The becoming-(anthropomorphically)-animal (of man)

A long EGS seminar in which Derrida reads a fascinating paper on Deleuze collected in Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis: I've selected the best little bit, where the citation and situation of Deleuze really takes place, and the argument gathers itself together. Particularly brilliant is the association of con and bête: the former is "as untranslatable" as the other. That is, it is no accident that D&G say that anyone who likes animals is a fool precisely when, in the same network of problems or problematic, Deleuze will also talk about stupidity and the becoming-animal (which Derrida initially said was "untranslatable"). Con then appears at the same time related to this problematic and also as having other possible problems of its own (con is a word for genitalia in particular). It is as if, in other words, con repeats the problematic around bête, and yet is singular and thus totally unrelated to it. Thus, "as untranslatable" on the one hand, and "as untranslatable" on the other.

Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sex, part 1

For a couple weeks now I have been thinking or circling about a certain passage in The Animal That Therefore I Am, and its relation to a certain motif, a certain problematic, that stretches itself through Derrida's entire corpus, indeed announcing itself (quite literally: you can find it there in the text), if not always, then with surprising frequency.
It itself was largely the subject of a series of seminars on philosophical nationalism Derrida held in the late 80's. Hopefully these will all eventually be published. But the motif or problematic I am talking about is not just confined to the issues it involved and which these seminars (and the articles and works explicitly published around them or with reference to them, which included Of Spirit and The Politics of Friendship)--that is, sex or all the words centering around Geschlecht, including sex, gender, race or breeding, nation--so much as an issue revolving around Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the problem of reproduction and biology and/or technology which extends much further than the apparent (that is, explicit) reach even of (this subject of) Geschlecht.
(In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida says the following, which approximates--and yet I wonder whether we might ever get an abstracted, pure formulation of this, outside of any text, any project like The Politics of Friendship--the problem or motif I am trying to get at, but as a particular conceptualization and/or question of politics:

The concept of politics rarely announces itself without some sort of adherence of the State to the family., without what we will call a schematic of filiation: stock, genus or species, sex (Geschlecht), blood, birth, nature, nation... This is once again the abyssal question of the phúsis, the question of being, the question of what appears in birth, in opening up, in nurturing or growing, in producing by being produced. Is that not life? That is how life is thought to reach recognition.
-The Politics of Friendship, viii.)
First, the passage. Derrida is talking about how the issue of whether and how an animal could see itself (and perhaps see itself naked, i.e. feel shame) within a mirror, whether it can apprehend its own reflection--how this issue is not found discussed in any discourse of a philosophical type (with the exception of Lacan, who ends up saying that the animal actually does not "see"). He suggests that this is because these discourses would have to "know for certain" the following:

Where do the mirror and the reflecting image begin, which also refers to the identification of one's fellow being? Can one not speak of an experience that is already specular as soon as a cat recognizes a cat and begins to know, if not in the end to say, that "a cat is a cat?" Does not the mirror effect also begin wherever a living creature, whatever it be, identifies another living creature of its own species as its neighbor [prochain, also "its next"] or fellow [semblable, also "its likeness"]? And therefore at least wherever there is sexuality properly speaking, wherever reproduction relies on sexual coupling?
-The Animal That Therefore I Am, 59.

It is this last sentence which made me think. It brought me around to that motif which I began to think about seriously when writing a paper on The Gift of Death--if only because it seemed like I had always thought along the lines of the necessity that the motif indicates, it captures and thematizes so very well the general experience that one has (and I certainly had) while reading Heidegger's Nietzsche. Indeed, in The Gift of Death, one finds a refrain of sorts that goes as follows: "that would be more Nietzschian than Heideggerian." So one finds, while Derrida is discussing a claim of Patocka's:

Heidegger would never have said that metaphysical determinations of being or the history of the dissimulation of being in the figures or modes of the entity developed as myths or fictions. Such terms would be more Nietzschean than Heideggerian.
-The Gift of Death (Second Edition), 39.

The refrain is important in this text for two reasons: 1) Derrida rarely economizes in this way by referring not even to the proper name but to the type or kind of discourse that is generally assumed to be that of a particular proper name--though The Gift of Death is indeed a rare text, full of many other rare instances of economizing, precisely--and 2) Nietzsche, as my friend Sand said to a class that included me several months ago, plays a crucial part in this book, if it all in fact does not wholly stand or fall with its take on Nietzsche.
But the importance is not just local: reading it, I remembered a phrase all the way back in Of Grammatology which seemed to bear upon this very refrain.

