The cultivation of irony

In my last post I was basically saying, underneath it all, that one of the most important things literary criticism can do is serve as the chief locus for the cultivation of irony (by which I mean, very broadly speaking, the general experience of things as having more than one meaning, or saying something different than what they say--which can mean, even more generally, possessing a little distance from the sincerity and literalness of what one says when one says it). But this presupposes something else: that the cultivation of irony itself is one of the foremost ethical demands in our society. And I pretty much firmly believe this: one of the big things we have seen in the last thirty or so years, after the rise of a certain theoretical criticism that privileged irony (and was the expression of a more ironic attitude in America as a whole, after the 60's), is that irony is actually something that is very hard to sustain.
Year after year, we keep hearing that the end of irony has come, and this announces not so much that irony is dead, but that our ability to sustain it and its constant demand to achieve a little healthy distance from a situation is something we've grown very tired of and would rather just put away. The last few years indeed have seen a huge preference for wholesome, dangerously serious discourses that people can just consume and be done with: Republican patriot rhetoric of the Bush years and (to a lesser extent, especially when it is seen as the rising up of a minority which brings irony back into it) the Obama rhetoric. What happens then is not so much that we get a set of people with staunch beliefs that won't talk to each other (fundamentalism) but that when these people do indeed talk to each other they lose the ability to also actually express what these beliefs entail: in short, they paradoxically lose their ability to demand something of the other person--especially without being backhanded or resentful (slavish, in Nietzsche's sense) in doing so. (This talking together, I should note, also happens much more often than those who too quickly make belief into fundamentalism would like to think--Stanley Fish being one of them, however much he seems to champion "belief").
So sustaining irony, keeping one's commitment to it, making it something that is cultivated (and indeed this is a most Nietzschian task--cultivating that which precisely and as such resists cultivation) and able to reassert itself steadily--this is what we in reality need more of, precisely after the 80's and such (also because it is so present not just in elite circles, but, more generally wherever there is this belief that I'm talking about). For what I'm saying is that what we see in our being tired of irony is really a growing ability to take irony as serious--which is counterproductive and in fact dangerous because it exploits irony while attacking it (Republicans have increasingly become masters of this--but also theorists, as we'll see). In other words, this doesn't take irony seriously as irony, but transforms irony into seriousness. It folds back what was a difference into precisely the discourse that it has achieved its distance from (unlike the folding back of close reading that I talked about).
In criticism, this manifests itself in the horrible move that is precisely that folding back of the speaker into the position from which he speaks, so as to show how he is complicit in what he speaks about (its a trademark of serious discourse that it takes things--here, even the mechanism of turning irony into seriousness--too literally). This is generally a very de Manian and deconstructionist-Marxist move, but it can happen everywhere (so Fish will fold back a speaker into his disciplinary position, which will always contradict whatever the speaker says). You know what I'm talking about. So in a class the other day we were discussing Derrida and political activism, and someone said that Derrida's discourse, which questions the possibility of activism rather than engages in it pure and simple was a nice thing, but could only happen because Derrida himself was a comfy professor, without any need to get in the streets and fight. What makes Derrida radical as concerns activism can therefore only be accomplished by being someone who doesn't need to know a thing about activism. You see what's going on--besides the remark being false (as the professor pointed out). The sort of ironic position of Derrida (who I'm just using as an example), which is to take up activism by questioning its possibility in the first place, is folded precisely back into a secure and stable notion of what activism is, and, as a result, what happens is that one takes Derrida's ironic position as a serious position. What is the result of this move? You expose the person as a hypocrite! Ooh, interesting--but pointless, because what you see is that they are still hypocrites only on your terms, which are precisely terms that have no sense of irony.
I hope it's clear that I'm not talking so much about Derrida here, but that something that needs to be understood in terms of irony is understood in terms of seriousness--which of course will expose the irony as contradictory, complicit, and hypocritical, because it precisely resists the notion (and practices) of serious discourse. Frankly, a better example is Frederic Jameson, who always, always takes an ironic discourse in terms of how serious it is. The noble thing about Jameson--and the thing that really makes his mode of meta-critique something to keep, rather than, like so many other instances of this same move, something that should be totally, remorselessly, given up--is that he does not do this in order to expose or show anyone to be a hypocrite. That has to be kept in mind--one really can't understand Jameson without knowing this (and I think many of these serious people--Spivak is one of them, cf. her remarks on Jameson on her Critique of Postcolonial Reason--read him this way and find in him confirmation of what they do). It is indeed what makes his discourse deserve the name of a dialectic. But the thing is that the move he makes to bring this about is something that essentially, as it is constituted, does not need to be deployed with these aims: this is evident in precisely the sorts of misreadings it often produces--which work in the context of the books he is writing, but which as readings totally misrepresent whoever they are talking about. So he reads what Deleuze and Guattari say about anti-hermeneutics as precisely something hermeneutical. This would be fine perhaps if it acknowledged the irony of what D&G say, but the mode of the folding back, of the establishment of complicity, does not allow Jameson to do this. So we get what D&G say as something without the possibility of irony, as something that is totally serious, which will in fact ensure the success of the move of folding back that Jameson effectuates:

From the present perspective... Deleuze and Guattari's proposal for an antiinterpretive method (which they call schizo-analysis) can equally well be grasped as a new hermeneutic in its own right. It is striking and noteworthy that most of the antiinterpretive positions enumerated... have felt the need to project new "methods" of this kind.
-The Political Unconscious, 23, note 7

This may be right, but you see that what is lost is any force that the quotes around "method" can have: the putting in abeyance of this term, which precisely seeks to account for the ironic status that any hermeneutic would indeed have in D&G, is a totally empty gesture. This is because it already takes their standpoint as complicit in an interpretive enterprise--in short, as serious. It's done simply to be accurate (consistent to a model that is already interpreted as a serious model, as something that needs consistency). The gesture that irony uses perhaps most--the putting in quotes--is turned itself into something serious. This you will find all throughout recent theoretical discourse, and it contributes, I think, to the real shabbiness and real nonpertinence that theory in particular is suffering from. (A look at this in particular would have really proved my point, since it is this sort of gesture of folding back and complicity condensed: its like seriousness-from-concentrate.) A whole generation of theorists puts things in quotes seriously--and that this is so announces such a gigantic failure of theory in particular to live up to what its possibilities were that it should concern itself henceforth with the sole task of annihilating (by the invention of new pedagogical tools) this little move that establishes complicity everywhere it appears and reestablishing the force behind the quotation marks. But this entails our discipline generally recognizing that these possibilities, however, were not the sole province of theory, but are ones that reach across the whole of literary criticism, and have their foundation in the possibility of cultivating irony.
(I should mention a merit of irony: that it isn't self-consciousness. This is what makes it, actually, very compatible with belief. But at the same time it opens up belief to self-consciousness. It is as if irony is a sort of middle-ground between the reflexiveness of self-consciousness on the one hand and shame on the other. But it's significant that current theorists of trauma and shame--Sedgwick, Leys, others--don't move towards irony: it seems that they want to in fact kill off irony and self-consciousness in the same gesture, which is establishing a very serious discourse which can account for ironic self-distance in terms of unreasoned violence and affect. This might be interesting, but it conveniently forgets that irony also implies an affective state of perplexity, frustration, and embarrassment that is not unlike shame. It might be more important for them--for both genuinely ethical and facetiously moralistic reasons--to keep the focus on serious violence.)
(I should also note that my mention of Marxism specifically above is a bit bitter, no doubt. But this is because Marxism is perhaps the most gravely serious and moralistic of discourses in the academy. Nevertheless, what is interesting is that it also contains the most condensed form of the move of folding-back a speaker into the position he speaks from. This is precisely why Jameson does it: he is a Marxist. And what this means then is that Marxism has the most to gain from cultivating its irony. Please don't take my remarks above as a blatant call to throw away Marxism, then: in fact, this is what many in the academy are doing. Rather, we need to cultivate a distance to Marxism as Marxists: what I would call for here then is a resurgence of the role of Marxism in the academy, but precisely one that learns how to make this move that it makes into the ironic principle of its operation and not its mere tool for resentment. An ironic Marxism: that would be the most profitable element in the work to cultivate irony, and it should be a part of our future.)

