Primer
One major theme in post-structuralist thought, which in a sense defines the trajectory or coherence of this ‘movement’ to a significant degree, is the attempt to offer a ‘determinate negation’ of the Hegelian Dialectic: that all-consuming philosophical hydra which is seemingly able to accommodate – to ‘predict’ and therefore outmaneuver – any and all possible forms of critique. In short this is due to the mechanism of sublation, which re-contextualizes every apparent anomaly back into a form amiable to the formulaic, difference-crunching machine which is the dialectic itself. It is intended to domesticate our monsters, familiarize them and so in a sense (as Derrida says) strip them of their ‘monstrosity’. What it suggests, or has been seen traditionally to suggest, is that with each resolution ‘Spirit’ moves towards ‘Truth’ in the process of perfection: i.e. that by determinate negation Dialectic accomplishes genuine progress.*
*Perhaps it will seem strange that I word this last sentence so tentatively. This, though, is a story for another time.
Nietzsche was of course one of those thinkers who did not have such faith in the power of the Dialectic; not only in the sense that he did not believe it was capable of resolving all difference via sublation, but also and perhaps more tellingly in the sense that he opposed the very idea of such a resolution in principle. This prescriptive distaste for Dialectic is taken up by many French thinkers, and it is in a manner of speaking this which is responsible for the inverted commas around ‘determinate negation’, whenever we speak of offering a ‘determinate negation’ of the Dialectic itself. We may view the observation that something other than a ‘determinate negation’ is needed to escape the Dialectic (lest we should fall into another sublation) as a development predicated on the original Nietzschean insight that there is something fundamentally or essentially wrong with the ‘telos’ of the Dialectic itself. And this is not just in the ‘factual’ sense that - to Nietzsche’s equal bemusement, sadness, and consternation – a culture which began as ‘Greek’ has become ‘German’; but also has to do with the underlying analysis of the Dialectic as the “ideology of ressentiment†which is what informs the initial normative rejection to begin with.
The attitude of many French thinkers towards the Dialectic, when viewed from the outside in the usual manner (which is wont to ride over subtleties for the sake of brevity or the satiation of a general impatience) might forgivably be viewed as a kind of ‘bogeyman’ mania, and I suppose that there is an element of truth in such suspicions. In any case the anti-Hegelianism of recent French thinkers such as Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida has influenced the horizon of philosophical concern, the set of problems attended to and those excluded as ‘outdated’, for the last couple of generations now, probably as far back as Sartre. (Though philosophers have been wrestling with Hegel since the very beginning.)
And so with this brief prologue I can now say something about the topic announced in the title of this thread. Deleuze views Nietzsche as having provided the conceptual resources necessary to escape the Dialectic in such a manner which would not itself involve or require a sublation. This would therefore fit the requirements for a successful escape. The keystone around which he organizes his exposition of this overcoming is found in the last chapter of his book ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’, entitled ‘The Overman: Against the Dialectic’. As it is more or less the conclusion of the book it is also a summarizing and appropriating of whatever conclusions or insights were derived in the earlier exposition and analysis. As I will only be focusing on this last chapter, however, I will not be able to take for granted to quite the same extent a knowledge of the preceding chapters. Yet at the same time I am not going to offer summaries of these chapters in the hope of giving ‘the gist’ of what they say. Instead I will walk the fine line between the two extremes, mostly because I believe the last chapter has enough recapitulation, at an appropriate level of generality, to be sufficient for my purposes here, such that further backtracking is not required. (And also because it would require a lot of work…)
1. Nihilism
“…it is by means of a fiction that something is opposed to life.†Deleuze understands nihilism as a depreciation of the value of life which presupposes the creation of a transcendental fiction*. That depreciation always presupposes fiction is a thesis similar to, and connected with, the one which describes the triumph of reactive over active forces as being not a matter of the reactive forces becoming active, nor as a matter of the reactive force overpowering the active force; but rather as a disintegration, a separation of the active forces “from what they can doâ€. (It is, importantly, a kind of illusion, a kind of fiction, because of this.) This is also the sense in which Nietzsche disagreed with Darwin, because it translates into the conclusion that ‘struggle’ and ‘selection’ are not the same thing. It also eliminates most if not all renditions of the formula ‘right=might’, because the triumph of reactive forces does not thereby render them active; rather they remain, and triumph as, reactive.**
- â€The idea of another world, of a supersensible world in all its forms (God, essence, the good, truth), the idea of values superior to life, is not one example among many but the constitutive element of all fiction.†(my italics)
