Nietzsche and the Shadow of God (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) 0810126664, 9780810126664

Citation preview

NIETZSCHE AND THE SHADOW OF GOD

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Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

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Founding Editor

General Editor

James M. Edie

Anthony J. Steinbock

Associate Editor

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†

John McCumber

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NIETZSCHE AND THE SHADOW OF GOD

Didier Franck

Translated from the French by Bettina Bergo and Philippe Farah

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois

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Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2011 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2011. All rights reserved. Originally published in French as Nietzsche et l’ombre de Dieu in 1998 by Presses Universitaires de France, 108 boulevard Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris 1998. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 978-0-8101-2665-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8101-2666-4 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [CIP to come] o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

000

Introduction

000

Part 1. From the Resurrection of Body to Eternal Recurrence 1

The Body Under the Law

000

2

Justice and Faith

000

3

One Vision Out of Another

000

4

Circulus Vitiosis Deus?

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Part 2. The Shadow of God 1

The Double Status of the Body

000

2

The Self-Negation of the Will

000

3

The Great Coincidence

000

4

Speculative Theology

000

5

The Prophetic Translation

000

6

Zeus or Christ

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Part 3. The Guiding Thread 1

The Plurality of the Body

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2

The Criterion

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3

Pleasure and Pain

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4

To Will, to Feel, to Think

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5

Organization and Reproduction

000

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Part 4. The Logic of the Body 1

Dehumanization as a Method

000

2

Fear and the Will to Assimilation

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3

Simplification and Judgment

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Part 5. The System of Identical Cases 1

Sensation and Evaluation

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2

The Formation of Categories

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3

Space and Time

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4

Representation

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5

Coordination and Necessity

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6

The Subject of Causality

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Part 6. From Eternal Recurrence to the Resurrection of Body 1

Memory

000

2

Consciousness

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3

The Decisive Instant

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4

The Incorporation of Truth

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5

The Priestly Revaluation

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6

The New Justice

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Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

Heartfelt thanks to Héloïse Bailly, Université de Strasbourg II and Université de Montréal, for her scrupulous work on footnotes and translation questions. Gabriel Malenfant, University of Iceland, followed the preparation of this text from start to finish; he is responsible for corrections as much as for inspiration. Thanks, also, go to Lukas Soderstrom (Université de Montréal) for extensive research into philosophical and historical questions. Marc-James Tacheji (McGill University Law School) provided invaluable help on the final translation. Thanks are due to the Université de Montréal, Département de Philosophie, to Joseph Hubert of the Vice-Rectorat à la recherche, and Yves Murray, directeur de la recherche, Faculté des arts et sciences, for their combined material support. Thanks to Babette Babich (Fordham University) and Christine Daigle (Brock University) for help on questions of Nietzsche scholarship. Finally, sincere thanks to Claude Piché for help on questions of German Idealism.

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NIETZSCHE AND THE SHADOW OF GOD

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Introduction

I “Only a god can still save us,”1 Heidegger confided by way of last testament. Whence the curious testamentary tone of these words, if not from the sheer movement of thought that gathers in them and is recapitulated there? What is this movement? How to understand it without abandoning oneself to it, that is, without being straightaway caught up in it and by it? How to describe its appearance and adventure without being concerned, even shaken by it in advance? Indeed, how could we not be so, when it is a question here of our own protection and salvation? If to be saved is to be out of danger, then what is the danger to which we are exposed and from which only a god could now save us? This could hardly be one threat among others; it must be a danger that tests our very being. Now, we could not be the bearers of an imperiled essence unless that peril came from our essence itself. The question therefore is not only: How can the danger arise from our being? But again and especially, how does the danger belong to being itself, and to its truth, which governs us and for which our being is to be its sentry? The danger could nevertheless never belong to being unless being were itself the danger. However, if being only ever gives or destines itself under the stamp of an age, and our age is that of technology in which “being is in its essence the danger to itself,”2 then we must begin by determining by what right technology is—in its essence and for our essence—the danger. What then is the essence of technology and how do we reach it? The moment that the essence of technology at least governs all apparatuses and technical systems [tous les appareils et dispositifs techniques], it is possible to accede to this essence starting from one of these latter. What happens when, for example, we activate an electrical switch? By reestablishing the passage of current in a circuit, we switch a lamp on to give us light. The electricity that brings the filaments of the bulb to incandescence is energy that, to be consumed, must have been produced in advance. How and where was it produced? In a hydroelectric or nuclear 3

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power station that, situated on a riverbank, captures the water to feed the turbines or serve as cooling fluid. Thus produced, the electricity is then transported by a network of cables suspended from pylons to be distributed and consumed everywhere, at will and without delay, through the simple flick of a switch. The preceding remarks suffice to show that the slightest technical mechanism refers to the totality of what is. But how does it do this? It refers to the world as that which it requires; a world in which the river is one element in the power station, and the plains, the site for the pylons. Technology is thus a mode of appearing. What is its essential feature? “The hydro-electric plant is set (gestellt) into the current of the Rhine. It sets (stellt) the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current (herstellt) for which the longdistance power station and its network of cables are set up (bestellt) to dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition (Bestellung) of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears to be something at our command.”3 In challenging nature to deliver all its extractable energy to transform, accumulate, distribute, and consume it, modern technology discloses each thing as a creation of provisions [mise à disposition] and storage for possible exploitation, as part of a permanent standing reserve for exploitation governed by the economic principle according to which the greatest profit must be provided at the least cost.4 Technology proves to be like such a standing reserve. It is thus indeed a figure and an epoch of being, a mode of being’s truth, and of its disclosure that “has the character of a setting upon, in the sense of a challenging forth, a provocation.”5 Through this mode of disclosure, what is no longer unfolds its presence as an object (Gegenstand)—in light of the destiny of being there is no technical object and the epoch of technology is no longer that of objects—but as a standing reserve (Bestand), a word that signifies more than “stock,” “reserve,” or “balance,” because it here takes on the dignity of ontological right or title. Whatever its perspicuity, is this interpretation of technology and of its essence not somewhat arbitrary? In no way, because it ties up afresh with the Greek sense of τέχνη. In describing the latter as a mode of αληθεύειν [alˉe theuein] and not as an instrumental apparatus or a means toward an end, Aristotle already made techneˉ a modality of setting into the open, a mode of disclosure.6 “All τέχνη is concerned with coming into being (γένεσις),” he specified, “with contriving and considering how something may come into being which is capable of either being or not being, and whose origin (αρχη) is in the maker (ποιοûντι) and not in the thing made (ποιοumenw).”7 Technology is thus relative to produc-

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tion, to ποίησις. What should we understand by this term? Ποίησις is first neither an artisanal nor an artistic or poetic work but rather, as Plato already said, the movement that carries something out of non-presence into presence. “Production presents something out of its withdrawal into non-withdrawal (Das Her-vor-bringen bringt aus der Verborgenheit her in die Unverborgenheit vor). Producing comes to pass only to the degree to which what is withdrawn comes into non-withdrawal. This coming rests on, and draws its impetus from what we call disclosure (das Entbergen). The Greeks have the word αλήθεια [alˉetheia].”8 Φύσις, or nature, thus belongs as much to ποίησις, thus understood, as to τέχνη. What then is the difference between these two modes of production that are φύσις and τέχνη? It cannot reside anywhere else than in the manner of coming-into-presence itself. Whereas the flower appears and comes into presence by itself, a house could not do so without the collaboration of an architect. The latter sets and installs the house in non-withdrawal. Relative to the specificity of the technical mode of production, Heidegger continues: “Τέχνη is what concerns, fundamentally, all producing in the sense of a human placing [Herstellen, which also means to produce and fabricate]. If producing (τεκειν) is the setting (das Hin-stellen) in non-withdrawal [Unverborgene] (of the world) then τέχνη designates the being-known-there in non-withdrawal [Unverborgene] and the ways of obtaining, holding, and fulfilling the non-withdrawal [Unverborgene].”9 Τέχνη is thus indeed production that, as a mode of disclosure, is maintained in the domain of non-withdrawal, that is, in that of αλήθεια [alˉe theia]. This determination of τέχνη clarifies the essence of modern technology, insofar as the latter could not be a “challenging creation of provisions”10 if τέχνη— from which the creation comes, since it preserves its name—had not already been understood as a placing or a setting (Stellen)—“a word that, assuming that we are thinking in a Greek way, corresponds to the Greek, θέσις.”11 In commanding nature to set itself [se mettre] or to set its resources at our disposal (which comes to the same), modern technology not only allows everything that surrounds us to appear as standing reserve, but it further requires that we complete this unconcealment. How is that possible? What must be our being, in order to do this? If we derive our being from being itself, then we can only disclose what is, as standing reserve, on condition that we ourselves belong to the standing reserve that is disclosed. Do we not speak of human resources in terms of energy resources? Does genetic engineering not make life into an industrial product? So we cannot disclose what is as standing reserve unless we ourselves belong to the standing reserve disclosed—and this, “in a manner still more original than nature,”12 since we are the executors of this

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unconcealment. In other words, we could not disclose what is, in the technological mode, unless we were called to do so by αλήθεια [alˉetheia] from which, on the one hand, we derive our being, since it is the truth of being itself—and, on the other hand, since it is the domain whence all technology comes, or may come to pass, “whenever it calls man forth in the modes of revealing allotted to him.”13 Because man cannot contribute to the challenging creation of provisions without himself being assigned to them in advance, the essence of technology could not be but an epoch of being, a destiny of unconcealment. Are we, henceforth, ready to determine the essence of the danger from which alone a god could save us? Not entirely. On the one hand, the mode of unconcealment that governs the essence of technology and characterizes it as an epoch has yet been named and, on the other hand, the connection between the mode of unconcealment and the domain from which it comes still remains obscure. To name the challenge that inclines man to let what is appear as standing reserve set as his disposal, Heidegger ventures using the word Gestell.14 The choice is risky because it implies that this word might be used in an unusual sense. If Gestell, in its current reception, means: chassis, support, frame, carcass, it here denotes that starting from which, and in which, all that is or implies a position and a provisioning (which the verbs stellen, herstellen, bestellen, and the noun Bestand all signify) is assembled and can deploy its reign. “The word stellen [to set] in the name Ge-stell [enframing]15 does not only mean challenging. At the same time it should preserve the suggestion of another Stellen from which it stems, namely that producing and presenting [Herund Dar-stellen] which, in the sense of ποίησις, lets what presences come forth into unconcealment or non-withdrawal. However fundamentally different producing and presenting may appear—e.g., erecting a statue in the temple precinct, and the creation of provisions that challenges, such we are now considerating it—they remain nonetheless essentially related to each other. . Both are modes of revealing or disclosure, of αλήθεια [alˉe theia].”16 But what is the domain common to these two modes of unconcealment that are ποίησις and Ge-stell, production and apparatus,17 and above all how do they arise from this domain? Since αλήθεια [alˉetheia] is the sole domain of all possible modes of disclosure, man could not disclose what is without having previously been summoned to it in one way or another. For no disclosure could take place if we did not first belong to the site of disclosure, of non-withdrawal, which alone could, consequently, lead us toward it in such a way that we can disclose what it is. And if “the unconcealment [non-withdrawal] of that which is always takes a path of unconcealing,”18 how could we take it without ourselves being set

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thereon, that is, sent and destined to it? “We shall call the sending that gathers [versammelnde Schicken], that first starts man upon a way of revealing, destining (Geschick). It is from this destining that the essence of all history (Geschichte) is determined.”19 Each mode of unconcealment, production as much as apparatus, is thus a sending of the destiny through which man is governed, since this sending arises from the truth of being from which man derives his own being. Yet this destiny is neither “a fate that compels,”20 nor consciousness of self as of a foreign power. This is because, on the one hand, it does not concern self-consciousness and, on the other hand, by sending us on the path of disclosure it opens us and frees us for the truth of being, which is that of our own being. “To the occurrence of unconcealing, that is, of truth, freedom stands in the closest and most intimate kinship. All revealing belongs within a harboring and a concealing. That which frees—the secret—is concealed and always concealing itself. All revealing comes out of the free, goes into the free, and brings unto the free.”21 Having thus arrived at the essence of technology as a destiny of unconcealment, which, qua destining, opens us to the freedom of what frees, it is hereafter possible to determine the danger to which we are exposed. As destined to unconcealment, man is by the same token essentially endangered. Indeed, because it turns us toward what is unconcealed and away from the non-withdrawal to which we are indebted for our essence and our freedom, every mode of unconcealment is dangerous in itself. If man cannot reveal what-is, save at the risk of the truth of his being (which is that of being itself), then “the destiny of unconcealing is, as such and in each of its modes, necessarily, danger.”22 Receiving its vocation from the non-withdrawal, responding to a destiny of unconcealment, thinking is in essence dangerous and simply abdicates when it becomes soothing and pacific, inoffensive or moral. What becomes of this danger in the age of technology in which being is destined in the mode of Ge-stell, of the apparatus? As long as he is called to disclose what-is as object, man discloses himself as subject and still remains (in this status and in his being) different from what he discloses. The subjective determination of man thus neither obliterates nor wholly obnubilates the truth, nor “the highest dignity of his being . . . which lies in keeping watch over the unconcealment—and with it, from the first, the concealment—of all essential unfolding on this earth.”23 In other words, in the age of subjectivity—or objectivity, it is the same thing—the danger is not yet at its apogee, and it could not be unless we were ourselves completely absorbed in and by that which is unconcealed, in such a way that the lost glimmer of the truth of being might be completely absorbed at the same time. It is therefore only when being is

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destined on the mode of the apparatus that the time of the supreme danger comes about. “This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is un-concealed no longer concerns man even as object but exclusively as standing reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer or commissioner of the standing reserve, then man comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing reserve. Meanwhile, man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself and postures as lord of the earth. In this way the illusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.”24 The supreme danger thus appears under two points of view. According to the first one, man, called to disclosure in the mode of the apparatus, himself becomes a part of it and consequently, on principle, finds himself incapable of hearing the call as call, and of considering himself as the one to whom the call of being is addressed. Turned away from his own essence, that is, from the truth of being, he no longer encounters anything other than himself and—this is the second perspective—he assumes the form of master and lord of the earth. In what sense are these two perspectives distinct, or, better, why does the errant man (and “the essence of errancy resides in the essence of being as danger”)25 come to imagine himself as master and lord of the earth? We could not respond to this question without determining the source of this “form.” It is not Greek, but biblical. In the Lutheran translation of the Bible, the expression “der Herr der Erde” [the Lord of the Earth] denotes God himself such as he is revealed to Israel and in Christ. Not only does Luther always translate the name Yahweh by “der Herr,” the Lord, but the latter again receives the title of “Lord of the Earth” in a psalm where it is written: “mountains melt like wax before the Lord, before the master of all the earth.”26 It is with the same epithet that God is invoked in the Gospel of Matthew by Jesus who, concerning the Gospel, will say, “I bless you, father, Lord of the heavens and the earth for having hidden this from the wise and the prudent and for having revealed it to the small.” It is again used by Saint Paul, citing the psalmist, when he declares, “of all that is sold on the market, you shall eat without asking questions or burdening your conscience, for the earth is the Lord’s as is that which fills it.”27 What does this divine lordship over the earth and the heavens imply? Nothing other than faith in a creator God. God is the master and lord of the earth because he is its creator, because it is his creation, and because he can change its landscapes by making the mountains disappear. However, as creator of the earth, God is equally so with man. What

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then is the relation between man and God? According to the priestly narrative of creation that opens Genesis: “God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.” How to understand the character of the image here? The following verse provides the answer: “and God blessed them and said to them: be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it, and rule over the fishes in the sea and the birds in the sky, over cattle and all the animals that creep on the earth.”28 How does this verse permit us to clarify the determination of man as “image of God”? If the term “image” is not taken in a formal, but rather a functional sense, assimilating acts rather than states, then man can be qualified as the image of God because he masters the earth and the animals in the fashion of God who reigns over the whole of creation. Man is in the image of God as ruler and because he is God’s trustee. We must, moreover, underscore the violence of the expressions that describe this rule of man over the earth, since the Hebrew verbs translated by “master” and “rule” first signified “to trample down,” “to crush,” and designated the pressing of grapes. However, in recalling here and in this way the biblical origin of the expression “master of the earth,” are we not granting finally a second foundation to the essence of technology—which does not mean a secondary foundation? Without any doubt, and Heidegger does not fail to point this out. After having asserted that Nietzsche recognized the danger to which man is exposed in the instant of exerting dominion over the earth and of using powers that free the unfolding of the essence of technology, Heidegger explains in effect: “Nietzsche was the first man to raise the question: Is man, as he has been and still is, prepared to assume that dominion? If not, then what must happen to man as he is, so that he can make the earth ‘subject’ to himself and thus fulfill the words of an old testament?”29 In thus citing what he calls “an old testament”—the substitution of the indefinite article for the definite one is pregnant with meaning, since it implies, against the witness he himself is bearing, that the God of Israel would only be one god among others—does Heidegger not recognize, by the same token, that the unfolding of the essence of technology concurs with the biblical characterization of man as will? And how could he do so unless the essence of technology had a second origin, other than the Greek, a Judeo-Christian origin? But the mere citation of a verse from the Old Testament nevertheless does not allow us yet to assign a second foundation to the essence of technology. In order to do so, two conditions are required. It is first necessary that the meditation on the essence of technology would itself be able to recognize that other foundation. It is then and especially necessary that the mode of disclosure that is the essence of technology always

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bear the mark of that foundation, always and everywhere. Let us return a moment to our point of departure. As we said, electricity can be consumed everywhere, at will, with the simple flick of a switch. Everywhere at will—what does this mean if not that the will is everywhere assured of what it wants, only to have ultimately to do with itself and with none other than itself? Technology seems to make of man the master of the earth, because the will, finding itself everywhere anew, has become its own object. “This will, which, in every intention and every perception, in all that is willed and attained, wills only itself and, more precisely, itself doted with the continually increased possibility of this able-to-will-itself [ce pouvoir-se-vouloir]”—this will, as Heidegger once said, “is the foundation and the essential domain of modern technology. Technology is the organization and the organon of the will to will.”30 In this way fulfilling the biblical word, the will to will proper to technology so violently masters the earth that it tears it out of its circle of possibilities to forcibly carry it into a measureless devastation. “The birch tree never oversteps its possibility. The colony of bees dwells in its possibility. It is first the will that arranges itself everywhere in technology that devours the earth in the exhaustion and consumption and change of what is artificial. Technology drives the earth beyond the developed sphere of its possibility into such things which are no longer a possibility and are thus the impossible.”31 To trample the earth under foot amounts, thereby and finally, to exhausting its being, to tearing it out of being and its truth. Moreover, analyzing the concept of reflection within the framework of a clarification of logic as “thinking about thinking” and “reflection on reflection”—analyzing this concept through which logic, deprived of a connection to things themselves, is carried into the void—Heidegger emphasizes that thanks to the care of the self implied in the quest for one’s own salvation on the one hand, and thanks, on the other hand, “to the technicist thought of creation (τέχνη-haften) which from the point of view of metaphysics is also one of the most essential foundations of the modern technology,” Christianity has played a role so decisive in the constitution of subjectivity qua the dominion of self-reflection, that the same Christianity is in principle powerless to surmount the rule of technology. And, that there be no doubt about the connection between Christianity thus understood and the very essence of technology, Heidegger continues by asking in the summer semester of 1944: “Besides, whence comes then the historial bankruptcy of Christianity and of its church in the history of the modern world? Would it take a third world war to show this to it?”32 The biblical thought of creation—which implies man’s dominion of the earth and all that is found in it—is not an object of knowledge but rather a confession of faith in the creator and redeemer God. Con-

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sequently, we could not truly recognize the stamp by which this thought marked the essence of technology without first determining the essential character of the creator god, from which this stamp could hardly fail to come. Different from a Greek god who shows, indicates, and unfolds its essence solely in the realm of αλήθεια [alˉetheia], “the God of the Old Testament,” Heidegger reminds us, “is a ‘commanding’ God; His word is: ‘Thou shalt not,’ ‘Thou shalt.’ This ‘shalt’ is written down on the tables of the law.”33 Before examining the context in which Heidegger was brought to make this remark and to which the adverbial formation “indeed also” refers, it is appropriate to make a few brief comments concerning the signification of the Decalogue. Proclaimed to Israel, the commandments assume election and alliance. The proclamation assumes election as, opening with the words “I am the Lord, your God, who led you out of the land of Egypt, out of slavery,”34 it is addressed to those whom Yahweh has ransomed, and it merges with the alliance since the “tables of the law” are said to be the “tables of the alliance.”35 In other words, to comprehend the God of Israel on the basis of the Sinaitic revelation of the commandments is to comprehend him in the fullness of his salvific work and his justice. But the Ten Commandments reveal God and man as wills conjoined the one to the other. In fact, a commandment is only possible where a will can act upon another will, where a will lets itself act through another will. If God speaks and commands—the commandments are called “the ten words”36—man responds to God through obedience or disobedience. It follows that the Decalogue could not fail to define the very humanity of man facing God, as a creature called to salvation in and through this very creation, as will. And it does this in an essentially negative way, since the commandment on the Sabbath and the honor due to parents—the only ones presented in positive form—must be considered as the transformation of old negative forms.37 Given over to that of God, the human will is originally determined by interdictions, that is, by negations. For man is this will that must originally will not to will what God does not want. Now this in no way amounts to willing originally what God wants, for in that case, we would have to admit that the divine will and being were directly accessible to human will and being. In a word, the human will is related to what it wills through the binding intermediary of a primary negation, precisely by virtue of divine transcendence. The human will is inhabited by negation just as it is by God; or, rather, it is inhabited by God in the form of negations. Is it not then this will that, with the death of God and in the vacancy of his lordship, allows man to posture in the form of master of the earth? Is it not this will that, having become the will to will with the death of God, fulfills—ever and again, in its thrust and as if dazed by mourning—his word? Of man (and to

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praise the Lord) one psalm says: “That you have made him little less than divine, and adorned him with glory and majesty; you made him master over your handiwork, laying the world at his feet.”38 Yet if, as long as God is alive, man though he be scarcely less than a god, remains subject to the Lord as to a higher, superior power and will, things shall be otherwise with the death of God, which cannot fail to confer on man the possibility of unfolding absolutely a power that could not be absolutely his own. If the “master of the earth” is a terrifying figure, or even the very form of the terrifying, then this is because the human, all too human principle, according to which it unfolds its power, does not measure up to the divine power from which it derives and of which it is the inheritor ab intestat. Because it is not before Zeus but before Yahweh that the mountains melt like wax, does not the essence of technology also unfold like the unfurling of a will to domination, which, as such and as the determination of being, of man or of God, never had anything Greek to it? And does not the unfurling of this will have as its drive a negation henceforth deprived of the meaning that transcendence could have bestowed on it? Does technology not thus substitute itself for faith; as a displacer of mountains is it not its prolongation?39

II Let us provisionally suspend these questions to which in a host of ways we will be returning throughout and which form the horizon of this work. It is over the course of his clarification of the change that comes to the essence and to the counter-essence of truth—at the time of the translation of the words αλήθεια [alˉe theia] and ψευδος by veritas and falsum— that Heidegger recalls the essential trait of the Old Testament god. The privative α- that constitutes the first letter of the word αλήθεια [alˉetheia] in fact indicates that the essence of truth, as non-withdrawal, unfolds in an oppositional dimension relative to a counter-essence: το ψευδος. Falsum, the participle of fallere, is related to the verb σφάλλω: to take down in wrestling, to wreck, or bring to a fall, a verb for which no nominal form corresponds to αληθές—the way ψευδος would do. No doubt, σφάλλω can be “correctly” translated as “deceiving.” But how can the “to bring to a fall” (das Zu-Fall-bringen) take on the sense of “deceit” or “deceiving,” or better: what is the Greek sense of this “deception” and how is it possible? In the midst of the beings that appear to him, man wavers when something comes to block his path and this, in such a way that he no longer knows what to believe nor what he is up against. Moreover, that man

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could thus fall into this trap, something must first appear and be taken for something else, by which precisely he is able to be mistaken. The “deceiving” in question is possible only on the foundation and “within the field of the essence of dissembling and concealing (which constitute the essence of ψευδος).”40 In other words, if man can only come to be led astray within the realm denoted by the word ψευδος, the “bringing to a fall” in the sense of “to deceive” is but a consequence of the essence of the ψευδος, and nothing that relates to this “fall” could originally be opposed to αληθές. But then, why did the Romans translate ψευδος by falsum; why did they make fallere into the very essence of the ψευδος and name what is primary starting from what is secondary? “What realm of experience is normative here, if the bringing to a fall attains such a priority that on the basis of its essence, there is determined the counter-essence to what the Greeks experience as αληθές, the ‘unconcealing’ and the ‘unconcealed’?” To which Heidegger responds on the spot: “the realm of essence decisive for the development of the Latin falsum is the one of imperium and the ‘imperial.’ ”41 What should we understand by this? The imperium is the sovereign power, der Befehl, commandment. Imperare is to take, prescribe, or recommend measures such that something be done. Imperare thus signifies praecipere, to take possession and to dispose of what is possessed, as of a territory over which command is exerted. “Imperium is the territory (Gebiet) founded on commandments (Gebot), in which the others are obedient (Botmässig). Imperium is the command (Befehl) in the sense of commandment (Gebot). Command, thus understood, is the basis of the essence of domination (Herrschaft), not the consequence of it and certainly not just a way of exercising domination.”42 These considerations, which—need we emphasize—are philosophical before being philological, prepare and introduce the reference to the Old Testament god. For the latter is “indeed also,” as Heidegger says in the sentence immediately following the one we just cited, “a god that commands (ein befehlender Gott).” What justifies these considerations or, more precisely, what is the legitimacy of the adverb also, whose use implies the assimilation of the biblical command to the Latin imperium? We must first point out that the words Befehl and imperium never translated what Israel called the “ten words,” and that the Greek of the Septuagint, the only one held to be inspired and which Heidegger does not mention, translated these by “τους δέκα λόγους.” Luther uses the verb befehlen in its original German acceptation. According to that sense, befehlen does not signify “to command” but “to recommend to . . .” When a psalm says “recommend your fate to Yahweh,” Luther translates: “befiehl dem Herr deine Wege,”43 and to refer to the commandments he resorts to

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the word Gebot. In the Vulgate, Saint Jerome uses the term praeceptum formed on the verb praecipere. Now, as we have seen, Heidegger (who subjects praeceptum and Gebot to imperium and Befehl) understands the last two terms in an exclusively Latin sense.44 But furthermore, and this is the essential point, the commandments revealed to Moses—which are the words whose very hearing calls for response but in no sense orders to be carry out, and which are assigned to a promise of life or salvation but not to discipline—could not be understood on the basis of imperial domination. Is Heidegger’s translation, that is, his interpretation, unacceptable for all that? Nothing as yet permits us to assert this, as Heidegger is not speaking of the god of Israel as such, but of the Old Testament god. It is thus with regard to Christianity as the actualization and fulfillment of the revelation made to Israel that the question must be posed. It is a matter of knowing, then, whether and how Christianity can be thought within the sphere of the Latin imperium. Let us return to the way in which the Latin imperium determined the essence of the falsum. As the essence of domination, command implies a difference of rank, a hierarchy that could not be maintained without constant supervision. This superintendence watches over that which is under supervision in such a way that any uprisings of the dominated against the dominant could be put down. In this sense, “the bringing to a fall necessarily belongs to the realm of the imperial.” But this putting down can result from a frontal attack or from one coming from behind (Hinter-gehen). But to attack from behind is to take something cunningly and therefore to deceive (Hintergehen). In this case, “the fallen are not destroyed but rather, in a certain way, raised up again—within the limits fixed by the dominating ones.” Such is the sense of the pax romana, which was never but the enduring form of imperial domination. Heidegger can thereby conclude that “to compass someone’s downfall in the sense of subterfuge and roundabout action is not the mediate and derived, but the really genuine, imperial actio” and that “the properly ‘great’ feature of the imperial resides not in war but in the fallere of subterfuge as roundabout action and in the pressing-into-service for domination.”45 How does this allow us to understand translating ψευδος by falsum or rather, what happens when the first is thought according to the sense of the second? In light of imperium, which defines the realm in whose midst and starting from which the Roman world unfolds—and which in a certain way is to that world what αλήθεια [alˉetheia] is to the Greek one— ψευδος ceases to be understood as a mode of closure that dissimulates by allowing to appear, and allows to appear by dissimulating. In light of imperium, ψευδος, no longer arising from non-withdrawal, is henceforth

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interpreted as what causes to fall, as what brings down, as fallace. The falsum is always the fallacious. The translation of ψευδος by falsum is not only what we might call a metaphysical militarization of αλήθεια [alˉe theia], but again “the most dangerous and most enduring form of domination.”46 In fact, the translation of ψευδος by falsum does not only consist in a transference of the realm of αλήθεια [alˉe theia] toward that of imperium, it implies at the same time the covering over of the truth of being by imperium itself, and consequently the endangering of the truth of being by the latter. As such, this translation, which by transforming the essence of the truth of being makes being foreign to its own truth, is essentially dangerous. Moreover, if the essence of technology is indeed the supreme danger, then it too must draw its source here in the covering over of the truth of being. But how? It is impossible to respond without first asking these two questions. From where does imperium derive the durable character of its domination, which only a thinking that turns back toward and accedes to αλήθεια [alˉe theia] is ultimately apt to put into question? And what must this same αλήθεια [alˉe theia] have become; that is, how has it been translated such that falsum could be opposed to it? If imperial domination was able to be enduringly exerted, then this was because the imperium Romanum gave way to the ecclesiastical imperium, to the sacerdotium, to priestly domination. “The ‘imperial’ here emerges in the form of the curial of the curia of the Roman pope. His domination is likewise grounded in command. The character of command here resides in the essence of ecclesiastical dogma. Therefore this dogma takes into account equally the ‘true’ of the ‘orthodox believers,’ as well as the ‘false’ of the ‘heretics’ and the ‘unfaithful.’ The Spanish Inquisition is a form of the Roman curial imperium.”47 The Roman Catholic Church thus appears as the most enduring, that is, the most dangerous figure of imperium, since it is the domination of domination itself, and since the latter makes being foreign to its own truth. Conversely, questioning this Church and its dogma, which always presupposes the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, is indissociable from the thinking of being and its truth. According to the way it understands itself, the thinking of being and its truth is as hostile to Catholicism and Christianity (we can never emphasize this enough), insofar as Christianity merges with Catholicism, as the thinking of being is hostile to that which is Roman. Nevertheless, is it enough to lead the courtly to the imperial, to characterize the Roman Church qua church? Nothing is less certain, and this for a number of reasons. First, the court or curia, which brings together the organs of ecclesiastical government (congregations, tribunals, offices), is relative to the authority of the pope as vicar of Jesus Christ on earth. If the pope

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is the visible head of a body whose invisible head is Christ, the church must be theologically understood as the body of Christ. Consequently and if—as Luther indefatigably reminds us—what is essential is not the pope but the cross, then any attempt to lead the Roman Catholic Church back to imperium remains insufficient if it does not proceed from this fundamental theological determination. It is the Christian revelation as a whole that must be led back to imperium, in order that the church might be one form of it. Now, that is impossible since the divine commandment that Christ comes to fulfill absolutely does not unfold in the same realm of experience as that of imperium. Let us take a few steps back, to understand the implications of these remarks. As he discloses himself and takes himself as ground, man gloats in his figure of master and lord of the earth. This mode of unconcealment and this figure, the conjunction of which describes and characterizes our being in the age of technology, do not have the same origin. Once it is shown that the commandments of the god of Israel, on the one hand, and the Christian Church, on the other, cannot be essentially assimilated to the forms of Roman imperium—that imperium on whose basis the essence of ψευδος was transformed—once it is shown that divine lordship is not imperial domination or that Jerusalem is not Rome, and Rome is not a holy city, then it is at the same time established that the figure of the master and the lord of the earth could not be led back to this change in the essence of truth brought about by its Romanization. This is because the Romanization through imperium of what is Judeo-Christian, like the thought of creation, does not reach this divine lordship that man cannot but assume with the death of God. The figure of master of the earth, consequently, could not be grounded in the Romanization of αλήθεια [alˉe theia], that is, ultimately in αλήθεια as the original realm of all modes of disclosure. In other words, if the unfurling of the will, which marks the essence of technology, is not essentially and exclusively of an imperial nature, a Roman nature, then it becomes impossible to attribute to αλήθεια [alˉe theia] alone, and to its Romanization, the unfolding of the essence of technology. Before examining the problems that this raises (but to bring out their breadth), let us return to the truth, that is to say, now, to the translation of αλήθεια [alˉetheia] by verum. The Latin verum derives from an Indo-European root, ver, present in the German words wehren, to resist; die Wehr, the defense; das Wehr, the dam. Resistance to . . . is nevertheless not the only meaning of the root ver. In old High German, wer also signifies: to resist for . . . , that is, to defend oneself, to assert oneself, to hold position and to hold one’s position, to remain upright and to be in one’s right; in short, to command and not to fall. “Thus it is from the essential domain of the imperial

