading his texts, Bataille lives off Nietzsche's experience [sur ses expenses] through them, thus casting a different and somewhat disturbing light upon the title of the work Sur Nietzsche. To be sure, Bataille does explore risk through his reading of Nietzsche, but is thereby also protected from it. Nietzsche's text—and moreover, his body—mediates Bataille's relation to his own life: he understands his relation to others, and to his own inner experience in terms that were given to him by Nietzsche. (The concepts of chance, excess, risk, and even laughter,9 so integral to Bataille's thought, all originate from Nietzsche.) It is in this respect, again, that Nietzsche's text is to Bataille as the mother's body is to the infant: by polluting and robbing it, he is able to negotiate the relation of his self to reality. In a sense we can read in Bataille's celebration of mourning and sensuality a reminder of our debt to the mother, and to the abiding connection to her that continues to mediate one's relation to the world. And yet, Sur Nietzsche can only mark the place of that relation, as

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

III

Bataille's sacrament to the body of Nietzsche is a mere promissory note for his unpaid—and unrecognized—debt to the mother. Indeed, if Nietzsche is understood as symbolic of the mother in Bataille's work, then this opens him to a further Kleinian intervention. For according to Klein, reparation to the mother is attempted by means of a deferral of anxiety to the symbol, which stands in for the mother's body, as its less-threatening (neutralized) counterpart. The chain of signification gains momentum and rhythm since the word continues to incarnate to the child his fear of the mother's body, and so with each symbol, a further representation is needed to divert anxiety. Yet, the symbol shelters the child from its own anxiety—an anxiety incarnated in the figure of the mother. Applying Klein's analysis of the symbol to Sur Nietzsche, we can imagine that, through Nietzsche's text, Bataille was able both to take refuge and to expose himself to risk: although such exposure to risk exists as such only in the realm of fantasy. The fantasy of madness simulates for Bataille an intimacy with Nietzsche that revisits the oneness with the mother, through which the world was first bestowed to him. Madness, a simulacrum of a primordial plenitude with the mother, sanitized of the anguish and violence that, according to Klein, characterizes that relation. Nietzsche's writing thus comprises, for Bataille, "a vessel" with which safely to navigate those more treacherous, "maternal waters."

DAVID FARRELL KRELL'S "NOVEL" APPROACH TO READING NIETZSCHE David Farrell Krell presents Nietzsche: A Novel as a "fictional" reconstruction of the onset of Nietzsche's madness and subsequent institutionalization. I place the word fictional in quotes, because Krell's use of the genre of the novel is curious. For he equivocates over the philosophical status of the book, and, I would argue, this vacillation itself performs an important function within the work. Krell attempts to explore the body of the philosopher. Moreover, Krell examines the body at its most decrepit and uncontrolled. Whereas, on the one hand, the philosophic value of this endeavor does seem questionable—given that the period of life concerned postdates Nietzsche's philosophic output—on the other, Krell's account of Nietzsche's decline is of great pertinence to the question of the reader's relation to the text. For in it we find Krell captivated by Nietzsche's bodily excesses: his madness, incarceration, and death, each of which is "properly" beyond his philosophy, yet

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

112

still clings to the reader's relation to it. With Nietzsche: A Novel, Krell demonstrates the difficulty that many of Nietzsche's readers experience in finding a place for this corporeal surplus: the particulars of his life that become an obsession for some, but are most usually relegated to the marginal notes of the philosophical account. In this text, Krell enlists to his aid that most phantasmatic of excessive bodily remainders, or "part-objects,": Nietzsche's voice. Many of Nietzsche's readers testify to having imagined Nietzsche's voice: booming and vigorous or quiet and conspiratorial (as if he were whispering in one's ear), depending upon the tone of the passage in question. Krell attempts to inhabit Nietzsche's voice, differentiating only by means of a change of font his own imaginings of Nietzsche's addled stream of consciousness from Nietzsche's words (letters, journal entries), and the words of his carers (doctor, mother, and sister). The book begins with a fairly standard chronology of Nietzsche's life that incorporates an element of editorial comment, but little that might be seen as controversial. Each section of the book, the progression of which takes us through the various stages of Nietzsche's incarceration, is also headed with a chronology of events to guide us through that period. Krell then dramatizes the various discourses surrounding these nodes of Nietzsche's life, thus encompassing the perspectives of those witnessing Nietzsche's breakdown and confinement, as well as speculation about what might have been Nietzsche's own subjective experience. Krell achieves this reenactment of Nietzsche's voice sometimes by means of recurrent phrases from Nietzsche's text, or by enacting the grandiloquence so characteristic of Nietzsche's style of writing. Otherwise, he adopts an unusual use of language—including unconventional grammar, neologisms, foreign languages, and eccentric metaphors—which attempt to approximate the disordered, but still luminous, thought process of "a mad genius." At times this approaches a poetic articulation, in imitation perhaps of those exemplars of mad style, Plath or Joyce: Occasionally I am not sufficiently vigilant and they are over the line before I am alerted. Mama holds my head by the hair, her knuckles press deep into my skull at the temples, I hear the roots like grass when the cows at graze tear it out in clumps. Her dugs dribble watery pus. I clench my teeth in resistance. Another crone pries upward the right corner of my mouth. The stench is overpowering the nausea I am gagging gagglegurgle garlegargoyle galagilagolapagos gallonga-

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

113

lactose gallglandulargalore gallimaufry glottisglopglitch glutengrilygruelglut gluggluttongobbleguzzle. 10 Krell affects in this manner an intimacy with Nietzsche that appears to exceed that already afforded by the scholar's engagement with his works—and there are few more thorough scholars than Krell, who has read and studied Nietzsche inside and out, so to speak, as interpreter and translator of his words. Krell indicates an area beyond the text, in which the reader—through a particular exertion of the imagination—might encounter Nietzsche: a place outside Nietzsche's writings, where body meets body, apart from the constraints brought upon them by the roles of reader and writer. Yet, what does this urge to meet with Nietzsche in the flesh indicate? Especially since we know that Nietzsche, no less than Derrida, was aware that the philosopher's body articulates itself as text, and that text is enough to elicit in the reader a feeling of proximity to its author {Beyond Good and Evil, §6, 13). As we have seen already, an intimacy is achieved in the act of reading— when one is called to the text as its proper reader—and an encounter with Nietzsche "outside the text" is not required for the reader to identify with him and relate to him at the level of affect. Indeed, this bodily excess to which Krell appeals is conjured precisely by means of the play of absence and presence that characterizes writing. The bodily excess that the text indicates is felt only as absence, or as a missed encounter with the author; the experience of getting to know the philosopher through text is never quite as satisfying as the reader anticipates. In this respect, reading is perhaps akin to mourning the loss of one whom you never really knew, involving "the reconstruction" of a relationship that did not happen. Krell's account of Nietzsche in his "novel" can thus be understood to enact an intimacy with Nietzsche by mourning him, as his journey begins where Nietzsche's body first ceases to produce text, and extends all the way to the funeral, where his body is finally—or at least symbolically—laid to rest. Krell's impulse to achieve this intimacy with Nietzsche also indicates the difficulty philosophers encounter when dealing with material that appears to lay outside the realm of text, or reason, but could equally be regarded as "evidence" if treated with some care. To begin to know what status biographical material has for philosophic enquiry, we need seriously and rigorously to consider our fascination for this material. More often than not, commentators separate out the two kinds of material—textual and what apparently exceeds the written word—treating them differently by confining discussion

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

II4

of the biographical to anecdotes and footnotes or, in the case of Krell, to a separate genre altogether. In this section I wish to pose two questions in tandem. First, why does Krell (or any reader) feel the need to know Nietzsche the man, and not only his philosophy? Second, what function does the equivocation about the status of the book, as a novel or as work of philosophy, perform for a reading of Nietzsche? My response to these questions will examine different possibilities for understanding Krell's project, first critically, and then more generously. In so doing, I draw upon Klein's account of the schizoid position, by way of the work of Mary Douglas, and Julia Kristeva. At the beginning of KrelPs novel on Nietzsche, the reader is escorted to the main body of text by way of an explanatory supplement, the preface, in which he attempts to affect a distance from Nietzsche—to put into question the philosophical relevance of Nietzsche's madness, and of his own project. The preface is conventionally the section of a work that also stands apart from its main body, and in which the author discloses his or her intentions. It also affords the reader a transition from his or her own concerns, to those of the author in whose thoughts they must soon dwell. Accordingly, in this preface Krell addresses himself to the reader, instructing in how to read his text: To dither about the human being may seem a declaration of bankruptcy on our part, a concession to our mania for biography and our lust for gossip. However, there are things about the man that elude us as much as the writing and the thinking do. This novel—if that is what it is—chases after the elusions of the dead man. (ix, my emphasis) Krell states his intention, albeit rather elliptically, in the last phrase of this sentence, and I will return shortly to this gnomic assemblage—"the elusions of the dead man"—as it is repeated later in KrelPs preface. Beneath this stated intention, the governing sentiment seems to be: "Do not take this too seriously, it is only a novel." Krell thus appears to place ironic air quotation marks around his whole endeavor, so as to produce a cynical distance between himself and his own project. In effect, he appears to suspend its legitimacy—but perhaps he does so strategically, in order to encourage a certain reading between the lines, by which he can transmit an undercurrent of meaning without owning it. The nomination of his text as a novel, combined

THE CONTAGION OP AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

115

with the parenthetical "if that is what it is" serves to place in doubt rather than elucidate the status of his work. Within the rhetoric of this preface we read two meanings at cross-purposes with one another: one exoteric, for the critic; the other esoteric, for the sympathetic reader. Krell states what "ought" to be stated—that his book, and the parameters that organize it (Nietzsche's madness and his relationships) cannot be taken seriously as measures of his work—and then reverses the message by placing a question mark in its wake. This double entendre increases in depth and complexity a little further into the preface, where Krell posits two possible readings of his own text: one of which positions him as sober and conservative, the other as mad. What follows is a story about Nietzsche's ten years of madness, years that allow us to catch crazy glimpses of the forty-five productive years that preceded them. Only one who is as mad as Nietzsche was would believe that the work of those productive years could be reproduced by the backspin, that a book such as this one could recapitulate or clarify in any way Nietzsche's own books. It cannot. It can only allude to the elusions of the dead man—and to our delusions touching him (ix-x) Krell begins by suspending—for the moment—the status of his book, as well as his sanity. But he promptly curtails this uncertainty with an apparent negation. With the definitive "it cannot," he rejects the intriguing idea that a reiteration of Nietzsche's madness could clarify his philosophy. On the most surface level, Krell appears simply to make a statement about propriety: that there is no place within philosophical discourse for reflection upon Nietzsche's madness. Accordingly, he has written a novel, so avoids muddying philosophical waters with a confusion of body and thought. This gesture would pay lip service to the injunction of the philosophical discourse against admission of "personal effects": for instance, the ad hominem argument for which Nietzsche himself is so infamous. What lies beneath it, however, is the inability of philosophy to analyze anything that is not obviously textual, such as bodies and biographical details. The embargo against interpreting Nietzsche's madness with his philosophy thus secures the discipline against what he fears would undermine its efficacy: the personal has no place in philosophy because if it did, philosophy would no longer be philosophy.

n6

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

Yet one could then exercise a degree of suspicion, and interpret Krell's double-statement as a rhetorical means of furtively pushing through a claim about the relation between Nietzsche's madness and his philosophy (for instance, that the madness recapitulates the philosophy), thus evading the level of criticism that such a claim would attract were it proffered in the scholarly context. In this case, such a disclaimer would serve only to remove this tenor of Krell's writing from the surface of the text in order to embed it deeper within its background assumptions, where it may be transmitted to the reader at an unconscious level. This maneuver recalls the neurotic in Freud's clinic who says, "The person in the dream is not my mother," wherein the disavowal suggests its opposite. As far as the unconscious is concerned, there is only affirmation. Negation can then indicate that a repression has taken place—and is, moreover, a means by which repressed material makes itself conscious. Material that causes discomfort is thereby acknowledged, but in such a way that it can also pass unnoticed, packaged in the guise of a no.n Likewise, Krell's reader will bring this supposition—that Nietzsche's philosophy can be elucidated in the "backspin" that was his madness—to the interpretation of Nietzsche's text, unconsciously, and without having had the opportunity to scrutinize its veracity. From this viewpoint, we could read Krell's preface as an attempt "to inoculate" philosophy against his dalliance with Nietzsche. While acknowledging the convention that keeps philosophy and the body apart, Krell indulges his curiosity about Nietzsche's life without expending the effort required to analyze what this can tell us about his own investment in the enquiry. Krell's prevarication about the purpose of his own text, far from enticing his reader, keeps her in the dark about his project. And the effect for philosophy is that its status and function remain intact, above an interest in the philosopher's life, considered at once too mundane and too unruly for philosophical enquiry. The opportunity that Krell's project poses—to think through the relation between life and philosophy, and the reader and the text they read—is thus missed. Instead, philosophy's "surplus" is projected into the apparently formless, and less serious, domain of fiction. This concern for philosophical propriety recalls Mary Douglas's structural account of the concept of hygiene, whereby whatever is ill defined or out of place is considered dirty, dangerous, even evil—and sometimes divine. In this sense, context is the key-determining factor regarding what is considered good or bad. 12 In Purity and Danger, Douglas demonstrates that rituals of purification in tribal and ancient cultures—much like our own "hygiene

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

117

practices"—are symbolic means by which a people deal with anxiety brought about by ambiguity and anomaly: "If we abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place" (35). There is nothing intrinsically wrong with dirt. Rather, it is a liminal concept, describing whatever is not easily accommodated by the system according to which we understand any given field (perceptual or conceptual). In this way, what does not belong cannot be looked upon as benignly out of place. Rather, we take an attitude to it that motivates us to remove, categorize, and neutralize it. For instance, hair that is perceived as clean and beautiful on someone's head becomes an object of revulsion when it is found in food. The offending strand must be removed and the food replaced with a fresh, clean serving, before a sense of propriety is reinstated. A more critical instance can be seen with the treatment of the so-called monstrous, or anomalous, live birth, which in every culture threatens the boundary between human and animal. Douglas cites Evans-Pritchard's observations of the Nuer to illustrate this: If a monstrous birth can be labelled an event of a peculiar kind the categories can be restored. So the Nuer treat monstrous births as baby hippopotamuses, accidentally born to humans and, with this labelling, the appropriate action is clear. They gently lay them in the river where they belong. (Purity and Danger, 39) There is something at once touching and horrifying about this particular method of maintaining the integrity of categories, whereby a child is "returned" to her proper place, but in effect her life is sacrificed for the sake of preserving the status quo. Yet, with all such mechanisms of border control, an inexplicable loss takes place: something vital is refused, and thus put out of the reach of consciousness. Respecting Nietzsche: A Novel, could we then say that Krell differentiates between two different genres of writing in order to assuage unease about the matter (biographic and bodily) that would otherwise confront the reader as if it were dirt? If this is the case, then Krell will have found a means of dealing with material from which the philosopher must distance himself, but that nonetheless exerts a force of attraction upon him. Moreover, in a sense, Krell thus "comes clean" about his relation to Nietzsche in the exploration of his madness: for not only does he bring to the fore a hitherto concealed

n8

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

element of his attraction to Nietzsche, but also he achieves this in a manner that keeps philosophy inviolable; clean, in that it remains unpolluted by the philosopher's life. Yet, perhaps philosophers need to muddy the water a little if we are to come to understand the foundations of philosophy: its hidden debts and responsibilities, certainly, but also its hidden potential; its source of life. For is not something vital lost in the maintenance of these boundaries? With his generic separation of Nietzsche's person from his philosophy, Krell thus throws the baby out with the (dirty) bathwater: or rather, to invoke Douglas's example, he gently lays his monstrous baby to waste in this water, to be incorporated by hippopotamuses. And so, we might ask, what of himself does Krell betray and sacrifice to this need to maintain an opposition between the philosopher's body and his words? And what of Nietzsche is sacrificed and betrayed? We will return to these questions—concerning the sacrifice and betrayal of the philosopher's body—momentarily. Given that Krell indicates a need to separate his treatment of Nietzsche the man from the philosophy, the question of what purpose the novel serves remains. Is Krell the novelist really so distinct from Krell the philosopher? For even if he designates the resulting text as fiction, Krell does feel compelled to write about Nietzsche's madness; as well as the relation to his mother and sister, and his slow and vegetative death, all of which are apparently extraneous concerns for the philosopher. According to Julia Kristeva, this fascination could indicate a proximity to the abject: neither subject nor object, the abject is instead a "jettisoned object" that "is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses." 13 Kristeva elaborates the fascination of the abject in relation to Klein's account of the schizoid position: The future subject is founded upon a dynamic of abjection whose optimal quality is fascination. And if this future subject readily grants himself a "presence" of other people that he internalises as much as expels, he is not facing an object but, in fact, an ab-ject, with this a understood in the privative sense of the prefix, that is, as vitiating the object as well as the emerging subject. 14 Abjection thus describes a process by means of which the ego and its objects are constructed; and yet also "vitiates"—violates and corrupts—the ego and its objects. Because the abject precedes objects and categories it provokes the same response as Douglas's "dirt": the abject never finds a place, as it had

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

119

produced place in the first instance. Beyond the established order, the abject is both repulsive and attractive: motivating the subject at a subterranean level of affect, because it subsists beyond the grasp of ordered thought. Abjection thus also indicates madness—the dissolution of order, of identity, and of time and space. It is significant, then, that Nietzsche's madness is precisely what beguiles Krell in this work, both repelling and drawing him into a liaison with Nietzsche. Nietzsche's pathology and personal history can be seen to occupy an abject relation to Krell, as what he needed to exclude in order to incarnate the ideal of the philosopher. The image of Nietzsche, post-breakdown, thereby provides Krell with a means of encountering a part of himself that he had sacrificed to engender a philosophical mode of subjectivity. Indeed, according to Kristeva the feeling of nausea—or presentiment of danger—that accompanies the fascination with the abject is what protects the subject from succumbing to it: "On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture" {Horror', 2). In this light, Krell's caution about admitting Nietzsche's madness to his philosophical discourse might be warranted, but achieves its goal of protecting philosophy even at the point of simple articulation. That is to say, in stating his uneasiness about "the sophistry" of connecting Nietzsche's madness with the meaning of his philosophy, Krell had already put in place adequate safeguards to protect him from falling into his own sophistry and, indeed, into madness. In a final attempt to interpret the equivocal passage in which Krell opens and then closes the possibility of reading Nietzsche's breakdown as the backspin of his philosophy, let us suppose, more charitably, that he is actually asserting: I am mad, even as mad as Nietzsche was. We would then understand this statement as performative, whereby Krell separates himself from a philosophical community for whom Nietzsche's madness cannot be interpreted in this manner. Underlying this address to the philosopher-reader is the assumption that philosophy and madness are mutually exclusive: thus, the attempt to read Nietzsche's philosophy through the prism of his madness renders Krell liable to fall into madness. But the statement can also be read as a performative contradiction, allowing him provisionally to redefine the parameters of philosophy. According to this reading, Krell bids the reader to permit the dual levels of textual meaning to coexist rather than cancel each other out—and thus to withstand the anxiety to which contradiction and ambivalence give rise—saying: "If I am a philosopher I cannot interpret

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

12.0

Nietzsche's philosophy in this manner, and yet I am a philosopher, and I do interpret Nietzsche thus." Krell, then, acknowledges his variance from the tradition of philosophy—a variance that renders him "mad"—and bids the philosophers adieu, but only to make way for philosophy anew: that is, a philosophy that could interpret Nietzsche's thought in relation to his madness. According to this reading, the preface establishes his equivocal status as a philosopher, both inside and outside philosophy. In the remainder of the text, Krell would then identify with Nietzsche's madness: become mad, like Nietzsche, in order "to catch crazy glimpses" of the genius behind the philosophy. He thus attempts to do philosophy behind its own back: furtively working like the unconscious. If we permit this reading of Krell, we can then understand him as attempting to access Nietzsche's philosophy from a different route: the backspin,

for which a different kind of literacy is required. Remembering

that Krell has already studied Nietzsche's texts assiduously, and mastered the art of reading slowly, he now attempts to develop a new art of reading, designed to crack the code of the corporeality that inheres in a text, for which there is as yet no lexicon. Krell's method of reading the obverse side of Nietzsche's philosophy—or at least the point of its disappearance—is therefore to write him-self mad. Krell, then, attempts to interpellate the position of the mad Nietzsche rather than the philosopher-legislator in relation to whom most of Nietzsche's readers—the philosophers

propre—

imagine themselves. More to the point, Krell attempts to identify with what already eludes, or confounds, identification. Isn't that precisely the definition of madness? Madness is what exceeds the boundaries of consistent identity, and thus threatens to pollute the community from which the mad must be sequestered. In this case, what are we to make of Krell's attempt to enact an identity that exceeds identity? Could such an effort put at risk Krell's own identity? And does it risk the identity of philosophical discourse? Or is security already guaranteed beforehand, such that Krell's text is at best only a pantomime of risk? To address these questions, let us consider an elliptical statement that recurs throughout Krell's preface, concerning death, absence, and delusion. The first time he writes it, he is responding to a suspicion regarding the value of gossiping about Nietzsche the man: "[T]here are things about the man that elude us as much as the writing and the thinking do. This novel—if that is what it is—chases after the elusions of the dead man." {Nietzsche: A Novel, ix, my emphasis)

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

121

Thesecond time, heapparently disavows theintention of reading Nietzsche's madness as the backspin of his philosophy, cautioning that his text "can only allude to the elusions of the dead man—and

to our delusions touching him"

(x, my emphasis). The "elusions of the dead man" to which Krell twice refers, is precisely what we cannot find—what eludes us—in Nietzsche's writings. "Nothing" attracts Krell to Nietzsche; or more precisely an absence, and the promise that such absence signifies, as a withholding of presence: that with a little more effort he might be inducted to Nietzsche's secret. Accordingly, these "elusions" may also be understood as the excess remainder, or object a: the unrepresented and unspeakable nothingness about which his desire circulates. A Lacanian reading might suggest that Krell represents this kernel of pain and fear that defies interpretation as the mad, dead Nietzsche, who thus becomes an enigma to him. As discussed in the preceding chapter, the relation to the other often involves a work of anamorphosis, whereby their inscrutability represents a relation to oneself. The puzzle of the other (object a) is a reflection of that portion of the self with which the subject least identifies—that, furthermore, must be rejected for the sake of attaining an ideal self. Consequently, if we are to understand KrelPs recurrent phrase to accord with "the excess" of identification, then it is to these "elusions of the dead man" that Krell must return, in a necromantic occupation of Nietzsche's mad body. In terms of Kleinian theory, too, the object of Krell's necromantic discourse cannot easily be separated from his own subjectivity, which continues to emerge through his encounter with Nietzsche: ebbing and flowing in relation to Nietzsche, as object—or more correctly, as abject. Krell elaborates further, stating that we can only approach these elusions—the intolerable lack, or dread—with "our delusions touching him": that is, in our fantasies with regard to Nietzsche. Accordingly, the body of Krell's text should be read as enacting his own fantastic relation to Nietzsche: a fantasy in which he attempts to fill in the very gaps that allow him to enjoy a relation to the text. In order to enact this fantasy, Krell imagines himself mad, in sympathy with Nietzsche, or even as Nietzsche, thus eliminating the difference between them: the gap in which Nietzsche's presence is given. Krell attempts to communicate with his own potentially dead (and mad) self through the medium of Nietzsche's "body"—or at least the illusions of that body that he imagines within the gaps of Nietzsche's elusive discourse. In this way, Nietzsche—like Bion's "mother"—modifies Krell's fear of death by returning it back to him as something more palatable; that is, as a feeling,

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

122

or intensity that he can withstand. Accordingly while the anxious relation to the mother's body had first motivated speech, Krell's relation to Nietzsche produces in him the need to write. Krell feels imperiled by the object (or abject) of his fantasy: the Nietzsche-mother-monster that threatens to incorporate and annihilate him, but without actually presenting itself to him as an object that he could master. Thus, if Krell's text chases "the elusions of the dead man," it is only to enact a scene in which his dread of madness and dying is finally given a place of rest and containment. In this way, it is only by separating off a "fantastic" meeting place—"the fictional account"—that Krell produces a space in which it is safe to confound these boundaries between himself and Nietzsche. In effect, the novel becomes a sacred space, in which a ritualized encounter can occur between the mortal and the divine. The madness that Krell takes it upon himself to endure, for the sake of getting to know Nietzsche the man, cannot be allowed to seep into his everyday existence. Krell cordons off this encounter from his life by means of scholarly trappings, such as the chronology, the preface, and the explanatory note—as well as a highly stylized mode of writing a "mad" subjectivity. In short, Krell secures himself against the effects of sharing Bacchic visions with Nietzsche. Although he may have set out to create philosophy anew—through a kind of revaluation that would engender reflection upon the relation between philosophy and the body—Krell delineates too sharply between the scholarly and a style of belle litterature. Whereas one can discern an ironic dialogue between them, in which the message of Krell's text is refracted esoterically, what is needed is a style of philosophizing that can openly work through the relation of the work to the life. Bataille and Krell had each intended with his encounter with Nietzsche to dissolve a boundary between reader and text, all too palpable to Nietzsche's reader. Because Nietzsche speaks to the reader as if addressing a friend, the desire to attain an intimacy with him is tangible, particularly in these readings that flirt with the possibility of joining Nietzsche in his delirium. Although Krell alludes to an experience of dispersion lived in relation to Nietzsche, through the trope of "madness," in practice he erects boundaries between the discourse of madness and the philosophy he takes it upon himself to protect. On the other hand, for Bataille a loss of boundary is affirmed, both explicitly and through a writing that constantly verges between genres. But moreover, Bataille celebrates a culture of contagion through his encounter with Nietzsche, and thus stages the reader's situation regarding the text as implicitly involving contamination. In this way, he presents a vivid contrast

THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

123

to the esoteric readings encountered in chapter 3. Whereas the imperative for Rosen and Lampert was to differentiate themselves from those outside Nietzsche's address, and thus (at the level of the fantasy) to keep themselves pure of contamination, Bataille's imperative was precisely to expose himself and Nietzsche to a contagion that each offers up to the other, as if this represented an exchange of gifts. In Kleinian or Kristevan terms, this is an exchange of the subject's abject by-products, through which the relation to the other is galvanized and consolidated. For this reason, Bataille's reading of Nietzsche at least is suggestive of what this book attempts: to trace the trail of abjection produced in the reader's negotiation with Nietzsche's text. Indeed, Bataille's characterization of communication in terms of sin and crime foregrounds the necessity of compromise in any social relation—and particularly respecting Nietzsche, whose philosophy and life railed against conventions and the safety they represent. There is a resemblance between Bataille's imagery of sin and contagion and Pierre Klossowski's understanding of communication in terms of the society of criminals, or complot,

which

will be elaborated in chapter 6. However, whereas his depiction of his relation to Nietzsche is instructive in the material exchange between the reader and text, I have argued in this chapter that his own boundaries are ultimately maintained, as Nietzsche's "maternalized body" is plundered for nourishing morsels. The confusion of boundary between Bataille and Nietzsche is only enacted, or parodied, and so does not lead to an experience of Nietzsche's madness. Rather, for both the commentators dealt with in this chapter, the enactment of Nietzsche's madness is precisely what protects them from actual madness. Bataille and Krell each invoke Nietzsche's madness precisely in order to control their relation to madness per se. In this respect, Nietzsche's philosophical corpus may be conceived as like a maternal body, mediating the relation to the reader's own abject materiality. Chapter 5 will address itself to somewhat murkier, albeit still maternal, waters. Sarah Kofman's engagement with Nietzsche produces in her a far less stable subjectivity, vacillating between the various figures of (projective) identification that she both incorporates and disavows. As we will see, however, the term that does the work of construction and destabilization for Kofman's interpretation of Nietzsche is not madness, but rather the Jew, and in particular the Jewish mother.

