Nietzsche and self-criticism

Nietzsche's "Attempt at Self-Criticism" in The Birth of Tragedy is hailed by innumerable commentators as the self-criticism to end all self-criticisms. But I'd say that the criticism isn't, on the one hand, something that should be simply admired because it is self-criticism taken to the nth level (some simply love to see a thinker destroy themselves), or, on the other, something that should be seen as foreign to the task that Nietzsche is setting himself in August of 1886. To condense these two poles into one formula: one should not read Nietzsche's self-criticism unless one gives enough weight to the fact that it is an attempt. "Versuch einer Selbstkritik:" this is a title that designates a sort of seeking out of the right way to look at oneself--and if one gives proper weight to Nietzsche's theses about the perspectival nature of our relation to things and the world's relation to itself, this search becomes much more problematic. It becomes a way that I would say is only definitively found on the brink of madness and already in the most insane language (extreme irony, extreme hubris, the elevation of the attempt itself to the form of a science), in that other amazing self-critique taking the form of a beholding of the man in Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
Thus, one can't take it as the prescription of a particular hermeneutic enterprise, which is precisely what you would look to it (like the "pessimists" who flocked to the book upon its release) to find. One wants Nietzsche to specify a relation to himself, thereby disclosing, in a sense, how one can see oneself, how a self is constituted--and in practice, for one is suspicious about Nietzsche's theories about this self (thus mistakenly assuming that Nietzsche's statements in places like Beyond Good and Evil and especially--this is Heidegger's supreme error--in The Will to Power, constitute a theory, and that, in other spheres, they don't). And though a sort of relation to himself is established in this self-criticism, I would suggest that it would be a misunderstanding to take it as prescribing this act as a hermeneutic, as so many do when they admirably look at the extreme immolation to which Nietzsche submits his own work.
And not only because it is merely an attempt--that is, not carried out well enough. This is also because it is not a purely destructive effort: Nietzsche localizes the main fulcrums of the text, extracts what he finds are most useful, and cautions that the other parts may distract one from seeing these more crucial parts. This is because the task of self-criticism is precisely that of subtracting, as it were, the anthropological--not destroying it. The point is to erase it and move on, not to glory in the subordination of a weaker opponent. For it is only through this act--a side-stepping of real conflict, of conflict qua suffering--that Nietzsche sees there being any possibility of power to assert itself. This is why he can confront Paul Ree in the Genealogy of Morals--and why it is not someone else, a mere straw-man, an empty figure against which Nietzsche would pretend to test his genius, only to ridicule the game itself.
All this is too slavish. This bears repeating or elucidating: the sidestepping of the conflict in which one would belittle one's opponent, precisely in order to appropriate exactly that amount of him which shows itself as able to be appropriated--this is the quintessential Nietzschian task. And it is the task of any self-criticism, where this opponent would simply be one's prior self. What this means is that there in a sense is no self pitted against self, no future self against a past self, because neither is a total self--there is only a relation between the two in which parts, forces, can be appropriated. No doubt Nietzsche also lost something by attempting the self-criticism: it is wholly possible that he did. But the main point--that I've hit on already--is that this is a conflict without suffering, two opponents that also are friends. Without suffering: this means that one doesn't appropriate such that one shames--any shaming will be a result of the appropriation, will appear afterwards only because of the subtraction of the inadequate, of what is criticized. And indeed, the ability to do this is precisely the art of tragedy itself which Nietzsche is trying to specify in The Birth of Tragedy--as he says in his writing on the book in Ecce Homo:

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.

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.

The "war" Nietzsche refers to is precisely that of saying No to oneself, to deny life in order to affirm it, to say Yes to it. And it is in this sense that he criticizes himself: "Nein, drei Mal nein!" he says to himself in one portion of the criticism, repeating it over and over. Indeed, the virulence of passages like this would lead one to say that the whole thing, in fact, is a great No to the work of 1871--but, one would immediately have to add, it is only a No that attempts to say Yes in its own way. To make my minor point too quickly, it is the struggle to lie while saying no, especially to the pessimists to which it is addressed, so that one actually affirms life in this negation--not through the negation, but by sidestepping any negation that would merely destroy, that would not overcome: is this not the greatest lie? And is it not this lie precisely, then, what Nietzsche is attempting? We shouldn't then be surprised--much less be in reverential awe that reduces it to a boring masochism passing for a signal of rigor a la Derrida (who is more and less Nietzschian, perhaps, than we might think--we shouldn't then be surprised at the force with which Nietzsche denies himself, criticizes himself. It is precisely to make the attempt qua attempt more pressing.
In the end, this is why the "Attempt at Self-Criticism" is the most fitting introduction to the book: not because it shows how one looks back at a work and castigates oneself for writing such drivel--as so many self-loathing critics would want it to be--but how one, in the act of reflecting, forgets that drivel by appropriating (or rather, since the success of this side-step is not guaranteed, by attempting to appropriate) what is valuable in it.

