Deleuze's Nietzsche
Dave Harris
I am not claiming to be well versed in the works of
Nietzsche, and I should confess that I find
them rather tedious, ranty and self serving. So
much seems to relate to his own circumstances -
his mood swings become Zarathustra's mood swings
as he demonstrates his needs for company and then
his to revulsion from company and so on. Deleuze
discusses the connections between Nietzsche's
philosophy and life in his'clinical project' .
Nietzsche urges us to put nobility and wisdom
above all else, just as he hopes people will
remember him in terms of his nobility and wisdom
and not his stupidity and recklessness. We
are urged to condemn academic life as pettifogging
and scholastic, but this looks a bit like sour
grapes from a man who had a glittering academic
career and then had to relinquish it. He
urges us to consider our heroes as human
all-too-human which is probably how he explains
his own peccadilloes and the lapses (sexual
dalliances and contracting STD?) that so
disappointed his mother and sister. He
clearly has a vengeful and distrustful view of
women, and of their evil wiles in diverting heroes
from their true purpose, which is to boldly
adventure, take risks, heroically laugh at fate,
take their losses at gambling, and press on and do
things that produce social change instead of
sitting about whingeing about inequalities.
At its worst it reads like a cross between Baden
Powell and the fantasies of the Freikorps analysed
byThewelheit [I must put my notes online] .
Nor am I particularly convinced by attempts to
suggest that Nietzsche was not actually
antisemitic. He does condemn current German
antisemitics, but that does not mean that all
versions of antisemitism are to be rejected.
Judaic heroes can also be admired as are all
heroes. Nietzsche seems to me to
offer a particularly potent form of anti
Semitism that sees Christianity, with all its
corrupting influences, as a kind of judaic
revenge. It is not necessary to actually
hate specific Jews, of course, or all Jews, but
antisemitism simply takes a more general
form. Studies of racism in England have
clearly pointed to these variations in racist
thought and noted that racists can clearly exempt
individual black people from their hatred, while
entertaining racist views of politics and
culture. More generally still, we might
pursue Adorno's view that it is not necessary to
hate Jews specifically to be antisemitic—that any
minority ethnic group will do as scapegoats, or
seen as threats to some natural community.
Nietzsche again clearly despises people who are
outside his ideal cultural community, the brave
elite, the blonde beasts, the heroic nobility, the
Aryans, so he has all the mechanisms for
antisemitism, so to speak, even if it is largely
Christians are not Jews who qualify for the most
hatred.
The same might be said for misogyny.
Generally, women come out as the main source of
feminised corruption of the manly spirit, and this
point emerges again and again. He
specifically says that giving women equal rights
is a sign of the triumph of this decadence.
Apologists, including Deleuze, might be able to
say that Nietzsche are clearly also admires
particular women, for Deleuze, Ariadne who plays a
major part in the Dionysus myth. Again this
does not exempt him from the charge, however,
since it is common for misogyny to differentiate
between good, idealised, divine and usually
asexual women on the one hand, and the majority of
nasty, corrupting, venal peddlers of sentimental
myth and judgment on the other. As usual,
philosophers like Deleuze need much more
understanding of the existing types and nature of
prejudice, and they miss this if they generalise
excessively.
Deleuze offers one of the worst and most dangerous
kinds of generalisation I have come across so
far. A naive reading of Nietzsche, such as
the one I have pursued, would see his main
interest in developing a strong morality that
values heroic fatalism, inevitably associated with
elite men. That seems to drive everything,
including his ethics, his reverence for Greek
tragedy, his educational policy, his attacks on
Christianity and his philosophical excursions into
critiquing Kant or Hegel. I see excursions,
not major themes, but for Deleuze it is the exact
opposite. Again this is convenient if you
want to apologise for Nietzsche, but it requires a
highly selective reading, and a symptomatic
one. We have to see Nietzsche as pretty well
indifferent to surface forms, and wanting to
develop a general symptomology, to look beneath
the surface in the classic manner, which is how he
is introduced in Deleuze's book:
the extended rants would suggest that surface
forms were all-important, though.
We can illustrate the different approaches by
considering an early argument in chapter one of
Deleuze's book on Nietzsche. For Deleuze,
Nietzsche is one of the first to recognise
the significance of difference as the source of
dynamism in the material and ideal world.
This clearly is going to be supported by Deleuze's
own work in Difference
and Repetition. Nietzsche and
Deleuze alike see these differences as material,
expressed in empirical matter, appearing as
multiplicity. This is a concept that rejects
the dialectic (Hegel's dialectic) as
oversimplified, selecting particular differences
as crucial, calling them negations, and using the
tension generated as a mechanism for social
change. Nietzsche's attack on Socratic
dialectic (in Birth
of Tragedy) is based on its
excessively cynical and rational/theoretical
tone. There are more differences than
dialectical opposites,andmore at stake than logic
or rationality. It follows for Deleuze at
least that this means we do not have to emphasize
the negative either in philosophy or ethics, and
here Nietzsche is celebrated again as an early
advocate of the affirmative, the celebration of
life, the Dionysian, with all its ups and downs.