CHAPTER

5

FAMILY ROMANCES AND TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS: SARAH KOFMAN READING NIETZSCHE

But the place of a survivor is unlocatable. If such a place were ever located, it would remain untenable, unbearable, I would almost say deadly. And if it appeared tenable, the speech to be held or the word to be kept there would remain impossible. Such speech or such a word is thus also untenable—unbearable. —Jacques Derrida 1 The hazard of family relations is well borne out by Sarah Kofman's texts. From her book-length studies of Freud and Nietzsche, to her short discourses about her childhood and her dreams, Kofman's writings are as personal as they are philosophical. Moreover, the personal interpenetrates

the

philosophical, and vice versa, because for her the two cannot properly be separated. Kofman recognized that, like all philosophers, she did philosophy for her own reasons—that her writings were motivated by a vital interest, and psychological need. 2 When approaching the work of another, she evokes material from the philosopher's life, such that through it she might gently illuminate the inconsistencies and commitments of the philosophy 3 The capricious coexistence of the philosophical and life narratives is precisely her object, such that philosophical interpretation merges with autobiography. Instead of detracting from the philosophical importance of her work, I would contend that it enhances it, because her attempt to balance the personal and philosophical—or more precisely, to reflect each through the other—brings into focus the relation of life to philosophy and writing. Yet by bringing her own life and body to the philosophical field, Kofman takes a risk that, arguably, Bataille and Krell do not. Unlike Krell or Bataille, she does not attempt to put her stake in Nietzsche's writing on display, but instead undergoes, at a subterranean level, a self-analysis and self-exploration

FAMILY ROMANCES AND TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

I25

by means of commentaries that appear perfectly scholarly, and even overly faithful to Nietzsche (see Deutscher, "Disapproprations," 168). As Penelope Deutscher has argued, 4 Kofman enacts a "complicated fidelity" to both Nietzsche and Freud, by utilizing each mimetically to interpret the other, altering them and herself through their shared encounter. In this way, she may be understood to keep her distance from each of these formative figures by fashioning from their texts her own conglomerate personas, perhaps in order to avoid "the madness" to which Bataille and Krell both allude. Notwithstanding this effort to keep her distance, Kofman's last word to us consists of a date, October 15, 1994: the one-hundred fiftieth anniversary of Nietzsche's birth, and the day upon which she took her own life. This fact confronts as if it were "a return of the Real"—of the body, repressed to make way for the philosophical self—and as such it might be assumed that, as something "beyond" language (as more real or urgent than language) it speaks for itself, undercutting all that can be said or written about her relation to Nietzsche. Yet, the finality of the evocation of Kofman's death—as a brute fact—is brought into stark relief by the silence that surrounds it, which seems in part to be connected to an observance of philosophical etiquette regarding the impropriety of the philosopher's death, and an embarrassment at the manner in which the body can so rudely insert itself into the scene of philosophical writing. A number of fleeting, and perhaps perfunctory interpretations of Sarah Kofman's death in relation to her philosophy have been attempted. 5 However, for the most part her readers keep their counsel about this event: it speaks to them, but thus also silences them. For it seems improper to consider with any seriousness a sign that not only is "unmodified" by discourse—lying outside of the text—but moreover, might have nothing whatsoever to do with her philosophical work, perhaps having originated in more personal, and thus private circumstances. What the quick "knock-out-blow" citation of Kofman's suicide has in common with the refusal to admit it as evidence, is the reluctance to subject to scrutiny the relation between the life of the philosopher and her work. The suicide is treated either as concrete (so irrefutable) proof of certain premises respecting the effects of her mode of reading—thus closing philosophical discussion about her work—or else as "matter out of place," and so philosophically irrelevant. An alternative to either of these poles is to take into account the philosopher's life, yet cautiously, and in a manner that leaves the interpretation open to revisions and annexations. Taking a leaf from Kofman's book, we might read her death and its relation to her work in a like

126

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

manner to the psychoanalyst's interpretation of a dream, and the numerous chance circumstances of the analysand's life that overdetermine its meaning. Kofman herself may have suggested such an interpretation of her death, with the citation that it bears to Nietzsche. Kofman often read philosophy—and especially Nietzsche—as if she were interpreting elements of a dream. Kofman presents us with a rich and complex field in which to explore the question of the reader's relation to philosophy. As a writer for whom Freud and Nietzsche were dominant influences, an awareness of these questions is evident in her work. Her relation to the text she reads, and its formative influence upon her identity, is perhaps the key theme of her work, and her texts can be read even as meditations upon this very issue. 6 In what follows, I wish to show how an understanding of Kofman's very particular interpretation of Nietzsche can be supplemented by reading the autobiography. Of interest is the manner in which Kofman can be seen to manage anxiety about her self—particularly her Jewish identity—by means of her interpretation of Nietzsche. I will argue that, because of his equivocal use of the trope of the Jew, Nietzsche became for Kofman a figure through which she could negotiate her own conflicted identification with Judaism. Her need to do so is expressed in the autobiographical work—and in particular Rue Ordenety Rue Labat, which addresses a period of her childhood when care for her was divided between her Jewish mother, and a Parisian Gentile: the "good" and "bad mother," in Klein's terms. The first of the commentaries that I consider is Explosions. analyzes Nietzsche's "autobiography," Ecce Homo,

Here, Kofman

through the prism of

Freudian psychoanalysis, demonstrating how Nietzsche constructed (and deconstructed) his own identity by means of "a fantastic genealogy" involving the philosophers whom he read. According to Kofman, what this fantasized genealogy addresses is Nietzsche's dissatisfaction with his maternal lineage. The mother represents all that is base, poisoned, and polluting: in particular, according to Kofman, the anti-Semitism that taints Nietzsche's name. It is thus readily interpreted in terms of the Kleinian framework, whereby the child distances itself from the polluting material within by projecting it, as if a weapon, into the mother. I will then turn to Rue Ordener, in which Kofman can be seen to construct her own fantastic genealogy: replacing her Jewish mother with the Christian lady, Meme, who shelters them from the Vichy Police. The object of ambivalence about which this narrative turns is Kofman's Jewishness, which must be repudiated if she is to pass as Meme's daughter, and thus avoid persecution as a Jew. However, I argue that Kofman's

FAMILY ROMANCES AND TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

127

abjection of Judaism is crucial to the construction of her Jewish identity in the context of the Nazi occupation—that at the heart of identification (or interpellation) is ambivalence. This will shed a new light upon her interpretation of Nietzsche in Le Mepris des Juifs: Kofman's defense of Nietzsche's position (s) on the Jews. This work is also interesting in terms of Klein's account of the schizoid position: For by sifting through Nietzsche's works and letters for positive comments (or "nutriments") about the Jews, Kofman performs a rescue and cleansing of herself along with Nietzsche—projecting all anti-Semitism onto "the bad breast" embodied by Nietzsche's mother and sister, as well as the German nationalist rabble from which Nietzsche also distanced himself. Kofman's commitment to Nietzsche's philosophy can thus be comprehended in terms of his ability to mobilize the very mechanism of ambivalence through which she attempts continually to rearticulate her subjectivity. Kofman sought to locate her self through the ambiguous image of the Jew found in Nietzsche's writings.

READING NIETZSCHE I: EXPLOSIONS Kofman frequently indicates the proximity of her philosophy to autobiography. For instance, in an interview she insisted that her identification with the figures whom she reads was the sole constituent factor of her identity per se: that she has no "autobiography other than that which emerges from my bibliography." 7 Implicit to this statement is an understanding of identity as pastiche, lacking a substantial core: moreover, as only an accretion of identifications with others. Kofman would then own an identity only to the extent that she could enact her various identifications with the objects of her books. This would explain her preference for close reading as a mode of writing. If, reading Kofman, it feels as if she loses herself in her interpretations of the great philosophers, it is only because these close readings are her favored mode of finding herself. Likewise, Kofman turns this conception of identity to reading Nietzsche, by addressing the question of how he articulated his own identity in relation to those most primary figures of identification: his parents, his sister, and the philosophers in whose texts he dwelled for most of his life. In her substantial work, Explosions^

Kofman notes that in Ecce Homo Nietzsche begins by

articulating his relation to his biological parents, but then continues by

128

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

fantasizing a genealogy consisting of various "great men" throughout European history She makes the case that Nietzsche's method of reading philosophy requires an unstable identification in which he invests himself in the philosopher, whom he simultaneously interprets and constructs: "The types with which he . . . identifies are necessarily fictions which owe more to what Nietzsche is or will be than to those they are supposed to figure."8 The aim of this "genealogical exercise" would then be to establish who he is—ironically, in a manner that puts into question the very notion of identity. Nietzsche uses the autobiographical genre, she writes, in order to subvert it "in the most radical way. It is the strangest autobiographical text ever written, 'the most depersonalized' there is" ("Explosions I," 57). Nietzsche's so-called autobiography is depersonalized, Kofman suggests, because within it Nietzsche presents himself not as a person, but as an explosive force fomented within the belly of European culture. Ecce Homo

bears witness

to Nietzsche's deconstruction of himself that he might release a capacity to deconstruct (or revalue) all values (52). Kofman's central argument is that initially Nietzsche had to confuse himself with various great philosophical and cultural figures in order to accumulate and develop his "self" therein; and the metaphor with which Kofman frames her understanding of this process is that of gestation ("Explosions I," 58). Accordingly, in all texts prior to Ecce Homo Nietzsche was impregnating Schopenhauer, Socrates, Wagner, Dionysus, and Christ with a seed that would grow to become "Nietzsche." In these texts, Nietzsche reflects upon, draws from, and spars with these various figures. Yet he was only preparing himself for the task to come: the revaluation of all values. With the text of Ecce Homo, Kofman tells us, Nietzsche has ripened, and now "births" himself from them. With that text, Nietzsche thus demonstrated that these figures were merely detours by which he had to travel to reach his destiny: masks and hiding-places he needed in order to amass the requisite energy for his own philosophical task. In the interstices of this text, however, perhaps Kofman is attempting "to birth" herself by means of her reading of Nietzsche, and in relation to other figures as well, such as Freud and Derrida. Kofman would then be the hybrid progeny of a textual encounter that she arranges between these philosophers. Her interpretation of Nietzsche thus operates at multiple levels: at the surface, she describes a process whereby Nietzsche conceives himself in the bellies of the philosophers whom he reads, but underlying her interpretation of Nietzsche is her own self-conception, for which she uses Nietzsche's text

FAMILY ROMANCES AND TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

129

as her incubator. Kofman's account of Nietzsche's "fantastic genealogy" elucidates the extent to which her texts about Nietzsche also represent her own "personal confession"; and perhaps even a "kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir" (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 13). To comprehend the extent of Kofman's identification with Nietzsche, and the degree to which her texts about Nietzsche are also about herself, let us turn to her discussion of Nietzsche's narrative about his relations—for which occasion she invites Freud to the family table. Kofman elaborates Nietzsche's identification with the philosophers in terms of Freud's concept of "fantastic genealogy," or "the neurotic's family romance." The family romance refers to a process whereby a child, grown dissatisfied with his parents' imperfections, fantasizes for himself a better family, in order to preserve his former idealization of the parents. 9 What is interesting about Nietzsche's fantasized genealogy is that, according to Kofman, he replaces the mother instead of the father, most usually the target of the child's fantasized coup. Perhaps this is due to his father's premature death. Simply, Nietzsche's early idealization of his father was never subjected to revision, or contradicted by an actual, living father. To be sure, Nietzsche retains a highly idealized concept of his father, as a beautiful, ascetic priest: "delicate, kind, and morbid . . . more a gracious memory of life than life itself" (Ecce Homo, 222). Nietzsche's dead father thus joins the ranks of, and is augmented by, his fantasized genealogy of great men; whereas his mother—whom he associates with the German rabble, "bad blooded" canaille (or "scoundrel") 10 —is disavowed by his own part in birthing himself from these great men. It is then Nietzsche who takes the place of his mother in this family romance, and his overvaluation of the father compensates for the deep ambivalence with which he regards his mother, whose connection to him he cannot simply abjure, since semper mater certissima est: maternity is always certain (Freud, "Family Romances," 223; cited in Kofman, "Fantastical Genealogy," 39). Kofman traces this fantasized genealogy with reference to numerous circumstances cited by Nietzsche as proof of a noble lineage that would thereby distance him from the base, German origins with which he associated his mother. Such proof consists, for instance, of his father's birth falling on the day Napoleon arrived in Germany, or that Nietzsche and King Wilhelm shared a birthday ("Fantastical Genealogy," 40, 41). Barely more realistically, Nietzsche hypothesized that he was descended from Polish aristocracy (the Nietzki counts who were expelled from Poland and may have ended up in Prussia). What is of importance to the fantasy structure of family romance,

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

i3o

however, is not the prospect of an actual biological connection to the figures of identification, as much as a network of fortuitous

circumstances

into

which the subject might interpellate her- or himself. To this end, Nietzsche downplays and disparages the importance of the biological connection, claiming that to identify with one's actual kin is a sign of degeneracy, ("Fantastical Genealogy," 36), whereas "true kinship is not of a physiological, but a typological order" (48). At the same time as he honored his paternal links to Polish and Prussian nobility, Kofman argues, Nietzsche further denigrated the German side of the family—the lineage he aligned with his mother and sister—suggesting that these connections represented precisely the parochial, canaille (42) that he felt had been infecting Germany. Moreover, he even designates his female relatives by the confused label venomous

vermin, evoking both "a swarming proliferating population of

which one must, with great difficulty, rid oneself," and "dreadful-tongued serpents who wound cruelly and infallibly, disarming the victim of any strength for self-defence" (43). According to Kofman, this schism between the maternal and paternal lineage signifies "a double-inheritance," or internal dissonance, through which Nietzsche is able to rebirth himself (44). In Explosions,

Kofman identifies Ecce Homo

as the text in which this

rebirthing occurs, by means of his double-inheritance of life and death (Ecce Homo,

222). Nietzsche's dead father represents all that is decadent within

him. Curiously, then, he imagines his father to have provided him "the germ," or "homeopathic dose," by which he is able to diagnose and overcome a more ubiquitous cultural decadence. Kofman writes that the father "had gotten him pregnant" (38), but such pregnancy is a kind of death—which for Nietzsche relates to Christianity, and to the idealism of the philosophers, who attempt to determine concepts by sucking life dry. The seed that Nietzsche's father plants in his fertile body is a toxin that would require Nietzsche to develop as his own antibody a "counterideal sufficiently potent to combat the dominant ascetic ideal" (38). Specifically, Nietzsche incorporates, or identifies with, the father in order to undergo a dialectical process (a process that would necessarily make him sick with pregnancy) whereby the father's values are reversed. It is thus through the father that Nietzsche inherits his ability to say Yes to life, but only after he has transformed the father into an idealized paternity, by means of a fantasized lineage that includes Napoleon, Goethe, and Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. The living mother, conversely, is redeemed neither by Nietzsche nor by Kofman's rendering of his texts. Rather, insofar as she had given him life, she

FAMILY ROMANCES AND TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

131

is abjured. Nietzsche thus does away with the need for the mother in order to take her place in his own generation. 11 Arguably, for this reason Nietzsche debases physiological kinship along with his own mother, refiguring birth in terms of "typological" genealogy. Birth is thus spiritualized, and gestation characterized as an energy that builds up to the bursting point by means of repression. Birth is conceived as the result of an accumulation of energy necessitating the build up of a capital that will burst forth or explode all the more strongly for the time it is kept in check. Time permits the selection of the most forceful force, and the elimination of all the rest. ("Fantastical Genealogy," 48) Through this spiritualized mode of birth—as an explosive force—Nietzsche "eliminates" his mother, along with "the rest": that is, all other German rabble with which he associates her. Interestingly, notwithstanding Kofman's intimate engagement with psychoanalytic theory, and her use of Freud to interpret Nietzsche, she stops short of analyzing Nietzsche's projective identification with his mother. Rather, along with him, she appears to identify Franziska Nietzsche with anti-Semitism and German Nationalism, and in this sense becomes complicit with Nietzsche's fantasy regarding his own birth, through which he constructs himself. Indeed, she is entirely uncritical of Nietzsche's use of the figure of the mother as a repository—or bad breast—into which he projected all pain and filth. It is therefore conceivable that Kofman had an interest in supporting Nietzsche's fantasy, and her own investment in his articulation of the bad-breasted mother. In order to appreciate the extent to which the mother must play this role for Kofman's reading of Nietzsche, I wish now to turn to her autobiographical text Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, in which we see her own life story bearing unsettling similarities to the narrative she provides for Nietzsche's life.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTOTHANOGRAPHY: KILLING WITH WORDS IN RUE ORDENER, RUE LABAT I would like now to suggest that Kofman's account of Nietzsche's family romance reflects as much about her own identity—and the fantasy structure that supports it—as Nietzsche's. We gain insight into this relation between

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

132.

Kofman and her reading of Nietzsche once we turn to the autobiographical writings, and in particular Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. My reading of Kofman's life-writing is informed by Kleinian object-relations theory, as enumerated in the previous chapter, which claims that the infant manages its anxious relation to its environment by internalizing and rejecting the mother's body, understood as both nutritious (or good) and polluting (or bad). The psychic exchange between the mother and child is mirrored by an exchange of food which can equally satisfy the child as leave him or her frustrated, or cause indigestion. By employing a Kleinian analysis to Kofman's narrative, I intend to elucidate the deep ambivalence that accompanies any identification. But in particular, Kofman's troubled relation to Nietzsche is connected to her ambivalent identification with the parts of both Jew and anti-Semite, represented by the two mothers in her story. Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, is open to a Kleinian reading, and this possibility has been indicated already in other responses to the text. 12 The narrative of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, is punctuated by scenes of feasting, conscientious abstinence from food (for instance, food that is not kosher), and the expulsion of food (by vomiting). Rue Ordener is what might be called a bulimic

text,

but in the background also dwell food controls and total prohibitions, according to the Judaic dietary law, as well as the rationing of food during a time of war.13 Kofman thus represents the boundary of self and other: by means of her relation to food, the young Sarah Kofman attempted to take control of her own life and her relation to others, at a point when all that was her own had been taken from her (Robson, "Bodily Detours," 610). This relation to food was a means by which she could control her anxiety; and within the narrative, it is a means for telling her story of dispossession and loss.14 Yet, Kofman's narrative also takes account of what she was reading at any particular point of the story, as well as various Jewish narratives that influenced how she made sense of her circumstances, plus the languages that were used and exchanged (Yiddish, Polish, and French). Thus, it is not only food but also words that Kofman consumes and expels: words that, following Klein, take the place of the mother, if only provisionally, once anxiety with regard to her comes to overwhelm the child. The story begins with the removal of her father, the Rabbi Bereck Kofman, by the Vichy police, and shortly after we are told that he was murdered at Auschwitz while praying, having refused to work on the Sabbath

(Rue,

9). Her siblings seek refuge in the countryside, but little Sarah will not be separated from her mother, and expresses this by refusing to eat whenever

FAMILY ROMANCES AND TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

133

they are apart. She and her mother are subsequently taken in by a good Christian "lady" whom she calls Meme: in French a term of endearment for one's grandmother, but also alarmingly close to the Yiddish designation for mother {mamme or memme)}5

In fact, Meme becomes for Kofman a fantasy

mother, and is positioned as the good mother at key points in Kofman's narrative. For instance, Meme finds a way to induce Sarah to eat pork, so that she assimilates better to Gentile society. And after Sarah has had her tonsils removed, Meme is the one who responds as a good mother should, in accordance with Bion's description of the mother's function, as modifying agent of the child's fear: When I was sick, Meme, unlike my mother, never showed any sign of panic. After being put to sleep with a vial of chloroform, I wake up in the clinic where my tonsils have been removed; both women are at my bedside. I weep and cry out from pain. My mother proceeds to talk very loudly, sympathizing with me in Yiddish, anxious to alert the doctor. Meme, very calm and smiling, says, "It's nothing terrible! And besides, you'll get a lot of ice to suck on!" Immediately I stop crying. On that day I feel vaguely that I am detaching myself from my mother and becoming more and more attached to the other woman. (Rue, 43-44) The psychic exchange of fear for reassurance is accompanied by the promise of ice (a pleasant nutriment), to quell little Sarah's pain. The actual mother is reduced in the daughter's mind to a hysterical and frightening spectacle, speaking Yiddish rather than the conventional French—and thus threatening to expose them. Judaism itself is condemned along with the mother, Yiddish apparently being the language of hysteria. Kofman conveys clearly these connections between the good and bad mother, food, language, and culture. For instance, when Meme suggests that by removing the blood from meat the kosher ritual of food preparation also removed "the goodness" from it (40), Kofman invests this statement with far more significance than it might appear on the surface. For not only is this food connected to her mother—responsible for her nourishment—but also to her culture, already under threat by the Nazi regime from which Meme conceals them. In effect, Meme achieves a coup, replacing Sarah's mother as well as her culture. By lifting food prohibitions—which signal frustration, the bad breast (Oliver, "Queasy," 185)—Meme offers herself in place of the

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

134

mother's good breast. This initiates for Sarah an interest in Meme's body as well, as if it were an imaginary food source: "to the amazement and irritation of my mother, she routinely walked around the apartment in pajamas, her chest uncovered, and I was fascinated by her breasts" (55). When it came to leaving the apartment, it also seemed most expedient for Kofman to pretend to be Meme's daughter (Rue, 40), dressed as a proper Parisian girl. In order to pass herself off as such, Sarah had to separate herself from her own mother, even at the level of affect. She begins to share intimacies with Meme, and even gives her the nicer of the two Mother's Day cards she buys for that occasion (45). Sarah's assumption of the role as Meme's daughter also represents the weakening of her ties to Judaism: through food, certainly, but also by means of words, labels that Meme applies to the Jews and that Sarah comes to associate with her self (and wishes to extirpate). By invoking the stereotypes of Jewishness, Meme ushers the young Kofman into the awareness of her Jewish specificity in relation to the rest of French society. In a sense, she produces the conditions for Sarah's interpellation of her Jewish self, but, significantly, not without also producing in her a degree of shame with regard to it. Accordingly, Meme—the good mother—also represents the origin of Kofman's ambivalence about all things with which she identifies. She taught me that I had a Jewish nose and made me feel the little bump that was the sign of it. She also said, "Jewish food is bad for the health; the Jews crucified our savior, Jesus Christ; they are all stingy and love only money; they are very intelligent, no other people has as many geniuses in music and philosophy." Then she'd cite Spinoza, Bergson, Einstein, Marx. It is from her lips and in that context that I first heard those names, which are so familiar to me today. {Rue, 47) The basis of Meme and Sarah's closeness concerns words and names as much as it concerns food. Bitter words, to be sure, laced with as much poison as nourishment (Oliver, "Queasy," 182; Kofman, Rue, 55). And yet this was the diet that Kofman had to live on to survive the Nazi occupation of France. This intimacy between them—secured by the exchange of food and words—eventually led to the loss of Sarah's mother tongue: "I didn't think at all any more about my father, and I couldn't pronounce a single word in Yiddish" (57). Her assumption of the French culture thus apparently

FAMILY ROMANCES AND TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

135

involved the loss of her Jewish identity, of which her father is emblematic in this passage. Yet Sarah is also marked by her Jewishness—the bump on her nose, as well as the innate potential for either evil or genius—and so never feels herself to occupy a rightful place in French society, to the extent that she is Jewish. Because she had to abjure her Jewish identity in order to survive, Kofman's own subject position involved a repudiation of Judaism that reinforced as much as concealed her identification as Jewish. Like the mother's body, Judaism is both internalized and rejected to produce in Kofman an unstable identity, subject to continual revision in relation to this most ambivalent object: the Jewish mother. This second loss—the loss of her mother—is a fait accompli after the loss of the father, who is the purveyor of the paternal (Judaic) law, without whom such law appears to lose its force. Yet as we saw in chapter 2, according to Freud it is precisely the father's absence—and the child's guilt regarding it—that inaugurates the law in the first place. Indeed, Kofman suggests it is also the father's absence that produces the conditions under which she would later become a writer, thus successfully interpellating herself within the French language. Whereas Meme supported her intellectual ambition— and her Jewish mother did not (see Kofman and Jaccard, "Apprendre aux Hommes")—Kofman intimates at the very beginning of the book that her primary motivation to write is given by the loss of her father. Of him all I have left is the fountain pen. I took it one day from my mother's purse, where she kept it along with some other souvenirs of my father. It is a kind of pen no longer made, the kind you have to fill with ink. I used it all through school. It "failed" me before I could bring myself to give it up. I still have it, patched up with Scotch tape; it is right in front of me on my desk and makes me write, write. Maybe all my books have been the detours required to bring me to write about "that." (Rue, 3)16 All that Kofman had left of her father by the time she came to write the book was his pen, which—as with any sign—had come to stand in not only for her father, but also his absence from her. She implicitly likens her "game" of writing to Freud's infant grandson, his game of fort-da, such that by writing she both re-creates his presence, and sends him away from her.17 Kofman suggests here that writing is for her a strategy of managing the anxiety

i36

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

and frustration brought about by the separation from her father. In other words, it is a manifestation of the death drive, which is the object cause of sublimation and desire. As Kathryn Robson suggests, it is not simply the father's death, but the "impossibility of writing that death as such" ("Bodily Detours," 613) that acts as the impetus for Kofman's writing. We might, then, read this passage as offering a key to the interpretation of all of Kofman's work. Kofman writes that all of her books are detours by which she might eventually arrive at this point [fa]. Perhaps it would not be out of order to suggest that, with the designation of her writings as detours, Kofman refers to Lacan's mischievous translation of Trieb (drive) as derive, meaning detour, drift, divert. If so, then the destination, whether it is the father's death, or her signification of the father with the pen, would also represent the starting point: the visceral source of the drive, the detour that takes her to writing. I would suggest further that another loss, conspicuously left undisclosed in the book, underlies Kofman's impetus to write. For just as the father appears to have been forgotten in her childhood, by the time Kofman goes to university, her mother has also disappeared, and her ultimate loss—her death—remains unacknowledged. Although the book opens with her father's disappearance and death, it closes with the death of Meme. After peace is restored to France, and an acrimonious custody battle has been fought between her mother and Meme, Kofman turns to Meme's funeral, which, for reasons untold she did not attend. She was, however, remembered to the congregation, signified by the words of the presiding priest. She writes: "I was unable to attend her funeral. But I know that at her grave the priest recalled how she had saved a little Jewish girl during the war" {Rue, 85). Kofman had by this time grown disenchanted with Meme, and of being interpellated into her version of their story: "I can't stand to hear her talk about the past all the time or to let her keep calling me her 'little bunny' or her 'little darling'" (84). In a sense, the narrative of Rue Ordener represents her own critique of Meme's narrative, albeit a faithful critique: that is, a critique that puts into question Meme's role as the good mother only between the lines of her writing. It remains that while two prominent deaths serve as bookends to Kofman's narrative, a third death remains unacknowledged: that of her mother, from whom she could not bear to be separated at the beginning of the story. What role does such an omission play in Kofman's narrative of her life? In fact, Kofman does refer, fleetingly, to her mother's death; but only instrumentally, in order to underscore the event of a second, symbolic loss of her father. "When my mother died, it wasn't possible to find that card [the last the father

FAMILY ROMANCES AND TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

137

had written to the family], which I had reread so often and wanted to save. It was as if I had lost my father a second time" (Rue, 9). Kofman thus misses the occasion to mark the loss of her mother. Is it not possible, however, that it is the loss of her mother that truly precipitates Kofman's need to write, and her identification with those figures about whom she writes? Perhaps unwittingly, Kofman implicitly indicates this possibility late in Rue

Ordener.

