7 Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Performative Critique James I. Porter
Whenever a reader of Nietzsche confronts the problem of genealogy, it is tempting for her to assume that she is in familiar country. As we read in the Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic from 1887, the aim of genealogy is to mount ‘a critique of moral values and the value of those values’ by reconstructing ‘an actual history of morality’, the sources for which are to be found in ‘what is documented, what can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short the entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral past of mankind’.1 Genealogy tracks large expanses of time, millennia that one can actually count. Here we finally come to grips with agents who are driven by urges that at least approximate to passions and instincts, as opposed to those ghostly agencies of the will to power straining to exert themselves against the background of some metaphysical and barely imaginable flux.2 However unsettling it may prove as a cultural diagnosis, genealogy at least provides the solace of a story with a familiar plot, one easily and intuitively followed: it is the well-worn tale of human decline and hoped-for redemption. Indeed, here the familiar becomes almost banal, a repetition of itself, or as Nietzsche would say, ‘grey’. At the extreme, genealogy is Nietzsche’s least original theory, in ways not much different from Homeric and Hesiodic mythology, the Judaeo-Christian story of the fall, or Marxian anthropology. Whereas Nietzschean genealogy is generally considered to be a historically valid critique of the present, I will argue that Nietzschean genealogy contains no historically valid contents, and therefore cannot achieve its critical aims by appealing to some historical past. On the contrary, genealogy for Nietzsche is a complex critical act that both reflects and mimics, in a parodic distortion, the deepest features of historical consciousness, which are, Nietzsche would say, the irremediable 119
120
Conceptions of Critique
features of consciousness tout court, all the while drawing attention to its activities through hyperbolic exaggeration. Thus, insofar as genealogy is as much complicitously as it is polemically tied to its objects, it is a performative critique. Whatever other virtues it may have as a critique of contemporary moral culture and its values, it does not offer a recuperation of history but only the caricature of one, as a moment’s reflection on its bare plotline ought to remind us.
1 Genealogy and the sense of history In what sense is genealogy a history? It is doubtful that genealogy is historical at all, although it is widely construed to be, just as Nietzsche is widely assumed – on Nietzsche’s own authority – to be a practicing ‘genealogist’, which is to say, a historian of even the apparently non-historical, of ‘what we tend to feel is without history’. That, at least, is the view set forth by Michel Foucault in his immensely influential essay, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’.3 And yet, it would seem heroic but in vain to try, as Foucault does, to extrapolate a theory and method of historical inquiry from Nietzsche’s genealogical writings when those writings are so obviously tainted with features of myth and myth-making. Genealogy, the narrative or ensemble of narratives through which Nietzsche purports to trace the dreary historical evolution of current-day morality, tells the story of a culture that once upon a time was knightly and aristocratic, exhibiting a healthy sense of moral self-affirmation, but later fell into degeneracy owing to a reactive revolt by the oppressed, the weak and the ascetic-priestly caste. Inverting this initial hierarchy and its values, the slave revolt ‘begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values’ that are inimical to the values embodied in the hitherto sovereign, and henceforward vulnerable, masters (I, 10). Several millennia on, the very idea of nobility has faded away into the misty past, and ‘we modern men’ are today in the grip of a diseased, reactive culture. A crucial point added by Nietzsche is that the slave revolt opened the door to a hoped-for return to master values, whether in the figure of the Overman, in some form of self-overcoming and selfaffirmation, but in any case as a kind of ‘second innocence’ (cf. II, 20). A series of analyses, investigating the origins of punishment, contract, law and other forms of institutionalised moral value, provides the somber foreground to this memory of a brighter and more desirable past. But these studies are a curious lot. They seem to be mere repetitions of the same story (the singular slave revolt in morality), viewed from slightly different vantage points. Exactly when is the slave revolt
Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Performative Critique 121
in morality supposed to have taken place, and where? Nietzsche has precious little to show in the way of evidence, documentation or the ‘relentless erudition’ that Foucault finds so inspiring about Nietzsche’s programme.4 Instead, what we do find is a fair amount of pseudoerudition set forth in the apodictic mode and brazenly challenging our sense of historical plausibility. ‘The Celts, by the way, were definitely a blond race,’ Nietzsche blandly claims at one point (I, 5). At the most critical junctures of his argument, and in its many asides (assuming that we can distinguish these), Nietzsche’s declaratives, straining all credulity, have the same status as his colourful pseudo-etymologies, which make no effort to conceal their own dubiety, as they pretend to plug gaps in the unknown (in Latin, Nietzsche opines, the word ‘good’ may be traced back to ‘war’, ‘bad’ to ‘black’; esthlos, in Greek, ‘signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true’; I, 5). It is a fair question just how much historical truth is required for genealogy. The values that Nietzsche questions are those of his contemporary present. Why should tracing them to their historical origins, or simply exposing their historically contingent character, count against them in any way? To map their history would be to defer their critique, not to accomplish it.5 If the aim