ANGELAKI journa l of the the oretical humani tie s v olum e 5 numbe r 2 augus t 2000

I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra In truth, what is the Übermensch? We do not know and, properly speaking, Nietzsche does not know. We know only that the thought of the Übermensch signifies: man disappears; an affirmation that is pushed furthest when it doubles into a question: does man disappear? Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation As Foucault would say, the Übermensch is much less than the disappearance of living men, and much more than a change of concept: it is the advent of a new form that is neither God nor man and which, it is hoped, will not prove worse than its two previous forms. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

A

ndrew Wernick gives us much to think about when he chooses to engage the comparison of Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida by considering their work in terms of a French sociological tradition from and against which they emerge.1 Wernick wants to challenge the standard story – the one invoked by Derrida in “The Ends of Man” – that frames the genealogy of French poststructuralism as both carrying on while at the same time problematizing the structuralist challenge to the philosophical anthropology of existentialist humanism. He does so initially by questioning just how well Derrida’s account – in terms of re-reading the phenomenologists anew and recuperating their own critique of philosophical anthropology – fits the work of Foucault and Deleuze. And this seems to me correct. After all, in the preface to the English translation of The Order of Things, Foucault goes so far as to specify phenomenology as the single method he rejects absolutely, while

alan d. schrift NIETZSCHE, FOUCAULT, DELEUZE, AND THE SUBJECT OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY Deleuze largely positions his work against the tradition of the “three H’s” – Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger – who so preoccupied the early Derrida. Wernick wants to challenge the standard story because it situates the genealogy of poststructuralism in German philosophy, while Wernick sees a more indigenous origin to the question of man, namely, the tradition of French sociology that runs from the humanism of Comte and Durkheim to the rebellions of Nizan and Bataille to the anti-humanism of Lévi-Strauss. Wernick is not interested in making a “nationalist” argument for its own sake, however. Rather, as he puts it, to tell the story of the genealogy of poststructuralism as a chapter in the rise and fall of French sociology allows us to see what, following Pierre Bourdieu’s formulation, is the real heresy of poststructuralism, namely, the refusal to posit anything that might occupy the site of a collec-

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/00/020151-11 © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/09697250020012250

151

the subject of radical democracy tive or plural subject, that is, the refusal to posit an anti-humanist or non-humanist analog to Comte’s “Humanity” or Durkheim’s “Society.” (As an aside, I might ask whether Wernick thinks Bourdieu, insofar as he does attend to the French sociological tradition, avoids this heresy?) While I’m not entirely sure about this, I wonder whether Wernick’s closing does not imply that by refusing a collective subject, these French heresiarchs don’t also to some degree refuse politics? If that is his implication, then I would like to offer the following remarks as a challenge to this implication. To do so, I wish to return to the tradition that Wernick acknowledges as canonical for the genealogy of poststructuralism, namely, the Nietzschean tradition.2 I do so not in order to show the poststructuralists as Nietzschean, something I think few would dispute.3 Rather, I’d like to show how, working out of the Nietzschean critique of the subject, two of these thinkers – Foucault and Deleuze – open up possibilities for reconstructing a notion of the subject amenable to the project of radical democracy.

becoming-übermensch Gilles Deleuze, who is perhaps the most significant “philosopher of becoming” since Nietzsche, noted that the central feature that distinguishes becoming from other transformative processes with which it can be confused, and in particular from evolution, is the absence of fixed terms: “What is real,” Deleuze writes, “is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. … Becoming produces nothing other than itself. … [A] becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself. … Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equaling,’ or ‘producing.’”4 What Deleuze finds missing in all of these apparent synonyms for “becoming” is the focus on process itself. Whereas evolutionary language focuses our attention on the beginning and endpoint of a process in a way that obscures the passage between them, the language of compound becoming draws our attention to what happens between these ever-receding endpoints.