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that verum, as antonym of falsum, received its rightful, well established signification.”48 But this acceptation covers another, more original one, which again das Wehr manifests, the dam. Effectively, the Italic word veru or verofe, which designates a door, “rests on an ancient neutral *werom, ‘closure,’ derived from the root *wer- (Skr. vr ̣ nóti, ‘it closes, it encloses,’ German Wehr).”49 Consequently, the most original, significant moment attached to the root ver is that of the enclosure. “The original element in ver and verum is that of closing off, covering, concealing, and sheltering, but it is not die Wehr [‘defense’] as resistance. The corresponding Greek word of this Indo-Germanic stem is έρυμα—the defensive weapon, the covering, the enclosure.”50 This word—related to the Latin verum— thus has in Greek a meaning opposed to that of αλήθεια [alˉetheia], which verum precisely translates. Nevertheless, this opposition would be impossible if the opposed terms did not unfold in the midst of one and the same dimension. In other words, the Latin verum comes out of the same semantic field as the Greek αληθές. However, verum there signifies the contrary and corresponds to the Greek λαθόν. From the moment that verum is opposed to falsum within the domain of imperium, the root ver cannot fail to signify covering, in the double sense of what protects (the covering force) and of what guarantees (the covering of a risk). The verum is thus what assures imperium against a fall and holds it upright. “Verum is rectum (regere, the ‘régime’), the right, iustum.”51 And if verum may be assimilated to iustum, it is because ius, right, is inscribed in the sphere of command, since the word ius signifies conformity to a rule, and the condition necessary to the fulfillment of an office.52 “Under the influence of the imperial,” Heidegger says by way of recapitulation, “verum becomes forthwith ‘being-above,’ directive for what is right; veritas is then rectitudo, ‘correctness’ [Richtigkeit], we would say. This originally Roman stamp given to the essence of truth, which solidly establishes the all-pervading basic character of the essence of truth in the Occident, rejoins an unfolding of the essence of truth that began already with the Greeks and that at the same time marks the inception of Western metaphysics.”53 Heidegger is alluding here to the transformation of αλήθεια [alˉe theia] into ομοίωσις. Initially, αληθές designates that which is not withdrawn. But man could not disclose the non-withdrawn without conforming to it. The unconcealment to which man is called—and this call constitutes his being—must therefore conform to that which calls to unconcealment; it must correspond to truth itself. And how could this conformity (or ομοίωσις), which presupposes non-withdrawal and takes what is not withdrawn for what it is, and is simply the mode in which unconcealment is fulfilled—how could this conformity not require the

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λόγος? How could this conformity to what calls to unconcealment (and which draws its very possibility from αλήθεια [alˉe theia]) not have, as its obligatory site, that by which man responds to the call addressed to him, that by which man discloses: the utterance, the λόγος?54 The conformity of the word to what it lets appear thus becomes “the definitive ‘representation’ of αλήθεια [alˉetheia]”55 and what is essentially secondary passes by the same token into the foreground. Now, and it is here that αλήθεια [alˉe theia] comes to encounter veritas, “the Greek ομοίωσις as disclosive correspondence and the Latin rectitudo as adjustment to . . . both have the character of an assimilation of assertions and thinking to the state of affairs present at hand and firmly established. Assimilation is called adaequatio. In the early Middle Ages, following the path set by the Romans, αλήθεια [alˉe theia], presented as ομοίωσις, became adaequatio. Veritas est adaequatio intellectus ad rem. The entire thinking of the Occident from Plato to Nietzsche thinks in terms of this delimitation of the essence of truth as correctness [Richtigkeit].”56 This determination of the essence of truth as correctness is, according to Heidegger, at the foundation of modern technology, whose domination we are attempting to clarify as the unfurling of the will to will. What then is the connection between the Roman determination of truth and technology? As we said, if unconcealment must conform to what it discloses, this is because it must take what is not in withdrawal for and as what it is. Latin calls taking something for something, reor. From this is derived ratio which translates λόγος. Consequently, “the essence of truth as veritas and rectitudo passes over into the ratio of man. The Greek αληθεύειν, to disclose the unconcealed, which in Aristotle still permeates the essence of τέχνη, is transformed into the calculating self-adjustment of ratio. This determines for the future, as a consequence of a new transformation of the essence of truth, the technological character of modern, i.e., machine, technology. And that has its origin in the originating realm out of which the imperial emerges. The imperial springs forth from the essence of truth as correctness in the sense of the directive selfadjusting guarantee of the security of domination.”57 It is thus indeed from imperium and ultimately from αλήθεια [alˉetheia] that the form of domination proper to modern technology proceeds, according to Heidegger. However, in that case, if the biblical command cannot be brought back to imperium, and if revelation is inaccessible from the Roman path [romanité], it then becomes impossible to understand how and why, in the moment of supreme danger, man gloats in the figure of the master of the earth, fulfilling the word of an old testament. Now, we could not be saved from this danger without beginning by recognizing all its origins. And we could not recognize them without starting from

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what we are in the very moment of man’s supremacy: the trustee of standing reserve and the lord of earth. In other words, the clarification of the essence of technology, that danger from which only a god could save us now, must be at least as inseparable from a confrontation with revelation as it is from a meditation on the truth of being and its destiny.

III The confrontation with revelation is all the more necessary in that, according to Heidegger, the modern determination of truth bears its mark, since “the ecclesiastical dogmatics of the Christian faith has contributed essentially to the consolidation of the essence of truth in the sense of rectitudo.”58 In effect, it is starting from the domain of the Christian faith that the new transformation of the essence of truth was fulfilled—a transformation that will determine the very character of modern technology: the transformation of verum into certum. In what way did this take place and what are its major moments? When Descartes takes the clear and distinct perception of self as characterizing the certainty of the cogito, and establishes “as a general rule that whatever I perceive very clearly and distinctly is true,”59 he thereby raises clear and distinct perception to the rank of a criterion of truth qua certainty. Whence, however, does clear and distinct perception derive its authority as criterion? If the general rule, which all knowledge must obey, is given to me with and through the ego cogito, then only the analysis of the second term is liable to lead to what grounds the first. As finite and imperfect, I am a being that does not have in itself the foundation of its being. Is there, then, in me an idea that could reveal this foundation to me? The idea of God, which God himself placed in me, is “the truest and most clear and distinct.”60 This is because the idea of God—“like the mark of the craftsman stamped on his work,” since he has created me “in his image and likeness”61—has an objective reality that necessarily implies formal or actual reality. Otherwise put, the idea of an infinite God, containing all that is true in things, is the ultimate ground of the general rule according to which clear and distinct perception guarantees truth. Yet if my being stems from a truthful God, whence then come error and what is false? As long as these have not been explained, and attested as exclusively human, the criterion of knowledge and of truth will remain insufficiently grounded. How does Descartes interpret error? “When I look more closely at myself and inquire into the nature of my errors (for these are the only evidence of some imperfection in me), I notice that they depend on two

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concurrent causes, namely on the faculty of knowledge which is in me, and on the faculty of choice or liberum arbitrium; that is, they depend on both the intellect and the will simultaneously.”62 In what way does error have understanding and will for its cause, if the one and the other are perfect in their genres? On the one hand, in fact, considered in itself as pure power to conceive, the understanding could not err and its limits are not a privation, for nothing proves that God should have given me a different faculty of knowing. On the other hand, and by contrast with the faculty of knowing, imagination, or memory, “it is only the will [or liberum arbitrium] which I experience within me to be so great that the idea of any greater faculty is beyond my grasp; so much so that it is above all in virtue of the will that I understand myself to bear in some way the image and likeness of God.”63 No doubt the divine will surpasses our own in the knowledge and power to be found there, or again by virtue of the objects to which it extends; yet, “considered as will in the essential and strict sense,” the human will is the equal of God’s, “because [it] simply consists in our ability to do or not do something (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or avoid); or rather, it consists simply in the fact that when the intellect puts something forward for affirmation or denial or for pursuit or avoidance, our inclinations are such that we do not feel we are determined by any external force.”64 In short, and considered purely in itself, the will is none other than freedom. This is not, however, the freedom of indifference, characteristic of God’s omnipotence, since “indifference does not belong to the essence of human freedom.”65 What then is the essence of human freedom? The human will is free when it is determined by the knowledge of what is good and true. “For in order to be free, there is no need for me to be inclined both ways; on the contrary, the more I incline in one direction— either because I clearly understand that reasons of truth and goodness point that way, or because of a divinely produced disposition of my inmost thoughts—the freer is my choice. Neither divine grace nor natural knowledge ever diminishes freedom; on the contrary, they increase and strengthen it. But the indifference I feel when there is no reason pushing me in one direction rather than another is the lowest grade of freedom; it is evidence not of any perfection of freedom, but rather a defect in knowledge or a kind of negation. For if I always saw clearly what was true and good, I should never have to deliberate about the right judgment or choice; in that case, although I should be wholly free, it would be impossible for me ever to be in a state of indifference.”66 Revisiting in his way Saint Augustine’s concept of freedom as propensity and determination to the good, Descartes—who, in the fourth Meditation, always associates error and sin67—makes clear and distinct knowledge of the good and the

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true (inasmuch as this knowledge determines the will) the very condition of the correct use of human freedom. He does this independently of the natural or grace-related origin of this clarity. Indeed, divine grace acts on the will the way clear and distinct knowledge can do, since “the clarity or evidence which can induce our will to give its assent is of two kinds: the first comes from the natural light, while the second comes from divine grace.”68 And if there really is a difference between the content of a revealed truth and that of a natural one, then this difference only concerns their respective substance and not the formal reason why we give them credence. “[For,] on the contrary, this formal reason consists in a certain inner light which comes from God, and when we are supernaturally illumined by it we are confident that what is put forward for us to believe has been revealed by God himself. And it is quite impossible for him to lie; this is more certain than any natural light, and is often even more evident because of the light of grace.”69 However, as we know God through the idea he has placed in us, it is ultimately clear and distinct perception that characterizes all certainty in general, because the latter is for us, in some way, the pure form of all light, whether natural or supernatural. If divine grace and natural knowledge confirm my freedom, this is indeed by virtue of the certainty that accompanies the one and the other. Consequently, Heidegger can venture that “Descartes transfers what was characterized theologically, as the effect of God’s grace, to the effect of the action of the intellect on the will.” And he can add that “the clara et distincta percepta takes on the role of grace,” since it presents to judgment “its characteristic bonum.”70 What is the meaning of this functional identity of grace with clear and distinct perception, which—we might add— assumes the convertibility of transcendentals? It means first that, if every will tends toward a good, then it is the intellect that gives, in advance, to the will the perceptum to be pursued or eschewed. As a result, error receives an explanation: “So what then is the source of my mistakes? It must be simply this: the scope of the will is wider than that of the intellect; but instead of restricting it within the same limits, I extend its use to matters which I do not understand. Since the will is indifferent in such cases, it easily turns aside from what is true and good, and this is the source of my error and sin.”71 Therefore I only ever deceive myself by using my freedom beyond that which I conceive clearly and distinctly, and “in this incorrect use of free will may be found the privation which constitutes the essence of error.”72 If error is a usus libertatis non rectus, then this is because truth itself has already been understood previously as rectitude, correctness.73 The functional identity of grace and clear and distinct perception has, furthermore and above all, the sense of a “detheologization” or a

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“secularization.”74 What should that mean? By detheologization, Heidegger is pointing to the movement according to which propositions originating in the realm of the experience of Christian faith are translated or transferred into that of philosophical knowledge. This detheologization does not proceed without raising serious difficulties, whose full sense we must try to evaluate. Heidegger never ceased interpreting the Cartesian turn that inaugurates and commands all of modern philosophy as a detheologization, emphasizing for example that the Cartesian demand for an absolute, unshakeable foundation “springs from the liberation of humanity from the bonds of the truth of Christian revelation and the doctrines of the Church, a liberation which frees itself for a self-legislation that is grounded in itself.”75 The Cartesian determination of the essence of freedom, from which error originates, thus implies the passage from the certainty of faith to that of knowledge that knows itself—and this in such a way that the certainty of faith is no more than the other contrary source, from and on which this knowledge breaks free. Yet what is true for Descartes and for all of modern philosophy is likewise true for the existential analytic. In fact, if the Christian definition of man, as ens finitum, was indeed “detheologized over the course of the modern age,” it nevertheless remains that “the idea of ‘transcendence’—that man is somethimg that reaches beyond himself—is rooted in Christian dogmatics, which can hardly be said to have made an ontological problem of man’s Being.”76 Because transcendence belongs to the being of Dasein, should we not understand fundamental ontology, and the initial posing of the question of being, as the fulfillment of that detheologization, tantamount to modern philosophy? What does this detheologization mean and, above all, under what conditions is it possible? If detheologization denotes the passage from the realm of experience of faith to that of philosophy—a passage that assumes or institutes a certain continuity—it cannot fail ultimately to hold philosophy in thrall to theology. Why and how so? When a concept originates in Christian dogmatics, it preserves in itself the stamp of its site of origin; that is, ultimately, the stamp of God himself—if only as Creator of that finite understanding to which certainty can be introduced. Now, this stamp of origin could not be erased like some arbitrary stamp, because its origin looms over all the others. In carrying a concept from Christian dogmatics into philosophy, by exporting it outside its birthplace, one may perhaps erase some of its theological traits. But this is also to proceed to a surreptitious and radical theologization of philosophy as such, since one is thereby introducing into reason itself a trace of God, which is to say, God himself. From Descartes to Hegel—for whom philosophy ultimately comes to coincide, in the form of absolute knowledge, with re-

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vealed religion—the path is secure. The Cartesian detheologization has for its ultimate consequence the assimilation of speculative philosophy to a speculative theology. In short, it is God himself who may, alone and through his death, make us forget him. And only the death of God can give rise to a radical—but above all definitive—detheologization of meaning and word [du sens et de la parole]. As long as the death of the God revealed in Christ has not become the object of a frontal confrontation, as long as the whole of revelation is more skirted than faced, the movement of detheologization, which moves from God toward being and proceeds from theology toward a general or fundamental ontology, remains insufficient. For, blind to the Christian nature of its point of departure, fundamental ontology invariably risks turning against its own intentions. Like every movement, detheologization never ceases transporting its origin. In other words, the renewal or return of onto-theo-logy to a mode of disclosure of being is not enough to make us forget that the god of Aristotle was subject to the God of revelation. It is therefore not only the essence of technology, but also the metaphysical realm of its unfolding, that requires that the biblical tradition be put into question anew. How to undertake such a task? The history of truth ought, by itself, to be able to point the way. If the transformation of verum into certum, which the essence of modern technology requires, was effectuated starting from the realm of Christian faith and corroborated the determination of the essence of truth as correctness, then this domain must have been previously concerned. No doubt, Descartes transferred to the cogito what Saint Thomas, who placed the certainty of faith above that of knowledge, attributed to divine science alone.77 However, the certainty of faith or of knowledge is not yet that of the believing and knowing ego as such. Whence comes that certainty, and how can Christian faith assure the ego about itself? By assuring it of its being-in-Christ, that is, of its salvation. After having asserted that the transformation of verum into certum originates with Christian dogmatics, Heidegger immediately adds the following remark: “Luther raises the question of whether and how man can be certain and assured of eternal salvation, that is, certain of ‘the truth’; Luther asks how man could be a ‘true’ Christian, i.e., a just man, a man fit for what is just, a justified man. The question of the Christian veritas becomes, in the sense just articulated, the question of iustitia and iustificatio.” What should we understand here by justice and justification? Must we understand them according to Scholastic theology, as Heidegger does when, citing Saint Thomas, by “justice” he understands “correctness of reason and will”?78 Or should we return more directly to Saint Paul, whose doctrine of justification constitutes, according to Luther, the core of all Scripture, that is, ultimately, of all theology, since the latter consists

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in interpreting Scripture? In other words, does Heidegger have the right to determine justice, such as Luther understands it, on the basis of the Scholastic theology and philosophy that Luther unceasingly criticized for their incomprehension of justification? Clearly not, for this would amount to confusing what Luther strove indefatigably to distinguish: the philosophical sense of justice as formal or active, and its properly scriptural and theological sense as passive justice. Recall the magnificent page on which, shortly before his death, Luther summed up all of Evangelical theology in a narrative and biographical mode: I had been seized by an astonishing ardor to know Paul in the Epistle of the Romans; yet what hindered me at the time was not so much the chill of the blood in my entrails as a single word, found in chapter I: “the justice of God is revealed in it [the Gospel].” Indeed, I hated that term “justice of God” that I was accustomed to understand philosophically, following all the Schoolmen, as the formal or active justice through which God is just and punishes sinners and the unjust. Yet I, who lived as an irreproachable monk, felt myself a sinner before God, with the most uneasy conscience, and could not find appeasement through my satisfaction; I did not love and even hated this just God who punished the sinners, and I revolted against this God, secretly fostering if not blasphemy, at least a violent murmur, saying: as though it were not enough that wretched sinners, lost through original sin, be burdened by all sorts of ills through the law of the Decalogue, why should God add pain to their pain and send his justice and his wrath against us, even through the Gospel? I was thus beside myself, my conscience infuriated, overwhelmed, and yet, intractable, I called upon Paul, ardently desirous to know what he meant to say in this. This, up until the moment when, God taking pity as I meditated day and night, I would finish by attending to the order of the words: “the justice of God is revealed in him, as it is written: the just man lives from faith.” I then began to understand that the justice of God is that through which the just man lives through the gift of God, which means from faith, and that it is through the Gospel that the justice of God is revealed, which means the passive justice by which the God of mercy justifies us by faith, as it is written: “the just man lives by faith.” Whereupon I felt myself being utterly reborn and entering into paradise itself, all its doors being opened. There and then, all of Scripture appeared to me under another countenance. I then read through the Scriptures such as I had them in my memory and observed the analogy with other terms: the work of God is what God effects in us; the force of God is that by which he makes us capable; the wisdom of God, that by which he makes us wise; the

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fortitude of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God. As great as was the hatred through which I had previously hated those words, “justice of God,” the more did I now exalt this sweet word in love. In this way, the passage of Paul was truly for me the door to paradise. I then read the De spiritu et littera of Augustine wherein, against all hope, I saw that he interpreted the justice of God in the same way: that with which God cloaks us in justifying us.79

If the question of the Christian truth is indeed that of justice and justification, then, qua Christian, it is not originally one of rectitude. By interpreting, in the wake of Saint Anselm80 and Saint Thomas, the justice of God as rectitude of reason and will, Heidegger surreptitiously abandons the Lutheran doctrine of justification through the faith alone, in favor of the Thomist and Catholic doctrine of justification by a faith informed by charity or love.81 In fact, understood as correctness of reason and of will, justice, though it would not go without faith, cannot fail to come out of rational and voluntary acts, that is, out of works—though they were works of charity itself. Now, “against the philosophers,” which is above all to say against Aristotle, does Luther not assert that “we are not made just by working justly, but rather made just, we work justly?”82 Against the Lutheran doctrine of justification, and consequently, against all of Evangelical theology, Heidegger thus subjects the justice of God revealed in Christ to that history of truth out of which Aristotle arises along with all of philosophy and, by the same token, subordinates the divine word to that of being. He does this more radically than had Scholastic theology, whose constant adversary was Luther. Now, to reiterate: the confrontation with revelation could not take place principally on the sole ground of the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics and that of αλήθεια [alˉe theia]. For, it is im-possible to accede to revelation on the basis of these, from the moment that divine commandment proves irreducible to imperium, and the justice of God revealed in Christ, irreducible to a justice that rewards merit. Nevertheless, this does not yet allow us to answer the question of how and from whence to engage the debate with revelation.

IV By bringing Luther into the history of truth, of αλήθεια [alˉe theia]— which is not at all self-evident—Heidegger intended to elucidate its modern determination as certainty, correctness [justesse], and justice; a

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determination presupposed by the essence of technology. After Descartes who, as we have seen, understands truth as certainty and correctness of judgment; after Kant who, in the Critique of Pure Reason, strives to justify the use of the pure concepts of the understanding, Nietzsche closed the metaphysical history of truth by interpreting it as justice. “If we experience and come to know these historial connections as our history, that is, as modern European ‘world’-history”—Heidegger writes to grasp and recapitulate the destiny of the essential transformations of αλήθεια [alˉe theia] since Plato—“will it then surprise us that in Nietzsche’s thought, where the metaphysics of the Occident reaches its peak, the essence of truth is founded on certitude and ‘justice’? Even for Nietzsche the true is the right (das Richtige), that which is directed (richtet) by what is real in order to adjust itself to it and make itself secure in it. The basic feature of reality is will to power. What is right must conform itself to the real, hence must express what the real says, namely the ‘will to power.’ All correctness must be adjusted in terms of the will to power. Correspondence to what the will to power utters is the just, that is, justice (das Rechte d. h. die Gerechtigkeit). It receives its essence, at the end of Western metaphysics, from the decree of the will to power. Nietzsche very often uses the word ‘life’ as a title for the ‘will to power,’ and he uses it in accord with the usual ‘biological’ way of thinking of the second half of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche can therefore say: ‘Justice is the highest representative of life itself.’ This is a Christian thought, though in the mode of the antichrist. Everything ‘anti’ thinks in the spirit of that against which it is ‘anti.’ Justice, in Nietzsche’s sense, presents the will to power.”83 In light of a meditation directed toward αλήθεια [alˉe theia], Nietzsche’s thought thus marks the apogee of Western metaphysics, since, as the ultimate consequence of the translation of αλήθεια by veritas, that thought consecrates the triumph of the Roman way [romanité]. What can this mean other than that αλήθεια is henceforth completely covered over by veritas as source, that is, by what derives from it? Nevertheless, if “the field of the essence of αλήθεια is covered over,” it will not be enough for us to sweep around the ruins to be able to come back to it. On the contrary, the essential field of αλήθεια is obstructed by the “enormous bastion of the essence of truth determined in a manifold sense as ‘Roman.’ ”84 Of this gigantic bastion that constitutes metaphysics, Nietzsche’s thought is the last stone, the last word that could not be fully “last” without also being first, in a certain sense. But how does Nietzsche fulfill this end of metaphysics? How does he lead the end back to the beginning? In an essay contemporary with his course on Parmenides, and which concerns the ontologico-historial determination of nihilism, before establishing the fundamental metaphysical position of Nietzsche, Heidegger reminds

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us that if metaphysics indeed recognizes that beings are not without being, this is only to immediately displace being onto beings, or onto a being, taken in an eminent sense. In other words, in withdrawing before the foundation of all beings by way of a supreme being that Plato and Aristotle called θείον, being gives rise to metaphysics as onto-theo-logy. To ask the question of what beings are as such, beings in their essence, is also immediately to ask the question of knowing what the being most appropriate to that essence is, and thereby, to seek its existence. Otherwise put, if metaphysics, in the guise of ontology questioning beings as such, inquires into their essentia (τί εστιν); in its guise as theology and focusing on the supreme being, metaphysics enquires into its existentia (ότι έστιν). What then, according to Heidegger, is Nietzsche’s fundamental metaphysical position or, more precisely, how does Nietzsche understand the being of beings in light of the dual relation of its essence and of its existence? “As an ontology, even Nietzsche’s metaphysics is at the same time theology, although it seems far removed from the School metaphysics. The ontology of beings as such thinks essentia as will to power. Such ontology thinks the existentia of beings as such and as a whole theologically as the eternal recurrence of the same. Such metaphysical theology is of course a negative theology of a peculiar kind. Its negativity is revealed in the expression ‘God is dead.’ That is an expression not of atheism but of ontotheo-logy, in that metaphysics in which nihilism proper is fulfilled.”85 In understanding the being of beings as will to power and eternal return, Nietzsche specifies being according to the double relation of its essentia and its existentia. In so doing, he brings together and combines the initial metaphysical positions of Parmenides and of Heraclitus. In fact, if, in response to the question: What is a being? Parmenides says: a being is; and Heraclitus answers: a being becomes, then to think will to power as eternal recurrence means to secure for becoming the constancy of being. Does Nietzsche not sum up his own thinking with these two propositions: “To imprint on becoming the character of being—this is the supreme will to power,” and again: “That everything returns is the most extreme rapprochement of a world of becoming with that of being”?86 Such is the way in which Nietzsche closes, according to Heidegger, the circle described by the history of truth. By leading the end of metaphysics back to its Greek beginning, a beginning whose originality he never questioned, Nietzsche did not replace the guiding question of metaphysics, What is a being? with the fundamental and prior question concerning the essence, or the truth, of being. In other words, Nietzsche’s thought is an onto-theo-logy because it over and again starts out from the withdrawal of being that gives rise to the distinction between the ontological and the theological.

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However, would Nietzsche’s thought (which Heidegger takes to be the apogee of metaphysics originating in Greece) not also be the place for a confrontation with Christianity [explication avec le christianisme]? If this were the case, then the question of knowing where and how the debate with revelation should be engaged, would find ipso facto its response. Can we take the doctrine of the eternal return of the same, then, as a properly philosophical theology, deriving its negativity from the death of a god that Nietzsche, for his part, always qualified as Christian? That said, for Nietzsche, the death of God never had an originally negative sense. From the summer of 1881, when Nietzsche warns, in light of the thought of recurrence, that “if we do not make of the death of God a grandiose renunciation and a perpetual victory over ourselves, we shall have to endure its loss,”87 he is emphasizing its affirmative sense since it denotes victory. It is always for man, never for the overman, that the death of God has and can have a negative sense. Consequently, if the doctrine of eternal recurrence is not the ultimate philosophical theology—or ontotheo-logy par excellence—then not only is Nietzsche perhaps not “the last metaphysician of the West,”88 as Heidegger argues indefatigably, but more importantly, this doctrine risks modifying the entire task of thinking risks. It is toward running this risk that the present work is, in a certain sense, dedicated. What then is the connection between, on the one hand, the clarification of revelation, whose necessity we progressively drew out of the essence of technology, and the metaphysical destiny of truth—and, on the other hand, the questioning of the onto-theo-logical character of the thought of eternal recurrence, which has to serve as counterweight to the death of the Christian God? Only the determination of the connection between the essence of technology and the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics (of which Nietzsche’s thought marks, or should mark, the completion) can allow us to answer definitively the question of how the debate with the word of God must be engaged. Why? The first reason has to do the historial position of Nietzsche who, according Heidegger, fulfills the Romanization of αλήθεια [alˉe theia]. Through this Romanization, however, αλήθεια was not only “immured” in the gigantic bastion of metaphysics, it was “reinterpreted in advance to serve as one of the building stones, hewn expressly for it.”89 Thus, as the ultimate Roman metaphysics, Nietzsche’s thought is the farthest removed—of all metaphysical thought—from the truth of being. From the moment the essence of technology, whose unfolding requires the transformation of verum into certum, is the mode of disclosure of the being that is farthest removed, strangest and most hostile to its truth, Nietzsche’s thought (and singularly that of eternal recurrence understood as onto-theo-logy)

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can only be related—and this is the second reason—to the supreme danger, albeit in its way and for the truth of being. Two brief remarks by Heidegger, which confirm this, are also clarified thereby. The first is a manuscript note in the margins of a lecture of 1949, entitled The Danger. There, Heidegger wonders, “assuming that God were, not being itself to be sure, but the supreme being, who would venture to say today that this god thus represented is the danger for being?”90 This strange question signifies first that the understanding of God as the supreme being has the same origin as the origin of technology, because it assumes the withdrawal of being and its truth. But thereupon, by not placing any article before the word “God,” is Heidegger not suggesting that the Christian God who invested metaphysics also has (by reason of his very nature) an intimate complicity with the essence of technology? And does this suggestion not distantly echo a note by Nietzsche, according to which “the Christian god, the god of love and cruelty, is a person conceived quite cleverly and without moral prejudices: really, a god for Europeans who want to subjugate the earth?”91 If this were not the case, then the “Note on the eternal recurrence of the same” that follows the lecture of 1953 devoted the figure of Zarathustra, would have no meaning. Indeed, after having cautioned against any “mystical” misinterpretation of the doctrine of recurrence, about which, in “presupposing of course that thinking is called upon to bring to light the essence of modern technology,” the present age could certainly set us straight, Heidegger goes on to argue that “the essence of the modern power-driven machine” is “one version of the eternal return of the same.”92 This second remark does not exhaust the doctrine of return, as it concerns but one form of it. It signifies fundamentally the same thing as the first remark. That is, that the thought of eternal recurrence— whether as the ultimate onto-theo-logy, or because it arises from the essence of technology out of which comes the essence of the machine— is the thought in which the entire history of the withdrawal of truth is concentrated and recapitulated. “The name ‘technology’ is understood here in such an essential way that its meaning coincides with the term ‘completed metaphysics,’ ”93 as Heidegger once said. Let us emphasize this once and for all: the confrontation with revelation—whose necessity we established on the sole basis of the description of the technological essence of man as master of the earth (thus, on the basis of philosophy alone)—can then take its point of departure from Nietzsche’s thought, whereby metaphysics is completed as the destiny of being. But that this confrontation might start out from Nietzsche’s thought does not yet mean that it must do so. In order to do so, it would have to be the case that Nietzsche’s thought were as much, if not more, the site of a

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clash with revelation, than it was the fulfillment of Romanization, i.e., the withdrawal of αλήθεια [alˉetheia]. Is Holy Scripture present in Nietzsche as something with which he contends? Let us return to justice. By making justice the supreme representation of life, Heidegger asserts that Nietzsche continues to think in a Christian fashion, all the while thinking in an anti-Christian one. But what is Christian in Nietzsche’s determination of justice? Heidegger observes, in regard to the transformation of truth into certainty, that this truth-certainty, “as self-assurance (to-will-oneself) is iustitia, understood as the justification of the relation between a being and its primary cause, and thus as the justification of its belonging to the being [God as primary cause].” Immediately thereafter Heidegger adds: “iustificatio, in the Reformation’s sense and Nietzsche’s concept of justice as truth, are one and the same.”94 Relative to the history of being, this claim would have precious little scope if the Christian truth (that is, ultimately, revelation in its entirety) belonged to the history of truth and to the destiny of αλήθεια the way the grounded belongs to its ground. Yet that is not the case, and it is necessary to complete the demonstration, here, at the apogee of metaphysics. First, to say that iustificatio, in the sense of the Reformation, that is, in the Pauline sense, and Nietzsche’s justice are but one and the same thing, is to make Nietzsche no longer a philosopher but a Christian theologian, since iustificatio constitutes “the head and the sum of Christian doctrine [doctrinae christianae caput et summam]”95 in Luther’s own words. This objection would be without impact on the destiny of being if it were possible to take Christian theology qua Christian—and it is from Christ himself that this theology receives its character as theology, since he is the incarnate λόγος—as a structural moment of all metaphysics. But it is not such a moment—moreover, and if it is true that “justification (iustificatio) is the achievement of iustitia,”96 the latter for Luther has nothing to do, either with willing-oneself or with the ultimate authentication of subjectivity as the being of beings. Heidegger emphasizes that, at the beginning of modernity, “the question is revived concerning how—out of the sum of beings, that is, facing that foundation which is more entity than any entity (God)—how man can become, and be sure of his own consistency (Beständigkeit), which is to say, of his own salvation.” Yet when Heidegger continues, asserting that “this question about the certainty of salvation is that of justification, which is to say, of justice (iustitia),”97 is he not reducing, among other things, man before God (coram Deo) to man before the world (coram mundo)? Is the certainty of salvation in Christ, and not that before the supreme being, not the very essence of faith for Luther? “The true faith says: I believe in the son of God, dead and resurrected, for me, for my sins, and of this I am certain. Indeed, he has died for the sins of the entire world. Yet it