is to show the effacement of the instincts, this event takes place with the onset of sociality if not earlier (see, e.g., II, 8–9). Arguments about this effacement are inevitably of a piece with mythology, a mere projection of the present. Clearly, another approach to the problem is warranted. Genealogy, one tends to forget in the dazzling rush of Nietzsche’s prose, is never anything more than a congeries of ‘hypotheses’ (Pref. 4). The question is not whether Nietzsche’s genealogy is historical, but why anyone should think it is. Nietzsche spells out the actual parameters of his critique of moral values and their value in the following terms: ‘morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as tartufferie, as illness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, as remedy, as stimulant, as restraint, as poison’ (Pref. 6). Later in the Third Essay he restates his project again: It is my purpose here to bring to light, not what [the ascetic] ideal has done, but simply what it means; what it indicates; what lies hidden behind it, beneath it, in it; of what it is the provisional, indistinct expression, overlaid with question marks and misunderstandings. (III, 23) Nietzsche plainly means to inquire not into the historical derivation of values, but into their form, their illogic and the issue of the continued
122
Conceptions of Critique
adhesion to morality, its binding quality, even in the face of its acknowledged valuelessness, whether that acknowledgement takes place in the secrecy of our underlying awareness or more openly, be it cynically or from an ‘enlightened’ perspective (GS 345, cf. 347). He inquires, in other words, into the ‘conditions and circumstances in which [moral values] grew, in which they evolved and changed’, by which we may understand the ever new ways in which values continually remask themselves as well as their unchanging vulnerability to critique. How is it that morality can appear as a cause or a consequence of anything at all, or even as its own cause? Why does morality so fascinate us? These, not historical origins, are the kinds of questions that drive Nietzsche’s inquiry. But there is another, unstated question lurking within Nietzsche’s project, which is more like a suspicion and a doubt than a theme. What if morality deliberately and surreptitiously masked itself by appearing to have evolved and changed? What if the sense of history and of historical perspective were the disguise of a morality that sustains moral values and a belief in their value? In that case, the question why Nietzsche should have chosen to present his genealogy as a project in historical moral inquiry would indeed be perplexing. And yet this sense of perplexity (corresponding to the entanglements underlying it) is, I believe, precisely the effect that Nietzsche sought to produce, or reproduce, in his readers. And that is a clue to the form that his critique takes.
2
Disavowals
It is crucial to clear off some of the potential misconceptions that the term genealogy invites. What Nietzsche most certainly does not have in mind when he deploys the concept is a sequential, linear and developmental scheme that traces contemporary appearances back to longforgotten (and repressed) evil causes – however shameful, and ultimately banal most origins prove to be.6 But neither is Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis a study in the shifting contingencies of value formations. What genealogy ultimately names are not sequences but their invention. What it labels is not the repression of specific contents but the misrecognition that constitutes repression. For Nietzsche, forgetting is ‘an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression’, a kind of ‘incorporation’ (II, 1). And so too genealogy (unlike history) brings back to mind not what is forgotten but the act of forgetting itself. Its function is not to recover a positive expression, from the past, of a present negation. It reveals nothing but a heritage that is never in any sense past or complete because it is always present, in a state of unfinished completion,
Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Performative Critique 123
labouring under a pseudonym. Thus, what is of interest in genealogy is above all its appeal to the conspiration of the historical imaginary with the moral imaginary. Contemporary perceptions of value are intimately bound up with perceptions of history, for instance the view that morality represents a progressive domestication of the instincts, that values and institutions have a certain utility, that culture has transcended its historical origins, and so on. Such perceptions, which are genealogical, Nietzsche roundly condemns for being ‘unhistorical’ (I, 2). By doing so he does not only mean to suggest that contemporary values are based on bad history, which they may be. What is more important to his argument is the view that contemporary historical thinking contributes to the ahistoricity of contemporary (modern) culture (cf. III, 26). This same thesis underlies Nietzsche’s earliest attacks on modern classical philology and appears again in his essay from 1874, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’.7 In all three cases, Nietzsche is pointing, rather shrewdly, to the belief in moral progress as one of the ways in which contemporary culture purportedly historicises itself while projecting its moral values sub specie aeternitatis. The belief in moral progress fares no better than the belief in moral decline: both views, jaundiced by uncritical teleologies and their accompanying moral imaginaries, rest on a misperception of the world and of history, and so too both views exhibit the defects of ahistoricity. Nietzsche’s argument is that historical consciousness, at least in the form that we know it, is a form of forgetfulness, not of remembrance, that it is essentially ahistorical. But the illusion of historical awareness that it creates is vital to modernity: ‘the ahistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people and of a culture’ (UM II, 1). Nietzsche’s ‘untimely’ response to his contemporaries consists in saying that culture has not transcended its shameful origins, its past or recent violences, and its barbaric practices. On the contrary, the repudiated past, so avidly despised by the morally upright, is with us today, but in the form of a disavowal. History is the form that this disavowal takes, allowing the present to proceed ‘with a good conscience’ (UM II, 1, cf. GM II, 14). Nietzsche’s genealogy aims to unsettle this hypocrisy of moral reason by unsettling the hypocrisy of historical reason. The latter goal is accomplished by illustrating how fragile any product of historical sense can be. Genealogy mimics the fragility and the confusion of historical sense. It is meant to be a symptom of the modern cultural subject and of the cunning artistry of its unconscious mechanisms. So understood, genealogy is not some hidden weapon in Nietzsche’s critical arsenal. Quite