Becomings take place between poles; they are the in-betweens that pass only and always along a middle without origin or destination.5 Deleuze’s notion of becoming facilitates a fruitful interpretive experiment with Nietzsche’s Übermensch. In fact, many of the interpretive paradoxes that result from the standard interpretations of the Übermensch as Nietzsche’s model of the ideal subject or perfect human being can thereby be avoided. Unfortunately, most readers of Nietzsche fail to take note of the fact that Nietzsche himself cautioned his readers against interpreting the word Übermensch either as “a higher kind of man” or in a Darwinian, evolutionary fashion. “The last thing I should promise,” Nietzsche wrote in the preface to Ecce Homo, “would be to ‘improve’ mankind. No new idols are erected by me” (EH Pr2).6 Later in Ecce Homo, he notes that “The word ‘Übermensch,’ as the designation of a type of supreme achievement [ … ] has been understood almost everywhere with the utmost innocence in the sense of those very values whose opposite Zarathustra was meant to represent – that is, as an ‘idealistic’ type of a higher kind of man, half ‘saint,’ half ‘genius.’ Other scholarly oxen have suspected me of Darwinism on that account” (EH, “Why I Write Such Good Books” §1). Remarks like these make clear that it is a mistake to read Nietzsche as a philosopher of the Superman or as someone who seeks to exalt Man as that being who will serve as God’s replacement in terms of some new anthropo-theology following the death of God. As Deleuze remarked in the Appendix to his book on Foucault, it is not Nietzsche but Feuerbach who is the thinker of the death of God and who seeks to install Man in the space vacated by God’s absence.7 For Nietzsche, on the other hand, God’s death is an old story, of interest only to the last Pope (see Z, “Retired”), a story told in several ways, more often as comedy than tragedy. Rather than trying to understand what Nietzsche means by Übermensch in terms of some model of ideal humanity, a Deleuzian approach would experiment with how the Übermensch functions in the Nietzschean text. If we attend to Nietzsche’s texts, we find that we are told very little about what an Übermensch is like, and Nietzsche nowhere gives us as detailed a

152

schrift picture of the Übermensch as we have of the last man, the higher men, the free spirit, or the slave and master moralists. If we avoid the question “Who is Nietzsche’s Übermensch?” and look instead to how “Übermensch” functions in the Nietzschean text, we find it functioning not as the name of a particular being or type of being. “Übermensch” is, rather, the name given to an idealized conglomeration of forces that Nietzsche refers to as an “achievement [Wohlgerathenheit]” (EH, “Why I Write Such Good Books” §1). Nietzsche does not provide, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra or anywhere else, a philosophical guidebook for Übermenschen; he provides instead suggestions for steps to take in order to become-Übermensch. Following Deleuze, I would suggest we construe becoming-Übermensch with a hyphen as a compound verb marking a compound assemblage. In so doing, we draw attention to the active process of assembling rather than hypostatizing or reifying the endpoint to be assembled. We can only speak of the becoming-Übermensch of human beings, of the process of accumulating strength and exerting mastery outside the limits of external authoritarian impositions. Nietzsche called this process of becoming-Übermensch “life-enhancement,” and he indicated by this a process of self-overcoming and increasing of will to power rather than an ideal form of subjectivity. Nietzsche’s failure or, more accurately, his refusal in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to present an Übermensch thus suggests that the answer to the question “Is S an Übermensch?” will always be “No” insofar as “Übermensch” does not designate an ontological state or way of being that a subject could instantiate.8 By experimenting with the different possibilities of becoming-Übermensch, we can read Thus Spoke Zarathustra not as providing the blueprint for constructing a centered super-subject called “Overman,” as was tragically the case in several readings of Nietzsche offered in the early decades of the twentieth century. Instead, an experimental approach attends to Zarathustra’s own experimentalism, noting as he does that one must find one’s own way, “for the way – that does not exist!” (Z, “On the Spirit of Gravity” §2). This approach will emphasize not a way of Being but