Foucault, interviews, and interpretation

According to Foucault, if one analyzes discursive formations, one does not interpret: there is no hermeneutic since the object of analysis is not language but what he calls the statement. Or rather, one builds up the formation according to the registration of statements and the isolation of their required principles of dispersion and redistribution--because this is the case, there is no hermeneutic.
This requires us to reflect a little: no interpretation? Is this a correct description of his own method? Let's step back a bit and look at one instance in which interpretation is or is not at play in Foucault's work.
David Glover in a pretty recent issue of the journal New Formations (entitled "Foucault Talk") marvels at the immense patience of Foucault in his countless interviews on the topic of sex after the publication of his History of Sexuality: Foucault was asked any and every question as to what sex meant when it was precisely his contention in that history that sex only meant something within the domain of sexuality. Sex was not the essence of sexuality, it was the specific acts that built up a regularity of sexuality and channeled or distributed power. One gets the sense that Glover's wonder at the persistence of the thinker has as its flipside a wonder at the stupidity of especially Anglo-American interlocutors in these interviews. But, I would contend, this disdain of Glover's is misplaced, and perhaps is only an instance of that typical philosophic prejudice (which Foucault himself was constantly combating) that makes the discussion of sex acts, or acts related to this domain, less important or less worthy of a philosopher's time than the "doctrine" of the philosopher that he is "applying" in the interview. I would contend, that is, that people weren't asking the wrong questions with Foucault "patiently" avoiding the issue of sex--as if it was not worthy of his "system"--and, when he did answer, was only trying to get them to focus on what he "really" was about in his History: sexuality as a discourse, as a field of power, as a domain of subjectivation.
As you can see if you read his wonderful 1982 interview in Toronto centering on sex acts and S&M ("Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity"), the point is precisely that Foucault is able to bring acts related to sex or, more accurately, instances of pleasure, within the domain of sexuality that he is sketching in his History. In other words, the point of much of that interview is to try and include S&M as a particular instance of pleasure into the larger field of his recently published study--or at least set up a relationship between the study and S&M. The interviews therefore aren't tiresome misinterpretations of what Foucault is about, with Foucault responding only to correct an interlocutor who just is focused on sex acts, or thinks Foucault is some sex-god come down to tell him all sorts of interesting meanings he can find in sex, as Glover would make us think. The interviews are Foucault trying to articulate how sexuality bears upon sex acts and especially upon acts that have interesting relationships to sex like S&M. The result is that he is not responding only from within his wholly-constituted, solid, definite theoretical position (everyone wants a philosopher to talk from the standpoint of his philosophy: can one imagine Kant saying something not Kantian?), but a bit outside it--or rather, on the edge of it, in the area where it is being tested, where the his history of sexuality may only somewhat come in to the discussion. In short, he's not speaking entirely within the viewpoint of his "philosophy," precisely because that would be to use that philosophy (and especially that philosophy qua genealogy/archaeology/history) to interpret. So, what he does is suggest a particular connection, but then simply restate his central thesis in the book regarding sexuality.
Why would this be interpretation? Because it would extend the description that constitutes the analysis of a discursive formation and power into something that bears upon sex wherever it appears--in short, it would be to elevate history (finite empiricity, for Foucault) to the level of ontology (finite transcendence, for someone like Heidegger). This is due to how the analysis of discourse is not interpretation precisely because it merely describes the modality of the existence of statements--that is, fields of differences or relations by which a statement is the way it is: in short, it does not apply to any domain outside itself except by provoking the discursive analysis of other situations. So when someone asks Foucault about S&M, he does not try and immediately fit it within his analysis of sexuality--as if the analysis of a discourse could account for anything and everything like an ontology. Instead, he tries to lift the domain of this particular practice of pleasure to the level where it would play a role in a discursive formation, if allied with other statements. This formation, indeed, might turn out to be sexuality--but this has to be worked out a bit more.
