Wars: Nietzsche, Foucault

My ever insightful buddy Sand Avidar-Walzer pointed out that the crucial thing in the passage from Nietzsche I quoted a little while ago is the fact that Nietzsche speaks of wars (Kriege)--that is, war in the plural:

Die höchste Kunst im Jasagen zum Leben, die Tragödie, wird wiedergeboren werden, wenn die Menschheit das Bewusstsein der härtesten, aber nothwendigsten Kriege hinter sich hat, ohne daran zu leiden.
-"Versuch einer Selbstkritik," Die Geburt der Tragödie (I quote the German because I remain a little dissatisfied by the English rendering of it.)

The highest art in saying Yes to life, tragedy, will be reborn when humanity has weathered the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars without suffering from it.
-"Attempt at Self-Criticism," in The Birth of Tragedy

I was making the argument that self-criticism, for Nietzsche, was this war, and that it was a war precisely because it was not a slavish No to life. It is the closest thing to this No which can be made from a non-dialectical perspective, which is (to remind us) a perspective that seeks not to fix and set an other against a self in a fight that this self will always win--because the other will never be anything than the self's other--but to endure the risk of confronting an other that is beyond any fixing, apprehension, etc., and so is, in its being a threat, an enticement to life, a potential for the self to increase its domination, impose its reality. Self-criticism is, for Nietzsche, the only No that would say Yes to life, and this because it is a war.
And this because, as Sand says, war is in the plural here, is already more than one war. For, if one is to confront the other non-dialectically, there will be no fixed self to oppose this other just as much as there will be no stable or fixed other. The war of this self will already be another war from itself: this is indeed why war is primarily life-affirming for Nietzsche. That is, war is not life-affirming because Nietzsche is bellicose or valorizes violence generally (this is perhaps most the case even in his early writing on war, "Homer's Contest"). Nor is it merely that a higher man would find in war not a threat but an increase in power. It is that war, properly conceived, is the dissolution of the self precisely as the endurance of an other qua other. Self-constancy becomes a leap into becoming only here.
And I shouldn't even be talking of a "self." Nietzsche here talks about "humanity," or, to interpret "Menschheit" a bit more provocatively or in a more Nietzschian manner, human-ness, the constitution of our species when we consider it in its animality. What falls away into becoming in the wars here is any type of consciousness inhabiting this particular non-animal animality of the human: we become animals in these wars. I stress this because the body, the brute matter that makes this animal up, is really what is involved in this war rather than a self. Nietzsche affirms the body always against certain philosophers, who think of it only as "infected with every error of logic there is!" as he says in Twilight of the Idols. This parody of the philosopher here is so brilliant, because it brings forth so much of the human way of considering the way bodies work in wars: carnage is the first thing we see and think of--the destruction of bodies without logic, without reason, purely on the basis of the contingency of violence escaping any battle tactics (for these tactics do not extend down to the level of the wound: they only organize its possibility, remaining chillingly rational--we will come back to this). Nietzsche inverts, however, the way we think we think about it: could it be that we think war illogical and full of carnage precisely because we humans, and especially we philosophers, think of the body as illogical and as the defiling of reason, of the soul?
Again, this is not to valorize war: it is to rethink humanity on the basis of a site that to it, qua human, seems the most animal, the most bodily, the most inhuman, precisely because there it concretely has the chance to make more war. Who would make war within war? Certainly not a human. But this is exactly what Sand gets at: for Nietzsche war is only really made when it is made in a war--when it is already another war.
Foucault picks up on this, and I suggest that we can only really understand him when we connect him to Nietzsche's sense of war: in an interview, asked about how an event gets taken up into discourse, he says,

Here I believe one's point of reference should not be to the great model of language (langue) and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning. History has no "meaning," though this is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be susceptible of analysis down to the smallest detail--but in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics.
-"Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Essays, 1972-1977, p. 114

One merely needs to read "humanity" for "meaning," and one has our Nietzsche. And in fact, this is precisely what Nietzsche is already doing in talking about "humanity" and especially about "consciousness:" the animal that goes beyond humanity is one that does not have the same way of making things mean. This is why he or she is first of all an animal, and second of all, because he does not only have a different way of meaning, but really seems to break the form of meaning altogether, so as to have no recourse to it, he is beyond both other animals and the human animal. He or she differentiates himself or herself by not meaning--which precisely means seeing a different type of intelligibility altogether, and precisely in places like struggles, wars. In the end, this is the way that wars are always in the plural, why they are waged again from within war: the human does not merely break with meaning to try and establish another meaningful war within (but outside) the war, but actually breaks with war as meaningful in waging it again. The superfluity of the act, its being able to be waged again and again, is precisely how it constitutes its intelligibility, how it brings the human out of the human. And, indeed, does not close off the other: Foucault continues,

Neither the dialectic, as logic of contradictions, nor semiotics, as the structure of communication, can account for the intrinsic intelligibility of conflicts. "Dialectic is a way of evading the always open and haserdous reality of conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton, and "semiology" is a way of avoiding its violent, bloody and lethal character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue.
-"Truth and Power," 114-5.

What we find here is that the talk of strategies is not a reference to their being planned, but their being the intelligibility of a struggle beyond meaning--in this sense only then, we can interpret strategy as working all the way down to the level of violence, of the individual wounds, struggles, bodies (to respond to our hint above). One must read Foucault this way in order to get his sense of power and to place it alongside Nietzsche's. One has to wonder, however, exactly where war is and is not: whether terrorism, civil unrest, incidental violence, etc. are war or (what is likely) are war only indirectly--if not at all. Foucault's inversion of the famous dictum of Clausewitz is very helpful in this context, for if politics is war by other means, we have a greater sense of where and how this nondialectical, Nietzschian confrontation of alterity is distributed. Foucault would have it reach back into many of our daily processes. In a way, we can then understand him as thinking various regimes already from a Nietzschian standpoint, the standpoint where we are beyond the human animal. Rather than confining war to a genuine, essential moment (a privileged one where war is really war), war suffuses our everyday activities--but with the possibility that it is not even violent. Bombing, terrorism--what if these were not always war, and not because they were not instances where war was "really," "authentically" war, even in a Nietzschian sense? Furthermore, when we critique the war on terror by calling it "the so-called war on terror," we don't posit an authentic war to contrast it against in this way--otherwise the critique of the phrase would have more traction, I think. But if we are not doing this, then precisely how are we criticizing the assertion that the war on terror is really a war? It is because we have not perhaps been as precise in our analysis of it as a function of something like a discursive regime, perhaps, that we lack any way to say what where we can find real wars to contrast this so-called war against.