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is quite certain that I am part of the world; therefore it is quite certain that he also died for my sins.”98 Is there anything that is Cartesian, and more generally, philosophical, in Luther’s determination of doubt and certainty? Luther writes, “doubt is the work of the law. Indeed, whereas the law produces doubt in the soul, the Gospel, on the contrary, consoles and makes the soul certain. Doubt and certainty lay siege to each other in bitter combat.”99 Has the foundation of beings or, if you prefer, the god of Aristotle ever saved or redeemed whomsoever, and does Luther’s justification not imply faith in Christ, to the point of merging with that faith? Does Luther not assert, in 1536, that “from the point of view of theology, Aristotle knew nothing of man”?100 Did he not criticize the philosophical definition of man as rational animal in order to substitute his theological definition for man? In thereby erasing the opposition, coram mundo—coram Deo, which crosses all of Lutheran theology, in identifying at the same time man, apt to justification as the image of God, in the place of man as rational animal or as the entity that understands being, Heidegger leads Evangelical theology back to philosophy—neglecting Luther’s lesson, which he nonetheless happened to recall.101 In this way, Heidegger leads the word of Christ back to that of being and this, at the cost of an essential misinterpretation of the Christian doctrine of justification and of the certainty of salvation,102 which is supposed to allow the transformation of verum into certum. By the same token, Heidegger sets off on a surreptitious de-Christianization of philosophy; that is, an unfounded and ultimately inoffensive de-Christianization. Once again in regard to justice and to the apogee of metaphysics, it appears that revelation could not arise from or be related to the destiny of αλήθεια, even in the guise of its Romanization. Finally, it is not certain that the rule, according to which “everything ‘anti’ thinks in the spirit of that against which it is ‘anti,’ ” can be applied to revelation in the same way that it is applied to philosophy.103 If the reversal of a metaphysical thesis is still a metaphysical thesis, if all anti-Platonism always comes back to Plato as to its source, it remains that to proclaim the death of God does not amount to announcing his resurrection. The death of God is not that of the Son who rose again to sit on the right hand of the Father. What has just been said means that there could not be, at the same time and in light of the history of being, a Lutheran philosopher and theologian. In other words, Nietzsche could not simultaneously carry out the Romanization of αλήθεια and think justice in the wake of Saint Paul or Luther. This is because the second of these two tasks comes out of a field of experience irreducible to that to which the first task belongs. That does not imply, yet, that Nietzsche’s thought would indeed be, above all, the site for a confrontation with revelation, a confrontation

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of which divine justice would either be the red thread, or at least that to which it should lead us. Nevertheless, it is not without right that Heidegger could say that “the metaphysics of will to power conforms only to Roman culture and with Machiavelli’s The Prince.”104 In the section of the Twilight of the Idols entitled “What I Owe to the Ancients,” and which Heidegger cites to confirm his interpretation, does Nietzsche not indeed declare: “To the Greeks I do not by any means owe similarly strong impressions; and—to come right out with it—they can not be for us what the Romans are. One does not learn from the Greeks—[their manner is too strange, it is also too fluid to produce an imperative, a ‘classical’ effect. Who would ever have learned to write from a Greek! Who would ever have learned it without the Romans! . . . Let no one offer me Plato as an objection.].”105 Yet the whole question is one of knowing whether the distinction between Greeks and Romans really has the same meaning and function for Nietzsche as for Heidegger. Whereas for Heidegger, Romanism denotes the covering over of αλήθεια [alˉetheia] as that essential dimension in which the Greek world initially unfolded, things are wholly otherwise for Nietzsche. What are those strong impressions of which the Greeks offer no equivalent? They are those for which Nietzsche is indebted to what he calls “the Roman style,” exploited in his Zarathustra. And in order to make himself fully understood, he specifies: “From that day to this no poet has given me the same artistic delight as I derived from the very first from a Horatian ode. In certain languages what is achieved here is not even desirable. This mosaic of words in which every word, as sound, as locus, as concept, pours forth its power to left and right and over the whole, this minimum in the range and number of signs which achieves a maximum of energy of these signs—all this is Roman and, if one will believe me, noble par excellence.”106 Roman for Nietzsche is thus eponymous for noble. And Romanism must be understood relative to the revaluation of values. It is therefore not Romanism that gives its meaning to this revaluation, but the reverse. It is for this reason important to grasp Nietzsche’s sense of Romanism, to specify what is eponymous for those servile values subject to revaluation. Why does Nietzsche refuse to consider Plato as an objection? To pose this question is ultimately to ask what Plato signifies on the horizon of the project of revaluation. In respect to Plato I am a thorough sceptic and have always been unable to join in the admiration of Plato the artist which is traditional among scholars. After all, I have here the most refined judges of taste of antiquity themselves on my side. It seems to me that Plato mixes together

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all forms of style; he is therewith in the matter of style a first decadent [erster décadent des Stils].107

But this response, which characterizes decadence according to its form or, better, to the mixture of forms (that is, in the absence of a sovereign form), does not yet allow us to understand what décadence is and consequently to name that over which “Romanism” is called to triumph. This is why—and still in the same paragraph of Twilight of the Idols from which Heidegger borrows—Nietzsche sets the figure that Plato takes on within the perspective of revaluation, writing: Ultimately my mistrust of Plato extends to the very bottom of him: I find him deviated so far from all the fundamental instincts of the Hellenes, so morally infected, so much an antecedent Christian—he already has the concept of “good” as the supreme concept—that I should prefer to describe the entire phenomenon “Plato” by the harsh term “higher swindle” or, if you prefer, idealism, than by any other. It has cost us dear that this Athenian went to school with the Egyptians (—or with the Jews in Egypt? . . .). In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that ambiguity and fascination called the “ideal”108 which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to step on to the bridge which led to the “Cross” . . . And how much there still is of Plato in the concept “Church,” in the structure, system, practice of the Church!109

If Nietzsche prefers the Roman style to the Greek one, for which Plato is here the paradigm, this is because Plato prepared the way for Christianity. What is more, in the years 1887–88, Nietzsche will not cease repeating that Plato is a Jew: “Plato . . . who had already devalued the Greek gods with his concept of the good, which was already itself marked by Jewish bigotry (—in Egypt?)” or again, “Plato, that anti-Hellene and Semite by instinct.”110 In short, the values to which Rome is opposed are Judeo-Christian values, or rather, those of which Judeo-Christian values are highly exemplary. And if Rome is not opposed to Athens but rather to Jerusalem, if the combat between noble values and servile ones can have as its symbol, “Rome against Judea and Judea against Rome,”111 this is because, far from being some ultimate metaphysics, Nietzsche’s thought is the site of a confrontation with revelation and metaphysics. More precisely, it is the site of a confrontation with a system of values that permits the conjunction of Athens and Jerusalem. The distinction between Greeks and Romans could therefore not have for Nietzsche the sense it has for Heidegger. The latter meaning includes the Christian

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Church in the Roman world, at a time when, paradoxically, that world excluded it, and it is impossible to say that the will to power agrees with Romanism alone, so long as the latter—understood as the covering over of αλήθεια—is not taken in its properly Nietzschean acceptation. In light of revaluation, symbolized and defined by the combat of Rome against Judea, it becomes impossible to describe the directing movement of Nietzsche’s thought as a reversal of the Platonism that persists in thinking in the spirit and sense of its adversary; impossible likewise to consider Nietzsche as “the most unrestrained Platonist in the history of Western metaphysics”;112 impossible, finally, to assert that “Nietzsche’s thinking was and is everywhere a single and often very discordant dialogue with Plato.”113 No doubt Nietzsche himself understood his thought this way. Did he not qualify his philosophy as an “inverted Platonism,” explaining that “the farthest one stands from the true being [vom wahrhaft Seienden], the purer, the lovelier, the better it is. Life in appearance [im Schein] as goal.”114 Nevertheless, this note dates from 1870–71 and not from the years 1887–88, in which Nietzsche’s thought reached its apex according to Heidegger115—and in which Plato is regularly characterized as a Jew. In other words, the reversal of Platonism, by which Nietzsche was able to grasp one moment of his thought, is inscribed in the revaluation of Judeo-Christian values, in regard to which Plato figures as a Jew. No more given to confusing Plato with Platonism than Heidegger was, Nietzsche took care to note in autumn 1887: “Plato becomes, with me, a caricature”;116 which is to say, the example of a type. What is more, did Heidegger not himself lead Plato back, at least once and in a strange fashion, to the Jewish world? Asserting that the theological, ecclesiastical, and Christian interpretation of the world arises from “the Judeo-Hellenistic world and whose fundamental structure was established through Plato at the outset of Western metaphysics,”117 does Heidegger himself not make Plato a Jew indirectly? For how could Plato have founded the JudeoHellenistic world without himself being—if not as Jewish as Greek—at least somewhat Jewish? From the moment the reversal of Platonism no longer suffices to characterize Nietzsche’s thought, it doubtless becomes impossible to see that, in and through which the circle of metaphysics comes to a close as the destiny of being. However, it does become possible, notwithstanding, to close by responding to the question of knowing where and how the debate with revelation should be engaged. Why is Plato Jewish, according to Nietzsche? “When Socrates and Plato took the side of virtue and justice, they were Jewish or I don’t know what—.”118 Plato is thus Jewish—or something else of which Judaism would be but an exemplary case—on account of justice. What justice is at stake? Given that Plato be-

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comes Jewish by taking the side of justice, the justice whose side he takes must ultimately be as Jewish as the decision about sides that it requires. Nevertheless, in order that Plato be qualified as Jewish and, as such, be recognized as an adversary, it is essential that the revaluation—of which Nietzsche’s entire philosophy is but the unfolding and enactment [mise en oeuvre]—finally concern divine justice itself. If one assumes that Nietzsche’s thought is everywhere and continuously in dialogue with that of Plato, then this is because the latter, having prepared the way for Christianity, “is still Europe’s greatest misfortune!”119 Consequently, Nietzsche’s debate with revelation essentially concerns justice in the biblical sense of the term, that is, God’s justice. And how could things be otherwise if God is dead? Nietzsche himself emphasized that the death of God signified the preemption of divine justice. “It is with great difficulty,” he writes, “that the greatest events reach man at the level of his sentiments [zum Gefühl]: for example, the fact that the Christian god ‘is dead,’ that in our experiences there is no longer expressed a heavenly goodness and education [Erziehung], no longer a divine justice [göttliche Gerechtigkeit], above all no immanent morality. This is a frightful novelty, which still requires a couple of centuries to come to Europeans’ sentiment: and then it will seem for a long time as though all gravity were gone out of things.”120 The confrontation with revelation would simply not take place if Nietzsche found that the action or effect of divine justice were extinguished, without looking for a new justice, which is to say, a new gravity. That this is the case is easily attested, if not already understandable. In a magnificent text from book 4 of The Gay Science, which ends on the first formulation of the thinking of eternal recurrence (entitled “The Greatest Weight,” §341), Nietzsche exclaims: “Rather a new justice is needed! And a new watchword [Losung]! And new philosophers!”121 A little later on, in a projected preface to the reissue of Human, All Too Human, he reconceived his entire itinerary as the search for a new justice. “It happened late—I was already well over twenty years old—that I discovered what was actually lacking me altogether: namely, justice. ‘What is justice? And is it possible? And if it should not be possible, how then would life be sustainable [auszuhalten]?’—in such a way I questioned myself unrelentingly.”122 At the same time, in another project for a preface, Nietzsche again wrote, “I was already over twenty years old when I discovered that I lacked the knowledge of men.”123 Was this not tantamount to saying that the new justice does not go without a redefinition of the essence of human beings, that the justice to come requires the overman as one of its conditions of possibility? How would this other justice be new if it were not victorious over the old divine justice that hitherto had made life possible? How would

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this other justice be new, if it were not also the condition of a higher, requalified and considered life; the function, as it were, of a power superior to that of God revealed in Christ? Need we recall that the justice of God was always one, if not the, manifestation of his power? Yet, where was the justice of God proclaimed as foundation for the entire economy of salvation if not in what Luther held to be the Gospel itself, that is to say, the Pauline doctrine of justification?124 It is thus relative to the latter that the confrontation with revelation must begin. However, if, as Luther always said—that same Luther to whom we appeal for the additional reason that he is according to Nietzsche “the grandfather of German philosophy” who “restores the fundamental logic of Christianity”125—if “our justification is not yet complete, if our justification is in act and in becoming, a work site,” then is it possible to attain revelation on the basis of a partial and incomplete phenomenon? Evidently not. What, then, should the fundamental motif in the confrontation with revelation be; that is, what is, in the final analysis, the point of departure for elucidating the positive sense of the death of God? The resurrection of the dead, for justification “shall finally be complete in the resurrection of the dead.”126 We can presently make two remarks that shall engage the rest of this work. On the one hand, it is indeed revelation, and philosophy, insofar as it is inscribed in revelation, that Nietzsche endeavors to surmount in seeking a new justice. Just as Nietzsche’s reproach to Plato for mixing all styles had nothing formal to it, so too it is no philologist’s remark when, after noting that “our ultimate event is still Luther and our sole book still the Bible,” Nietzsche declares: “Luther’s language and the poetic form of the Bible as the foundation for a new German poetry:— that is my invention!”127 Consequently, the thought of eternal recurrence, which is heralded in this new form and lies at the base of that “Bible of the future”128 that is Thus Spoke Zarathustra—such a thought should tend to invalidate the resurrection of the dead that Saint Paul, conjoining old and new testaments in a single Bible, placed at the foundation of any economy of salvation. On the other hand, the death of God being the event before which Nietzsche’s own thought would be the counterweight, it is important to understand straightaway which God this was, that alone could save or justify us, and why he can no longer do so. Failing that, we shall never understand why and how, in the age where technology is the supreme danger, man comes to take on the vacant and fatal figure of lord of the earth. It is for this reason that, from the moment Christian theology asserts that “resurrection and God are so connected that an atheistic comprehension of resurrection would be eo ipso meaningless,” and when it then concludes that “the relation between God and resurrection must

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be grasped in a fashion so rigorous that the purity of the understanding of God would depend on the purity of the understanding of resurrection,”129 we must begin our confrontation with [explication avec] God revealed in Christ by an explanation of [explication avec] the resurrection of the dead, which is always a resurrection of bodies.

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Part 1

From the Resurrection of Body to Eternal Recurrence

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1

The Body Under the Law

“If there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is also not resurrected; but if Christ is not resurrected, then our preaching is vain, and so is our faith.”1 These two verses from the first Letter to the Corinthians point, as clearly and firmly as possible, to the foundation of the Pauline predication. Developing the meaning of the revelation of Christ on the road to Damascus, Saint Paul’s theology and beyond it, the whole of Christian theology which he inaugurated is centered on the death and resurrection of Christ. This is not the first case of a resurrection whose possibility would be given in advance. On the contrary, it constitutes the origin in grace of that possibility. The resurrection of Christ, the resurrection in Christ, is the belief proper to Christians, and God himself is invoked as the one whose power raises the dead. The resurrection, which marks the passage from death to life following that from life to death, is a resurrection of the body. Thus, in order to elucidate the concepts of life and death insofar as they relate to resurrection, that is, to justification, and hence to reach the foundations of Paul’s theology, we must take the body as our starting point and principal theme. How does Saint Paul conceive the body? In another passage from the first Letter to the Corinthians, he compares the unity of the church to that of the body: “For as the body is one while having many members, and all the members of that body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.”2 Let us leave for the time being the ecclesial and Christic side of the comparison and keep only what concerns the human body. The body is the unity of manifold members whose functions differ. How is this unity possible and from whence does it come? It does not originate in the members themselves, as is attested by the following imaginary variation, which takes up an ancient apologue: “For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, ‘Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body’; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear shall say, ‘Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body’; is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole were hearing, where would the smelling be?”3 This fable, which engages all the senses except taste, shows clearly, on the one hand, that every member is a member of the body and, on the other hand, that the unity that reigns among the members does not 41

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derive from them, since none is liable to represent the body as a whole. “If they were all one member, where would the body be?”4 As the unity of body is neither in one of its members nor in an immortal soul (of which Saint Paul knows nothing), it can only originate in God who “set the members every one of them in the body, as it had pleased him.”5 If the unity of body and the disposition of its members is the work of the divine will, then the belonging of the body’s members merges with the belonging of our body to God. Saint Paul thus conceives the body in the very site of our relation to God. As a divine unity of manifold members, the body is man himself in his openness to God and, by the same token, to his fellows in the world. Does this mean that the body is precisely that openness; or does it mean that man, considered exclusively from the perspective of God, is essentially a body? Saint Paul writes, “We carry in our body, at all times and everywhere, the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus might also be manifest in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus might be manifest in our mortal flesh.”6 It is clear in this passage that life and death are not solely natural phenomena in the Greek sense of the term, but above all that “in our body” means “in us,” and the word “body” has the value of a personal pronoun. This is not a hapax legomenon. Exhorting the Romans to turn away from sin and to dedicate themselves to God, Saint Paul entreats, “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, exacting obedience to its desires. Neither yield your members as instruments of injustice to sin, but give yourselves over to God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of justice to God.”7 Again, “your body” and “your members” mean the same thing here, just as do “yield yourselves” and “yield your members.” If it is thus possible to substitute a personal pronoun for the words “body” and “members” without modifying their sense, this shows clearly that man is first and foremost corporeal, a body.8 But why is it that Saint Paul understood man as a body? How does the body show us the man? What is the structure of the body that makes it apt to denote the being of him who says I? Let us return to where we left off in Paul’s description. “If they were all one member, where would the body be? But in fact there are many members, yet only one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, I do not need you; nor the head to the feet, I do not need you.”9 By insisting at once on the unity of the body and the multiplicity of its members, Saint Paul brings out the unity of the body as something relational. Every member is necessary to the others, each one, correlated with them. The body is a relational order, in which each relation stands in reciprocal and total dependence on the others. The

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relationship of one member to another is a relationship of one to all the others; that is, ultimately, the relationship of the body to itself. The unity of the body is thus that of the relationship to self of its multiple members. Yet the relation to self constitutes the I. Therefore, for want of a soul, it is starting with the body that we should understand that being who, because he is a self, can say I. The description is not complete and the next verse begins with a comparative adverbial phrase, which points out that the essential has perhaps not yet been reached. “Rather, those members of the body which seem to be the feeblest are necessary; those which we regard as less honorable are treated with special honor, and to our indecent parts is given a more than ordinary decency; for our decent parts need no adorning. But God has combined the various members, giving special honor to the humbler parts, so that there be no division in the body, but that all its members feel the same concern for each other.”10 What idea is most significant here, if we overlook the progressive transition from the human to the Christic body? If Saint Paul opposes a body hierarchically ordered according to force, honor, and decency, to a body whose members are equal despite their difference; if he opposes a divided body to an undivided one, this is because the unity of the members, and of the body itself, is subject to variation depending on whether the axiology that orders it belongs to us or is divine. The unity of the body is the self, and if this unity can be broken, it is because the self can be divided. What does this division mean? The unity of the created body is likewise an ordering of the divine will. Consequently, the division of the self could have no other sense than that of a rupture between man and God. It could only mean an antagonism between the human and the divine modes of valuing the members, a conflict between the possibilities of self, as signified by the various relations of value liable to be incorporated. Fidelity and infidelity to God, obedience or disobedience of His word are thus possibilities of the body. And when Saint Paul asserts that “the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body,” it is immediately upon having warned that “the body is not for fornication,”11 which obviously implies that it could well be. Man is a body, and by “body” we should understand an openness to self, which as such is an openness to God. To put it more rigorously, it is the openness to God which, as such, is the openness of self to self. The unity of body therefore could not be natural—as the body itself is not— it is a matter of creation, of the bond between man and God, which is to say, of holy history alone. As it trusts in or distrusts God—and distrusting God means defying him—the body is united or divided, possessing itself in itself or turned, in itself, against itself. What then are the scope and

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meaning of the disruption of self that is a rupture with God? As we noted earlier, Saint Paul opposes two purposes, two ways of being for the body: to be for God or for fornication. What does “fornication” cover? It is a “work of the flesh,” a “sin against one’s own body.”12 Thus, the analysis of the concepts of flesh and sin should allow us to grasp why and how the body comes to dismember itself. According to Old Testament usage, the flesh designates fragile man before the Eternal. When Saint Paul announces that “no flesh will be justified by the deeds of the law,” or that God has chosen “things which are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no flesh should glory before Him,”13 the expression “no flesh” means “whosoever,” and the word “flesh” has a personal sense. On what grounds can “the flesh” be substituted for “the body” to express the self? What is the difference between flesh and body? If no flesh can be justified through practicing the law, nor vaunt in the presence of God, that is because flesh is foreign and hostile to him. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.”14 How then should we understand the flesh if, as opposed to the body, it cannot resurrect? Not even once attributed to God in the entire Old Testament, the flesh is first the skin and muscles of animals or men; then it is man himself such as he sees and appears to himself. “The true circumcision is not the external mark in the flesh.”15 The flesh is thus coextensive with natural visibility—“naturally with prepuce” amounts to being uncircumcised according to the flesh—and, supposing it were legitimate to speak in this way, Paul’s phenomenology makes the flesh into the very being of the visible. However, the flesh not only characterizes the body such as it sees itself, but also as in the midst of what it sees. The wisdom of the logos, the wisdom of the world sought by the Greeks, is a wisdom “according to the flesh,” opposed to the grace of God.16 The flesh is thus the body inasmuch as it refers to itself and to the world; in short, to the extent that it turns away from God. Does Saint Paul not say, in the space of a few lines, that “those who belong to Christ have crucified their flesh”? And will he not add that, through Christ’s cross, “the world is crucified to me and I to the world”?17 That flesh is aversion to God is brought to light in a passage from the Letter to the Romans: “Those who are according to the flesh mind the things of the flesh; but those who are after the Spirit mind the things of the Spirit. But to be fleshly minded is death; and to be spiritually minded is life and peace. For the fleshly mind is enmity against God.”18 In distinguishing between the carnal and the spiritual, Saint Paul distinguishes two kinds of relationship of man to God, and two modes of being for the body. The antagonism between flesh of death and spirit of life

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has the body for its site. Who are those according to the flesh? They are firstly the Greeks, who “exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image [Bild] shaped like corruptible men, birds, four-footed beasts, and creeping things,”19 and who do not observe the commandments of the law, which, for want of explicit revelation, is inscribed in their hearts, as is attested by the universal phenomenon of the moral conscience, qua knowledge of self vis-à-vis God. They are then, and above all, the Jews who, possessing the law—“guide to knowledge and truth”20—never respect it. The Greeks are thus Jews unaware of themselves, and the Jews ignore the law they have received. To be according to the flesh is to be under the law whether one is Greek or Jewish. Thus it is in relation to the law that flesh, sin, and death should be understood in Saint Paul’s sense of the words. By the law, Saint Paul understands the letter of the covenant, which he will be the first to call “the Old Testament”21 and, more narrowly, the statutes revealed by God to lead man to justification, without which there is neither salvation nor eternal life. If he occasionally speaks of the law in its ritual or religious acceptation, he nonetheless gives it an essentially moral meaning, since “the whole law is fulfilled in this single word: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ”22 The morality in question here is not the regional science which, in addition to logic and physics, constitutes philosophy for the Stoics—that “vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.”23 Instead, morality is that from which the economy of salvation arises, i.e., the biblical story; in short, the totality of relations between humans (which is to say, the body) and God. This being said, why are all bodies, whether Greek or Jewish (here, the difference is unimportant), those of death and sin? Why is the law never respected or fulfilled? Paul’s answer is radical: justification through the law is impossible because it misunderstands divine justice. Where does this misunderstanding lie? If “Moses writes of the justice of the law: ‘The man who does this gains life through it,’ ”24 then the law’s justice is, for the Jews, the condition they are called to satisfy in order to receive life. This is to say that, on the one hand, justice is that from which we live in the same sense as sin is that from which we die. On the other hand, justification before God depends on our works. But to want to obtain justice through the works of the law is to want to obtain it by oneself, from oneself, and to substitute one’s own justice for God’s. Such a substitution is the essence of sin, which is pride, unconditional assertion, and self-glorification, “confidence in the flesh.”25 Far from delivering us from sin, the law effectively closes us up in it, irremediably. And what ought to enliven us condemns us to a life of death. Under the law, bodies remain bodies of flesh, “whose God is their bellies”;26 in other words, the flesh

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itself. To live under the law, after the flesh, is thus, ultimately to live under the wrath of God. Does this actually mean that the law is sin? “Of course not. But I had not known sin except through the law.”27 What does it mean to know sin through the law? Should we understand that the law reveals sin qua sin or, more profoundly, that the law incites us to sin, elicits sin? The law could not be sin’s ratio cognoscendi, because knowledge does not have a theoretical sense here. Moreover, the rest of the text shows clearly that the law, like a ratio essendi, is at work in sin itself: “I should never have known lust, if the law had not said: Thou shall not covet. But sin took advantage of the commandment to produce in me lust of all kinds. For without the law, sin is dead.”28 The law is thus sin’s mainstay, and there is a cunning of sin just as there is a cunning of reason. Relative to its origin the law is holy; relative to its carnal recipient, it is that by which sin takes shape and is known to us. Sin buttresses itself against the law, only to break it. Sin draws from the law the strength to transgress it, thus turning it against itself, making a commandment of life into an instrument of death. “I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. And so the commandment, which was ordained to life, led me to death.”29 If, having formerly lived in innocence, I am now dead, this present death now characterizes my life, and sin turns life against itself. To live under the law, or under sin, is to live a life that bears death with it and keeps itself in death. It is to live against life, resting on it so far as it is mine but opposed to it so far as it is God’s. “I am dead” means: I am a divided body, separated from God, a body of flesh. This argument directly calls for a few comments. First, life and death should not be understood in a biological or Greek sense, but relative to God’s word, which places everyone before the choice of the one or the other.30 That does not imply that life and death have no natural meaning, but rather that “nature” should always be understood against the horizon of salvation. Such is, moreover, one of the meanings of creation. Second, Paul’s description of life under the law assumes it is possible to recapitulate the entire history of Israel, before as after Exile, according to a law whose observation should lead to salvation. But the recapitulation of this history under “the law” is late. And, what is more, far from representing servitude, the law is, for the faithful and pious Jew, an object of love and a source of joy.31 Finally, and third, there is in Saint Paul’s diatribe an illegitimate leap, a surreptitious modification of meaning, if not a veritable sophism. To obtain justice through one’s own works in no way amounts to substituting one’s own justice for that of God. I may want to be justified through my own works, without the court before which I appear belonging to me. I may desire justice for

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myself without myself rendering justice to me alone. In short, Saint Paul does not demonstrate that justification by the law misunderstands divine justice, or that it is perverse and sinful in essence. Nevertheless, this assertion is the cornerstone of his interpretation of the Jews’ role in the economy of salvation. To be sure, rejection of the law ultimately comes from faith in Jesus Christ, so far as he fulfills the law; it thus springs from a new theophany. But to agree that only one theophany can abolish another here leads to ruling out a solution of continuity between the God of Israel and the one who resurrects His Son. It consequently forbids our seeing in Christ the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham, and ultimately breaks the unity of holy history. Let us return to the division of the body under the law, which was never as powerfully described as at the end of chapter 7 of the Letter to the Romans. Recall, too, that this epistle constituted for Luther “the masterpiece of the New Testament and purest of all the Gospels.”32 When Saint Paul opens his analysis of the carnal ego with the claim that the law is spiritual, he no longer considers it as arising from the letter that kills, but rather as belonging to the vivifying spirit of Christ.33 The law is spiritual when, gathered solely around the commandment to love, it has become charity. It is thus according to a new principle of justification, a new justice, that the division of the carnal body under the law is shown— a division perceivable only at the end of the law, starting from Christ. Let us examine this description. “We know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. For I do not even acknowledge my own acts, for what I want, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.”34 Speaking, here, is the ego of the flesh; it is divided between what it wants and what it does. It is because it does not do what it wills but rather what it wills not to do, that it no longer understands what it reaps. Paul’s analysis, which should be understood in a purely eidetic sense, implies that the body, whether living according to the flesh or according to the Spirit, is will. Saint Paul defines man as a body, and the body as a will. But what precisely does the body will? As openness to God, it could only properly want what God wanted from and for it by revealing the law, that is, life to it. The will wants life. Thus, if I do not acknowledge my acts and feel lost in them, it is that, wanting justification and life, I obtain sin. And the paradox is that I stop understanding myself the moment my will asserts itself against God’s, instead of giving itself up for that of God. Yet in both cases it is toward, or away from the divine will, that my will turns. The body that I am is thus constituted by the relationship of my will to God’s will. The body is a relationship between wills. Under the law, the body of flesh wills the contrary of what it wants, since it does not will what God wills, and the will is turned back against itself. This presupposes first that I know, in any

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event, that the law is good, that God’s will is by nature “good, acceptable, and perfect.”35 The disjunction between the willing and the willed, the autonomy of my will relative to what it essentially wants—namely God’s will—implies that the law is understood as holy. “If then I do that which I would not, I consent to the law that it is good.”36 This further presupposes that it is not enough to know the law—as “form of knowledge and truth”—in order to be justified, and that knowledge according to the flesh is powerless to govern the will. Divided between what it wants and what it does, between the goodness of the law and the malignity of its acts, the carnal ego is divested of itself. “Now then it is no more I who perform the act, but the sin that dwells in me. For I know that the good dwells not in me—that is, in my flesh—for though the will to do good is there, the deed is not. Thus, the good that I want I fail to do, but the evil I want not, that I do. Now if I do that I want not, it is no more I that do it, but the sin that dwells in me.”37 Under the law, the I cleaves, strays from itself, and falters, while conscious of itself as of another, and it is not so much the subject that is a sinner as the sin that is a subject. In the proposition, “the good I want and the evil I do,” which characterizes the body under the law, the first I is not identical to the second. One belongs to God, the other to the flesh. The I that wills the good is the one whose will belongs to God, the I that does evil is the one whose will disobeys God for the benefit of the flesh. To will the good is to will life, and evil is the death that I do not will. Good and evil, life and death are aligned with my will to stand for each of the possibilities of my relationship to God. And, as Saint Paul—who assimilates evil to sin—never conceives God outside any relationship to man, this relation, whichever it be, is inscribed in the antagonism of good and evil. Holy history is a moral history, the God who judges good and evil, is a moral God; in short, everything can be understood under the opposition of good and evil; the knowledge of good and evil is the ultimate knowledge of life and death, of what revives and what mortifies by turning life against itself. Need we recall that the works of the flesh are opposed to the fruits of the Spirit, as vices to virtues?38 Flesh and Spirit vie for the I, that is to say, for the body. It is enough to continue our reading of Romans 7 to be convinced of this: “I then find a law, which has it that when I would to do good, only evil is within my reach. For, following the inward man, I delight in the law of God, but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and chaining me to the law of sin that is in my members.”39 What is the human being within, and what is Saint Paul’s intent when he borrows this Platonic expression?40 The human being within is opposed, first, to the outward human being, as the spirit to the flesh. In his second Epistle to

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the Corinthians, Saint Paul writes: “though our outward man perishes, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.”41 But beyond this, the inward human being is equivalent to reason, and reason to mind; this is the case in the Letter to the Romans. What should we understand by reason here? Reason is the will insofar as it knows the alternative before which it is placed: good or evil, life or death. In this respect, reason is neither good nor evil, but neutral. Why then does Saint Paul identify it with the law of God, with the spirit? Does that mean that the will always chooses the good? No, it means only that it always opts for the good when, in accordance with its essence, it is what it should be and what it is commanded to be; namely, a will of life, the will of God. Saint Paul can merge reason and spirit because the will always implies knowledge and because no one fails to realize—as moral conscience attests—that the law is good, holy. If the inward man that I am basks in God’s law while being riveted to sin, the division of self and the body’s turning against itself both arise from the clash between flesh and spirit for the mastery of my members. My body can submit to the flesh or to the spirit; it can live from and by itself, or from and by God. It can be ruled by good or by evil. But in order that these two possibilities be offered to it, and proper to it, the body, qua relationship of wills, should itself be a moral phenomenon whose constitution as such belongs to sin or to justice. It must be a phenomenon whose being, and whose way of being are always a function of good and evil. In other words: the body under the law leads to death, it is the body of someone dead. The body freed from the law leads to life; it is invested by the spirit, sanctified. The end of the reign of the law thus opens the possibility of a change in the condition of bodies, of a new qualification or determination of the body. Centered on the salvific work of Christ, holy history, biblical history is always also the history of bodies.