Writerly texts and the poet-critic

The genius of that famous distinction Barthes makes in S/Z (which I am now finally getting around to), between the readerly and writerly text is that it challenges the old transit that existed and still (*shudder*) exists between the writer and the critic, famously typified in the poet-critics of Modernism.
Obviously this type or figure is too often assumed to be stable (and also to only belong to Modernism) and indeed thoroughly reflect the practices of Eliot and Pound, for example, when there are many differences between what we mean by the poet-critic and the activity of these poet-critics (and my colleague Evan is doing a lot to investigate this whole area--I should mention the mere fact that I.A. Richards went to Eliot for advice on whether he should continue teaching at Cambridge as a critic or go abroad, teaching high-school students and embarking upon the project of promulgating Basic English, and the fact that Eliot said Richards should go for the latter, is enough to demolish a lot of what we assume about Eliot as poet-critic). I refer to this figure however because (whether he exists or not) he still serves as a sort of weird model for a lot of critical activity going on even today. In short, the role of a lot of criticism is to try and hide--and yet preserve (that is, displace in the Freudian sense)--the desire to write in the manner of the authors we read. It isn't so much a primary-secondary text problem (critics don't want to be secondary) as what Barthes says it really is: a problem of production (the powerful force of a writer, the force behind writing) being mistaken for consumption.
The writerly text is a text that, when read, makes the reading act productive: it actually writes the text that it is reading--that is, loosely speaking, constitutes it. It is a lot similar to what I was calling the work of constitution and displacement that close reading should be doing--and I will write more about this soon, to elucidate more what I was talking about (and also the ways that my conception of this rewriting and constituting is, ultimately, very different than Barthes', though it shares a lot of his emphasis: I'd risk saying that, in the end, you can't call S/Z a close reading, if we interpret this in my privileged sense of the term). Reading produces the text, then. It is not responding to something that is already there: reading is creating precisely that which one reads.
Now, as it stands, this is precisely the illusion that the critic, desiring to be a poet-critic, worships. He thinks that the act of interpretation is one of production tout court, and therefore can flout philological rigor, disciplinary rules, etc., because it is shares in a certain power that those who can discern it in authors' texts can also wield. One sees that this is really a reactive stance, in the Nietzschian sense (and Nietzsche is all over S/Z): it is really a freedom that works out of frustration, carving a little imaginary nook for itself out of the prison that is the world. But what Barthes recognizes is that this desire to produce, to write, means nothing unless it is contrasted with consumption of texts, with the consumption-text, which is what he calls the readerly text. The readerly text is one that is already constituted before the act of reading: it is a totality which one can approach and then throw away when one is done with it.
The point is that the introduction of consumption makes one rethink what one means by production--and in a way that shows that the desire to be a poet-critic (now, that is--I'm not talking about Eliot et. al.) is not a desire to produce but to consume. In fact, it is the desire to consume in such a way that it passes itself off as production: one could rightly say that the only thing it produces is the notion that it, as an act of consumption, is production (this is obviously a Nietzschian logic which Barthes is following whereby something's lie is always more creative, and more "true," than its truth-claim: this is how Nietzsche can--and to recognize this is of the utmost importance for anyone studying Nietzsche--actually like Kant and Christianity at times, as odd as that sounds). The point though is that the poet-critic-desire desires not really to write in the manner of the poet or author, but actually wants to be consumed like they are: he interprets the power of their writing to be precisely a power over consumption, over creating a totality (that people can enjoy and then throw away). One sees that this is a capitalist configuration through and through: not only in the large sense, but down in the nitty gritty aspects of what labor is conceived as (and this would be the sort of French Nietzsche-Marx Marxism of Barthes, a particularly interesting strand that runs from Bataille and Klossowski through Blanchot to Deleuze).
What then gets revealed is that the writerly text is not just a text that makes the reading act productive in any old sense of this word: it is an act that makes the productive act escape all reappropriation into consumption. "Creation" in the sentence above ("it is creating precisely that which one reads") becomes construing, dispersing, relaying, since this is creation in a Nietzschian sense: it does not at all become a matter of creation in an aesthetic sort of manner (copying the author's ability to produce a vague type of pleasure and beauty which never needs to be specified or determined, it is so "pure"). So if the reading of the writerly text (or the writing of the writerly text, for they are the same thing) is faithful to itself, it will in this way--and only in this way--write in the manner of the poet or author himself.
Here, finally, is Barthes explaining this distinction, on the second page of the amazing book:

What evaluation finds is precisely this value: what can be written (rewritten) today: the writerly. Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of a text. Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness--he is intransitive; he is, in short, serious: instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing, he is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text: reading is nothing more than a referendum. Opposite the writerly text, then, is its countervalue, its negative, reactive value: what can be read, but not written: the readerly. We call any readerly text a classic text.
-S/Z, 4.

So in the end what Barthes accomplishes is not the dissolution of the desire of the critic to be a poet-critic, but a refinement of what being a poet-critic, a writerly reader, means. In short, he formalizes it, and shows that it cannot remain just a vague desire motivating one's critical work: if one is serious about this desire, one has to be willing to leap into it such that its productive act cannot be reappropriated by its sort of reactive, frustrated side (and this means making it all the more rigorous--not reckless--in whatever institutional habits it has to go against, so that in the end it should also refine and transform the institution, rather than engage in anti-institutional nihilism). So if literary criticism is hounded by the ugly desire to be like the authors it reads--this doesn't have to be as disgusting as it sounds, or as it (*shiver*) actually still is. One can refine this impulse, or rather force it to finally take itself seriously. Perhaps the Yale School knew this: I'm thinking of some remarks of Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, as well as J. Hillis Miller. But overall the failures of theory are very obviously coextensive with letting this active desire become reactive (and, especially, nihilist as regards the institution)--as so many crappy theory articles can prove.
(A final note: though the bad transit between the critic and the author via the poet-critic is accomplished by this sense of production as consumption, this bad idea of production is also fostered by the idea of the author-in-isolation and reading-in-isolation. If one thinks of this situation of production differently, another attack against this bad transit is possible: this will be the matter of my dissertation, I think, so you can hear much more about this in posts to come!)