124
Conceptions of Critique
the contrary, it is a way of exposing a kind of stupidity or blindness in contemporary historical and ideological thought – in a perfectly open and exposed fashion. This at last begins to suggest a reason why the history purveyed by Nietzsche’s genealogy is so obviously laden with myth. History as it is conceived, sensed and lived is but the outward trace of the inner workings of the modern mind and its invariable delusions, and it is the latter that comprise the true object of Nietzsche’s critiques. What is of interest to him is not historical consciousness itself, but rather the ways in which modern subjects willy-nilly construct for themselves, a posteriori, fantasies about the past and ignore their imaginary logic (cf. UM II, 3, 4). Such fantasies are of course never free from prior historical determination. Nietzsche’s view, early and late, is that historical consciousness, for all its ahistoricity, is crucially overdetermined by accretions over time, so much so that certain features of the way in which the mind works appear to be inerasably fixed, invariable and virtually intemporal. ‘The entire past of the old culture was erected upon force, slavery, deception, error; but we, the heirs and inheritors of all these past things cannot decree our own abolition and may not wish away a single part of them,’8 for ‘it is not possible wholly to free oneself from this chain’ (UM II, 3). At best, Nietzsche seems to say, one can hope for new ways of accommodating old habits. To capture more satisfyingly the ahistorical core of historical awareness we might begin by saying that different historical moments find ways to create their own ahistorical illusions. The point is that ahistoricity is produced historically, in part by virtue of the sheer weight of historical sediment pressing down upon everyday awareness, and in part out of an aversion to this pressure. Blank trauma and a naturalised awareness are the classic responses that render a subject into a historical subject that is enveloped in ahistorical gauze.
3 Polemics and hypotheses This contradictory logic is directly embodied in Nietzsche’s genealogical writing. His practice of genealogy erodes itself in a subversion that is both concealed and spectacular, which is why it is so tricky a genre. To begin with, genealogy is an entirely polemical form of discourse, as the frequently overlooked subtitle to the Genealogy spells out. But Nietzsche is also the hyperbole of a polemicist. And so it should come as no surprise that Nietzsche’s project crucially overlaps with the ‘genealogical
Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Performative Critique 125
hypothesis’ of contemporary moral speculation on the continent and in England, especially with the work of Paul Rée, The Origin of Moral Sentiments (1877) – and this to a degree that Nietzsche would never acknowledge.9 Affecting moral outrage, he derides ‘these investigators and microscopists of the soul’ for doing what he does best himself, namely, for constantly dragging the partie honteuse of our inner world into the foreground and seeking the truly effective and directing agent, that which has been decisive in its evolution, in just that place where the intellectual pride of man would least desire to find it (I, 1). That is doubtless why Nietzsche goes on to concede that genealogists in the English tradition ‘have trained themselves to sacrifice all desirability to truth, every truth, even plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth’. Polemics, taken to such thrilling heights, are as much a theatrical act as they are the grinding of an axe. Elsewhere I have shown how it is in staging a radical coincidence of opposites that Nietzsche’s writing most poses a challenge, and often a threat, to its comprehension by readers.10 The situation is no different here, for at this point Nietzsche has virtually become the genealogist whom he opposes himself to. Can he actually be attacking – himself? The answer is, quite literally, ‘Yes.’11 Nietzsche’s genealogy, at odds with itself, is a simulacrum of the logic and form of conventional genealogy.12 As Nietzsche wrote to Rée, ‘All my friends are now unanimous in the opinion that my book was originated and written by you.’13 Mimicking its object down to this last detail, Nietzsche’s discourse is a faithful reproduction of genealogy, succeeding to the extent that it conceals its own mechanisms and fictions. Consider the historical pretensions of conventional genealogy. Presenting their case as a historical inquiry into the shameful origins of contemporary moral sentiments, what moral genealogists in fact bring to light, without quite acknowledging this to be the case, are not recorded events from the past but unwanted spectres of morality’s buried, repressed and disowned present (morality as a habituation in conduct, as a convention mistaken for a natural condition, as egoism – our true nature – in disguise, etc.). Moral genealogy thus furnishes a stigmatic evaluation of the present in the form of a speculative history. By repeating these very moves in an exaggerated way, and by scandalously affirming the speculative dimension of his own history, Nietzsche is in effect giving us a correct reading of the genealogists’ designs.14 He is challenging not so much the thrust of their arguments, which is critical, as their historicism, which is little more than a projection of first causes, themselves hypothetically inferred, onto an imaginary historical dimension.