However, the main originating difference that
drives history for Nietzsche is the difference
between the noble and the ignoble, the wise and
the ignorant, the masculine and the feminised, the
strong and the weak. So far at least, I have
seen no general account of difference at the level
of reality itself, nothing to support Deleuze's
account of the intensive differences between
ontological forces appearing in
multiplicities. Nietzsche's multiplicities,
like his differences are social ones. We
cannot divide human affairs into good and evil but
have to go beyond those categories. Heroes
are not entirely heroic, but have definite human
all-too-human elements. There are no simple
moral precepts to follow, rather political and
cultural uncertainties to be pursued.
Attacking conventional morality involves restoring
a time when social division, and the rule of the
strong and the masculine were properly valued, and
left to get on with the great task of developing
social relations with daring and creativity:
modern notions of community simply gloss over
these divisions. When Deleuze generalizes from
these descriptions to support his own ontology, it
serves also to apologise for these highly
controversial political and ethical views.
Take a more specific controversy, the eternal
return. When I first read Deleuze on
Nietzsche on the eternal return, in Difference
and Repetition, I thought then that it was
rather special pleading. Deleuze spent time
and effort on explaining that difference was the
real source of dynamism, not repetition of the
same. Apart from anything else, this enabled
him to dismiss an awful lot of conventional
thought as unduly conservative, including
scientific procedures based on the probabilistic
return of the same. However, Deleuze then
has to deal with the notion of the eternal return,
only because one of his heroes uses the term,
which is usually understood as a form of
repetition, the cyclic reproduction of the same
sort of social life. I said in my own
comments that this reproduction needed to be
distinguished from sociological conceptions of
social reproduction that predict development, not
the return of the identical, but Deleuze does not
even mention those accounts. Instead, he has
to deal with Nietzsche who implies that life will
return in the same way. In Zarathustra,
this eternal return is used to make
ethico/political points, that basically we should
try to be far more daring in this life because
otherwise we will have to simply repeat all the
old tedium in the next. However, Nietzsche
specifically says, in the same Zarathustra, that
it will be the identical that returns, not the
similar but the identical:
I come again with this sun,
with this eagle, with this serpent --NOT to
a new life, or a better life or a similar
life: I come again eternally to this
identical and self-same life, in its
greatest and smallest, to teach again the
eternal return of all things (LVII)
Deleuze tells us exactly the opposite! In
Zarathustra, he says, Nietzsche refers to the
eternal return as the great Becoming, and,
secondly, that it was not by the identical that
returns:
Deleuzes actually smuggled in his notion of
becoming in the earlier discussion about
difference. For him, becoming is a quality
of the multiplicity, which makes it far more
important than static orfrozen states of
being. I'm not sure that Nietzsche has
exactly the same emphasis, however, and that he
does not mean the same strong sense of becoming
when he talks about individuals or objects being
multiple. The Becoming that is cited does
not seem to me to have particular philosophical
importance, but is a pronouncement of social
change, with a rather Christian emphasis, perhaps
for ironic purposes. Again much will depend
on how you read your Nietzsche, and I am of course
aware that the translations might be different.
While I am here, an enthusiast
on the web gathered together some other
discussions in Nietzsche on the eternal return,
and here, there might be more support for
Deleuze's view. Even so, change requires the
strong to grab the opportunity to assert
themselves and the weak to gladly erase
themselves?:
Plan for an unfinished book:
The Eternal Recurrence
My philosophy brings the
triumphant idea of which all other modes of
thought will ultimately perish. It is the
great cultivating idea: the races that cannot
bear it stand condemned; those who find it the
greatest benefit are chosen to rule...
I want to teach the idea that
gives many the right to erase themselves - the
great cultivating idea...
Everything becomes and recurs
eternally - escape is impossible! - Supposing
we could judge value, what follows?
The idea of recurrence as a selective
principle, in the service of strength (and
barbarism!!)...[He is
saying we could select if we only accepted
his values?]
To endure the idea of
the recurrence one needs: freedom from
morality; new means against the fact of pain
( pain conceived as a tool, as the father of
pleasure...); the enjoyment of all kinds of
uncertainty, experimentalism, as a
counterweight to this extreme fatalism;
abolition of the concept of necessity;
abolition of the "will"; abolition of
"knowledge-in-itself." [well
yes -- all that tosh about the will would
have to be revised? Do we learn to love fate
or will our lives to be different?]
Greatest elevation of the
consciousness of strength in man, as he
creates the overman.[Who
will end the eternal return?]
from The Will to Power,
s. 1053,1056,1058,1060, Walter Kaufmann
transl.
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