Dynamic, structural: explaining free and bound energy, and more, in Freud

Here is a little thing I wrote about two years ago, as I was first getting into the problems of Freud. It's a bit on the right track, but it puts a lot of things the wrong way. I hope to revise what it says eventually in another post, one that will more clearly explain the shuttling between the dynamic (or "economic") and structural (or "topographical") accounts of the mind in Freud. My ultimate goal was a bit more expansive than it should have been, which confused me: I was trying to relate how the unconscious related to the Id, and what displacement was effected there in the terms with which Freud was dealing with the mind. However, following Derrida, I got hung up on how these problems were already emerging in the Project for a Scientific Psychology and resurfacing in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as well as, especially, "The Economic Problem in Masochism:"

In understanding the relationship between the Ego, Id, Unconsciousness and Consciousness, it is helpful to investigate what exactly underlies a comment Freud makes nearing the end of The Interpretation of Dreams. Recalling his discussion of the “primary” and “secondary” processes—what will be termed, descriptively, the unconscious and preconscious processes or, structurally (that is, in terms of how this process relates to the other processes of the mind when describing the dynamic operations of the whole apparatus), the Ucs. and Pcs.—Freud reminds us that what we are invited to assume by the postulation of these two different parts of the mind “is not the existence of two systems near the motor end of the apparatus, but the existence of two kinds of processes of excitation or modes of its discharge” (the first sentence of "Unconsciousness and Consciousness--Reality," the last section of the book). What Freud attempts to point out here is that these two processes can be made more distinguishable as results or effects of the dynamic movements of a basic psychical energy rather than as two static psychical territories that govern this movement. In other words, Freud reminds us that, when dealing with the two psychical processes he elaborates here, we should remain attentive not to the location of the psychical energy within the mind but to the two basic tendencies of movement of this psychical energy.
We may bring forth what underlies this comment if we see what happens when we heed his advice. Paying attention to psychical energy and its movements—that is, to its investments, its Besetzungen (translated in English as “cathexes”)—we find that Freud feels compelled to distinguish between two processes because he believes he has observed two basic tendencies of energetic movement or investment. As Freud explains here and throughout his writings, it becomes evident that the first (primary and Ucs.) process should be regarded as the process constituted by the tendency of energy to move or be invested such that it can be described as “free” energy, and the second (secondary and Pcs.) process constituted by the tendency of energy to move such that it may be described as “bound” energy. What do these descriptions mean? The aim, goal, or purpose of any accumulation of energy within the psychic apparatus being discharge (a fundamental point of Freud’s that we will discuss more in depth momentarily), energy is deemed “free” because it tends to move directly towards discharge along the path of least resistance—or at least along a path where there is as little deferral of the event of discharge as possible—and because when it discharges, it usually does so completely. On the other hand, the energy that makes up the Pcs. system is called “bound” because it is seen as “inhibited,” or more willing to defer its discharge and possess the tendency to discharge only partially (cf. “The Unconscious,” 135-6, “The Economic Problem in Masochism” 194). We may note in passing that these tendencies of movement amount as a whole into huge threads of energetic behavior that Freud calls “instincts” or, more accurately translated, “drives.”
Now that we more clearly understand this distinction between “free” and “bound” investment, we must turn to how Freud regards investment itself as existing only as differences of the quantity of energy. That is, at any specific moment in the history of the psyche, there exist no qualitative distinctions between units or even tendencies of psychic energy, and especially not between the “free” and the “bound.” The “free” and the “bound” are thus only different quantities of investment, despite their tendencies or mode of investment that we have just noted. The psyche is, indeed, like a portfolio: we may invest more or less rapidly, but at any particular point, if we ask exactly what we have invested, there will only be amounts of cash. However, throughout his work, Freud proceeds, after making this point, to keep these two distinctions of “free” and “bound” energy anyway, as if they were accumulations of investment so different in quantity as to be regarded for all intents and purposes as qualitatively different elements of the mind—so long as we remember these elemental qualities arise only from quantities.
We may ask, then, whether Freud should make this distinction in this way at all when he is attempting to set up two dynamic processes governed by the movement of psychic energy and not two static systems that, as it were, handle the energy with their own independent agency. Perhaps a simple criticism is adequate here: perhaps Freud could have explained this in different language so as to draw even more attention to the lack of a qualitative distinction between different movements of psychic energy, and thereby buttress his larger point about the radical difference of the dynamic and structural conception. For what the notion that we have merely one psychic substance made up of differences only in terms of quantity—what this notion helps to reaffirm is that we have two tendencies of psychic energy that simply operate in different ways, rather than two (or more) different types of energy within the mind warring against each other with no common battleground. That is, this quantitative conception eludes a horrific mistake of the systematic view: though this latter view is able to describe quite clearly the various parts of the mind and how they interact with each other, because it affirms a qualitative distinction between these parts in terms of the energy within them it actually forecloses an accurate analysis of the dynamics of these qualities’ intermixings. Each region of the mind gets divorced from the other based on the quality of its energetic unit, and we get only a reshuffling of the order of the qualities and their arrangement--Lacanians love this aspect of Freud the most, and generally all they do is this reshuffling (which of course has its own merits). So, would not referring to the two tendencies of energy within Freud’s structural and dynamic view in terms of their differing quantities then drive this point home? We quickly find, however, that our position is in the wrong: our hesitation to agree with this phrasing is precisely what Freud would have wanted to engender, but he only could engender it by keeping these two distinctions present in this way. That is, Freud’s decision to leave us with two types of energy, and thereby to seemingly contradict his own point by slipping back again into language that regards as qualitative what he claimed should be rigorously held as only quantitative, is not only to keep things simple for the reader so as to more fluently present the structural and dynamic conception of the mind. This contradictory phrasing remains because it also has the effect of actually reflecting and elucidating something else about the dynamic nature of the cathexes or investments that will eventually explain why a systematic view of the mind is essentially inadequate at an even more fundamental level: it is inadequate because to describe two manifestations of psychic energy in any terms other than qualitative ones (while appending disclaimers that this is, despite the language, not a qualitative distinction) is not possible if we are going to say that the psyche actually has a particular status, exists in a particular way at a particular time.
Let us elaborate: we find that this contradictory phrasing is in fact necessary for Freud because not only is he encountering a fundamental problem within the nature of the most basic element of his structural and dynamic theory of the mind, but he is also running up against a problem many thinkers--chiefly Nietzsche--have encountered. Essentially, the contradictory language opens up to larger, metaphysical levels because Freud here is tapping into a primordial contradiction: he attempts to describe something (psychical energy) that he wishes to assert ontologically exists as becoming while using language and logic that can only assert that something ontologically exists (and can only possess the quality of becoming). Thus he flips back and forth between quality and quantity. And because he is able to describe the psyche dynamically with quantities, he nevertheless must backtrack and describe it again in terms of quantity in order to say that, at a particular moment, it exists. If he were to forego the quantitative, he could only say that the psyche functions as organized, or looks as if it exists, in a particular way. This is the larger tension at play between the dynamic and structural accounts, and why both tend to feed off of each other's inadequacies.