Radicalizing the concepts of interpretation, perspective, evaluation, difference, and all the "empiricist" or nonphilosophical motifs that have constantly tormented philosophy throughout the history of the West, and besides, have had nothing but the inevitable weakness of being produced in the field of philosophy, Nietzsche, far from remaining simply (with Hegel and as Heidegger wished) within metaphysics, contributed a great deal to the liberation of the signifier from its dependence or derivation with respect to the logos and the related concept of truth or the primary signified, in whatever sense that is understood. Reading, and therefore writing, the text were for Nietzsche "originary" operations... with regard to a sense that they do not first have to transcribe or discover, which would not therefore be a truth signified in the original element and presence of the logos, as topos noetos, divine understanding, or the structure of a priori necessity. To save Nietzsche from a reading of the Heideggerian type [my italics], it seems that we must above all not attempt to restore or make explicit a less naive "ontology," composed of profound ontological intuitions acceding to some originary truth, an entire fundamentality hidden under the appearance of an empiricist or metaphysical text... Therefore, rather than protect Nietzsche from the Heideggerian reading, we should perhaps offer him up to it completely [my italics again], underwriting that interpretation without reserve; in a certain way and up to the point where, the content of the Nietzschean discourse being almost lost for the question of being, its form regains its absolute strangeness...
-Of Grammatology (Corrected Edition), 19.

If we ignore the Saussurian language regarding "the liberation of the signifier"--this has been too much commented upon, in my opinion--we find that there is a proposal for rebelling against the Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche, and in a unique way (that annuls itself or self-destructs as rebellion--we will return to this later): that is, much of what will become Spurs. But before turning to that text--another in the motif we are establishing--we must ask, Why does Derrida propose (to take back) this rebellion? Why should we protect Nietzsche from Heidegger in the first place?
It is not that Heidegger's reading of Neitzsche itself fails to give due credit to certain crucial aspects of Nietzsche, namely those "nonphilosophical" ones Derrida speaks of--essentially his engagement with positivism (psychology) and his appropriations of Darwin. This would be, fundamentally, Deleuze's objection to the Heideggerian reading, along, perhaps, with Foucault. It is not, then, the oft noted fact that Heidegger takes the "late" Nietzsche, the most rigidly philosophical or schematic Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of The Will to Power, as the useful Nietzsche (indeed, if one wanted to really make this argument, one would encounter much opposition from the fact that Heidegger does interpret much early Nietzsche, if not so much in his two volumes on him then in other texts, where he usually brings in most of the corpus--the early writings and even some early fragments, not to mention much of Zarathustra). This despite the unbelievable extent of the prejudice against these aspects of Nietzsche that Heidegger expresses so often in his later work and so (there is no other word for it--though "hastily," "unthinkingly," "inappropriately," "misleadingly," "slanderously" all come to mind, and I use this one precisely to call up or recall what Heidegger himself said of his affiliation with the National Socialists--and I would argue this is just something basic about Heidegger, to be reviled and unceasingly argued against rather than mocked or dismissed, because it is right beside the brilliance of his interpretations) stupidly in remarks like the following: Nietzsche's philosophy, he says,

rests on strange foundations. These foundations indeed show themselves to be based on a quite ordinary and metaphysically highly questionable "psychology." Yet Nietzsche can afford that.
-The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, (Heidegger's winter 1929/30 seminar), 74.