** In other words, hierarcy is not a function of ‘force’, because force is itself differentiated.
Nihilism is a quality of the will to power itself. The will to nothingness remains a will. But nihilism does not merely mean a kind of ‘will’, but also a kind of reaction. Both the denial of the value of life and the denial of the higher values which themselves institute this denial are together aspects of nihilism, and this is why nihilism causes Zarathustra both much grief and also much joy*. In the latter what is meant is as such not a denial of higher values in the name of yet higher values, but a denial of all values, or rather of the place of higher values themselves. This is the sense in which, as Deleuze points out, Nietzsche has a kind of hidden dialogue or ‘rivalry’ with Kant. Kant was not radical enough, according to Nietzsche; his critique was too ‘apologetic’ in nature. As such, he ended up becoming ‘Her Majesty’s Opposition’.
*Because in a sense the latter reveals the possibility of the creative act, of affirmation.
Finally, the second form of nihilism - which laments the empty throne where the higher values once sat - is a derivative form of nihilism, which presupposes the original denial of the value of life in the name of those very values. It would be incomprehensible but for this connection.
2. Analysis of Pity
“Pity is practical nihilism… pity persuades to nothingness!.. One does not say ‘nothingness’: one says ‘the Beyond’; or ‘God’; or ‘true life’; or Nirvana, redemption, blessedness… This innocent rhetoric from the domain of religio-moral idiosyncrasy at once appears much less innocent when one grasps which tendency is here draping the mantle of sublime words about itself: the tendency hostile to life." (AC 7 pp. 118-119)
In the analysis of pity Nietzsche makes an important distinction. Reactive forces and the will to nothingness are not simply Christian phenomena. Therefore it is necessary to say in what way his aggressive attitude towards religion is different from the ‘reactive’ variety. Indeed there is an atheist ressentiment which eventually turns against God as well, a movement which is synonymous with the move of reactive forces to separate off from the will to nothingness, to abstain from even this will, to die passively. To die any other way would require too much effort. This is what is meant by ‘passive nihilism’.
This reactive force, Deleuze says, is the one which is ‘satisfied’ with itself, and even claims to secrete its own values. The ugliest man has killed God, and the Higher Men blink. They blink and say “We have invented happinessâ€. The Prophet asks: “Alas, where is there still a sea in which one could drown…?â€
Deleuze’s conclusion is indicative here;
“Values can change, be renewed or even disappear. What does not change and does not disappear is the nihilistic perspective which governs this history from beginning to end and from which these values (as well as their absence) arise. This is why Nietzsche can think that nihilism is not an event in history but the motor of the history of man as universal history. Negative, reactive, and passive nihilism: for Nietzsche one and the same history is marked out by Judaism, Christianity, the reformation, free thought, democratic and socialist ideology etc. Up until the last man.â€
3. God is Dead
The death of God is a theme which begins in the above, but also has a life beyond this genesis. It is not a speculative proposition but what Deleuze calls a ‘dramatic one’. The idea of the ‘dramatic’ takes on a technical application in Deleuze’s exposition, because it is connected with the Nietzschean conception of tragedy, which is in turn a node within the nexus of concepts that constitute the Nietzschean methodology; the pluralistic typology, analysis of value and sense, force, quantity and the differential quality between quantities, will to power… etc; essentially, then, genealogy itself and what Deleuze calls ‘symptomatology’.
The pluralist typology is developed in contrast to the Socratic method, which is necessary if we are going to understand Socrates as the first Dialectician, and the Overman as being against the Dialectic. The distinction between the two methods is the distinction between asking ‘what is’, and asking ‘which one’, roughly speaking. In asking for ‘which one’ what is meant is not a person but a type. This is why it is called a ‘typological’ method, and also why the question of ‘who’ killed God is so important to Nietzsche.