The hyperbole of Nietzsche, and Heidegger

The title of the post here brings out a contrast, a difference made visible by the ambivalence of the additive or supplementary: the comma with the conjunction counting Heidegger, tacking him on like an afterthought, in a set philosophers in which there exists hyperbole. In sum, the title announces a problem, rather than a solution. It is a question about the correctness of its formula, and it is accomplished already in its formulation. Hyperbole, it says, Is it also in Heidegger? Is there hyperbole in Heidegger? And this question, we already know, risks proving something that seems itself hyperbolic: Heidegger never ever used hyperbole. If he did, it was a million times less remarkable than any regular use of hyperbole.
But in a way this is already a miscalculation: to ask if there is hyperbole also in Heidegger risks presupposing that Nietzsche is hyperbolic. Is this true? In fact, it presupposes more than this: if it is possible for Heidegger to be hyperbolic here, as it were, along with Nietzsche, Nietzsche must be himself hyperbole--that is, 100% hyperbolic, some standard of real, authentic, total use of hyperbole--since Heidegger comes afterwards to measure himself against Nietzsche. But is this the case? To understand all this about hyperbole, then--and it should be obvious that we're talking about hyperbole in a wide sense, about the figure and the logic that makes it up--we must be vigilant enough to pose this question of Heidegger (Is there hyperbole in Heidegger?) and, at the same time, question this question, which is to question Nietzsche (Does there exist the hyperbole of Nietzsche?)--that is, to add (Heidegger) and subtract (him) at the same time.
Working out the formula, checking for mistakes, we nevertheless seem to see that this odd operation it forces us to perform has its basis in the extreme nature of the Nietzschian task. As we said, Nietzsche isn't prompting us to ask just whether he is (also) hyperbolic, like Heidegger, but whether hyperbole exists. Nietzsche makes us ask, first and foremost, whether there is such a thing as hyperbole at all, whether hyperbole is such a thing that could be used in Nietzsche to the extent that he can be said to be a standard, some sort of authentic user of hyperbole, in comparison to Heidegger. Thus, like the question of Heidegger, this risks proving something hyperbolic as well: in the entirety of Western discourse there never was any hyperbole. Hyperbole never existed. Until Heidegger's poor use of hyperbole, that is a million times easier to miss than any normal use of hyperbole, hyperbole was completely nonexistent.
Let's note that this more extreme of the two claims--more extreme, more hyperbolic, because it questions whether there exists at all what is the basis of its very question--already touches upon the question of madness, which seems to be inextricably bound up with hyperbole. Must we be mad to question whether there is such a thing as the hyperbolic? Before we answer yes, we must reflect: isn't this question--whether we can hurl ourselves (ballein) above ourselves (húper) at all--not the sanest question of our current status, of our being, of our self-identity, of whether we are what we are (because it is questionable whether we can be higher than we are)? Another way to put this would be to say it touches upon the question of the overman.
But, to return to the question, is there hyperbole? Is it in Nietzsche at all? Let's simply try to prove this--regardless of whether this might end up disproving things. To prove this, many are tempted to simply look at the title of Nietzsche's work that seems most hyperbolic (and also, incidentally, nearest madness): Ecce Homo. Already, there it is. But we also know, from Nietzsche's letters (October 30, 1888), that the title was chosen to test the censors. Regardless of whether this is true, it is clear that it could just basic, pointless blasphemy, rather than hyperbole. Already, then, we have a sense of what will be so troubling to our efforts to point to hyperbole: Nietzsche's hyperbole is, at the same time as it is hyperbole, dishonest. And while this describes perfectly just what hyperbole is--dishonesty, being above oneself--it also hints that there is no such thing as "pure" hyperbole--a hyperbole that would honestly just be hyperbole.
We have already disproven things then. This, it would seem, is what is so disturbing and disarming about the hyperbole in Nietzsche: at the same time as it is hyperbole, we sense that it isn't. This forces us to look at it as truth, however, which is just as disarming, since the claim is so grand. There is no way to get around the problem: either Nietzsche is boasting, or he is merely being descriptive. The two acts map onto each other so well that we are not left with any alternative between true and false. And thus with no hyperbole: the extreme or hyperbolic nature of his task is then to show that hyperbole actually outlines a structure of truth.
But, given what we know about Nietzsche, this seems itself problematic. For we might just as well think that hyperbole would actually be something very contrary to the rest of Nietzsche's claims. Why? Simply because hyperbole seems to make a qualitative claim. And Nietzsche, we know, is the thinker of the quantitative par excellence. How do we reconcile this emphasis upon hyperbole with the emphasis upon quantitative relations of force? How do we see one as the other? Can we see one as the other?
Let's look at a passage to outline the problem more clearly:

I am an evangelist the like of which there has never been; I know tasks so lofty that there has not yet been a concept for them; I am the first to give rise to new hopes.
-Ecce Homo, "Why I Am a Destiny," 1.

Isn't this a claim similar to that claim of Heidegger, the qualitative claim?

If a thinking question is not so simple and so outstanding as to determine the will and the style of thinking for centuries--by yielding to them what is the most profound issue to think--then it is best that it not be asked.
-Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning), #5: "For the Few and the Rare."

Isn't the claim of Nietzsche a claim that says: it is almost better if the rest (of the evangelists, of those who thought they knew lofty tasks, of those who hoped) were dispensed with? In other words, that what makes up the hyperbole--the lump of that which Nietzsche is greater than (in a more normal hyperbole, "I could sleep for a zillion hours," it would be the hours)--is, despite its makeup, simply a set of identical things? Things that, because they are that set, can be dispensed with, compared to Nietzsche, who has more value? The question already arises, then, of whether this is indeed what Heidegger is here saying as well. And the more basic question of the relation of Heidegger to hyperbole. Perhaps we can address that now, in order to come back to Nietzsche.
Is Heidegger really saying that it is better for us if an unthinking question is never asked? In other words, is he serious? We would be mistaken if we said either yes or no. And yet, I maintain this is a qualitative claim, one which Nietzsche's claim, which should be quantitative and not qualitative, is in danger of approaching. How can this sentence of Heidegger be qualitative and not be serious? And, then, how can it not be unserious? And is either of these hyperbole?
It is just as much a mistake to say yes as to say no, because the particular type of qualitative claim does not move on the level here of identity. When Heidegger is saying that there is such a thing as a question, and that it is better off that a particular kind of question not be asked, he isn't talking about the existence of the question. He's not saying that a certain set of existent things have a particular quality--let's call it, being unthinking, or simply not being determinative enough of the will and style of thinking--which does not make them worthy of existence. The unthinking questions do not all exist such that they are identical in this respect. They do not have, that is, a relationship of identity with respect to each other. Their relation is, for Heidegger, that of sameness. Which means that a certain set of questions are unthinking in the sense that they all would not heavily participate in the determination of the will and style of thinking--even if they do not exist in the sense of just being present there. Thus, a question that is not yet on someone's lips, but is deep and unformulated in their mind, or scattered in notes somewhere, yet still ready to come together to become a question that is unthinking, that does not determine the will and the style of thinking immensely--this is what makes up the type of question that is better off not asked. This is what constitutes the quality of unthinkingness: essentially, what a piece of a question will do when it is eventually a question.
It is hard not to explain this in terms that are teleological (though Gadamer rightly calls this, and similar reasonings by Heidegger, only a "teleology in reverse"), but it is clear from this that when the question is better off being not asked, it does not mean that burning the pieces of paper with unthinking thoughts or silencing all the people who would only ask unthinking thoughts would not get rid of the quality here of unthinkingness. So, if Heidegger is not totally serious about what he is saying, it is not to be unserious or false. It is to be serious in a different way--and hyperbolic in a different way.
What is clear, however, is that this does not totally make a claim about truth or falsity in the way we found Nietzsche to be doing already. Heidegger is actually dismissing both alternatives--as we saw when neither saying yes or no would characterize his statement. What Heidegger is doing, then, is finding a different type of a claim to truth. Its relationship to hyperbole will have to be, then, ambivalent, insofar as hyperbole is not determined with respect to this new conception of truth. In essence, what Heidegger is doing here, on the level of our inquiry, is trying to show that hyperbole hits a limit with a conception of truth that is based on identities and things that are existent. What should we get out of this? Not that Heidegger lacks a certain ironic, jocular willingness to use hyperbole, or that his hyperboles are indeed serious, but that what he is in search for--if this were a concern for him--is a way of being hyperbolic that is precisely what we have already sensed Nietzsche resists: a way of being purely hyperbolic, hyperbolic in a way that is not at the same time a bit dishonest. What would this hyperbole look like? Would it still be hyperbole? This is where critiques of Heidegger may be launched.
But now we can return to Nietzsche and make more sense of the type of qualitative claim he is in danger of approaching. For there are actually two types of qualitative claim that we distinguished: the type that lumps things together based on their identity with respect to each other, that is, based on their existence, and the Heideggerian type, which lumps things together in terms of their possibility, in terms of their essence (that is, when we understand essence as the same or sameness). Is Nietzsche, then, in claiming that he is an evangelist the likes of which has never been actually claiming that it is better off if the whole set of previous evangelists are better off not existing? Or is he claiming that all other evangelists weren't really evangelists, wouldn't be evangelists when they came to be evangelists, and thus we would be better off if they never came to be this? Obviously, the answer is closer to the second: this is what Nietzsche comes close to claiming. But this is so only because we can't admit that this is a qualitative claim.
When Nietzsche is saying he is the first to give rise to new hopes, he is in danger of claiming that there is a particular quality that he has which others don't: that of being able to give rise to hope. But we can understand this in a different way: Nietzsche is so hopeful, so more hopeful than those who have been hopeful, so much more of a quantity of force, that to do any justice to the quantity, we have to make a qualitative shift. The shift isn't qualitative, however, since it is just to mark anew a qualitative difference. This is what it means to revalue in Nietzsche: to collect energy along a different distribution so that it gives rise to what seem to be qualitative shifts, shifts which actually can only really be described--can only really be--quantitative. In other words, suddenly there is so much more hope, that all the previous people who hoped look like they are less--to the extent that the phenomenon of hope that they exhibit seems different. What this does is not only make the phenomenon appear reversed or overturned, it determines the scale on which phenomena are compared upon quantity. Hope looks different because it is more, and thus also because it is not a quality.
The reason why this comes close to what Heidegger is claiming is actually, then, because it is closer to the first situation: really, the previous people who hoped should not exist--as people who exhibited the quality and not quantity of hope. Nietzsche isn't denying their right to exist as well. He is transforming, however, everything that centers around what right means. This transformation, then, is different than that effort of Heidegger's--it is precisely the reverse of that. This hyperbole of Nietzsche does not strive to make hyperbole pure: it seeks to infect the entire range of what is not considered hyperbolic with its hyperbole. One could say, then, that to read Nietzsche right, one has to take every word as hyperbolic--which means taking it as both true and false--whereas with Heidegger one has to look for another level at which hyperbole and truth would be more originary.
So, to return to our formula: Heidegger would be ambivalent with respect to the hyperbole of Nietzsche, precisely because Nietzsche's hyperbole would be dishonest--that is, would not be hyperbole. He would also be ambivalent because we could not be sure whether his hyperbole had any relationship to what seems like hyperbole in Nietzsche. Which makes the ambivalence into a reversal or opposition.