153

the affirmation of self-overcoming and transvaluation that makes possible the infinite processes of becoming that I am here suggesting we call becoming-Übermensch. And the outcome of this approach will be to reformulate the notion of the subject itself, not as a fixed and full substance or completed project, but always as a work in progress. I do not want to make too much of this aesthetic analogy, however, for the important idea here is not to create one’s life as a work of art, a view advanced by those who see in Nietzsche some kind of aestheticism. Rather, the central idea is that as a work in progress, one’s life is never complete. One is always unterwegs, on the way, and the emphasis is always on the process of going rather than the destination reached. This, I would suggest, is the issue raised by Nietzsche in his discussion, at the opening of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, of the active forgetting of the “sovereign individual [souveraine Individuum]” who has earned the right to make promises: it is only in the case of this “emancipated individual [Freigewordne],” this “master of a free will” (GM II, §2), who is capable of becoming other than he was by forgetting what he was, that promising becomes a praiseworthy act of a responsible agent. This idea animates as well the “great health” that Nietzsche alludes to at the conclusion of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, that health that knows that growth requires destruction, that knows that to become requires that we in some sense destroy what we presently are (GM II, §24). With this in mind, I think we must refigure the subtitle of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, for “How one becomes what one is [Wie man wird, was man ist]” implies that the final destination – the “what one is” – is the goal toward which one’s becoming is directed. Instead, focusing on the antecedent clause, I would suggest we emphasize the process – the “how” – of becoming. And, noting that Nietzsche says here “what one is (was man ist)” and not “who one is (wer man ist),” I would suggest further that the goal of this process of becoming is not to be understood in terms of some fully formed and completed subject or self. Instead, the central insight in Nietzsche’s account is that the process of becom-

the subject of radical democracy ing never comes to an end. Life, as Zarathustra learns, is that which must always overcome itself (cf. Z, “On Self-Overcoming”). The greatest obstacle to self-overcoming is thus not to be found in others. Instead, it is the self that one already is that stands as the greatest obstacle to future over-comings (cf. Z, “On the Way of the Creator”). Which is to say that the lesson which Zarathustra teaches in the teaching of the Übermensch is that to become what will become means becoming-other than what one is.

the politics of becoming What can this account of the Übermensch, framed as it is by Deleuze’s concept of becoming, contribute to our thinking the subject of radical democracy? At the very least, if we set radical democracy in opposition to a politics of identity, we see immediately that Nietzsche’s account of becoming what one is actively resists any attempt toward a fixed notion of identity. It thus runs counter to the foundational assumptions behind many contemporary forms of identity politics that, in the end, must depend on an attitude like Sartrean bad faith or what may be the modern guise of bad faith, namely, some sort of essentialism. This bad faith or essentialism is deeply problematic, when it shows anything other than a momentary strategy to which one makes no ontological commitments. More importantly, however, the Nietzschean–Deleuzian account of becoming shows that any fixed notion of identity, whether national, racial, ethnic, or gender identity, is as problematic when imposed by those who participate in the identification as when imposed by those whose gaze views the recipient of the identification as other. From this Nietzschean perspective, in other words, the prison of identity is no less oppressive when it is imposed from without by the majority on the minority than when it is self-imposed, as Nietzsche first suggested when he highlighted free will and the invention of the soul as a central moment of the “hangman’s metaphysics” of Christianity (see TI, “Four Great Errors” 7). Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy have argued for a radical democratic politics that is dependent

in part upon reconfiguring subjectivity in terms of a multiplicity of subject positions. While Laclau and Mouffe make a strong case for the necessity of reconfiguring subjectivity, they fail to see how Nietzsche’s critique of the metaphysics of the subject can ground their own account of multiple subject positioning. Equally important for our current purposes, they also fail to recognize how Michel Foucault’s appeal to Nietzsche’s critique of the metaphysics of the subject is connected to his turn toward the subject in his last works, a turn that provides conceptual resources for a radical and plural democratic leftist politics. For at the very least, when Foucault demonstrated how the discursive practices of modernity facilitated the construction of the modern docile and disciplined subject, he demonstrated as well both the historically contingent character of the subject’s construction while opening the possibility of alternative constructions. Foucault’s work as a “critical ontology of the present” thus made clear that the subject position delivered to us by modernity is not an ontological necessity, and it made equally clear that other subject positions are possible in terms of the contingencies of the present moment. Acknowledging the multiple positions which “subjects” occupy helps to explain both the current resistance to enduring political allegiances and the attractiveness of a model of coalition politics that will allow temporary alliances among various groups in response to contingent developments that call for these groups to mobilize collectively. Foucault’s genealogy of the subject provides a theoretical articulation of this account of a multiple subject positioning insofar as it frames the subject not as a substance but as a form: this form is not above all or always identical to itself. You do not have towards yourself the same kind of relationships when you constitute yourself as a political subject who goes and votes or speaks up in a meeting, and when you try to fulfill your desires in a sexual relationship. There are no doubt some relationships and some interferences between these different kinds of subject but we are not in the presence of the same kind of subject. In each case, we play, we establish with one’s self some different