As Kofman recounts, apres coup™ after watching Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, she feels "a visceral anguish" when the nice Mrs. Froy (Freud?) is replaced by a second, cruel-looking woman: "The bad breast in place of the good, the one utterly separate from the other, the one changing into the other" (66). Her response of horror at this replacement suggests the work of abjection: a moment that is obviously significant in terms of the articulation of her identity, and the function that the relation to her mother has for such a construction. Yet it seems that Kofman can only acknowledge the loss of her mother and the impact it has upon her when such recognition is expressed by the narrative of another—in this case, Hitchcock. Her own narrative voice refuses to comprehend the loss of the mother; moreover, her loss is rendered manifest precisely by this refusal. In this respect, the abjection of the mother represents Kofman's surplus enjoyment: the point of pure pain about which the narrative revolves but cannot encounter. In order to experience the painful fact of the relation to her mother, Kofman must disguise it from herself within the other's account, where it then becomes the object of her contemplation at a safe distance. Kofman's modus operandi throughout her oeuvre was to take refuge, in this manner, within the other's narrative or fantasy. And as I will demonstrate in the section that follows, this is exactly what occurs in her reading of Nietzsche. In Kleinian terms, Kofman's failure to achieve reparation—specifically, her guilt regarding the abjection of her mother and later the mother's unacknowledged death—is refigured within her treatment of Nietzsche's text and projected into his fantasized genealogy. The elision of the mother thus also performs a signifying function, representing a loss that Kofman could not write, and that thereby kept her needing to "write, write" herself through the discourse initiated by other figures with which she could identify. A fourth death—unfigured within her texts, but perhaps still prefigured by them—is Kofman's own. As was suggested at the beginning of this chapter, the reader's understanding of Kofman's texts is influenced by the manner of her death, even if we do not yet own the resources to comprehend precisely how such knowledge affects our perceptions of her work. Kofman's suicide

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

i38

fulfills a like function to the twist in a thriller movie, whereby the meaning of all that has come before it is produced retroactively in terms of that event. The plot—or in this case, Kofman's philosophical project—is placed under review in the light of a rupture, or stain, that despoils its coherence. We might think of the significance of Kofman's death for her writing in terms of Lacan's understanding of anamorphosis,

as discussed in chapter 2. That is to

say, the part of the object that does not make sense—that even appears to mar the beauty of the image (like the anamorphic skull in the foreground of The Ambassadors)—aligns

precisely to a portion of one's self projected therein.

Kofman's suicide is both unthinkable and fascinating for the reader because it touches upon what must remain outside philosophical thought to ensure its internal consistency. If "the death of the author" is felt simultaneously to be relevant to the meaning of the text, and to compromise the integrity of the interpretation, then perhaps this is because it is what motivates reading and writing in the first place. The liminal place of Kofman's death (or our inability to find its proper place) signals its centrality to the very activity of reading her work. Ambiguously "inside" and "outside" the bounds of the textual encounter with Kofman, consideration of her death also seems to traverse what is agreed to be good hermeneutic practice. What if, then, we were to understand the uncertainty regarding the place of Kofman's death in the interpretation as indicative of the reader's uneasiness respecting death in general, and its relation to writing? For as Kofman's own work demonstrates, reading and writing philosophy are essentially melancholic processes—wherein one internalizes (and thus also destroys) the lost Other, only the better to rebirth oneself in its image. Kofman's death, then, becomes additionally significant once we consider the extent to which loss looms as a figure of excess, with which the reader can identify by projecting within it her or his most abject fears of dissolution. Her last writings, both autobiographical and philosophical, synthesize these seemingly disparate matters of writing and death. For as Kofman had already admitted, her interpretations of the philosophers were works of autobiography in another mode: that is, a self-portrait that takes as its canvas the life and work of another. Auto-bio-graphy,

reduced to its elements, refers to a life that writes itself.

Rue Ordener is an autobiography in the manner of Ecce Homo, as a kind of last testament, or a settling of accounts with one's self and the various figures of which it is composed. But in this simplest sense of auto-biography, stripped down to these bare essentials—life writing itself—perhaps

FAMILY ROMANCES AND TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

I.39

all of Kofman's writings could be understood as autobiographical. Jean-Luc Nancy, who knew her well, said of Sarah Kofman that writing was for her a testimony to her existence: Sarah wrote for her living, as we say of those who make it their profession, but in her case, over and above the profession, it was not just a question of ensuring subsistence but of attesting to an existence. 19 In a tribute to Kofman, Nancy draws her as a writer who lived to write, and wrote to live, leaving nothing of herself in reserve except, perhaps, what allowed her to keep writing (something left unarticulated, whether this be the loss of the father, or the mother, or a fear of the body-in-bits-and-pieces, or . . .). Yet writing is also traditionally associated with death—and reading with mourning—because the word guarantees a presence of the author in her absence. In Explosions,

Kofman writes of Nietzsche that he paid for his

immortality with his death, quoting Nietzsche himself in this vein: "One pays dearly for being immortal: one has to die several times while alive" (Ecce Homo, III Z , 5; "Explosions I," 54). Nancy relates that toward the end of her life, Kofman complained that she could no longer read or write: When Sarah used to say, toward the last days, that she could no longer even read, she was not giving a sign, an effect of something else: she was pointing to the thing itself. No longer to read (but also, for Sarah, no longer to listen to music, no longer to see paintings or films), no longer to write, no longer to live. ("Run," xv) Writing is thus the meeting point—or perhaps the point of a missed encounter— between life, the body, and death. If we could read the event of Kofman's death as if it were one of her writings—composed by her, but ultimately requiring her absence—then it would appear to attest a relation to the texts to which she devoted her life; to Nietzsche, to a birth, and to philosophy. In this way, it is like an overdetermined dream symbol, fortuitously meaningful according to a variety of happenstances, but only apres coup: after the event of the interpretation, and with the benefit of hindsight. The dream, like death—and like Kofman's inability to read to which Nancy connects it—not only gives a sign: it points to "the thing itself." But the thing itself is in fact

no-thing,

whether this no-thing is taken to refer to the subject's castration, or the abject,

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

140

or the prospect of death itself. Kofman's suicide can be read in this way as an auto-thano-graphy,

whereby death writes itself by means of Kofman's body;

throwing into relief her life's work, and bestowing upon it a somewhat perverse immortality only achieved by virtue of the author's death. Alongside her own autobiography, Kofman's last projects of writing concerned Nietzsche: a two-volume undertaking on Nietzsche's Ecce Homo; and a response to the accusations against him of anti-Semitism. Nietzsche and Kofman's life-writings thereby touch upon one another, as she reflects upon her own self through her study of Nietzsche's writing—and unwriting—of "himself." As she states in

Explosions,

what the text [Ecce Homo] "recounts" is . . . the death of the autos as a stable and substantial subject, as conceived by metaphysics; it is also the death of the "bios" if one takes this to mean that the "life" of a living person has its origin in his two parents to whom he is bound by his "blood." {60-61) Nietzsche and Kofman share in common a reservation regarding their bios, understood as the binds of blood through which the living person is engendered. Hence, perhaps, their attraction to the philosophical text, through which the living person may be transformed or rebirthed according to an alternative parentage of their choosing. Nietzsche is in this way as much an element of Kofman's fantasy life as the ideal reader was for Nietzsche's: and so their relation might be characterized in terms of the transference and counter transference. They are bound to one another psychically, and the object of exchange between them is the abject mother, whose concealment organizes their shared fantasy. What this means is that Kofman's stake in reading Nietzsche—the ambiguous pleasure she derives from his text—is situated in the irresolvable question of her own identity. Nietzsche's texts offer Kofman a stage not only for her identity but also the destruction of her self (and thus also the unacknowledged pleasure that such destruction produces). Kofman's attraction to Nietzsche, I contend, is equal to anxieties his texts could provoke within her regarding "the sites" of her interpellated identity, as Jewish, and also as woman. For it must be admitted, Nietzsche offers no easy identification for women or Jews who come to his texts. Rather, it is an identification for which the reader must pay, and the higher the price perhaps also the richer (and more complex) the identification.

141

FAMILY ROMANCES AND TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

The final section of this chapter considers Kofman's attempt to address Nietzsche's position on the Jews, which I read here in terms of the exigencies conferred upon her as Nietzsche's ideal reader. Accordingly, I will read Mepris des Juifs in the light of the concept of fantastic genealogy discussed earlier.

READING NIETZSCHE II: LE MEPRIS DES JUIFS NIETZSCHE, LES JUIFS, L'ANTI-SEMITISME

he Mepris

des Juifs, "contempt for the Jews," was Kofman's last book

on Nietzsche, and the one written with the closest proximity to Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Both were her last contributions to philosophy and to life; and both focus upon the politics of being Jewish in a culture of anti-Semitism. In this section, I will bring together Kofman's concern to untangle Nietzsche's position on the Jews, and her preoccupation with the possibility of writing (and un-writing) the self. More precisely, I will demonstrate that Kofman's relation to Nietzsche and her relationship with Meme are structurally similar, in that both were formative of her unstable identity as a Jew. Nietzsche's characterization of Judaism and Jews, like Meme's, is deeply equivocal: not only positive and negative in turn, but even within the same moment. My contention is that Mepris

des Juifs

represents Kofman's attempt to resolve her own ambivalence about being Jewish by minimizing tension in Nietzsche's account of the Jews. And in the background of her identification with Nietzsche, Kofman negotiates a difficult relation to her own repudiated mother, whom she aligns both to the base canaille Nietzsche's mother represents and that elusive Jewishness she wishes to salvage from Nietzsche's text. As suggested already, Kleinian object-relations theory informs my reading of Mepris, in particular the relation to the bad breast—the figure of excess for which the anti-Semite stands in Kofman's text. However, we can also understand Kofman's identification with Nietzsche and her defense of his position on the Jews in terms of interpellation. Judith Butler discusses the interpellative power of pejorative uses of language when she writes: "the address constitutes a being within the possible circuit of recognition and, accordingly, outside of it, in abjection." 20 Since the subject, or what Butler terms "the social existence of the body" (Excitable,

5), owes the fact of

its very existence to the other's designation of it, being called a bad name

I42.

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

evokes a visceral sensation of threat. According to Butler, if language confers existence, it can also withdraw it by displacing the subject from the context in which she knows herself: "one can be 'put in one's place 5 by such speech, but such a place may be no place" (4). We could understand Kofman's project in Mepris des Juifs accordingly— to show that Nietzsche was not anti-Semitic—in terms of a need to retain her place in relation to him, a place that she might have to relinquish if she were to take the possibility of his racism seriously. Yet perhaps in the case of Sarah Kofman, vilification can also be conceived as an ambiguous (and unacknowledged) source of pleasure. Kofman was first given her "place" in French society precisely by virtue of her vilification. Hence, perhaps, she is not simply displaced by abuse leveled at her Jewishness, in the manner that Butler indicates above. Rather, her identity intrinsically involved the threat of expulsion from society; and her interpellation was founded upon a prior repudiation of her Jewish self. In this way, Kofman's attraction to Nietzsche can be understood as heightened rather than simply frustrated by the fact that his texts provide no clear place for the Jewish reader. The feelings of frustration evoked by exclusion enhance the appeal of Nietzsche's text for her. For this reason, Kofman's response to the excessive figure of the Jew— both attractive and repulsive—is of interest. However, what also emerges from her engagement with Nietzsche in Mepris des Juifs is the extent to which "the Jew" plays a pivotal role for Nietzsche's identity, as an excessive and unstable category into which he projects his own anxieties. Thus we can read Mepris des Juifs as the site of a transference and countertransference between Kofman and Nietzsche: in which Kofman manages her identity by means of Nietzsche's text and the specter of the anti-Semitic reader, whereas Nietzsche articulates his own in relation to the shadow of the Jewish reader. If we read the engagement between Kofman and Nietzsche in terms of this exchange of psychic material in fantasy, we may understand her, perversely, to have a better claim than most to the role of the ideal reader—but only once the essential instability of this position is conceded. The concern taken up by Mepris des Juifs is very specific. The text deals with Nietzsche's statements about the Jews and Judaism, weighing them against one another in order to determine his final, overall position. Even at only ninety-four pages, it is a scholarly work, heavy with citation, and it appears that Kofman intended the book to resolve the question of the Jew in Nietzsche once and for all. Kofman acknowledges the existence of anti-

FAMILY ROMANCES AND TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

143

Semitic uses of Nietzsche's work, but is quick to quash any credibility to which they might lay claim: Without a doubt, certain texts, taken out of context, isolated from the whole of the corpus and from all reference, mounted on a pin and, what is more, that are falsified, when they fall in the hands of men of a certain type (their frog perspective renders them inept to see and understand well) could have been able to attribute to a misinterpretation and to a dangerous, scandalous reappropriation. It is, Nietzsche knew, the destiny of all good books. 21 Thus, she argues, his philosophy will appear anti-Semitic only to those who cannot attain to its heights. It implicitly excludes those lowly types who are without the subtlety of taste to detect the critique of the notions of blood and race that grounds his prelude to a higher culture. The notion of type—so essential to the esoteric readings examined in chapter 3—represents Kofman's best line of defense against anti-Semitism since it provides an alternative to a politics of race or blood invoked by the anti-Semitic reader. Yet also, as we saw in Explosions,

it furnishes Nietzsche his escape route from ties

to his blood relations. Kofman exploits both uses of the term in

Mepris

des Juifs, and I will turn to her enlargement of these mechanisms. What I would like to emphasize here is the cursory and unconditional manner in which Kofman rejects the legitimacy of the anti-Semitic interpretation of Nietzsche. Paradoxically this anti-Semitic reader, whom Kofman so reviles, is a necessary element of the reading she will go on to construct of Nietzsche as pro-Semitic. Along with the mother, "the bad reader" is a figure of excess into which she can project any remnant of racism in Nietzsche's work. Accordingly, Nietzsche's philosophy requires the racist "misinterpretation" that then renders the service of containing "the good reader's" uncertainty about Nietzsche's position on Judaism. Notwithstanding the certainty of her conclusions about Nietzsche's position respecting the Jews, Kofman begins Mepris des Juifs by indicating and even celebrating his ambivalence toward the Jew, claiming that his occupation of various perspectives is his means of playing out, within his own body, the European struggle with "the Jewish question." N o one yet, she writes, has found the solution to the Jews' "enigmatic strangeness" (11). In order to work through the Jewish question, she reasons, Nietzsche "impregnated" himself with it before he could birth himself anew as a Jew.

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

144

The nature of this pregnancy was then an ambivalence that would condition the possibility of being Jewish not only for Nietzsche but also for Kofman, through her reading of his texts. For Kofman, Nietzsche thus presents himself as the answer to this perennial question. It is worth noting, however, that the existence of this insoluble Jewish question toward which Kofman gestures, but does not examine, suggests the work of projection. As Zizek famously demonstrates in The Sublime Object of Ideology', the figure of the Jew has long been (and continues to be) the site of fantasy in the West, much to the detriment of Jews: In the anti-Semitic perspective, the Jew is precisely a person about whom it is never clear 'what he really wants' ["Che

vuoi?"]—that

is, his actions are always suspected of being guided by some hidden motives (the Jewish conspiracy, world domination and the moral corruption of Gentiles, and so on). . . . [T]he answer to 'What does the Jew want? 5 is a fantasy of 'Jewish conspiracy 5 : a mysterious power of Jews to manipulate events, to pull the strings behind the scenes. (114) The Jew, like the mother, is positioned as the enigmatic other whose voracious desire threatens subjectivity, simply because it does not accord to the law that interpellates us, or with respect to which we know our place. In this context, Judaism is understood as what lacks a place in the system, and thus portends its collapse. The enigma of the Jews signifies an anxiety regarding a people who appear to exist outside the law by which we are interpellated, and thereby to threaten that law. On the one hand, they become the site of fantasy whereby the subject projects the secret of his self: that is, discarded psychic material he cannot recognize as his own. On the other hand, the fantasy of "the Jewish conspiracy 55 —or that Jews possess innate properties such as deviousness, avarice, or genius—fills the gap opened by the suggestion that the law does not already encompass all that exists. In Mepris des Juifs, Kofman joins Nietzsche in an idealization of Jews that renders them outside of any possible interpellation. "The Jew55 thus belongs to the already extensive panoply of excessive figures drawn upon by Nietzsche's philosophy, and his readers. The narrative Kofman presents in Mepris ostensibly traces Nietzsche's "convalescence" from his early anti-Semitism, to his eventual transformation into a Jew so that he may attain his destiny. Kofman aligns anti-Semitism with his female relations (as well as such early influences as Wagner

M5

FAMILY ROMANCES AND TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

and Schopenhauer) and invokes, again, "the fantastic genealogy" as the mechanism by which Nietzsche separates himself from these figures, and, accordingly, anti-Semitism: His contempt for the Germans of the Reich led him to repudiate, on the maternal side, all Germanic parentage that risked assimilating him to this canaille and to these base instincts. And to forge a fantastic genealogy, a "family romance," which would electively confer to him higher and nobler origins. Of his mother and sister, belonging to the side of the canaille, he declared himself to have such a horror that he preferred even to renounce his most abysmal thought rather than envisage the possibility of their eternal return. (Mepris, 15-16. My translation) It remains . . . to recall that the one who signs these texts with the single name of Nietzsche has not actualized himself in his "purity" and his "unity," that it is after all a selective and cathartic operation; a work of emancipation and of the repudiation of his identificatory models; after a divorce from those to whom he was at first symbiotically united. We have seen this in our lecture on Ecce Homo [Explosions], the becoming "Nietzsche" of "Nietzsche," the accomplishment of the "promise" that he would make himself by conquering his own soil and his secret garden, by (re)birthing himself, implying a severance of the umbilical cord with Germany of the Reich, with his mother and sister, and with his paternal substitutes who had been, among others, Wagner and Schopenhauer. And thus, with the frenzied anti-Semitism that characterizes them. (76. My translation) The consistent thesis throughout the book is that the project of "becoming what he is," so central to Nietzsche's philosophy, involved separating himself from his (anti-Semitic) friends and relations. In this manner, we can explain Nietzsche's regard for the Jews in terms of the fantasy structure Kofman elucidates in Explosions. Nietzsche was born of anti-Semitism, but presented himself as its antidote. As with his relation to the father—dead inside him— anti-Semitism is the sickness Nietzsche convalesces, thus rendering himself the stronger for having fended it off. We might ask, what is Kofman's

own investment in

Nietzsche's

convalescence from anti-Semitism? And does Kofman, with her reading of

146

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

Nietzsche, also inoculate herself against hatred of the Jews? Indeed, if we take seriously the hypothesis that Kofman identifies with Nietzsche, we can read the book as her own attempt to birth herself as a Jew through the figure of Nietzsche. There are a number of fortuitous circumstances that could support Kofman's identification with Nietzsche, and Kofman emphasizes these coincidences when relating his story and her own. Kofman's portrayal of her father as having died while praying, for instance, maps well onto Nietzsche's pious and idealized father's life as "more a gracious memory of life than life itself" (Nietzsche, Genealogy, 222). Moreover, according to Kofman's accounts, both she and Nietzsche credited their vocation as writers to an inheritance their absent father left them. Nietzsche was "impregnated" with his father's decadence and thus invented the revaluation of values as its counter-ideal; Kofman was, in a manner of speaking, impregnated by her father's pen, with which she generated her sundry writings (Rue, 3). Equally, however, there is an unacknowledged relation between Kofman's representation of Nietzsche's mother and of her own. For instance, in a move all too familiar to those who study Nietzsche, Kofman charges Nietzsche's mother with responsibility for an anti-Semitic aftertaste that one has in the wake of reading Nietzsche. In Mepris des ]uifs Nietzsche's transition from anti-Semite to advocate of the Jews is attended by a rejection of the mother, according to Kofman. But whereas Nietzsche's mother is cast as the anti-Semitism Nietzsche must overcome, Kofman's mother represents an unassimilable remainder of Jewishness that she must cast off in order to survive the Holocaust. Kofman's portrayal of her mother throughout the autobiographical writings, and in interviews, is abject. Like Franziska Nietzsche, Kofman's mother (whom she does not name) personifies all that she must repudiate. During the war, this is Judaism; later, the mother represents a barrier to her intellectual accomplishment. With each of these maternal figures, then, what we find are instances of "the bad mother" in whom, according to Klein, the child projects whatever pain or discomfort he or she cannot incorporate. Kofman comfortably identifies with neither the stereotype of the Jewish woman, nor the anti-Semite; and yet she also constitutes her self by means of a certain projective identification with each of these poles. The two mothers thus occupy the place of the extreme in relation to which Kofman must continuously differentiate herself to maintain her moderate identity, as "Parisian Jew." What is interesting about Kofman's treatment of Nietzsche's family relations is the manner in which it articulates her relation to her own mother

FAMILY ROMANCES A N D TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

147

and to Judaism. Not only does she use Nietzsche's life to stage her story, but she also employs the interplay of Nietzsche's varied statements about the Jews to bring her into a more tolerable relation to her own culture and identity. In this respect, like Meme, Nietzsche's text modifies material that she encounters only with horror in the personage of her nameless mother. Kofman's mother embodies her negativity about being Jewish, which at one time may have been synonymous with social alienation and death. Once interpellated to Meme's narrative, Kofman saw her mother only in terms of her failure to comfort, shelter, and nourish; accordingly the Gentile Other was in a position to save her. In this context, we can make sense of Kofman's failure to disclose her mother's name. For in the European imagination, the figure of the Jew garners its horrifying power by virtue of its existence outside of the law; that is, outside of interpellation. Kofman is thus better able to stage her identity with reference to Nietzsche's pantomime of birthing himself as a Jew through which he attempts to appropriate the Jews' enigmatic strangeness. Kofman thus joins Nietzsche in constructing a fantasy of the enigmatic Jew, each attempting to appropriate a lost part of their selves reflected (or projected) in this fantasy. Without deviating from racist stereotypes, they articulate this figure of the Jew as mercurial, inscrutable, and equivocal, positioning it as what evades the structures that contain identity. Both Kofman and Nietzsche claim to seek the dissolution of subjectivity, so the figure of the Jew—as what has no place— adequately symbolizes this aim. Yet the way in which they enact this gesture to the Jew does not actually lead to a relinqirishment of identity. On the contrary, it is an attempt to recover a lost part of the self abjected in the Other; to colonize the other rather than divest the self. For this reason, it should be kept in mind when reading Mepris des Juifs that Kofman's own "contempt for the Jews"—or at least a confusion and ambivalence about being Jewish—guides her thought in this text. As Kofman's attempt to resolve the question of anti-Semitism in Nietzsche's texts, Mepris des Juifs marks the point at which we can see her participating in the familial romance that in Explosions

she only described. Her stake

in Nietzsche's fantasy concerns the repudiation of her own anti-Semitism, understood as both an effect and a precondition of Jewish subjectivity in Vichy France. Her attempt to clear Nietzsche's name is thus symptomatic of an effort to absolve herself of anti-Semitism. It must be remembered, however, that what attracted Kofman to Nietzsche in the first place was precisely the ambivalence his text exhibits toward the Jews. The ambiguity of Nietzsche's position fascinates Kofman since it represents a piece of herself she refused

148

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

to recognize as her own. In this way, the renunciation of the two mothers— her own as well as Nietzsche's, representing Judaism and anti-Semitism respectively—is a manner of keeping this piece of the self in reserve. It is accessed by reading and writing about Nietzsche who, like Meme, trades in stereotypes of the good and bad Jew. In this respect, Nietzsche's accounts of Judaism provided Kofman with the double bind that she had come to associate with her identity as Jewish: an identity that could be affirmed only in its repudiation. Kofman's readiness to be transformed by Nietzsche's philosophy—that is, to operate according to its terms—can be attributed equally to her commitment to her personal mode of philosophizing and to the very personal tonality with which Nietzsche's texts address her as their reader. Her intimacy with Nietzsche is afforded by an ambivalence that quite literally split her in two, according to exigencies indicated by the text itself. Nietzsche's hook for Kofman was his equivocal depiction of the tropes with which she identified as a woman and a Jew. Nietzsche thus took a piece of Kofman's flesh with him in this encounter, such that it was his writings to which she turned in order to find her lost self. This mode of addressing the reader appealed already to Kofman's proclivity for putting herself on the line for her philosophy. At work in her writings is also a performance of identity as a fragile, incomplete, and transitory structure that must continuously be rearticulated in relation to its others and equivocate between incompatible extremes. Her attempts to reconcile these extremes, which both disrupt and constitute her identity, organize her philosophy, and to this extent renders it continuous with her life narrative. It is a volatile continuity, however, constituting a porosity of boundary between Kofman and the philosophers in whom she invests herself. Nietzsche, for his part, indicates a wary admiration for his Jewish readers—or at least the one of which he was most aware: the Danish scholar Georg Brandes. It is uncertain what he would have made of the fact that so many of his most well-known readers since his death have been Jewish (Schrift, "Kofman," 207). What is clear is that Nietzsche's curious fascination for the Jewish type, and the pivotal place he awards it in the elaboration of his fantasy, has been reciprocated by an equally fascinated body of Jewish readers, captured by those fishhooks left for them in his texts:

fishhooks

through which they attempt to answer the insoluble question of their own identity. In light of this collusion of fantasies, Sarah Kofman's fascination with Nietzsche was perhaps inevitable; a necessary component of her destiny as a Jewish

femme-philosophe.