The death of God also means the death of Jesus, which Deleuze understands in relation to the thesis that Christian love is only an outgrowth, indeed a crowning flower, of Judaic hatred; new testament to old testament, this crucial thesis reflects the core of the reactive type and of ressentiment, as they are conceived by Nietzsche.* The Christian love is a love of the sick and of the reactive; it is a pitiful love; and when Deleuze asks ‘which one’ is it that loves in this way, he answers that it is the reactive man. ‘A little bit of life, but only a little…’ That is all which can be tolerated by this love. Any more ‘will’ than this, and the reactive and passive nihilisms shirk back. It is distasteful in a sublime kind of way.
*Though reactive forces antedate this historical period.
But this connection between hate and love must remain hidden. “The will to nothingness must be made more seductive by opposing one aspect to the other, by making love an antithesis of hate. The Jewish God puts his son to death to make him independent of himself and of the Jewish people.†This is the birth of the cosmopolitan God; the God of love.
There is another sense of the ‘death of God’ which is dear to Nietzsche. This is his reading of St Paul. According to Nietzsche, Paul’s portrayal of the death of Christ as an act undertaken for ‘our sins’ is a ressentiment fiction. The concept of sin is said to be what grants Christianity its genius, and raises it far above the Greek mythologies in power and effectiveness. The man of ressentiment looks around for a cause of his suffering, just as he looks for an ‘evil-doer’ in order to define himself ‘good’. In the second stage, which is conceptually prior, the power of ressentiment is directed outward, towards others – against others. Nietzsche’s typological genealogy, when applied in explaining the shift in this behavior that transforms this outward expression of ressentiment to an inward one – called ‘sin’ – picks out the type of the Christian priest as the force behind this shift. ‘Bad conscience (the type of the priest) suggests to him (the reactive man) that he must look for this cause “in himself, in some guilt, in a piece of the past, he must understand his suffering as a punishment.â€â€™ (GM III 20 p. 140, with my additions in brackets)
Deleuze writes:;
“ Even the death of Christ is a detour which leads back to Judaic values: by means of this death a pseudo-opposition between love and hate is set up, this love is made more seductive, as if it were independent of this hate. The truth that Pontius Pilate discovered remains hidden: Christianity is the consequence of Judaism, all the premises are found there, it is merely the conclusion from these premises. – But, from another standpoint, Christianity does sound a new note. It is not content to complete ressentiment, it changes its direction. It imposes the new invention, bad conscience. But, once again, it should not be thought that the new direction of ressentiment in bad conscience is opposed to the first direction. Once again, we are merely concerned with an additional temptation, an additional seduction. Ressentiment said “it is your faultâ€, bad conscience says “it is my faultâ€. But ressentiment is really only appeased when its contagion is spread. Its aim is for the whole of life to become reactive, for those in good health to become sick. It is not enough for it to accuse, the accused must feel guilty.â€
Nietzsche also tells us that the genealogical development of sin belongs in the same class of concepts as punishment, justice, credit, and debt. The repayment of a debt with pain is the original equation of ressentiment, and this analysis is applied to the death of God. “The creditor is said to have given his own son, to have repaid himself with his own son, so immense was the debtor’s debt. The father no longer kills his own son to make him independent, but for us, because of us. God put his son on the cross out of love; we respond to this love to the extent that we feel guilty, guilty of his death, and we redress it by accusing ourselves, by paying interest on the debt.â€
Interestingly, this form of debt repayment differs from the social practice from which it originated by virtue of the fact that it is never-ending. The interiorization of debt in sin is concomitant with the infinitizing of debt in the death of the son. The son is reborn as wholly reactive life, and this is the object of Christian love. It is in this sense that Deleuze interprets Nietzsche: love born from hate. The hate is seemingly ‘displaced’ but never negated. It becomes a means to be used against all who resist this ‘love’. “Warrior-Jesus, hateful Jesus – but for the sake of love.â€
There is yet another way in which God dies for Nietzsche, which I will touch on only briefly as it is latent in the above already. This is when we view the death from the perspective of reactive nihilism, from the nihilism which killed God – the ugliest man. I had a good laugh when I read Deleuze’s formulation of this; “The divine will, the will to nothingness, can not tolerate any other life but the reactive one and this no longer even tolerates God, it cannot bear God’s pity, it takes his sacrifice literally, it suffocates him in the trap of his mercy. It prevents him from rising from the dead, it sits on the coffin-lid.†Funny, no…? 