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2

Justice and Faith

Yet how should we understand Paul’s word, according to which “Christ is the end of the law”?1 Let us start from justice, which is the condition of salvation and life. Just as sin leads to death, justice leads to life, and the connection between them is so close that justice may be regarded as the essence of life: “The spirit is life for the sake of justice.”2 What then is justice for the Jews under the law? Nothing in the Old Testament is more important than justice since it designates that which relations between man and world, man and others, and above all man and God must satisfy. Virtually a divine name, justice is thus essentially what is necessary to maintaining the covenant between God and Israel. Just is the one who satisfies the requirements of the covenant; who, consequently, obeys the law. But God too is just, if not equally so, as his beneficial acts attest both fidelity to his promises and his quality as a judge. If justice is the demand to which this dissymmetrical relation—that is the covenant—must respond, then only a divine judgment can declare a man just. Because man finds himself before God as before a judge in a court, justice has primarily a forensic meaning. This is the sense, too, that comes out of the expression, “it was counted unto him for justice,” which Saint Paul borrows from Genesis on many occasions.3 However, as Israel gradually allowed itself to be shaped by the eschatology of prophets, justice took on an eschatological sense. This second sense appears for example in the Letter to the Galatians, when we read, “We . . . wait for the hope of justice.”4 Thus, justice has for the Jews an eschatological-forensic sense, in relation to which we should grasp both Saint Paul’s rupture with Judaism, and the novelty of the Gospel of justification through faith alone. When the Apostle argues, “now the justice of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; justice of God by the faith in Jesus Christ to all that believe, for there is no difference. For all alike have sinned and come short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by God’s grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,”5 he is upholding four claims against Judaism as he interprets it. First, that justification no longer proceeds from the law but from faith, and the one excludes the other. Second, that justice is no longer awaited but rendered, and eschatological judgment pronounced. Third, that sinners are henceforth justified by divine grace. Fourth and finally, that that 50

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grace and justice are present forevermore, having been revealed in Jesus Christ—or better, that the Christ Jesus, himself, is that grace and justice. Everything rests here (Luther, as we have seen, took this for the foundation of Scripture) on the sense of the words “justice of God.” God’s justice is not a justice wielded, nor is it the law by virtue of which the sinner is punished. It is a received justice, a passive justice through which God acquits us of sin and thanks to which he makes us just. This is a justice that we allow to act on us through faith. The Gospel Saint Paul preaches is “the power of God to save whosoever has faith; the Jew first and also the Greek. For therein is revealed the justice of God through faith and for faith: as it is written, the just shall live by faith.”6 It is henceforth around the Cross that the entire history of salvation turns, for Saint Paul first, and after him, for all Christians. The renewal of the covenant through the sacrifice of Christ is thus correlative to a change in the essence of both justification and justice. That is, it is related, ultimately, to a change in the essence of life. “Whoever is in Christ is a new creature: old things have passed away, all things becoming new.”7 Now, to be in Christ means to die to sin to live in God. The death and resurrection of Christ separate the old from the new, divide history into two ages; they form the eschatological event that frees us from our past as sinners by opening a believer’s future to us. If Christ were not this, then Saint Paul could not make of him the antitype or counter-figure of Adam. Indeed, to Adam’s sin, which brought death into the world, is opposed the grace and the gift of justice, by which Christ imparts life. “As the offense of one led to the condemnation of all, so the justice of one leads to the justification of life for all. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made just.”8 We can now understand how, through Christ, God has emancipated us from the law of sin and from death, and wherein lies his grace. The analysis of the division of the body under the law ended in the following way. “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? Thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”9 This cry of the flesh is a call, and that call has already found its answer in divine grace or, better, it is itself an answer to the call of divine grace, as is shown in the verses that follow immediately afterward, opening chapter 8: “Therefore there is now no condemnation for them who are in Christ Jesus . . . for the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could never do, because it was weak through the flesh, God has done, by sending his own Son in a flesh like that of sin and for the sake of sin, thus condemning sin in the flesh, so that the justice of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”10 Through the crucifixion of his

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son, God crucified the flesh itself and redeemed Adam’s sin. Thanks to Christ, sin is no longer attributed to us—as it was since the revelation of the law11—and the reign of the law and the flesh over bodies is ended. However, the crucifixion is nothing without the resurrection, outside of which we could never know that the son of man is also the son of God. Moreover, the death of the flesh would be meaningless were it not ipso facto a birth unto spirit. Consequently, only kenosis and the salutary exaltation of Christ make the resurrection of the dead possible, and this is none other than the power of God itself. But how can we appropriate the eschatological event and the coming of salvation? If Christ is dead and resurrected for us, how can we make the salvation realized in Him our own and become new creatures? Through faith. In a passage from the Letter to the Philippians, where Saint Paul explains the meaning of his conversion, after claiming to have lived beyond reproach in the eyes of the law—but who can claim this without glorifying himself, and is it not up to God alone to judge?—he continues: “What things were gain to me, those I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Furthermore, I count everything as loss, for all this is outweighed by the gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake everything was lost to me and I counted it but dung, to gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own justice, which comes from the law, but the justice of faith in Christ, which comes from God by faith. That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, in conformity with his death; may I finally reach the resurrection of the dead.”12 These verses determine the content of faith: to believe is to know Jesus as Lord by virtue of his resurrection, and this knowledge is simultaneously trust and hope. However, while faith possesses a content, it is also an act. What is then the particular nature of the act of faith? Faith is obedience: to believe is to “obey the Gospel.”13 Faith lies in obedience to the proclamation: to believe is to preaching as hearing is to saying—and the saying, here, is God’s. This obedience is a movement of the will. In obeying God’s word, in believing, the will abandons itself. Yet it is not a matter of willing no longer to will, but of willing the submission of one’s own will to that of God. As a movement of the will, faith is inseparable from a revaluation: what was considered profit turns into loss. To gain Christ, to believe, thus supposes a real axiological reversal, relative to the world, of weakness into force and force into weakness, since “God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound those that are mighty.”14 This reversal of value implies a new justice: for the justice of the law is substituted that of faith, filled with grace, and a new ego. In faith and obedience to Christ, the ego is no longer divided as it was under the flesh, but brought together outside itself, reconciled

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in God and with God, since its ipseity is Christ himself. “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me.”15 From the moment faith is in itself crucifixion and resurrection, the act of faith is identified with the object of faith. This identity of act and object confers on faith the character of knowledge based on a decision and not on a pure eidetic gaze. Faithful knowledge could not have a theoretical sense but rather, assuming such a concept is relevant here, an existential one. As a decision to obey, which opens into knowledge and hope, faith only ever responds to the word of God. It is thus preceded by a gift of grace. That is why Saint Paul can say—and this amounts to a definition of faith—that to know God is to have been known by him.16 In this regard, faith is as passive as justice. If faith consists in glorifying and magnifying Christ in one’s body,17 this is because the Lord is lord of the body, which always means: of my body. Perhaps even more than the God of the law, the God of faith is essentially mine. As appropriation of salvation, faith encompasses the relation of man to God, since the latter is more my own than my own body. “God belongs to me more intimately than my body,” as Leibniz once said.18 My body is my own because it is the property of my God. What then does the body wholly in faith become? How does Saint Paul describe this? The only text liable to give us such a description is found in the penultimate chapter of the first Letter to the Corinthians. These are its initial verses: “But some will say, how are the dead raised up? With what body do they come? Fool! That which you sow does not come to life lest it has first died; and that which you sow is not the body that shall be, but bare grain, perhaps of wheat, perhaps some other; and God clothes it with the body of his choice, each seed with its own body. All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of birds, and another of fish. There are also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies; the glory of the celestial bodies is one thing, the glory of the terrestrial, another. The sun has a glory of its own, the moon another glory, the stars another, for one star differs from another in glory.”19 Is this really a description of the resurrected body? In no way. Addressing the Corinthians who, in spurning resurrection, ultimately reject his gospel, Saint Paul takes pains here to set down the possibility of resurrection. He does so using two arguments. The first one is a comparison. Just as what is sown lives again only when it has died, so too our past body dies only to live again in a body to come. The second argument proceeds directly from the body. Living earthly bodies differ among each other through the flesh, since all flesh is not the same, while heavenly bodies differ among each other according to brilliance [éclat], since all brilliance is not the same. Finally, earthly bodies differ from heavenly ones, since flesh differs from

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brilliance, that is to say, from glory. Flesh and glory are thus bodily qualities, whose variation does not destroy the body. A body can therefore cease to be a body of flesh to become a body of glory, without losing its being as a body, and my body can resurrect as other than what it was. None of these two arguments is conclusive. The first is not, because it presupposes resurrection, asserting that the passage from the grain to the plant is one of death. The second is inconclusive, because any qualitative modification of a body requires its permanence as a substrate, thereby excluding death, and because—what is a stronger reason still— it is no longer a question of the body that resurrects, and that I am, but of the body with which I resurrect and which I have, in the manner of a vase liable to receive indifferently flesh or glory, flesh or spirit. Saint Paul is no longer describing a salutary event, but a physical process for which death is but a phase. And, at the foundation of his sermon, he gives a metaphysical interpretation of the resurrection whose consequences will prove considerable. Indeed, if resurrection is a variation affecting an invariable form, and if “neither the flesh nor the blood can inherit from the kingdom of God,” then spirit should be conceived as the matter of the resurrected body. Now, spirit here is the spirit of God, and to understand the Holy Spirit, or glory, as celestial matter amounts to modifying the sense of divine transcendence and grace. These become supernatural, metaphysical, which is to say, relative to nature itself. In short, attempting to ensure for the Greeks of Corinth the possibility of the resurrection on the basis of a natural concept of body, Saint Paul, who perhaps learned his Greek too well, surrenders God’s power of resurrection to metaphysics, and metaphysics to God. To think resurrection from the perspective of the earthly or heavenly body—i.e., from a physical perspective—is to think God metaphysically and surreptitiously to invert the priority of the logos of the Cross over the wisdom of the world. But this inversion is God’s own deed, insofar as he translated himself (as we will see later on) into Greek; and consequently, insofar as the Greek learned by Saint Paul was taught to him by God himself. It remains that this ambiguity in the concept of the body will profoundly mark the conjoined history of Christian theology and Greek philosophy. Upon considering the possibility of the resurrection of the dead, Saint Paul continues: “So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown as perishable is raised imperishable. Sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; sown in weakness, it is raised in power; sown as a natural body, it is raised as a spiritual body.”20 Once more, is this a description of the body resurrected? It is, to the degree that it can be suitable to its object. Indeed, with the exception of chapter 15 of the first Letter to the Corinthians—which will subsequently serve as the framework for all the

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theologies of the glorious body—Saint Paul refrains from representing the resurrected body. There are two reasons for his abstention. On the one hand, every image of the resurrected body contradicts its being to come—the glorious body is to-come—and its miraculous character— God gives every seed the body he wanted. On the other hand and above all, the knowledge that I can have in the present of the resurrected body is partial. “Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then we shall see face to face.”21 Should we conclude that it is vain to present what is hoped for, that representation of the glorious body is illegitimate, even insignificant, with regard to the essence of eternal life? There is no doubt that the resurrection and the resurrected body are hopes rooted in faith, but faith is a hope that knows, and partial knowledge is still knowledge. Besides which, if it is true that “the partial vanishes when wholeness comes,”22 it is the same confused, reflected, and darkened knowledge that shall become clear, intuitive, and beatific; it is the same body that dies and resurrects. The glorious body, such as Saint Paul sees and depicts it, could not then be essentially different from the glorious body such as it will be in itself. This is all the more so, that the glorification of body has already begun with the baptism that immerses it in the death and resurrection of Christ, to make it a member of the church.23 Consequently, what Saint Paul says about the resurrected body is enough to determine its essence. Now, by attributing to the glorious body predicates contrary to those of carnal body, rather than proceeding the other way around (which is attested by his series of privative prefixes: im-perishable, dis-honor, asthenia),24 Saint Paul sees the former as the negation of the latter. The glorious body is the negation of the carnal body; the future eternal life, the negation of the present carnal life. But, as we have seen previously, the life of and according to the flesh, sinful life, is turned against itself in itself; it negates itself. What then does the negation of the flesh by glory mean, when it is carried out on something that already negates itself? There is an abyss separating to negate that which negates, and to negate that which negates itself. To negate what negates is, if not to affirm, at least to put an end to the negation; but to negate what negates itself is to redouble and intensify the negation. To destroy that which destroys is to put an end to destruction, but to destroy that which destroys itself is to pursue that destruction. Insofar as it is the negation of the carnal body that negates itself, the glorious body will thus be more strongly and more certainly turned against itself than the carnal body ever was. And, as the fruit of the spirit, eternal life—far from opposing the destruction that is the fruit of the flesh25—will radicalize its work. Resurrection eternalizes a life that negates itself, and the negation of life is always, and only ever, a mode of resurrection.

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There remains another determination of the resurrected body that we have not yet emphasized. The glorious body is spiritual, and this adjective is opposed to psychic or psychological, which here means natural, carnal. What is a spiritual body? Is it a body invested by spirit after having been invested by the flesh? If this acceptation is present—and how could it not be, once the body is taken for a form?—it is neither the only, nor the most important one. This comes out clearly from what follows in the text: “If there is a natural [psychic] body, there is also a spiritual body. As it is written: the first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam is a lifegiving spirit. The spiritual does not come first; the soul [natural] comes first, and after that the spiritual.26 The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is from heaven.”27 The opposition between natural or psychic bodies, and spiritual ones is thus related to that between Adam and Christ, which is fundamental for the whole economy of salvation, and the meaning of the spiritual body rests on the designation of Christ as an ultimate Adam, a last Adamic man. If Adam was a living soul, then initial humanity is that of terrestrial psychic bodies, but if Christ, the new Adam, is the spirit that gives life, then the second humanity will be that of celestial spiritual bodies. Without Christ, around whom all of biblical history revolves and gravitates, there would never have been but bodies of flesh, and the body of Christ is that utterly unique body, which makes the transformation of all the others possible. Christ is he who “shall transfigure our vile body, that it may be fashioned like his own resplendent body, by the very power whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.”28 The power of Christ is the power of his body; it is exerted on our own bodies by shaping them according to his. But how does a body conform (σύμμορφος) to the body of Christ? In being “with (συν) Christ,” which is to say, in Christ, since, for one thing, these two expressions of Paul are mostly synonymous and since, for another, “if all die in Adam, so all will be brought back to life in Christ.”29 Thus, the spiritual body is not so much a body in which there is spirit, but a body that is in the spirit, and the body resurrects when it is in Christ. To be in Christ is to be a member of the body of Christ. In order to understand this statement, let us return to the initial comparison between body and Church. “We have,” writes Saint Paul, “many members in one body, and all members have not the same office; so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one a member of the others.”30 While by body we should understand the unity of a multiplicity of members, this formal definition does not apply univocally to the body of flesh and to that of Christ. The unity of the body of flesh is that of different members among each another, since every member has its proper activity: the eye sees, the hand touches, etc. On the contrary, the unity of the body of

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Christ is one of equal members, since they are all equally different from Christ. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”31 The equality of the members of the church, whatever the diversity of their gifts, is thus ensured through their common obedience to Christ; and the unity of the ecclesial body, far from reigning over different members, reigns on members reduced to equality through their complete submission to Christ. Conceiving the body as the unity of a multiplicity of members, it thus becomes difficult, even impossible, to subsume the carnal body and the church under one concept. Although Saint Paul borrows from Gnostic thought in speaking of the body of Christ, we must still establish the meaning and condition of possibility of his usage—that is, the right of the Church to be called a body. It is time, then, to analyze further the concept of body. When we defined the body as the unity of a multiplicity of members, we did not specify what a member was. Yet, if this definition concerns the body and not an aggregate of some kind, this is because it refers back to the members. What then is a member here? It is not an organ qua instrument or function. A member appears in an action, and Saint Paul encompasses both in the same gaze. When, citing Isaiah, he cries: “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel!”32 he is not praising the formal beauty of an organ, but that of the propagation of faith. The member signifies the act and, having an energy of its own,33 it is a potential will. So long as the members are not understood as possibilities of the will, there is no sense in making them the arms of justice or injustice, no sense in describing them as obedient to the law of sin, or that of God, both of which are laws only for a will, and the fable relating their union thus remains unintelligible. Indeed, the allegory designed to show that one member could not live exclusively for itself but had to be concerned with the others, implies that the body unites wills before uniting members. The body is thus the unity of a multiplicity of wills, and this second definition applies equally to the community of believers. The church is the body of Christ because a multiplicity of wills live in it, all of them for Christ to whom they are subject, and relate the ones to the others only through him. There is thus a concept of body in regard to which it is legitimate to speak not only of the body that I am, but again of the church as the body of Christ. Nevertheless, if this concept is really effective in Saint Paul’s theology, it should allow us to understand how the body that I am can appear as a form liable to be diversely filled. It should also allow us to recognize a right relative to the determination of the body, in terms of the members. If the body is a multiplicity of wills whose

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interplay is not necessarily subject to the divine order, then each of them, in this case, wills something different and cannot fail to be opposed to all the others. Hence the body is divided. What does this division mean? It means there is in me, not someone who is more myself than I (as is Christ), but something that is not me all the while belonging to me. Divided among many wills, the one [myself] wanting what the others do not, unable consequently to orient itself [myself]—and being unable to find myself therein, I am other than I am, and this alterity is my own. The body is then no longer exclusively what I am, but also what I have and that to which I am bound. The multiplicity of wills gives way then to the multiplicity of members whose unity can only be formal or external since those members, henceforth abstracted from their actions, are themselves forms. Inversely, the unity of the glorious body—once its different wills are reconciled through their common submission to Christ and to the energy of his power—resides in a force more peculiar to it than those of its own. In other words, through the mediation of Christ, God brings divergent wills together in a body that sin literally dismembers. One remark before going further: if this analysis does not enable us to grasp how and why the glorious life is more deeply turned against itself than life according to the flesh, it nevertheless suggests that only an interpretation of the will and of the relationship between the wills that constitutes the body will allow us to understand the meaning of the resurrection, and beyond that, of Christian faith. We will come back to this question, which merges to a large extent with that of the death of God. The spiritual body is a body whose life is renewed through incorporation into Christ; a body become a member of Christ. How then should we characterize the relationship between the members? The comparison between the body and the church ends with these words: “If one member suffers, they all suffer with it. If one is glorified, they all rejoice with it.”34 The members of the body of Christ, together in joy or pain, live in the fulfillment of the commandment of love whose essence is compassion. But this compassion, or charity, is possible only with regard to men reduced to equality before God. Let us note in passing that Nietzsche often refers to this equality of men before God. He writes for example, “The Christian love of men, which does not differentiate, is only possible through the continuous contemplation of God, for whom the hierarchy between men diminishes to the point of disappearing, and man himself above all becomes so insignificant that relations of magnitude no longer elicit any interest: just as from a high mountain, the great and the small become like ants and similar.”35 Moreover, this compassion of love could not unify the wills composing the ecclesial body without previously unifying those of my own body, which, likewise leveled down, becomes dependent in its

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being (whether obedient or not) on the only will that surpasses it, that of God. Compassionate love is thus the synthetic principle that ensures the conjunction of wills in a body, which relates them the ones to the others. The love of God, in both senses of the genitive, is the bond of the body, while the death of God is its dissolution. This is the essential reason why the problem of the body must henceforth be posed according to these new stakes. But if the passion of Christ is the salutary event that makes the renewal of the body possible, how can we experience it? How can the death and resurrection of Christ—which, as it were, occurred at a particular date and, to that extent, belong to world history—still open this possibility for us hereafter? Addressing the Corinthians, Saint Paul endeavors to prove the fact of the resurrection in recalling that he was, among others, a witness of it.36 Nevertheless, if the vision of the glorious body of Christ on the way to Damascus can represent for him, and for him alone, the de jure source of what he calls “my Gospel,” it remains that it is not transmissible as such, and could not allow another to become a “new creature.”37 It is thus a matter of knowing how an event, both unsubstitutable and forever bygone, can forever, and ever anew, be the eschatological instant. In other words, what should the mode of presence of the salutary event be, that we could at any moment receive divine grace? Where then can Christ come to us? In the predication itself. Saint Paul writes in effect, “Whoever invokes the name of the Lord will be saved. But how could they invoke one in whom they had no faith? And how could they have faith in one they had never heard? And how could they hear without a preacher? And how could one preach, except one be sent?”38 The salutary event does not cease to come to pass in the tradition of the apostolic word. But if Christ is at work therein, it is because he himself is the effective word [la parole énergique]39 that justifies and revivifies. It is then altogether essential that he who is sent to preach be incorporated into Christ who exhorts us through him,40 and that he who teaches be incorporated into that teaching, which is to say, here, into the economy of salvation. That is the reason why Saint Paul can designate the Gospel of God as his own or speaking more as a Greek than as a Jew, assert that “according to the grace that God has given me I have, as a wise master builder, laid the foundation.”41

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3

One Vision Out of Another

Holy history as Saint Paul conceives it, from the fulfillment of the promise in Christ, is also the story of man coram Deo, facing God, that is, man as a body. Hence, the death of God, to which we briefly alluded, cannot fail to bring about the destruction of that “temple of the living God”1 that is our body. But what does the annihilation of the body mean when an organism is not in question? What do the multiple wills constitutive of the body become when the love of God no longer unites them? Under what conditions, then, is another body possible? If God is more proper to me than my own body, if God is what is ownmost to my body, then it is impossible that the absence of God not affect that body, and it is necessary that the thought that unfolds announcing the death of God aim at the creation of a higher body. Therefore, we should now determine whether Nietzsche’s thought is related to that of Saint Paul, by opposing one incorporation to another. In 1880 Nietzsche dedicated a paragraph of Daybreak to the “first Christian,” Saint Paul.2 However vivid one’s belief might yet be in the inspired character of the Bible, Nietzsche points out that the latter nevertheless relates “the story of one of the most ambitious and importunate souls, of a mind as superstitious as it was cunning,” that of the apostle Paul, without whom there would never have been Christianity. But have we really understood him, have we “really read” the letters of “the Jewish Pascal, [which] expose the origin of Christianity as thoroughly as the pages of the French Pascal expose its destiny and that by which it will perish”?3 From the moment we pose this question, two remarks become necessary: (1) If Nietzsche proceeds from the Bible as a whole to Saint Paul in particular, then this is because, like Luther whose heritage he here takes up, he holds the latter, Paul, to be the key to the former, the Bible. Consequently, and we will have the occasion to verify this, Nietzsche’s critique of Saint Paul concerns revelation in its totality. (2) In substituting his reading according to “the free spirit” for the reading according to the Holy Spirit, Nietzsche destroys the principle of spiritual hermeneutics and exegesis; he institutes a new philology in regard to which Christian philology looks like an “art of reading badly,”4 and which alone makes possible the disappearance of the principle which gave meaning to the holy Scriptures. 60

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How does Nietzsche interpret Saint Paul? He interprets him on the basis of the question to which his Gospel is the solution. Paul, whom Nietzsche does not distinguish here from Saul, “suffered from a fixed idea, or more clearly from a fixed question which was always present to him and would never rest: what is the Jewish law really concerned with? and, in particular, what is the fulfillment of this law?” Who was Saint Paul and what did he want, that he suffered so? A Pharisee, a zealous defender of the law he desired to satisfy, “voracious for this highest distinction the Jews were able to conceive—this people which had taken the fantasy of moral sublimity higher than any other people and which alone achieved the creation of a holy God, together with the idea of sin as an offence against this holiness”—Saul was not only incapable of fulfilling the law, he was also continuously tempted to transgress it. Was this due to the incitements of the flesh or, more profoundly, to those of the law itself? Must he not have said to himself, and after him Luther, who for that reason was his first true reader: “It is all in vain! The torture of the unfulfilled law cannot be overcome.”5 Torn between the holiness of the law and his sinful conscience, threatened with vanity, Saint Paul turned against the law: “The law was the cross to which he felt himself nailed: how he hated it! how he resented it! how he sought about for a means of destroying it—and no longer to fulfill it in person!”6 Such was the torment of a soul whose desire for distinction, which is to say, for power, required the negation of the law. The vision that blinded Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, where he was going to condemn the disciples of Christ, fulfilled this requirement. Nietzsche relates it as follows. “And at last the liberating idea came to him, together with a vision, as was bound to happen in the case of this epileptic: to him, the zealot of the law who was inwardly tired to death of it, there appeared on a lonely road Christ with the light of God shining in his countenance, and Paul heard the words: ‘why are you persecuting me?’ ”7 While he fails to specify that the vision occurred at noon in a light more splendid than that of the sun, and that Jesus addressed Saul in Hebrew, Nietzsche, whose narrative follows Luke’s account,8 introduces the qualifier “epileptic.” What does this diagnosis mean? To grasp it we need only to turn to the paragraph in [his notes for] Daybreak, where Nietzsche explains that “almost everywhere, it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea,” madness “that bore so visibly the sign of total unfreedom as the convulsions and froth of the epileptic.”9 In short, the grand mal attributed to Saint Paul is the stigmatum of a renewal of values. What did this consist in, and how did Saint Paul interpret the event? “What essentially happened then is rather this: his mind suddenly became clear: ‘it is unreasonable,’ he says to himself, ‘to persecute

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precisely this Christ! For here is the way out, here is perfect revenge, here and nowhere else do I have and hold the destroyer of the law!’ ”10 A sinful power that devastated Saint Paul, the law, by reason of which he hunted down the disciples of Jesus, was henceforth abolished. The epiphany of the glorious Christ makes the law obsolete, “moral despair is as if blown away, destroyed, since morality itself is blown away—namely, fulfilled, there on the Cross!”11 The resurrection of Christ thus allows Saint Paul to triumph over the law. Nietzsche therefore writes: “The tremendous consequences of this notion, this solution to the riddle, whirl before his eyes, all at once he is the happiest of men—the destiny of the Jews—no, of all mankind—seems to him tied to this notion, to this second of his sudden enlightenment, he possesses the idea of ideas, the key of keys, the light of lights; henceforth history revolves around him! For from now on he is the teacher of the destruction of the law!”12 Let us pause at this dramatization. Nietzsche, who understands Saint Paul against the horizon of Judaism, describes his Damascus vision as an act of vengeance that negates a morality, which is to say the set of conditions that make life possible and justify it. However, in taking the appearance of the resurrected Christ as vengeance, it is the resurrection itself that Nietzsche considers to be such. Vengeance does not cease with the destruction of the law; on the contrary, it proceeds and reaches completion in the resurrection of bodies. Thus, in order to determine in what sense the salutary work of God through Christ is vengeance, is reactive—and that is one of the intentions of the present work—it is important to know what was, for Nietzsche, the body according to Saint Paul. In July 1880, reading a study on Paul’s anthropology and its place in the doctrine of salvation—“a masterpiece” he will write to Overbeck13— Nietzsche took extensive notes, which constitute so many drafts of paragraph 68 of Daybreak. Without entering into the details of these texts, where citations and commentaries intertwine, we can say that Nietzsche identifies sinful flesh with sensibility,14 and the body with a form liable to receive, following the death of sensuous flesh, a celestial matter.15 Following Saint Paul himself, Nietzsche seems to conceive the body and its resurrection in a Hellenizing fashion. This interpretation of the foundation of Pauline theology is largely prior to 1880, for, as early as March– April 1865, Nietzsche devoted a few pages to the doctrine of the resurrection and to the Damascus christophany.16 Referring to chapter 15 of first Corinthians, he there grasped the glorious body as already spiritual and celestial, the body of flesh as already natural and terrestrial, and the resurrection on the ground of the physical and metaphysical oppositions of earth and sky, nature and spirit. If it is a given that Paul understands

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the body primarily as the unity of a multiplicity of wills, and secondarily as a form apt to be variously filled, then it seems that Nietzsche does not reach the primary meaning of the Pauline body, but only the derivative one. Let us leave this for a moment, to come to what is most remarkable in this mise en scène of the origin of Christianity: its premonitory value. Indeed, Nietzsche there depicts the conversion of Saint Paul using the same terms that will serve him, one year later, to characterize the upsurge of the thought of eternal recurrence. Is this something fortuitous or the sign of an essential relation? Let us begin by highlighting that which, in regard to its modality as a datum, relates the doctrine of the eternal recurrence to that of the resurrection. As Nietzsche notes from 1865, it is on the route to Damascus, at noontime, in a light more than solar, that Saint Paul saw and heard the Christ. It is while walking through a wood, toward the Lake of Silvaplana, at the foot of an enormous rock set upright like a pyramid,17 that there came to Nietzsche the thought of the return, which marks “high noon for humanity every time.”18 Nietzsche is fully aware of the repetition, since he notes that “the sun of knowledge stands, once again, at high noon.”19 Should we conclude from this that the eternal recurrence was the object of a revelation? In August 1881, immediately upon having set down his thought for the first time, Nietzsche asks himself with an unshakable probity: “Am I speaking as one under the effect of a revelation? Then despise me and do not listen to me—would you still be among those who need gods?”20 This question, addressed to himself and which immediately finds its response, would nonetheless have no sense if the thought of the eternal recurrence were wholly devoid of religious scope. Moreover, would Nietzsche struggle against being considered a founder of a religion if the mode of appearing of the eternal recurrence, which is to say, ultimately, its tenor and its content, did not contain the possibility of such a mistake? As the prophet of his own thought, did he not proclaim what was going to befall him and would never cease happening to him, when, in a paragraph from Daybreak, slightly preceding the one concerning Saint Paul, he explained as follows the birth of religions: “How can someone regard his own opinion about things as a revelation? This is the problem of the origin of religions: on each occasion there was a person in whom this phenomenon was possible. The precondition is that he already believed in the fact of revelation. Then, one day, he suddenly acquires his new idea, and the happiness engendered by a great hypothesis encompassing the universe and all existence enters his consciousness with such a force he does not dare to

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consider himself the creator of such happiness and ascribes the cause of it, and again the cause of the cause of this new idea to his God: as his god’s revelation.”21 Is the eternal recurrence not also a new and sudden thought, whose ownership Nietzsche claims, a hypothesis embracing all things and attended by an intense feeling of joy? Further, in making Christ the negator of the law, Saint Paul had “the thought of thoughts,” says Nietzsche. This thought divides and apportions the history that begins revolving around it. But the eternal recurrence, likewise named “thought of thoughts,”22 cuts history in two, since “from the moment that thought is there, every color is modified and there is a new history,” even “a new hope.”23 After having revolved around the teacher of the destruction of the law, history—but is it the same one, is it another, and what do same and other mean here?—revolves around the “teacher of the greatest doctrine,”24 that of the eternal ring. The parallel is thus too close to be accidental and Nietzsche himself attested to a relationship between the thought of return and Christian theology. On July 21, 1881, he sent from Sils Maria a postcard to Peter Gast, in which, concerning Daybreak, he wrote the following, whose meaning is not simply biographical: “I am aware, dear friend, that in my book, the constant internal debate with Christianity must be unfamiliar to you, even painful; it is nonetheless the best part of the life of the mind that I have effectively known; since my earliest childhood I explored it from many angles; in my heart I believe I have never been vulgar in respect to it. Ultimately, I am the descendant of whole lineages of Christian clerics— forgive me this limitation!”25 Then, after three weeks’ silence, and still from Sils Maria, he proclaims to Gast: “I [am] filled with a new vision far superior to that of other men.”26 Thus it is borne out that the vision of eternal recurrence obtrudes on Nietzsche over the course, if not at the end of a conflict with Christianity. Dating from his childhood and continuing up to the last notes of January 1889, it is no doubt on the horizon (which does not mean the exclusive horizon) of his reflective existence. Therefore we must now consider whether the eternal recurrence is in itself related to Pauline theology and to its ground: the resurrection of bodies. If the essential aspect of a great thought, as Heidegger says precisely of the eternal recurrence, is given in the instant of its upsurge,27 then, whatever the multiple perspectives in which Nietzsche will later persist in unfolding it, what is most specific to the thought of the return should be able to be found in the notes from the summer of 1881. And this applies especially to the first among them, that is, to that note to which Nietzsche himself alludes when, in 1888, in Ecce Homo, he tells the story of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Here is its text:

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The Return of the Same. Project. 1. The incorporation of fundamental errors. 2. The incorporation of passions. 3. The incorporation of knowledge and of the knowledge that foregoes. (Passion of knowledge) 4. The innocent. The individual as experience. The lightening of life, lowering, weakening—transition. 5. The new weight: the eternal recurrence of the same. Infinite importance of our knowledge, of our wandering, of our habits, ways of life for everything to come. What do we do with the rest of our life—we, who have passed the principal part of it in the most fundamental ignorance? We teach the doctrine—it is the strongest way for us to incorporate it. Our kind of beatitude as teacher of the greatest doctrine. Beginning August 1881, Sils Maria, 6000 feet above sea level and well above all things human!—28

Let us begin the examination of this memorial to which, in one way or another, explicitly or implicitly, we will unceasingly return. The eternal recurrence is designated therein as the “new gravitas,” and this definition comes about following a passage, a “transition.” The thought of the eternal recurrence is thus at the source of a distinction drawn between the old and the new. But what have these two adjectives come to qualify, and what is it that needs steadying? The answer is provided by this question: “What do we do with the rest of our life—we, who have passed the principal part of it in the most fundamental ignorance?” The thought of eternal recurrence, as “the heaviest of knowledge,” exacerbates a life lightened and weakened. Consequently, we could not understand this thought without identifying the specific weight of the old life, without explaining the reasons why it ended by losing all its gravity. In the fall of 1881, Nietzsche conceived the first part of his work to come as a “funeral oration to the deceased God”;29 and four years later, a draft entitled The Eternal Recurrence mentions: “First part: Funeral feast of God.”30 Does this mean that God alone gave life its weight? Yes, since the madman who announced his death addresses his auditors with the following interrogative: “Have we lost all weightiness since there is now neither an above nor a below?”31 The eternal recurrence is thus to the dead God what the new weight is to the old one; the “thought of thoughts” answers the “murder of murders,”32 and this act, comparable to none other, inaugurates “a higher history than all history hitherto.”33 Who is this God to whose death the eternal recurrence serves as a counterweight? “God is dead! God remains dead!” cries the madman.

