Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory

Paul Patton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134890644
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip!'
'Thus Spoke Zarathustra
'the democratic movement is...a form assumed by man in decay'
Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche's views on women and politics have long been the most embarrassing aspects of his thought. Why then has the work of Nietzsche aroused so much interest in recent years from feminist theorists and political philosophers?
In answer, this collection comprises twelve outsanding essays on Mietzsche 's work to current debates in feminist and political theory, It is the first to focus on the way in which Nietzche has become an essential point of reference for postmodern ehtical and political thought.

1 Nietzsche and the pathos of distance

Rosalyn Diprose

Jeanette Winterson, in her novel Sexing the Cherry, describes the city of Jordan’s dreams. A city

whose inhabitants are so cunning that to escape the insistence of creditors they knock down their houses in a single night and rebuild them elsewhere. So the number of buildings in the city is always constant but they are never in the same place from one day to the next.

For close families, and most people in the city are close families, this presents no problem, and it is more usual than not for the escapees to find their pursuers waiting for them on the new site of their choice.

As a subterfuge, then, it has little to recommend it, but as a game it is a most fulfilling pastime and accounts for the extraordinary longevity of the men and women who live there. We were all nomads once, and crossed the deserts and the seas on tracks that could not be detected, but were clear to those who knew the way. Since settling down and rooting like trees, but without the ability to make use of the wind to scatter our seed, we have found only infection and discontent.

In the city the inhabitants have reconciled two discordant desires: to remain in one place and to leave it behind forever.

(Winterson 1989:42–3)

This is a postmodern city. It is built on the recognition that one’s place within a political and social space rests on unstable foundations. Places can change. This instability arises from the complex creditor-debtor relations which characterize subjectivity: the self gains a place in the world only by incurring a debt to the other, making self-present autonomy, freedom from this debt, impossible. The best one can hope for is a reconciliation of the desire for stability, for proximity to oneself (and hence to one’s creditor) and the desire for change, for distance, for difference.

Winterson’s city encapsulates Nietzsche’s philosophy of self—a philosophy which sits uneasily between two streams of thought in Anglophone philosophy. On the one side there is mainstream social and political theory which, in the name of stability and sameness, assumes that society consists of relations of contract and exchange between free and equal, autonomous, self-present individuals. On the other side is the declaration that self-mastery and self-identity are dead along with the ideal of uniform social relations these notions of self-support. Rather than a society consisting of unified individuals governed by universal values, this alternative position variously posits a self dispersed into another, a multiplicity of differences, and finds universal values both invalid and oppressive.

This ‘postmodernism’ is often evoked in the name of feminism and sometimes in the name of Nietzsche. Craig Owens (1985), for example, defines postmodernism as the death of self-mastery, of the representation of woman as Other and of the repression of femininity that self-mastery entails. In the interests of opening up a multiplicity of sexual differences, he argues against the representation of ‘positive’ images of a revised femininity which may shore up a monolithic culture of centred masculinity (Owens 1985:71). Similarly, Jean Graybeal (1990), in a sympathetic reading of Nietzsche and following Kristeva, concludes that rather than repressing the ‘dividedness’ within ourselves and projecting this ‘otherness’ on to women, we should take a leaf out of Nietzsche’s book and ‘delight’ in our dispersed condition (Graybeal 1990:160).

Nietzsche’s aesthetics of self has more in common with these than it does with the self-presence underscoring conventional assessments of social relations. However, the reading of his philosophy which I offer below cautions against simple declarations of the death of selfpresence which assume the ability to promote change and difference by distancing oneself from others. My aim is to explore Nietzsche’s contributions to an understanding of both individual and sexual difference as the ‘problematic of the constitution of place’ in relation to others (Irigaray 1984:13–14).

While he may delight in self-division, there are at least two aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy that I shall highlight which warn against the forms of postmodernism mentioned. The first is his analysis of the self as an embodied cultural artifact which suggests that any change in self involves a material production rather than a change of mind (or a simple declaration that the self is divided). Second, while Nietzsche’s project for self-creation reads at times like an escape from others, there is much to suggest that even creative self-formation incurs a debt to the other. Both his philosophy of the body and his understanding of the self-other relation as a debtorcreditor relation rest on a certain concept of distance: distance as a division within the self and distance as difference between the self and others. And Nietzsche’s understanding of the operation of distance has important consequences for re-thinking sexual difference within the context of a postmodern aesthetics of self.

