Here is a cluster of (not entirely organized) thoughts raised by my revisiting Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality this week.
In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche says he wants more philosophers of the dangerous maybe, more thought that unsettles the ground, that undoes the established wisdom (e.g. conventional morals). This project will make us freer to act according to our own drives, our own will to endure. The problem is (BGE 27) that even though we often think of philosophical ideas as being autonomous, they always grow up in relation to a system of many other ideas. Thinking is thus more of a recognition, a remembering certain strains of what has already been thought. And so it can be very difficult to break out of the established habits/channels/assumptions. One can of course see the deep resonance with Foucault’s project here. His is a very deeply Nietzschean approach to thought.
Moreover, Nietzsche says we are constrained in our thought by our language, a fact my students and I realized viscerally when we tried to speak after accepting Nietzsche’s argument that
a thought comes when “it” wishes, and not when “I” wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks; but that this “it” is precisely the famous old “ego” is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an “immediate certainty” (BGE 24).
Immediately we started saying thinks like “I think…” or “Nietzsche wants…”, and we were not sure how to even construct a sentence if the subject is no longer the initiator of action, but is rather just an illusion we invent to help us make sense of a world where a thought or a desire just arises, or emerges, somehow, in the vicinity of our body. Here, of course, as in Nietzsche’s idea of the multiplicitous soul, one can see the strong influence on D&G and their obsession with the process of subjectification (in TP) and the tyranny of the ego (in AO).
Nietzsche reiterates this desire to open up new forms of thought and action when he complains that Kantian and Platonic philosophy suffers from a will to truth, which “prefers a handful of certainty to a ‘whole carload of beautiful possibilities’ ” (BGE 16). Here it struck me that his thought is important for inspiring, perhaps though Foucault, much of the obsession in contemporary political theory with the idea of possibility, or potential, with keeping possibility open, instead of settling on a certainty, on a fixed identity/determination. Here I am thinking of Agamben’s whatever, but also Ranciere’s political ruptures, or the potentia of (Hardt &) Negri, or even Lefebvre’s own search for a path to the possible.
And lastly, I was struck this time by the remarkable resonances between these texts and D&G’s discussion of a breakthrough over into a new land (in AO (and TP)). Nietzsche says that the dangerous ideas he seeks urge us to go beyond morality, to voyage past it, to cross over into a realm beyond conventional ethics (BGE 31). Here we can recall the ubermensch crossing over, on his line, on his his tightrope, headed toward “an unknown country” or “new land” as D&G call it, toward what Nietzsche says is “a new domain of dangerous insights (BGE 31).
Nietzsche says his project is to “traverse…with new eyes…the hidden land of morality,” and thus “to discover this land for the first time” (OGM 21) which clearly echoes D&G’s approving description of Proust:
But the narrator-spider never ceases undoing webs and planes, resuming the journey, watching for the signs or the indices that operate like machines and that will cause him to go on further….Oh, the narrator does not homestead in the familial and neurotic lands of Oedipus, there where the global and personal connections are established; he does not remain there, he crosses these lands, he desecrates them, he penetrates them, he liquidates even his grandmother with a machine for tying shoes (AO 318).
Nietzsche prompts us to recall D&G’s lines of flight when he calls together those who want “to get–away. A little more strength, flight, courage, artistic power, and they would want to rise–not return…” (BGE 17). And things get quite unmistakable when Nietzsche says: We need “a new psychologist,” who “exiles himself into a new desert,” and “condemns himself to invention–and–who knows?–perhaps to discovery” (BGE 21).
Of course it is well-known that Deleuze loved Nietzsche; but it is worth remembering sometimes just how deeply Nietzsche’s thought is shot through the former’s work, not to mention the work of so much radical theory today.
Path to the Possible 