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The addition is decisive and signifies that this death, excluding all resurrection, concerns him whose son died for our sins and was resurrected for our redemption. In paragraph 343 of The Gay Science (the paragraph that opens the fifth book, which takes up after the fourth ended on the eternal recurrence), does Nietzsche not observe that “the greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead,’ that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe”? More clearly still, he warns us, from 1887–88, that “the time is coming, when we will have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years: we shall lose the weight that allowed us to live—for a time we shall no longer know what is out nor in.”34 Need we give examples of this bewilderment that corresponds to our own historical situation, to our own historical condition? The thought of eternal recurrence is thus inseparable from the death of the God that is preceded by no article, the God revealed to the Christians, but first to the Jews, the living God from whom springs life itself, who constitutes the weight of all life, and thus likewise of all sin, that is, of all death. Eternal recurrence, “the mightiest knowledge,”35 is destined to counterbalance the lack of God, the loss of that which was—ever in the words of the madman—“the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned.”36 According to an economy without equivalent or precedent, eternal recurrence is the price paid upon the death of God, the price due, if not to God, at least for God, the eternal price of God. That the death of God concerns the one that Nietzsche calls, following the Bible, “the holiest and the mightiest”37 in no way contradicts his remark that “only the moral God is refuted.”38 On the one hand, Nietzsche speaks of the “Christian moral” God; on the other, and above all, the God revealed in Christ is, as we have seen, an essentially moral God. The death of God is thus not that of one god among others, nor is it that of the god of Plato or Aristotle, but that of God, whose essence it is to outstrip and exhaust all possible divinity. Need we recall—against Nietzsche, who seems at times not to exclude the possibility of “other kinds of gods”39—need we recall the words, striking in their ambiguity, that Yahweh confides to Isaiah: “Before me, no god had been formed, neither shall there be after me.”40 The death of God is henceforth the impossibility of a new god; it is the now finished past of any god to come— and to think, as Heidegger did, that only “one” god could save us now is, at the very least, as much to misunderstand the meaning of God as it is that of his death. The death of the Christian god means the collapse of our world, which for two millennia never ceased revolving around him. Clearly, Nietzsche was not unaware of this collapse, characterizing “the absolute

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change that comes about with the negation of God” in the following way: “We have absolutely no longer any master above us; the old world of values is theological—it is overturned.—More succinctly: there is no higher instance above us: insofar as God could be, we are now ourselves God . . . We have to ascribe to ourselves the attributes we ascribed to God . . .”41 But how could we appropriate the attributes of God, and particularly his power, without triumphing over that power, without surpassing it, without incorporating it? Directly or not, everything that follows will attempt to answer this question. The relationship of the doctrine of recurrence to Christianity is brought out in a host of notes from the summer of 1881, where the former is determined through a confrontation with the latter. Eternal recurrence will find its first partisans among the weakest of beings, but “the first adepts prove nothing against a doctrine. I believe the first Christians, with their ‘virtues,’ were the most unbearable of peoples.”42 Eternal recurrence will unfold its power only after a long period of time: “What do the two millennia during which Christianity preserved itself represent! The mightiest thought will require thousands of years—for a long time, a very long time, it shall have to remain small and powerless!”43 Eternal recurrence is the object of a belief: “This doctrine is mild toward those who do not believe in it, it is without hell or threats. Whosoever does not believe, has in his consciousness a fugitive life.”44 The thought of eternal recurrence is that of a possibility: “If circular repetition is but a likelihood or a possibility, then even the thought of a possibility can shake us profoundly and transform us, and not only our sensations and particular expectations! What did not fail to result from the possibility of eternal damnation!”45 Or again: eternal recurrence is a “hypothesis in the long run more powerful than any other belief—assuming it remains stable much longer than a religious dogma.”46 While the thought of eternal recurrence is considered from a different angle in each of these notes, each one enriched by interrelated determinations, it is always with a view to comparing its power and necessary duration with that of Christianity. Is the doctrine of eternal recurrence essentially religious, then? When Nietzsche cautions, “Let us keep from teaching such a doctrine as a spontaneous religion,”47 his warning concerns only this spontaneous character, and not that of a religion, which is decisively asserted in another note: “I would defend my thought in advance! It must be the religion of the freest, the gayest, the most sublime spirits—a lovable verdant glen between the ice and the pure sky!”48 But this religion could not be inscribed into the landscape of Engadin—to which Nietzsche says he owes his life49—if its contents did not warrant it or differ essentially from that of the Christian religion, whose landscape is altogether different.50

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This is why Nietzsche took pains to distinguish the eternity of recurrence from the eternity of the life resurrected: “Let us impress upon our lives the image of eternity! That thought contains more than all the religions that hold life here below in contempt as something fugitive, and which have taught us to look toward an other, indeterminate life.”51 To think eternal recurrence, to live according to this thought, which makes a new way of living, a new life, possible, is not “to direct one’s gaze toward distant unknown beatitudes, benedictions and graces, but rather to live in such a way that we should want to live again, and want to live in this way throughout eternity!—Our task summons us at each instant.”52 If the doctrine of eternal recurrence is religious, and for the moment nothing permits us to assert this, it is not religious in the Christian sense of the term. In comparison to the religion revealed in Christ, the thought of eternal return is not religious. Yet do the death and resurrection of Christ forever exhaust the meaning of all religion? Are there not godless religions, and is it not, on the contrary, because the thought of thoughts modifies the essence of religion itself that Nietzsche can qualify eternal recurrence as a “religion of religions”?53 Does this designation not also point toward the nature of the relationship between eternal recurrence and Christianity? If the thought of thoughts is the thought that grounds all thought, then the religion of religions is the religion that surpasses all religion. How can the religion of recurrence surpass that of Christ? A brief note from the summer of 1881 states: “A wholly other eternalization—glory moves in a false dimension. We must introduce into it eternal depth, eternal repeatability.”54 Nietzsche thus opposes the glory and eternity of eternal return to the eternal glory of the Holy Spirit, as the true opposed to the false. But what is glory? Glory is the weight and power peculiar to the manifestation of God,55 and for Saint Paul, who speaks of “the eternal weight of glory” in the resurrected life, glory and power are synonyms.56 Consequently, to assert that glory has unfolded in a false dimension is to lighten, to weaken, and to devalue the power of God revealed in Christ, while subordinating it to another, higher, truer power. The thought of eternal recurrence exceeds the testamentary revelation, and from the moment this thought is thought [dès l’instant où cette pensée est pensée], God dies and remains dead since, by its essence, this moment repeats eternally. The appearing of the return is the disappearing of God, and if the grandeur of this double event is incommensurable with the course of history, that is because this event is, paradoxically and like the word of God himself, datable in time and iterable throughout eternity. What does this devaluation of God’s power mean? Divine power is the resurrection of the dead. Consequently, to say that glory moves for-

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ward in a false dimension is to say that the resurrection of the carnal body as a spiritual one, or the resurrection of an earthly body as a celestial one, fails to grant the body its true power, that it is a false resurrection, or a resurrection unto a false life. But how can we utter such a judgment without having opened beforehand the possibility of a “resurrection” to the true life, of a sur-resurrection in the very sense in which Nietzsche speaks of sur-Christianity? And how should this possibility not be confused with eternal recurrence itself? Let us go back to the memorial of August 1881, which established a divide between two ways of living. Even more than of life, Nietzsche speaks there of incorporation and, following Heidegger, we must take this term as the “key word [Leitwort]” of the project.57 The incorporation of the new doctrine in fact replaces the incorporation of fundamental errors, of passions, of knowledge, and even of the knowledge that abjures. Ensuring the passage from one incorporation to another, from one body to another, “the mightiest thought”58 is liable to change the body, bestowing on it its own power. Eternal recurrence is thus knowledge that makes possible a modification of the body. Should it, however, be understood in relation to the Pauline, the Christian dogma of the resurrection of bodies? Doubtlessly so, even if this reference does not permit us to characterize the thought of eternal return in a positive fashion. In 1885, Nietzsche—who, we repeat, understood Christianity on the basis of Paul’s Gospel—defined his task in this way: “to overcome everything that is Christian by way of something that is sur-Christian, and not simply by ridding ourselves of it—for the Christian doctrine was the counter-doctrine that opposed the Dionysian doctrine.”59 The Dionysian doctrine of eternal recurrence could be anti-Christian and sur-Christian only by being grounded on a sur-resurrection, since Christianity was itself grounded upon the resurrection. From this it follows that eternal recurrence is the knowledge which, by opening the possibility of a new incorporation, invalidates the resurrection in Christ and gives to the expression “the eternal weight of glory” an entirely other meaning.

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4

Circulus Vitiosis Deus?

Should we take this to mean that the doctrine of eternal recurrence does not concern philosophy? Not at all. But if Greek philosophy and revealed religion rest—as will become progressively apparent—on the same type of values, then the revaluation, inseparable from eternal recurrence, cannot concern the one without concerning the other. It is sufficient in this regard to refer to paragraph 56 of Beyond Good and Evil, the text in which, according to Heidegger, the thought of thoughts reaches “to the very limits and supreme heights of what can be thought.”1 A complete understanding of this “third communication of the doctrine of recurrence,” which comes after paragraph 341 of The Gay Science and after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, requires that we know its context, as Heidegger again says though he perhaps leaves it behind too hastily himself.2 This occurs in Beyond Good and Evil in the section entitled “What Is Religious?” Of itself this placement indicates that the thought of recurrence cannot proceed without a new determination of the essence of religion and, consequently, of its relations with philosophy. Paragraph 56 of Beyond Good and Evil is approximately at the heart of the section devoted to the essence of religion. Let us therefore examine what comes before it. Nietzsche begins in defining the Christian faith in a crucified God as a “revaluation of all the values of antiquity”3 or again, aristocratic ones. This revaluation is not only of Jewish origin, but also— though not equally—of Greek origin. This is because, while it allowed itself progressively to be invaded by a servile fear, the religiosity of the first Greeks was characterized by “an enormous abundance of gratitude,” which bore witness to their high nobility. In this way, early Greek religion ultimately prepared the way for Christianity and its ideal of holiness.4 Now, this holiness amounts to an enigma, from which “the most recent philosophy—Schopenhauer’s,” still draws its source. “How is the denial of the will possible? How is the saint possible? This really seems to have been the question over which Schopenhauer became a philosopher and began.”5 That is to say that the metaphysics of the will and German Idealism, whose inheritor is Schopenhauer, belong to the horizon of revealed religion. In what sense and for whom is the saint an enigma? If “the most powerful human beings have still bowed worshipfully before the saint as 70

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the riddle of self-conquest and deliberate final renunciation,” this is first because they recognized in the force of his will “their own strength and delight in dominion.” But it is further, and above all, because the saint inspired suspicion in them: “Such an enormity of denial, of anti-nature will not have been desired for nothing . . . There may be a reason for it, some very great danger about which the ascetic, thanks to his secret comforters and visitors, might have inside information.” What is this danger wherein all the grandeur and enigma of the saint reside? “In short, the powerful of the world learned a new fear before him; they sensed a new power, a strange, as yet unconquered enemy—it was the ‘will to power’ that made them stop before the saint. They had to ask him—”6 The enigma of holiness is thus that of turning the will to power against oneself. Considering the context in which the will to power is introduced—just prior to the third statement of the doctrine of return— we must suppose this doctrine capable of putting an end to the reversal of the will to power. What could this mean if not that eternal recurrence opens a new history, since the will to power is “the primordial fact of all history”?7 It is nevertheless impossible to grasp the novelty and superiority of the history opened by the thought of recurrence without first determining what the old history was. Nietzsche applies himself to this in the four paragraphs preceding and preparing the proclamation of eternal recurrence. The first paragraph treats of the greatest “sin against the spirit,” which weighs on the European conscience: the gathering into one and the same Bible of the New Testament—the book of grace—and the “Old Testament”—the book of divine justice.8 This gathering, and its principle, presuppose Saint Paul’s theology and, consequently, are founded on the resurrection of bodies. The third paragraph characterizes the new philosophy—skeptical in matters of the theory of knowledge—as “anti-Christian.”9 Now, on the one hand, this epistemological skepticism is in certain respects that of Nietzsche himself. On the other hand, a philosophy can only be anti-Christian by opposing the Christianization of philosophy and the values that permitted this. In short, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is directed against what we will call the great coincidence between revealed religion and metaphysics; a coincidence that only the latter can bring to light and to which we will return later. The second and fourth paragraphs concern the death of God. In the one, Nietzsche claims that today, “ ‘the Father,’ in God, has been thoroughly refuted; ditto ‘the Judge,’ ‘the Rewarder.’ ”10 In the other paragraph, the death of God is interpreted as the highest stage of religious cruelty: “To sacrifice God for the nothing—this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation that is now coming up:

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all of us already know something of this.—”11 Having thus recalled the content and position of the four paragraphs, it is possible to identify the history the thought of recurrence aims to overcome. It is holy history, of which the death of God is the dark but true apocalypse. Into this history comes that of philosophy, in a secondary, which is to say servile way—and this, from the time of the constitution of the Christian Bible. Now, in noting that “the religious instinct is indeed in the process of growing powerfully—but the theistic satisfaction it refuses with deep suspicion”12 or again in specifying that anti-Christian in no way amounts to anti-religious,13 Nietzsche refuses to reduce religion to its reactive and nihilist type alone. For this reason, we should expect that the thought of recurrence overturns the hierarchical relations between philosophy and religion, and confers on philosophy a wholly new sovereignty over religion. In acquainting ourselves with the context to which the third statement of the doctrine of return belongs, we have determined its effective domain; viz., the common history of metaphysics and revealed religion, and thus laid the ground for its interpretation. Here, then, is paragraph 56 of Beyond Good and Evil: “Whoever has endeavored with some enigmatic longing, as I have, to think pessimism through to its depths and to liberate it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which it has finally presented itself to our century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauer’s philosophy; whoever has really looked into, down into the most world-denying of all possible ways of thinking— beyond good and evil and no longer, like Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion of morality—may just thereby, without really meaning to do so, have opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo, not only to himself but to the whole play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle but at bottom to him who precisely needs this spectacle—and makes it necessary: because again and again he needs himself—and makes himself necessary——What? And this wouldn’t be—circulus vitiosus deus?” In one long, single sentence, Nietzsche describes the transition from one ideal to another, from one mode of life and thought to another. But is this really what is essential, and will it suffice to change the essence of religion? To answer this, we should follow the movement that leads from pessimism to eternal recurrence. What should we understand by this pessimism whose final expression is Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will, yet whose “quintessential forms” are encountered in

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Asia?14 Pessimism is “a preliminary form of nihilism,”15 which culminates in Christianity and the Pauline conception of God. The initial version of paragraph 56 of Beyond Good and Evil bears this out since, after defining eternal recurrence there as “a way of thinking, the most high-spirited, liveliest and most world-affirming of all possible ways of thinking,” Nietzsche adds: “I found that God is the most annihilating and hostile to life of all thoughts; and it is only through the enormous obscurity of the dear pious ones and the metaphysicians of all time that knowledge of this ‘truth’ had so long to be awaited.”16 But whence can this knowledge come if not from eternal recurrence itself? Is it not solely in light of the most affirmative thought that the most negating one can be recognized as such? In other words, and more profoundly: the moment the Judeo-Christian God is the apogee of negation, should not eternal recurrence, as the apogee of affirmation, be called, in a higher and thus entirely different sense, Deus? The Latin expression circulus vitiosus deus thus answers the following one: deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.17 The thought of return here reaches the ultimate limit and supreme degree of what is thinkable in it, because it proves to surpass God himself in power. If this were not the case, then never could The Anti-Christ have reproached Europeans for “not having repudiated the Christian God”; for “having failed since then to create any new God!” Never could he exclaim, burning with a brilliant impatience in which all his grandeur and nobility are concentrated: “Almost two millennia and not a single new God! But still, and as if existing by right, like an ultimate and maximum of the Godcreating force, of the creator spiritus in man, this pitiable God of Christian monotono-theism!”18 Yet is it not absurd, even quite mad, to consider eternal recurrence as a thought mightier than the God of revelation? Outside the fact that madness is a moment of all true thought, this is indeed Nietzsche’s conception. To be convinced of this, it suffices to read the paragraph immediately following the statement of eternal recurrence, where Nietzsche characterizes, as discretely as rigorously, the relationship between the circulus vitiosus deus and the Christian religion. With the strength of his spiritual eye and insight grows distance and, as it were, the space around man: his world becomes more profound; ever new stars, ever new riddles and images become visible for him. Perhaps everything on which the spirit’s eye has exercised its acuteness and thoughtfulness was nothing but an occasion for this exercise, a playful matter, something for children and those who are childish. Perhaps the day will come when the most solemn concepts which have caused the most fights and suffering, the concepts “God” and “sin,” will seem no

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more important to us than a child’s toy and a child’s pain seem to an old man—and perhaps “the old man” will then be in need of another toy and another pain—still child enough, an eternal child!19

In saying that the world ordered according to the eternal return is to that which gravitated around God, what the old man is to the child that he once was, is Nietzsche not claiming that the circulus vitiosus deus is deeper, more enigmatic, richer, and, in a word, more powerful than that God before whom we have sinned, before whom we have been sinners from the beginning? The conception of a thought more powerful than the old God implies ipso facto a modification of the meaning of religion and of its relations with philosophy. This is brought out in all the paragraphs following the declaration of eternal recurrence. Before we examine them, we must forestall a misinterpretation. The circulus vitiosus deus should not be thought of as an additional metaphysical god or on the horizon of the Judeo-Christian determination of God, as it refers the one and the other back to their common axiological ground, to their coincidence, and their simultaneous decline: to nihilism. What meaning does the doctrine of eternal recurrence confer, then, on religion? After having explained that modernity teaches disbelief and destroys the religious instincts,20 after having made of homines religiosi the greatest of all artists because they embellished man at the cost of truth, whose inversion and negation they wanted;21 after having understood Christ, who preached the love of men as the love of God and “remained forever venerable and holy”— as he who “up to now flew highest and erred most magnificently”22— in short, after having shown that the problem of religion has never in truth been posed for want of a commensurate knowledge, Nietzsche was able, thanks to eternal recurrence, to determine the meaning of religion and of its relations to the philosophy henceforth irreducible to metaphysics, and finally relieved of its status as ancilla theologiae [theology’s handmaiden].23 “The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits—as the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the over-all development of man—this philosopher will make use of religions for his project of cultivation and education, just as he will make use of whatever political and economic states are at hand.”24 In light of eternal recurrence, of the most powerful knowledge, religions, in the eyes of the philosopher, are but means toward ends and values that vary according to the rank of those who set them down and establish them. The doctrine of eternal recurrence is therefore not a new religion in the Christian or Buddhist sense of the term, and while

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Nietzsche calls it the “religion of religions,”25 the first occurrence of the word has absolutely not the same meaning as the second. The “religion of religions” qua essence of religion has nothing religious to it in the sense of those “moral religions”26 of which it is also the essence. It is not one religion more, but on the contrary one religion less, since being incommensurable to all ancient religions, it is their tutelary and sovereign power. What then is religion, when it does “not want to be a means of education and cultivation in the philosopher’s hand, but [reigns on the basis of itself] and [in] its own sovereign way,” or again, what were religions and to what did they contribute, particularly Christianity, before eternal recurrence? Nietzsche’s answer is as clear as possible. While underlining the inestimable benefits that Europe owes to Israel and to Christianity, he asserts that in the final analysis, “the sovereign religions we have had so far are among the chief causes that have kept the type ‘man’ on a lower rung.” Indeed, claiming for itself a sovereignty that eternal recurrence restores and confers, as we shall see, to philosophy alone, the Christian religion sets “all evaluations on their head,”27 works through a revaluation of all aristocratic values, and thereby, makes life diseased since it turns it against itself. Eternal recurrence is thus indissociable from a new revaluation liable to put an end to the will to power’s turn against itself, a reversal of which one of the highest forms is holiness. Thus is attested on the basis of the thought of thoughts—such as the third section of Beyond Good and Evil states it, and when considered as a whole and according to its logic—the solidarity among the fundamental concepts of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which, as a critique of holiness and of the holy lie,28 has as its purpose to raise philosophical knowledge, freed of all theological servitude, above God, whose power and wisdom were revealed in Jesus Christ. But how does eternal recurrence develop a power superior to that of God? As long as we have not answered this question, all that has preceded will remain ungrounded. To say that the power of the circulus vitiosus deus surpasses that of God is, in a certain fashion, to compare them, supposing that they impact the same thing, even if in different ways. But how and on what does the power of the God of revelation operate? According to the gospel of him who laid its foundations, this power applies to bodies such that they “walk in a new life.”29 The resurrection of the body is the very enactment of divine power and “the expression ‘resurrection of the dead’ is for Saint Paul but a definition of the word ‘God.’ ”30 We should determine, then, the way in which eternal recurrence makes possible another “new life”31 and the creation of a superior body, which

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together invalidate, render powerless, and destroy the life and resurrection in Christ. This is the task to which the present study is devoted—a task whose properly philosophical character remains uncertain as long as we have not specified the relations between the metaphysics of the will and revealed theology, the word of God and that of Being.

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Part 2

The Shadow of God

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1

The Double Status of the Body

That Nietzsche’s thought should refer to the economy of salvation whose foundation was laid by the Pauline teaching in no way signifies that this thought is theological or religious in nature. A thought may have theological implications without necessarily being encompassed in the sphere of the theology at which it aims. Nietzsche did not want merely to maintain the rank of philosophy but above all to raise it, and this is one of the reasons why he engaged in an unprecedented struggle with the revelation whose power, i.e., grandeur, he knew he must never or almost never underestimate. In effect, the German philosophy whose polemical inheritor he was, and which was marked by the names of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer—this philosophy is “a cunning theology.” The Anti-Christ proclaims, “it is necessary to say whom we feel to be our antithesis—the theologians and all that has theologian blood in its veins—our entire philosophy.”1 However, since it is above all by way of Schopenhauer that Nietzsche came to the metaphysics of German Idealism, it is appropriate to begin by reading The World as Will and Representation, which, weaknesses not notwithstanding, “gathers up in one all the basic directions of the Western interpretation of beings as a whole.”2 In this way we will bring out the theological character of this thought. Schopenhauer’s work, whose title recapitulates the entirety of modern philosophy, opens with the following proposition: “The world is my representation.” If this thesis is valid, according to Schopenhauer, for every living and knowing being, then it is exclusively in humans that it can become the object of reflective consciousness. As the pure correlation of the subject and the object, representation is thus “the form of all possible and imaginable experience, more general than the other forms, time, space, and causality.”3 From the moment that the I think, understood as an I represent to myself a representation, is set as the principle of philosophy, no truth is more evident, certain, and absolute than that which affirms the essential connection between the knowing subject and the objects known, between the subject as “whole and undivided in every representing being”4 and those objects that are necessarily multiple because subordinate to the a priori forms of time, space, and causality. This thesis from Descartes and Berkeley, and recognized, as Schopenhauer adds, by the philosophy of the Vedanta school, nevertheless 79

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results from an abstraction—as attested by the “internal resistance”5 that we feel when taking the world for a pure and simple representation. The thesis must therefore be completed by another truth, more originary than the first one: “the world is my will.” But what does this statement mean? How does one come to it? At the end of what argument or what experience? And if it is only representations that constitute the initial datum, then what is the representation (or the object) apt to lead us to posit that the intuitive world is—beyond representation—will? Representations are distributed into classes, an inventory of which was established by Schopenhauer’s dissertation On the Four-fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. If this principle expresses, in the most general way, the necessary connection between representations, its form will not fail to vary according to the nature of the representations subjected to it. Schopenhauer thus distinguishes (1) intuitive representations, which are complete and empirical (real objects) and connected by the law of causality or the sufficient reason of becoming. (2) Abstract representations, representations of representations, concepts, connected by the principle of sufficient reason of knowledge, according to which judgments should be grounded. (3) Pure, formal representations, i.e., space and time, whose reciprocal relationship of parts, that is position and succession, is determined by the principle of sufficient reason of being. Finally, (4) and unique in its genre, the immediate representation of the internal sense, or the subject of willing qua immediate object for the subject of knowledge, whose acts obey the law of motivation, or the principle of sufficient reason of action. Understanding, reason, pure sensibility, the internal sense or self-consciousness, are the subjective correlates of each one of Schopenhauer’s four classes or representations. Intuitive and complete representations—matter subjected to causality—constitute the world of experience offered to knowledge. But to know is to know the cause from the effect. That means first, with sensibility presupposing matter and causality, that empirical intuition consists in the knowledge of the cause starting from the effect, by means of the understanding; in a word, that it is intellectual. It further means that no intuition of the world would be possible without a first effect serving as the point of departure to the operations of the understanding. What then is the representation immediately given, to which the understanding is applied, that is to say, the law of causality, and whence proceeds knowledge qua totality of representations? It is the body whose sensations are apprehended by the understanding as effects referring necessarily to causes. Subjective sensation thereby becomes objective intuition, and the world an object of knowledge. “The body,” writes Schopenhauer, “is for us immediate object, in other words,

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that representation which forms the starting-point of the subject’s knowledge, since it itself with its immediately known changes precedes the application of the law of causality, and thus furnishes this with the first data. The whole essence of matter consists, as we have shown, in its action. But there is cause and effect only for the understanding, which is nothing but their subjective correlative of these. The understanding, however, could never be applied if there were not something else from which it starts. Such a something is mere sensuous sensation, the immediate consciousness of the changes in the body, by virtue of which this body is [its] immediate object.”6 Such a mode of argument, appealing so strangely to a Kantian vocabulary, immediately raises a problem. Is it possible, in effect, to make my body an object, even an immediate one, before the intervention of the understanding? In other words, if the body stands at the origin of objectivity, can it then itself be an object and, in qualifying it as an immediate object serving as the point of departure for objective and intellectual intuition, does Schopenhauer not commit from the outset a petition of principle? To be sure, he will specify, regarding the expression “immediate object,” that “the conception of object, however, is not to be taken here in the fullest sense, for through this immediate knowledge of the body, which precedes the application of the understanding and is mere sensation, the body [Leib] itself does not exist really as object, but first the bodies [Körper] acting on it.”7 Seeing the difficulty, however, does not suffice to resolve it, and if my own body is known objectively only through the application of the law of causality to the relations among its organs, then the question remains of knowing whence comes the immediate objectivity of the first organ, the affection of which is understood as the effect of a second organ, which is its cause. The aporia is not without implications, when the body is the point of departure of knowledge through causality, which connects only objects, and when it is the obligatory mediator of every objective intuition. The body is thus the immediate representation that opens our access to the ordered set of representations. Yet is the world only representation, or again something else that would no longer be a representation? Before responding, we must justify the question. Representation is the fundamental form of consciousness and, by distinguishing intuitive representations from abstract representations, Schopenhauer makes the first into the content of the second. Consequently, if abstract representation is a form that contains intuitive representation, then should we not inquire about the content of intuitive representation itself? It goes without saying that the latter could not be representative or objective, and hence that it is inac-cessible to the red thread that is the principle of sufficient reason.

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It would nevertheless be impossible to reach the non-representational being of the world (and the being of the world is, according to Schopenhauer, the sole theme of philosophy)8 without some representation that permits us to exceed representation toward that which differs radically from it. “The meaning that I am looking for of the world that stands before me simply as my representation, or the transition from it as mere representation of the knowing subject to whatever it may be besides this, could never be found if the investigator himself were nothing more than the purely knowing subject (a winged cherub without a body).”9 It is therefore because the subject of knowledge, the philosopher, is neither cherubic and incorporeal but rather incorporated and individuated hic et nunc, that it is possible to pass beyond representation. The body is not only a representation that the subject has, but likewise one that the subject is, and if its movements appeared only in a representational form, then they would be as foreign and external to me as those of any other body. That this is not the case proves that my body is offered to me in two ways: “it is given in intellectual intuition as representation, as an object among objects, subject to the laws of these objects. But it is also given in quite a different way, namely as what is known immediately, and denoted by the word will.”10 My body is representation and will; the subject of knowledge is identical with that of willing. The identity of the body and the will is, in Schopenhauer’s view, “the miracle” for which his entire work becomes (or at least would like to be) the explanation. Stricto sensu, this identity is indemonstrable, since it is an absolutely immediate knowledge [connaissance], whose truth resides not in some relationship between representations, but in the intuitive relation with that which differs totally from them. In light of this, the assimilation of the body and the will constitutes “philosophical truth kath’ exokhen.”11 The body is thus distinguished from all other objects because it is an immediate representation at the starting point of knowledge, and because it is known in two ways that are heterogeneous to each other. The question then arises whether it is the only possible object of this double grasp or again, whether all objects are not representation and will. “But whether the objects known to the individual only as representations are yet, like his own body, phenomena of a will, is . . . the proper meaning of the question.”12 In short, does the body manifest the unrepresentable essence of all representations, the being-in itself of all phenomena? How to answer this question when it is impossible in principle, save in the case of my own body, to pass through representational appearances in order to arrive at the thing-in itself beyond the phenomenon? We resist taking our body as a pure and simple representation because we

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know it internally as will. It is therefore not from representation but from the will (whose affections are pleasure and pain) that my body draws the reality I attribute to it. Consequently, should we not impute the reality we reserve for the representation of the world—as when, for example, we distinguish it from a dream—to the will, since outside of representation and will we cannot think anything? Such is my body, and such, the world—and it is by way of analogy that Schopenhauer posits that the essence of every phenomenon, the thing in itself, is will. But in naming the thing in itself will, do we not understand it from one of its phenomena? We could entertain this objection if it were possible to do otherwise; if philosophical knowledge could do without a red thread. This is not the case, and we could not conceive the thing in itself without representing it. However, since the representation of the will can be either immediate or not, it is graduated, and it will be enough to designate the thing in itself according to the most transparent of its manifestations, and to choose as our red thread the phenomenon that is “the most distinct, the most developed, the most directly enlightened by knowledge”13—all of these, conditions filled by the human will, which the body makes visible. These qualifications are accompanied consequently by an extension of the concept of the will that goes well beyond the merely reflective, motivated, and reasonable one: “Before all things,” Schopenhauer warns, “one must learn to distinguish will [Wille] from free choice [Willkür], and see that the former can exist without the latter. This, of course, presupposes my whole philosophy. The will is called free choice where it is illuminated by knowledge, and when therefore motives, hence representations, are the causes that move it.”14 In other words, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics is founded on the radical separation of the will and of knowledge. The body is therefore not only the starting point of empirical and etiological science, but likewise the red thread of metaphysical knowledge. If, in a general fashion, we understand the cogito to be the cardinal and preferential theme of philosophy since Descartes, for Schopenhauer it will take the following form: body I am, a proposition in which it is the body that gives its meaning to the I am. Schopenhauer explains and justifies this methodological privilege of the body in a text worth citing because Nietzsche will himself take up its argument and terminology. After having qualified as an error the method that consists in proceeding from simple and general phenomena to elucidate complex and particular ones, Schopenhauer goes on to say, “but we—who are here aiming not at etiology but at philosophy, that is to say, not at a relative but at unconditioned knowledge of the nature of the world—take the opposite course, and start from what is immediately and most completely known

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and absolutely familiar to us, from what lies nearest to us, in order to understand what is known to us only from a distance, one-sidedly, and indirectly. From the most powerful, most significant, and most distinct phenomenon, we seek to learn to understand the weaker and less complete. With the exception of my own body, only one side of all things is known to me; namely, that of representation. Their inner nature remains sealed to me and is a profound secret, even when I know all the causes on which their changes ensue. Only from a comparison with what goes on within me when my body performs an action from a motive that moves me, with what is the inner nature of my own changes determined by external grounds or reasons, can I obtain an insight into the way in which those inanimate bodies change under the influence of causes, and thus understand what is their inner nature. Knowledge of the cause of this inner nature’s manifestation tells me only the rule of its appearance in time and space, and nothing more. I can do this, because my body is the only object of which I know not merely the one side, that of the representation, but also the other, that is called will.”15 As a guiding theme of philosophical research, the body is thus the object starting from which it is possible to reach the meaning of any object’s being [sens d’être], including that of the world, itself. Clearly, the choice of such a theme is not arbitrary but grounded on the determination of being to which it leads. Schopenhauer substitutes the body for consciousness, because representation derives from the will, of which it is simply the objectification. This substitution is legitimate insofar as it never deviates from the principle according to which every explanation should go from the most powerful, the richest and clearest phenomenon to the weakest, the poorest and most obscure one. In this way, the description of the body—characterizing as it does the relations between will and representation—ought to allow us to secure the status of knowledge. Before following this description in detail, we must emphasize one point. Schopenhauer is in agreement with Kant when he maintains that no representation allows us to know things in themselves, but he opposes Kant when he asserts that the knowing subject also belongs to the things to be known and even that, among these things, the subject is the only such thing whose being in itself is directly given as will, outside all representation. The immediate consequence of this thesis is that the human essence does not reside in consciousness or in knowledge [la conscience ou la connaissance], but in the will. In thus subordinating the understanding to the will, whose objectification is the body, Schopenhauer—who claims he is putting an end to an error whose history is coextensive with that of philosophy itself 16—necessarily attributes knowledge to a particular organ, the brain. Indeed, if the will is originary and metaphysical,