No, Derrida does not reject this regarding Heidegger's Nietzsche. Nor does Derrida here directly reject what this move of Heidegger's is affiliated with--a suspicion about representation in general, and about die Zeit des Weltbildes--which Derrida often critiques (cf. "Envois" in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I for an amazing extended discussion of "The Age of the World-Picture"). It is more complicated here than the particular characterization of Nietzsche as a thinker of being as will, as calculable representation, that Heidegger will often lament in his sketches and essays on the history of being.
The rejection is at once more simple and infinitely more profound--this is why it will have to be taken up again in Spurs, as well as--indeed--the rest of the Derridian corpus: it is too much to the side of the main theses of Of Grammatology to be examined with the attention it deserves (and indeed this is why it can here be so directly). Derrida dismisses the idea that things in the world must, for Nietzsche, have their sense in being--and this is precisely what Heidegger concludes must be the case. In other words, things in the world (I have to use this awkward phrase because to use "what exists" or "beings" is already to submit to a Heideggerian interpretation) do not admit of looking any deeper behind them for what their residence in the world is grounded within (even if this ground is an ungroundedness, an abyss, an Abgrund). And this "looking deeper" for a ground is precisely what Heidegger always does with whatever Nietzsche asserts about the world (again, precisely by conceiving of its ground as ungrounded: to assert that Derrida is wrong because he misses this aspect of Heidegger--which I have seen happen often, especially on the part of Heideggerians--is to willfully misinterpret what Derrida is saying). For Heidegger, the things in the world from Nietzsche's perspective are indecidable with respect to their sense, their meaning--and this, however, is precisely their meaning: whatever is there, even if it is only an upsurge of becoming, has being, in the sense that it is not nothing. In the end, Heidegger thinks that if what becomes is not nothing, it must have being for Nietzsche on some level. That is, until Heidegger starts to entertain certain thoughts even beyond enowning (Ereignis) seriously. But we will (have to) come to this later.
Now, again, we are not circling around an exact interpretation of what "becoming" means in Nietzsche--and if it sounds as if this is the case, it is due to my lack of mastery over what I want to say here. But this term (becoming--and, indeed, how it relates to being) is not the point of the contestation (I outlined Heidegger's view of this with more precision--that is, with respect to eternal return and will to power--in a post last summer). If it were, then it would be an issue of either of the two objections we already specified (Deleuze and Foucault's, for example, and another Derrida's). Rather, in this passage of Of Grammatology, and throughout the sort of debate running through Derrida's corpus that I would here like to trace, there is an issue over the precise way things mean or have sense in Nietzsche's view and how we ourselves should interpret it--in short, it's much more basic than any debate over meaning, precisely because its about the most basic sense of meaning (if that means anything). What is at issue is an approach to Nietzsche, and whether it does not admit of another--a wholly other--way of approach. It comes down to this difference: if we were to take Heidegger's standpoint, we would suspect that whatever becomes, at some basic level (perhaps the level of attunements, which are not conscious), would still exist rather than not. What Derrida is advocating for, on the other hand, is the interpretation of becoming (that is, the things in the world) as a suspension of this being or meaning, even at this most basic level that Heidegger would be looking at. The indeterminacy with respect to meaning then would not be something that could be grounded even in what is ungrounded. It would be both indeterminate with respect to whether it is or meant, and indeterminate with respect to whether it was not (i.e. did not exist), or was not meaningful.
The entire discourse of Nietzsche, then--i.e. whatever he said about anything--would have been indeterminate. (This, by the way, is the fundamental thesis of Spurs, to which we will return).
This makes it more than clear that the stakes in this similarly naive-sounding "Such terms would be more Nietzschean than Heideggerian" are actually very high.
But before getting into this more, we must first ask about this detour I took with Derrida into Nietzsche and Heidegger--at bottom a detour towards a proposal for a saving (or not saving) of Nietzsche from (and by) Heidegger--and why I was reminded of it by a sentence on a discourse on animals. I say that there is a relation between the passage in The Animal That Therefore I Am and this this proposal. I will specify this relation--as well as develop this motif (by looking at remarks in both Spurs and Of Spirit, as well as the "Geschlecht" series of essays) in three or four more posts.

The animal mechanical: Nietzsche

The following is a very famous passage from The Anti-Christ. Let's look at it yet one more time, for it bears upon our understanding of both technology and animality massively. It especially constitutes an association, a particular orientation of motifs (by extending that association that is made first in Descartes), that will be explicitly dealt with by two of the most important theorizers of technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Heidegger and Derrida. With the latter, one should read it alongside the entirety of L'Animal que donc je suis (à suivre) (The Animal That Therefore I Am, to be released in full in a few days). And though he does not seem to be as related to the two when it comes to being a theorizer of technology, one has to--in a completely different, but perhaps infinitely more interesting way--try and include Foucault in this group. One has to precisely because his work is largely an expansion of the domain in which the following orientation of Nietzsche's is set up. We might add that in Foucault this occurs not only in the development of his problematics of micro- and bio-power, but also and perhaps even more pressingly in his notion of a discursive formation (which appears very removed from power in general). But, to begin to turn back to this association or constellation of motifs and their being picked up by the great thinkers of technology: Derrida in his lecture puts this whole motif together when he recalls the opening of the second section of On the Genealogy of Morals: "Nature is said to have given itself the task of raising, bringing up, domesticating and "disciplining" (heranzuchten) this animal that promises." But, to return to the passage in The Anti-Christ itself: let us pay attention to two (or three or four) words in the following especially: machine (machina and Nietzsche's own "translation" in the last line: machinal, which gets rendered as mechanistically) and calculate (and miscalculate: all the cognates of rechnen):