154

schrift relationship. And it is precisely the historical constitution of these different forms of subject relating to games of truth that interest me.9

Like Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe advocate a dispersion of a fixed and unified subjectivity, but they also claim that the moment of dispersion cannot exist in theoretical isolation. Instead, a second analytic moment is required, as “it is necessary to show the relations of overdetermination and totalization that are established among these” moments of dispersion.10 It is precisely this second moment that Foucault’s last works, in which he began his “hermeneutic of the self,” sought to articulate. For Laclau and Mouffe, the hegemonic relations established among the discursively dispersed subject positions are what provide the conditions for their notion of a “radical and plural democracy.”11 While they do acknowledge Foucault’s importance in terms of his concept of “discursive formation,”12 they fail to acknowledge the profoundly Foucaultian character of their own claim that democracy requires a fluid, transformative, and historically contingent notion of identity. For Laclau and Mouffe, there can be no foundational, unified discourse. Instead, “discursive discontinuity” becomes for them “primary and constitutive”13 inasmuch as the social sphere of radical and plural democracy is, by design, precarious and incomplete. And in such a society, characterized essentially by tension and openness, the “identity” of the democratic subject will likewise always be in process, a work in progress and never finished, producing itself in response to and being produced by the contingent antagonisms and alliances that constitute the social. It is at this point that a radical democratic theory might again return to Nietzsche and recall his appeal to the political and cultural value of the agon. In one of his earliest pieces, the unpublished “Homers Wettkampf,” Nietzsche suggests that the Greeks knew that “competition is vital if the well-being of the State is to continue.”14 Indeed, as the agonistic opposition between the Apollonian and Dionysian arts continually incited each other to new and more powerful creative productions (see BT 1), the Greek educational system was designed to cultivate respect

155

for the agon. In fact, in contrast to what he regards as the modern desire that seeks the exclusive position of absolute dominance, the Greeks saw the ongoing contest of powers as necessary for cultural advancement. Nietzsche recognizes that an absolute victory within the agon would mark the death of the agon, and he acknowledges that in order to preserve freedom from dominance, one must be committed to maintaining the institution of the agon as a shared public space for open competition. While Nietzsche himself may not have realized it, his thinking here is profoundly democratic, as we can see when we juxtapose this sentiment with the following comment from Ernesto Laclau: A democratic society is not one in which the “best” content dominates unchallenged but rather one in which nothing is definitely acquired and there is always the possibility of challenge. If we think, for instance, in [sic] the resurgence of nationalism and all kinds of ethnic identities in present-day Eastern Europe, then we can easily see that the danger for democracy lies in the closure of these groups around full-fledged identities that can reinforce their most reactionary tendencies and create the conditions for a permanent confrontation with other groups.15

Contrary to liberal democratic theorists like John Rawls, for whom conflict and antagonism are “seen as disturbances that unfortunately cannot be completely eliminated, or as empirical impediments that render impossible the full realization of a good” that total social harmony would constitute, Laclau and Mouffe argue that pluralism is necessary for democracy, and dissensus – conflict and contestation, diversity and disagreement – is a necessary condition of pluralism.16 Rather than erasing differences through the postulation of some imagined consensus yet to be achieved, they call instead for the development of a positive attitude toward agonal differences that sees in a pluralism whose objective is to reach harmony, not the life but the death of a democratic polity.17 Political theorist William E. Connolly appeals directly and explicitly to Nietzsche’s account of the contestatory nature of the agon when he argues for a reinvigorated democracy understood