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then knowledge is secondary and can only be physical, better, cerebral. This identification of the understanding with the brain, which ruins all transcendental idealism, is founded on the metaphysical priority of the will and for this reason constitutes a major premise of Schopenhauerian doctrine. Following the guiding thread of the body, and in order to determine the relations between representation and will, it is apposite to begin by examining those between the brain and the organism, since “that which in self-consciousness, and hence subjectively, is the intellect, presents itself in the consciousness of other things, and hence objectively, as the brain; and that which in self-consciousness, and hence subjectively, is the will, presents itself in the consciousness of other things, and hence objectively, as the entire organism.”17 The brain, including the spinal cord and the nervous system, is embedded in the organism that feeds it, yet in whose preservation it does not participate directly. It is thus a parasite.18 What then is the “somatic function”19 of this parasite? It “controls the relations with the external world; this alone is its task, and in this way it discharges its debt to the organism that nourishes it, since the latter’s existence is conditioned by the external relations.”20 The brain is a necessary parasite—a parasite because it lives off of a host that can live without it, necessary because this host needs it to live in the external world. Qualifying the brain in this way means that knowledge is always in service to the will, that knowledge is essentially servile. Can we describe in a more detailed fashion the function of the neuro-cerebral apparatus? No doubt we can, but in turning toward the organism itself. The will, which it objectifies, is not subjectively perceived as the constant substrate of its movements, for self-consciousness is subject to the sole form of time that, when united with that of space, then makes possible a substantial permanence. We therefore know the will only through its successive acts: the contractions of the muscles of the body. If muscular irritability is the immediate objectification of the will, there is nevertheless no contraction without excitation. How then can excitations unleash contractions? Schopenhauer explains the process in this way: the will is immediately present in the muscles of the body, as “a continuous tendency to activity in general.”21 For this tendency to externalize itself in movement, the latter must receive some direction that only the nervous system can impose on it. In effect, irritability, in itself indifferent to any direction, cannot alone give rise to movement, which, if deprived of direction, would be indistinguishable from rest. It is thus from the activity of the nervous system [activité nerveuse] that muscular irritability receives the direction that makes its realization possible as bodily movement. However, the nerves, which unleash muscular

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contractions by way of excitation, themselves belong to the cerebrospinal system or to the neuro-vegetative one. In the first case, when the nerve is afferent to the brain, the contraction is a conscious and motivated act of will; in the second case, when the nerve is afferent to the intercostal nerve [grand sympathique], the contraction is an unconscious, reflexive act of the will. The distinction between these two types of acts immediately raises a question: why are certain bodies endowed with consciousness? Schopenhauer answers, “As I have often explained, the necessity of consciousness is brought about by the fact that, in consequence of an organism’s enhanced complication and thus of its more manifold and varied needs, the acts of its will must be guided by motives, no longer by mere stimuli.”22 Consciousness is therefore proper to complex organisms in which, as essentially one, it ensures the centralization of motives among which the will chooses and determines itself. In thus making consciousness the foyer of cerebral activity, Schopenhauer identifies it at the same time with the synthetic unity of apperception: “That point of unity of consciousness, or the theoretical ego, is exactly Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception on which all representations are ranged as pearls on a string, and by virtue of which ‘I think,’ as the thread of the string of pearls, ‘must be capable of accompanying all our representations.’ ”23 Now, the synthetic unity of apperception is the supreme principle of every usage of the understanding, that is to say, of any possible knowledge, and by assimilating it to the foyer of cerebral activity, Schopenhauer confirms the subordination of the I think to the body, and that of knowledge to life and to the will. Let us return to our description of the organism. The muscles in which the will is objectified are themselves “the product and the work of the blood’s solidification”; they are “only blood that has become congealed, or as it were clotted or crystallized.”24 Schopenhauer defends this thesis with the help of the following considerations: (1) muscles are made of blood, since the latter absorbs without modification their fibrin and the matter that gives them their color. (2) The force that transforms blood into muscle is none other than that which, later on, moves the muscles. The contractions of the heart are, effectively, independent of the cerebrospinal system and the circulation of the blood is a movement that, precisely like that of the will, is spontaneous and originary. As the “primary fluid of the organism,”25 the blood consequently determines the entire form of the body and is the site—if difficult to imagine—in which the will is most immediately manifested in representation. After having raised blood to the dignity of the primary phenomenon of the thing in itself, Schopenhauer resumes in this way his whole interpretation of the body: “From all this it follows that the will objectifies itself most immedi-

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ately in the blood as that which originally creates and forms the organism, perfects and completes it through growth, and afterwards continues to maintain it both by the regular renewal of all the parts and by the extraordinary restoration of such as happen to be injured. The first products of the blood are its own vessels, and then the muscles, in the irritability of which the will makes itself known to self-consciousness; also with these the heart, which is at the same time vessel and muscle, and is therefore the true center and primum mobile of all life. But for individual life and continued existence in the external world, the will requires two subsidiary systems, one to govern and order its inner and outer activity, and the other constantly to renew the mass of the blood; it thus requires a controller and a sustainer. Therefore the will creates for itself the nervous and the intestinal systems. Hence the functiones animales (sensuous or nervous functions) and the functiones naturales (metabolism) are associated in a subsidiary way with the functiones vitales (circulation of the blood), which are the most original and essential, which are the most original and essential.”26 Taken as a whole, this description is not without a serious aporia, which already came to light under the question of whether the body was conceivable as an immediate object and this, by way of the application of the law of causality to the relations among its various organs. Indeed, if the will is absolutely one and unique, then the body in which it is objectified is constituted, for its part, by a multiplicity of organs whose functions differ. How, consequently, can the single indivisible will divide itself between “the will-to-know, [which] objectively perceived, is the brain, just as the will-to-walk, [which] objectively perceived, is the foot, and the willto-grasp, the hand . . . etc.”?27 Would it not be necessary—and above all in order to be able to account for the plurality of organs—to relinquish the primordial hypothesis about the uniqueness of the will and attribute to it an internal principle of differentiation? How, when Schopenhauer argues at the same time that the will is tied to no particular organ28 and that the heart is its “symbol and synonym,”29 could this will be “that which really moves and forms”30 without being articulated? Or again: if the will is the “inner nature of the force that manifests itself,”31 then must he not reduce it in order to render it capable of information and organization? It is not possible at this point to answer these questions. We will return to them later on, when we discuss the will to power as an organizing principle.

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2

The Self-Negation of the Will

Using the body as our guiding thread, we have thus learned that the will was absolutely one, and knowledge its instrument. The foregoing discussion notwithstanding, is it possible to liberate knowledge from the yoke of the will? If knowledge is knowledge of the will in the subjective genitive sense, then can it become this in an objective sense as well? Moreover, since the will is the being of the world, and the latter the exclusive theme of philosophy, to seek to know the former, the will, is to look for the conditions of possibility of the knowledge of philosophy itself. As it does not obey the principle of reason, that is, the a priori form of all empirical knowledge, the will seems to be unknowable. Yet this argument supposes that all representations result from the principle of reason. Is this the case, or again are there not representations that are independent of the principle of reason? The will, as we have seen, objectifies itself in diverse ways; it appears according to gradations, with increasing clarity, passing from the blind thrust to cerebral activity as it grows increasingly conscious of itself. There is thus a hierarchy of representations in which the privilege of the body is grounded. What is more, each degree of objectification is expressed in a plurality of individuals for which it [the particular degree] constitutes the universal, identical, and eternal form. If spatiotemporal phenomena are born and die, ceaselessly becoming without ever being, then “these grades of objectification of the will are nothing but Plato’s Ideas,” states Schopenhauer, specifying that “by Idea I understand every definite and fixed grade of the will’s objectification, in so far as it is the thing-in-itself and is therefore foreign to plurality. These grades are certainly related to individual things as their eternal forms, or as their prototypes.”1 The Ideas are therefore representations independent of the principle of reason. Now, one remark before proceeding: in assimilating the thing in itself to the will, and the Idea to its adequate objectivity [objectité adéquate], Schopenhauer claims he is harmonizing Plato and Kant, like two paths leading to his own “single thought . . . which has been sought for a very long time under the name of philosophy.”2 Reading Kant as having argued that experience knows only phenomena and not the thing in itself—a restriction extended to our ego—and Plato as having asserted that things given to the senses have no authentic being, cannot be the 88

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object of a true science, and as having maintained that only the eternal Ideas are knowable, Schopenhauer can by all rights say that “the inner meaning of both doctrines is wholly the same; that both declare the visible world to be a phenomenon which in itself is void and empty, and which has meaning and borrowed reality only through the thing that expresses itself in it (the thing-in-itself in the one case, the Idea in the other).”3 Now, even if, as Nietzsche will say, “Schopenhauer as much misunderstood Kant as Plato,”4 the imposed tutelage of appearance can be sanctioned by this twofold authority. The Idea, whose “empirical kind is the species,”5 is a representation that has not yet espoused the forms of space, of time, and of causality. It is only representation, pure being-object-for-a-subject [pur être-objet-pour-un-sujet], and this alone distinguishes it from the thing in itself. The Idea is the thing in itself under the most minimal form of representation, and to know it is to know the will. But how can a subject, individuated through its body, acquire knowledge of Ideas foreign to plurality and individuality? Would the subject of knowledge not have to cease being simultaneously an individual subject, and “its intuition no longer be mediated by a body,”6 whose affections permit the application of the law of causality, the sufficient reason of becoming? To be sure, and the subject could not know the Ideas without annulling its corporeal individuality. A detour is necessary to bright to light the possibility of such a modification. Because it takes as point of departure the relationships between the immediate object and other objects, only to extend from there, under the figure of a system of sciences, to all inter-objective relations, knowledge remains in thrall to the body and the will. Consequently, “as it is the principle of sufficient reason that places the objects in this relation to the body and so to the will, the sole endeavor of knowledge, serving this will, will be to get to know concerning objects just those relations that are laid down by the principle of sufficient reason, and thus to follow their many different connections in space, time, and causality. For only through these is the object interesting to the individual, in other words, has it a relation to the will. Therefore, knowledge that serves the will really knows nothing more about objects than their relations, knows the objects only in so far as they exist at such a time, in such a place, in such and such circumstances, from such and such causes, and in such and such effects—in a word, as particular things. If all these relations were eliminated, the objects also would have disappeared for knowledge, just because it did not recognize in them anything else.”7 Now, although knowledge, under the jurisdiction of the principle of sufficient reason, is always a function of the interests of the will, it is

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possible through the “power of the mind” alone to suspend this manner of considering things according to the where, the when, and the why, and to contemplate their very being. The subject then loses itself in the object and, forgetting its individuality and its will, no longer knows the singular thing as such but only, exclusively, the Idea. “As clear mirror of the object,”8 freed from its corporeal individuality, the pure subject then knows the object outside of any interest, “without interest.”9 Through his tacit reference to Kant’s definition of the beautiful, Schopenhauer lays the ground for his determination of the mode of knowledge that considers objects in their absolute objectivity: “It is art, the work of genius. [Art] repeats the eternal Ideas apprehended through pure contemplation, the essential and abiding element in all the phenomena of the world. . . . Its only source is knowledge of the Ideas; its sole aim is communication of this knowledge.”10 Thus attesting the possibility of a disinterestedness in the subject, and that of a diminution of its individuality, art is—to borrow an expression of Schelling in whose regard Schopenhauer is here more than simply tributary—the true “organ of philosophy”; art is the organon of the metaphysical knowledge of the will, as it permits us to comprehend the world in a constant presence that no becoming can alter; in short, independently of the principle of reason. We retain the three following theses from the aesthetics developed by Schopenhauer, and which form the background of Nietzsche’s own: (1) Art is the work of the genius, that is, of a man whose force of knowledge exceeds that of his will, and who uses this excess in the contemplation of the Idea and of life. “Genius is the capacity to remain in a state of pure perception, to lose oneself in the intuition, to remove from the service of the will the knowledge which originally existed only for this service.”11 As a higher degree of the objectification of knowledge, genius is thus against-nature, since in it the intellect is emancipated from the will. If man in general “is simultaneously [the] impetuous and dark impulse of willing (indicated by the pole of the genitals as its focal point), and [the] eternal, free, serene subject of pure knowing (indicated by the pole of the brain),”12 then the genius is he whose encephalon (as objectification of the faculty of knowing) dominates his sex (as the objectification of the will to live), and who, through this domination, destines knowledge toward pure objectivity. In other words, the sovereignty of knowledge has for its condition of possibility the annihilation of the body, and the subject can only be absorbed in the artistic contemplation of the Idea at the price of his sexual drive. Nietzsche overlooks none of this when he notes, “ ‘The World as Will and Representation’—retranslated in a narrow and personal way, into Schopenhauerian: “The world as sexual drive and contemplative life.’ ”13

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(2) Art manifests the Ideas, that is to say, the different degrees of objectification of the will, starting from which a system of beaux-arts is organized, and which moves from architecture—where charge or loading vies with the support, and weight with rigidity—to tragedy, where in the light of day the will struggles with itself. One art nevertheless remains outside this system: music, which reproduces no Idea. When then does music reproduce if reproduction is the essence of art? Schopenhauer proposes an explanation that, he admits, is indemonstrable. Music is a representation of what can never be immediately represented. “Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas.”14 In the physical world music expresses the metaphysical will that transcends it, and “we could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will.”15 Music is then the true universal language since it is that of the will and, paraphrasing Leibniz, Schopenhauer (whose aesthetic doctrine is the soil of Wagnerian opera) can define music as “an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is philosophizing.”16 (3) Art sedates the will. If but for an instant, contemplation withdraws us from the will and from those sufferings that necessarily accompany it. “Here is the summit of all art that has followed the will in its adequate objectivity, namely in the Ideas, through all the grades, from the lowest where it is affected, and its nature is unfolded, by causes, then where it is similarly affected by stimuli, and finally by motives. And now art ends by presenting the free self-abolition of the will through the one great quieter that dawns on it from the most perfect knowledge of its own nature.”17 As consolation for the pain of being, art lets the will resign itself to nothingness and thereby holds a “high value.”18 Yet if art possess such a value, is it not ultimately that the will, from which it delivers us, is in itself devoid of value? In thus posing the question of the value of existence we are posing what Nietzsche called “the Schopenhauerian question,” which “will need several centuries simply to be understood in an exhaustive fashion and in all its depths.”19 At the outset of part 4 of World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer announces “the most important aspect”—in effect, that he will here discuss ethics— “of the value or non-value of an existence, of salvation or damnation”— terms that cannot fail to surprise us when “a philosopher is bound to be an unbeliever.”20 In being represented with an increasing clarity, of which humans are the fullest measure, the will comes to know itself and to know that it wants to manifest itself in the visible world; in a word, that it wants life. The will is will to life, and life is inseparable from the will, since birth

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and death concern only individual phenomena. Schopenhauer insists on this point, “the present alone is the form of all life,” the nunc stans or “everlasting midday”21 is the sole form of the manifestation of the will. But how does the self-knowledge to which the will raises itself react to this manifestation? Does the knowledge of its proper essence exert a stimulating function on the will or a sedative function, as in the case of art? Does this knowledge give rise to an affirmation of the will to live or, on the contrary, to its negation? Referring to the different ways of acting found among humans, in whom alone the will becomes conscious of itself, these questions consequently lead metaphysics back to morality. What is this life liable to be affirmed or negated? Insatiable, the will is an unending effort: “nowhere is there a goal, nowhere a final satisfaction, nowhere a point of rest.”22 This indefatigable effort tears it apart, since “every grade of the will’s objectification fights for the matter, the space, and the time of another,”23 and the universal war of the phenomena sets the will in opposition to itself. Born of lack, torn asunder by its representations, the will is essentially suffering. But what belongs to the essence of the will belongs to that of life and, to take up a word from Ecclesiastes, cited by Schopenhauer: “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”24 It is thus in view of a life known as suffering, opposition to self, and tragedy, that the concepts of affirmation and negation of the will must be elucidated. If the body is the red thread of metaphysical knowledge because it is identical to the will, then to affirm the latter is to affirm the body whose acts aim to preserve the individual and perpetuate the species. However, there is a difference between preserving oneself and reproducing oneself. To preserve oneself is to limit the affirmation of life and the will to a single phenomenon; to reproduce oneself is to affirm life and the will beyond the single phenomenon. The generative act is “the most decided affirmation of the will-to-live,” since the birth of a body reaffirms, beyond those who engender it, the pain and death essential to every living phenomenon. Consequently, “the possibility of salvation, brought about by the most complete faculty of knowledge, is for this time declared to be fruitless,” and, Schopenhauer adds, “here is to be seen the profound reason for the shame connected with the business of procreation.”25 To better grasp what this shame signifies before “the act, as the most distinct expression of the will, [which] is the kernel, the compendium, the quintessence of the world,”26 we must specify what is implied by the affirmation of the body. If the thing in itself is one, and its representations multiple, then the will is entirely and constantly present in each one of these. Thus is metaphysically egoistical every phenomenon that, in asserting or affirming its will, affirms the will. However, in so doing, it de-

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nies the will so far as it is likewise affirmed by the others. To affirm one’s body is thus to live in a state of universal war: metaphysical egoism necessarily causes harm to another and this prejudice “is most completely, peculiarly, and palpably expressed in cannibalism.”27 Each individual lives at the expense of the others. To be is to be originally guilty and my existence, beyond being shameful, is a priori culpable and unjust. In regard to what justice, however, and what is justice? It is first the temporal justice that is confused with law, with right—and whose function it is to recompense or to punish. As a means utilized by this egoism to protect itself from its own consequences, the State is in principle incapable of reducing harm and suffering [le mal] to nothing. Beyond this and above all—and inaccessible within the horizon of the principle of reason—it is eternal justice that governs the world and belongs to its essence. In effect, if the will is one, then there is no essential difference between that which causes evil [le mal] and that which suffers it and, modifying one of Hegel’s expressions, Schopenhauer can write that “the world itself is the tribunal of the world.”28 Absolutely free, omnipotent, the will alone is responsible for existence. Eternal justice, as supreme representation of life, is then a name for the will itself. If such is the true justice, is it nonetheless possible to introduce it into the realm of experience? To put it another way: how can human actions have a moral reach, be good or evil? “The concept good (gut),” says Schopenhauer, “is essentially relative, and denotes the fitness or suitableness of an object to any definite effort of the will.”29 Conversely, “evil” (böse) signifies the unsuitableness of an object and any effort of the will. Thus an action is good that is favorable to our will; an action is evil when it thwarts it; a man is good who affirms his will without denying that of the other person, evil when he affirms his will while denying that of the other. However, if evil is the exacerbation of egoism, it is simultaneously that of suffering. In effect, the violence of the will brings with it the violence of want and of pain, from which it is unceasingly born, and every evil act is accompanied by a remorse that, beyond the appearance of the principle of individuation, recalls to conscience the ontological identity between torturer and victim, life and passion. Does conscience not then point the way to virtue and goodness? Remorse attests that the being in itself of the other person is likewise my own, and that the true self is not coextensive with its individual representation. Goodness thus supposes the intuitive knowledge of the unity of will-to-live [du vouloir-vivre], beneath the antagonistic multiplicity of its singular representations; it resides in what Schopenhauer shall call, borrowing an expression of Luther, “the works of love.”30 To be good is to love—while abolishing the representative difference between

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individuals—one’s neighbor as oneself. If “all love (αγάπη, caritas) is compassion or sympathy,”31 then the latter lies at the origin of acts of goodness and justice, and to be charitable is to substitute “the confident serenity of good conscience” (which accompanies the disinterested gesture) for “the anxious care for [one’s own] self,”32 which is characteristic of egoism. The “works of love” would nevertheless be impossible if the knowledge from which they derive remained without influence on the will itself. What effect can this knowledge have on the will? The reduction of the principle of individuation overwhelms me with all the suffering of the world, since I no longer distinguish myself from others. If no grief or trouble is foreign to me, then I could hardly continue to affirm life. The knowledge of will-to-live [du vouloir-vivre] exerts a sedative action on it. The intuitive knowledge of the will is its greatest sedative and in this regard, art is but a preliminary phase of it. Let us describe this sedation further. The will of the compassionate, loving individual “turns about; it no longer affirms its own inner nature, mirrored in the phenomenon, but denies it.”33 The knowledge of the thing in itself thereby places the phenomenon in contradiction with itself, turning the will back against itself, and this turning back is the sole manifestation of the freedom of the will in the phenomenal world subjected to necessity through the principle of sufficient reason.34 How then to set in motion this annulment of the will that merges with love? It cannot take the form of suicide, which, far from annihilating the will-tolive [le vouloir-vivre], concerns but one of its representations; instead, it takes the form of chastity and more generally, of asceticism. In fact, once it is established that the body is the objectification of the will, for which sexuality is the focus, the knowing, incarnate subject can only negate the will by refusing sexuality. “Voluntary and complete chastity is the first step in asceticism or the denial of will-to-live. It thereby denies the affirmation of the will which goes beyond the individual life, and thus announces that the will, whose phenomenon is the body, ceases with the life of this body.”35 The negation of will-to-live, likewise called “complete resignation or holiness,”36 is thus charity itself—and the ascetic renunciation of the world that is, as Schopenhauer says, “the greatest, the most important, and the most significant phenomenon that the world can show,”37 frees knowledge from its subjection to the will, only to make it the sovereign ruler of nothingness. “In starting from his nihilism,” Nietzsche writes, “Schopenhauer was perfectly justified in holding compassion for the sole virtue: it is compassion, indeed, that requires the strongest negation of the will to live. In allowing the depressed and the weak to continue to live and to have a posterity, compassion, caritas, crosses out the natural

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laws of development: it accelerates decline, destroys the species—it denies life.”38 This starvation of the will implies the disappearance of the phenomenal world, whose in itself it is. “No will: no representation, no world.”39 The annihilation of the will proves to be a will to annihilation, and having opened his work with the word world, Schopenhauer closes it with that of nothingness: “We freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is—nothing.”40

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3

The Great Coincidence

The ethics with which Schopenhauer’s metaphysics concludes is not subordinated to it but rather equaled by it. Indeed, determining the world as will is ontologically moral. “My philosophy, however,” says Schopenhauer, “is the only one that grants to morality its complete and entire rights; for only if the true nature of man is his own will, consequently only if he is, in the strictest sense, his own work, are his deeds actually entirely his and attributable to him.”1 The moralization of metaphysics is thus the necessary consequence of the identification of being and the will, of the determination of being as will. Yet if Schopenhauer’s moral metaphysics, or his metaphysical morals, posits that the annihilation of the will is the “summum bonum,” or even the “only radical cure,”2 then by assimilating the absolute good to nothingness and life to an illness, it is nihilist. “Nihilist is,” writes Nietzsche, “the man who judges that the world, such as it is, ought not to be, and who judges that the world such as it ought to be, does not exist. It follows that existence (acting, enduring, willing, feeling) has no sense.”3 No sense, that is to say, no value. An answer is thus given to the question raised at the threshold of the fourth and final book of the World as Will and Representation. The morality of resignation agrees, as Schopenhauer insists here, with Christianity and Buddhism, since “we also see how immaterial it is whether [holiness] proceeds from a theistic or from an atheistic religion.”4 At numerous points, Schopenhauer defines his own thought, in effect, as the philosophical expression of what the logos of the cross proclaimed in a mythic form. The fundamental opposition between the affirmation and the negation of the will represents, in a conceptual fashion, that which the opposition of Adam and the Christ figures in a symbolic fashion. Citing Saint Paul, Schopenhauer points out that the Christian doctrine “regards every individual, on the one hand, as identical with Adam, with the representative of the affirmation of life, and to this extent as fallen into sin (original sin), suffering, and death. On the other hand, knowledge of the Idea also shows every individual as identical with the Savior, with the representative of the denial of the will-to-live, and to this extent as partaking of his self-sacrifice, redeemed by his merit, and rescued from the bonds of sin and death, i.e., of the world.”5 In thus invoking the Pauline typology, Schopenhauer appeals to the entire 96

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economy of salvation. Again, the proof lies in the assimilation of the human will to works, and intuitive knowledge to faith;6 the qualification of necessity as a natural domain, and of freedom as that of grace;7 the comparison of eternal justice of the will to that of God himself,8 and the proclamation of the annihilation of the will as the “complete and certain gospel.”9 The metaphysics of the will thus ends by coinciding with the religion revealed in Christ. What is the foundation of this coincidence? It could not be sought elsewhere than in the will itself. In order to do this, let us begin from an indication furnished by Nietzsche, who notes, in the margin of the work of Hermann Lüdemann devoted to Saint Paul’s anthropology, that “the Schopenhauerian doctrine of the ‘will’ is easily insinuated here, because we have already been trained in what is essential to it—by way of the Jewish concept of a ‘heart’ with which we are acquainted through Luther’s Bible.”10 It is clear that if Schopenhauer’s will is ultimately none other than the heart in the Hebraic sense, then the metaphysics founded on that will shall be confused with the revelation bound up with that heart. But is this rapprochement, which is well worth interpreting, legitimate? Before responding by elucidating the biblical concept of heart, three remarks must be made. (1) The determination of the essence of humanity and of world as will does not have a Greek, but a Judeo-Christian origin. This implies that the determination of Being as will, and with it the completion of metaphysics, could not be led purely and simply back to the Greek beginning. (2) With creation being a salutary event, the world arises from the divine will with which the human will is always in relation. (3) Schopenhauer did not merely understand the heart in an organic manner, but also in a moral one. It is, he explains in effect, because man is will, and the intellect his instrument, that “all religions promise a reward beyond this life in eternity for excellences of the will or of the heart, but none for excellences of the head, of the understanding.”11 That said, what is the biblical signification of the heart? The Hebrew word leb, which the Septuagint translates by καρδία [cardia] or by νοϋς [noos], is no doubt the most important one in Old Testament anthropology. It denotes the seat of affects, knowledge, and will, placing the strongest accent on the latter. The heart is the human being itself understood against the horizon of the will in relation to God revealed through his commandments. The heart is the human will enlightened by the divine will, the instance to which the word of God is addressed and which, in one way or another, responds to it. We need give but two examples. In chapter 11 of Ezekiel, God promises a new covenant to the exiles and says, “I will give them one heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove the heart of stone from their bodies and give a heart of flesh,

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that they may follow my laws and faithfully observe my rules. Then they shall be my people and I will be their God. But as for them whose heart is set upon their detestable things and their abominations I will repay them for their conduct—declares Adonai Yahweh.”12 Clearly, we should understand by the words “heart of stone” and “heart of flesh” man’s two modes of being in regard to God. If having or being a heart of stone is to proceed against the law, if to have or to be a heart of flesh is to proceed according to the law, then the heart is really man himself insofar as he can make up his mind to be for or against God, to know and to obey him, or fail to know him and disobey him. This concept of heart was taken up by Christian preaching. Indeed, when Saint Paul writes that “if you shall confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and shall believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved; for with the heart one has faith in justice, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation,”13 the heart always denotes the human will insofar as it can or cannot be commanded by faith, that is, by the knowledge of God in Christ. Nevertheless it does not seem possible to maintain that, essentially, Schopenhauer’s will is the same as the heart in the biblical sense since, contrary to the latter, the will is always blind. Should we then give up understanding why the metaphysics of the will comes to coincide with the religion revealed in Christ? By no means. Let us again follow a hint from Nietzsche who, in the same context, noted the following: “the heart as a Jewish concept, scarcely reasonable, clouded, blinded, hardened, to be seduced by flattery or its opposite: its functions are affects: the Old Testament attributes the faculty of νοϋς to the heart: God alone can see into the heart. The carnal heart: the innards are active in the affects [in den Affekten]. This corresponds approximately to Schopenhauer’s ‘will.’ ”14 We must not understand this note from the verses of Ezekiel cited earlier, but once again starting from Saint Paul, since the adjectives that Nietzsche attributes to the Jewish heart (“scarcely reasonable,” “clouded,” “blinded,” “hardened”) qualify the heart of those who live under the wrath of God, according to the apostle.15 Schopenhauer’s will thus does not correspond to a heart able to make up its mind for or against God, i.e., neutral, but rather to the heart of the sons of Israel who refuse the divine justice of grace and live according to the flesh, ignoring Christ and his resurrectional power. Hence it is entirely legitimate to assimilate the “blinded” heart of the Jews, “who have zeal for God but zeal without knowledge,”16 to the blind will of an atheist metaphysics. The metaphysics of the will thus ends by coinciding with the religion revealed in Christ, because it comes out of it. Indeed, the metaphysical concept of will—and we thereby designate as much Schopenhauer’s concept as that of his predecessors—draws its principal traits

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from what Heidegger, citing only the Greek and Latin translations of the Genesis verse, according to which man was made in the image of God to dominate his creation, calls, in a singularly restrictive fashion, “the anthropology of Christian theology.”17 In other words, the determination of the being and essence of human beings as will inscribes metaphysics into revelation by inscribing revelation into metaphysics. This double movement is not peculiar to Schopenhauer, but characterizes the entirety of German Idealism on which it closely depends. Having explicitly identified the outcome of the Doctrine of Science with the Johannine gospel, Fichte states in the Initiation to the Blessed Life: “yet it nevertheless remains certain, that we, with our whole age and with all our philosophical inquiries, are established on and have proceeded from Christianity; that this Christianity has entered into our whole culture in the most varied forms; and that, on the whole, we might have been nothing of all that we are, had not this mighty principle gone before us in Time.”18 After having argued in the Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom that, in the “final and highest instance there is no other being than will,” and that “the will is the originary being and it is to it alone that all the predicates of that being are suited: absence of foundation, eternity, independence in regard to time, self-affirmation,” Schelling states clearly that the philosophy of revelation, with which his work comes to a close, has as its unique goal to “conceive the person of Christ,” and that “in the highest sense revelation . . . is a revelation of the divine will.”19 Finally and above all, Hegel repeats the fundamental thesis according to which the true must be grasped and expressed not as substance alone but every bit as much as subject. In light of that, he writes in the last chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit devoted to absolute knowing: “that which in religion was content or a form for presenting an other, that is here the Self’s own act; it is the Notion that connects the content with the Self’s own act. Indeed, as we see, this notion is the knowledge of the act of Self in itself as the knowledge of all essence and all existence; the knowledge of this subject as of the substance and of substance as this knowledge of its act.”20 Whatever the differences, then, between the ways Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel conceive philosophy, Christianity, and their interrelationships, they all fulfill one and the same movement (on the shared ground of the determination of being as will), whose program and law Leibniz—“that true German” situated, according to Nietzsche, “between Christianity, Platonism, and mechanism”21—sets forth, when he states: “I begin as a philosopher, but I end as a theologian.”22 Now, Nietzsche never ceases to refer to German Idealism, understood in this way. As he notes in 1884: “Fichte, Schelling, Hegel Feuerbach Strauss—this all stinks of theologians and Church Fathers.

