the only means of “knowledge,” which Nietzsche defines as essentially a reduction of multiplicity, for the sake of conscious thought (Gay Science, §355, 300). Knowledge is for Nietzsche already the province of the herd animal. Indeed, throughout his oeuvre, the body is figured in excess of our knowledge of it. Nietzsche frequently comments upon the epistemic gap between the body and consciousness. Following Spinoza, he relates that we cannot observe the simplest bodily functions as they occur within us, nor can we understand the vast complexity of our own corporeality with such an inadequate instrument as consciousness.[12]
That knowledge in general is limited is a necessary adjunct to Nietzsche’s perspectivism because, as finite beings, the needs that determine the truth available to us cannot exhaust all potential aspects of “the thing.” But more precisely in the case of knowledge of our own bodies, consciousness necessarily simplifies and conceals in its perceptions of the body. Consciousness exists principally as a simplification of, and mantle for, the body, of which it is merely the most surface aspect. For the sake of the mind’s proper functioning, the life of the body must for the most part remain obscure—otherwise, not only would the mind become overstimulated, but also it would cease to perform its vital role as interpreter of bodily needs. And here Nietzsche’s dual vocations—as philologist and philosopher—come more apparently to work together. For as with texts, so with bodies, interpretation is a selective process in which the work of excluding superfluous material, or information, is equally as important as including what is relevant. Thus, much of the work of consciousness, according to Nietzsche, is actively to forget whatever does not accord to a simplified schema of what the self is.[13]
Yet more significantly, in order to know itself—to become self-conscious—the body undergoes a transformation that renders it unrecognizable “as such.” “The ideal of the self”—for Nietzsche a very limited aspect of “the whole self” (what he calls “the great intelligence” of the body)[14]—acts as a measure for the selection and interpretation of the surrounding environment and, indeed, of the body itself. This ideal through which perceptions are mediated is the “I”: the subject, or “self” to which Nietzsche appeals when addressing his reader. This subject begins only as a surface projection: the body’s interpretation of itself for the purposes of communication—as Nietzsche points out, not only with others, but also within itself. Corporeal differences are thus “subjected” to the need to communicate: language—through the subject—bridges differences, so adhering to the fiction of similarity and exchangeability between bodies in discourse. Nietzsche even suggested that language and morality are promoted by a specific bodily drive, which he calls “the herd instinct” (Gay Science, §116, 174–75). Language “hails” the body by picking out a particular drive within it. The body, in turn, has an interest in acceding to the herd instinct: for without to some extent annulling differences for the sake of communication, there is little chance of the organism’s survival.
The cost of survival, however, is that this “herd drive” would then suppress and reorganize in its image all other forms of corporeality. By this account, the body is at war with itself: not only because it is essentially an irreducible multiplicity—each element of which must engage in a struggle in order to prevail over the others—but also because of a tendency that conflicts with this multiplicity in order to compose the body as unified. This unified entity is, indeed, a fictive account of bodily being. Yet such a fiction, or “untruth,” is a necessary “condition of life” (Beyond Good and Evil, §4, 11-2) for the human as “herd animal.” In accordance with Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power, the body interprets itself as a unity that takes the form, in language, of the subject. The subject of language opposes itself to the body. Yet subjective being is not opposed to corporeality in any simple sense. Rather, consciousness and subjectivity are the foundational “truths” required by our species in order that its bodily existence is maintained—remembering that for Nietzsche “[t]ruth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive” (Will to Power, §493, 272).
In view of the body’s need to maintain “the untruth” of subjectivity, might we not venture that the subject acquires (or “returns to”) the depth from which it is understood to have emerged, and against which it opposes itself? For the body that resists subjection also comes to be invested in it for the sake of survival, “answering” to the designations by means of which language lays claim to it. The body is here language’s coconspirator, harking to its call. We might conjecture, pace Althusser, that language is installed within the subject as the other to whom he or she answers. Yet, clearly, the causality of this event is paradoxical, for this subject already presupposes language for its existence, and so cannot simply “await” being hailed by the call of language, as if it were walking innocently (though with a guilty conscience) down a crowded street in Paris (Althusser, “Ideology,” 162–63). The subject I is itself a linguistic element that gives rise to a particular modality of life: the living body inhabits language through the shifter, I. Yet, as Lacan points out (in apparent agreement with Nietzsche’s statements about consciousness), the accession to subjectivity always produces a remainder, or excess, which cannot be neatly incorporated, and separation from which indelibly conditions subjectivity. Interpreting Freud’s famous phrase Wo Es war, soll Ich werden (where “it”—the id—was, “I”—ego—should come to be), Lacan affirms the gap between the greater self (“the subject of the unconscious”) and the ego “as constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications.”[15] By establishing a relation to language, the self is split—severed from the bodily multiplicity celebrated by Nietzsche—but it also comes to be as such.
We can reread Nietzsche’s invitation to his reader “to be your self!” in the light of this difference between aspects of the self, as an attempt to awaken a sense of this excess—that there is another, vaster self that the regularity of everyday existence obscures. “The self” to which Nietzsche’s writing appeals is then supposed to be drawn from this limitless reservoir to which language bars access, ironically, by the language employed by Nietzsche. Nietzsche thereby promises to reunite his reader with a “self” that transcends grammar and a particular historical milieu: a “self” that is not simply installed as a means of communication between bodies. The currency of this call, however, trades on the sense of loss that characterizes human subjectivity—so that Nietzsche exploits the readers’ felt disengagement from an unconscious and instinctual plenitude summarized by “will to power,” but fails to offer a viable alternative to such separation. By invoking a self that is always already constituted in its relation to language, however, Nietzsche also taps into the hidden and unexpected corporeal depth of language, evidenced in the pleasure that the subject feels respecting his or her subjection. The pleasure of being named—of being actualized through language—is a pleasure regularly set in motion by Nietzsche’s writing. Yet given his otherwise poor opinion of language and consciousness, how does Nietzsche account for the fact that the body comes to love what apparently disempowers it?
Nietzsche’s most systematic account of how the subject, as a denial of corporeal difference, is “born of” the body is contained in On the Genealogy of Morals. It is also the work in which we find both an explanation for, and mechanism of, the subjection of the reader to Nietzsche’s text. On the one hand, Nietzsche argues that the social requirement to understand and predict one another’s behavior suppresses differences between—and, indeed, within—individuals. Accordingly, language (in this case its exemplar is the promise) comes to represent a common ground that quite literally erases difference, by altering the way that the body organizes itself (58). For the society that runs smoothly demands not only an ontology of regularity (the institution of “natural laws,” like causation), but also a subjectivity of regularity. According to Nietzsche, social imperatives penetrate to the very body of the subject, by favoring its conformist (reactive) instincts over the active, “unruly” (and, for Nietzsche, more interesting), drives.
On