In other words, S&M means too much when he is asked about it for him to comment from the perspective of his history of sexuality as it is already constituted: it is too much of a meaningful act. (We can see this in how we commonly refer to it precisely as something with a relationship to a "sex act" and not as a richer domain of pleasure on its own--not that, of course, it should relinquish any relationship with sex acts or sexuality.) Let me be clearer, for it is not that S&M must lose its meaning. Rather, it must become a richer historical fact in order for it to be analyzed within the domain of sexuality as it is constituted by Foucault--in short, it simply lies outside the sphere of the analysis he completes as a historian. But this is for essential, and not contingent, reasons--and it does not mean that S&M must be something that is "over with" (history is not simply what is in the past, for Foucault). The level of formation at which he is looking at sexuality in the History is simply not exactly right to get into S&M at any length--this is why he steps back from saying, in the interview, that S&M is something that can be immediately related to sexuality. But this is also why--and Glover cannot account for this--Foucault continues to analyze it there with his interviewer. What needs to be done, for Foucault, is to determine the limits and the context of S&M and try and find a level of formation where it could interact with other discourses or other disciplines, one of which may be sexuality. In short, Foucault tries to show the interviewer that S&M is not as much of a fact as he assumes it is: something immediately significant, something that, merely by virtue of its being an act or an event, has meaning. He is trying to show this interviewer that it perhaps is, qua act, also an instance or a statement governed by the rules of a discourse and the power that sustains and proliferates within it. Or, perhaps put better (why does a philosopher always have to seem like he is correcting his interviewer?), Foucault is, with the help of his interviewer, bringing S&M into the field where it can link up with discourses, where it can be seen as more mobile and also more delicate (it has finer and more determining limits)--that is, when it is precisely less of a phenomenon that needs to be interpreted and more of a non-phenomenon, an instance of representation, that has a specific mode of existence and a way of occurring in accordance with regularities.
This all means that Foucault is bringing S&M, with and not despite his interviewer, into the sphere where it will need no hermeneutic--there will need to be, insofar as history is concerned (that is, insofar as this does not exclude all sorts of other modes of analysis), only description of it. Of course, things get tricky as to how this precisely is done: indeed, there might be hermeneutic decisions to be made as to how to gain this descriptive perspective. But the goal is clear, and one doesn't have to start from this non-descriptive point of view anyway: one can just begin at the level of the analysis of statements, within that perspective.
I should also note that this also allows Foucault to comment as a person--that is, he can switch back and forth between the descriptive perspective and back into some more quirky comments sex acts he may personally enjoy or knows of others enjoying. In other words, Foucault might not be helping the interviewer, or letting the interviewer help him, at any of these occasions as well--for the simple reason that he does not really indicate when he is speaking descriptively or more personally. This creates many problems in reading an interview of Foucault, one of which Leo Bersani once, with amazing rigor and unbelievable accuracy, pointed out: at the same time as he could sound extreme or radical in his politics precisely via analyzing certain sex acts or certain dynamics of contemporary sexuality, and bringing both together, he could also be talking more descriptively, lodging the grounds for this togetherness elsewhere, in a history of sexuality that might have some bearing here. At the very worst, this allows Foucault to precisely make his own idiosyncratic pleasures sound radical--and gesture for proof not at the more interesting and wide ranging aspects of the history, but the bare fact that they are connected to a general project of the expansion and proliferation of pleasure. This makes acts with which his may be associated lose the political burden they have, unfortunately manifested most crudely in their typical production of white, male heterosexual revulsion: this results in him sometimes looking like he is saying that

the revulsion, it turns out, is all a big mistake: what we're really up to is pluralism and diversity, and getting buggered is just one moment in the practice of those laudable humanistic virtues. Foucault could be especially perverse about all this: challenging, provoking, and yet, in spite of is radical intentions, somewhat appeasing in his emphases.
-in "Is the Rectum a Grave?"