126
Conceptions of Critique
The fact that Nietzsche is trading one falsified historicism for another is irrelevant to his immediate purpose. But there is an ulterior purpose as well, for Nietzsche’s parasitic polemics cuts two ways. Deriving whatever coherence it has from the modern imaginary that breathes life into it, Nietzsche’s genealogy can be said to add nothing to his polemical objects. At one level, he is not even polemical any more, but merely a faithful mirror of his object (genealogical narrative) and his subject (his readers’ fantasies). His writing is effective only in situ, as the site of a writing practice that opens itself up to self-betrayal in its readerly reception. The critique it accomplishes is not one that it itself performs. It is the reader who must perform that in her own person. Nietzsche simply provides the occasion and the bait. Now, all the traits of reactivity isolated above – naiveté, stupefaction, the inability to keep anything straight for very long, the tendency to revise oneself retroactively, mythical projection and quiet (calculating) elision – are the most prominent features of modern consciousness, especially in its historical form (cf. UM I, 2). And they also are, not coincidentally, the most prominent features of Nietzsche’s genealogical discourse, which mimes the epigonal, late-born, or if you like ‘reactive’ modern consciousness that is the object of its critique. Genealogy is a critique of modern historical consciousness in the disguise of that historical consciousness itself. It is this self-reflexive dimension, which makes wrapping our minds around Nietzsche’s critique so hard to do. Since Nietzsche’s (as opposed to Rée’s) genealogy works against itself, it is only by retracing from close quarters its logical patterns that one can appreciate how genealogy anticipates its apprehension by a reader: how it seductively courts readers into false certainties and how it disables their readings at the selfsame stroke. In literary critical terms, Nietzsche is a most unreliable narrator – a fact that complicates any attempt to read Nietzsche as the literary author of his self. Were there space, I would want to turn to some of the larger patterns that characterise history, culture, and genealogy in Nietzsche in order to demonstrate their essentially static structure, their lack of development and forward motion, despite the otherwise overwhelming impression they give of motion and change, of a parabola of evolving tendencies. One explanation for this unexpected feature has to do with the way in which genealogy traces the frustration of the two primary motions that it describes, the one characterised by decline, the other by overcoming and redemption: equally matched, they are in fact self-cancelling. The two motions of genealogy are not really motions at all, but are mere characterisations, mere psychological perspectives that are, moreover,
Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Performative Critique 127
symptoms of each other. For ultimately it is in the nature of reactivity to see things in the jaundiced perspective of decline and decay, to look upon the world with ‘a retrospective weariness’, to feel that the future is a thing of the past (Pref. 5; III, 25), and to believe ‘that one is a latecomer and epigone’, as Nietzsche sometimes claims to be (UM II, 5). What genealogy reveals, in other words, is not the contrast between activity and reactivity, but rather the activity of reactivity. This dimension of genealogy has significant consequences.
4
Actively reactive
Perhaps the easiest way of explaining what this means is to say that reactivity is a form of agency that disavows its own activity. Quite simply, it disavows what it actually and actively does (in Nietzschean parlance, it ‘denies itself’). Nietzsche’s abundant commentary on the suppressed present cruelty, violence and hypocrisy of morality already points in this direction. The argument underlying this account is that virtue, always manufactured, always staged, necessarily retains a component of violence and cruelty, not least in the contortions that the disavowal of these motivations requires of putatively moral agents. In a word, morality is founded upon a ‘mendaciousness that is abysmal but innocent, truehearted, blue-eyed, and virtuous’ (III, 19). Nietzsche is keen to expose the hypocrisy of a moral culture whose agents, themselves ‘black magicians’, have a special talent for making ‘whiteness, milk, and innocence of every blackness’, especially their own (I, 14). But from this fact, easily ‘acceptable’ to readers who would identify with Nietzsche’s critical posture, there follows a troubling consequence: if reactive agents are in some crucial sense themselves active agents, why do we need the distinction? We can imagine one defence of the distinction in terms of the psychological features of agents. For surely if reactive agents are caught up in the mechanisms of disavowal, then they are to be distinguished from agents who are forthrightly and unabashedly active, untouched by disavowal because ‘they do not know what guilt, responsibility, or consideration are’ (II, 17). The latter’s activity is, one might wish to say, unrepressed. But that won’t do, for if all agency is essentially and irreducibly active as a matter of definition, at most we can hold on to two ways of expressing activity, not to a radical distinction between activity and reactivity. And as Nietzsche says at one point, ‘fundamentally it is the same active force that is work’ in both active and reactive agents, namely, ‘the instinct for freedom (in my language: the will to power)’ (II, 18).