CHAPTER

6

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE: PIERRE KLOSSOWSKl'S READING OF NIETZSCHE'S SICK BODY

Lucid thought, delirium and the conspiracy form an indissoluble whole in Nietzsche—an indissolubility that would become the criterion for discerning what is of consequence or not. —Pierre Klossowski1 How Shakespeare loathed humanity—the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same. —Virginia WoolP In closing with an analysis of Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, we will have toured a full circle, returning to and summarizing questions of the subject's relation to language, the philosopher's body, and the pivotal role of interpretation in Nietzsche's philosophy. But this chapter will also revisit the esotericism of Nietzsche's writing (explored in chapter 3), and the manner in which the reader constructs herself or himself in relation to the text, by refracting these issues through the lens of Nietzsche's concern about the health or sickness of the body and culture. According to Klossowski, Nietzsche's specific cultural problematic—preparing the ground for the revaluation of values—was acted out through his body, or what Klossowski calls his valetudinary states. In this respect, the hidden ground that Nietzsche's writing keeps from "the improper reader" is a mute intensity of the soul, accessed only by means of an art of reading between the lines of his text—or more precisely, beneath the text, as what cannot be articulated

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

i5o

as such. Klossowski thus appeals to a subterranean imagery, rather than the Hyperborean view from the heights evoked by Rosen and Lampert. And, according to Klossowski, Nietzsche's esotericism would create a community of deranged criminals and wastrels instead of legislators and elitists. Far from producing a distance between himself and other less-worthy Nietzscheans, Klossowski's interest was the transformative effect of Nietzsche's texts upon each of his readers, himself included. In Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Klossowski's principal concern was Nietzsche's experience in writing. This experience is elaborated with reference to a tension in Nietzsche's work between the extant, didactic level, and the tussle of forces through which text is formed. Klossowski thus elucidates a corporeal undercurrent of Nietzsche's philosophy that both resists and produces the text, by means of an analysis of the enigmatic

thought

of

eternal recurrence. Klossowski holds that the eternal recurrence—referenced sparsely and gnomically by Nietzsche in his published writings—was in fact his most important discovery, expressing "the phantasm" about which all his other thought turns. Klossowski thus also indicates the mechanism by which Nietzsche was able to recruit readers to his critical project: because the thought of eternal recurrence produces the textual conditions under which the reader might share Nietzsche's experience. In this respect, text is conceived as the medium for a contagion between its author and reader. That is, Nietzsche's bodily experience is transmitted to the reader through his writings. Given Klossowski's focus upon the pivotal function of

Nietzsche's

attitude to his valetudinary states, the contagion of his corporeal experience is a particularly evocative metaphor. For it addresses the reader's anxiety about textual material with respect to which he or she would rather keep some distance: be it the possibility of madness, anti-Semitism, or some other of Nietzsche's excesses. As with Bataille, Kofman, and Krell, we can sense Klossowski's mixed pleasure (or jouissance) in the face of the prospect that by reading Nietzsche he opens himself to an acephalous agency that could deconstruct his self. Unlike other commentators dealt with so far, however, Klossowski was particularly aware of his own investment in Nietzsche and, moreover, of the ambiguity and ambivalence that such an investment cost him. In this chapter, I will elucidate the manner in which Klossowski theorizes this investment with respect to his concept of the simulacrum: artifact that, like the anamophic skull in Holbein's The Ambassadors,

the both

reproduces and interrupts the viewer's ideal, reflecting back to her or him the conditions by which the subject appropriates its object. By exhibiting the

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

I5I

intrinsic connection between the ideal and the abject, the simulacrum serves to destabilize the subject by means of a parody of subjectivity. Accordingly, I argue in this chapter that although Klossowski documents Nietzsche's mental disintegration as if it were the object of the philosophy, he approaches what I consider an ethical reading of Nietzsche to the extent that his interpretation preserves the ambiguity so essential to the writing and its effect upon the reader. 3 He renders the figure of eternal recurrence as an object of fantasy. Moreover, he views this figure as the central object of Nietzsche's fantasy, through which the narrative structure of his philosophy, and his self, is both articulated and disarticulated. An ostensible similarity between Klossowski's commentary and those of Krell and Bataille comes to the fore in this regard, as he is oriented to Nietzsche by a fascination with his madness, and attempts to draw some philosophical significance from it. By positioning his discussion in relation to Nietzsche's delirium, Klossowski treads a fine line between pathologizing Nietzsche's philosophy, and characterizing him as a hysteric, simply acting out his philosophy bodily. My contention, however, is that Klossowski's focus upon the role of the simulacrum (as what simulates the ipseity of the philosopher's body) brings out the bodily remainder's pivotal role in forming his identification with Nietzsche: an identification that is at least figured in terms of corporeal experience. Klossowski demonstrates how his investment in Nietzsche is articulated around a point of excess in the text, and so brings to the fore his own stake as reader. Let us begin with the question with which Klossowski frames his study of Nietzsche: the question of the relation between the body and language, as both a point of departure from, and a return to, Nietzsche.

ON THE CONTINUITY AND DISJUNCTION BETWEEN THE BODY AND LANGUAGE To a significant degree, Nietzsche

and the Vicious Circle responds to and

enlarges a problematic set up by Nietzsche throughout his oeuvre: the relation of the body to language. As we saw in chapter 1, for Nietzsche this is a troubled relation: language both emerges from and obstructs, or falsifies, the body. Language is a product of the body, and can even be interpreted with reference to the order of drives that comprise the speaker's body because, according to Nietzsche, the philosopher's body provides the "real germ of life from which the whole plant has grown" (Beyond Good and Evil, §6,13). Thus, Nietzsche

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

152-

is able to claim to be a physician to culture, diagnosing the disease from which Western philosophy and religion—understood as misunderstandings of the body—stem (Gay Science, §2, 34-35). However, precisely in this respect, language opposes and disempowers the body, separating the subject from the immediacy of bodily impulses and impressions. The body fabricates (produces) language, and in turn, language fabricates (lies about) the body. Reading back from language to the body therefore requires the philological arts: an ability to interpret beyond the face value of every sign, and sometimes even to infer from what is avowed its opposite. 4 If language is a mode of corporeal encryption, then the process of deciphering seeks precisely a kernel of meaning unintelligible in terms of the convention of signs of which it is composed. In this respect, the body is understood as "the ground" that meaning must leave behind or obscure, and a return to the body would involve a departure from sense. As Klossowski writes, "[t]o restore these 'corporealizing 5 forces (impulses) to thought amounts to an expropriation of the agent, of the self" (Vicious Circle, 31). The nature of this mute "core" of meaning can be clarified, to an extent, by comparing two systems, or terms, that do not quite coincide: for instance, in translation. Especially as concerns the literary or poetic work, no matter how faithful the translation, a loss of depth, or affect, must always be incurred. As Leslie Hill writes, "the problem of translation is the question of the relation of language to its outside" (Writing at the Limit, 154). For a language indicates, but cannot encapsulate, the material conditions of its production: its history of use and cultural milieu, inflected by every linguistic exchange between individual speaking/ subjects. 5 For Klossowski, the exchange of signs— both between and within particular languages—conceals and disavows the specificity of each body, and so begets an oppressive sameness. He invokes Nietzsche's disparagement of consciousness to articulate this loss: [T]he historical and human world has not managed to silence the affects: in order for this newly autonomous

consciousness

to tri-

umph completely over the initial Desire (represented by the idleness of the Master), it was necessary for art to disappear . . . and for the affects to be swallowed up entirely in the fabrication of exchangeable products. (Vicious Circle, 13. Emphases in original) The body wants to make itself understood through the intermediary of a language of signs that is fallaciously deciphered by conscious-

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

153

ness. Consciousness itself constitutes

the code of signs that inverts,

falsifies and filters what is expressed through the body. (26) As with Nietzsche, Klossowski understands consciousness as a thin tissue that mediates a body's relation to its outside, and especially to other subjects. Moreover, it is a part of the body that is alienated from itself: the "self," or "person," which is generic and exchangeable. "The code of everyday signs" [le code des signes quotidiens],

to which

Klossowski refers in the passage quoted above, indicates an economy of words—exchangeable, and so equivalent, units of imaginary value—through which consciousness understands itself. All phenomena, if they are to be registered by consciousness, must be converted to its currency—the code of everyday signs—and this also includes interoception:

that is, the body's

perception of its own inferiority. Thus, for Klossowski words constitute a closed system that refers only to itself rather than to a material outside. Consciousness's economy does not accord to that of the body, which deals in incommensurable quantities: or rather, differences in quality, which cannot be exchanged or definitively reconciled. Insofar as thought is confined to an ordinary language, then, it is able to create nothing new. Its "surplus value" arises from an accumulation of energy that presses on between words: the silence that subtends (and escapes) the statement. Conscious thought has separated itself from the body, but continues to draw upon its secret reserve: from the unarticulated ground upon which the statement derives its meaning. In this respect,

Klossowski—like

Nietzsche, Freud, and

Lacan—

understands the self to be coextensive with language and consciousness; situated contrary to the impulsive, volatile body. Whereas the body is not self-present, does not coincide with itself, but is instead a multiplicity of disparate forces, the self is a facade of "sameness" manufactured by the body for instrumental purposes. As Klossowski puts this, the body produces the self as an illusion of its own cohesion, and then comes to threaten this "self" with disintegration (29). Klossowski's account of the relation between the body and its ideal resonates, then, with Lacan's account of the mirror-stage, interrogated in chapter 2. At the level of fantasy within Klossowski's account, consciousness shares a place in common with Frankenstein's monster: it is the body's "artifact" that forgets (or refuses) its subordinate status, reversing the hierarchy of progenitor and creation. "To understand Nietzsche, it is important to see this reversal brought about by the organism: the most fragile

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

154

organ it has developed comes to dominate the body, one might say, because of its very fragility" (27. Emphases in original). The problematic that Klossowski thereby sets up in relation to Nietzsche's work is the question of how creativity (encoded as corporeal) is possible within language, and correlatively, how a discourse faithful to the body might be generated. Klossowski looks to Nietzsche's writings in search of a praxis capable of bringing to language a corporeal logic, such that "the incommensurable" becomes accessible at least to those rendered open to it by Nietzsche's text. Nietzsche's point of access to a "corporealizing thought" (30)—or thought that returns to the body—was by way of what Klossowski calls his valetudinary states: that is, the very sickness that imperiled his self. "[Nietzsche] followed what he called, in several places, the guiding thread of the body. By examining the alternations in his own valetudinary states, he sought to follow this Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth of the impulses" (30). Of essence to Nietzsche's project of recovering the body to language, according to Klossowski, is an experimentation that takes as its "empirical data" the modulations within his own body. And in order to gain access to this material, Nietzsche had to reinterpret his sickness—or "valetudinary states"—as an address to consciousness: hence Klossowski's appellation for these violent bodily fluctuations, as "a semiotic of impulses" (15-54). Nietzsche's "experiments" upon his body—the observations that he made during the times of his worst incapacity—served an insubordination of the body to the brain. His sickness became a conspiracy against his self—the stable identity Nietzsche—in

order to enable a greater lucidity with regard to the

physiological conditioning underlying all human action, including language and culture. Nietzsche's sick body, according to Klossowski, presented him with a perspective on language, writing, and thinking, unavailable to the healthy (meaning gregarious) man. By means of his sickness, Nietzsche was able to observe the body at war with itself. The cycles of migraine, vomiting of phlegm, dyspepsia, and blindness—which both interrupted and fueled his work—Nietzsche experienced as assaults of the body upon the brain. Under such conditions, the illusion of bodily coherence could not hold. Broken down into its component parts, Nietzsche's sick and unruly body could not furnish him the minimum conditions for social agency. Against gregariousness, and against his own self, Nietzsche "sided with his body": If the body is presently in pain, if the brain is sending nothing but distress signals, it is because a language is trying to make itself

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

155

heard at the price of reason. A suspicion, a hatred, a rage against his own conscious and reasonable person was born. This person— fashioned by a particular epoch, in a familial milieu he increasingly abhorred—is not what he wanted to conserve. H e would destroy the person out of a love for the nervous system he knew he had been gifted with, and in which he took a certain pride. By studying the reactions of his nervous system, he would come to conceive of himself in a different manner than he had previously known— and indeed, in a manner that will perhaps never again be known. (M-M) Accordingly, Nietzsche's attentions to his bodily symptoms engender a lucidity with which the opacity of the impulses can be ameliorated. The central concern of this concept is thus an awareness of the reality of the body as heterogeneous, that the self is a fiction, and that there'is a fundamental rupture between this body and self.6 For this reason, Klossowski aligns lucidity with Nietzsche's delirium, wherein Nietzsche identified with the internal diversity of his physiological states in preference to the cultural and familial milieu represented by his person. In his delirium, according to Klossowski, Nietzsche's consciousness scratched at the tain of "the mirror" that had separated his self from his body, and thereby he was opened to the danger of madness. For "once it 'scratches' the tain, consciousness itself, in its very transparency, merges with the flux and reflux of the impulses" (27). This is precisely the point at which the attractions of Nietzsche's madness emerge for Klossowski: where his delirium coincides with lucidity, and there is a departure from the code of everyday signs that limits human experience. In keeping with Nietzsche's own account of subjectivity, Klossowski situates the self at the extremity of chaos (33): as a surface "delegated" by chaos, or becoming, which then interprets itself as origin, such that chaos is rendered at its service. The protective barrier between the self and the chaotic depth that subtends subjectivity, however, is permeable—especially when subjected to stress. According to Klossowski, Nietzsche's philosophical strategy of siding with his body rather than his self involved "expropriating" the self in order to restore thought to the body (31). And as "the agent thinks only as a product of this code" of everyday signs (37), it is understood that whatever is left for thought in the wake of the expropriation of agency would involve a different economy to everyday language—or "a semiotic of impulses."

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

i5*

Having posed the question of how Nietzsche could "corporealize" thought—expressing his singularity by somehow transgressing the generic code of signs—Klossowski proposes the thought of eternal recurrence as the mechanism of this expropriation. For Klossowski, eternal return is the figure through which Nietzsche is able to dissociate himself from the fiction of his "person"; and it is also a means by which he is able to transmit to the reader an intensity, or "soul tonality," which approximates "wordless communication." In the section that follows, I will map the relation in Vicious Circle between this project of expropriating the self and the possibility of corporeal communication, or "community," between the reader and the text. Of central importance to Klossowski's thesis is eternal return, perhaps the most excessive (and thus corporeal) figure left to us by Nietzsche.

EXQUISITE DELIRIUM: THE THOUGHT OF ETERNAL RETURN Nietzsche finally resolved the tragic conflict of his life—the conflict between the need for God and the compulsive need to deny God. —Lou Salome 7 'Dangerous wellness,' 'morbid brilliance,' a deceptive euphoria with abysses beneath—this is the trap promised and threatened by excess. . . . In disorders of excess there may be a sort of collusion, in which the self is more-and-more aligned and identified with its sickness, so that finally it seems to lose all independent existence, and be nothing but a product of sickness. —Oliver Sacks 8 Eternal recurrence is elucidated only twice within Nietzsche's published writings, and even then it appears more as a poetic device than a philosophical argument. 9 In which case, why has this "thought" exerted such a powerful influence upon 20th-century interpretations of Nietzsche's philosophy? 10 Perhaps this is precisely because of the seeming incongruity of the thought of eternal return with the remainder of Nietzsche's work, such that it either holds the reader's attention or else is passed over relatively unacknowledged. Eternal recurrence—with its reference to demons and cosmology—stands out in its impenetrability as a blot on the landscape of a philosophy that is

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

157

otherwise characterized by its this worldliness. The thought of eternal return evokes an uncanny resonance that can potentially unsettle the reader— Nietzsche's references to it are all the more powerful for their brevity, more effective at shocking the reader out of a comfort zone. As well, according to Nietzschean folklore he held return to be his most profound thought, divulging it to friends in hushed and eerie tones, as if merely to think it were potentially dangerous (See Lou Salome, Friedrich^ 130). In light of this affect of disorientation associated with recurrence, we might understand the thought as furnishing Nietzsche's reader with a particularly compelling site of identification, both positive and negative. As I will argue momentarily, this is precisely the effect that the account of recurrence as a simulacrum explains. Initially, however, eternal return is understood as a thought experiment. The reader is asked to imagine that she is addressed by a demon (or spirit of gravity), who challenges her to relive every moment, great and small, innumerable times more. 11 The test resides in one's affective response to this possibility: 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." {Gay Science^ §341, 2-73-74) This passage is generally considered in existential terms, as an affirmation of immanence: a revaluation of life in response to the realization that our predominant Wissenscbaft

no longer supports an afterlife, and a challenge

to take responsibility for the meaning of the earth. 12 Klossowski interprets this revolutionary thought at an even more personal level, as representing the apotheosis of Nietzsche's philosophy and life: that highest point wherein he achieved lucidity, understood as an opening to a transformative and divine delirium. Within a mode of thinking for which the self functions chiefly to reproduce social norms, "lucidity" is misconceived as opposed to delirium: expressing, rather, an apex of individuated selfhood—and thus safeguarding against civil disobedience. By coupling lucidity and delirium, Klossowski renders eternal recurrence as signifying the deconstruction of the self. In order to comprehend what this coalescence between lucidity and delirium entails, it would serve well at this point to introduce the specific vocabulary with which

i58

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

Klossowski elaborates the various qualitative differences of experience, or perspective; and through which he sketches the possibility of the return of conscious thought to the body: impulse, phantasm, simulacrum, and the code of everyday signs. First, Klossowski designates as impulsive the most unintelligible aspect of human being: the incommunicable abyss from which all meaning arises. The impulse refers to the bodily chaos that Nietzsche calls Trieb: "instinct," "force," "will," or "drive." The impulse remains inaccessible to consciousness; unrepresentable within the terms that orient identification. This is primarily because an impulse is not exchangeable, differentiating itself from all other drives, and in this respect approximating pure difference. It can be understood as "a monad" of the internally incoherent play of forces that Nietzsche saw as underpinning the self, and relations of difference between these monads organize what is only contingently a coherent entity. It is the impulses—these basic units of life—that interpret, each hierarchical organization of impulses yielding its own perspective. Differences

in

perspective between agents are, at least in principle, traceable back to the most dominant impulse: perspectival difference is essentially corporeal difference. Insofar as one's hierarchy of impulses is able to accord to the species configuration in general (that is, "the code of everyday signs") one is considered moral, subordinate, and productive. To the extent that one senses the call of an impulse that surpasses the economy of signs, however, one is set apart from species being: "Once the body is recognized as the product of the impulses (subjected, organized, hierarchized), its cohesion with the self becomes fortuitous. The impulses can be put to use by a new body, and are presupposed in the search for new conditions" (Vicious Circle, 33). This "excess" that would open out to new trajectories of being represents society's monstrous counterpart: its immoral, insubordinate, and profligate shadow. Such singularity is a possible mode for all, as all bodies are products of the interplay of impulses—and yet not all will apply to this call, which requires a degree of sacrifice and social abandonment. 1 3 In this respect, impulses both subtend and oppose gregariousness. What Klossowski and Nietzsche both call species life is fundamentally impulsive; yet, the species opposes impulsional singularity by virtue of its need for exchange. As Nietzsche elucidates in his essay on truth and metaphor, the survival of the collective necessitates the metaphysical reduction of one "thing" to another, and thus the occultation of idiosyncrasy and difference ("Truth and Falsity," 4—5). For Klossowski the impulses constitute "the soul

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

159

tonality" that accumulates beneath, or in opposition to, culture. The impulse— corporeality—is forgotten by culture, and will only resurface through an anamnesis (remembrance, or "unforgetting") consisting in a delirious mode of being, such as that exhibited by Nietzsche immediately prior to the onset in 1889 of what would become total brain inertia. According to his doctrine of will to power, impulses are in fact all that there is for Nietzsche, whether prior to or after interpretation. Klossowski reaffirms this sentiment when he writes "[n]othing exists apart from impulses that are essentially generative of phantasms"

(133).

This brings us to the phantasm, which, Klossowski writes, is "produced at the limit-point

where this impulse is turned into a thought {of this impulse) as

a repulsion against the adulterous coherence" of agency (260). The phantasm is a reaction against the person to whom it is understood to belong: an attempt to enact a state of difference from the species (or the herd in Nietzsche's parlance), and from the species aspect of oneself (that is, "the individual," installed by virtue of the code of everyday signs). More specifically, however, a phantasm represents the impulse's attempt "to objectivate" itself: that is, to appropriate itself as an object of interpretation, thus becoming self-reflexive. The phantasm is in this way related to Freud's concept of the symptom, as the organism's attempt to make conscious what consciousness rejects. Like the impulse, Klossowski's concept of the phantasm is in itself still relatively incoherent, and manifests as "an obsessional image" to which the agent must continuously return in the attempt to expunge, or satisfy, the impulse. The phantasm never finds its adequate expression, and is experienced as a constraint that drives one to return continually to certain behaviors; or an engine for obsessive productions such as philosophy or art. The concept of the phantasm

can be further elucidated with reference

to the simulacrum of eternal return. As noted earlier, Klossowski interprets the thought of eternal recurrence as the apotheosis that finally transported Nietzsche to the perilous heights of disintegration. This figure of apotheosis must be read also in relation to the apparent incommunicability of the idea of return. For, as many of Nietzsche's friends attested, his attempts to relate recurrence to them was marked by an urgency that might have been absent were he engaging merely in a didactic repetition of the ancient doctrine of return. According to Klossowski, the essential kernel of the thought that Nietzsche attempted to communicate was precisely this affective intensity that had so perplexed his friends, and was perhaps more eloquently transmitted by means of the silences in which it was couched than the abridged explications offered

i6o

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

by Nietzsche. Klossowski thus characterizes the eternal return as a vehicle for the expression of the high tonality [hohe Stimmung]

of Nietzsche's soul,

or his highest feeling [hochste Gefuhl]. Eternal recurrence is the simulacrum that figures the phantasm, which both motivates and provides the limit for Nietzsche's philosophy. Understood as a simulacrum, eternal return "is not the product of a phantasm, but its skilful reproduction, by which humanity can produce itself, through forces that are thereby exorcized and dominated by the impulse" (133). If the phantasm is a production of the impulses, importantly it is not communicable in itself. For that, the simulacrum is needed: in this case, the figure of recurrence. Klossowski ambiguously opposes the phantasm to the simulacrum. On the one hand, the simulacrum is the externalization (or expression) of the phantasm, and is thus in this sense—albeit at another remove—the body's own creation. The simulacrum most frequently takes the form of myth or parody, and is characterized by a use of language that is not strictly translatable or exchangeable. Klossowski holds that such mythmaking is crucial to corporealized thinking, and "the inability to invent simulacra is . . . a symptom of degeneration" (133). We might understand poetry as exhibiting the form of the simulacrum, because it opens the reader to an experience that cannot be rendered by the precis. If one cannot attain the experience directly from the text, as it is written—or from a fragment of words, images, or sounds that expresses a similar density or intensity—then this experience is simply unavailable. The inability to experience what the poem, piece of music, or artwork shows reveals a weakness of the impulses to which it appeals. Eternal recurrence, as a simulacrum, appeals to impulses that want to be freed of their bondage to the self. Nietzsche's attempts in his notes to elucidate (or test) recurrence scientifically are not persuasive for the same reason that others' attempts to do so are merely ridiculous: the intensity that corresponds to return can only be hailed by the simulacrum, which does not yield to reality testing. The simulacrum is productive

of truth; it does

not conform to a standard of truth that would be determined externally and universally. Conversely, the simulacrum also tends toward stereotype to the extent that it is circumscribed by the code of everyday signs. The simulacrum is an ossification of the impulses, liable to empty itself of meaning as soon as a cultural shift takes place. Simulacra can lose their vibrant intensity, becoming mere relics, or windows into the past; husks of some prior life-form rather than living architectures of the body. Importantly for Klossowski, however, the

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

I<Sl

simulacrum substitutes itself as a sign for the phantasm, and in this manner protects the phantasm from the leveling effects of the code of everyday signs. In this regard simulacra enact a fraudulent exchange, substituting itself for the phantasm, and thus undermining the laws of the sign economy: If the phantasm is what makes each of us a singular case—in order to defend it against the institutional signification given to it by the gregarious group—the singular case cannot avoid resorting to the simulacrum as something that is equivalent to its phantasm—as much as for a fraudulent exchange between the singular case and the gregarious generality. But if this exchange is fraudulent,

it is

because it is willed as such by both the generality and the singular case. (261)14 As was the case for the impulse and the phantasm, the phantasm and simulacrum abide together in a close relation: From the mood (impulse and repulsion) to the idea, from the idea to its declarative formulation, the conversion of the mute phantasm into speech is brought about. For the phantasm never tells us why it is willed by our impulses. We interpret it under the constraint of our environment, which is so well installed in us by its own signs that, by means of these signs, we never have done with declaring to ourselves what the impulse can indeed will: this is the phantasm. But under its own constraint we simulate what it 'means' for our declaration: this is the simulacrum. (260) The simulacrum attempts to render the phantasm accessible to a select audience by simulating its movement, or tonality. The simulacrum "chaperones" the phantasm on its rendezvous with the code of signs, ensuring that a space is kept open for bodily creativity. The simulacrum simulates the phantasm, thus rendering its communication possible but only by deviating from its essential nature: that is, by means of an esoteric movement of revealing concealment. Like phantasms, simulacra remain highly evocative, equivocal figures, frustrating quotidian, propositional thought. In relation to the code of everyday signs they are hyperbolic, and thus more playful and dramatic. The ambiguity and playfulness of the simulacrum, together with the strong hold it exerts upon the emotions, often renders it a questionable source of

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

i6z

knowledge. In this vein, eternal recurrence can be understood as an esoteric and selective form, appealing to the body of the reader upon whom it acts, and stimulating within him the quality, or tonality, for which return is the touchstone. Yet it must be remembered that, as a simulacrum, recurrence can only simulate this high tonality (or highest feeling), by transforming it into a mythic form, and thus also potentially ushering into being a culture equal to the impulsional power that it designates. In this light, Nietzsche may have envisioned the figure of recurrence as the centerpiece of a new culture, and as the engine for a new set of values, but such a revolution in culture and value would occur at the micro-level of his reader's body, and the community to which it would give rise would be constituted solely of those who shared with him the experience of return. Before turning to a more thorough examination of Klossowski's treatment of Nietzsche's esotericism in the next section, I would like to focus upon the distorting aspect of the simulacrum, precisely because such distortion generates the possibility of textual esotericism. To this end, it would be propitious to investigate the Latin origin of simulacra: for the etymology of this word would not have been lost on Klossowski, who peppered his fiction—Le

Baphomet,

for example—with passages of Latin. As Daniel

Smith points out in the preface to his translation of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, the word simulacrum

"comes from the Latin simulare (to copy, repre-

sent, feign), and during the late Roman empire referred to the statues of the gods that lined the entrance to a city" (x). These Roman statues reproduced a realism in excess of the original to which they were understood to refer: not only because what they represented was mythical (and so did not actually exist), but also because of the technique by means of which they achieved the representation. So that they would appear more realistic, these colossal figures were constructed larger at their highest point and smaller at the point closest to the viewer, so as to counteract the diminishing effects of distance upon the viewer's perspective. Whereas from an objective point of view the statues might seem out of proportion, from the point of view of those entering the city they would have appeared perfectly natural. Perhaps fittingly given that they depicted gods, these statues would have produced a hyperreal effect for the viewer of seeming more real than reality. The distortion produces the reality effect, thereby replacing the need for a reality.15 This reality effect of the simulacrum is a function of perspective, whereby the viewer's point of view is incorporated into the work of art. The difference between the artifact and the viewing

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

I63

subject is thereby annulled, and the independent status of each term placed into question. The simulacrum represents to the viewer (or the reader) his or her own investment in the object of contemplation. For with their appropriative gaze, subjects believe themselves to have taken hold of the object—aligned as it is to their perspective. Yet the object captures the viewer's viewpoint precisely to the extent that he or she is able to lay eyes upon it. That is to say, the subject must already have invested him- or herself within the object, as a condition of being able to attain a perspective upon it. This returns us again to Lacan's concept of anamorphosis, discussed in chapter 2. Recall that for Lacan anamorphosis

designates an ineffable bodily

remainder that cannot be represented by the mirror image. This "no-thing" is the piece of the self that must be displaced, or invested, in the object world so that the subject can establish an (appropriative) relation to it. For this reason, insofar as it can be registered at all by the subject, the bodily remainder (object a) is viewed with a sense of disorientation as a blur or stain upon one's field of vision. The anamorphic skull (or memento in The Ambassadors,

mori)

recalls to the viewer the mortality of all men: that

notwithstanding the greatness of our accomplishments, our possessions, and our mastery of the world, we are all fated for nothingness. But at the level of technique what occurs in The Ambassadors

is only a clash of perspectives—or

the uncomfortable cohabitation of incompatible viewpoints. Although the main picture displays the conventions of renaissance perspective—placing its viewer in control of the objects arrayed in the field of vision—the minor, anamorphic image is aligned to a perspective that competes for the viewer's attention, and requires the viewer to relinquish propriety over the objects within the main picture (and analogously, over reality) if he or she is to make it out. Holbein's anamorphic "death's head" reinforces the meaning of the image that it depicts: that the very possibility of death undermines the subject's position of authority, as grounded in the assumption that she is the unmovable point from which the rest of the world unfolds. Just so, the simulacrum of eternal return—like the statues to which the word originally referred—incorporates the subject's point of view, thereby increasing its hold upon her or him by means of "the reality effect": that is, the feeling of presence generated by the reader's own unconscious investment within it. In contemplation of eternal return, the reader feels herself or himself to share in Nietzsche's corporeal experience, to accord to the vicissitudes of his body: his soul tonality, or highest feeling. Bodily awareness—which is assumed to be immediate to the subject—is found to

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

i^4

be displaced in relation to return, as the reader locates her own experience within Nietzsche's body, and Nietzsche's experience within her own, so that the text mediates a relation to corporeality. T h e reader is thus met at once with a feeling of plenitude and a disorienting sensation of having lost hold upon the position of authority that is supposed to ground experience. In this respect, the figure of return is like the anamorphic skull that haunts The Ambassadors,

because in order to comprehend it one must disrupt the

perspective according to which the subject constructs its relation to the world. Klossowski situates the thought of recurrence within Nietzsche's attempt to corporealize thought: and in particular, within his claim to side with his body against his person. Just as for Lacan the distorted skull in Holbein's painting decenters the viewer's perspective, for Klossowski recurrence decenters the reader's subjectivity; and it does so by "remembering" the many moments that have led to a particular present, and the various selves already lived. Klossowski characterizes return in terms of what he calls anamnesis, which is for him a curious equivocation between remembering and forgetting. It is a remembering that coincides with lucidity with regard to the cleavage between the unified self and the multitudinous body; and a forgetting that transforms and reinscribes the subject with all its infinite possibilities. At the moment the Eternal Return is revealed to me, I cease to be myself hie et nunc and am susceptible to becoming innumerable others, knowing that I shall forget this revelation once I am outside the memory of myself; this forgetting forms the object of my present willing; for such a forgetting would amount to a memory outside my own limits: and my present consciousness will be established only in the forgetting of other possible identities. {Vicious Circle, 58) The self is thus predicated upon the forgetting, or denial, of all other possible selves; and return provides an access to these forgotten selves by means of a Stimmung

(tonality) through which they are provisionally unified and

affirmed: hence, the sensation of being both completed and ruptured by return. Recurrence is giddying because its affirmation is also a negation of the " I " of the symbolic, and a return to a body in bits and pieces. In the light of this attack upon the symbolic order, we can understand why Klossowski held that the effect of anamnesis delivered by return must be read together with Nietzsche's declaration of the death of God:

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

l65

The emphasis must be placed on the loss of a given identity. The c

death of God' (the God who guarantees the identity of the respon-

sible self) opens up the soul to all its possible identities, already apprehended in the various Stimmungen

of the Nietzschean soul.