I would argue though, with what I imagine would be Bersani's aggreement, that Foucault only does this occasionally (though more than one might think)--and that anyway what is most important is that even the confusion he produces here cannot be profitably read if one looks at it as a mere deviation from his grand "philosophy," as Glover seems to do. If anything it indicates only the opposite--and in turn shows how especially amenable the philosophical gesture of appealing to established doctrines or systems is to fostering (though Glover is way far from engaging in this) precisely that humanistic revulsion. However, my point here was to carve out a space in between, I guess, the personal and the philosophical where Foucault is working--it seems to me--most of the time in these amazing interviews. This presupposes the fact that interpretation, for him, is something we can indeed dispense with if we think hard enough and look at discourse in the right way. Foucault is clear about all this in the following, with which we will end this post:

The analysis of statements, then, is a historical analysis, but one that avoids all interpretation: it does not question things said as to what they are hiding, what they were "really" saying, in spite of themselves, the unspoken element that they contain, the proliferation of thoughts, images, or fantasies that inhabit them; but, on the contrary, it questions them as to their mode of existence, what it means to them to have come into existence, to have left traces, and perhaps to remain there, awaiting the moment when they might be of use once more; what it means to them to have appeared when and where they did--they and no others. From this point of view, there is no such thing as a latent statement: for what one is concerned with is a fact of language.
-The Archaeology of Knowledge, 109

Or, in the French (somewhat too literally translated into the English above, except for the last clause, which is much more ambiguous in the original):

L'analyse énonciative est donc une analyse historique, mais qui se tient hors de toute interprétation: aux choses dites, elle ne demande pas ce qu'elles cachent, ce qui s'était dit en elles et malgré elles le non-dit qu'elles recouverent, le foisonnement de pensées, d'images ou de fantasmes qui les habitent; mais au contraire sur quel mode elles existent, ce que c'est pour elles d'avoir été manifestées, d'avoir laissé des traces et peut-être de demeurer là, pour une réutilisation éventuelle; ce que c'est pour elles d'être apparues--et nulle autre à leur place. De ce point de vue, on ne reconnaît pas d'énoncé latent: car ce à qui on s'adresse, c'est à la patence du langage effectif.
-L'archéologie du savoir, 143-4

Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, depth, and the body

This is a continuation of the beginning of a paper (posted below as "To see in secret") I have just completed on Derrida and Merleau-Ponty:

Merleau-Ponty opens his discussion of painting in “Eye and Mind” with the body. This fact alone already proves that any description of his thought as just a general philosophy of the embodied—Jean Luc-Nancy calls it a “monism of the flesh” —might be, if not incorrect (this might be exactly what Merleau-Ponty does), then as reductive and as violent as describing Derrida in this way. For painting is not usually a place where we would expect the body to be thought: the fields of sexuality, ethics, and the philosophy of mind (with all its well classified and extremely interesting issues: physicalism, Turing machines, “neural nets,” and perhaps the most related to our problematic as well as, within the field, the most vaguely defined—qualia)—all these seem more at home philosophically with the body. However, for Merleau-Ponty, painting seems naturally to provoke this discussion of the body by the particular types of problems that it poses: indeed, as he will say, we cannot imagine it being otherwise. Regardless, even if this is nothing more than the most radical extension of this “monism” to all problems whatever, it is clear that new complications are introduced in both painting and the body that Derrida will probably pick up in that realm where they exceed the simple extensions of any of Merleau-Ponty’s particular prejudices—and these surely will be more complex and rich than any “monism” might produce. But let us witness the beginning of this discussion:

The painter “takes his body with him,” says Valéry. Indeed, we cannot imagine how a mind [un Esprit] could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body—not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement [mouvement].
I have only to see something to know how to reach it and deal with it, even if I do not know how this happens in the nervous machine. My mobile body makes a difference in the visible world, being a part of it; that is why I can steer it through the visible. Conversely, it is just as true that vision is attached to movement. We see only what we look at. What would vision be without eye movement? And how could the movement of the eyes bring things together if the movement were blind? If it were only a reflex? If it did not have its antennae, its clairvoyance? If vision were not prefigured in it?