the subject of radical democracy not in terms of the drive for consensus but as a dynamic social space in which agonistic respect is folded into “the ambiguities, conflicts and interdependencies that constitute social relations.”18 Connolly makes agonism central to democratic practice as he takes the impossibility of arriving at a final and fixed identity – whether social or individual – as the basis for cultivating the “agonistic respect” necessary for democracy. For Connolly, Nietzsche’s agonal dynamism operates both interpersonally and intrapersonally as Nietzsche’s account of the multiple self – of the self as a struggle between competing drives and impulses – can likewise serve as a model for a dynamic and pluralistic polity. By attuning oneself to the “differences that continue to circulate through my or our identity [one] can engender a certain empathy for what we or I am not. Empathy, then, emerges from the ambiguous, relational character of identity itself, when this ambiguity is affirmed rather than denied or regretted.”19 In fact, this is what Connolly takes Nietzsche to mean by the “pathos of distance”: an attachment to that which differs from you growing out of glimmers of difference in you, an attachment that takes the form of forbearance in strife and generosity in interdependence rather than a quest to close up the distance between you through formation of a higher unity. … This ethos of agonistic respect amidst a world of dissonant interdependencies is crucial to the fabric of democratic politics: … it folds a pathos of distance into democratic relations of contestation, collaboration and hegemony.20

The pathos of distance thus facilitates a model of democracy in which the agonal relations between us are not something to be regrettably put up with but are the only means by which we will be able to engage in democratic political practices. It is this Nietzschean sensibility that admires the Greek agon while despairing over the Christiandogmatic tendency to seek the elimination of difference because it has always and only understood difference as opposition. Following the famous opening section of Twilight’s “Morality as Anti-Nature,” in which Nietzsche notes that the only way that the Church, and morality more generally, knows how to combat the passions is

through their extermination, there comes this less famous statement of Nietzsche’s alternative: The Church has at all times desired the destruction of its enemies: we, we immoralists and anti-Christians, see that it is to our advantage that the Church exists. … In politics, too, enmity has become much more spiritual – much more prudent, much more thoughtful, much more forbearing. … We adopt the same attitude toward the “enemy within”; there too we have spiritualized enmity, there too we have grasped its value. One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions; one remains young only on condition the soul does not relax, does not long for peace. (TI “Morality” 3)

Thus, at the end of his productive life, as at the beginning, Nietzsche continued to appeal to the idea that competition and contestation – the agon – is necessary for the continued well-being of the individual and the community. And while Nietzsche did not choose to link the agon with democracy, his oversight should not keep us from acknowledging that it is precisely totalitarianism that requires the elimination of competition and contestation in the political sphere. Contrary to the Right’s tendency to desire an identity or unanimity that presumes the elimination of their antagonists, Nietzsche never tires of invoking the desirability of a “worthy enemy, against whom one can test one’s strength” (BT Pr1), whose enduring presence is required for the agon to continue and for each of the agonal partners to proceed along the path of self-overcoming.21 This “worthy enemy,” whether one’s democratic contestatory others or whether the others within that one is in competition with or struggling to become, thus serves to insure against those forces that motivate us to rest, to remain what we are, to fix our identities in their present incarnation.

becoming (as) the radical democratic subject Nietzsche’s proximity here to Deleuze could not be closer, as the Nietzschean contrasts between identity/multiplicity, agonism/totalitarianism, democracy/tyranny are all at work in the

156

schrift Deleuzian contrast between becoming and fascism (whether micro or macro). For Nietzsche, as for Deleuze, identity is fluid and constantly in the process of being contested as it is being constituted. When Deleuze writes that “multiplicity is the difference of one thing from another [while] becoming is difference from self,”22 he presumes, as we must, that a certain agonal dimension is constitutive of all intersubjective relations and that, insofar as we will always face agonal partners, when contesting different partners, our identity will be constituted differently. To this we must also add the Foucaultian suggestion that while exploring the interlaced technologies of subjects and power, we must presume “not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous”23 as we work toward identifying the “main dangers” and organizing the forces of production to resist them. We learn from Foucault that although relations of power are inevitable, we need not accept as inevitable the particular forms in which those relations have emerged. There is, in other words, an emancipatory dimension of Foucault’s analytic insofar as the understanding of how power relations function in the local arenas in which we act can aid us in resisting the more repressive exercises of these relations. The omnipresence of relations of power, therefore, does not lead to a resigned acceptance of the fact of domination, as those nihilistic readings of Foucault often conclude. To the contrary, in one of his final interviews, Foucault remarks – vis-à-vis Habermas – that when he rejects as utopian Habermas’s idea that “there could be a state of communication which would be such that the games of truth could circulate freely, without obstacles, without constraint and without coercion,” his alternative is not a dystopian vision of inevitable oppression: relations of power are not something bad in themselves, from which one must free one’s self. I don’t believe there can be a society without relations of power, if you understand them as means by which individuals try to conduct, to determine the behavior of others. The problem is not of trying to dissolve them in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give one’s self the rules of law, the

