Using the Political Nietzsche: Hope or Despair?

Using the Political Nietzsche: Hope or Despair?

Jonathan Murphy

12/9/2005

Nietzsche

Dr.Shapiro

Using the Political Nietzsche: Hope or Despair?

Understanding Nietzsche's political theory is no simple task. Perhaps because of his lack of faith in "philosophical system-building" as Daniel Conway describes it, Nietzsche doesn't take a traditional tact in explaining his politics. Nietzsche's writing style and the deconstructive nature of his thought are not conducive to that kind of logical structure. Also, the aphoristic structures of the volumes most relevant to political and moral issues don't lend themselves to the kind of argument that most students of continental philosophy have come to expect. These difficulties have led some to dismiss Nietzsche as either politically irrelevant or altogether hostile to politics and political structures on the whole. The Nazis took advantage of these misunderstandings, aided by the intentional distortion of Nietzsche's ideas by his anti-Semitic sister after his death, to rationalize their fascist reign of terror and genocide. Tragically, the political Nietzsche was seen in this light by many people for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Contemporary scholars have, however, been able to see past this nearsighted and twisted application of Nietzsche's thought (which fails to address his hatred of anti-Semitism, rejection of nationalism and distaste for German volk culture) and looked hard at his work for a coherent political philosophy, with intriguing and controversial results.

These intrepid scholars have surely spent countless hours trying to discern theory of Nietzsche's politics understanding out of the textual jungle of aphorisms and that make up Nietzsche's writing. One of them, the anti-authoritarian philosopher Gilles Deleuze, characterizes Nietzsche as a "war machine" set against humanity's painful cycle of existential failure in his essay "Nomad Thought". He emphasizes Nietzsche's conception of the exteriority of experience and distrust of the interior life, precipitated by the normalizing technocratic machinery of the state and culture. Deleuze formulates a revolutionary ideology of style as politics to escape this repressive machinery and overcome the state of misery that characterizes human existence. Wendy Brown, building on Deleuze, paints Nietzsche's political philosophy as withholding the possibility for the revitalization of democratic society, which is contemporarily in decay, by genealogical Nietzschean critique in her essay, "Nietzsche for Politics". She also proposes the insertion of an anti-democratic tension into the heart of democracy, by which it can constantly stand in question of itself and thereby perhaps achieve a potential overcoming of its mediocre values and resentment of the will to power.

These two Nietzschean political theories have a unique and interesting relationship with one another. There is a remarkable interplay of concepts and theoretical structures by which Brown's ideas relate Deleuze. She tackles the difficult task of constructively adapting Nietzsche's politics for the 21st century in a way that offers the hope of democracy's here-to-fore unimaginable self-overcoming of its mediocre values and resentment of the will to power, without risking the utterly horrifying chance of a capitulation to suicidal nihilism, as Deleuze does. She takes the knife called style as politics and uses a scalpel in a homeopathic surgery on the heart of democracy, hoping therefore to make use of a new tightly strung liberal democratic bow to propel the institution past its narrow minded evolutionary technics of resentment and into a new life-affirming liberal politics. For those who have faith in human understanding and are hesitant to devalue society without protection against the murder of the will to life at the hands of suicidal nihilism, this theory is very attractive. This essay will explore the relationship between Deleuze and Brown, especially the relationship "style as politics" in Deleuze and "effective history" in Brown, drawing from preeminent Nietzsche theorists such as Dan Conway and Keith Ansell-Pearson.

I.

"I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous Ð'- a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite." (EH 782)

Gilles Deleuze's short essay, "Nomad Thought", builds on the Nietzschean critique of liberal culture and politics and expounds on the ascetic relationship between Nietzsche's aphoristic writing style and the meaning of his text in the exterior world. In doing so he portrays Nietzsche as counter-culture provocateur par excellence. Deleuze begins his argument, like Zarathustra in his first speech after coming down from the mountain, at the death of God. However, first, the background is necessary.

With no convincing metaphysical values to guide humanity and help it overcome the existential condition of suffering that otherwise prevails, society limps along in its last days of decadent existence. Codification has ceased to be effective. Formerly, in the ages of proud strong people (i.e. politically autonomous Jews), God "represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and power-thirsty in the soul of a peopleÐ'..." (AC 16) moral codes were a way of taking the abundant strength and power of a people's interaction and laying them out in detail specific enough for them to be readily understood and adhered to in order to promote the continuing strength and power of the group. Codification helped to normalize the affirmative values of man. Man, however, was unable to sustain his strength in the captivity of society and he turned against himself. He developed a soul and began to doubt the motivations that previously served to make him such a strong and healthful creature. This made his conscience sick. The priests, small, weak but cunning and clever men, reinforced this turn inwards. This slave revolt in morality allowed the priestly caste to wrest control of politics from the strong and they normalized a resistance to power and strength in their laws. Their success is evident from the circulation of their most exemplary codification of their "bad conscience", the Bible. Importantly,