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Schopenhauer is rather free of this, one breaths a better air, one even scents Plato. Kant—oafish-heavy-footed [schnörkelhaft-schwerfällig]: we note that the Greeks have not yet been discovered. Homer and Plato did not resound in those ears.”23 And, one year later: “fundamentally, it was the held-in and long accumulated piety of the Germans that finally exploded in their philosophy, in a way obscure and uncertain to be sure, as is all that is German, namely, in pantheistic vapors as in Hegel and Schelling, qua gnosis; at other times, mystical and world-denying, as in Schopenhauer: but principally there is a Christian piety and not a pagan one. . .”24 These notes call immediately for two remarks: (1) in 1884, following his conception of the eternal return and the will to power, Greece designates only that which is not yet Christian but also, and more uncannily, that which is no longer Christian. (2) In regard to theological metaphysics and the metaphysical theology of German Idealism, Schopenhauer’s situation is ambiguous: without being a theologian or a believer properly speaking, he nevertheless participates in Christian piety, in a word, in the same life prospects. Indeed, if speculative theology is quite absent from Schopenhauer’s doctrine, it remains that it is that doctrine that completes the moralization of metaphysics, whether this be by preaching asceticism, “which Schopenhauer associates much too exclusively with Christianity,”25 or by appealing to resignation and charity. Schopenhauer’s thought attests that Christianity—that is, the sum of corporeal possibilities opened thanks to the resurrection of Christ—can be maintained sub contraria specie, under the cover of atheism, and outside of any explicit theology. Schopenhauer is thus more cunningly Christian than were his predecessors. On the basis of his final positions, Nietzsche will judge that “Schopenhauerian nihilism is always and ever the consequence of the same IDEAL as that which produced CHRISTIAN THEISM.”26 What should we understand here by “ideal,” and in what sense is Schopenhauer still Christian? When Nietzsche calls the reinforcement, the thinning out or the denial of life “ideals,”27 he is aiming at the possibilities that are always, for Schopenhauer, possibilities of the body, since the latter is the immediate representation of the will-to-live. The affirmation and negation of the first, the body, are thus identical to the affirmation and the negation of the second, the will-to-live. If the affirmation of the body is confused with sexual practices, then its negation takes the form of ascesis and of the holiness that together institute a contradiction between the phenomenon and the thing in itself, between life and its highest representation. But what does this mean if not that resignation and charity turn life back against itself? And what is life turned back against itself, if not the very essence of sickness? The negation of the will-to-live—or the negation of the body by itself—ultimately consists in

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essentially sickening the body that I am. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is a transcendental pathology. In what sense is this pathology Christian? In the penultimate paragraph of the World as Will and Representation, after having compared at length his own doctrine to Christianity, Schopenhauer concludes: “The doctrine of original sin (affirmation of the will) and of salvation (denial of the will) is really the great truth which constitutes the kernel of Christianity, while the rest is in the main only clothing and covering, or something accessory. Accordingly, we should interpret Jesus Christ always in the universal, as the symbol or personification of the denial of the will-tolive, but not in the individual, whether according to his mythical history in the Gospels . . .”28 The metaphysics of the will is thus a demythologization of Christianity that, like all demythologization, finds its source in the kerygma itself. How does this metaphysics come from the revealed kerygma; better, how can it be found therein? Let us return to Paul’s predication founded on the resurrection of the body. The latter denotes in Saint Paul the being of man before God; it is understood in Saint Paul as will and, as we have shown, far from putting an end to the splitting of the body subject to the law, the resurrection exacerbates its opposition to itself. The glorious redeemed body is thus more radically sick than is the body of flesh, and resurrected life is a life that negates and denies life itself. Having been laid out in a wrongful dimension, that is, in a dimension in which life is essentially falsified, glory is a sickness and the life eternal in Christ an eternal pathology.29 By making Christ the representative of the negation of the will-to-live, Schopenhauer says nothing particularly different. Yet, this assimilation of Christ to the negation of the will-to-live obviously supposes that the will could be opposed to itself. And this possibility in turn presupposes the absolute unity of the will. In other words and to sum up, the coincidence between Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and revealed theology would be impossible, lacking the properly philosophical assertion of the absolute unity of the will. Conversely, no critique of the unity of the will can fail to cast into doubt, whether directly or not, the subordination of philosophy to theology. As the ultimate figure of philosophy, the metaphysics of the will nevertheless could not coincide with revelation unless the one and the other each contained, hidden from view, its possibility. Consequently, it is not simply a matter of knowing how the metaphysics of the will, understood in its highest form as absolute idealism, came to assert the “coincidence” between revealed religion and philosophy, and to conceive philosophy as “religion” and “the service of God.”30 Rather, it is also a matter of understanding how revelation itself was able to assimilate

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philosophy; how God called philosophy into his own service. Yet, by posing this double question are we not proceeding in a direction opposite that of Heidegger who, in a dialogue with Hegel, led the theological character of metaphysics back to the differentiated unfolding of Being itself? No doubt, and this is the reason why we must attempt to respond to this double question by interrogating the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics.

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4

Speculative Theology

In 1927, at the outset of his inquiry into the ontological meaning of the copula and the utterance, Heidegger cautioned: “The problem will make no further progress as long as logic itself has not been taken back again into ontology, as long as Hegel—who, in contrast, dissolved ontology into logic—is not comprehended. And this means always that Hegel must be overcome by radicalizing the way in which the problem is put; and at the same time he must be appropriated. This overcoming of Hegel is the intrinsically necessary step in the development of Western philosophy which must be made for it to remain at all alive. Whether logic can successfully be made into philosophy again we do not know; philosophy should not prophesy, but then again it should not remain asleep.”1 In saying this, Heidegger justifies a dialogue he had been having with Hegel and which he had never stopped pursuing more or less openly, more or less directly. It is therefore worthwhile indicating its source, and this, for reasons that have nothing to do with some sort of history of philosophy. Evoking his own path, Heidegger reports that he came to Hegel from theology, thanks to Carl Braig who made him see “the meaning of Schelling and of Hegel for speculative theology, by opposition to any doctrinal system of Scholasticism.” He adds, moreover, “This is how the tension between ontology and speculative theology came into the horizon of my research.”2 The debate with Hegel thus cannot be dissociated from a confrontation with the combined history of philosophy and theology; and if the 1957 course on The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics comes out of a seminar devoted to Hegel’s Science of Logic, then we can proceed along with it in an attempt to break the circle in which absolute knowledge (whose content is that of revealed religion) becomes interwoven with itself. Heidegger begins by recalling that in order to dialogue with a thinker, we should agree to speak about the same thing. What then, according to Hegel, is the matter of thinking? It is thinking as such (der Gedanke), thinking that thinks itself and is finally unfolded as absolute Idea. At the end of the Science of Logic, Hegel in fact writes that the absolute Idea—which “alone is Being, imperishable life, truth knowing itself,” which “is all truth,”—is “the sole object and content of philosophy.” After citing this passage, Heidegger comments: “Thus Hegel himself explicitly gives 103

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to the matter of his thinking that name which is inscribed over the whole matter of Western thinking, the name: Being.”3 But how does Hegel speak of it? He always does so in a historic fashion, since the Idea is inseparable from the dialectical process of its speculative self-generation. Thus, the dialogue with Hegel will not have to concern Being alone, but again and by the same token its history, since “the sequence in the systems of Philosophy in History is similar to the sequence in the logical deduction of the Notion—determinations in the Idea.”4 Nevertheless, there could not be dialogue without disagreement, and Heidegger stands apart from Hegel in a threefold respect. (1) If, for Hegel, the affair of thinking is the being-thought [l’être-pensé] of beings in the absolute concept; for Heidegger, it is Being inasmuch as it differs from beings, inasmuch as it distinguishes itself from beings; thus, difference as difference. (2) If, for Hegel, dialogue with prior philosophies consists in integrating them as moments within the genesis of the concept, what is at stake there, for Heidegger, is a search for that which is unthought [l’impensé ], and from which these philosophies receive their essence. (3) If, for Hegel, the relationship to the history of philosophy has the quality of a sublation (Aufhebung)5 of its forms in the knowledge that knows itself absolutely in itself, this relation has for Heidegger the character of a “step back” that, far from being a simple change in direction, impresses on thinking an entirely different movement, since it leads “outside what has been thought so far in philosophy,”6 toward what constitutes its source: the ontological difference. We could nevertheless not step back outside of the metaphysics whose absolute recollection Hegel brought about, without having first taken foot in it, that is, without having described and delineated its fundamental constitution. But how do we reach this point when starting from a science that presents itself as a circle of circles? To that end, Heidegger resorts to what he calls “an expedient,” the explanation of the pages on which the first book of the Science of Logic opens, which is entitled “Where Should the Science Begin?”7 Hegel answers this question by setting forth “the speculative nature of the philosophical beginning.” What does that mean? After having shown that this beginning, which could be neither immediate nor mediate, lies in pure Being, “this absolute immediacy [that] has equally the character of something absolutely mediated,”8 Hegel asserts that the science’s movement describes a circle, by virtue of which the beginning is the result and the result the beginning. Heidegger then draws the following conclusion: “The beginning must really be made with the result, since the beginning results from that result.”9

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What then is “the last result” of the science? It is “pure truth”;10 truth under the sign of the self [du soi]. This is the reason why, starting from the “Introduction” to the Science of Logic, Hegel can write that logic must be understood “as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought,” and specify: “This realm is truth as it is without veil and in its own absolute nature. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind.”11 Now, Heidegger does not remind us of this determination of the logic, without which the unfolding of the seminar on the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics nevertheless remains unintelligible. In fact, immediately after having concluded that it is with the outcome that we might appropriately begin, Heidegger follows by asserting, with neither explanation nor justification, that this speculative proposition has the same sense as the “incidental” remark, placed between parentheses by Hegel, according to which “God has the absolutely undisputed right that the beginning be made with him.”12 Yet to identify the outcome of the science—as its true beginning—with God himself, one would first have had to assimilate God to the absolute truth; one would have had to define the content of the logic as the presentation of God, such as he is eternally in himself. What are the motives guiding this omission, where the argumentation falls short? The science that begins with God is the science of God: theology. Heidegger then observes, “This name speaks here in its late signification. Consequently, theology is the expression of representative thought about God. Θεόλογος [theologos], θεολογία [theologia] denote firstly mytho-poetic speech about the gods, with no relation to dogmatics or to ecclesiastical doctrine.”13 Now this remark calls for two points. (1) Heidegger distinguishes two acceptations of the word theology. According to one—the initial one—theology is the fable about the gods; according to the other—the late sense—it is the science of God. How, then, do we pass from the first, the Greek, to the second, or Hegelian; or again, how has God decreased or diminished the gods? (2) Heidegger seems to consider that Hegel’s theology comes out of representation alone; that it is a theology of understanding. Such is not the case, however, since the logic as speculative philosophy is a speculative theology. Yet, to recognize that logic is speculative theology14 entails knowing that “the relation in which these three leading grades of thought, or of the logical Idea is shown in the manner in which God, who is truth, is known to us only in his truth, that is, as absolute spirit, and only to the degree to which we recognize simultaneously as non-true the world created by God, i.e., nature and the finite spirit—non-true in their difference with God.”15 But conversely, to hold Hegel’s trinitarian theology as representative amounts to separating

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what he united absolutely: revealed religion and philosophy. By lowering speculative theology to the level of a theology of understanding, or by omitting to specify that the God by which the science should begin is the creator of nature and finite spirit (which amounts to the same thing), Heidegger obliterates the Christian identity of Hegel’s theology. Why is speculative logic—which includes traditional logic and metaphysics—a theology? Because, Heidegger responds, from the time of the Greeks, metaphysics is an ontology and a theology. If this qualification appeared discreetly in What Is Metaphysics?, it is explicitly referenced in the text that, twenty years later, forms the new introduction to the inaugural lecture of 1929. In applying itself to the task of thinking the being or entity as such, according to its most general characteristics and in the sense of the supreme divine existent, metaphysics since Aristotle is ontology and theology. This onto-theo-logical essence of metaphysics could have no other origin than the way in which the being of the entity unfolds. The onto-theo-logical character of metaphysics thus does not come from its absorption by Christian theology, but rather from the truth of Being itself. Heidegger summarizes his claim as follows: “It was this unconcealedness (Unverborgenheit) of beings that first provided the possibility for Christian theology to take possession of Greek philosophy—whether for better or for worse may be decided by theologians on the basis of their experience of what is Christian, in pondering what is written in the First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians: ουχì εμώρανεν ό θεος την σοφιαν του κόσμου [oukhıˉ emoˉranen ten sophıˉan tou kosmou]: ‘Has not God let the wisdom of this world become foolishness?’ (I Corinthians 1:20). The σοφία του κόσμου [wisdom of this world], however, is that which, according to 1:22, the Έλληνες ζητουσιν’, the Greeks seek. Aristotle even calls πρωτη φιλοσοφία [proˉte philosophia], philosophy proper, quite explicitly ζητουμένη [dzetouméne], that which is sought after. Will Christian theology one day resolve to take seriously the word of the apostle and thus also the conception of philosophy as foolishness?”16 But is philosophy indeed folly for Christian faith? Nothing could be less certain. On the one hand, it is already folly for itself—μανία [manía] provides access to being; on the other hand and above all, philosophy is not confused with what Saint Paul calls the “wisdom of the world.” In fact, to be able to assimilate philosophy to the wisdom of the world, as Heidegger does, we would have to assume that the Pauline concept of κόσμος [kosmos], world, is ontologically identical to that of Aristotle. Or again, we would have to suppose that what Saint Paul understands by “the Greeks” coincides with what Heidegger grasps under this name, within the horizon of the question of Being. Neither of these two presuppositions is admissible: (1) for example, when Aristotle points out that “all

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men have some conception of the nature of the gods, and all who believe in the existence of gods at all, whether barbarian or Greek, agree in allotting the highest place to the deity,”17 the Greeks are defined in opposition to the Barbarians. However, when Saint Paul speaks of the Greeks, in his first Letter to the Corinthians (to which Heidegger is referring), it is in order to associate Greeks with Jews, before the Christians, since he also writes at that point: “whereas the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, we preach a crucified Christ, which is a scandal for the Jews and a folly for the nations, [we preach] a Christ that is the power of God and wisdom of God for the summoned, whether Jews or Greeks.”18 (2) The Pauline concept of the world is at least as ontologically distinct from Aristotle’s concept as an existential can be distinct from a category. Heidegger had himself insisted on this, noting that “it is no accident, however, that in connection with the new ontic understanding of existence that irrupted in Christianity the relation between kósmos and human Dasein, and thereby the concept of world in general, became sharper and clearer. The relation is experienced in such an originary manner that kósmos now comes to be used directly as a term for a particular fundamental kind of human existence. Kósmos houtos in Saint Paul (I Corinthians and Galatians) means not only and not primarily the state of the ‘cosmic,’ but the state and situation of the human being, the kind of stance he takes toward the cosmos, his esteem for things. Kósmos means being human in the manner of a sentiment that has turned away from God (he sophía tou kosmou). Kósmos houtos refers to human Dasein in a particular ‘historical’ existence, distinguished from another one that has already dawned (aioˉn ho melloˉn).”19 Far from being a synonym of philosophy, the expression “wisdom of the world” has a theological signification and denotes the being of man separated from God, opposed to God, as a sinner. Within the context of a definition of the onto-theo-logical essence of metaphysics, why does Heidegger so misinterpret the apostolic word, to which he gave its true sense albeit in a wholly different context? The assimilation of philosophy to the “wisdom of the world” has for its consequence to make philosophy into folly. What does this qualification cover? In 1935, Heidegger already said that “a Christian philosophy” was but a sideroxylon, an iron-wood, and “folly for the originary Christian faith.” Once again, in 1940, he wrote: “a ‘Christian philosophy’ surpasses in its absurdity the squaring of the circle. The square and the circle agree at least as spatial figures, while there is an abyssal difference between Christian faith and philosophy. Even if we were to say that the truth is taught in the one as in the other, it remains the case that what is called truth here differs entirely from the one to the other.”20 Applied to philosophy, the epithet “folly” thus denotes the abyss that, according to Heidegger,

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stretches between metaphysics and the faith on which Christian theology is founded. According to Heidegger, we said—although not according to Hegel, for whom philosophy is Christian, since it simply conceives the absolute essence, as given and represented in manifest or revealed religion.21 Consequently, the uncrossable distance that Heidegger sets between metaphysics and Christian faith could not fail to pose serious difficulties for reading Hegel and, beyond him, for characterizing the metaphysics that came out of his thought. To bring these difficulties to light, we have only to return to the conference on The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics, at the very point where we interrupted our reading of it. Immediately upon having referred to the “Introduction” to What Is Metaphysics? Heidegger states: “But it would be rash to assert that metaphysics is theology because it is ontology. One would say first: Metaphysics is theo logy, a statement about god, because the god enters into philosophy. Thus the question about the onto-theological character of metaphysics is sharpened to the question: How does the God enter into philosophy, not just modern philosophy, but philosophy as such?”22 Let us pause a moment to consider this question, whose repetition marks the entirety of the conference we are studying. (1) The question as such is prepared by a consideration according to which metaphysics is a theology because the god entered into it. Is the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics then the consequence of some divine initiative? One might think so, since the god is in the grammatical sense the subject of the interrogative statement. (2) Heidegger does not ask, How does God enter? but, How does the god enter into metaphysics? Now, to say that metaphysics is a discourse on God is not the same as saying that it is a discourse on the god. The definite article changes absolutely everything here, in German or in French.23 When Heidegger says “the god,” he is translating literally ho theos in its Homeric, Platonic, or Aristotelian senses. But when Hegel names God, without any article, he is speaking of the God revealed in Christ, whose mode of being is wholly other than that of a Greek god.24 These remarks are not without implications, because in questioning the entire history of philosophy “with a particular regard to Hegel,”25 Heidegger necessarily sets himself the task of comprehending how and why philosophy comes to an end and is fulfilled, in coinciding with the manifest Christian religion. In relation to Hegel and to all that which he takes on and sublates [assure et assume la relève], it is not the eruption of the god in metaphysics that must be accounted for, but rather that of God. Indeed, according as the name “god” is or is not preceded by the definite article, its identity

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changes and with that, too, the problem of the theological character of metaphysics. Yet it is not enough to formulate a question to be able to answer it, since the same terms can take several meanings. Let us therefore specify the way in which Heidegger understands it. He writes: “we can properly think through the question, How does the god enter into philosophy?, only when that to which the god is to come has become sufficiently clear: that is, philosophy itself. As long as we search through the history of philosophy merely historically, we shall find everywhere that the god has entered into it. But assuming that philosophy, as thinking, is the free and spontaneous self-involvement with beings as such, then the god can come into philosophy only insofar as philosophy, of its own accord and by its own nature, requires and determines that and how the god enters into it. The question, How does the god enter into philosophy? leads back to the question, What is the origin of the onto-theological essential constitution of metaphysics? and,” Heidegger adds, “to accept this kind of question means to accomplish the step back.”26 Can we really accept this final expression of the question, which merges with the step back and therefore with Heidegger’s entire enterprise? Nothing would be less clear; for, in passing from the first question to its second formulation, Heidegger initiates a curious reversal. No longer is it a matter how the god entered into philosophy, but rather how philosophy arranged its entry. The grammatical subject of the interrogative statement is no longer “the god” but “philosophy.” Its verb is no longer conjugated in the indicative, but in some sense in the imperative. Hence, “the god” is deprived of any initiative and after substituting for the God revealed in Christ (Hegel will say that he is “the axis on which the History of the World turns”)27 an anonymous and religiously indeterminate god, Heidegger will definitively reduce its divinity and its power, since he sequesters it in a compulsory residence and subjects it to the metaphysical order. If the question of knowing how the god entered into philosophy does not come down to the question of the origin of the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics, then is it possible to respond to the first question without being led back to the second, that is, ultimately, to the truth of Being itself? It is, emphatically; but on two conditions: (1) when turned toward Hegel’s thought, our gaze is turned ipso facto toward God and not toward the god. The subject of the question should therefore be God revealed in Christ. (2) This God could not, however, take a place hitherto occupied by a Greek god, as their respective modes of being differ so greatly. As no metaphysical site is neutral, metaphysically, and as

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philosophy can offer to God only a site that conforms ontologically with what philosophy is—rather than with what God is—it proves impossible to comprehend the eruption of God within philosophy starting from philosophy itself. On the contrary, we should attempt to grasp how God insinuated himself into metaphysics, and why revelation, which is not a philosophical event, was nonetheless an event for philosophy.

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5

The Prophetic Translation

How, and why, did God consent to his philosophical investiture? First, it was necessary—to take up, in part, an expression of Nietzsche—that he learn Greek. It was on the instigation—or so goes the legend—of a king of the Lagide dynasty, Ptolemy II Philadelphus or Ptolemy Soter, and under the influence of Demetrius of Phaler, that the Greek translation of the Torah was undertaken in Alexandria in the 3rd century b.c.e. The importance of this resists comparison to any other translation, as it will found Europe as a spiritual form. The Alexandrian version of the Pentateuch “Judaized the koineˉ even more than the latter Hellenized Judaism.”1 It was early on taken as an inspired text, as attested by the account provided by Philo. The latter was a contemporary of Christ and according to Hegel, Philo was “the first [thinker] in whom we see appearing the transformation of universal consciousness into a philosophical consciousness.”2 In his The Life of Moses, Philo recounts that Ptolemy Philadelphus, “seized with passion and fondness for our legislation,” decided to have it translated into Greek. He thus demanded of the high priest and the king of the Jews that they choose translators for him. Now, the king, “having reckoned that it was not outside divine design that the Alexandrian regent be impassioned by such an undertaking,” drew up the list of those Hebrews who, besides their Jewish education, had also received a Greek one. Having arrived in Alexandria, and after having been questioned by Ptolemy, the Septuagint withdrew to the Isle of Pharos and “prophesied as though God had taken possession of their spirits, not each one with different words, but all in the same words and the same turns of phrase; each one as though under dictation by an invisible prompter.”3 Moreover, Philo points out that “each year, a festival and public eulogy are celebrated on the Ile of Pharos . . . to venerate the place where this translation cast its first rays of light, and to thank God for this ancient blessing, which is ever reborn.”4 Now, this legend, which is echoed by the Talmud,5 implies that, by virtue of its inspired character, the Septuagint translation amounts to an event in holy history, and that God had therefore spontaneously learned Greek. What, however, is meant by the inspiration of a translation? Is it inspired solely by virtue of what it translates, or likewise because it is translating? Is the Septuagint a prophetic translation, or simply the 111

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translation of prophecies? Did God himself speak Greek, or was his original speech just humanly translated from Hebrew into Greek? Following Origen, Saint Augustine studied this question in book 18 of The City of God. Upon having recalled the history of the translation by the Septuagint, and against Saint Jerome who proclaimed the Hebrew text to be the only inspired one, Saint Augustine justifies in this way the divine authority of the Greek version: “If therefore, as is right, we look for nothing in the Scriptures but what the Holy Spirit has said by the mouth of men, we can conclude that whatever is in the Hebrew and not in the Greek, the Spirit of God wished to say through the prophets and not through the translators. But whatever is in the Septuagint and not in the Hebrew, the same Spirit preferred to say through the translators, thus showing that both were prophets. In the same way he said one thing by Isaiah, another by Jeremiah, another by this prophet and another by that, as his pleasure was. Whatever is found among both, the one and the selfsame Spirit wished to say by both. The prophets came first, the prophetic translators followed after. As there was one Spirit of peace in prophets who spoke the truth in harmony, so one and the selfsame Spirit was evident in those who without any connivance arrived at a completely identical translation.”6 Saint Augustine thus attributes to the Septuagint translation— which, we note in passing, translated only the Pentateuch and was not responsible for the Greek version of the other books of the Hebrew canon—a divine authority, because the divine spirit is its true author. As he had already done in other circumstances and invariably did over the course of Israel’s history, God endowed his translators with prophetic charisma. He rephrased his word to address the Hellenistic world and, after having been that of the Jews of the Diaspora, the Bible of Alexandria became the original and canonical form of the Old Testament for the early church as for all of patristic theology up to the fourth century. This work, which Saint Paul named “the old covenant,” must therefore be considered as “the final realization of the Mosaic message to the nations prior to the Pentecost.”7 This is the same Pentecost that, Hegel says, inaugurates the possibility of recounting, that is, of comprehending, the history of Christ.8 God thus learned Greek before sending his Son, and the Hellenization of the law is indissociable from the Christian revelation. It is only with regard to this revelation, then, that the question of how God entered into philosophy should ultimately be posed. If God took up a place in metaphysics, then that metaphysics is inscribed in revelation. Yet in that case, where and how does revelation— which must always also be understood relative to the addressees that we

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are—open itself to philosophy? Conjoining the law with the Gospel, Saint Paul founded the entire economy of salvation on the resurrection of bodies. Now, we should recall that in Pauline theology, the term “body” has at least two senses. At times it denotes, in a sense more Jewish than Greek, the very being of man before God, and is conceived as a plurality of wills, united or disunited according to whether they obey or disobey the divine will. At other times and in a sense more Greek than Jewish, “body” denotes a form holding together the organs at humans’ command—a physical form, since it is capable of being filled with earthly or celestial material. Now the first of these concepts founds the second; for, if it is legitimate to describe the body in terms of organs, then it is still more legitimate to refer these to their respective capacities, that is, to the forces or wills that de jure precede them. Stated differently, the body I have could only be a modification of the body that I am. This much said, we are henceforth in a position to grasp how God entered into philosophy. Hellenized through the translation of the Septuagint, who proclaimed the message of Israel before the nations, revelation opens itself to metaphysics when Saint Paul, the apostle inspired by the spirit, endeavors to establish for the Greeks of Corinth the possibility of the resurrection by describing indirectly the body of glory. In fact, proceeding exclusively on the basis of the physical concept of the body, Saint Paul could not help but identify the mystery of the resurrection with a metaphysical event. In a word, God could not exert his resurrective power—which is all his power and his all-powerfulness—upon a body understood pneumatically as a physical form, without its having initially become metaphysical. It was thus quite spontaneously that God consented to his philosophical investiture, and that which we call the “Christianization of philosophy” was carried out on the body. There is little here that should surprise us, moreover, from the moment the incarnation of God is the absolute novelty of the revealed religion, a wonder that, as Hegel says, “absolutely contradicts both representation and understanding,”9 since it belongs, on the one hand, to that “mystery of God called the Trinity,” a mystery whose content is speculative, and on the other hand, since “the whole range of speculation is for [the understanding] a mystery.”10 Let us return now to the point at which we interrupted Heidegger’s lecture. Having led the question, How did the god enter into philosophy? back to the question, What is the essential origin of the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics?—a reformulation that, we repeat, is one with the stepping outside of metaphysics—Heidegger ventures a response. He begins by observing that Hegel “does not call speculative philosophy, that is, philosophy proper, onto-theo-logy, but rather ‘Science of Logic.’ ”11 In fact, already in the “Preface” to the first edition, Hegel indicates that “the

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science of logic . . . constitutes metaphysics proper or purely speculative philosophy.”12 It goes without saying that this metaphysics differs from “the former metaphysics” (metaphysica generalis, or ontologia and metaphysica specialis), which henceforth comes out of the objective logic alone.13 Now, that implies first that speculative logic be distinguished from the logic Kant held to be closed and completed—the logic of understanding— which logic, having undergone no changes since Aristotle, was “in need of a total reconstruction.”14 This implies further, and above all, that the λόγος [logos] to which the speculative logic refers should not be understood exclusively as the έν πάντα [hen panta] of Heraclitus. In effect, as the speculative logic is a speculative theology, and the latter a trinitarian theology, the λόγος [logos] must likewise have a Christian sense therein and more specifically, a Johannine sense. If such were not the case, then Hegel could not define the content of logic as the presentation of God in his eternal essence before the creation. Nor could he say of the logic what Christ said, according to Saint John, of the spirit—namely, that it “leads . . . into all truth.”15 How does Heidegger interpret Hegel’s designation of metaphysics as “logic”? Is it simply because the affair of thought is, according to Hegel, thinking itself, and that thinking itself always passes (or practically always) for the theme of logic itself? “Certainly. But it is just as incontestable that Hegel, faithful to tradition, sees the matter of thinking in beings as such and as a whole, in the movement of Being from its emptiness to its developed fullness.”16 The problem is then one of knowing why “Being” [l’être] should be manifested as “thought.” This is only possible if, on the one hand, Being is previously marked out as ground (Grund), while, on the other hand, the thinking that is turned toward the ground is foundation. Given that “the ground, the ratio by their essential origin are the Λόγος, in the sense of the gathering of beings and letting You asked for a them be (des versammelnden Vorliegenlassens). [Given that they] are the Ἑν rough breathing mark Πάντα [Hen Panta],” Heidegger can conclude that for Hegel metaphysics on Eν in the “How does” is a “logic,” because “Being remains the matter of thinking; while Being, ¶. Please make sure it’s ever since the early days when it became unconcealed in the character as it should be. of Λόγος, the ground that grounds, claims thinking—the accounting of the ground—for itself.”17 The determination of the Being of beings as λόγος, as the ground that grounds, sets a double orientation on thinking. Thinking must consider beings as such, according to their universal aspects, and it must simultaneously consider supreme and ultimate existent. Indeed, understood as the foundation of beings (that is, on the basis of beings), the Being [l’être] that founds every being [tout étant] as such cannot fail to appear, to beings, as supreme and ultimate; in short, as the supreme and

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ultimate being [l’étant]. If, in thinking the being or entity as such, as well as the supreme being [l’étant comme tel et l’étant suprême], metaphysics is an ontology and a theology, this is above all because metaphysics is a logic. “Metaphysics responds to Being as Λόγος, and is accordingly in its basic characteristics everywhere logic, but a logic that thinks of the Being of beings, and thus the logic which is determined by what differs in the difference: onto-theo-logic.”18 The unity of the onto-theo-logical makeup of metaphysics thus rests in “logic,” and the three terms that compose the epithet onto-theo-logy do not have the same weight; far from it indeed. Having thus restored to the name of “logic” its essential signification, which “includes also the title used by Hegel,”19 Heidegger returns to the guiding question: How did the god enter philosophy? He will now give it the beginnings of a response. From the moment that Being [l’être] appears as ground, the affair of thinking must be the first ground, or πρώτη άρχη [proˉteˉ archeˉ ]. “The original matter of thinking [die ursprüngliche Sache] presents itself as the first cause [die Ur-Sache], the causa prima that corresponds to the reason-giving path back to the ultima ratio, the final accounting. The Being of beings is represented fundamentally, in the sense of the ground, only as causa sui. This is the metaphysical concept of God. Metaphysics must think in the direction of the god because the matter of thinking is Being; but Being is in being as ground in diverse ways: as Λόγος, as υποκείμενον [hupokeimenon], as substance, as subject.”20 Before examining in what respect this amounts to a merely initial response, we should make the following three observations. (1) Heidegger characterizes the metaphysical concept of god on the basis of the Greek determination of Being as λόγος. Given this, why does that concept—which holds for all of metaphysics as such—receive a Latin name? Is it possible, for example, to think the Aristotelian god as causa sui? The question is all the more serious that the translation of Greek into Latin is, as we have seen, the mutation in the essence of truth and Being, which constitutes “the very event (Ereignis) of history,” and to think in Latin that which is Greek comes down to Christianizing it, again according to Heidegger.21 In abstaining from justifying the Latin of the epithet he attributes to the metaphysical concept of god (causa sui), has Heidegger not neglected the difficulty of understanding how a Greek god (whose being can only be thought on the basis of αλήθεια [alˉe theia]) could give way to the revealed God (who does not emerge from αλήθεια)? We will not solve the problem by invoking here what the Christ says of himself: “egoˉ eimi heˉ hodos kai heˉ aletheia kai heˉ tzoˉˉe , I am the way and the truth and the life”—since, according to Heidegger, “only the tones of this speech are still Greek.”22 (2) If it is appropriate in all things to consider only their higher degrees, then should we think that the title “causa sui” denotes

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par excellence the metaphysical concept of god? This would not be without implications, since the determination of god as causa sui comes from Descartes, who not only counted himself among the “Christian philosophers,”23 but even attempted to explain Eucharistic transubstantiation in light of his own principles. In other words, the causa sui is, in Descartes’ view, the philosophical concept of the God of the faith. Is it not the case, then, that taking the concept of causa sui as the metaphysical concept for god par excellence amounts to holding, as quietly as necessarily, the Christian God to be the metaphysical god par excellence? (3) We must pay constant attention here to Hegel, who conceives God as “spirit,” that is to say, as the differentiation of self by self, as position and sublation of its other, as the “trinitarian God containing difference in himself, God become man, God revealing himself.”24 The same Hegel reserves the title of causa sui to what he likewise names “the metaphysical concept of god.”25 The adjective “metaphysical” clearly does not have the same sense throughout. If, for Hegel, it is opposed to “speculative,” according to Heidegger it qualifies what is marked by the forgetting of the difference as such. Consequently, Heidegger could not lead Hegel’s Christian God back to a metaphysics forgetful of Being, without having first shown that the triune God is indeed that of onto-theology as such, or—to put it differently—that the Greek λόγος is retroactively inscribed in the Johannine λόγος. This at least was Hegel’s thought when, he recalls that it was the work of “Jewish sages” and of the “profound thinkers of Alexandria,” notably Philo, to have “united the abstract forms of the concrete, as received from Plato and Aristotle, with their representation of the infinite, and to have recognized God according to the more concrete concept of the spirit [united] with the determination of the λόγος,” Hegel thereupon adds that “the provenance of a thing is perfectly indifferent, the only question is, is it true in itself and for itself?” He says all this ultimately to assert that “the profound speculative is intimately entwined with the appearance of Christ himself.” And, that there be no misunderstanding, Hegel specifies that “already in John (‘at the beginning was the logos and the logos was with God and God was the logos’), we see the beginning of a deeper apprehension: the most profound thought (Gedanke) is united with the figure of Christ, with the historical, with the external . . .”26 Heidegger obviously did not overlook the essentially Christian character of Hegel’s logos. “Up to the time of Hegel,” he writes in 1940, “modern metaphysics remains the interpretation of beings as such; remains ontology, the logos of which is experienced in a Christian theological way as creative reason, grounded in absolute spirit (onto-theology).” And, in 1969, he will again qualify Hegel’s dialectical thought as “Christian-theological-metaphysics.”27 However, it is doubtless in the