157

techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination.24

Foucault here makes clear that it is a mistake to regard his power-analytic as leading to a quietist acceptance of the inevitability of oppression. Yet at the same time, we must acknowledge that Foucault himself may have chosen in the end to turn away from the political and return to the personal. This is surely one way to interpret his decision to go back to the Greek notion of the cultivation of the self as a model of an agonal victory over forces within oneself that are difficult to subdue or a model of self-mastery in which one is one’s own master. I want to emphasize, however, that although Foucault may have made a personal choice to focus on the cultivation of the self in terms of answering only to oneself and the authority one exercises over oneself so as to concretely take “delight in oneself as in a thing one both possesses and has before one’s eyes,”25 more overtly political strategies of liberation can be drawn from the Foucaultian analytic. I would like to close, then, by examining Judith Butler’s work as an example of a more explicitly political appropriation. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler acknowledges at the start of her text the political import of Foucault’s emphasis on the productive power of law for a subversion of identity.26 She also acknowledges, albeit less frequently, the import of Nietzsche for a critical project that seeks to rethink gender (and) identity insofar as Nietzsche’s challenge to a metaphysics of substance opens the possibility for a performative account of identity. Drawing upon Foucault and Nietzsche both, Butler challenges the language of interiority or internalization, offering in its stead the language of performativity in which “the gendered body [as] performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality.”27 While critical of some of Foucault’s positions on sexual difference and the body, the political dimension of Butler’s conclusions that identity is a practice and gender a performative remains profoundly Foucaultian as it articulates the alter-

the subject of radical democracy native gender possibilities produced within the repressive and constraining practices of our compulsory heterosexist culture. Arguing that “all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat,” Butler locates “‘agency’ … within the possibility of a variation on that repetition.”28 In order to be intelligible, cultural forces compel certain repetitions, but at the same time, these forces produce possibilities of alternative performances. The task for a subversive politics of identity, therefore, “is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself.”29 And by keeping in view the Nietzschean–Foucaultian dimension of her thinking on the question of the subject, moreover, one avoids the precipitous misreading of “performative” as “performance” that mistakenly views Butler in Gender Trouble to be articulating a voluntaristic notion of subjectivity that willfully decides one day to adopt one gender position, with the implication that it could just as willfully adopt a different gender position the next day. This point bears repeating, for the Nietzschean dimension of Butler’s position here is rarely noted, and it is precisely in terms of this dimension that she avoids the voluntaristic position she is mistakenly accused of holding. In Gender Trouble, when arguing for a non-substantive notion of gender, Butler quotes Nietzsche’s remark, cited above, from On the Genealogy of Morals (GM I, 13): “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.”30 Butler’s performative account of gender identity is thus articulated at the intersection of Nietzsche and Foucault, as we see in the following remark from the concluding pages of Bodies That Matter: One might be tempted to say that identity categories are insufficient because every subject position is the site of converging relations of power that are not univocal. But such a formulation underestimates the radical challenge to the subject that such converging relations imply. For there is no self-identical subject who houses or bears these relations, no site at which such relations converge. This

converging and interarticulation is the contemporary fate of the subject. In other words, the subject as a self-identical identity is no more.31

