for thought. As a life form that inherently poses questions of essence to itself and the world, the human being situates itself anxiously and precariously over an abyss most fecund because of its fundamental indeterminacy and duplicity. All sense of boundary—and so the basis of conscious thought, language, and the subject—is dissolved in the abyssal body. But, at the same time, the abyss constitutes the boundary for language, as the outer space that surrounds it. The abyss laps at the shores of all sense, threatening to engulf it, but thereby providing it with a coastline or definition.
It is perhaps not coincidental that, in the quote considered above, Nietzsche articulates this abyssal excess with reference to the Oedipal myth, thus preempting the psychoanalytic tradition that would emerge in his wake.[25] For not only does that story deal with the ultimate social transgression—thereby acting as a cautionary tale to the moral being, know one’s place—but in so doing it also deals with what Freud maintained is the subject’s ultimate and most obscure desire: to kill the father in order to marry the mother. Nietzsche, then, implicitly refers the reader to what has become the paradigm of “excess” or “the sublime”: the child’s relation to the mother. Marriage to the mother would here signify a return to a primordial wholeness that is disturbed with the introduction to the scene of the father—representative of language and subjectivity. The relation to the figure of excess is thus always already interrupted, in virtue of the structures by which the self is ordered. By learning his or her relation to the parental figures, the subject comes to occupy a social role. Yet the process by means of which this occurs involves both punishment and love; pain, abstinence, and pleasure. Love and hatred of the parental figures comes to be felt with reference to the ideal self that, psychically, replaces them. The subject’s attachment to its subjection is thus essentially characterized by ambivalence.
We can learn much about the manner in which the reader is subjected to Nietzsche’s text if we consider the work of ambivalence in the formation of subjectivity. Instances of excess—“chaotic,” corporeal multiplicity, and the direct expression of power represented by the noble—promise the reader a return path to what one understands to be the primordial unity. At the same time, however, these figures represent a disturbing surfeit that threatens to undo the self. Likewise, the force of Nietzsche’s writing is that it keeps the reader guessing as to her place in relation to it: its polyvalence and duplicity provide a varied topography wherein the reader may invest her hopes and fears. This recalls the ambivalent parent–child relationship described above. For within this triad the means by which one gains recognition, and thereby love, is also the source of privation. Nietzsche withholds the promise of recognition from the reader with his avowal that only a very few will be admitted to his text’s inner sanctum. He thereby awakens the reader’s need to be interpellated, and so to negate and suppress whatever does not fit to the ideal promoted by his writing. And Nietzsche’s text thus plays the (paradigmatically parental) role of both destabilizing the reader’s sense of self and of reorganizing it—providing for them a place (or perspective) from which to speak and interpret.
The figures of excess with which Nietzsche intersperses his writings accord to the form of “the pure object,” existing prior to interpretation, and for this reason should arouse our suspicion. “The thing itself” is especially excessive for Nietzsche, having already been prohibited by him in accordance with his perspectivism. Nietzsche’s use of these figures, then, indicates a rhetorical aspect to his writings—and perhaps even an attempt to dissimulate, or to manipulate the reader, by means of the construction of fictive truths. These so-called truths capture our imagination and our desire, understood not simply as what one wants, but moreover as a relation to the object world through which the self is constructed. The discarded excess and the chaotic plenitude, beyond interpretation, can be understood to coincide: for each is only the surplus product of a so-called repressive process (language, or the subject) that they are deceptively understood to have preceded and provoked. In this respect, the conceptual content of Nietzsche’s philosophy is brought to bear in virtue of the manner of its disclosure to the reader: through an affectively charged relation to the figure of excess. Nietzsche gives ideas such as will to power, the Übermensch, chaos, and the abyss to be his philosophical purpose, and the limit points of his theoretical apparatus. In fact they are its points of impossibility. And this impossibility precisely designates the site of the reader’s desire, wherein the moment of rupture (separation from a mythical plenitude) that founds subjectivity is most likely to be rehearsed and recapitulated.
We have seen how Nietzsche’s account of subjectivity is intimately related to the subjugation of his reader. Nietzsche’s interest in the genealogy of “the moral subject” thus also serves his concern to generate a following of loyal subjects that might continue his name and legacy. In the chapters that follow, we will proceed to theorize how Nietzsche’s various “figures of excess” function as sites of identification for the reader, as well as repositories for the projection of material they would disown. These excessive moments of the text produce for the reader the illusion of a coherent identity that preexists their encounter with Nietzsche, whereas in fact this identity is only a textual effect. This retroactive movement conforms to what Butler designates as the circular figure of the subject in Nietzsche’s work, or the circuit of bad conscience: a concept that—caught within its own reflection—is inextricable from what is supposed merely to figure it.
Let us, in the next chapter, turn to the theory of subjection as it emerges from Nietzsche and extends to psychoanalysis. As we shall see, accounts of dangerous bodily excess are here integral to the emergence of the superego: the mechanism of interpellation, or socialization of the subject for Freud. Thus we will continue to develop and refine an understanding of subjectivity as a process driven by ambivalence, the better to understand various readers’ attachments to Nietzsche.
[1]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), preface, §5, 5.
[2]. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), “On the Prejudices of Philosopher,” §12.
[3]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 127.
[4]. The subtitle to Nietzsche’s “autobiography,” Ecce Homo, is ‘How to Become What You Are’—and thus could be mistaken, in the contemporary context, for a self-help manual. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989).
[5]. “[t]here is no being ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), I §13, 45.
[6]. Nietzsche’s role as guarantor of the future is discussed at more length in chapter 2, in relation to Derrida’s Otobiographies.
[7]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gasamtausgabe. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, eds. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970), 8;1: 2 [99]. My translation.
[8]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power. Walter Kaufmann, ed. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), §507. 275–76.
[9].