128
Conceptions of Critique
The very same activity, Nietzsche postulates, is the productive and constitutive force in ‘blond beasts of prey’, who are cited as agents of the ‘state’ (II, 17) and in agents driven by ressentiment, the victims of this ‘conqueror and master race’. If the identity is puzzling, and the suddenness of the transformation of masters into slaves downright inexplicable, the contrast seems straightforward: the violent organisers of states turn their will to power outwardly onto others, while creatures of resentment direct their power ‘backward’ onto themselves, ‘“in the labyrinth of the breast”’ (II, 18). This is at least consistent with Nietzsche’s apparent view that noble spirits act spontaneously and immediately while slave spirits are consumed by internalised feelings. But elsewhere these criteria are reversed, and ultimately this formal and psychological difference proves impossible to maintain.15 The contrast between the two kinds of agency represents the divided agency of cultural subjects generally, their disavowal of what they do, but also their disavowal of the very mechanisms of disavowal.16 Consider how the difference plays itself out in the two passages just cited: The same active force is at work on a grander scale in those artists of violence and organisers who build states, and that here, internally, on a smaller and pettier scale, directed backward, in the ‘labyrinth of the breast,’ to use Goethe’s expression, creates for itself a bad conscience and builds negative ideals. (II, 18) If it seems odd that Nietzsche should choose to cast blond beasts as the agents of the state, we needn’t look far for an explanation: we are in the midst of yet another genealogy. ‘I employed the word “state”: it is obvious what is meant – some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race’ (II, 17; emphasis added). The point is startling, but the logic is familiar by now. Naive moralists would have us imagine that political and cultural organisation are grounded on polite contractual norms, but they are wrong. What today pass for civil states are in essence violent formations that do indeed civilise, but only through oppressive fear and terror, which take the form of guilt, conscience, duty and the painful mechanisms of shame (II, 6). Nor do states ground individual freedom; they actually remove it through terrible repressions. Presenting the story of the expulsion of ‘a tremendous quantity of freedom … from the world, or at least from the visible world’ (II, 17), Nietzsche’s genealogy is not just reciting a cliché from modern political thinking; he is giving it a radical reinterpretation.
Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Performative Critique 129
Confounding the political wisdom not only of naive moralists or of enlightened naturalists but even of prudentially minded social Darwinists like Paul Rée, who was by no means a complacent believer in the natural goodness of mankind, Nietzsche places the beasts on the outside of the social prison, not inside it. More precisely, the blond beasts, instantiating the agency of the state, are both its wardens – the quintessential civil servants [Beamter] – and its prisoners.17
5 Laying down the law A parallel point is brought out a few sections earlier (II, 11), where the system in question through which moral culture asserts itself is that of law and justice. Again, Nietzsche asks, disarmingly, ‘In which sphere has the entire administration of law hitherto been at home – also the need for law? In the sphere of reactive men, perhaps?’ His answer, again genealogically comprehensible, runs: ‘By no means: rather in that of the active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive.’ This inversion of weakness and strength might appear to be a polemically motivated reversal.18 But that is not the end of the story, for the logic of genealogy is the logic of unwanted identification, not of expected difference. By ‘the administration of law’ Nietzsche means precisely that – not the blind aggressions of blond beasts, but the agency of reactive and resentful moral culture itself, its proper activity. He is obviously playing havoc with the racial fantasy of Aryanism for anyone who might be lured into such an identification, whether one admits it or not. Inverting his own inversion, Nietzsche is not demonstrating how the strong fulfil the expected role of the weak, even if that is the apparent, and admittedly mind-boggling, sense of the text. Nor is he showing how justice is a later sublimation of a primary instinct for revenge (so Dühring) or how the (reactive) demand for retributive justice is a rationalisation, a mere feeling, imposed upon the original deterrent and mnemonic function of punishment (so Rée) (see II, 11). To the contrary, he is demonstrating how the strong and the weak are irretrievably one. His argument is that reactivity is fundamentally active, which may well leave us in doubt as to what, in that case, might constitute the relevant contrast to reactive agency. That doubt, I wish to argue, lies at the heart of genealogy. It is plain that in referring to the agency of law, Nietzsche has in mind crimes perpetrated by reactive subjects who are driven, despite all their piety towards justice, by ‘the truly active affects, such as lust for power, avarice, and the like’ – as in the burnings, tortures, dispossessions and maimings so spectacularly described in II, 3. But also intended are
130
Conceptions of Critique
the kinder, gentler and more recent variants of these forms of penalty, not least ‘the institution of law, the imperative declaration of what in general counts as permitted, as just’, in accordance with which ‘violence and capricious acts on the part of individuals or entire groups’ are treated henceforth ‘as offenses against the law’ (II, 11). Who are these lastnamed victims of the reprisals of law? Is it active outlaws (blond beasts) or reactively if imperfectly shaped moral subjects who must be disciplined into conformity with law? If the answer is – tellingly – uncertain, the drift of the passage is nevertheless plain as day. ‘Life operates essentially … through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction’ (ibid.), and this is nowhere more apparent than in the legal system that gives teeth to the system of morality, whether we look to the crude violences of law in the past, more closely associated with active aggression, or to the violent imposition of a non-violent