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.

Translating Ecce Homo

Duncan Large's new translation of Ecce Homo for the Oxford World Classics series is excellent. It lends an entirely different flavor to the German, exactly what a new translation should do. Though Roger Hollingdale's version is the most solid, in my view, and Walter Kaufmann's the most forceful, this translation seems to get at the precariousness, the grotesqueness of the German, and particularly the tension it establishes with the tradition of autobiography.
The biggest change Large adopted was to use the second person singular pronoun much more for the German "Man." Thus, for "Wie man wird, was man ist," the famous subtitle of the little volume, we do not get the more traditional translation with the impersonal "one," as in Hollingdale's rendition "How One Becomes What One Is," but the much more interesting and simple "How To Become What You Are."
The effect is remarkable when it is dispersed across the entire book. It is an entirely different--and I think more interesting--experience of reading. Take, for example, the following on curing oneself when ill with ressentiment, in first the German and then in Hollingdale's rendition:

Wenn irgend Etwas überhaupt gegen Kranksein, gegen Schwachsein geltend gemacht werden muss, so ist es, dass in ihm der eigentliche Heilinstinkt, das ist der Wehr- und Waffen-Instinkt im Menschen mürbe wird. Man weiss von Nichts loszukommen, man weiss mit Nichts fertig zu werden, man weiss Nichts zurückzustossen,—Alles verletzt. Mensch und Ding kommen zudringlich nahe, die Erlebnisse treffen zu tief, die Erinnerung ist eine eiternde Wunde. [...] Hiergegen hat der Kranke nur Ein grosses Heilmittel— [...] Weil man zu schnell sich verbrauchen würde, wenn man überhaupt reagirte, reagirt man gar nicht mehr: dies ist die Logik. Und mit Nichts brennt man rascher ab, als mit den Ressentiments-Affekten. Der Ärger, die krankhafte Verletzlichkeit, die Ohnmacht zur Rache, die Lust, der Durst nach der Rache, das Giftmischen in jedem Sinne—das ist für Erschöpfte sicherlich die nachtheiligste Art zu reagiren: ein rapider Verbrauch von Nervenkraft, eine krankhafte Steigerung schädlicher Ausleerungen, zum Beispiel der Galle in den Magen, ist damit bedingt. Das Ressentiment ist das Verbotene an sich für den Kranken—sein Böses: leider auch sein natürlichster Hang.
-"Warum Ich So Weise Bin," 6

