are born and found themselves in violence. I believe that truth to be irrecusable. Without even exhibiting atrocious spectacles on this subject, it suffices to underline a law of structure: the moment of foundation, the instituting moment, is anterior to the law or legitimacy which it founds. It is thus outside the law, and violent by that very fact.”28 The event is originary. As such, it has no ground, a groundlessness that is the focus of the next chapter.
ONE CAN TRACE the twisting free of the event from the categories of causality, reason, and subjectivity in Nietzsche’s destructive genealogy of the philosophical tradition, as well as in Heidegger’s deconstruction of the principle of reason. If the event in its eventfulness has been neutralized in the metaphysical tradition, enframed in an entire metaphysical and epistemological apparatus, then Nietzsche is a key figure in the task of thinking the event: for it was he who endeavored to provide a deconstructive genealogy of this tradition so as to reveal the processes and events that subtend it. Nietzsche’s destructive genealogy of metaphysical concepts consists in exposing their fictitious nature and overturning the values they carry while returning to the origins of the metaphysical tradition’s pathological formations in order to determine how its concepts have been constructed, for what purpose, and with what motives. It is a matter for Nietzsche of evaluating the value of our values, following the thread of life. “What are our evaluations and moral tables worth? What is the outcome of their rule? For whom? In relation to what?—Answer: for life.”1 Our concepts are symptoms of a certain state of life, and metaphysical constructs are to be read as a reaction against life, if it is the case that the “true world” “has been constructed by contradicting the actual world.”2
Nietzsche’s deconstruction of our metaphysical concepts is first a critique of conceptuality as such. A concept is never the grasp of some essence, of some objective fact, but a human, all-too-human invention, a creation of our mind that is then accepted by convention. By definition, a concept has no objective validity, no “truth-claim.” In a sense, a concept is from the outset, as a concept, something “false,” what Nietzsche calls a “lie.” This recognition cannot but cast a doubt on our traditional beliefs in our concepts and their objectivity. The reliance upon the traditional concepts of objectivity and truth finds itself shaken: our concepts are beginning to appear as beliefs, as constructs. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche explains that “man has for long ages believed in the concept and names of things as in aeternae veritates,” that “he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.”3 Of course, only much later did it dawn on humans that “in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error” and that we do not possess categories that would give access to a world in itself. This passage indicates the intimate relation between the formations of concepts and the constitutive role of language. Knowledge, concepts, truth itself are here referred back to language, conceived of as a sort of symbolic activity performed for the sake of life’s needs. The name “truth” is the designation of such conventional agreement deposited in language. “That which shall count as ‘truth’ from now on is established. That is to say, a uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and the legislation of language likewise established the first laws of truth.”4 The link between language and a corresponding objective reality finds itself severed, as it immediately appears in Nietzsche’s questions: “And besides, what about these linguistic conventions themselves? Are they perhaps products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth? Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” (OTL, 81). Clearly, for Nietzsche, they are not, and it is not.
Conceptuality proves to be a linguistic phenomenon. In fact, for Nietzsche reason is nothing but a metaphysics of language, a “crude fetishism” with respect to language. “In its origin, language belongs to the time of the most rudimentary type of psychology: We encounter a crude set of fetishes when we become conscious of the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language—or, to put it plainly, reason” (TI, 20). Language finds itself severed from any ideal meaning that would anchor it: it is but a material, physiological production: “What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus” (OTL, 81). The origin of language is not an ideal sphere of intelligibility, but a material production, a radically subjective phenomenon. In one statement, Nietzsche has posited both the material basis of language (nerve stimulus) and the metaphoricity of sense (copy or image). Further, this metaphoricity of sense is as it were unhinged, for it is not anchored in any proper, literal, ideal meaning. The referentiality or transference inherent in metaphor (a word for another) is not about connecting a word with a reality, but rather heterogeneous and always subjective realms. “To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one” (OTL, 82). Between these spheres, there is no relation of causality, but rather of translation and invention: “For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue—for which there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force” (OTL, 86). One notes in this transference the radical absence of any necessity (whether natural or otherwise): “even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one” (OTL, 87). Both the material basis of language and the metaphoricity of sense collapse the possibility of an objective causality. This is why Nietzsche is able to state that to infer from the nerve stimulus a cause outside of us is a prejudice of reason, of the principle of sufficient reason: “the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason” (OTL, 81). No natural connection whatsoever with sense is here allowed. Arbitrary designations are mistakenly taken to be the exact descriptions of the things themselves. However, when one returns to the material genesis of language and sense, one can no longer invoke such thing in itself. “The ‘thing in itself’ (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for,” concludes Nietzsche (OTL, 82). One can see how, ironically, it is the activity of the mind that invented such fictions as “objectivity,” “essences,” and “causes,” precisely on the basis of a forgotten metaphorical activity. A metaphor is mistakenly taken for a nonmetaphor, and that oblivion is what is called a concept! Man “forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves” (OTL, 86). Hence Nietzsche’s celebrated passage on truth, where truth is declared nothing but a fluid complex of metaphors: “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins” (OTL, 84).
We may believe that through our linguistic designations, through our concepts, we know things as they truly are, as if we could know “something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers”; in fact, “we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities” (OTL, 83). A concept is the result, the trace, or the residue of a metaphor, and the formation of concepts is an artistic creation. “Anyone who has felt this cool breath [of logic] will hardly believe that even the concept—which is as bony, foursquare, and transposable as a die—is nevertheless merely the residue of a metaphor, and that the illusion which is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother,
