instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward—this is what I call the internalization [Verinnerlichung] of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his “soul.” The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited. (84)
Simply, when we are compelled not to act, we turn the charged drive inward as thought. Subjectivity (the soul) thus constitutes a reservoir for the conversion of active force into an internalized reactivity.[23] For Nietzsche, we create an inner world to the extent that we fail to create in the outer world. The expansive economy of “will to power” carves out its new domain within its own flesh as the unconscious, so that an economy of sameness can operate at the level of consciousness. This “economy of sameness,” according to Nietzsche, is the domain of the subject and of language. Language, subjectivity, and philosophy—the most exalted achievements of humankind—are thus the outcome of a long and punishing negation and redeployment of the human organism’s inner plurality.
Yet one would be mistaken to think simply that the history Nietzsche lays forth in Genealogy is to be regretted: that it would be better had the slave never transfigured the moral landscape, or converted the noble to slavery. Rather, that the greatest value is bestowed upon the product of the body’s self-effacement demonstrates, for Nietzsche, how “the body” creates. Truth, imagination, philosophy, and value are only possible from the point of view of the slave. The revaluation that Nietzsche incites amounts to yet another slave revolt. Nietzsche may have imagined himself to be like a Greek god, a Hyperborean, and even an Antichrist, but perhaps it makes better sense to think of him as—like Christ—a king of slaves and a founder of cults.[24]
This chapter is intended to demonstrate the manner in which Nietzsche’s writing promotes a critical philosophy and, concomitantly, a program of recruitment of readers to see through to completion the promises Nietzsche makes of this philosophy. Especially where his most obvious meaning contradicts the subtler currents of the text, Nietzsche engages in a program of subterfuge against some readers, and conspiracy with others, to the purpose of achieving through these readers—and by means of their interpellated positions within his texts—different, but nonetheless complimentary, tasks. This argument will be pursued further in chapter 3, wherein I consider some esoteric readings of Nietzsche. In the main, by playing various threads of Nietzsche’s texts against one another, the present chapter has demonstrated how his writing produces a textual remainder. This textual excess gives itself to be a pure object, which exerts the force of the sublime upon the reader: thereby capturing his or her desire, such that one recapitulates subjectivity in terms of a relation to Nietzsche’s text. These “pure objects”—for instance, “the body” understood as a multiplicity of drives, or “the noble type”—beckon to the reader as objects of desire: states that he would like to attain. Yet what is attractive about these objects also renders them frightening to the reader. For, they are understood to exist in an incorruptible nook prior to interpretation. In terms of Nietzsche’s own critique of truth—whereby there can be no thing in itself; no fact without interpretation (Will to Power, §481, 267)—they are impossible objects. In the final, brief section of this chapter, I wish to interrogate further “the pure object” that Nietzsche dangles before his reader, by way of both carrot and stick. While I will elucidate here the operation of this textual excess within Nietzsche’s work, it is worth keeping in mind that Nietzsche’s use of this excess prefigures the plotting of desire as rendered by psychoanalytic theory, which will be dealt with in the chapters that follow.
Moments of Excess: The Making and Unmaking of the Subject
In keeping with the circular movement of origin and corruption in Nietzsche’s texts, the body, as a vision of plurality—caught, as it seems, only with the corner of one’s eye—in truth answers (but is not to be reducible) to a desire cultivated by language and subjectivity. Language indicates its origin in a place before its existence. But what must be comprehended is that this scenario is structured already in terms bestowed by language: “the host organism” for a metaphysics of presence. The relation between the body and language emerges as a question only because of a peculiarity of one of its terms. For, de facto, the matter is already organized from the perspective of language, which—in the attempt “to look around its own corner”—appoints itself as chief arbiter, thereby determining the findings in advance of a question having been posed. Language, which essentially organizes, defines itself in opposition to “a disorganized” body, and in this way the body comes to play the role of its abject term: as what resists the dictates of grammar. The body is conceived as the site of an aporia—or impassable point—which ultimately empowers language, because in it language sees itself reflected as the measure of all things. In terms of Nietzsche’s ontology, language exhibits the most voracious will to power, and as such represents the body’s overcoming of itself. This aggrandizement of language is hardly surprising, however, as the body is understood only in terms of language in the first place—even, and especially, within Nietzsche’s philosophy. Perhaps the conflation of body and language, as text and perspective, is Nietzsche’s gift to us as a philologist: he thereby provides a means by which we might rethink subjectivity as essentially a synthesis of—or a point of ambiguity between—the body and language.
Such conflation, however, is also moderated by a curious oppositional structure: a rupture that makes all the difference for subjection. The subject must understand itself to have been violently separated from its origin, for such violent separation in fact characterizes subjectivity. And as we saw earlier, for Nietzsche the rupture at the heart of subjectivity also founds all knowledge. With this in mind, I will outline Nietzsche’s acutely incongruous attempt at metaphysics, which he cautiously frames in terms of negative ontology. Nietzsche famously designated as “chaos” all that exists beyond the schematic (Apollonian) idealization of the self, and the equally idealized things accrued through everyday experience. Chaos is supposed to refer to whatever is not already incorporated, domesticated, or organized. Yet, we cannot characterize chaos without bringing it into our own field: which would be to interpret it, to organize it. Not without a certain irony, chaos, drawn by Nietzsche from the writings of Heraclitus, is then already a positive concept, with the positive quality of infinite mutability. It is almost axiomatic for Nietzsche that nothing can be said about chaos, that chaos discloses the indescribable. Yet, the word chaos already bespeaks the multiplicity of the river that is never the same; or the primordial swamp from which we pull ourselves by our bootstraps. In this way, chaos operates for Nietzsche precisely as the excess that both creates the subject and is its by-product. It is an inconvenient, yet necessary, remainder of his attempt to escape the antinomies of metaphysics.
Once “chaos” is revealed to be a positive concept, and so already subject to metaphysical interpretation, we find Nietzsche attempting to gesture beyond the reaches of language by substituting for “chaos” the negative concept of “the abyss.” This abyss aligns with many other impressions of the sublime found within philosophical discourse: as the source of all reason and identity that also threatens to annihilate reason and identity. For Nietzsche, every question posed to a human being—and each response that attempts to take the enquiry beyond its usual terrain—risks consigning the inquisitor to the abyss: that is, to a bodily excess, or destabilization, that would threaten subjectivity. This is why he warns the reader of the dangerous questions and perhapses at the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, and also writes the short and enigmatic aphorism in that same book: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you” (§146, 89).
This passage indicates the element of risk that attends any mode of enquiry that draws too near to one’s own foundations: simply because what one might find is that there is no foundation, no substantive I upon which experience is grounded. For designated as the abyss, the body signifies for Nietzsche not a multiplicity of forces, but rather a constitutive nothingness. This bodily