law in the more recent present.19 Meanwhile, there seems to be no space left for an essential violence outside the mores of culture. Not even the outbreaks of barbaric aggression and violence so terrifyingly portrayed by Nietzsche in the earlier sections of the Genealogy can count as an instance. For on a second look, all this violence appears to take place within the well-marked terrain of cultural achievement, not outside of it. The wilderness outside and prior to culture is a figment and a phantasm. Indeed, the image of blond bestiality seems to be a way of accommodating, through fantasy, the violence proper to culture’s own activity. One victorious culture’s supremacy is another, downtrodden culture’s barbarism, and the same logic applies within a given culture.20 This convergence of outlawed violence and culture’s laws is wholly inexplicable in terms of the categories ‘active’ and ‘reactive’. But there is simply no way round the conclusion that ‘noble morality’ (I, 10) and ascetic morality (cf. Pref. 4), significantly actuated by the selfsame need for law, are indistinguishable. Their difference is, we should say, merely perspectival. Law is the disguised moral equivalent of the will to power: this is the equation, and the irony of power, its law, that genealogy brings embarrassingly to light. No expression of power (e.g. law) can be adequately expressive of power: no sooner does power assume a form than power, in that form, senses its own restriction. And since the will to power is forever qualified by its expressions, it is essentially a falsification and simplification of its own essence. It is only logical that the activity of law should so to speak get in its own way, become reactive, should reveal itself in fact always to have been reactive, simultaneously a means and an impediment to the will to power. This is why the conditions of law and justice, which Nietzsche has shown to constitute an expression
Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Performative Critique 131
of the will to power in its active form, can at the same time be said to ‘constitute a partial restriction of the will of life’, the goal of which is to ‘creat[e] greater units of power’ (ibid.). Law and life collide. But then life conflicts with itself as well. When Nietzsche writes that ‘a legal order thought of as sovereign and universal’ contradicts the actual ‘goal’ of the legal order (III, 27), he is saying that law is destined forever to be a victim of its own successes. Law, conceived as sovereign, is beyond law. Law cannot justify itself, and so the conditions of law remain precariously anomalous, unjustified and outlawed even by law. Hence, law is in its essence doomed to fail – and this failure, which is the failure of its tyrannical sovereignty, is the only genuine mark of law’s self-realisation. In fact, law is the positivisation of its own failure and of its innermost contradiction. ‘Law’ is merely the way in which the very failure of law comes to be characterised, while justice, as the expression of law qua ‘the supreme power itself’, is the violent codification of a contradiction, the attempt to ride over the impossible logic of law. Sovereignty, apparently, comes at a fatal price, like all good things. Far from being a positive idealisation of the cruelty of justice, of its self-overcoming and self-transcending, Nietzsche’s remarks on justice in these pages are on the contrary saturated with irony, dark humour and above all with complication. Justice conceived as the ‘self-overcoming of justice’, as the becoming just of justice and the ‘consciousness of [its own] power’ (II, 10), is nothing other than the rationale, and the hypocrisy, behind justice as we know it today and as it has always ever been known. Thus, if ‘the active aggressive, arrogant man is still a hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive man’ (II, 11), this is not because his activity represents the real essence of justice (ibid.), but rather because it represents the falsified essence of justice in its purest form – that of a presumed right to sovereignty. To summarise briefly, the thrust of the passage on law and justice modulates gradually into its opposite: the putatively active agents of the law become agents of a putative reactivity and nihilism in the course of their being narrated. ‘The active, aggressive, arrogant man’ turns out to be no one else than the mild, impersonal and just-minded jurist, imposing law and order with an innocent mendacity, at the height of law’s dominion, and so driven down ‘a secret path to nothingness’ (II, 11) – in the very same way as the blond beasts dissolve seamlessly into Beamten (II, 17–18). It is, after all, the same active force at work in the spheres of agency, subjection and law. Strangely, Nietzsche’s genealogy of law is immune from contradiction just by being as deeply incoherent as it is: the incoherencies of his analysis, blatantly and cheerfully strewn throughout, only signify the
132
Conceptions of Critique
incoherencies of the objects under analysis. Thus, elsewhere we find that a reversed scenario can be given as historical fact. Noble races, disdainful of law, forbore from entering into its sphere; ‘“law” was for a long time a vetitum, an outrage, an innovation’ (III, 9). Which account is correct? Is it active agents or reactive agents who reduce their opposites to submission through the constraints of law? The answer to these questions is perhaps unsatisfying: the alternative accounts are both false. But Nietzsche invites confusion by putting on offer only bad choices, genealogies that are as ‘confused’ as those found in the late religions of syncretistic, greatly purified and fully ripened cultures – cultures, moreover, that are in themselves indeterminately strong and weak (II, 20). The confused genealogy of law is, I believe, the most typical pattern of Nietzsche’s genealogies, which offer no declarative truths, but instead merely present, as if by analogy with their own deceptive form, the unpalatable truth of culture: its failure to grasp the essential antagonisms of culture itself. In no case do these genealogies correct, as though with a more perfect lens, the hypocrisies and self-betrayals of consciousness. To this precise extent, subjects of culture are under the obligation to submit all such ‘true lies’ to a remorseless critique, however painful and rigorous an examination of themselves this kind of acknowledgement might entail.