Its a long quote, but I think with it you can get some of the sense of what its like to read Large's translation. Here is Hollingdale:

If anything whatever has to be admitted against being sick, being weak, it is that in these conditions the actual curative instinct, that is to say the defensive and offensive instinct in man becomes soft. One does not know how to get free of anything, one does not know how to have done with anything, one does not know how to thrust back—everything hurts. Men and things come importunately close, events strike too deep, the memory is a festering wound. [...] Against this the invalid has only one great means of cure— [...] Because one would use oneself up too quickly if one reacted at all, one no longer reacts: this is the logic. And nothing burns one up quicker than the affects of ressentiment. Vexation, morbid suceptibility, incapacity for revenge, the desire, the thirst for revenge, poison-brewing in any sense—for one who is exhausted this is certainly the most disadvantageous kind of reaction: it causes a rapid expenditure of energy, an morbid accretion of excretions, for example of gall into the stomach. Ressentiment is the forbidden in itself for the invalid—his evil: unfortunately also his most natural inclination.
-"Why I Am So Wise," 6, Hollingdale's translation.

Now look at Duncan Large's rendering:

If anything at all needs to be counted against being ill, being weak, then it is the fact that in that state the true healing instinct, in other words the instinct for defence and weapons in man, is worn down. You cannot get rid of anything, you cannot cope with anything, you cannot fend anything off—everything hurts you. People and things get intrusively close, experiences affect you too deply, memory is a festering wound. [...] The invalid has only one great remedy for it— [...] Since you would exhaust yourself too quickly if you reacted at all, you no longer react in any way: such is the logic. And nothing burns you up faster then the emotions of resentment. Anger, sickly vulnerability, powerlessness to take revenge, the lust, the thirst for revenge, every kind of poisonous troublemaking—for the exhausted this is certainly the most detrimental way of reacting: it brings on a rapid consumption of nervous strength, a sickly intensification of harmful excretions, for example of bile in the somach. For the invalid, resentment is the absolute forbidden—his evil: unfortunately his most natural inclination, too.
"Why I Am So Wise," 6, Large's translation.

Though some crucial things are lost (the forbidden "an sich," though of course it could mean "absolute," I think is preserved better by Hollingdale's "in itself"), Large's translation, I think, benefits in the end for being so very bold. Hollingdale saves some key words better perhaps than Large, who interprets them more, it could be said--and precisely by going back to the roots of the German words, which should not in itself be seen as an act of fidelity to the source text's meaning, as is so often taken to be the case in philosophical translations of German. But it should be noted that Large is often more close to the sentence structure than Hollingdale, which, in Nietzsche, as well as in most German and French, is often more crucial than we think it is (just pick up Barbara Harlow's unbelievably horrible rendering of Derrida's Spurs, which absolutely decimates this fact about Derrida's text, if you want a good example of what this produces: a translation that is nearly unreadable). Usually, though, any of these deviations with respect to the accepted translation as represented by Kaufmann and Hollingdale is done with a lot of thought on Large's part--it is only thus that it could be so bold in the first place. Take, for example, his refusal to leave Nietzsche's "Ressentiment" in the French--that is, translate it by "resentment:" at its first appearance he appends a note, saying

The standard English translation "ressentiment," characterizes it as a loan-word from the French, but Nietzsche spells it with an initial capital [this is true in fact always, mj], stressing that he considers it to have been successfully adopted into the German language (which gives all nouns initial capitals)--by contrast with "décadence," [another frequent word that is French in origin], for instance.
-Ecce Homo, Note to page 13, 101.

Few would have the guts, I think, to do this to such a well known and oft quoted concept (even though I thoroughly agree with Large here, out of habit I myself used the French when referring to it above), but Large both does it and shows that it is right.
The fundamental boldness of this translation, though, lies in that basic gesture I am circling around above, which uses "you" instead of "one." Why this is so bold is that it fundamentally increases the danger of intimacy, of the cancellation of distance--which anyone who knows Nietzsche will tell you is absolutely crucial to him (cf. the famous passages on the "pathos of distance" in the Genealogy). Not only does it increase the danger for us, but also for Nietzsche himself: if it is true that this book is Nietzsche telling himself his life--the various "you's" in the text, which can be interpreted as Nietzsche somewhat referring to himself, show how constantly the pressure is there to maintain some coherence, to will the relation of himself into some economy, some shape, and yet at the same time not have it collapse into self-identification. Giving us some sense of this danger might, by itself, be Large's translation's greatest triumph.

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.