THE BODY AND ONE’S PLACE

Central to Nietzsche’s concept of self, and a point often overlooked by hyperreal postmodernism, is his recognition that the problematic of the constitution of place is a question of the social constitution of embodiment. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he claims that ‘body I am entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body’ (Nietzsche 1966:34). In contrast to the assumptions that the self’s identity can be reduced to consciousness and that the mind directs the body, Nietzsche claims that the body is what compares and creates and that thought and the ego are its instruments.

He is not suggesting that the body is an a-social fact in charge of operations. While ‘in man creature and creator’, matter and sculptor, are united (Nietzsche 1972:136), it is not consciousness (transcendental or individual) which makes a man out of matter. Rather, the body like any ‘thing’ is the sum of its effects in so far as those effects are united by a concept (1967:296). The ‘body is only a social structure composed of many souls’ (1972:31) where ‘soul’ refers to a corporeal multiplicity or a ‘social structure of the drives and emotions’ (1972:25). So, for Nietzsche, one’s place in the world is determined by the concepts which govern the structure of the social world and which sculpture the body accordingly—a body which is a ‘unity as an organisation’ and is therefore a ‘work of art’ (1967:419).

How the self is made as a social structure is first a question of how the body is unified through social concepts. Second, and related to this process of unification, is the question of how thought and the ego are instruments of the body. The body is the locus of pleasure and pain (which are already interpretations) and thought is a reflection on pleasure and pain. To quote Nietzsche:

The self says to the ego, ‘Feel pain here!’ Then the ego suffers and thinks how it might suffer no more—and that is why it is made to think.

The self says to the ego, ‘Feel pleasure here!’ Then the ego is pleased and thinks how it might often be pleased again—and that is why it is made to think.

(Nietzsche 1966:35)

Thought then is about the projection of bodily experience into the future: the conscious subject is an effect of temporalizing the body.

The target for much of Nietzsche’s critical attention is the manner in which experience is unified and the body temporalized in the social relations of modernity. Here, the embodied self is constituted by social concepts which discourage difference, creativity and change. His account in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals begins with the idea that the unification of any body relies on the operation of memory and forgetting. ‘Forgetting’ is the incorporation of bodily affects before they become conscious and a making way for new sensations by allowing one to ‘have done’ with the old (1969:58). But, while this not-remembering is necessary for the constitution of any self as present, the making of the modern moral subject, the individual who is responsible for his or her acts, requires a faculty which opposes forgetting—memory.

Nietzsche describes how the social and moral discourses of modernity constitute a particular kind of memory: a memory which unifies a selection of activities, events, experiences and effects such that they belong to one person (1969:58). This memory makes the self constant and apparently unchanging through time by projecting the same body into the future. The operation of memory and forgetting unifies experience in another sense—it makes different experiences the same. What is remembered is not just an experience but a socially prescribed mode of interpreting that experience. As Nietzsche explains in Twilight of the Idols (1968:50–3), effects and events are incorporated by interpretation using prevailing moral norms and the concept of cause. Unpleasant feelings are said to be caused by actions considered undesirable. Pleasant feelings are said to arise from good or successful actions (1968:52). Hence, ‘everything of which we become conscious is arranged, simplified, schematized, interpreted through and through—…pleasure and displeasure are subsequent and derivative phenomena’ (1967:263– 4).¹ So even forgetting as having done with an event involves first, dividing effects into those which are written into the body and those which are not. Second, events which are incorporated and upon which we reflect are divided into a cause and an effect where the effect is pleasure or displeasure and the cause is interpreted according to social moral norms. Then, when encountering a new event or effect, the memory ‘calls up earlier states of a similar kind and the causal interpretations which had grown out of them’ (1968:51). New experiences are subsumed under habitual interpretations making every experience a fabrication (1972:97).

