herself as the aggressor—then the genealogy must be read in reverse, or even as circular, rather than as a lineage beginning with the master and ending with the Übermensch. It is at this point, then, that we can begin to tease out a second order narrative from Nietzsche’s text: a fairy tale whose monsters arise from the fantasies of good, Christian folk. Arguably the most interesting section of Genealogy is also its most oblique. The second essay describes the condition of socialization of the human, who would have to become “calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is to be able to stand security for his own future” (58): in order, that is, to have the right to make promises. Nietzsche’s variation on the theme of the social contract, therefore, demonstrates what must have occurred before we were able to make a contract in the first place. We must have had to install a sense of the other’s well-being into ourselves at the expense of our own “free” expression of power, and this is exacted at the level of corporeality, according to Nietzsche: whereby the body is forced to work against itself, in what must have necessitated an extremely painful and protracted process of shaping the individual as a more or less exchangeable type within the social economy. “‘If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory’—this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth.” (61) Only in the context of a social economy of sameness could the notion of guilt arise, according to Nietzsche, out of the concept of debt (the German for both guilt and debt is Schuld) (62–63). Punishment thus consists in the creditor’s right to extract from the debtor’s body the pleasure of freely discharging one’s power at the expense of another. The nature of the economy is that all are exchangeable, and the juridical system regulates this principle by converting masters into slaves and slaves into masters, in what Nietzsche calls a “carnival of cruelty” (65).[19]
In order to become a social animal—and thus a regular participant in the economy of the social contract—the master has had to renounce its own stake in life as will to power: that is, the enactment of jouissance upon the other’s body. For the wielding of force has come to be regulated by the law rather than by individuals, and the master is thus equally subject to law as the slave. This is where we find the subject returning to its bodily depth: for this enjoyment through the infliction of pain upon the other is redeployed to become the very impetus of social behavior. Enjoyment is reconfigured as bad conscience, wherein the persecutor takes her or himself as the object of cruelty. In bad conscience, “will to power” turns in upon itself—makes itself its own victim—in order to practice a cruelty that is not only socially permissible, but also necessary to the formation of the subject. When frustrated, enjoyment that would have been thrust outwardly, and so immediately dissipated, is stored up to create an interior reservoir of pleasure. Accordingly, abstinence also becomes a manner of (ascetic) pleasure, in the realm of sexuality as well as violence: “there is no necessary antithesis between chastity and sensuality; every good marriage, every genuine love affair, transcends this antithesis” (98). Both cruelty and sensuality are allowed to ripen and gather force by means of abstinence. When placed in these terms, it is difficult to imagine a being with the requisite power for greatness in a period historically or ontologically “prior” to the slave moral revolt. The conditions for the body “becoming what it is” are prepared by slave morality; that is, by the body’s subjection—and active participation in such subjection—to language.
Let us examine more closely the narrative that Nietzsche presents here. For the order of priority, both temporal and ontological, is precisely what he puts into question. In presenting us with a genealogy—a search for origins—Nietzsche reveals the paradox of any narrative of origin: for the narrative must always presuppose its remainder, which is produced “after” the account, retroactively. The narrative of origins is always circular, assuming what it purports to explain. In the case of the conventional myth of origin, the social contract relies upon the existence of an animal that can make promises, and as such can consider the needs of others, and retain an image of itself through time, even to the extent that this ideal determines future events. The social contract anticipates the type of being that it sets out to explain. But even Nietzsche’s critique of the social contract—which presents us with the circularity of the appeal to natural law, and undercuts the social contract with his presentation of a man even more primordial than Rousseau’s essentially good noble savage—even this critique sets itself within the parameters that it ostensibly seeks to explode. For Nietzsche’s good noble is a product of the slave system of evaluation, as its moment of excess. The noble, as the one that created value through the act of naming, could only have been the slave’s invention. For, to wield language in positing what is good, he must already have been subject to it.[20] The noble is thus the slave’s dreamed-of ideal; a remainder produced by the very process of socialization.
Are we not, then, all fallen masters when we read Nietzsche’s Genealogy? “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”: Does the child become a social being by means of the same painful internalization by which the master becomes a slave? The reader who desires the noble situation might thereby feel contaminated by the slave perspective—reminiscing a great loss of power as the price of knowledge. The hidden truth of Genealogy, however, is that we must first have been fallen masters before owning the capacity to become, or even to imagine, this “original” sense of mastery. Judith Butler argues a similar case in The Psychic Life of Power. In the essay on Nietzsche and Freud,[21] Butler draws our attention to the circular figure of the subject, as a body turned back upon itself,[22] but suspends the status of this figure by asserting the counterintuitive hypothesis that this trope “makes no ontological claim” (69). The figure performs its meaning in the circuit, but there is no substance behind this performance; no subject that preexists the figure that pretends merely to represent it. What this figure reveals consists in the subject’s circular, or self-founding structure: in a relation of reciprocity, language and the subject establish one another; and together they provide the foundation for all ontological claims. Butler articulates this with reference to “bad conscience” (for Nietzsche synonymous with modern subjectivity):
[F]or Nietzsche, the writing of such figurations, and figuration in general, are part and parcel of the “ideal and imaginative phenomena” which are the consequences of bad conscience. Hence, we do not come to know something about bad conscience when we consider the strange figure of reflexivity that Nietzsche offers us. We are, as it were, caught up in the luring effects of bad conscience at the very textual moment when we seek to know what, precisely, this bad conscience is. (69)
According to Butler, Nietzsche’s insight is that the subject (bad conscience) only becomes a question for us once we are already caught within its circular movement. I would add that once the subject is produced by this self-reflexive moment, it takes on a life of its own, albeit situated within language. The question of bad conscience orients us to and keeps us engaged with language as such, but it does so through the invention of an affective dimension as full and diverse as the bodily multiplicity that Nietzsche’s philosophy both describes and initiates. If Nietzsche deploys the question of subjectivity in Genealogy, it is little wonder that this text affects its reader. Because there is no subject apart from the performance of subjectivity in relation to some discourse or other, the subject must continually recapitulate itself by means of subjection. The text activates the reader’s desire, which only emerges in relation to language, by posing itself as the perennial question of the reader’s own origin as subject.
This desire for itself that inaugurates psychic interiority is not without its corporeal contours. Nietzsche’s masterstroke in Genealogy is to demonstrate how consciousness emerges in its opposition to the body, yet remains a mode of bodily enjoyment, albeit differently articulated. With the advent of bad conscience, the drives that once ordered the life of the master-type go to ground, resorting instead to covert means of satisfaction: “as a rule they had to seek new and, as it were, subterranean gratifications” (Genealogy, 84). And Nietzsche’s explanation