Finally, Nietzsche interprets the actual Jesus in exact opposite terms to how Paul supposedly does. Really he is an exponent of passive nihilism, an anachronistic Buddha in a land far from India, a man before his time. This thesis allows Nietzsche to explain why Paul would have felt the need to distort the image of Jesus, beyond merely ‘personal’ reasons. “Christ was neither Jew nor Christian but Buddhist; nearer the Dalai Lama than the Pope. So far ahead of his country, of his surroundings, that his death had to be deformed, his whole story falsified, moved backward, made to serve preceding stages, turned to the benefit of negative or reactive nihilism.â€
…
At this point Deleuze has given an overview of the Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis of nihilism, pity, and the death of God. These are the defining themes of the ‘modern condition’, but also the motor of culture itself, start to the finish, before and after. For Nietzsche culture is essentially a machine for producing humans of a certain type, and it has served the goals of reactive forces which wish to establish the last man and passive nihilism as the goal and end of this movement. This raises the question whether the reactive type is the ‘essence’ of mankind. When Nietzsche proposes the Overman he simultaneously denies the premise that the reactive type is the ultimate goal of culture, and denies that this type is the essence of mankind. That this proposal is also simultaneously the escape from Hegelianism and the Dialectic shows another level of connection between these themes, which I have developed in separation up until this point. In what definite sense then might they be connected?
4. Against Hegelianism
There is a prominent place for the death of God in Hegel’s thought. It is necessary then, at this point, to put Nietzsche’s own utterance within the context of his profound disagreement with this belief. “Nietzsche, in contrast to his predecessors, does not believe in this death.†What this means is that the death of God does not have a meaning ‘in itself’, but rather “the death of God has as many meanings as there are forces capable of seizing Christ and making him die…†This is the approach of the genealogist. The ‘factuality’ of the event, its truth, becomes questionable once we ask for whom it is true, ‘which one’, which type. Nietzsche is skeptical of every proclamation of this death which masks the establishment of a new God, new higher values, in his place. Such a death is really just an ‘appearance’, an ‘abstraction’, a ‘fiction’ which serves a determinate function. Nietzsche has no faith in ‘great events’.*
*“I have unlearned belief in ‘great events’, whenever there is much bellowing and smoke about them… And just confess! Little was ever found to have happened when your noise and smoke dispersed.†(Z II pp. 53-4)
For Hegel the death of God is the reconciliation of infinite and finite, God and man. “The death of Christ stands for superceded oppositionâ€. For Nietzsche the universal and singular, changeless and particular, infinite and finite etc… all of these binaries must be understood as symptoms. His criticism of the Dialectic is therefore that it “confuses interpretation with the development of the uninterpreted symbol.†The principle of opposition is preceded by the principle of difference: whereas opposition is the law of relation between abstract products, difference is the principle of genesis or production itself. Similarly, the bad conscience hides beneath the Hegelian unhappy consciousness, the connection between love and hate beneath the appearance of their distinction. “Deprived of its claim to give an account of difference, contradiction appears for what it is: a perpetual misinterpretation of difference itself, a confused inversion of genealogy.â€
“Nietzsche’s work is directed against the dialectic for three reasons: it misinterprets sense because it does not know the nature of the forces which concretely appropriate phenomena; it misinterprets essence because it does not know the real element from which forces, their qualities and their relations derive; it misinterprets change and transformation because it is content to work with permutations of abstract and real terms.â€
Indeed I cannot resist the urge to quote the rest of the conclusion in full;
All these deficiencies have a single origin: ignorance of the question “which one?†There is always the same Socratic contempt for the sophist’s art. We are informed, in the Hegelian manner, that man and God, religion and philosophy, are reconciled. We are informed, in the manner of Feuerbach, that man takes God’s place, that he recuperates the divine as his own property or essence, and that theology becomes anthropology. But who is Man and what is God? Which is particular and what is universal? Feuerbach says that man has changed: that he has become God; God has changed, the essence of God has become the essence of man. But he who is Man has not changed: the reactive man, the slave, who does not cease to be slavish by presenting himself as God, always the slave, a machine for manufacturing the divine. What God is has not changed either; always the divine, the supreme Being, a machine for manufacturing the slave.