Here we find several arguments in Merleau-Ponty’s earlier work, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), condensed for us and taken beyond the logic of that particular investigation in a very specific way that will repay our attention, since this essay’s linkage of painting to the body will sketch for us that concept of the “visible” which needs to be thought to know what he means by “invisible.”
In his Phenomenology of Perception, as well as in the even earlier Structure of Comportment (1942), Merleau-Ponty made it clear how much is lost both for and by a science (as well as a culture) that indeed, as he says here, thinks the body is “a chunk of space,” or, at most, a mere meaningless interface (“a bundle of functions” or sometimes stimuli) between the outside and the inside of a system that is only there to sustain thought. The first notion of the body (“empiricist”) describes merely a collection of organs distributed in the space of physics, and is the object of physiology and medicine, as well as most other sciences that deal with it. The second view (“intellectualist”) is the philosopher’s notion of the body, as well as (if it is not the first notion) the psychologist’s and, we might add (though advances are continually moving in the direction of more holistic notions of brain-based psychic phenomena ) the average modern neuroscientist’s (**See, for one of numerous and promising examples--proving no doubt that categorizing all these views into two big camps is quite crude on Merleau-Ponty's part--the amazing work of Daniel Dennett, which combines computational models and artificial intelligence with neuroscience and the work of Merleau-Ponty and Husserl in what he calls “heterophenomenology:” cf. “Who’s on First? Heterophenomenology Explained.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10:9-10, p. 10-30). For Merleau-Ponty, however, the body is more like that background functioning that allows a particular perspective to be towards a world (or in the world, in the Heideggerian sense of this “in” ). In other words, for Merleau-Ponty, it is the unity, prior to (but not excluding) thought, that allows an extraordinary range of action that extends from reflexes and other fundamental and usually completely non-conscious tasks like breathing (which presuppose this unity—thus his comment, above, on how the body cannot be a collection of reflexes), to delicate manipulation of objects with the hands, or (what is a better example) the sophisticated movements of a soccer player or other athlete performed “without thinking.” Thus, in these paragraphs, Merleau-Ponty stresses the seemingly obvious (“we see only what we look at”), precisely because it is not obvious when one begins to think about the immense network of operations at play in that gap between what is traditionally thought of as “mind” and “world” (between “seeing” and “looking”). As he says, here is space where “I have only to see something to know how to reach it and deal with it, even if I do not know how this happens in the nervous machine.”
But, as the next sentence stresses, this amazing space is not prior to action or to any lived experience—so this theory of the body is not the theory of something upon which or by means of which actions occur: “my mobile body makes a difference in the visible world, being a part of it; that is why I can steer it through the visible” (italics added). What this means is that the body is less the “background functioning” that makes action possible, as we said, than it is the unity of an action of movement that is actually taking place. In fact, more generally, we might call it the unity of experience, if we stress the double genitive here: it is that which every experience presupposes and yet only exists in that experience. Brought about by an action towards and within the world (whether on the level of breathing or of some fancy soccer move), and yet being precisely what is necessary for that act to occur, it is probably better to describe this movement-experience by the word “motility,” as it is done in the Phenomenology of Perception: it is not so much any one movement as the potential to move actualized—that is, existing as a finite movement in space and in time. Regardless of what term one uses, however, we see now why the stress in this quote is on the mobile, on steering through the world, and the fact that the body is actually making a difference in the world or is unified around one perspective or motivation: though in its act of synthesis or unification through a distinct movement it might seem like the apperception of Kant, the body is not an intellectualist’s ideal structure of some sort as much as it is not an empiricist’s collection of organs. It is, instead, only that potential to act that is fully spent within any actual movement (**The language of potentials and action, of course, is inadequate, but brings out the transformation Merleau-Ponty is effecting with Husserl’s notion of intentionality. Intentionality shall be, for Merleau-Ponty, more concrete and more factical (in the Heideggerian sense) than in Husserl. As he says in the Phenomenology of Perception: we must ultimately “understand motility as basic intentionality” (PP, 159)). This concreteness of action no longer separated from the world as an ideal system of consciousness, looking upon it from the outside as a series of objects or data—this is what Merleau-Ponty is getting at in his assumption that embodied painting is the only painting we could imagine (“indeed, we cannot imagine how a mind could paint”). In the end, we understand that we cannot simply say that Merleau-Ponty thereby is giving us a bodily theory of perception (a word we have avoided until now, precisely because it seems so much like the viewing of an act outside of moving or desiring or intending towards it, but shall mean the same for us as apprehending or having a moving perspective upon the world), unless we mean by this and understand that, for him, perception is the body itself... (to be continued...)