6
Concluding remarks
Genealogy relates the story of the various ways in which the conditions and limits of consciousness are actively avoided and forgotten, for the most part in vain. The subject, Nietzsche is claiming, cannot imagine itself except in or through one of two forms, whether as ennobled or debased. It cannot, in other words, imagine itself as it exists prior to this self-imagining, prior to its retroactive definition, in a condition that is neither noble nor enslaved but simply driven away from itself out of a compulsion to ideality. Genuine self-apprehension is debarred to subjects by the very nature of consciousness itself. Such is the shabby, gray, utterly banal truth about the human, all-too-human condition that all of Nietzsche’s writings tirelessly work to convict, if not convince, his readers of again, and that it is impossible for genealogical readings, and genealogical readers, to face. Proffering seductive but equivocal reflections of the modern subject to that subject, images of sovereignty or of self-overcoming, of raw power or its sublimation, of desired but disavowed wishes, Nietzschean genealogy incites and betrays the imaginary logic of the contemporary subject,
Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Performative Critique 133
whose simulacrum it is. Subtly repeating the very errors of logic that it attacks, genealogy is fashioned as a trap, luring readers into the hidden recesses of their own subjectivities, their culture and their conceptions of history. That is why I suggested earlier that genealogy is a critique of modern historical consciousness in the very guise of historical consciousness. In its naive simplicity, genealogy is the product of an imagination that, already shaped into an instrument of ahistorical thinking, attempts to reflect for once on the conditions of ahistoricity itself. Thus, Nietzschean genealogy is a critical practice whose principle object is the human mind and its endless capacities for (self-)delusion. Nietzsche’s writings are no more and no less than a compendium of his contemporaries’ inherited fantasies, be these racial (the fantasy of racial purity), classicising (the myth of the noble Greeks), or political (nationalism or Europeanism). He exploits the potentials of his own rhetoric and logic, thrilling meaning and even his own coherence. Nor can his various accounts hope to extricate themselves from contamination with what they expose. Quite the contrary, they revel in this added confusion. They are a critical reflection of the fantasms that he gives voice to, like a pantomime. With his extraordinary talent for extroversion and for mimetic identification with others’ fantasies, Nietzsche enacts these wishes or fears, invites them, seduces them into confessing themselves and then into traducing and confounding themselves, simply by allowing the essential incoherence of all such fantasy projections to stand exposed in their own harsh light. And we, as Nietzsche’s readers, stand in that same light as well. The foregoing analysis raises a few formidable questions about the place of Nietzsche in contemporary critical discourse. First off, one has to wonder about the simple relevance of Nietzsche today, this great mammoth from the nineteenth century, covered in cobwebs and a quaint and foreign idiom that is no longer spoken, about matters of concern that need a great deal of contextualisation even to be made comprehensible to ourselves today. Then there is the question of what it means to receive Nietzsche’s writings, to appeal to him and on what grounds. For the benefit of his timeless and inexhaustible wisdom? His teachings? His so-called theory? As an intellectual ally? Nietzsche was once, in his own day and shortly afterwards, among the most objectionable and feared writers alive. Today he is the object of fearless appropriation. He is fêted and celebrated while being carefully cordoned off by academic protocols – in footnotes, conferences, reviews, quietly voiced disagreements and CVs. Journals and book series are devoted to a figure who once had difficulty finding publishers and whose scathing criticisms,
134
Conceptions of Critique
were he alive today, would unquestionably find targets among the very academic elites who so hastily embrace him. It is not simply that the passage from culture industry to critical industry involves a few short and shuffling steps, or that critique has lost its steam. It is that the very idea of critique, which Nietzsche once impressed so searingly upon his environment, seems to have lost its bearings. And yet, one might argue that if critique is to have any contemporary or future relevance, if it is not to get lost in the byways of thing theory or the post-human, then it must take its measure against the rigorous criteria of self-critique that Nietzsche once upon a time set forth for the benefit of everyone and no one, against all the odds.
Notes The following is drawn from a book in progress entitled Nietzsche and the Seductions of Metaphysics. A longer version appeared in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 84/2, 2010, 313–336. My thanks to the editors of this volume, Karin de Boer and Ruth Sonderegger, for their invitation to reprint this essay and for their superb editorial management of the redacted version. Their penetrating queries and suggestions throughout have much improved this essay. 1. F. Nietzsche, ‘On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic’, in On The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, translated by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), Pref. 7 (hereafter GM), references by essay and paragraph (or ‘Pref.’) alone will be to this work. 2. See J. I. Porter, ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will to Power’, in K. Ansell-Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 548–564. 3. M. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, translated by D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–164, 139; cf. ‘The role of genealogy is to record … the history of morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or of the ascetic life,’ ibid., 152. Similarly, Nehamas notes that genealogy is ‘an effort to take history itself very seriously and to find it where it has least been expected to be. … [Genealogy] tries to show how the way in which [those institutions and practices, like morality] undergo changes as a result of historical development’ (A. Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 112). According to MacIntyre, genealogy traces ‘the historical genesis of the psychological deformation involved in the morality of the late nineteenth century’ (A. C. MacIntyre, ‘Genealogies and Subversions’, in ibid., Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 33–57, 39). 4. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, 140. 5. Cf. F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, translated by W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 345 (hereafter GS).
Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Performative Critique 135 6. Cf. F. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 42 and 44. 7. F. Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), I, 2 (hereafter UM). The desire for undisturbed ‘complacency’ that motivates historical consciousness is what a year later is called ‘an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate’ (UM II, 3). See J. I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford, CA: Stanford University 2000). 8. F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1, 452. 9. The following remark from Rée’s Preface to Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen [The Origin of Moral Sentiments] (Chemnitz: Schmeitzner, 1877), sets the tone for what follows it: ‘The moral man stands no closer to the intelligible world than the physical man’ (viii). In the sequel, Rée offers demystifying insights into the retroactive derivation of moral concepts, intuitions, and values; into moral freedom (as an illusory construct); the ethics of blame into ascetic hypocrisy; notions of the Beyond; and the belief, which is purely an assuagement, that mankind is not invariably and universally driven by egoistic motives. Moral values, he holds, are mere feelings and unnatural habituations, indeed mere errors and lies; ‘in themselves’ actions and consequences have no intrinsic value, utility, benefit or harm. 10. See J. I. Porter, ‘Nietzsche et les charmes de la métaphysique: “La logique du sentiment”’, Revue germanique internationale, 11, 1999, 157–172. 11. A former close friend and companion since their days at Basel, Rée was intellectually in Nietzsche’s debt, so much so that he inscribed a copy of his book, which he gave to Nietzsche, with the following: ‘To the father of this essay, most gratefully from its mother,’ cited after W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 50 n. 28. Disowning any affinity to Rée (‘perhaps I have never read anything to which I would have said to myself No, proposition by proposition, conclusion by conclusion’, Pref. 4), Nietzsche is effectively writing against some of his own ideas as they appear in Rée’s genealogy (whether he inspired them or not – presumably he did) and then reaffirming them again, in a different form, in his own genealogy. 12. Nietzsche eventually does, after all, concur with the genealogists that morality is a matter of forgetting, habit, error and presumed utility (cf. I, 2). He simply adds the caveat that forgetting one’s impulses can often be as active as it is automatic: ‘[I]n judgements “good” and “bad” mankind has summed up and sanctioned precisely its unforgotten and unforgettable experiences’ (I, 3). 13. Quoted in R. Hayman, Nietzsche, A Critical Life (New York: Oxford University Press 1980), 204. 14. So, for example, Rée’s genealogy traces an evolution in moral ideology, not in human action. Our real natures, he shows, are contained rather than extinct: ‘[A]s long as people act, they are egoistical, selfish, and envious; but as soon as they start to philosophise, they insist upon moral progress’ (Rée, The Origin of Moral Sentiments, 140; cf. vii–viii).
136
Conceptions of Critique
15. ‘Slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside”, what is “different” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed. This … need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself – is of the essence of ressentiment’ (I, 10). 16. See J. I. Porter, ‘Unconscious Agency in Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-Studien, 27, 1998, 153–195. 17. Contrast Nietzsche’s account with Rée’s: ‘Every civil society is a large menagerie in which the fear of punishment and the fear of shame are the [iron] bars by means of which the beasts are prevented from tearing one another to pieces. Occasionally these bars break open’ (Rée, , 45). It is worth noting that Nietzsche elides the transition from beasthood to the new division of labour in II, 16 with ‘suddenly’ and in II, 17 with ‘a break, a leap, a compulsion’ – descriptions that explain absolutely nothing at all, although readers have gone on blissfully undisturbed by this narrative legerdemain. 18. In this case, of a thesis by Dühring. See GM II, 11, III, 14 and 26 contra E. Dühring’s Der Werth des Lebens (1865); and Porter, ‘Unconscious Agency in Nietzsche’, 181 with n. 56 and 184–185 with n. 163 on the uncomfortable similarities between Nietzsche and Dühring – from whom Nietzsche borrowed the terms ‘reactive’, ‘ressentiment’, and ‘übermenschlich’, inter multa alia. 19. Implicated, in other words, are both regimes of spectacle and regimes of a more insidiously concealed power (surveillance), to phrase this in a Foucauldian idiom that owes much to Nietzsche. See M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House 1977). Only, in Nietzsche these are not opposed as linear, historical developments, as they are in Foucault; rather, each presupposes the other. 20. ‘This “boldness” of noble races, mad, absurd, and sudden in its expression … all this came together in the minds of those who suffered from it, in the image of the “barbarian”, the “evil enemy” etc.’ (I, 11; emphasis added), where the ‘suffering’ in question need only be imaginary and phantasmatic.