And this;
The dialectic foretells the reconciliation of Man and God. But what is this reconciliation, if not the old complicity, the old affinity of will to nothingness and reactive life? The dialectic foretells the replacement of God by man. But what is this replacement if not the reactive life in place of the will to nothingness, the reactive life now producing its own values? At this point it seems that the whole of the dialectic moves within the limits of reactive forces, that it evolves entirely within the nihilistic perspective. There is a standpoint from which opposition appears as the genetic element of force – the standpoint of reactive forces.
…………………
The rest of the chapter looks like this;
5. The Avatars of the Dialectic
6. Nietzsche and the Dialectic
7. Theory of the Higher Man
8. Is Man Essentially reactive?
This is connected with the idea that the Dialectic is flawed in principle. Man is not so much essentially reactive as determined to become reactive, to pass from active to reactive. This is the sense in which what was ‘Greek’ becomes ‘German’, or the Renaissance becomes the Reformation. “What constitutes man and his world is not only a particular type of force, but a mode of becoming of forces in general.†Keep in mind that we are talking about the higher man. The higher men in Zarathustra’s cave do not experience themselves as ‘false’ or ‘failed’ higher men, but rather being higher men they experience themselves as false. The goal is missed, as in the Dialectic, “not because of insufficient means, but because of its nature, because of the kind of goal that it is.†That it is missed does not mean that it is not reached; rather in being reached it is at the same time missed.
“We must reject every interpretation which would have the Overman succeed where the higher man fails.†What distinguishes the two is that whilst the higher men share some affinity with Zarathustra, such that they are able to tempt him to pity (and therefore death), the activity which they represent is not the same as the affirmation which is necessary to free becoming-active forces from the will to nothingness. “The higher man claims to reverse values, to convert reaction into action. Zarathustra speaks of something else: transmuting values, converting negation into affirmation.†This is connected back to an earlier theme: there is a power of negation which is also an affirmation, and this is the creating power, the power of philosophizing with a hammer. Destruction and creation are synonymous when the direction or trajectory of destruction expresses the affirmative character of creation, of joy. If it were not for this we would not be capable of ‘transmuting values’ at all; we could only move them around whilst remaining within the nihilistic perspective which produced them. “…the conditions which would make the enterprise of higher man viable are conditions which would change its nature: Dionysian affirmation rather than man’s species activity.â€
9. Nihilism and Transmutation: the focal point
“The question is: how can nihilism be defeated? How can the element of values itself be changed, how can affirmation be substituted for negation?
Perhaps we are closer to a solution than we might think. It will be noted that, for Nietzsche, all the previously analyzed forms of nihilism, even the extreme or passive form, constitute an unfinished, incomplete nihilism. Is this not to say, conversely, that the transmutation which defeats nihilism is itself the only complete and finished form of nihilism? In fact nihilism is defeated, but defeated by itself.â€
“Active destruction means: the point, the moment of transmutation in the will to nothingness. Destruction becomes active at the moment when, with the alliance between reactive forces and the will to nothingness broken, the will to nothingness is converted and crosses over to the side of affirmation, it is related to a power of affirming which destroys the reactive forces themselves."
10. Affirmation and Negation
“To the famous positivity of the negative Nietzsche opposes his own discovery: the negativity of the positive.â€
11. The Sense of Affirmation
The ass takes everything upon its back, and says only ‘Yea’. That this is a false affirmation gives us an opportunity to further distinguish the point being developed above, whilst also using the type of the ass as a symbolic means of drawing several other threads together.