We have learned differently. We have become more modest in every way. We no longer derive man from "the spirit" or "the deity," we have placed him back among the animals. We consider him the strongest animal because he is the most cunning: his spirituality is a consequence of this. On the other hand, we oppose the vanity that would raise its head again here too — as if man had been the great hidden purpose of the evolution of the animals. Man is by no means the crown of creation: every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection. And even this is saying too much: relatively speaking, man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, and not one has strayed more dangerously from its instincts. But for all that, he is of course the most interesting. As regards the animals, Descartes was the first to have dared, with admirable boldness, to understand the animal as machina: the whole of our physiology endeavors to prove this claim. And we are consistent enough not to except man, as Descartes still did: our knowledge of man today goes just as far as we understand him mechanistically [machinal]. [...] The development of consciousness, the "spirit," is for us nothing less than the symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism: it means trying, groping, blundering—an exertion which uses up an unnecessary amount of nervous energy. We deny that anything can be done perfectly as long as it is still done consciously. The "pure spirit" is a pure stupidity: if we subtract [rechnen... ab] the nervous system and the senses—the "mortal shroud"—then we miscalculate [verrechnen]—that is all!
-The Anti-Christ, 14; Kaufmann's translation.

First, the play on calculation, on this act of programming and tabulating, which returns both in Derrida and could be said to govern nearly the entirety of the use of the word throughout Heidegger, including its use in Being and Time. If we reckon (the word comes directly from rechnen) such that we get rid of the nervous system and the senses from our sense of what we are, Nietzsche says, we do not reckon: if we rechnen... ab, we ver... rechnen--that is, taking ab- and ver- more literally than usual as Nietzsche invites us to do, if we subtract or deduct, we calculate awry. But what is so interesting about this play is that it is precisely showing the ineluctability of the mechanical: in a way, we are in fact always already calculating, because we are already calculating in such a way that we try to get rid of what makes us calculable--in a calculable way (subtracting).

To be a bit clearer and spell out the paradox that gets missed in the English (though Kaufmann tries valiantly to save it): in order to get rid of the senses and make man something that is only spiritual, we are already deducting, adding, multiplying (cf. what Nietzsche says a few sections earlier about pity being the multiplier of suffering), etc. We are sizing up man in terms of forces, in fact quantities, in order to be able to make a qualitative distinction of this sort. Thus: we only miscalculate according to Nietzsche because we (only) calculate. In other words, we do not miscalculate because we somehow have gone about our qualitative distinctions in the wrong manner--that is, theoretically put it out there in an impoverished or mistaken form. No--and we must add what he says in Ecce Homo, namely that error is not blindness but cowardice (merely--but this makes all the difference!--a lesser form of strength, power as a quantity of energy). In the end, this subtracting here is only finally expressed in theories. Thus, this calculation is taking place on the ground, as it were (and this does not disqualify theorizing and theory as forces at play here--the important thing we're noting is that theories and propositions of reason are not just the only things operative), in the domination of a certain set of bodies over another--the priestly as it has dissipated itself about, or made itself into the "herd." Instead of being an error in theory, this is an error in the constitution of an entire people (or, better, a set of biological/physiological forces), according to Nietzsche, precisely in their calculable qualities. It is these that Nietzsche shows, in the earlier part of the passage, are calculable--that is, able to be reckoned mechanically. Let us take a closer look at what he says here, in the German:

Was die Thiere betrifft, so hat zuerst Descartes, mit verehrungswürdiger Kühnheit, den Gedanken gewagt, das Thier als machina zu verstehn: unsre ganze Physiologie bemüht sich um den Beweis dieses Satzes. Auch stellen wir logischer Weise den Menschen nicht bei Seite, wie noch Descartes that: was überhaupt heute vom Menschen begriffen ist, geht genau so weit als er machinal begriffen ist.