The revelation of the Eternal return brings about, as necessity, the successive realizations of all possible identities: 'at bottom every name of history is P—in the end, 'Dionysus and the Crucified.' In Nietzsche, the 'death of God' corresponds to a Stimmung

in the

same way as does the ecstatic moment of the Eternal Return. (57) God's Word gave form to all of creation, and thus guaranteed the identity of all things. With the death of God, the basis upon which an identity asserts its claim over the body is undermined. But return also signifies the disintegration of identity by opening Nietzsche's bodily impulsions to the reader—engendering within the reader the same quality, and thus destabilizing distinctions between Nietzsche this reader. That brings us again to the simulacrum's function of distortion in relation to what it claims to represent. For the figure of recurrence simulates Nietzsche's high tonality, and is supposed to evoke in the reader the fullness of "Nietzsche's" own experience. Yet the fullness of Nietzsche's experience— his body—is only a lure for the reader, return's principle effect being nothingness, dissolution, and destabilization of the self. It is Nietzsche, as the claimant of any experience in particular, that is put into question by return; and the experience to which the thought refers is precisely that of not having a unity, or "self," which would underwrite that experience. The dangerous truth of return that Nietzsche attempts to share with his friends and readers should also open them to such dissolution. Indeed, this is the basis upon which the thought selects: it measures the extent to which the reader is able to withstand, and even affirm, a relinquishment of unity, and to open him- or herself to becoming. Such a renunciation of identity opposes the codification imposed upon the body by gregarious (social) being, representing instead an affirmation of discontinuity that characterizes "the sovereign individual." 16 As Alan Weiss puts this, "Eternal Return is not a dialectical process of instilling memory, but rather the very sign of forgetting, of a unique experience, of the loss of language" ("Logic of the Simulacrum," 120). In this way, recurrence is not only an agent of the communication of the incommunicable, but as a thought that prefigures the bearer's disintegration it is also the agent of contagion, threatening madness along with enlightenment.

i66

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

By means of the excessive thought of return, something of the body—the incommunicable, high tonality—resonates and is transmitted; and this is what renders it a corporealized thought. And yet, as a simulacrum, recurrence also cloisters or encrypts the impulse, protecting it from the abrasive action of common thought. It keeps in reserve its truly corporeal aspect, and then only simulates those qualities that are read as impulsive.

But in so doing

something of the body is indeed communicated, or transmitted—although this can perhaps be understood as a gestural communication 1 7 rather than an exchange of vapors or fluids. The simulation that codifies Nietzsche's highest feeling gives rise to a mimicry on behalf of his reader: a mimicry that reproduces in the reader the experience of return. By posing to his readers the question of recurrence, Nietzsche bids them to access for themselves the possibility of self-annihilation. The figure of return thus reproduces itself in the reader as a kind death drive, or the curious vicious circle enacting, in the form of parody, the alienation through which the self is precariously constituted. Yet in line with this notion of return as a simulacrum—or a simulation of the impulses—it must be understood that the reader can experience the dissolute effects of return only to the extent that he or she plays at being "Nietzsche," in all his various incarnations (the Kaiser, the Antichrist, Dionysus, and the Crucified One). The contagion of the thought of recurrence is not organic, so much as hysterical or purely symptomatic; and the transmission of its affect to the reader relies upon the reader's own attempt to reproduce through

his or her own body Nietzsche's delirium.

In this sense, the terms simulacra and gestural communication

indicate a

form of production. Although the reader assumes that a renegade impulse, existing prior to his reading of return, singles him out among Nietzsche's readers, in fact the reader's performance of the thought of return provokes, rather than invoking, the impulses to which it corresponds. If we are to take Klossowski's characterization of eternal recurrence as a simulacrum seriously, then it must also be understood to have a productive relation to the reality that it purports merely to represent. The simulacrum brings the impulse into a relation with a community of others, but always in the guise of something else. The interpretation produces the impulse, but not "in itself": rather, the simulacrum of return reproduces itself through the reader's attempt to enact an authentic (dissolute) experience of return. Nietzsche's conspiracy against culture and against language is a bodily contagion transmitted to the reader, paradoxically, by means of writing.

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

I67

In a like manner to Nietzsche's genealogical analysis of subjectivity addressed in chapter 1, recurrence enacts in the form of parody the body's subjection to its own ideal. In so doing, the thought of recurrence destabilizes subjectivity, demonstrating the necessity of the abject to the formation of ideal subjectivity. We might put this in Klossowski's terms as the indivisibility of forgetting and remembering {anamnesis) in the thought of return. Predicated upon a continuity of memory that unifies her experience, the subject also finds itself by forgetting those moments and selves that would compromise such unity. Recurrence is the mechanism by which this interchange of forgetting and remembering is playfully reenacted—but such play also brings to the fore the rupture at the heart of identity. As a condition of their repetition, the moments that constitute the life of the self are separated. "The same" thus becomes internally differentiated, and the subject-unity is thereby destroyed; reduced to the gap between an incongruous collection of impulses, and the self understood as a fraudulent representation of their unity. Klossowski explicates this rupture of the self that recurrence represents in terms of Nietzsche's mental breakdown, which he calls "the euphoria in Turin." Klossowski had already interpreted Nietzsche's "lucid thought" as embracing the rupture between the body and consciousness; and in this light we can understand Nietzsche's insanity as extending a sovereign mode of being, aware of its own groundlessness. Madness is in this sense a refusal of the principle of identity that mocks our quotidian notions of rationality, truth, and enlightenment. What is intelligible, according to Klossowski, accords to the gregarious morality, and so what must be sought is the unintelligible, or even what openly flouts intelligibility: the ambiguous, the duplicitous, the perverse, and the insane. Madness thus becomes for Klossowski the signature for Nietzsche's project of communicating the most unique aspect of his being. Curiously, for Klossowski lucidity, revaluation, and community all converge in his notion of the complot,

or conspiracy.

The figure of conspiracy also organizes his reading of the Marquis de Sade, whom Klossowski relates to Nietzsche through the attempt to express in writing his own peculiar idiosyncrasy. Klossowski's interest, however, is the collaboration between Sade and Nietzsche's attempts to communicate a sense that resists common sense, and their attempts to generate a community of kindred outlaws—able to comprehend the tenor of their writings that otherwise only confuses or appalls the reader. I will now elaborate this conspiracy of recruitment, in relation to the esotericism interrogated already in chapter 3.

i6S

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

THE CONSPIRACY OF PHILOSOPHER-VILLAINS: NIETZSCHE-KLOSSOWSKI-SADE My Uncle Octave, the eminent professor of scholastics at the University of Y***, suffered from his conjugal happiness as though from an illness, firm in the belief he would be cured of it once he had made it contagious. —Pierre Klossowski 18 Given Sade's lasciviousness, and Nietzsche's famously impoverished sex life, Nietzsche and Sade may be unlikely bedfellows. Yet Klossowski brings them together productively—if not within the same text, at least within the same movement of his own thought on the relation between language and the body, culture and what it refuses, the political and its ambiguously situated moment of critique. Nietzsche and Sade each embody for Klossowski the cultural tipping point: or, an extremity at which the decadence of the cultural elite becomes self-reflexive and -critical. Nietzsche, as the heir to an overripe accumulation of knowledge (or cultural memory), and the morally corrupt and sexually excessive Sade, each assume the burden of representing to culture its inconsistencies and internal points of rupture. And they do so, according to Klossowski, by means of a corporeal semantics fashioned from the limits of their own experience, represented by Nietzsche as the simulacrum of eternal return, and within Sade's writings, as sodomy. Klossowski theorizes these simulacra as units of exchange between "sovereign individuals," which form the basis for a secret society deeply embedded within existing society, or a conspiracy [complot] against culture. The question Klossowski thus poses through his readings of Nietzsche and Sade concerns how their works might found a counterculture. Moreover, his readings of their works ask after the machinery of their particular variety of esotericism, conceived as a bodily contagion of sickness and perversity, rather than as the skeleton key to a pristine and delicate locked box. Klossowski's interpretation of Nietzsche, considered alongside his work on Sade, demonstrates the integral relation between the reader's ideal of herself—constructed with respect to the text— and those abject, unpalatable aspects (both of herself and the text) through which she derives an illicit pleasure. Where Rosen and Lampert position themselves unequivocally above other readers—thus affecting a kind of purity—Klossowski confronts his own ambivalence respecting Nietzsche by conveying his relation to him in terms that suggest the opposite of purity:

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

l6$

contagion, contamination, perversion, and corruption. Thus, we might ask after Klossowski's relation to this secret society of criminals and invalids: as disciple, learned associate, or founder of a criminal cult. Klossowski provides us with a first clue to his relationship to these figures in the preface to a later edition of Sade My Neighbor, to which he had added "The Philosopher-Villain" as a belated first chapter. He begins self-reflexively, by putting his own authority into question, quoting a character from another of his works, Roberte Ce Soir: ROBERTE: Who gave Antoine that book he was reading last night? Was it you, or did Victor already pass it on to him? The title alone is enough to make one vomit: "Sade My Neighbor"! 19 - His commentary on Sade is depicted here as contagious, dealing in the works of a perverse atheist, and thus itself capable of inducing sickness and disgust in its reader. Significantly, this gesture of self-effacement echoes the introductory section of Justine; or, Good Conduct

Well Chastised, where Sade disowns

"the moral" issued by the work—crudely, that crime pays—arguing rather circuitously instead that even the most hardened and debauched reader will be touched by Justine's torments, and would thereby be turned to the path of righteousness. 20 By dissociating himself from the opinions of the characters about whom he writes—and, in a later work, denying his authorship of Justine entirely 21 —Sade radicalizes the contagious effect of his writing. For while enacting an ironic distance between oneself as author and the morality of the text is a standard technique of esotericism, its more lasting rhetorical effect is to implicate the reader within his "bad philosophy." Thus Sade's esotericism represents not simply an effort to protect himself against political persecution, 22 but also an instrument by which he contaminates the reader with his desire, polluting his or her imagination and good conscience. By dissimulating his position as author of the text, Sade hands over to the reader responsibility for Justine, the book as well as the woman. It is then the reader who must either assume or refuse the burden of guilt respecting the crimes perpetrated against her. Sade thus infects the reader with the responsibility for Justine by denying such responsibility himself; and as with Nietzsche, the vehicle for this contagion of guilt—or ressentiment—is

reason. 23

Reading Justine, one is struck by the cruelty of which reason is capable, as it is by use of reason that the libertine philosopher-villains of the text practice their perverse pleasures at her expense. 24 But if, pace Enlightenment thought,

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

170

reason leads only to virtue, then what are we to make of the arguments that issue from Sade's philosophers, who use reason only in order to justify their own cruelty and vice? For Klossowski, reason ("the code of everyday signs") can be understood precisely as an agent of contagion—promoting weakness of the organism— and the philosopher—villain dramatizes this aspect of reason for him. Reason is supposed to be exercised with indifference to motives and passions: the philosophical-hero is typically austere, even self-effacing, with regard to truth. The characters that Sade depicts in Justine and Philosophy in the Bedroom,15 on the other hand, use reason cynically to further the pursuit of their desires: they are philosopher-villains that gratuitously abuse the notion of truth. Sade thereby puts into question the possibility of arriving at the right and good course of action through the use of reason alone: being utterly indifferent to one's desires, passions, and values, reason cannot lead the way to the correct desire, passion, or value. The use of reason is thus always already tainted, our objectives always already determined by the values that we pretend to efface in the appeal to it. We forget the value of our values, so accustomed are we to the belief that they are only inferred from our reasoning, that they have come to be confused with reason—and in this way merely customary values are enshrined as inherently reasonable. Sade's innovation is to put into the mouths of "philosophers" whom all reasonable men would judge as perverts and degenerates, reasonable assertions that prove the exception. Whereas by common standards their desires are aberrant and criminal, with the voice of reason they take on the appearance of normalcy, even decency. This demonstrates the arbitrariness of reason's application, and makes fools and liars of the righteous and murderous men of his day: the revolutionaries of French republicanism who represented the "terror" as following the dictates of reason. Yet more importantly, it also gives Sade cause for hope that the values of his day could, in time, be superseded, through the various turns and inversions of reason itself. Sade's arguments would transmit to the reader his perverse passions—or those of the characters whom he disowns. The distinction between "the philosopher" and "the villain"—the one who dedicates himself only to reason, and he who subjects reason to his passions—would thereby break down. In a further respect, however, Sade sought belonging through his writing, which was also an expression of vengeance against those who demonstrated punitiveiy that he did not belong [Sade My Neighbor,

14). According

to Klossowski, Sade attempted to develop an alternative generality of

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

171

writing—as a system of shared values and signs—based upon his perverse body and desires, or "singularity." The most potent signifier of his type is sodomy, which becomes for him the basis of a new discourse, and a new community. However, the creation of a new type would also necessarily destabilize the old type: the present community, or as Klossowski nominates it, our species being. [S]odomy is formulated by a specific gesture of countergenerality, the most significant in Sade's eyes—that which strikes precisely at the law of the propagation of the species and thus bears witness to the death of the species in the individual. It evinces an attitude not only of refusal but of aggression; in being a simulacrum of the act of generation, it is a mockery of it. (Sade My Neighbor, 24) Sade mocks what he takes to be a central tenet of conventional morality, procreation, by setting up an alternative moral conversation that takes sodomy as its paradigm. In the act of sodomy, not only is the seed spent in vain, but it also mixes with excrement. Thus, Sade's system offends and ridicules the values of the conventional. However, Klossowski is careful to show that Sade's transgression only functions as such by asserting itself with reference to the order that it seeks to undermine. In outrage what is outraged is maintained to serve as a support for transgression. (18) Transgression presupposes the existing order, the apparent maintenance of norms under which energy accumulates thereby making transgression necessary. (19) Countergenerality thus takes the meaning of its signifiers parasitically from the normative structure of culture, but exploits and explodes them. That is to say, Sade does not perform a Kinseyan (or even Freudian) disarmament of sodomy's offensive signification, by positing it as merely one sexual practice among others. Rather, sodomy retains for him the full force of its biblical significance, as an offense against God and human dignity. However, Klossowski notes, as an undercurrent to culture, the transgressive symbol accumulates its force to the extent that it is repressed, or kept in store. This is why Sade peoples his writings with priests, judges, and aristocrats as well

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

172.

as thieves and vagabonds, thus signifying that corruption is already inherent to the system that morality apparently protects; that what the moral order rejects lies only barely beneath the surface of its highest echelons. 26 In this way, Sade presents himself to the Enlightenment philosopher as embodying the corruption of society and—what amounts to the same thing—the death of the human species, or type. In "The Philosopher-Villain," however, Klossowski presents the case that Sade's writing is intended not only to offend—that, rather, it is also an appeal to tastes that accord to his own. From the loneliness of his imprisonment, Sade developed a perverse community, comprising his imaginary interlocutors in Philosophy

in the Bedroom,

as well as the book's (largely imaginary)

readers. Together, they would "reproduce" their values, using a language that rivals conventional usage, or the code of everyday signs. Under the banner of integral atheism, Klossowski indicates a self-destructive possibility within reason whereby "the principle of identity itself disappears along with the absolute guarantor of this principle; the property of having^ responsible ego is therewith morally and physically abolished" {Sade My Neighbor,

19). In

other words, if God were really dead, then the consistent atheist would also need to relinquish the notion that things are self-identical, as this notion is inconsistent without a Creation mythology to underpin identity. This critique from the point of view of integral atheism foreshadows the forfeit of identity that we find in Klossowski's reading of Nietzsche. And like Nietzsche, for Sade this alienation of the self takes place not only at the level of religion, psychology, or morality, but also bodily. He continues: "The first consequence will be the universal prostitution of beings. And this is but the counterpart of integral monstrosity, which rests on the insubordination of the life functions in the absence of any normative authority of the species" (19). Klossowski's interpretations of Sade and Nietzsche thus attest to a symmetry of purpose. Although both symbolize to him "the sovereign individual" whose uniqueness challenges the code of everyday signs and conventional morality, each also attempts at once to signify and encrypt his difference so as to be understood only by those with the sensual capacity to share the singular experience that their writing attempts to reveal. Central to this attempt to communicate a singularity is the concept of the simulacrum,

which playfully and treacherously creates "truth," or value. For,

as Klossowski indicates in relation to sodomy, the simulacrum mocks "the real," or whatever is understood to be natural and right. The simulacrum represents a gnawing hollowness sewn into the normative fabric of society at its very beginning: the simulacrum makes the real possible, because it is that

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

173

against which the real is opposed, and against which irruption the real bolters. By refiguring what is conventionally considered the most marginalized, abject sexual behavior as central, we can understand Sade to dismantle—or even revalue—the values of his day. Moreover, the secret communities embodying such a revaluation of values live among us as society's most important elements, including custodians of the law. Like most revolutions, the community that takes "universal prostitution" as its goal is strangely consistent with the purveying system of values: it is the "rot" that society refuses to recognize as rigorously consequent of its organizing principles. Similarly, recurrence is the signifier of Nietzsche's own "integral atheism," wherein the notion of an afterlife is excluded, and life itself is parodied as a vicious circle: to be endlessly repeated. With the death of God, the world of selves and of things is also suspended. For Klossowski, the simulacrum of recurrence is a point of revolution that both articulates and dismantles identity. Through the experience of return the subject renegotiates its own reflexivity by means of "an anamnesiac lucidity" that recognizes the incongruity between the body and conscious thought, and dwells in the dissonances between moments: thus privileging becoming (chaos) over being (identity). Above all, however, what both simulacra re-create is the phantasm: the obsession according to which signs are configured, and the internal constraint that determines the sovereign individual's manner of "insubordinate enjoyment." The phantasm, thus maintained by the simulacrum, is that kernel of an irritation (jouissance,

or pleasure in unpleasure) that both motivates and

destabilizes the subject. It is also represented by what Lacan calls the object a: the abject particle that detaches itself from the subject so that he may enjoy a relation of appropriation to the object world. In this regard, then, we may think of the phantasm as the corporeal remainder that resists representation only thus to form the basis of representation: as the unconscious connection between the self and its objects. It is precisely in this sense that Klossowski can hold that Nietzsche's body "communicates" itself to the receptive other— the one whose own bodily impulsions "accord" to Nietzsche's high tonality. The impulse thus communicated is not withheld deep at the core Nietzsche's body, as if it were an atom. Rather, the bodily remainder forms the tissue that renders intersubjective relations possible: a mood "inhabiting" language as a surface that can only be communicated by way of mimicry. That muteness, or soul tonality, indicated in Nietzsche

and the Vicious Circle, is the very

stuff of a nonverbal (gestural) communication, without which language loses its texture and materiality. This unexchangeable depth that would ordinarily evade, or subsist beneath the economy of signs, is precisely what

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

174

the simulacrum allows the reader to access. Such "access," however, takes the form of an exchange: the reader "gives body" to Nietzsche's phantasm, allowing it again to come to life through her or his experience of recurrence; and in turn, Nietzsche's text provides a place wherein the reader is able to act out abject fantasies in the safety afforded by psychological distance, or projection. For Klossowski, then, selection by Nietzsche's text does not accord one the security of "the hyperborean," in purity and seclusion from the mundane affairs that despoil "lesser men." To the contrary, the relationship between Nietzsche and his reader consists in a kind of cross-contamination at the level of "corporeality," in which each projects their surplus enjoyment (or bodily remainder) into the other. Hence Klossowski's designation for the community of sovereign individuals selected by the text as a society of criminals and sodomites, all engaging in a mode of communal perversion. The other is the object that must be defiled, and purity plays the role o n l y ^ f a lure for the defiling subject. For this reason we can detect a marked difference between the understandings of esotericism deployed within commentaries of Nietzsche. In stark contrast to Rosen or Lampert's suggestions, Klossowski holds that the connection between Nietzsche and the reader is ambiguous in the extreme. Klossowski's reader is never assured of a safe position in isolation from his "bad readers": rather, there must be a continuous commerce between them. The reader is "chosen" by Nietzsche's writings to the extent that she is able to lose herself, and thereby to obscure and put at risk her position. The experience of having a position of privilege respecting Nietzsche's text thus betrays the goal of being addressed by it: for, according to Klossowski, such an address already implies an attenuation of the (subject) position, to the point that it is barely viable. Likewise, the truth of Nietzsche's text is not guaranteed to the good reader, as if it were a prize hidden within the text for her only to find. The simulacrum (sodomy and eternal recurrence) is not only the engine for the reader's interpellation, but also provides the form through which truth and value are created. Or more precisely, truth and the interpellation are inseparable, since truth is the shiny and ever-retreating object of desire with which the reader attempts to gain access to Nietzsche's text—and through it to the self. Truth generated by the simulacrum is a distorted reflection of the reader, and this is why it exerts a power of fascination over her. This can be characterized, again, in relation to perspective. Just as the statue's verisimilitude is an effect of including the viewer's point of view within its form, the simulacrum produces the effect of truth by concealing within

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

175

itself that aspect of the reader that she cannot recognize as such—precisely because it regulates her relation to the world of knowable objects. In this manner, the truth of Nietzsche's text is a lost aspect of the reader's self, alienated and distorted, "anamorphically"' like the abject image of death, or the object a. We can approach this idea again by way of Zizek's treatment of desire in The Sublime Object of Ideology. According to Zizek, the other provokes the subject's interest—in terms of repugnance or anger, curiosity or fascination— because the subject unconsciously invests in this Other the counterpart to its own position, which it then figures as a secret it must appropriate in order to regain wholeness {Sublime Object, 64-66). It is in fact the division between the ego ideal and the discarded corps morcele that produces the illusion of there being "a secret" that the text withholds from its reader: a secret to which only a subgroup of Nietzsche's readers are privy. Esoteric readers, such as Lampert and Rosen, imagine that this secret comprises a particular truth about Nietzsche's philosophy: for instance, a radical nihilism that separates the strong from the weak. It is important to remember that, for Nietzsche, truth is more equivocal and elusive than this: it does not hide in one place for the reader to find it; moreover, there is not even one truth to be found precisely because the text is accessible from so many different points. There is a sense, however, in which Rosen and Lampert verge upon the real secret of the text: that there is no truth; that truth itself is an illusion, and its only purpose is to allure the reader to invest herself within the text. T h e secret for which the reader searches is her own desire—the guilty excess, remnant of the attempt to identify with the ideal reader—concealed from her within the labyrinth of the other. The bifurcation of Nietzsche's text into esoteric and exoteric addresses is thus itself a means of holding back from the reader the secret of her desire, as a piece of the self that is invested within the text. The enigma of Nietzsche's philosophy accords to that part of the reader's self that cannot be recognized as such; "a stain" that is projected, thus marking the object of the gaze. The traffic of material between the text and its reader thus moves in both directions: at the level of the unconscious, the reader is reorganized by the text—invested with a duty exemplified by the figure of the philosopher of the future. In turn, the text is invested with the unassimilated debris of the reader's unconscious. If Nietzsche's text sometimes takes on a monstrous appearance, it is in part because the reader sees reflected there the own-most abject self. The figure of recurrence is one such point of identification: an excessive figure, in which the reader confronts the self in a Nietzschean guise, with a vertiginous

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

i76

sense of loss and disintegration. Klossowski recognized return as his strongest point of affinity with Nietzsche, but this was an ambiguous affinity, requiring him to reappropriate the abject (exclusion of which had assured his subject position) and thus also to expropriate his subjectivity. Klossowski's concept of the simulacrum depicts this dual nature of the subject's involvement with the world: the splitting that renders coherent thought—and philosophy in particular—possible. The simulacrum also shows us to look for a piece of the reader wherever an intensity of relation manifests itself in the commentary. The reader is enthralled and discomfited by eternal return, as if it were the distorted skull in a painting of two accomplished men, because in it this reader finds surplus and abject enjoyment: the missing piece, the inclusion of which would destroy the whole. Our association with Nietzsche's writing incriminates us all, because it is our own filth that returns to us as "the bad reading," or those passages of Nietzsche's text that we prefer to ignore. Klossowski's imperative to the reader is to affirm this ambiguity since it is precisely what produces the intersubjective relation. If clarity is what is required, then one need not look further than the code of everyday signs: itself the measure of clarity. But Nietzsche's project integrally involves contaminating the reader with his own concerns: this is principally what the interpellation achieves for him. If Sade transmits responsibility for Justine to the reader by means of a denial of its authorship, Nietzsche, too, is able to shirk ownership of the most toxic elements of his own philosophy by means of the text's multiplicity. In exchange for a place in his inner sanctum, the reader takes upon her- or himself the burden of Nietzsche's vision for the future. The bad reader thereby shadows the good reader by bearing the responsibility for Nietzsche's guilt. This makes perfect sense if Nietzsche's "genealogy" of morality and the subject is correct: for it is guilt (bad conscience) that engenders the subject. Thus, it is this guilt that ultimately engenders the reader as subject to Nietzsche's text.

