reflections exhaust the situation of which this thought is part. We should not approach it without circumspection. ‘The Cartesian mind is seized by terror as soon as it enters the world of Nietzsche.’16
History? For Nietzsche as for Marx, contrary to Hegel, it continues – under a double form: on the one hand, absurd wars, endless violence, barbarities, genocides; and on the other, an immense, cumulative knowledge, ever more crushing, made up of scholarship, quotations, an amalgam of actions and representations, memories and techniques, speculations that are of little interest but supremely ‘interested’. What continues, therefore, is not history (historicity) as conceived by Hegel, a genesis of ever more complex realities, productive capacities that finally culminate in the edifice of the state. Nor is it history according to Marx, leading towards neither divinity nor the state, but towards ‘humanity’, the fullness of the human species, perfection of its essence, domination over matter and appropriation of nature. The Hegelian hypothesis (which Nietzsche was familiar with, and attacked violently in his Untimely Meditations),17 and the Marxist hypothesis (which Nietzsche rejected, via Hegel, without knowing it), were for him no more than theological. They presupposed that thought or practical action had a meaning, without demonstrating this. They postulated a direction: an immanent rationality, a divinity in humanity, or in the world. But God is dead! The atheism of Feuerbach, Stirner or Marx misunderstood the import of this assertion. Philosophers and their accomplices continued to reason – to philosophize – as if God were not dead. But along with God died history, man and humanity, reason and rationality, finality and meaning. Whether proclaimed by theologians as a higher entity, or secularized, placed in nature or in history, God was the support of philosophical architectures, systems, dogmas and doctrines.
What then is history? A chaos of chances, desires, determinisms. In this Nietzschean triad, taken over from the Greeks, chance holds the first place. The revelation and acceptance of chance, even the apologia for it, give a new dimension to freedom, declares Zarathustra, by breaking the slavery of finality. There is no event without a conjunction or conjuncture of forces initially external to one another, which meet up at a point in space and time where something happens in the wake of this encounter. Chance offers opportunities, favourable conjunctures (the kairos of the Greeks). ‘Chances end up being organized according to our most personal needs’, wrote Nietzsche. Why? Because what emerges in the face of analysis as well as in life is the will: not the pallid ‘faculty’ of classical psychology, the will of the subject who says ‘I want’, but the will to power [puissance], the active energy that seeks not a particular advantage from power [pouvoir], but power for itself: to dominate. As Hegel saw, following Heraclitus, there is struggle, combat, war; but for Nietzsche, the struggle of wills to power replaces Hegel’s rational historicity and dialectical overthrow (which Marx followed, modifying the Hegelian terms), an overthrow through which the slave conquers the conqueror (the master), so advancing in the direction of history. The third term of the triad: determinism, necessity. According to Nietzsche, there is not and cannot be a unique necessity, an exclusive determinism (physical, biological, historical, economic, political, etc.). There are multiple determinisms, which are born and die, grow and disappear after having undergone a certain path, played a certain role in nature or society. A role more often disastrous than beneficial …
So, history is not strictly speaking a chaos; it can be analysed and understood; but the understanding of history shows it to be irreducible to an immanent rationality, a progress determinable in advance. In any historical sequence, elements and symptoms of decadence can be discerned, even within something still strengthening. The shocks of violence shatter anything that seeks to establish itself in a fixed mould. Partial determinisms (biological, physical, social, intellectual) allow genealogies, such as that of a particular family, a discovery, an idea or a concept, far more than they do geneses, explanations by a producing activity.
Hegel, and Marx after him, refused to disconnect the rational from the real. They took the point of view of a logico-dialectical identity of the two terms (unity in contradiction and struggle, victory of a third term born from this struggle). According to Nietzsche, however, this is the root of a fundamental error. It rationally associates fact with value or meaning; but facts have no more meaning than a pebble on a mountain or an isolated noise. As for nature, it has no meaning, rather offering the possibility of countless meanings, in a mixture of cruelty and generosity, joy and suffering, pleasure and pain – a mixture with no name. ‘Man’, by a choice, confers a meaning on nature, on natural life, on the things of nature. ‘Man’ is not a ‘being’ that endlessly questions the world and himself, but a being that creates meanings and value – which he does as soon as he names things, evaluating them by speaking of them. Very likely, there are only facts and things for and by such evaluation. Does knowledge contribute a value, does it give meaning to objects and things? No, says Nietzsche against Hegel. In fact, as ‘pure’ and abstract knowledge, it strips the world of meaning. As for work, Nietzsche agrees with Marx that it has and gives meaning and value, but not the labour that manufactures products, only work that is creative. ‘Who evaluates? Who names? Who lives according to a value? Who chooses a value?’ This is how the question of the subject is posited, to which a response is necessary in order for the quest for a new meaning to retain a meaning – a question that it is hard to answer, since the answer presupposes a return to the original, by giving the ‘subject’ and its relationship with meaning a genesis. Hence Nietzsche’s uncertainties (significant in themselves). Sometimes he says that peoples invent meanings, create values. The philosopher and the poet keep aloof from the crowds, yet they emerge from the peoples, even and especially when opposed to their people.18 It is peoples that invent, and not states or nations or classes, which give no more meaning and value to anything than does knowledge or politics. This thesis posits in principle a complete relativism, a ‘perspectivism’ that is nonetheless convergent with Marxist positions, as it attributes to peoples, and consequently to the ‘masses’, the creative capacity of generating a perspective on the basis of an evaluation. Sometimes Nietzsche replies on the contrary that only the individual (of genius) has this capacity – an ‘elitist’ position: ‘We, who indissolubly perceive and think, we ceaselessly bring to birth that which is not yet’, he proudly declares in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. Nietzsche’s thought, in other words, in as much as it is a thought, does not flinch from contradictions and incoherencies. But is it necessary to choose between these propositions? Are we faced with a system, a knowledge, or rather the transition from one knowledge to another, from sad science to Gay Science?
What then is this ‘gay science’, opposed both to the absolute science of Hegel and the critical science of Marx? Without awaiting a deeper reconsideration of this central point, it is useful to give right away here the genealogy of the fröhliche Wissenschaft. It has its origin in what is deepest in the West: a subterranean current combatted and buried by Judeo-Christian morality and Greco-Roman logos, against which Nietzsche waged a combat that was all the more terrible in that this was the matrix from which he himself emerged, which gives this struggle an exemplary and paradoxical character.
At the origin of Christian thought we have a work both illustrious and misunderstood, Augustinianism, relegated into the shadows by official doctrine. Augustine contemplated with all the resources of Greek, Platonic and Judeo-Alexandrian philosophy, in other words, with all the still-fresh memories of the Roman tradition, on the specific characteristic of Christianity, the doctrine of the fall, of sin and redemption. He interpreted the image of the mundus, of Greco-Italian origin, as a function of ordeal and purification by pain: the hole and the gap, the abyss deepening in the earthly depths, the shadowy corridor opening to the light by a path hard to find, the trajectory of souls who return to the maternal womb of the earth to be later reborn. The mundus: a ditch in which newborn infants were abandoned when their father refused to raise them, along with the condemned to death, refuse, corpses that were not returned to the celestial fire by burning them. Nothing was more sacred, that is, more accursed, more pure and more impure. The ‘world’: an ordeal in darkness to gain redemption, light. ‘Mundus est immundus’, Augustine proclaimed, at the dawn of the Christian world – the moment when the pagan world collapsed. He had found a motto for Christianity,