What Nietzsche means by this is very basic--but it is precisely this that makes it an unbelievably profound understanding of Descartes: we can provisionally say that, according to Nietzsche, Descartes had the boldness to interpret the animal as a set of physical forces--in short as something that was constituted in a calculable manner. But we have to double back and look at the terms Nietzsche uses in order to substantiate this, for, as we will see, the way we understand the two appearances of the machine here interprets the entire paragraph for us. These two (more or less) appearances are constituted in Nietzsche's use of the Latin machina, and then of als er machinal begriffen. The reason why we speak so timidly about the number and the exact constitution of the mechanical here is because it is not clear what the relationshp of the latter phrase to the former Latin one is doing, nor what they themselves actually refer to individually. We can turn for help to the translators. Kaufmann leaves the Latin, and renders the last phrase as "understand mechanistically." R.J. Hollingdale turns machina into "machine," and renders the phrase provocatively as "our knowledge of man today is real knowledge precisely to the extent that it is knowledge of him as a machine." This directly makes this phrase refer back to the use of machina: according to this rendering, Descartes understands animal as a machine, and our knowledge of man is gained only by understanding him as a machine. Kaufmann's translation, on the other hand, collapses the whole phrase als er machinal begriffen into an adverb, but preserves the reference: this has the effect of setting up a tension between the two phrases. In short: Descartes did not understand the animal mechanically, as we do when we gain our only knowledge of the human, but instead understood the animal as having the essence of machina, of what is invented, of what is a contrivance or a creation.

The point is not to specify which translation is better, but to understand the problems at work here. Kaufmann is extremely delicate in trying to show the difference between the first and second reference to the machine, because that difference is there--not only in the use of the Latin but also in the use of the verb: in the first case, we have verstehn (know, in the sense of understanding) and in the second we have begriffen (know, in the sense of grasping). Descartes understands, we grasp. To this extent, we can say with Kaufmann that Descartes understands man as machina, while we grasp man mechanistically.
But we also have to specify, with Hollingdale, that what Nietzsche says is, more literally, not "just as far as he grasps...," but "precisely to the extent that he grasps as..."--this is how he translates it (substituting grasp back in there instead of either "have knowledge" or "understand"). While being more literal is by no means to be more accurate to the source text, it is true that Kaufmann loses a few crucial words (the crucial word als, especially) in his version by trying to lump them all together in an active word.
So, what to conclude from all this? With the first phrase, I side with Kaufmann (one should retain the Latin), and in the latter, I side with Hollingdale, though recognize the importance of the fact that Hollingdale loses something active about the phrase--namely, the fact that any understanding or grasping that we do would, in a sort of paradox that we explored already with calculation, have to be just as mechanical as the object we are grasp, because the object is us. And insofar as this is the case, we don't really have knowledge or understanding in the manner of Descartes: Descartes understands the animal as machina, therefore, while we do something different, more actively, in itself, already machina.

In the end, let us just explicate what it is trying to get at with this knowledge of the tension between the two phrases at the level of the rendering of the words themselves, expanding our initial reading of them. We can come up with the following: Descartes had the boldness to acquire knowledge of the animal as machina--as a construct, as an invention, as a functioning. In fact, it was precisely this that allowed him to distinguish the human from the animal: the human was more natural, less machine-like, more spiritual than the animal. The perversity of this gesture is, for Nietzsche (beyond the oddness that humans would be more natural than animals), in that it makes the natural precisely what is anti-nature: spirit. And what is more, it is obviously not consistent--it cannot be, nor would Descartes want it to be that way. We physiologists endeavor to prove how the animal is a construct, is, in short, a set of calculable elements or functions like forces, and to do so more consistently than Descartes by extending this into the human. The effect is double: it is to make the natural precisely what is mechanical, precisely what is constructed; and it is therefore also to restore naturalness to the human, by despiritualizing him (as it were) and interpreting him as a functioning just like this mechanical animal. It is in this sense that any knowledge or grasp of the human that we have now extends only to what we know of him as this construct, as this calculable set of forces--that is, insofar as he is natural and we interpret the natural as the mechanical. Now how one understands this last sentence comes about here, for one understands both the nature of one's understanding and how much the mechanical is exactly participating in the human. Instead of coming down on this phrase, I'll leave it somewhat open (I might come back to it later, and with my own rendering/translation of it), and simply point to a recent experiment ("Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts") that does not specify so much as illustrate a particular way that we can understand this grasp. I would say that this is not the particular type of physiology that Nietzsche is thinking about, but that actually this experiment would indeed be included in its efforts. What is precisely so interesting and slightly disturbing about the experiment is that it merely is an extension of what is already there with respect to the animal, as well as the human: the animal is already a machine, in some way--and we too are visibly seen in the experiment as coming close both to this animal and this machine (that the animal is).

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.