FROM CANNIBALISM TO VOODOO: THE CREATION AND CONTROL OF THE SUBJECT OF NIETZSCHE'S WRITING Nietzsche's works are letters addressed from the dead to the living. —Geoff Waite, Nietzsche's Corps/e, 12

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

177

By way of conclusion we might ask, is there a response to Nietzsche's philosophy that is not already anticipated, and thus controlled, by it? This is a question that Geoff Waite poses, and he eventually responds in the negative, holding that Nietzsche appropriates and contaminates whoever crosses his path, and that culture will never be the same after Nietzsche. 27 Waite's reliance upon a metaphorics of contamination, death, and voodoo spiritualism (he depicts the contemporary Left-Nietzschean as like a zombie, operated from a distance by Nietzsche) is suggestive of Klossowski's understanding of eternal recurrence as the medium of contagion for Nietzsche's bodily impulses, and perhaps even his madness. Obviously, this imagery can lead us astray and into reveries; yet, there is something to the notion that Nietzsche infects the reader at the level of corporeality, or more precisely at the level of the bodily remainder; or unconscious. And like the practitioner of voodoo—who collects hair samples, or items belonging to the object of influence—once Nietzsche has a piece of the reader, he is able to control him or her. By virtue of the structure of his text—his baiting of the reader with the figure of the philosopher of the future, the esoteric-exoteric distinction, and those points in his text of irresolvable ambivalence—Nietzsche produces the conditions under which the reader gives herself over to him, piece by piece. To the extent that the reader aspires to the ideals presented within Nietzsche's text, even her reservations, or negative affects, will secure her to it. The reader's intimacy with Nietzsche, in turn, is inherently contaminated by these negative affects and reservations, the pleasure in reading him attaining its unconscious depth by virtue of being a mixed pleasure. For this reason, the reader's enjoyment of Nietzsche's text can be understood as like a symptom: for it is a pleasure in unpleasure, or jouissance,

through

which the reader retains a connection to the part of the self that she or he expropriates. In psychoanalysis, a symptom is the effect of corporeal excess that cannot be assimilated by the form that structures subjectivity. A symptom is the means by which the unconscious makes known a meaning that cannot be articulated by conventional language. The unconscious addresses itself to the Other through the symptom, which is then interpreted by the analyst. Yet, curiously, the symptom does not necessarily subside once its interpretation has taken place—that is, once the one for whom it was intended deciphers its hidden meaning. 28 For the symptom is also a manner of enjoyment: a peculiar enjoyment, to be sure, because it represents the surplus prohibited as a condition of our being subject to language. The

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

178

subject cannot experience this surplus enjoyment as pleasure since such enjoyment is already disavowed, or repulsed. Rather, the jouissance is felt as an ambiguous and disconcerting anxiety or compulsion—even pain. We can also understand this in Klossowski's terms through the concept of the phantasm which, like the symptom, is an uncanny bodily constraint, at once belonging and foreign to the subject. The reader's ambivalence respecting Nietzsche's more immoderate proclamations can thus be understood in terms of surplus enjoyment, as beyond but subtending the everyday code of signs, or consciousness. The fascination with which Nietzsche's reader typically regards the ambiguity and multiplicity of his ethical positions indicates her own uncanny internal obstacle, regarding which she is both attracted and repelled. The growth of interest in Nietzsche can in part be read in terms of its symptomatic significance. It is precisely the aspect with which the reader least identifies that provides a visceral connection to the text. The dimension of Nietzsche's text that produces discomfort—and which is most vulnerable to misappropriation—allows the reader to give vent to a surplus enjoyment: an enjoyment that her role as "ideal reader" will not permit her to experience as such. According to Klossowski's account of the simulacrum, this ambiguous element of Nietzsche's writing "looks back" at the reader, as its strange familiarity is denied. We also find Nietzsche anticipates this phenomenon with the concept of abyss {Beyond Good and Evil, §146, 89), embodying both excess and emptiness: the pure surface that holds both the ideal and its surplus. In precisely this regard the ignoble, anti-Semitic reader (whether actual or spectral) is no less Nietzsche's symptom than the good reader. Rather, Nietzsche finds the anti-Semitism he had "renounced" looking back at him in the guise of the misappropriation, which is only an uncanny and distorted image of himself. The Nazi interpretation stages the more dire consequences of Nietzschean doctrine: the subterranean aspect of his philosophy that Nietzsche refused to recognize as his own. In this sense, it is the anamorphic stain that pollutes an otherwise coherent, albeit diverse, field of interpretations. It is a monstrous apparition that haunts Nietzsche and his reader, because it represents a possibility of the philosophy that neither could consider directly. But whereas it may be true that Nietzsche hadn't anticipated that his writings would be used for the purposes of Nazi propaganda—and such a prospect might even have repulsed him—this does not prevent the fact that his text supports such a possibility. The problem is only further

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

179

compounded when we refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Nazi reading: that it represents an entire dimension of Nietzsche's writings. Like the symptom, ignoring it only exacerbates the condition that it marks, a condition endemic to Nietzsche's philosophy. The reader's fascination with the textual excess threatens her identity, and thereby also motivates the reader to reaffirm the boundaries by which it is circumscribed. This moment is indicated when the commentator returns us to the unquestionable "facts of the matter": that Nietzsche was appalled at his sister's anti-Semitism; that he deplored the idea of statehood, upon which National Socialism was grounded. By cleaving to the position that the good reader reads carefully and thoroughly, and thereby is not affected by mere partial perspectives . on Nietzsche's writing, the reader betrays the very basis of her relation to Nietzsche. For this relation is founded upon a black market, so to speak: an exchange not registered by consciousness. For a place in the symbolic network of Nietzsche's text, the reader exchanges surplus enjoyment: that is, what remains after the reader has filled that place. The reader's enjoyment of Nietzsche, what motivates her to identify with his project, is the effort to maintain a connection to the piece of the self that is projected therein. Accordingly, it is precisely the elements of the text that the reader finds most questionable, which provide an orientation to it. The most derided interpretation, from which the reader distances herself, provides a pleasure that cannot be felt as such, because it is that pleasure in excess of the interpellated position; that is, the symptom, or phantasm. Yet if a reader accepts Nietzsche's call, then perhaps he or she also ought to take responsibility for textual ambivalence, and acknowledge the fact that, as Derrida points out, the only attempt so far to enact a Nietzschean social hierarchy resulted in the Holocaust (Derrida, Otobiographies,

31; Schrift,

"Kofman," 210). A key question that the reader must pose is the extent to which she is invested in Nietzsche's good name for the sake of her own purity. If such purity is at stake, then the most vertiginous position of all for the reader would be to accept that her relation to Nietzsche is supported by those most malign possibilities of the text: the Nazi, anti-Semitic, and misogynist interpretations. In effect, this might ultimately mean rejecting the interpellation, and the benefits that it affords: the enjoyment gained through the projective identification, the little object [object a) of gratification. Or a more realistic trajectory for the reader may involve a heightened attention to the commerce of psychic material between herself and Nietzsche's text, in order to affect a distance from its vagaries. By resigning herself to having been

i8o

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

irrevocably contaminated by Nietzsche, the reader might develop strategies for managing such pollution: a digestive capacity "to stomach" ambivalence regarding the material Nietzsche represents. The tendency instead to deny the inherent ambiguities of his text—and to send "the bad reader" into the desert burdened with our collective guilt—indicates the very [schizoid] mechanism that leads to racism and sexism in the first place (see chapter 4). After acknowledging that the relation to Nietzsche is grounded upon a mutual exchange of abject material, what becomes of the reader? If Nietzsche's project unsettles the reader to the core, then how should she respond to this situation? Does the analysis presented above exhaust the possibilities of interpreting Nietzsche? Or could one benefit from an ongoing negotiation with his texts? Dead Letters is intended to provide a theoretical starting point from which to interrogate the value of Nietzsche's project to his readers, and the viability of a productive relation to his philosophy. The question of the reader's agency, and of the usefulness of Nietzsche's project of revaluation (the linchpin of his philosophy), must continue to be subjected to scrutiny. For what is revaluation but an attempt to transform the process of interpretation that enables, according to Nietzsche, life itself? The inherent value of the revaluation of values is often taken for granted by the reader, who accepts Nietzsche's critique and his characterization of humanity as a reactive (and therefore bad) form of life. Yet the immediate value of that project for Nietzsche is that it gains a purchase upon his readers, such that they allow the text to reconfigure their very bodies, in accordance with the order designated by Nietzschean revaluation. If Nietzsche's project of revaluation is ultimately to prevail, it must accumulate followers. This is why he situated revaluation within a critique of subjectivity that, quite paradoxically, produces the reader's subjectivity in the very movement of critique. Hence the account in chapter 1 of Nietzsche's genealogy, revealed as an apparatus of subjection. The reader, split by a dual identification with both noble and slave, has a personal stake in Nietzsche's philosophy. For the active noble's force of attraction is grounded in the reader's having already been constituted as reactive, botched, and clever. One is invested in the project of revaluation—of transforming reactive into active force—by virtue of this double bind, because it is one's own (reactive) being that is at issue. In this way, the reader's subjective attachment to revaluation, and to the critique of the subject that attends it, exhibits a curious circularity. As transpires, the best means to recapitulate subjectivity is the very mechanism of its critique. The idea that an engagement with Nietzsche's philosophy

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

181

might lead to an overcoming of the shackles of subjectivity, or one's social and moral bonds, is thus ironic at best. Nietzsche's ability to capture his reader's imagination is contingent precisely upon the reader's acceptance of the social role assigned to each by the text. This is because, as Butler observes, the figure of bad conscience—so central to the becoming reactive of force—is what renders imagination and creativity possible in the first place. The reader thus aspires to an ideal of creativity produced by means of the very process against which it opposes itself. Indeed, the engagement with Nietzsche generates the conditions for both the ideal and the reader's (reactive) subjection to it. It is then of first importance that the reader analyze her own stake in interpreting Nietzsche in these terms, rather than according to an (empty) ideal of freedom from externally imposed constraints. There is no unaffected position of purity from which to interpret Nietzsche. As we have seen already, the ability to occupy a position in relation to Nietzsche's text indicates that an exchange has occurred, through which each party to the transaction [mis]recognizes him- or herself in the other. To claim "immunity" from the commerce of abject material that grounds the relation would mean excluding oneself from discourse with Nietzsche. Likewise, to engage seriously with his writings is already to be sullied by ineradicable excrement: one's own, as well as Nietzsche's. As Bataille recognizes, there is no communication without the risk of contamination by the Other. In essence, the relation pollutes; and the maintenance of purity amounts to a kind of autistic piety. Inasmuch as the relation to Nietzsche can become a constituent factor of the reader's subjection, it is as impossible to throw off the connection to him as it is to throw off social subjection itself. In view of this, perhaps the most pressing question emerging here concerns the possibility of an ongoing relation to Nietzsche, after an attendance to the interpellative effects of his writing. Whereas my own strongest impulse is to twist myself away from Nietzsche, as if I were a snake shedding its skin, such a complete dissociation is hardly viable. In keeping with Nietzsche's metaphor, however, the snake that cannot shed its skin (like the spirit that cannot change opinions) must perish

(Daybreak,

§573, 228), and so the reader is caught in a double bind whereby Nietzsche's texts limit, and thereby also condition her or him as such. In just this way, Nietzsche's influence is readily summarized in terms of the parental relation, whereby ambivalence toward him indicates the constitutive nature of that relation—the relation to the self being managed with reference to the relation to Nietzsche. Sarah Kofman gestures toward this parental dynamic when she notes that, as one of her first philosophical interlocutors, Nietzsche had

i8z

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

exerted a formative force upon her work. Indeed, as the subtitle to Explosion II, "Les Enfants de Nietzsche"

indicates, she positioned herself as Nietzsche's

philosophical offspring.29 Given the eventual fate of that relation, Kofman's selfcharacterization is hardly reassuring to the reader whose primary philosophical identification is with Nietzsche. Yet, in this book I argue that his effect upon the reader can be decisive for an understanding of philosophy, politics, one's own role, and even desire. What then are we to make of this circumstance, and our own manner of implication within it? First it should be emphasized that the distribution of influence between Nietzsche and the reader is not entirely one-sided. Nietzsche's destiny is as contingent upon the reader's response as the reverse, which accounts for his own contagion anxiety (see chapter 3). Nietzsche's specific talent was to harness this uncertainty respecting the interpretation to the task of recruitment, by motivating the reader to redeem him from "the bad interpretation." By representing to the reader her own absence from his text—emphasizing the dearth of readership that separated him from commoner philosophers— Nietzsche interpellates her as his ideal reader. Relative to Nietzsche's silent peers, his true reader is awarded a position outside the sociohistorical context in which Nietzsche writes, since Nietzsche (born posthumously), also falls outside that milieu. Yet, as Dead Letters set out to show, the reader exacts her own ambiguous advantages from the encounter with Nietzsche, whether or not she is conscious of them. On this basis, the success of his writing depends upon its ability to marry two trajectories, whereby the philosophy serves the reader's purposes in order that the reader can perform a function for the philosophy. This relation is only viable if both parties benefit—in the manner of symbiosis—but equally. It relies upon the sacrifice of each to the other: the transmutation (or projection) of self into the other that renders the interaction possible. Second, the attempt "to overcome" the encounter with Nietzsche invariably leads instead to a manner of incorporation. This is because the act of betrayal in which overcoming consists binds the reader all the more to Nietzsche, according to the logic of mourning (see chapter 2). Nietzsche prefigures this betrayal where Zarathustra tells his disciples that they should lose him if they are to find themselves (Zarathustra, "On the Bestowing Virtue,"§3,103). Such "overcoming" is only partial, as the ultimate movement in this dialectic is Zarathustra's return. Betrayal thus makes way for a deeper commitment to him. Likewise, the betrayal internal to mourning concerns the fact that we find a means to keep living after our dead are buried. We profane the

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

I83

dead routinely, by placing them at the level of everyday objects; and this is a variety of overcoming, or incorporation. Nevertheless, betrayal forges the connection to the object of reverence even as it attempts a departure from it. Nietzsche understood this better than most and demonstrated numerously (but specifically with reference to Christianity) the power of guilt for the production of subjects of the law. In overcoming Nietzsche, one thereby enacts one's commitment to him. Again, we are confronted with the double bind that comprises our subjectivity and our subjection to Nietzsche. I have closed with a consideration of Klossowski's encounter with Nietzsche because we might find within his concept of simulacrum a possible direction forward. The simulacrum

is essentially an equivocal concept, and so—like

eternal recurrence—has been interpreted and appropriated variously. For instance, Ian James attempts to recuperate the transformative possibilities of the simulacrum by rendering it in terms of parody. James argues that Klossowski's parodic mode of thought, engaged in his fictional as well as philosophical writings, casts doubt upon the notion of identity and origin, showing the reader instead that all identity claims are performative—and so effectively they destabilize the identities they enact. This interpretation of the simulacrum has interesting implications for Klossowski's readers. As James states this, "[f]rom the outset Klossowski suggests that there is something strange about Nietzsche's text insofar as it necessarily forces his commentators to parody it." 30 The interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy is thus necessarily a perversion of it, through which the commentator is forced unwittingly to betray Nietzsche. We can understand the consequences arising from this conception of the relation to Nietzsche in a number of ways. James, however, sees parody ultimately to have emancipatory effects: Paradoxically . . . the only way to live one's existence in good conscience is always self-consciously to dissimulate, to perform a role that one knows to be a fiction or mask, because that is what one is always doing anyway. In the movements of parody, honesty and dissimulation, authenticity and falsity cease to function in opposition to each other, and properly speaking they just cease to function, for there is no point of origin or self-identity upon which any of these terms can be founded. ("Play of Parody," 309-10) The circumstance thus outlined is paradoxical, and perhaps even revolutionary, since it opens the question of what it means to live authentically ("in

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

184

good conscience") without an origin, or identity. What the dismantling of oppositions such as "honesty and dissimulation, authenticity and falsity" achieves is to demonstrate the complexity of identification: that the mechanism through which we understand the self as such is also its point of weakness; and conversely, that overcoming Nietzsche also involves a performance (albeit parodic) of the gestures through which one is bound to him. In this respect, a distance is affected through parody, but such detachment easily collapses back into Nietzsche. Parody is never merely parodic. Rather, parody is the way the subject "does" identity. Accordingly the ideals of authenticity, independence and singularity engendered by Nietzsche's philosophy, also function to bring the reader into his service. The impulse to separate from Nietzsche consequent of disaffection with him leads the reader into his sphere, because the identification with his text involves betrayal of necessity. The Name of the Father is perpetuated through a death rite that sees the son accede to the father's function, but always with deference to him: the sublime object that keeps all subjects in check. But importantly, Freud maintains that this social configuration is motivated by the son's guilt of imagined betrayal, residual of a primordial ancestral parricide. As the betrayal inherent to parody cannot engender the overcoming of subjection to Nietzsche that it promises, I would like to return to the function of simulacra as developed in this last chapter, as a locus of ambivalence. Understood in terms of ambivalence, the simulacrum of return renders apparent the reader's investment within Nietzsche's work. Indeed, the simulacrum represents the bare mechanism of investment; and the capacity of the text to show the reader to herself in negativity, as abject remainder. Whereas parody, conceived as an attempt to escape Nietzsche, immanently risks falling back into his demand (specifically, the demand to leave him so that he may return), read in terms of ambivalence, the simulacrum positions the reader as neither entirely inside nor outside Nietzsche, but rather as vacillating between the two. Thus it designates an acknowledgment to Nietzsche that also marks one off from him, yet only momentarily. A distance is enacted to the extent that the simulacrum demonstrates the impossibility of any project completely to coincide with him. Yet, there remains between Nietzsche and the reader an umbilical thread constituted by what recurrence represents: the confluence of abject remainders, of both reader and text. To return to the question of whether one can overcome Nietzsche's "bad influence"—or extricate oneself from the contamination represented

THE VISION, THE RIDDLE, AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

I85

by his more extreme positions on women, Jews, socialists, feminists, democracy—one must conclude from these reflections upon

simulacra

that the answer is no. However, Nietzsche's contagion is not what it seems since it represents contamination by one's own abject remainder. If the engagement with Nietzsche is ultimately irreversible, it is due to the role his texts play representing and concealing his readers' disavowed possibilities. In this respect, then, flight from Nietzsche is also a flight from oneself (in the manner of projection), which is destined for failure. Nietzsche's text is effective because it provides the occasion for articulating a relation to one's own abject material, such that we may detach ourselves from it, while also enjoying its ambiguous benefits. In this light, repudiation of Nietzsche—or even those notorious misappropriations of his philosophy—misses its mark. What is needed is neither a vehement rejection of Nietzsche, nor uncritical embrace only of those aspects of his philosophy that please us. Rather, the continued engagement with Nietzsche's project in its entirety is not only inevitable but also desirable to the extent that it is attempted under "controlled conditions." What is required is a new ethics of reading Nietzsche, whereby instead of locating the excesses of his texts elsewhere, readers take responsibility for them in the knowledge that their attraction to Nietzsche's philosophy demands excess as the site of

projective

identification. This ethics of reading Nietzsche might finally enable the revaluation that his philosophy envisages. However if such a revaluation is to transpire, it must begin with an assessment of Nietzsche's project, and then extend to an examination of the reader's own commitments. By posing the question "Do I want this?" to each of Nietzsche's propositions—and particularly his most extreme moments, the sites of our ambivalence—the reader would partake in a project of awakening the affects, consisting of the return to corporeality that the philosophy had foreshadowed. This awakening of the affects provoked by revaluation would traverse the limits of Nietzsche's philosophy per se, effecting instead a transformation of Nietzsche and the reader that acknowledges the coexistence of each through the other. The imperative of revaluation thus conceived is the commitment never to take for granted the authority of Nietzsche's text, or one's ability to renounce a connection to it. The relation to Nietzsche is abiding and limiting, but need not amount only to the wretched mode of servility sketched by the genealogy. Rather, the ability actively to evaluate his philosophy, and one's own relation to it, is situated already within a reactive subjection to his texts. But as Nietzsche imparts to

iB6

DEAD LETTERS TO NIETZSCHE

us in Genealogy, albeit implicitly and perhaps against his will, reactivity is the birthplace of the active evaluation that only mythically precedes it. Likewise, only once the reader acknowledges a subjection to Nietzsche's texts, and the role that it plays in the articulation of desire, will she be positioned to have a degree of control over what the relation to Nietzsche can achieve.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

i. Dorothy Porter, "The Dead," Crete (Melbourne: Hyland, 1996). 2. See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamilton, 1992). 3. See Daniel Conway's "Ecce Caesar: Nietzsche's Imperial Aspirations," Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, (eds.) (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). 4. See Rosalyn Diprose, "Nietzsche, Ethics and Sexual Difference," Radical Philosophy (52), Summer (1989), 27-32. 5. See Rebecca Stringer, "'A Nietzschean Breed': Feminism, Vicitmology, Ressentiment" Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Politics. Alan D. Schrift, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 6. Alfred Baumler and Alfred Rosenberg are perhaps the most prominent Nietzsche scholars of the Nazi persuasion. For an excellent account of the National Socialist reception of Nietzsche's thought, see Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 232307. For contemporary reflections upon this aspect of Nietzschean scholarship, see the edited collection Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? See also the chapter in Mazzino Montinari, Reading Nietzsche. Trans. Greg Whitlock (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), entitled "Nietzsche between Alfred Baumler and Georg Lukacs," 141-69. 7. In particular, see Paul-Laurent Assoun, Freud and Nietzsche. Trans. Richard L. Collier Jr. (London and New Brunswick, New Jersey: Athlone, 2000); Ronald Lehrer, Nietzsche's Presence in Freud's Life and Thought: The Origins of a Psychology of Dynamic Unconscious Mental Functioning (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995); and Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ronald L. Lehrer, (eds.), Nietzsche and Depth Psychology (New York: State University of New York Press, *999)-

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), "Woman and Child," §380, 150. 9. See Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1971). In this seminal essay, Althusser sets out to demonstrate a relation between relations of production,

i88

NOTES TO PP. 4 - 1 6

ideology (the way that material relations of production are "imagined," or the meaning that we give to them), and subjection: [I]deology "acts" or "functions" in such a way that it "recruits" subjects among the individuals . . . or "transforms" the individuals into subjects . . . by the very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: "Hey you there!" (162-63) If ideology is supervenient upon the existence of subjects who (re)enact it, then, in terms of reading Nietzsche, his philosophy (ideology) is reproduced by means of the reader, who is subjected to his text, and so takes on a role in relation to it. 10. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 142-48. 11. Michel Foucault "What Is an Author?," Twentieth-century Literary Theory, Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller, (eds.) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 124-42. 12. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology», Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 13. Plato, Phaedrus, Trans. Tom Griffith (New York: Knopf, 2000).

CHAPTER i : ONTOLOGY FOR PHILOLOGISTS

i. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), preface, §5, 5. 2. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), "On the Prejudices of Philosopher," §12. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 127. 4. The subtitle to Nietzsche's "autobiography," Ecce Homo, is 'How to Become What You Are'—and thus could be mistaken, in the contemporary context, for a selfhelp manual. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989). 5. "[t]here is no being 'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything." See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), I §13, 45. 6. Nietzsche's role as guarantor of the future is discussed at more length in chapter 2, in relation to Derrida's Otobiographies. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gasamtausgabe. Giorgio CoUi and Mazzino Montinari, eds. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970), 8;i: 2 [^]. My translation. 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power. Walter Kaufmann, ed. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), §507. 275-76. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), book 5, §374, 336. Nietzsche provides a more rough and ready expli-

NOTES TO PP. 16-Z6

189

cation of the interaction between will to power and perspective in his unpublished notes: Perspectivism is only a complex form of specificity. My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (—its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on. (Will to Power, §636, 340) 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, "On the Prejudices of Philosophers," §13. 11. I have written elsewhere about Nietzsche's use of digestive and reproductive metaphors for the intellect, and vice versa. See Joanne Faulkner, "The Body as Text in the Writings of Nietzsche and Freud," Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy. 7, November (2003): 94-124. 12. See, for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Falsity in their Extramoral Sense," Essays on Metaphor. W. Shibbles, ed. (Wisconsin: The Language Press, 1972), 2. 13. For his account of the importance of forgetting, see Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), 57. 14. See "Of the Despisers of the Body" in Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 61-63. 15. Jacques Lacan, "The Freudian Thing," Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 128. 16. Deleuze argues that Nietzsche uses his account of the relation in order implicitly to criticize Hegel's tendency to equate power with the representation (or recognition) of power. (Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone, 1983), 10). However, Genealogy may also be read as a "heuristic myth" wherein there is no possibility of a master type that "names" without a concern for the recognition of his power. David McNeill writes: [T]he noble mode of valuation appears to be essentially, if only implicitly, comparative and relative. The nobles first come to experience themselves as noble only in contradistinction to a lower social stratum to which they oppose themselves . . . it seems that what Nietzsche says about 'slave morality,'—that 'from the outset (it) says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed'—is just as true of 'noble morality' as it is of 'slave morality.' ("Moral Psychology and Transcendental Philosophy in Nietzsche's Genealogy" unpublished manuscript). 17. The French jouissance incorporates a legal sense, of use and ownership—having something at one's disposal for free enjoyment—as well as pleasure. 18. See Daniel Conway, uEcce Caesar: Nietzsche's Imperial Aspirations." 19. Significantly in this context, the carnival was originally a festival that involved

190

NOTES TO PP. Z 6 - 3 8

the ritual reversal of social hierarchy, through the playing of roles. Nietzsche's usage of the term here indicates a relation to this tradition, albeit concerned with the reversal of privilege through the infliction of suffering rather than excessive drinking, and so forth. 20. See David McNeill, as referred to in note 16. 21. "Circuits of Bad Conscience: Nietzsche and Freud," in Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) 63-82. 22. In this book, Butler focuses upon the figure of "the turn" as it is used to demonstrate psychic interiority in the texts not only of Nietzsche, but also of Hegel, Freud, Foucault, and Althusser. 23. Freud uses the term Verinnerlichung, "internalization," to explain the authority of the superego. (See Sigmund Freud, "Civilization and Its Discontents," Civilization, Society and Religion, Penguin Freud Library vol 12. Albert Dickson, ed. Trans. James Strachey [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991], 72). 24. For an evocative depiction of Nietzsche as a leader of cults, see Geoff Wake, Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophes; or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). 25. In the story of Oedipus, a monster (sphinx) poses him the question of mortality, and whoever cannot answer it correctly is cast into the abyss.