While it would take us too far afield to demonstrate in detail the Nietzschean character of Butler’s position, I would like here to simply note that one could easily show that Nietzsche’s account of a non-substantive self as a convergence of relations of will to power confronts a traditional metaphysics of the subject with the same radical challenge. Before leaving Butler, it is worth noting in this context that her recent work has developed this position through the Derridean notion of iterability; what she earlier discussed in terms of performative repetition, she now recasts as a subversive re-iteration that re-embodies subjectivating norms while at the same time redirecting the normativity of those norms.32 Even in this Derridean incarnation, however, her position remains, it seems to me, more congenial to a Foucaultian than a Derridean politics,33 a fact Butler herself seems to acknowledge as she reiterates her Foucaultian sympathies in a recent comment on the work of Drucilla Cornell and Ernesto Laclau. She concludes her discussion of “Poststructuralism and Postmarxism” by posing a Foucaultian alternative to “the Derridean approach pursued, for the most part, by both Laclau and Cornell.”34 And for those who are willing to see, one must also note that this Foucaultian alternative is itself couched in the language of Nietzschean genealogy, language that calls for a shift in the focus of critical inquiry. Leaving the question “what kinds of political practices are opened up now that Emancipation and the Good have proven their unrealizability,” Butler suggests we move “to the more Nietzschean query: ‘how is it that the unrealizability of the Good and/or Emancipation has produced a paralyzed or limited sense of political efficacy, and how, more generally, might the fabrication of more local ideals enhance the sense of politically practicable possibilities?’”35 In so doing, she displays her continued affinity for operating out of a Foucaultian grid, framed within the ambivalence of production and repression, an affinity she recalls in the concluding chapter of Bodies That Matter:

158

schrift the question for thinking discourse and power in terms of the future has several paths to follow: how to think power as resignification together with power as the convergence or interarticulation of relations of regulation, domination, constitution? How to know what might qualify as an affirmative resignification – with all the weight and difficulty of that labor – and how to run the risk of reinstalling the abject at the site of its opposition? But how, also, to rethink the terms that establish and sustain bodies that matter?36

Where this leaves us, I would suggest, is with a Nietzschean–Foucaultian account of the constitutive relations of power that sets for us the context in which a Nietzschean–Deleuzian account of the metaphysics of becoming-other can accommodate the multiple subject positionings that are necessary to negotiate the shifting alliances and allegiances that are incumbent on the subject of a radical democratic polity. A creative fusion, then, of Nietzschean–Foucaultian–Deleuzian perspectives is at work, whether recognized or not, whether acknowledged or not, in Laclau and Mouffe’s call for discursive discontinuity and the multiplicity of subject positions, in Butler’s bringing to the fore the productive resistances called forth by the repressive constraints of contemporary gender/identity politics, and in Connolly’s explorations of an agonistic model of the democratic polity. As these positions and others with which they share philosophical assumptions and political affiliations develop in response to changing political contingencies, the attentive reader will continue to be able to hear clearly the echoes of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze. Which is to say, to close with an image with which Foucault closed Les mots et les choses, that although Foucault and Deleuze themselves may have been “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,”37 their discourses emphasizing the process of becoming, whether construed in Foucaultian terms of assujettissement or Deleuzian terms of agencement, will continue to mobilize accounts of subjectivity or agency that can help support the political project of radical democracy.

159

notes 1 The reference is to Andrew Wernick’s essay, “The Rhizomatic Genealogy of Deconstruction”, published in this issue of Angelaki (5.2), pp. 137–150. 2 I hasten to add, here, that I have no real quarrel with Wernick’s genealogy. In fact, as a Nietzschean, I am quite comfortable operating with multiple genealogies, both real or phantasmatic. 3 The Nietzschean thematics at work in French poststructuralism is a central thesis in my Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (New York: Routledge, 1995). 4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) 238–39. 5 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 293. 6 References to Nietzsche’s texts will be cited parenthetically with the following abbreviations. Unless otherwise noted, Roman numerals designate essay number, Arabic numerals designate section number, and Pr designates Nietzsche’s prefaces. AC The Antichrist, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968) BT The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967) EH Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967) GM On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967) TI Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968) Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Viking Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1967) 7 Gilles Deleuze, “On the Death of Man and Superman” in Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988) 130. 8 And by implication, this also provides an answer to the interpretive question “Is Zarathustra an Übermensch?” While I am arguing here that a real instantiation of an Übermensch is not possible, note must be taken of at least one passage where