The ass is like the camel who takes everything upon his back and calls only this the ‘real’. This acquiescence to the ‘burden’ of reality is the meaning of the affirmation of the ass, which is unable to say ‘no’. This positivism leads us back to the critique of the Dialectic (as mistaking interpretation with the development of the uninterpreted symbol, as dealing exclusively in the element of fiction), and also to the exposition of genealogy itself, of what it means to conduct a ‘symptomatology’. We can think also of the exposition of consciousness and the unconscious: especially in the Spinozist sense where the former has the structure of seeing the effects of exterior causes but without perceiving these causes themselves, and so mistaking the one for the other. Likewise “…the ass only ever grasps consequences separated from the principle of their production and forces separated from the spirit which animates them.â€
“Faced with ‘the men of the present’ Zarathustra says: “the unfamiliar things of the future and whatever frightened stray birds, are truly more familiar and more genial than your ‘reality’. For thus you speak: ‘We are complete realists and without belief or superstition’: thus you thump your chests – alas, even without having chests! But how should you be able to believe, you motley-spotted men! – you who are paintings of all that has ever been believed!..â€â€
This kind of reality is the reality of the camel: the desert. Nihilism. “The ass does not know how to say no; but first and foremost he does not know how to say no to nihilism itself.â€
And it should be remembered that the ‘motley-spotted’ man is the dialectician.
12. The Double Affirmation: Ariadne
“If we understand affirmation and negation as qualities of the will to power we see that they do not have a univocal relation. Negation is opposed to affirmation but affirmation differs from negation. we cannot think of affirmation as ‘being opposed’ to negation: this would be to place the negative within it. Opposition is not only the relation of negation with affirmation but the essence of the negative as such. Affirmation is the enjoyment and play of its own difference, just as negation is the suffering and labour of the opposition that belongs to it.â€
13. Dionysus and Zarathustra
“Nietzsche’s speculative teaching is as follows: becoming, multiplicity and chance do not contain any negation; difference is pure affirmation; return is the being of difference excluding the whole of the negative.â€
Deleuze’s Conclusion
Modern philosophy presents us with amalgams which testify to its vigour and vitality, but which also have their dangers for the spirit. A strange mixture of ontology and anthropology, of atheism and theology. A little Christian spiritualism, a little Hegelian dialectic, a little phenomenology (our modern scholasticism) and a little Nietzschean fulguration oddly combined in varying proportions. We see Marx and the pre-Socratics, Hegel and Nietzsche, dancing hand in hand in a round in celebration of the surpassing of metaphysics and even the death of philosophy properly speaking…
…There is no possible compromise between Hegel and Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s philosophy has a great polemical range; it forms an absolute anti-dialectics and sets out to expose all the mystifications that find a final refuge in the dialectic. What Schopenhauer dreamed of but did not carry out, caught as he was in the net of Kantianism and pessimism, Nietzsche carries out at the price of his break with Schopenhauer, setting up a new image of thought, freeing thought from the burdens which are crushing it. Three ideas define the dialectic: the idea of a power of the negative as a theoretical principle manifested in opposition and contradiction; the idea that suffering and sadness have value, the valorization of the “sad passionsâ€, as a practical principle manifested in splitting and tearing apart; the idea of positivity as a theoretical and practical product of negation itself. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole of Nietzsche’s philosophy, in its polemical sense, is the attack on these three ideas…
…Nietzsche creates his own method: dramatic, typological and differential. He turns philosophy into an art, the art of interpreting and evaluating. In every case he asks the question “Which one?†The one that… is Dionysus. That which… is the will to power as plastic and genealogical principle. The will to power is not force but the differential element which simultaneously determines the relation of forces (quantity) and the respective qualities of related forces. It is in this element of difference that affirmation manifests itself and develops itself as creative. The will to power is the principle of multiple affirmation, the donor principle of the bestowing virtue.
Regards,
James