CHAPTER 2 : LACAN, D E S I R E , AND T H E O R I G I N A T I N G F U N C T I O N OF LOSS

i. Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I. Jacques-Alain Miller, ed. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 166. 2. Jacques Lacan, "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet" Yale French Studies. 55/56 (1977): 49. 3. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre Xll: Problemes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, 1964-1965, unpublished. 4. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 3-6. Although the punishment that Foucault describes pertains to "Damiens the regicide," arguably the King's place accrues its power from being symbolically paternal. This, at least, would be the case in psychoanalytic terms. 5. Sigmund Freud, "The Ego and the Id," The Essentials of Psycho-analysis: The Definitive Collection of Sigmund Freud's Writing. Anna Freud, ed. Trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, "The Ego and the Id," 1991), 459. 6. Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," Ecrits, 1-7. 7. For a reference to Biihler, see Lacan 2001,6. For an account of Lacan's intellectual debt to Wallon, see Shuli Barzilai, "On Chimpanzees and Children in the Lookingglass: Wallon's Mirror Experiments and Lacan's Theory of Reflexive Recognition," PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts (2004). See also Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France 1925-1985, Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Free Association, 1990), 66-71. On the relation between Lacan and Merleau-Ponty see Roudinesco 1990, 300, 390—91.

NOTES TO PP. 4 0 - 5 3

I^I

8. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 118. 9. There is no precise English translation for the French jouissance. It signifies "pleasure," but also a sense of property, or propriety that is better expressed by "enjoyment." If one is the object of someone's jouissance, they enjoy you as they would enjoy property. In this sense, one's subject status is thereby compromised. Lacan's use of the term is also supposed to convey the sense of pleasure that is inseparable from pain, or a pleasure that cannot be owned as such, as with the hysterical symptom. 10. Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 144. 11. Freud elaborated his controversial concept of the death drive in Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)," On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Trans, and ed. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). See my "Freud's Concept of the Death Drive and Its Relation to the Superego," Minerva, An Internet journal of Philosophy, 9 (2005): 153-76. 12. See Sigmund Freud, "Project for a Scientific Psychology," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1, Trans, and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966). See also Sigmund Freud, "Instincts and their Vicissitudes," On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, Trans, and ed. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). 13. Jacques Lacan, "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis," Ecrits, 20. See also in Ecrits, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious," 307. 14. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, Jacques-Alain Miller, ed. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 177. 15. Jane Gallop makes this point in Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 80-81. 16. Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 104-5. 17. Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 90. 18. Lacan designates as the "quilting point" (point de caption) a term that provisionally, and in a certain context, halts the shifting of meaning that characterizes signification. It is a term that provides a frame in which meaning can be designated [Ecrits, 303). 19. Lacan argues that "subjectivity" is an excess that can never be captured within the statement, differentiating between two registers of subjectivity: the subject of enunciation (le sujet de Venonciation) and the "enounced," or stated, subject {le sujet enonce). The statement of the cogito thus produces even as it ascertains the existence of the subject. See Seminar XI140 and 26. 20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), 217. It is possible that Nietzsche is parodying Rousseau here, who, prefaces his Confessions: "Here is the only portrait of man painted exactly following nature and in all her truth that exists, and probably will ever exist." (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions 1 [Paris: Le livre de poche, 1972], 4. (My translation.)

NOTES TO PP. 5 4 - 7 4

I9Z

21. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Christie V. McDonald, ed. (New York: Schocken, 1985), 8. 22. For Nietzsche's use of the ear as a metaphor for a connection of understanding, see "On the Vision and the Riddle" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 178). See also Beyond Good and Evil (§202,115), and The Gay Science (§381, 343). 23. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 114. 24. See Gilles Deleuze, "Nomad Thought," The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation. David B. Allison, ed. (New York: Dell Publishing, 1977). 25. Nietzsche discusses this aspect of Christianity, most significantly in The AntiChrist (§39,151-52). 26. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo. Trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, i960), 141. 27. Slavoj Zizek poses this in more Lacanian terms in "The Big Other Doesn't Exist," journal of European Psychoanalysis [5], Spring-Fall (1997), §1,1. 28. Luce Irigaray criticizes Nietzsche's writings on the grounds of their not being able to accommodate "the woman reader," designated by him as incapable of friendship. See Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). See also my "Voices from the Depths: Reading'Love' in Irigaray's Marine Lover," Diacritics, 33.1 (2003) 81-94. Alan Schrift argues that Nietzsche uses the figure of the Jew in a bricoleur fashion, simply to assist his case against a common enemy, Christianity; but that this nonetheless puts the Jew in "an awkward position." Alan D. Schrift, "Kofman, Nietzsche and the Jews," Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 217.

CHAPTER 3: "THE INSIDERS"

i. Leo Strauss, An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays. Hilail Gildin, ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), ^S. 2. Ernst Krieck, cited in Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy, 253. 3. Alexander Nehamas, "Who Are "the Philosophers of the Future"? A Reading of Beyond Good and Evil," Reading Nietzsche. Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 58. 4. Slovoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology. (London: Verso, 1989), 104. 5. The diagram represents graph three of a set of four. It appears in "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet," 13. Here it is reproduced from "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious," in Ecrits (3i3)6. Zizek provides a lucid explanation of this process in his The Sublime Object of Ideology,

110-21.

7. Hamlet, act 2, scene 2; lines 85-167 in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Blackfriars Shakespeare, J. Leeds Barroll, ed. (Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown, 1970), 29-31.

8. Hamlet is played out from its protagonist's viewpoint, but once we separate ourselves from the tyranny of Hamlet's point of view, it is not at all certain that Claudius had actually done anything underhanded. Moreover, from a psychoanalytic view,

NOTES TO PP. 7 4 - 9 0

193

it is not at all certain that he is not Hamlet's "real father." The relationship merely represents the antagonism between the child and his father, such that perhaps we are met with a split in the boy's mind between his idealized father and the father who is his rival. In this light, Hamlet's continued suspicion of Claudius represents his refusal to accept his father's authority (the non du Fere), and to rescind his own right to the mother's body. After all, paternity is always uncertain, and so the rebellious little boy can take refuge in this uncertainty. 9. I do not wish to position myself above the esoteric reader or the commerce in abject material that structures the reader's desire—as if such a position were possible. Instead, I intend to bring the esoteric position down to the level of Nietzsche's everyday readers. To this extent, and perhaps to this extent alone, my reading of Rosen and Lampert is a political gesture, divulging as it does a commitment to the egalitarianism against which Nietzsche's philosophy rails. 10. Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 1. 11. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1952), 22-37.

12. Stanley Rosen, The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 139. 13. For an account of the importance of physiology to Nietzsche, see Penelope Deutscher, "Autobiobodies: Nietzsche and the Life-blood of the Philosopher," Parallax 11 [3] (2005), 28-39. For an analysis of the relation of Nietzsche's bodily metaphors to his philosophy, see Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture; Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy (London: Athlone, 1991). 14. For an excellent analysis of Nietzsche's reception by thinkers of the Third Reich, see Steven E. Aschheim's The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, especially 232-271. 15. Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 45. 16. Both Lampert and Rosen indicate the absurdity of all Nietzsche's readers believing themselves to be philosophers of the future, and the ubiquity of Nietzsche's attractiveness to his readers. See Lampert, Modern Times, 277, and Rosen, The Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 189. 17. Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 4. 18. Sigmund Freud, "Three Essays on Sexuality," The Essentials of Psychoanalysis: The Definitive Collection of Sigmund Freud's 'Writing. Anna Freud, ed. Trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 322. 19. Sigmund Freud, "Negation," On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, Trans, and ed. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 439. 20. Berel Lang, "Misinterpretation as the Author's Responsibility (Nietzsche's Fascism, for Instance)," Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of Philosophy. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. "Wistrich, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 6i-6z. 21. Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), z35~3^- See also Question of Being, 137-75-

NOTES TO PP. 9 I - I I 6

194

22. Robert Sinnerbrink, '"We Hyperboreans': Platonism and Politics in Heidegger and Nietzsche," Contretemps, 3, July (2002), 169.

CHAPTER 4: THE CONTAGION OF AFFECT IN NIETZSCHE

i. Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, Ted Hughes, ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 272-73.

2. Melanie Klein, "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms," The Selected Melanie Klein. Juliet Mitchell, ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 181. 3. Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), 10. 4. Wilfred R. Bion, Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psych-analysis (London: William Heinemann, 1967), 104. 5. Sigmund Freud, "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (1911)," Trans. James Strachey, Complete Psychological Works, standard edition, vol. 12 (London: Hogarth, 1959). 6. Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, Trans. Bruce Boone (New York: Paragon, 1992), xix.

7. Sur does generally translate directly as "on," "on top of," "over," or "about." Yet it can also refer to a relation of quantity, as in un sur dix personnes (one in/out of ten people). It may also indicate a relation of means, as in vivre sur ses economies (to live off one's savings) or copier sur quelqu'un (to copy off/from someone). 8. For Bataille, the "accursed share" [part maudite] indicates the portion of the economy that is destined to be wantonly and conspicuously wasted, and that thereby appears to contradict the economic rationale (at least in the West) of parsimony and austerity. Examples might include nonprocreative sex, Christmas shopping, and spending on the arts; or, alternatively, war, which wastes both human life and government moneys. Prodigality serves its own purpose, for Bataille, and (according to a very Nietzschean logic) justifies the entire economic system, acting as its release and raison d'etre. The sense in which Bataille might relate to Nietzsche as his own "accursed share" is explored shortly. 9. Laughter represents for Bataille a kind of collapse of coherence and meaning: a tolerance for ambivalence, contradiction, and excess whereby a singular "personal identity" is rendered impossible. Laughter is also for Bataille a mode of communication, in which something of one's self is transmitted to the Other, as if by contagion. Georges Bataille, The Bataille Reader, Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell 1997), 60. See also Michele H. Richman, Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982), 115. 10. David Farrell Krell, Nietzsche: A Novel (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 100-101. 11. See Freud, Negation, 437, and "The Unconscious," On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, Trans, and ed. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 190. 12. "What is clean in relation to one thing may be unclean in relation to another, and vice versa. The idiom of pollution lends itself to a complex algebra which takes into account the variables in each context." (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, i966],9)

NOTES TO PP. I I 8 - I Z 9

195

13. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, Trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2. 14. Julie Kristeva, Melanie Klein, Trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 72-73.

CHAPTER 5: FAMILY ROMANCES AND TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

i. Jacques Derrida, "Sarah Kofman," The Work of Mourning, Trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 170. 2. As Francoise Duroux suggests, Kofman contravenes philosophical mores by taking an interest in philosophers' lives, and how the life is related to the philosophy. (Francoise Duroux, "How a Woman Philosophizes," Trans. Lisa Walsh; Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 136). 3. See Penelope Deutscher, "Disappropriations: Luce Irigaray and Sarah Kofman," Resistance, Flight, Creation: Feminist Enactments of French Philosophy. Dorothea Olkowski, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 166. 4. Penelope Deutscher, "Complicated Fidelity: Kofman's Freud (Reading The Childhood of Art with The Enigma of Woman)," Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999). See also her "Disappropriations." 5. For instance, it has been suggested that Kofman's turn away from the philosophical, and toward autobiographical writing, led her to take her own life (Duroux, "How a Woman," 138-40; Verena Andermatt Conley, "For Sarah Kofman, on Rue Ordener, Rue Labat." SubStance. 81 (1996), 153; Kelly Oliver, "Sarah Kofman's Queasy Stomach and the Riddle of the Paternal Law," Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver, eds. [Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999], 183,188). I find the citation of Kofman's death in support of a particular interpretation of her project to be problematic, for a variety of reasons. What is necessary is to work through what we can make of her death, as a text: how it influences the reader's relation to her work, certainly, but also how the death presents itself to us as "a work"; what are the conditions of its legibility? And what is the relation between death and text per se? 6. In "Complicated Fidelity," Penelope Deutscher provides an excellent exposition of Kofman's relation to her textual "father-figures," Nietzsche, Freud, and Derrida, demonstrating how Kofman constructed her identity by mimicking her own various stylized depictions of Freud and Nietzsche. 7. Sarah Kofman with Roland Jaccard, "Apprendre aux hommes a tenir parole: Portrait de Sarah Kofman," he Monde, 27-28, April (1986), 'Aujourd'hui': 7; cited in Penelope Deutscher, "Complicated Fidelity," 159. Deutscher's translation. 8. Sarah Kofman, "Explosion I: Of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo," Trans. Duncan Large, Diacritics, 24:4 (1994), 58. 9. Sigmund Freud, "Family Romances," On Sexuality, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 7. Trans. James Strachey, Angela Richards, ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 222-23; 2.24-25.

10. Sarah Kofman, "A Fantastical Genealogy: Nietzsche's Family Romance," Trans. D. Jenson. Nietzsche and the Feminine, Peter J. Burgard, ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 42.

196

NOTES TO PP. 1 3 1 - 1 5 1

11. Kelly Oliver suggests "matricide" as a figure for Nietzsche's relation to his mother, in her reading of Explosions ("Queasy," 179-81). 12. For instance, Deutscher ("Complicated Fidelity," 160) and Oliver ("Queasy," 186,188) each draw attention to the figures of the good and bad mother in the text, but neither mentions Klein by name. Kathryn Robson invokes Klein explicitly in "Bodily Detours: Sarah Kofman's Narratives of Childhood Trauma," Modern Language Review, 99(3] (2004) 610. 13. See Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. Trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 21. 14. Sarah Squire writes of bulimia as a means of managing anxiety when other means are deficient. Squire's personal account of bulimia is also mapped out according to a Kleinian framework, and recounts her own "use" of bulimia to mourn the loss of her mother. Sarah Squire, "The Personal and the Political: Writing the Theorist's Body," Australian Feminist Studies, 17 [37] (2002), 6i-6z. 15. See Solange Leibovici, "Remembering, Acting-out, Working through: The Case of Sarah Kofman," PsyArtrAn Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, special series: Conceptualizing Trauma (2004). I(D. As Robson points out, the il that Ann Smock translates as referring to the pen in Kofman's refrain "// ma «ldche» avant que je puisse me decide a Vabondonner" (Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat [Paris: Galilee, 1994], 9), might also refer to Kofman's father, "as both could be seen to have abandoned the narrator prematurely" (Robson, "Bodily Detours," 613). A level of ambiguity, between the father and the pen, was most likely intentional. 17. In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud elucidates his concept of the death drive in relation to "a game" his grandson invents. The child tosses a spool from his cot, exclaiming "fort" ("gone"), and then returns the spool, screaming "da" ("there/ here"). Freud interpreted this game as a working through of the child's anxiety respecting his mother's recent intermittent absence from him. Thus he understands himself to gain control of the mother (whose proxy is the spool), and masters the traumatic experience her leaving provokes. 18. Apres coup is the French translation of Nachtraglichkeit, used by Freud to mean the retro-, or deferred, action of consciousness in making sense of psychic events. See footnote 43 to Duncan Large's translation of Kofman's Explosion I. 19. Jean-Luc Nancy, "Forward: Run, Sarah!" Trans. Paul Patton, Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), viii. 20. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), 5. 21. Sarah Kofman, Le Mepris des Juifs: Nietzsche, les Juifs, VAntisemitisme (Paris: Galilee, 1994), 12. My translation.

C H A P T E R 6: T H E V I S I O N , T H E R I D D L E , A N D T H E VICIOUS CIRCLE

i. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xvi. 2. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordworth, 2003), 66. 3. With respect to Klossowski's attendance to ambivalence, it is notable that he

NOTES TO PP. 1 5 1 - 1 6 5

197

was well versed in psychoanalytic theory, having applied it already to his reading of the Marquis de Sade in 'Elements d'une etude psychanalytique sur le marquis de Sade,' Revue francaise de psychanalyse, 6 [3-4] (1933)5 45^~74- See also Leslie Hill, Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3-44. Blondel argues that this relation is circular, the common thread between terms being interpretation. See his Body and Culture, 239 and 242. 5. Leslie Hill suggests that Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux is "a translation" that responds to and inverts Heidegger's interpretation of eternal return as properly metaphysical. See Writing at the Limit, 154. 6. Klossowski provides three definitions for this term in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Lucidity refers first to "the 'physiological' consciousness of oneself and of others" (53); second, to "the new consciousness of the more or less subtle 'conditioning' that underlies every mode of behaving, thinking, feeling, and willing" (53); and third, to "the thought of a total discordance between the hidden reality and the one that is claimed or admitted" (54). 7. Lou Salome, Friedrich Nietzsche: The Man in His Work. Trans. Siegfried Mandel (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan, 1988), 89. 8. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Summit, 1985), 84-85. 9. Nietzsche's notes contain much more sustained and worked-through elaborations of eternal return, in which the idea is "tested" against scientific theories of the day—that is, mechanism (especially thermodynamics). 10. See especially Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1991, 228); Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy; and Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 205-9. 11. See especially The Gay Science, §341, 273-74, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "The Vision and the Riddle," 176-80. 12. This interpretation of return is summarized by Bernd Magnus in his book Nietzsche's Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 142.

13. See Daniel W. Smith, "Klossowski's Reading of Nietzsche: Impulses, Phantasms, Simulacra, Stereotypes," Diacritics, 35 [1] (2005), 9.1 would like to thank Daniel Smith for providing me with his notes on Klossowski's vocabulary in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle prior to this article's publication. 14. -Allen S. Weiss brings out this double genesis of the simulacrum when he writes: "language is both the simulacrum of the common external resistance and the simulacrum of our singular phantasms" (Alan S. Weiss, "A Logic of the Simulacrum or AntiRoberte," Paul Foss, Paul Taylor, Allen S. Weiss, eds."Phantasm and Simulacra: The Drawings of Pierre Klossowski," special issue of Art and Text, 18, July [1985], 118), meaning that the simulacrum is produced at the limit of two constraints: generality (the code of everyday signs), and the "creativity of the sovereign individual." 15. The terminology I am using here comes from Jean Baudrillard's account of simulacra in Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Baudrillard's simulacrum, however, has quite a different purpose to that of Klossowski. 16. The notion of the sovereign individual was coined in relation to the libertinage movement of thought that culminated in Sade. The sovereign individual is not subject

198

NOTES TO PP. 1 6 5 - 1 8 2

to the limits and superstitions of religion and morality that regulate society; taking "his" law from Nature rather than society. 17. With the use of the phrase gestural communication I have in mind MerleauPonty's account of intersubjectivity in terms of the postural schema. Transposed to Nietzsche's philosophy, the idea of "gestural communication" describes a structural replication rather than the transmission of actual material. 18. The opening passage of Roberte ce soir in Pierre Klossowski, Robert ce soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: Two Novels. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse (London: Marion Boyars, 1989), 9. 19. Pierre Klossowski, Roberte ce soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: Two Novels. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1989), 69, quoted in Sade My Neighbor, Trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 4. 20. D. A. R de Sade, Justine; or, Good Conduct Well Chastised (1791), The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, trans, and eds. (New York: Grove, 1965), 457-58. 21. D. A. R de Sade, "Note Concerning My Detention," The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, trans, and eds. (New York: Grove, 1965), 153-54. 22. Michel Delon states well Sade's invidious position in relation to the established political interests of his day, being identified by the Jacobins as a feudal lord, and by monarchists as implicated in the revolution. Michel Delon, Sade oeuvres, vol. 1 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1990); and Michel Delon, "Sade comme revelateur ideologique," Romanistische Zeitschrift fiir Literaturgeschichte 5 [1] (1981), i n . 23. See my treatment of Nietzsche's master-slave narrative {Genealogy of Morals) in chapter 1 of the present volume. 24. See Thomas DiPiero, Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel, 1569-1791 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 25. D. A. R de Sade, "Philosophy in the Bedroom" (1795), The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, trans, and eds. (New York: Grove, 1965). 26. Thomas DiPiero, commenting upon the rhetorical efficacy of Justine, argues that Sade writes subversively by means of a style that parodies narrative conventions of his day—for instance, the educational treatise—but in particular, the convention of vraisemblance, or verisimilitude. This deployment of vraisemblance, or verisimilitude, clearly resonates with Klossowski's understanding of the simulacrum as what simulates, or parodies, the real. 27. Waite suggests that until "the left-Nietzschean" confronts the fundamental elitism of Nietzsche's philosophy they are infected by it in a way that they cannot control. What is needed, according to Waite, is a front-on assault of Nietzsche's esotericism, which his book attempts. I agree with Waite's analysis to an extent, but do not think he goes far enough to address how the reader can productively negotiate their implication with Nietzsche, and how his own relation to Nietzsche might constitute a particular enactment of unconscious response. 28. The one for whom the symptom is intended in this case would be Nietzsche himself, just as the one for whom the hysterical symptom is directed is "the Big Other," merely represented by the analyst. 29. Sarah Kofman, Explosion II: Les Enfants des Nietzsche (Paris: Galilee, 1993),

NOTES TO PP. 18Z-183

199

371. Penelope Deutscher also remarks on Kofman's positing of this relation. She translates Kofman: "Has one properly understood Nietzsche?... at any rate, one will have loved him, one will have been with him symbiotically to the point of being confused with him." (Explosions II, 371, cited in "Disappropriation," 168). 30. Ian James, "Simulacrum and the Play of Parody in the Writing of Pierre Klossowski," French Studies, 54(3], July (2000), 309.

BIBLIO-GRAPHY

Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, 123-73. London: NLB, 1971.

Aschheim, Steven E. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." In Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana, 1977,142-48. Barzilai, Shuli. "On Chimpanzees and Children in the Looking-glass: Wallon's Mirror Experiments and Lacan's Theory of Reflexive Recognition." PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts (2004). http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ ipsa/journal/2oo4_barzilaioi-2.shtml (last accessed January 5, 2009). Bataille, Georges. "The Use Value of D. A. E de Sade." In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 192-7-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr., edited by Allan Stoekl. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. . On Nietzsche, translated by Bruce Boone. New York: Paragon, 1992. . The Bataille Reader, edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson. Oxford: Blackwell 1997. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Bion, Wilfred R. Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psych-analysis. London: William Heinemann, 1967. Blondel, Eric. Nietzsche: The Body and Culture; Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy. London: Athlone, 1991. Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Boothby, Richard. Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan. New York and London: Routledge, 2001. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. . Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. London: Routledge, 1997. Conley, Verena Andermatt. "For Sarah Kofman, on Rue Ordener, rue Labat." SubStance. 81 (1996): 153-59. Conway, Daniel. "Ecce Caesar: Nietzsche's Imperial Aspirations." In Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, ed. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, 173—95. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ZOI

Danto, Arthur. Nietzsche as Philosopher. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Deleuze, Gilles. "Nomad Thought." In The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison, 142-49. New York: Dell, 1977. . Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London: Athlone, 1983. Delon, Michel. "Sade comme revelateur ideologique," Komanistische Zeitschrift fur Literaturgeschichte 5 [1] (1981): 103-12. . Sade Oeuvres, vol. I. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology', translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. . The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Christie V. McDonald. New York: Schocken, 1985. . "Sarah Kofman." In The Work of Mourning, Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. 165-88. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Deutscher, Penelope. "Complicated Fidelity: Kofman's Freud (Reading The Childhood of Art with The Enigma of Woman)." In Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, ed. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver, 159-73. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999. . "Disappropriations: Luce Irigaray and Sarah Kofman." In Resistance, Flight, Creation: Feminist Enactments of French Philosophy, ed. Dorothea Olkowski, 155-78. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. . "Autobiobodies: Nietzsche and the Life-blood of the Philosopher." Parallax 11(3] (2005): 28-39.

DiPiero, Thomas. Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel, 1569—iyyi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Diprose, Rosalyn. "Nietzsche, Ethics and Sexual Difference." Radical Philosophy 52 (Summer 1989): 27-32. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Duroux, Francoise. "How a Woman Philosophizes," trans. Lisa Walsh. In Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, ed. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver, 134-40. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Faulkner, Joanne. "The Body as Text in the Writings of Nietzsche and Freud." Minerva: An Internet journal of Philosophy 7 (November 2003): 94-124. . "Voices From the Depths: Reading 'Love' in Irigaray's Marine Lover" Diacritics 33(1] (2003) 81-94. . "Freud's Concept of the Death Drive and Its Relation to the Superego." Minerva, 9 (2005): 153-76. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. . "What Is an Author?" In Twentieth-Century Literary Theory, edited by Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller, 124-42. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Freud, Sigmund. "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning." In Complete Psychological Works, standard edition, vol. 12, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 213-26. London: Hogarth Press, 1959. . Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, i960. . "Project for a Scientific Psychology." In The Standard Edition of the Complete

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Z02

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. i, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 283-397. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966. . "Family Romances." On Sexuality, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 7, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards, 217-25. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. . "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." In On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 113-38. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. . "Instincts and their Vicissitudes." In On Metapsychology, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 269-338. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. . "Negation." In On Metapsychology, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 439-41. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. . "The Unconscious." In On Metapsychology, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 159-222. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. . "Three Essays on Sexuality." In The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis: The Definitive Collection of Sigmund Freud's Writing, ed. Anna Freud, trans. James Strachey, 277-375. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. . "Civilization and Its Discontents." In Civilization, Society and Religion, Penguin Freud Library, vol 12, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey, 243340. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. . "The Ego and the Id." In The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, 439-81. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Hamilton, 1992.

Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Golomb, Jacob and Wistrich, Robert S. (eds.) Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche, vol. II, trans. David Farrell Krell. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Hill, Leslie. Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Irigaray, Luce. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. James, Ian. "Simulacrum and the Play of Parody in the Writing of Pierre Klossowski," French Studies 54(3] (July 2000): 299-311. Kilgour, Maggie. From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Klein, Melanie. "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms." In The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell, 176-200. New York: Free Press, 1987. Klossowski, Pierre. "Elements d'une etude psychanalytique sur le marquis de Sade." In Revue francaise de psych analyse 6 [3-4] (1933): 458-74. . Nietzsche et le Cercle Vicieux. Mesnil-sur-1'Estree: Mercure de France, 1969. . "Robert Ce Soir" and "The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes": Two Novels, translated by Austryn Wainhouse. London: Marion Boyars, 1989. . Sade My Neighbor, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

203

. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Kofman, Sarah. Explosion II: Les Enfants des Nietzsche. Paris: Galilee, 1993. . "Explosion I: Of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo" trans. Duncan Large. Diacritics 2 4 [ 4 ] (1994): 51-70.

. "A Fantastical Genealogy: Nietzsche's Family Romance," trans. D. Jenson. In Nietzsche and the Feminine, ed. Peter J. Burgard, 35-52.. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. . Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. Paris: Galilee, 1994. . he Mepris des Juifs: Nietzsche, les Juifs, I'Antisemitisme. Paris: Galilee, 1994. . Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Kofman, Sarah with Jaccard, Roland. "Apprendre aux hommes a tenir parole: Portrait de Sarah Kofman." he Monde, April 27-28, 1986, "Aujourd'hui": 7. Krell, David Farrell. Nietzsche: A Novel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror, trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. . Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Lacan, Jacques. "Le seminaire, Livre XII: Problemes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse," 1964-65, unpublished. . "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet." Yale French Studies 55/ 56 (1977): 11-52-

. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 9, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. . The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954x 955: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 1, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. . Ecrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, i?77Lampert, Laurence. Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. . Nietzsche and h/lodern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Lang, Berel. "Misinterpretation as the Author's Responsibility (Nietzsche's Fascism, for Instance)." In Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism* On the Uses and Abuses of Philosophy, ed. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, 47-65. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Leibovici, Solange. "Remembering, Acting-out, Working through: The Case of Sarah Kofman." PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Special Series: Conceptualizing Trauma (2004). http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/ journal/2004_leibovicioi.shtml (last accessed January 5, 2009). Magnus, Bernd. Nietzsche's Existential hnperative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. McNeill, David. "Moral Psychology and Transcendental Philosophy in Nietzsche's Genealogy," unpublished.