The individual is not the author of this dutiful memory: it is created through what Nietzsche calls the ‘mnemotechnics of pain’ (1969:61), techniques of punishment which carry social norms and moral values. ‘Body I am entirely’ in so far as my conscience, sense of responsibility and uniformity are created by an ordering of sensations, and projection of the body into the future through a social disciplinary system. This ensures not only that an individual’s experiences are consistent over time but, as we are subjected to the same moral values, we shall have ‘our experience in common’ (1972:186). Forgetting in conjunction with a selective memory becomes a social instrument of repression against the dangers of inconsistency and variation. A society which favours consistency and conformity discourages us to leave our place behind.

Contrary to mainstream social and political theory, Nietzsche proposes that the individual is a cultural artifact whose existence is a product of the exclusion of other possibilities for one’s embodied place in the world. But this account leaves Nietzsche with a problem shared also by those who find self-mastery and universal values oppressive: how can change be effected given that the self is the result of a socially informed material process of production? How can different possibilities for one’s embodiment be opened, how can one leave one’s place behind, without assuming the possibility of stepping outside either one’s present body or one’s social context? It is Nietzsche’s concept of a distance within the self which addresses this apparent impasse.

DISTANCE AND LEAVING ONE’S PLACE BEHIND

The body which conforms to a uniform mode of subjection is one which acts out a social role imposed upon it.² In contrast to this actor, Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, privileges a process of selffabrication with the artistic ability to stage, watch and overcome the self according to a self-given plan (1974:132–3). He draws on two features of art and the artist to characterize creative self-fabrication (1974:163–4). The first is the suggestion that the self, like any artifact, is an interpretation, perspective or mask. Second, the relation between artists and their art illustrates the point that creating beyond the present self requires that we view ourselves from a distance in an image outside ourselves. Leaving behind the influence of social concepts which restrict our place in the world requires treating one’s corporeality as a work of art.

The distinction that Nietzsche makes between the self as artist and the image or spectacle staged beyond the present body could imply a unique, extra-social invention. But, at a less ambitious and more realistic level, it suggests that you are never identical with yourself. Nietzsche sometimes refers to this difference within the self as the ‘pathos of distance’:

that longing for an ever increasing widening of distance within the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, more remote, tenser, more comprehensive states, in short precisely the elevation of the type ‘man’, the continual ‘self-overcoming of man’, to take a moral formula in a supra-moral sense.

(Nietzsche 1972:173)

What Nietzsche is suggesting here is that the ability to move beyond oneself hinges on a relation within the soul (where the soul is something about the body). A distance or difference within the self, between the present self and an image of self towards which I aspire, is necessary for change to be incorporated in the constitution and enhancement of the bodily self. We should not confuse the artist and his work, says Nietzsche, ‘as if [the artist] were what he is able to represent, conceive and express. The fact is that if he were it, he would not represent, conceive, and express it’ (1969:101). The self as a work of art is never the same as the self that creates it, not because the self as artist is the true or essential self in contrast to a false, unique, extra-social image projected. Rather, the image which the artistic self creates is a moment beyond the present self which creates it. The difference, or distance, between the two is a precondition to representation which for Nietzsche is always selfrepresentation.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche accounts for this distance within the self in terms of a process of self-temporalization of the body which subverts the notion of linear time assumed in normalizing social structures. Unlike the ‘last man’, who views himself as the essential and unchangeable end point of his history (Nietzsche 1966:202), the overman views himself as a moment. He risks his present self or, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘goes under’ (1966:14– 15). But, unlike the ‘higher man’, who, in a manner not unlike Owen’s ‘postmodern’ self, affirms the future by negating the past and skipping over existence, thereby changing nothing (1966:286–95), the overman risks himself by ‘willing backwards’: ‘To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all “it was” into “thus I willed it”—that alone I should call redemption’ (1966:139). Creativity is not a matter of declaring oneself born again by simply reaching for a new part to play: it requires working on oneself. The overman then is the sel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Nietzsche and the pathos of distance
• 2 Nietzsche, woman and political theory
• 3 Nietzsche and the stomach for knowledge
• 4 Not drowning, sailing
• 5 'Speaking of Immemorial Waters'
• 6 Das Weib an sich
• 7 Ressentiment and power
• 8 Politics and the concept of power in Hobbes and Nietzsche
• 9 ‘Is it not remarkable that Nietzsche…should have hated Rousseau?’
• 10 The return of Nietzsche and Marx
• 11 Child of the English Genealogists
• 12 The postmodernist politicization of Nietzsche
• Index