the subject of radical democracy Nietzsche seems to say the opposite. In AC (4), he writes that In another sense there are cases of individual success constantly appearing in the most various parts of the earth and from the most various cultures in which a higher type does manifest itself: something which in relation to collective mankind is a sort of Übermensch. Such chance occurrences of great success have always been possible and perhaps always will be possible. And even entire races, tribes, nations can under certain circumstances represent such a lucky hit. About this remark one point is worth noting: insofar as Nietzsche’s Übermensch is supposed to provide a definite description of a certain type of higher humanity, the fact that he here says “a sort of Übermensch [eine Art Übermensch]” is significant, for it leaves open the possibility that Nietzsche is simply referring to some type of being that has overcome its Menschlichkeit rather than to the specific being whose task it was Zarathustra’s to teach. 9 Michel Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” trans. J.D. Gauthier, S.J., Philosophy and Social Criticism, special issue “The Final Foucault” 12.2–3 (Summer 1987): 121. 10 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985) 117. 11 See ibid. 166–67. 12 See ibid. 105–07. 13 Ibid. 191. 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer on Competition” in On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Carol Diethe, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) 191. 15 Ernesto Laclau, “Power and Representation” in Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture, ed. Mark Poster (New York: Columbia UP, 1993) 292. 16 Chantal Mouffe, “Democratic Politics and the Question of Identity” in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York: Routledge, 1995) 44. 17 Ibid. 44. 18 William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993) 195. 19 Ibid. 195.

20 Ibid. 21 I thank Debra Bergoffen for suggesting I recall Nietzsche’s idea of the “worthy enemy” in this context. 22 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia UP, 1983) 189. 23 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” in The Foucault Reader,” ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984) 343. In the original transcript of this interview, dated 19 April 1983, Foucault makes this comment in response to questions from Dreyfus and Rabinow in which they are trying to get Foucault to distinguish his position from that of Richard Rorty, which they frame as a view that accommodates multiple narratives by accepting them all as equally good. It is in this context that Foucault remarks that although he disagrees with Rorty, it isn’t because everything is bad, but because everything can be dangerous. The transcript continues: “If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. And in this way, I think that Rorty’s position, or Rorty’s hypothesis, leads to an apathy. And my position leads to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. And I think that’s a very great difference.” Foucault goes on to remark that our task becomes one of accurately identifying the dangers and “the ethico-political choice we have to make every day [is] to decide which is the main danger” (Centre Michel Foucault, Document D250(5) 22–23). 24 Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom” 129. 25 Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1986) 65. 26 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) 2. Although I will discuss Butler’s work here in the context of its relation to Foucault and, to a lesser extent, to Nietzsche, I want to make clear that her work is far more than an “application” of the Foucaultian analytic. In fact, the account, articulated in Gender Trouble, of the subject as a performative is, in my opinion, one of the most sophisticated, thought-provoking and potentially valuable accounts of the “subject” to have appeared following the structuralist “death” and poststructuralist “decentering” of “subjectivity.”

160

schrift 27 Ibid. 136. 28 Ibid. 145. 29 Ibid. 148. In her more recent work, Butler further develops her position by using the Derridean notion of iterability; what she earlier discussed in terms of performative repetition, she now recasts as a subversive re-iteration which re-embodies subjectivating norms while at the same time redirecting the normativity of those norms [cf. “Subjection, Resistance, and Resignation: Between Freud and Foucault,” chapter three of Theories of Subjection: The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997)]. Even in this Derridean incarnation, however, her position remains, it seems to me, profoundly Foucaultian. To cite just one example where Butler’s work can continue to be viewed as operating out of a Foucaultian grid, framed within the ambivalence of production and repression, consider the following remark from the concluding chapter of Bodies That Matter: the question for thinking discourse and power in terms of the future has several paths to follow: how to think power as resignification together with power as the convergence or interarticulation of relations of regulation, domination, constitution? How to know what might qualify as an affirmative resignification – with all the weight and difficulty of that labor – and how to run the risk of reinstalling the abject at the site of its opposition? But how, also, to rethink the terms that establish and sustain bodies that matter? [Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993) 240]. 30 Quoted in Butler, Gender Trouble 25. 31 Butler, Bodies That Matter 229–30. 32 See Butler, Theories of Subjection 99. 33 Whether Butler, in using the language of reiteration, is moving away from a Deleuzian account of repetition is an issue that I cannot take up here. 34 Judith Butler, “Poststructuralism Postmarxism,” Diacritics 23.4 (1993): 11.

and

35 Ibid. 10–11. 36 Butler, Bodies That Matter 240. 37 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1973) 387.

Alan D. Schrift Philosophy Department Grinnell College Grinnell IA 50112 USA E-mail: [email protected]