204

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Montinari, Mazzino. Reading Nietzsche, translated by Greg Whitlock. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Forward: Run, Sarah!," trans. Paul Patton. In Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, eds. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver, viii-xvi. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Nehamas, Alexander. "Who Are "the Philosophers of the Future"? A Reading of Beyond Good and Evil" In Reading Nietzsche, ed. Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, 46-67. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. . The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. . Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. . Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970. . "On Truth and Falsity in Their Extramoral Sense." In Essays on Metaphor, ed. W Shibbles, 1-13. Wisconsin: Language Press, 1972. . The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. . Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. . Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. . Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. . Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989. . On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1989. . Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1989. Oliver, Kelly. "Sarah Kofman's Queasy Stomach and the Riddle of the Paternal Law." In Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, ed. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver, 174-88. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999. Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Tom Griffith. New York: Knopf, 2000. Porter, Dorothy. "The Dead," Crete. Melbourne: Hyland, 1996. Richman, Michele H. Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Robson, Kathryn. "Bodily Detours: Sarah Kofman's Narratives of Childhood Trauma." Modern Language Review 99(3] (2004): 608-21. Rosen, Stanley. The Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. . The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. . The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France 1925-1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. London: Free Association, 1990.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

2.05

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Confessions 1. Paris: Le livre de poche, 1972.. Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York: Summit, 1985. Sade, D. A. F. de. "Justine; or, Good Conduct Well Chastised." In The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, 448-743. New York: Grove, 1965. . "Note Concerning My Detention." In The Complete Justine, 151-54. . "Philosophy in the Bedroom." In The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, 178-367. Salome, Lou. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Man in His Work, translated by Siegfried Mandel. Redding Ridge: Black Swan, 1988. Sax, Leonard. "What Was the Cause of Nietzsche's Dementia?" Journal of Medical Biography 11 [1] (February 2003): 47-54. Schrift, Alan D. "Kofman, Nietzsche and the Jews." In Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, ed. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver, 205-18. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Blackfriars Shakespeare Series, ed. J. Leeds Barroll. Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown, 1970. Sinnerbrink, Robert. "'We Hyperboreans': Platonism and Politics in Heidegger and Nietzsche." Contretemps, 3 (July 2002). http://www.usyd.edu.au/contre temps/3july2oo2/sinnerbrink.pdf (last accessed January 5, 2009). Smith, Daniel W. "Klossowski's Reading of Nietzsche: Impulses, Phantasms, Simulacra, Stereotypes." Diacritics 35[1] (2005): 8-21. Squire, Sarah. "The Personal and the Political: Writing the Theorist's Body." Australian Feminist Studies 17(37] (2002): 55-64. Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1952. . An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays, ed. Hilail Gildin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989. Stringer, Rebecca. "'A Nietzschean Breed': Feminism, Vicitmology, Ressentiment." In Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Politics, ed. Alan D. Schrift, 247-73. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Waite, Geoff. Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophesy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Weiss, Alan S. "A Logic of the Simulacrum or Anti-Roberte." In "Phantasm and Simulacra: The Drawings of Pierre Klossowski," ed. Paul Foss, Paul Taylor, and Allen S. Weiss, special issue of Art and Text, 18 (July 1985): 115-25. Winnicott, Donald W. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock, 1971. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2003. Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. . Looking Awry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. . "The Big Other Doesn't Exist." Journal of European Psychoanalysis, 5 (Spring—Fall 1997). http://www.psych0media.it/jep/number5/zizek.htm (last accessed January 5, 2009). Zupancic, Alenka. "Philosophers' Blind Man's Buff," Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. . The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.

INDEX

abjection, 7-10, 3 1 , 42-43, 46, 49, 52, 7 4 , 9 4 , 96, 102-5, IO9 defined 118,118-23,127,137-41,146-47, 151,167-68,173-76,180-81,184-85, 193 n. 9 abyss, 31-34, 44-45, 4 8 , 6 4 , 1 0 3 , 1 4 5 , 1 5 6 - 5 8 , 178,190 n. 25 active force, 17, 22-23, 29> 83,180 aggressivity, 4 2 , 1 7 1 alienation, 2 1 , 23, 38-41,46-47, 50, 54-55, 59-60,69, 7 6 , 1 4 7 , 1 5 3 , 1 6 6 , 1 7 2 , 1 7 5 Althusser, Louis, 20-21,187 n. 9,190 n. 22 Ambassadors, T h e . See Holbein ambiguity, 4, 7, 10, 19, 24-25, 50, 75, 8 1 , 84, 90-95, 1 0 2 , 1 0 8 , 1 1 7 , 1 2 7 , 1 3 8 , 1 4 2 , 1 4 7 , 150-51,160-61,167-68, 174-82,185,196 n. 16. See also ambivalence. ambivalence, 3 , 9 , 24, 33-34, 5 0 , 9 0 - 9 5 , 1 0 1 , 108,119,126-29,132-35,141-44,147-50? 168,177-81,184-85,194 n. 9,196 n. 3. See also ambiguity anal stage, 86 anamnesis, 159, 164,167, 173 anamorphosis, defined 49, 49-52, 7 2 , 1 2 1 , 138, 163-64,175,178 Angst. See anxiety Anti-Semitism, 9,94,126-27,131-32,140-50, 178-79 anxiety, 8-9, 24, 32, 35-38, 40-41, 43, 45-48, 59, 63, 66, 72-74, 85-86,95-99> i02--3> 107-8, i n , 117-19,126,132,136,144,150, 178, 182, 196 n. 14,196 n. 17 art, 1 3 , 4 2 , 4 9 , 1 5 9 - 6 2 autobiography, 53-55,61,124,126-28, 131-32, 138-40,146,188 n. 4,195 n. 5 Bacon, Francis, 78, 80, 81,93 bad breast, 97-102,127, i3i-35> x37> I 4 1 band of brothers, 57-58, 69 Barthes, Roland, 4

Bataille, Georges, 9,103-11,122-25, 1 5°-5 I » 181,194 n. 8,194 n. 9 Baumler, Alfred, 84,187 n. 6 becoming, 26, 54, 6 1 , 9 2 , 1 0 5 , 1 4 5 , 1 5 5 , 164-65,173,181,188 n. 5. See also chaos biography, 113-17. See also autobiography Bion, Wilfred, 99-102,121,133 body, 12,16-22, 26-32, 36-38,41-47, 52,64, 83, 87-88,96-100,104-18,121-25,130,132, i34-35> i39-43> *49-55> 158-68,171-74* 189 n. 9,193 n. 8,193 n. 13. See also corporeality body-in-bits-and-pieces. See corps morcele Bonaparte, Napoleon, 129-30 bondsman. See slave Boothby, Richard, 41 Bosch, Hieronymus, 42 Brandes, Georg, 148 breeding, 81-83, 89 Buhler, Charlotte, 38,190 n. 7 Butler, Judith, 27-28, 34,141-42,181,190 n. 22 castration, 5 2 , 9 3 , 1 3 9 . See also split subject chaos, 31, 3 4 , 4 4 - 4 5 , 6 4 , 1 0 2 , 1 5 5 , 1 5 8 , 1 7 3 . See also becoming Che vuoif, 7 0 , 7 3 , 1 4 4 Christ. See Jesus Christianity, 25, 5 6 , 7 5 , 1 0 7 - 8 , 1 3 0 , 1 8 3 , 192 n. 25,192 n. 28 code of everyday signs, 153,155,158-61,170, 172, 176,197 n. 14 cogito, 53,191 n. 19 communication, 12,18-21,99-102, 105-9, 121, 123,156,159-61, 165-67,172-73,181, 198 n. 17 complot. See conspiracy conscience, 12, 21,169,184 bad, 8, 23-28, 3 4 , 1 7 6 , 1 8 1 , 1 9 0 n. 21. See also guilt

208

consciousness, 18-21, 28-29,40-41, 46, 80, 88, 117,152-55,158-59,164,167,178,196 n. 18,197 n. 6 stream of, 112 conspiracy, 29,123,149,154,166-6$ Jewish, 144 contagion. See contamination contamination, 9, 24, 27, 86-92,95-123, 150, 165-85,194 n. 9 corporeality, 9,18-22, 26, 28, 33, 38, 41-46, 52,73-76, 83, 8 8 , 9 4 , 1 0 0 , 1 0 5 - 6 , 1 0 9 , 1 1 2 , 120,150-68,173-77,185. See also body corps morcele, 42-44,47, 64-66,139,164,175 countergenerality, 171 creativity, 18, 2 3 , 4 8 , 1 5 4 , 1 6 1 , 1 8 1 , 1 8 9 n. 16, 197 n. 14 cynicism, 8 0 , 1 1 4 , 1 7 0 Darwinism, 82-83 drive, 12-23, 2-8-30,42-43, 6 4 , 1 3 6 , 1 5 1 , 158-59. See also Trieb; active force; reactive force; impulse. death drive, 4 1 - 4 2 , 9 8 , 1 3 6 , 1 6 6 , 1 7 2 , 1 9 1 n. n Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 56, 83, 189 n.16 depressive position, 98,107 Derrida, Jacques, 2 , 4 , 5 4 - 5 6 , 1 1 3 , 1 2 4 , 1 2 8 , 179,195 n. 6 Descartes, Rene, 49, 52,78-81,93 Deutscher, Penelope, 125,193 n. 13,195 n. 6, 196 n. 12,199 n. 29 difference, 16-23,44* 67-68,82-83, I O 9 > I 2 I > 153,158-59,172. See also singularity feminism of, 2 Dionysus, 128,165-66 disavowal, 25, 50-54,63-68, 87-98,102, 115-26,129-35, MI'S** i59> 172-, i78-79> 185 Douglas, Mary, 114-18,194 n.12 down-going, 6 , 9 0 drive, 12,14,16-17, 2.0, 22-33, 28-30, 42-43, 64,136,151,158-59 ego, 2 1 , 4 1 , 4 3 , 4 9 , 6 4 , 7 6 , 87,96-98,102, 105-7,118,172. See also ideal ego esotericism, 8, 3 0 , 4 9 , 6 0 , 7 6 - 9 3 , 1 1 5 , 1 2 2 - 2 3 , 143,149-50* 161-62,167-69,174-77* 193 n.9 eternal recurrence, 9, 22,145,150-51,156-66, 168, 174-76,183,197 n. 5,197 n. 9 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 117 excess, 6-9,19, 2 1 , 24-27, 30-37, 4 ^ 4 3 * S2-* 63-64, 68-69, 73"74> 7^ 84, 87, 96, 99, 100,

INDEX

1 0 2 , 1 0 7 , 1 1 0 - 1 3 , 1 1 6 , 121, 138, 141-44,

150-51,156-58,162,166,175-79,185,191 n. 19,194 n. 9 exoteric interpretation, 76-85,91-92,115, 175*177 family romance, 9 defined 129,129-31 fantasy, 25, 35-38, 59,64 defined 71,71-73, 80,98-102,105,107-8, i n , 121-23,126-33,137,140-48,151, 153*174 father's death, 32, 35-36, 56-58, 69-74,130, 184. See also Oedipal complex father's prohibition, 36, 47, 52, 57, 70, 85,96. See also paternal law Feminism, 2, 3, 4, 8 2 , 1 8 5 , 1 8 7 n 5 forgetting, 19,164-67,189 n. 13 Foucault, Michel, 2 , 4 , 36,190 n. 22, 190 n. 4 Freud, Sigmund, 3 , 4 , 2 1 , 27-28, 32, 34, 35-36, 4 2 , 4 7 , 56-58, 69, 8 6 - 8 9 , 9 7 , 1 0 0 , 1 1 6 , 124-26,128-29,131,135,137,153,159, 171, 184,190 n. 22,190 n. 23,191 n. 11, 195 n. 6,196 n. 17, 196 n. 18 "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," 47,196 n. 17 "Family Romances," 129 fort-da game, 135 "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," 42 " O n Negation," 9 7 , 1 1 6 Totem and Taboo, 57-58 "The Uncanny," 47 "Three Essays on Sexuality," 86 gaze, the, 39,48-52, 5 5 , 7 6 , 1 6 3 , 1 7 5 genital stage, 86 God, 58,75,79,106-8,156,165,171-73 death of, 108,164-65,173 gods, Greek, 29 gods, Roman, 162 Goethe, J. W. von, 130 good breast, 86-87,97" I O O > I O 8 > 134 good-enough mother, 98-99 good reader. See ideal reader grammar, 18, 2 1 , 24, 31,112. See also language gregariousness, 154, 158,161,165,167 guilt, 2 1 , 23-26, 57-58, 60, 69, 7 6 , 9 7 , 1 0 6 , I 35"37* *69> I 75"76,180,183-84. See also bad conscience Hamlet, 35, 69-74, 92-93, 192-93 n. 8 Hegel, G. W. E , 39-40,189 n. 16,190 n. 22

INDEX

Heraclitus, 31 herd animal, 19-20, 2 3 , 9 0 , 1 5 9 instinct, 20 hierarchy, 6 , 1 0 , 23, 72, 77-86,153,158,179, 190 n. 19 Hill, Leslie, 152, 197 n. 3,197 n. 5 Hitchcock, Alfred, 137 Hoffmann, E. T. A, 47 Holbein, H a n s , 51-52,138,150,163-64 Hyperborean, 29, 8 2 , 9 1 - 9 3 , 1 5 0 , 1 7 4 , 1 9 4 n. 22 hysteria, 47, 133, 151,166, 191 n. 9 , 1 9 8 n. 28 Id, 2 1 , 87 ideal breast. See good breast ideal ego, 3 8 , 6 1 , 66,73-74,76. See also ego ideal reader, 6, 8, 46, 58-59,62-64,66-69, 76-77, 89,91,93-94,140-43* i75> i78-79> 182 identification, 6-9, 24, 34, 58-60, 66, 69, 74, 87-91,99-102, n o , 120-21,126-41,146, 151,157-58,175,179-85 idealization, 31, 35, 4 2 , 4 7 , 5 2 , 9 7 , 1 0 2 , 129-30,144, 146, 193 n. 8 ideology, 7, 2 1 , 80,187 n. 9 imaginary, the, 38-45,47, 5 0 , 6 1 , 6 4 - 6 6 , 7 1 , 76,134,153,172 imaginary ideal. See ideal ego imago, 4 2 - 4 3 , 6 1 , 6 4 impulse, 9 , 1 4 , 24, 42, 85, 87,107,152-55, defined 158,158-62,165-67,173,177,181 incorporation, mechanism of, defined 86, 86-89,9 2 * 95-97* n 8 , 1 2 3 , 1 3 0 , 1 4 6 infant psychology, 9, 37-50, 64, 87,94,96-104, 107-10,132,135 integral atheism, 172-73 internalization, 7, 27-29, 87, 118, 132, 135, 138,190 n. 23 interpellation, 4, 7-9, 24, 29, 33-34, 41* 43* 59, 62-66, 69-75, 85,90-94, 120,127,130, 134-36, 140-47, 174-82,188 n. 9 introjection, 87-88,97-100 James, Ian, 183 Jesus, 29, 106-8, 128, 134 Jew (figure of), 3, 59, 84,123,126-27,132-36, 140-48,185,192 n. 28 jouissance, 23, 26, 4 0 , 4 6 , 58-59, 59,69-74, 76, 96, 101, 137, 150, i73"74» 177-79* 189 n. 19, 191 n. 9 Joyce, James, 112

209

Kilgour, Maggie, 86 Klein, Melanie, 4, 8-10,94-99,103-8, i n , 114, 108, 1 2 1 , 1 2 3 , 1 2 6 - 2 7 , 1 3 2 , 1 3 7 , 1 4 1 , 146, 196 n. 12,196 n. 14 Klossowski, Pierre, 9-10, 123,149-78,183, 196 n. 3,197 n. 6 knowledge, 2-3,16,19, 27, 31, 36, 38,40-41, 47-48, 52, 8 0 , 9 0 , 9 3 , 1 6 8 Kofman, Sarah, 9,123-50,179,181-82,195 n. 2,195 n. 5,195 n. 6,196 n. 16,199 n. 29 Krell, David Farrell, 9,103,111-25,150-51 Krieck, Ernst, 61 Kristeva, Julia, 114,118-19,123 Lacan, Jacques, 4, 8,10, 21, 35-60,62-63, 66-76,92,96,121,136,138,153,163-64, 173,191 n. 9 , 1 9 1 n. 19 lack, 8, 38-40, 5 0 - 5 2 , 6 4 , 7 0 , 7 4 , 1 0 0 , 1 2 1 , 127,144 Lang, Berel, 89 latent stage, 86 Lampert, Laurence, 8,76-81, 8 4 , 9 0 , 9 2 - 9 4 , 123,150,168,174-75* 193 "• 9* 193 n- i ^ language, 11,17-22, 27-33, 37* 4*-4*» 46-48, 54-55, 6 2 - 6 6 , 7 1 , 7 3 , 86-87,9^> 104, I Q 8 , 112,125,132-35,141-42,149-55, i ^ o , 165-68,172-73,177. See also g r a m m a r law, 4, 36, 58-59,198 n. 16 dietary, 132 natural, 27 paternal, 5, 36,47, 58-59,69-70,92-93, 135,144 life, 13,15-26, 28, 37, 53-58,103-12,116-18, 122-32,136-41,146-48,151,157-60, 167-68,172-73,180 lucidity, 154-57,164,167,173, 197 n. 6 madness, 9 , 7 2 , 7 4 , 9 3 - 9 6 , 1 0 2 - 4 , 1 0 7 - 9 , I X I > 115-23,125,150-51,155,165,177 Maimonides, 93 master, 5 , 6 , 7 , 23-30, 33, 39-40, 7 9 , 9 1 , 1 4 5 , 152, 180,189 n. 9,189 n. 16 meconnaissance. See misrecognition Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 38,190 n. 7,198 n. 17 metaphysics, 2 , 1 4 , 1 8 , 30-31,91,140, 158, 197 n. 5 mimicry, 166,173, 195 n. 6 mind, 19, 41-42, 87 mind-body dualism, 41 mirror stage, 38-45, 50, 6 1 , 7 1 misinterpretation, 3, 5, 5 3 , 6 2 , 76, 84, 89-90, 95,101,143,182

INDEX

2.IO

misrecognition, 37, 4 1 , 45, 48, 66-67, 70 mother's desire, 40, 70-76,94 muteness, 1 4 9 , 1 5 2 , 1 6 1 , 1 8 1 name of the father, 36, 70, 74, 6 2 , 1 8 4 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 139 Nazism, 2 , 7 , 59, 8 4 , 1 0 1 , 1 0 8 , 1 2 7 , 133-34, 178-79,187 n. 6 nationalism, 6 1 , 1 2 7 , 1 3 1 National Socialism, 2, 6 1 , 1 0 1 , 1 2 7 , 1 3 1 , 1 7 9 , 187 n. 6 negation, 115-16,164 life, 1, 29 Nehamas, Alexander, 65 Nietzsche, Elizabeth, 5 9 , 1 1 2 , 1 1 8 , 1 2 7 , 1 3 0 , I45>179 Nietzsche, Franziska, 3,118,129-31,145-46 Nietzsche, Fried rich Anti-Christ, The, 55, 192 n.25 Beyond Good and Evil, 17, 20, 22, 32, 62, 65* 77, 81, 83^ 9 1 , 1 1 3 , 1 2 9 , 1 5 1 critique of equality, 1-, 77, 82 Daybreak, 64, 8 3 , 1 8 1 EcceHomo, 5$J66,77, 84-85, 88,126-30, 138-40,145,188 n. 4 Gay Science, 17-20, 50,152, 157 Genealogy of Morals, 2 1 - 2 9 , 9 1 , 1 4 6 , 1 8 6 , 188 n. 5,197 n. 13 Human, All Too Human, 3 , 1 6 , 1 8 7 n. 8 illness of, 149-50,154,168 Jewish reception of, 4 , 1 4 8 madness of, 9,93-96,102-4,107-25, I49-51,155-59,166,177 "Schopenhauer as Educator," 12 Tfcws Spoke Zarathustra, 55, 67-68, 77, 8 3 , 1 0 3 , 1 8 2 , 1 9 2 n. 22 "Truth and Falsity," 158 Will to Power, 17, 20, 30, 189 n. 9 nihilism, 6-7,14-15, 64, 72, 8 0 , 1 0 1 , 1 7 5 noble. See master noble lie, 78-79 Nom du Pere. See name of the father Non du Pere. See father's prohibition nothingness, 8,10, 32, 42-49, 52, 6 4 , 1 0 6 , 1 2 1 , 163-65. See also abyss object a, 49S^ 63, 7<>77,12.1,136, ^ 3 , *75, 179 object cause of desire. See object a objet petit a. See object a object-relations theory, 132, 141. See also Klein; Winnicott; Bion

Oedipal complex, 9, 41-44, 5 8 , 7 0 , 9 2 . See also father's death Oedipus, 32, 4 1 , 1 9 0 n. 25 Oliver, Kelly, 196 n. n oral stage, 86-89 organism, 16-17, 20-24, 29-30, 39, 42, 64, 87-88,153,159,170 parody, 123,151,160, 166-67, *73> 183-84, 191 n. 20,198 n. 26 part-object, 112 persecuting breast. See bad breast perspectivism, 2, 6 , 1 2 , 1 5 - 1 7 , 1 9 , 27, 30-31, 33, 48-50, 78, 82,90-91,109,143-44,154, 158, 162-64,174,189 n. 9 phantom limb, 48-49 phantasm, 150,158-61 defined 159,173-74, 178-79, *97 "• 13, 197 n. 14 philosophy, 5,17-18, 29, 62, 66, 79-82,90, 103, 115-22,124,138, 152,159,176 Plath, Sylvia, ^6,112 Plato, 4, 78-79, 8 1 , 8 2 , 9 3 poetry, 112,152,160 predestination, 75-77 primal father, 56-59, 69 p r o j e a i o n , 25, 34, 42, 44, 50, 73, 76,98-105, 116, 123,126-27,131, 137-38,142-47, 174-75,179,182,185 hypertrophic, 100-102 realistic, 99-100, 102 surface (ego as), 20, 38 projective identification. See projection promise, 22, 25, 27,145 Protestantism, 75 psychoanalysis, 3-4, 6-7,9, 30, 32-38, 61-76, 85-89,95-111,126-31, 177,190 n. 4 , 1 9 2 n. 8, 197 n. 3 quilting, 52,191 n. 18 racism, 101,142-43,180 reactive force, 17, 22-23,180-81 real, the, 43, 47-52,125,172-73,198 n. 26 reality principle, 101 reason, 17-18, 31-32, 8 1 , 9 5 , 1 0 4 , " 3 » I 5 5 , 169-72 rejection. See disavowal reparation, 99-102, i n , 137 repression, 3, 7, 33, 59, 76, 8 1 , 1 1 6 , 1 2 5 , 1 3 1 , 171 repudiation. See disavowal

INDEX

revaluation of values, 1 , 5 , 7 , 29,62,83-84, 89-90,95,122,128,146,149,157,167,173, 180,185 Robson, Kathryn, 136,196 n. 12,196 n. 16 Rosen, Stanley, 8,76-77, 81-84, 8 9 - 9 4 , I 2 3 , 150,168, J74-75> *93 n. 9,193 n. 16 Rosenberg, Alfred, 84,187 n. 6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 2 7 , 6 1 , 1 9 1 n. 20 rupture, 31, 34-37,48, 57-59,62-69,108,138, 155,164,167-68. See also split subject Sacks, Oliver, 156 Sade, Marquis de, 105,167-73, *76> *97 n - 3> 197 n. 16,198 n. 22,198 n. 26 Salome, Lou, 156-57 schizoid position, 97-102,107,114,118,127, 180 schizophrenia, 101 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 12-15,128,145 Schuld, 26. See also guilt selection, 6, 8,19,75-77, 80-89, 1 3 I > I45> 162-65,174 self, the, 7-9,12-15,19-21, 32-33, 36-40, 4 6 - 5 0 , 6 0 , 6 2 , 7 1 - 7 2 , 85-87,94,99-110, 121,127,132,134,138-40,146-48,153-57, 163-67,172-84,194 n. 9 Justine; or, Good Conduct Well Chastised, 169-70,176,198 n. 26 sexuality, 26, 41, 43, 57, 86-88,168,171,173 sight, sense of, 16, 25, 3 8 , 4 4 - 4 5 , 4 9 , 7 8 , 1 6 3 simulacrum, 9,111,150-51,157-78, defined 160,183-85,197 n. 14,197 n. 15,198 n. 26 singularity, 54,156-58,171-72, 184 Sinnerbrink, Robert, 91 slave, 6, 23-29, 39-40,91,180 morality, 7, 23-29, 8 3 , 9 1 , 1 8 9 n. 16 Smith, Daniel, 162,197 n. 13 social contract, 25-27, 57 Socrates, 128 sodomy, 168,171-72,174 laws, 4 soul-atomism, 12, 52 Spinoza, Baruch, 19,134 split subject, 6-7, 2 1 , 4 1 , 55,75, 8 7 , 9 7 , 1 0 2 , 148,176,180. See also castration and rupture

211 splitting (of object), 97-99,193 n.8 Stimmung, 160,164-65 Strauss, Leo, 6 1 , 7 9 sublimation, 3 , 4 3 , 1 3 6 sublime, the, 30-32,184 superego, 3, 34, 37, 56-58,190 n. 23 surplus. See excess surplus enjoyment. See jouissance symbolic, the, 41,43-44,48-50, 58,64-66, 70-75,92-94,100,113,117,136,164,179 symptom, 47, defined 1 0 7 , 1 5 5 , 1 5 9 , 1 6 0 , 1 6 6 , 177-79,191 n- 9,198 n. 28 thing itself, the, 33,139 s transformation, 14,19,61-62, 81,130, 140-44,148-50,157,162,164,180,183-85 transgression, 3 2 , 1 0 4 , 1 5 6 , 1 7 1 trauma, 47-48,64,196 n. 17 Trieb, 136,158. See also drive typology, 6, 8, 22-30,63-66,75,77-78, 82-91, 94,128-31,143,146-48,171-72 Uncanny, the, 7,42-43 defined 47,47-50, 52, 8 8 , 9 0 , 1 5 7 , 1 7 8 unconscious, the, 3, 21, 29, 37,43,47-48, 58, 74-76, 8 9 , 1 1 6 , 1 2 0 , 1 2 9 , 1 6 3 , 1 7 3 - 7 7 Unheimlichkeit. See Uncanny Untergehen. See down-going vision. See sight, sense of Wagner, Richard, 128,144-45 Wallon, Henri, 38,190 n. 7 Waite, Geoff, 176-77,190 n.24,198 n. 27 Weiss, Alan, 165,197 n. 14 will to power, 12,15-23, 26-31, 34, 50,90, 105,159,189 n. 9 Winnicott, Donald W , 98 Woolf, Virginia, 149 Yeats, William Butler, 6 Zizek, Slavoj, 4, 51-52,66,72, 8 0 , 1 4 4 , 1 7 5 , 192 n. 6 Zupancic, Alenka, 48, 54,75