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1930–31 course on the Phenomenology of Spirit that we find the most important text in this regard, insofar as it clearly brings out the problem that Heidegger’s concept of the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics raises—from the moment it would be essentially (which does not mean exclusively) related to Hegel. Heidegger shows there that the speculative interpretation of Being is grounded in such a way that “the actual being [Seiendes] is the absolute Θέος. It is from the being [Sein] of the absolute that all beings and the λόγος are determined.”28 Absolute knowledge, which is ultimately to say, the science of logic, is thus indeed an onto-theo-logy. But the essence of the god in question is “that which ultimately presents itself to the specifically Christian consciousness of God, and more precisely, in the form into which it passed through Christian theology and above all through the doctrine of the Trinity—that dogma of Christian theology that remains unthinkable without the Ancient metaphysics.”29 If the god of Hegel’s onto-theo-logy is that of revelation, and though the Trinity would nevertheless be unthinkable (yet what does “unthinkable” mean here?) without the ancient metaphysics from which it did not, in fact, originate, then the debate with Hegel and with the entire history of philosophy inevitably becomes “the most central thrust of the problem of being. The logical is theological, and this theo-logical logos is the λογος of the őν, whereby the term logical means at the same time ‘speculative-dialectical,’ proceeding in the three steps of mediation.”30 This, Heidegger recognizes. Yet, how is it possible to carry out (and herein lies the whole problem raised by the concept of an onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics) simultaneously a debate with Greek metaphysics and with Christian theology, without having previously legitimated this “at the same time” and this “and,” whether by leading the Christian God (what is also to say the God of Israel) back to αλήθεια [alˉe theia], or conversely by explaining how the God of Israel erupted into metaphysics forever to change and to alter its sense. As we have seen, the first path [leading the Christian God to αλήθεια] is impracticable. Moreover, Heidegger never pursued the second one. And, if one were to object that the debate concerns only the λόγος, then we would respond that, for Hegel, the Johannine λόγος (which, according to Heidegger, is not Greek and, like the Pentateuch of the Septuagint, is nonGreek in Greek) sublated that of Heraclitus and of Aristotle—and, ever according to Hegel—Christology arises from the affair of thinking.31

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6

Zeus or Christ

Even in setting aside the difficulties intrinsic to it, the determination of the metaphysical concept of god as causa sui is insufficient to explaining how the god was introduced into philosophy. Since philosophy is not just a theology but also ontology, and since it is ontology because it is a theology (and vice versa), the unity of its constitution, which should preside over the metaphysical integration of the god, could not be explained starting from separate terms, where one of these terms was independent of the other. The question of knowing how the god entered into philosophy can therefore not be answered until we have thought the unity from which proceeds the differentiation of ontology and theology. And how could we think the unity of these two disciplines without returning to what is being questioned there: the Being of beings, according to what, in it, is universal (ontology), and to what, is supreme (theology). If “the essential constitution of metaphysics is based on the unity of the being as such [the god] in its universality and supremacy,”1 then we must attempt to grasp how this conjunction springs from the difference between Being and beings. Being is the being of a being; that is, it is the being that is a being, an entity.2 In the latter statement the “is” has a transitive sense that means that “Being here becomes present in the manner of a transition to beings.”3 One must not understand this passage as though Being left its site to go rejoin an entity from which it would have been originally separated. Being makes its transition to a being or entity by surpassing that entity. It crops up, arises, and arrives at what it discloses, like disclosure itself and, in this arriving, covers itself in being-unconcealed: it is a being. “Being shows itself as the unconcealing overwhelming. Beings as such appear in the manner of the arrival that keeps itself concealed in unconcealedness [Unverborgenheit].”4 Being (the disclosing occurrence or arrival) and a being (the arrival covering itself) therefore unfold on the basis of the “passage”; that is, from the movement of the difference as difference, which is a movement comparable to no other, as it is difference itself— and as it is a movement that Heidegger attempted indefatigably to restore, by making it visible. Hence, these differents (Being and beings, entities)5 differ on the basis of the difference (Unterschied) that is the dimension itself (Unter-Schied) of their differentiation.6 This dimension, which ac118

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cords to the one as to the other the disclosing occurrence and the arrival re-covering itself (or again, that regulates the controversy between Being and the existent), is “the perdurance of the two in unconcealing-keeping in concealment [der entbergend-bergende Austrag].”7 And this is Being itself, so far as it is thought starting from the difference. If this completion of the stepping-back is necessary to understanding the way in which the god has entered into philosophy, it is nevertheless not sufficient to that end. Indeed, the word “Being” [“être”] has been taken here in its most universal and most indeterminate sense. Now, in speaking this way, “we represent Being in a way in which It, Being, never gives itself.”8 In order to bring out what it is that makes it impossible to represent Being as a universal for every being, Heidegger turns back to Hegel: “Someone wants to buy fruit in a store. He asks for fruit. He is offered apples and pears, he is offered peaches, cherries, grapes. But he rejects all that is offered. He absolutely wants to have fruit. What was offered to him in every instance is fruit and yet, it turns out, fruit cannot be bought.”9 Heidegger does not tell us the context of this Hegelian fable. Yet that context is not unrelated to his own remarks. Hegel is there discussing the relationship between philosophies and philosophy, and therefore the history of philosophy. To whomever takes each philosophy for a philosophy, and not for philosophy; whoever consequently takes the universal in a formal fashion, setting it alongside the particular, and thereby making it ipso facto something particular, Hegel will object: just as cherries are fruit, the many philosophies are philosophy. In a word, to wish to buy fruit and not apples, pears, etc., is to think in a representative manner but not in a speculative one. The Hegelian fable is thus destined to illustrate the manner of thinking of those who do not comprehend that the various philosophies are but different degrees of the development of the Idea, the various moments of a single philosophy whose millenary overseer is “the sole living spirit.” This is so much the case that “the last philosophy in time is the result of the all preceding philosophies, and it must therefore contain the principles of them all; this is why once it is philosophy, it is also the most developed, the richest, and the most concrete.”10 In other words, the meaning that Hegel attributes to this fable assumes that speculative philosophy would be the presence, or parousia, of the absolute: a speculative theology. Heidegger draws the following lesson from the impossibility of representing the universal outside the particular, and thus, from the difficulty of thinking the universal itself (i.e., of thinking the speculative concept). He writes, “it is still infinitely more impossible to represent ‘Being’ as the general characteristic of particular beings. There is Being only in this or that particular historic character: Φύσις, λόγος, Έν, Ιδέα, Ενέργεια,

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Substantiality, Objectivity, Subjectivity, the Will, the Will to Power, the Will to Will.”11 Being thus only shows itself under the stamp or trace of an age; its moment of being given is essentially epochal. This means that Being is, in a sense, itself the light under which it offers itself. What, then, is the unity that crosses the different ages of Being, if the latter are “lined up on the counter of historical representational thinking”?12 In other words, how does Heidegger characterize the unity of the history of Being, the moment that it is no longer possible to conceive the history of philosophy, in Hegel’s way, as the dialectical process of the speculative self-engendering of Idea? If only “the unconcealing-keeping concealed perdurance” is common to the various ages of Being, since it is starting from this that Being and beings unfold, it is at the same time that which bestows its character of unity or destiny upon the history of Being. Heidegger states this very clearly, without underestimating its difficulty: “perhaps this elucidation (Erörterung) of the difference between Being and a being in the regulation (Austrag) qua foregoing site (Vorort) of its essence, allows something general (etwas Durchgängiges) to appear, which crosses through the destiny of Being from its beginning up to its completion. It is nonetheless difficult to say how this generality should be thought, if it is neither a universal that holds true for all cases, nor a law guaranteeing the necessity of a process in the sense of the dialectic.”13 These considerations about the epochal character of Being should allow us to grasp how the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics arises from the difference; that is, from the unconcealing-concealing perdurance. If, on the one hand, the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics rests on the Being of beings, in function of what it has that is universal and supreme—while, on the other hand, this Being never gives itself except under the stamp of an epoch—then it is in light of one of these two that we must necessarily describe the way in which the onto-theo-logical constitution draws its source from difference qua unconcealing-concealing perdurance. What then is the epochal stamp from which it is possible to return to the source of the onto-theo-logical constitution? Since it is a matter of determining the constitution of metaphysics as such, should we not proceed from the initial stamp, from what was preceded by none other and was first named Φύσις? This is not, however, the path followed by Heidegger. In order “to facilitate our gaze” upon the origin of the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics, he turns toward Being as it is given beneath the stamp of the λόγος. Why? Here, Heidegger provides only an ancillary justification, but it is quite clear that his decision is dictated by the particular concern for Hegel that must accompany his stepping-back. To put it otherwise: in turning toward Being

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under the stamp of the λόγος, Heidegger is turning back toward The Science of Logic. But then, should he not explain how God, and not the god, entered into metaphysics? If the λόγος has the sense of the gathering and letting be of beings (des versammelnden Vorliegenlassens) and of the ground, then under its stamp Being shows itself as the gathering of beings and the foundation of that to which it happens, and to which it arrives: a being, and it appears as founded, that is, “so grounded and so generated, [that] it in turn grounds in its own way, that is, it effects, it causes.”14 But what is it that the being founds or causes? Let us return to the unconcealing-concealing perdurance, which differentiates Being and beings all the while referring the one to the other. Under the stamp of the Λόγος, the difference unfolds in such a way that Being founds the being or entity, but in its own way the being founds Being. In effect, “grounding itself appears within the clearing of perdurance as something that is.”15 In a word, the founding appears as a being and, as such, it must in its turn be founded. However, how could this founding, which is Being itself, be founded, if not by the being itself? And how could the being found the Being [l’être] that appears as a being [l’étant], without itself being the superlative being that founds all other beings? The original affair of thinking thus presents itself as the first cause, and the founding as a foundation in reason.16 How is it then that this supreme being received the name god? This could only have come from the λόγος itself, in the sense of the gathering of what unifies, in the sense of the έν πάντα [hen panta; one-all]. In effect, “the same Λόγος, as the gathering of what unifies, is the Έν [One]. This Έν, however, is twofold. For one thing, it is the unifying One in the sense of what is everywhere primal and thus most universal; and at the same time it is the unifying One in the sense of the All-Highest (Zeus).”17 What does this mention of Zeus mean? Zeus, the only god whose name is pronounced in the entire lecture on the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics? It echoes Heraclitus, according to whom “the One who alone is wise is not ready, and yet is ready to be named Zeus.” What is the meaning of this speech? If the λόγος is the Being of every being, the setting-into-presence (Anwesenlassen) of all that is present (Anwesenden), then it is not itself a being. Yet Zeus, who “is the supreme present (das höchste Anwesende) . . . remains, in an exceptional manner, assigned to presence (Anwesen).”18 He is not, therefore, himself the unifying-one. Under what relation, then, could the latter receive the name of Zeus despite this? “The response is already contained in what was just said. If the Έν is not understood, based on itself, as the Λόγος, if it appears on the contrary as Πάντα, then, and only then, will the entirety of present things show itself, under the government of the highest thing present, as an

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You asked for a rough breathing mark on Eν in the “How is it” ¶. Please make sure it’s as it should be. There are two other capped instances of this word in the book that you didn’t mention. I didn’t add the diacritic for those; please mark them if we should.

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all under this one [comme un tout sous cet un]. Under the highest among them, the all of present things is the Ἑν qua Zeus.”19 In other words, when the difference itself is taken into view or, rather, when Being is thought starting from difference, then the unifying-one cannot receive the name of Zeus. But when the difference has withdrawn before that to which it gives rise, then the unifying-one does indeed take the name of Zeus. Metaphysics can thus be defined henceforth as “a logic that thinks of the Being of beings, and thus the logic which is determined by what differs in the difference: an onto-theo-logic.”20 This definition would, however, be quite simply impossible if Zeus could not appear as the supreme present, and if he did not have the same provenance as presence and Being themselves, namely as αλήθεια [alˉe theia].21 Consequently, and with regard to Hegel’s onto-theo-logic, whose essential origin Heidegger is attempting to elucidate, the question is this: Does the Trinity of God derive from the Έν Πάντα? Or does the creator God, whose eternal essence is presented in The Science of Logic, appear out of αλήθεια [alˉe theia]? Heidegger seems sometimes to have thought so. Does he not write in the Letter on “Humanism”: “Only from the truth of being can the essence of the holy be thought. Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word ‘God’ is to signify.”22 Still more clearly, he understands the absence of God and of the divine as “the presence of the hidden plenitude of what has been and what is thus gathered (die Anwesenheit der verborgenen Fülle des Gewesenen und so versammelt Wesenden): the divine for the Greeks, that in Jewish prophetism, and that in the preaching of Jesus.23 This gathering, whose order is obviously not indifferent, assumes that the God of Israel, revealed in Christ, unfolds on the basis of αλήθεια [alˉetheia], or again that, in the manner of all the other gods, it receives its being from the essence of the Deity. Now, on the one hand, Heidegger has never shown this; on the contrary, he has emphasized the abyss that separates the Greek gods from God.24 On the other hand—and above all, when Yahweh reveals his name saying: “I will be what I will be”25—does he not mean that he is the exclusive, the jealous origin of his own manifestation? If the Trinitarian God cannot be led back to the truth of Being, it then becomes impossible to include all of The Science of Logic under the concept of the “onto-theo-logical constitution.” To overlook the Trinity—without which “God would not be spirit, and spirit [would be] an empty word,”26 as Hegel says—would then come down to misunderstanding the speculative as such. Indeed, as we have already shown, the speculative is inseparable from Christ, but not from Zeus. As if responding in advance to Heidegger, Hegel takes care to state this. “We derive pleasure

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from tales about Jupiter and the other Gods; but then, in the first place, we do not ask more from them than what Homer has reported to us, and we do not take them the way we do other historical things. Nevertheless, there is indeed something historical that is divine history and that must be history in the proper sense of the term; viz., the story of Jesus. This story does not simply pass for a myth in the mode of an image; rather, there are tangible events in it: the birth, the passion, and the death of Christ pass for fully historical things. This story is, to be sure, for representation and it is written in the mode of representation. But it also has another side. The story is double: it is divine history—not only that external history that should be considered no different than the ordinary history of a man—but it also contains something divine, a divine coming or advent, a divine doing, an absolutely divine action. This absolutely divine action is the interior, the veritable, the substantial dimension of this history, and that precisely is the object of reason.”27 To be sure, Hegel’s interpretation of the Greek gods never reaches that of Heidegger. Yet, under the circumstances, that changes nothing since, in the first place, the speculative is tied to the passion of Christ from the moment that it is the “doctrine of the Incarnation (Menschwerdung) [of God] and of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the community of believers, that first gave to human consciousness a perfectly free relationship to the infinite and thereby made possible the comprehensive knowledge of mind in its absolute infinitude.”28 In the second place, this passion does not take place starting from αλήθεια. No doubt Hegel never reaches the truth of Being. But, conversely, the thinking of αλήθεια cannot be allowed to reach the realm of truth, insofar as it is at one with the eternal essence of God before creation.29 The Trinitarian God, of which The Science of Logic is the speculative self-presentation, therefore cannot occupy the site reserved for it from the outset by the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics.30 This means that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is inaccessible on the basis of the difference and the discovering-recovering regulation. Yet it does not exclude—to the contrary—that this metaphysics take place within Revelation, while preserving an onto-theo-logical constitution in the rigorous sense of the term. In other words, if the beginnings of philosophy are indeed Greek, then its completion is Christian, and (this is a mark of our historicity) we can only accede to the beginnings by proceeding from the completion. Hegel’s speculative theology, which never lowered God to the rank of the concept but raised the concept to the height of God, thus supposes that Heraclitus’s λόγος was taken up in the Johannine λόγος, that the word of God would have breathed that of Being. In a word, that God would have learned Greek. Metaphysics could not

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have opened itself to revelation if God himself had not previously invested it. Do we require a final confirmation of this? At the end of his lecture, Heidegger points out that we could not pray to the god of metaphysics, nor dance, nor make music before him.31 Perhaps not; but Descartes closes his third Meditation with worship, and Nietzsche’s Dionysus, whom Heidegger takes to be metaphysical, is a god that dances,32 and, with Hegel, philosophy becomes an immense proclamation of faith. “I am a Lutheran and will remain the same,”33 he confesses while defining philosophy as divine service34 and stating (contrary to Heidegger) that metaphysics has taken place in revelation, and even that it is ultimately and in the final analysis coextensive with revelation. Can we ever surpass Hegel, then, without overcoming Christianity, and Israel whose promise it fulfills? Is it possible to destroy the metaphysics that is recapitulated by Hegel, without attempting first to destroy the biblical tradition outside of which and without which the essence of technology (which gets confused with completed metaphysics) could not have unfolded its reign? No doubt the destruction of the Judeo-Christian heritage will have to take paths other than the destruction of metaphysics, such as Heidegger understands it. For the Christianization of philosophy is inaccessible, and thus unintelligible, starting from the truth of Being. Nevertheless, if metaphysics is no longer “the darkening of Being,” but rather “the shadow of God,”35 then any destruction of metaphysics that fails to pronounce the death of God will be a limited undertaking. We must therefore proceed to a conjoined critique of the ontological and biblical traditions, so as progressively to show the ground common to them both. And where should this critique on two fronts find its point of departure and its red thread if not precisely at the site where the Christianization of philosophy was carried out? God translated himself into Greek to be revealed in Christ, and the Christianization of philosophy took place on the resurrection of the body. Hegel hardly says anything else when he takes the incarnation of God as the possibility of knowledge of the infinity of absolute spirit. The body is consequently the site and the hinge at which metaphysics and revealed theology, the word of God and the language of Being, are articulated. Now, if modifying an articulation is the only means by which to transform its terms, then it is by opening the body to new possibilities, ordered according to a new justice and a power superior to those of God, that Christianity will be surmounted, and philosophy triumphantly liberated, thereby, from its status as the servant to theology. Is this possible, and if so, under what conditions? Only the analysis of body will allow us to decide.

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Part 3

The Guiding Thread

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1

The Plurality of the Body

Before we proceed to the interpretation of body it is important to delimit once again the context in which it is inscribed, and the weight it is destined to bear. To understand the intention governing all our preceding analyses, we will rely on two sayings of Novalis, who is, according to Nietzsche, “one of the authorites in questions of saintliness.”1 The first dates from 1798: “The art of becoming omnipotent—the art of realizing our will totally. We must attain power over the body as we do over the mind. The body is the tool to shape and modify the world—we must therefore seek to cultivate our bodies to become an organ capable of anything. Modification of our tool is modification of the world.”2 The second one, somewhat shorter, dates from 1799: “Who declared the Bible closed? Should it not be conceived as still growing?”3 How should we understand these two sayings? Let us start from the second. The closure of the Bible is the fact of the Christ, who is “the alpha and omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”4 It is thus God himself who, through his son, proclaimed the Bible closed. Consequently, to question in this way the canonicity of the Scriptures does not amount to arbitrarily opening the possibility of an event concerning the economy of revelation, but rather to think that such an event has already begun to happen, or has already occurred. To question the closure of the Bible, to venture conceiving it as open, apt to metamorphosing, as a book to come amounts silently to proclaiming the death of God, and attempting to overcome Christianity: “my book shall be a scientific Bible,”5 says Novalis, who likewise notes that “the Gospel contains the fundamental features of superior gospels to come.”6 But how is that possible, and what path should we take to accomplish it? If, thanks to the Christ, if in Christ, our body is the temple of the living God—“there is but one temple in the world; and that is the body of man. Nothing is holier than this high form,”7 says Novalis—we could only become other than Christian by enhancing the power of the body. Mutatis mutandis, the creation of a superior body erects a wholly different sanctuary, tied to an entirely different holiness and not to the reconstruction of the old temple, for “if a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed: that is the law.”8 The first word of Novalis thereby acquires its full meaning. If “out of One God there will arise a Universal-God,”9 then, 127

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correspondingly, our body must become almighty. But how could it become this without being an organ capable of wholly fulfilling our will, an instrument capable of anything? This means, on the one hand, that the omnipotence or total realization of the will could not be attained, unless power became the will’s own, exclusive essence. On the other hand, it means that the body ceases being conceived as a system of organs. Indeed, an organ capable of anything is an organ at least capable of all that which the other organs can accomplish. Strictly speaking, it is no longer an organ per se. In short, in order to raise the power of the body and the will by opening new possibilities to them, and becoming the “poets of our life,”10 it is necessary to think body and will differently. However, since the conative body [le corps volontaire] is, as we showed, the site at which Greek metaphysics and Christian religion are articulated, its new concept ought to answer for the one, as for the other, as well as for their ultimate coincidence. Once again, if modifying an articulation is the only way to transform its terms, then philosophy will not revoke God, fulfill his death, and free itself from theology unless it opens new possibilities to the body. Nietzsche, who wrote this note in 1884, knew it well: “We are richer than we think, we have in the body wherewith to make many persons, we take for ‘character’ what belongs only to the ‘person,’ to one of our masks. Most of our acts do not come from the depths but are superficial: as with most volcanic eruptions: one should not be deceived by the noise. Christianity is right in this: one can put on a new man [einen neuen Menschen anziehen]: to be sure, and then yet another newer one. We deceive ourselves when we judge a man according to isolated acts: such acts warrant no generalizations.”11 Let us examine in what precise sense Christianity is right, here. The words Nietzsche emphasizes are a literal quotation from Luther’s translation of a verse from the Letter to the Ephesians. Saint Paul there urges us to reject the old man and to “put on the new man, who was created after God in true justice and holiness.”12 Now, since the old man was crucified with Christ and the new one resurrected with and in him, Nietzsche is thus referring, beyond baptism, to the resurrection of the body. Why should he do so, if the resurrection did not imply a certain plurality of body? Indeed, the change in condition that resurrection denotes could not occur if the body did not itself contain this possibility and could not be other than what it is. Proclaiming the glorification of the body, Christianity implicitly acknowledged its possible plurality. After having thus picked up the thread of Paul’s concept of body as a plurality of wills, and this—we note in passing—beyond the physical concept on which he seemed to be dwelling, Nietzsche immediately adds that the new man of whom Saint Paul spoke is not the only one possible. But

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whence does Nietzsche know that Christianity did not exhaust the plurality of bodies, or their multiple possibilities? Let us go back for a moment to the Pauline concept of a body. Living according to the spirit, the body is unified by the love of God; living according to the flesh, it is divided, turned against itself and God. Yet, a divided unity, turned against itself, is no longer, or not yet, a true plurality. And with God dead and sin no longer having meaning, the unity divided and turned against itself that results from this necessarily loses everything, including its unified character, thus allowing a plurality of wills to appear whose very dispersion calls for the creation of a higher body. That this was the task prescribed by the death of God—outside of which the elevation of the body to the rank of a guiding thread remains ultimately unintelligible—is clearly attested by a note from 1882–83: “The dissolution of morality has for its practical consequence an atomized individual, even the scattering of the individual into multiplicities— absolute Flux. This is why a goal is now more than ever necessary and from love, a new love.” In 1874, Nietzsche had already observed: “we live in the age of atoms, of atomistic chaos” and, in 1881: “We are entering into the age of anarchy.”13 The dispersion of the individual, that is, of the body, into a flowing plurality requires a new love, because the old love, that of God, had assured its unity—but can no longer do so. The dissolution of morality has for its correlate the dissolution of bodies, and the death of God makes simultaneously possible and necessary an over- or sur-resurrection [sur-resurrection]—in the sense in which Nietzsche speaks of an overman [surhomme]—a new love. “I never profaned the holy name of love,”14 he declares against Christianity. Our body thus carries within itself the death of God as the hope for a wholly other glory, and this statement, in no way nostalgic, expresses the strict experience of the death of God and of revaluation, since “all morality is a habit of self-glorification.”15 It was after having finished Thus Spoke Zarathustra, whose fundamental idea is eternal recurrence, at the moment he started the work first called The Will to Power, then Revaluation of All Values and which led ultimately to The Antichrist, that Nietzsche assigned to the body the function of guiding thread. This simple fact implies that the clarification of the body is inseparable from the combined understanding of eternal recurrence, the will to power, and the revaluation of values, that is, the ultimate figure of Nietzsche’s thought. The first occurrence of the expression “guiding thread of the body” dates from 1884. “Nothing good,” writes Nietzsche, “has up to now come out of the self-reflection of the mind. It is only now that we inquire into all spiritual processes, memory for example, following the guiding thread of the body, that we progress.”16 This

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note, which points to a functional substitution—the body henceforth assuming a role previously assigned to the mind, in the exploration of mind itself—nevertheless does not provide the motives behind such a substitution. What are these, and how does Nietzsche justify them? The establishment of a guiding thread is a methodological choice relative to an epistemic project, and if “methods, one must repeat ten times, are the essential, as well as being the most difficult,”17 it is important to specify the motives and consequences of such a decision. Why does Nietzsche grant the body this privilege? He writes in 1885–86: “If our ‘I’ is for us the sole Being, after which we fashion and understand all of being: very well! Then doubt is apposite, is there not here an illusion of perspective—the ostensible unity in which everything is gathered, like the line of the horizon. The body as guiding thread reveals a tremendous multiplicity; it is methodologically permissible to use a richer, more easily studied phenomenon as guiding thread for understanding a poorer one. Finally: supposing that everything is becoming, knowledge is possible only on the basis of a belief in being.”18 Thus, to take the body as guiding thread is then first to destitute the I of this function, and to hold the unity of consciousness, even were it synthetic consciousness, as a mere semblance of unity. Directly questioning the subject about itself, inquiring into the processes of the mind, on the foundation of the image it offers and provides itself (of itself), is thus to exclude straightaway, hastily, and without justification “that it might be useful and important for one’s own activity to interpret oneself falsely.”19 In 1886–87, the assertion according to which “the phenomenon of the body is the richer, clearer, more tangible phenomenon,” is preceded by this remark: “Everything that enters into consciousness as ‘unity’ is already prodigiously complex: we never have but a semblance of unity.”20 This destitution of consciousness, starting from which we could not conceive our real subjective unity—that of which the body is exemplary—implies calling into question all knowledge that holds, as its supreme principle, the synthetic unity of apperception. To be sure, Nietzsche was not unaware of this, when he writes: “If there is only one being, the ‘I,’ and all other ‘beings’ are made in its image—if, ultimately, the belief in the ‘I’ stands or falls with belief in logic, that is to say, in the metaphysical truth of the categories of reason; if, on the other hand, the I proves to be something in a state of becoming: then— — —”21 Then? Then to consider the becoming I, the body, as a guiding thread, amounts to modifying the essence of knowledge by questioning the truth of the categories, that is, the truth of the transcendental deduction. We will return to this. The preceding notes indicate next what a guiding thread is. The guiding thread is the unique being from which we constitute and com-

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prehend the world, the unique being in whose image other beings are made or—to use a language that is not that of Nietzsche, as we cannot emphasize enough—the being which opens access to the meaning of Being. The guiding thread thus supposes, if not ontological difference, then at least a certain difference between Being and beings. But this difference can only take form amidst the becoming that exceeds it on all sides. In other words, Being and beings are for Nietzsche but punctuations, stations, states of becoming, and the latter is the pure verb, preventing any nominalist use; unceasing event or advent: absolute flux. What ultimately are the characteristics peculiar to the body, such that it might be apt to serve as guiding thread for philosophical knowledge? It is impossible to answer this question without previously pointing to that to which body leads. From the moment the guiding thread is that from which we understand all that is, the analysis of the body will surely lead us to what Nietzsche calls “the innermost essence of being”: the will to power.22 And if this were not the case, then the foregrounding of the body would not be contemporaneous with the formulation of the will to power. That means first that the essential traits of the guiding thread can only come into view on the horizon of the will to power. It further means that the body is the easiest phenomenon to study,23 authorizing the clearest observations;24 it is, consequently, the phenomenon which most manifestly shows the will to power. The body is more astonishing, richer, and more complex than the soul, the mind, the subject, or consciousness.25 And, since “the most complete phenomenon is always the beginning,”26 the body must, from the point of view of method, come first.27 This is all the more so in that the body is the most certain entity, the object of a stronger and more fundamental belief than that in the subject, the soul, or the mind.28 This priority of the body immediately raises a problem. Since The Birth of Tragedy, had Nietzsche not always assigned himself as task “to look at science through the prism of the artist, but also to look at art through the prism of life?”29 Did he therefore not make art—understood from the perspective of the artist—the thread that leads to life, that is to say, to the will to power? Was it not for this reason that he wrote, “the phenomenon ‘artist’ is still the most transparent:—to see through it to the basic instincts of power, nature, etc.! Also those of religion and morality!”30 If art is the most transparent of the configurations of the will to power; if it is the easiest to know, does it not become ipso facto the thread that leads to it? Yet, is it conceivable that philosophical knowledge detains more than one thread, or is it the case that the one may be referred to the other?

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The answer to this question presupposes that we clarify further the essence of the guiding thread as such. If the latter is the being from which we constitute and comprehend all the others, if philosophical knowledge is devoted to “clarify[ing] the world starting from what is clear for us” or even, if “science does what man has always done: use something of himself, which he holds for comprehensible, for true, in order to explain all the rest,” then recourse to a guiding thread implies, directly or not, the “humanization”31 of the totality of beings. Thus, the world has always been interpreted in function of our being, and there has never been but one sole and unique guiding thread, under different guises. Should we conclude from this that philosophical knowledge is, by its very structure, a humanism? Perhaps, but in any event this could not be the case with regard to that “great knowledge,” whose spokesman is Zarathustra, and by virtue of which he teaches the overman; in other words, that “man is something that must be overcome.”32 From the moment that there is but one guiding thread, art— considered against the horizon of the will to power—must itself be understood relative to the body. Mutatis mutandis, did Schopenhauer not already subordinate art to the body, by making art the initial stage of the negation of the will, which is fulfilled by the ascetic annihilation of the body? “Art,” writes Nietzsche in 1887, “brings us back to states of animal vigor; it is, on the one hand, an excess and overflow of flourishing corporeity in the world of images and desires; on the other hand, [it is] an excitation of animal functions through images and desires of intensified life;—an elevation of the feeling of life, a stimulant to that feeling.”33 It is thus indeed starting from the body that the work of art should be understood. But when the work of art can “appear without an artist, for example, as body”34 or in other words, when the artist is not the sole artistic power,35 then the meaning of art is no longer exclusively bound to the artist’s point of view, and the artistic point of view is but a “preliminary stage”36 on the path leading to the will to power. If art is the object of physiology;37 if it is an “organic function” and “the greatest stimulus to life,”38 which is always corporeal, then aesthetics should be dissolved in physiology39 in order to be grounded on the analysis of body—that “formation” whose perfection “surpasses that of the work of art.”40 In short, artistic beauty is but a “shadow” of “living beauty,”41 or beauty corporeal, which, as we will see, always means intellectual. The reasons justifying the methodological privilege of the body, according to Nietzsche, are in large part formally identical to those that had allowed Schopenhauer to make the body the starting point and guiding thread of metaphysical knowledge. Thus, to offer the body these new possibilities, whose invention is the very task of philosophy42—and only

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the reinterpretation of the body is liable to open these possibilities—we must again take up the concept of the body that is conjoined to the metaphysics of will, which, recall, is fulfilled by coinciding with Saint Paul’s predication. This is all the more necessary in that the new possibilities we are seeking should answer for both the concealment of philosophy by revealed religion and for its overcoming. If such were not the case, then Nietzsche could never proclaim that “the poets still have to discover the possibilities of life, the stellar orbit is open to them, and not some Arcadia or a valley in Campania: an infinitely bold imagination, resting on the knowledge of animal evolution, is possible. All our poetry is so earthy and petit-bourgeois, the great possibility of superior men is still lacking. It is only after the death of religion that the invention of the divine could again become luxuriant.”43 In making the body the immediate objectivation of the will, Schopenhauer by the same token made the plurality of organs and functions inconceivable. Indeed, how can an absolutely single and indivisible will, in one and the same time be will to knowledge, which considered objectively is the brain, [and] will to walk, which considered objectively is the foot, [and finally] will to grasp, which considered objectively is the hand, etc.? This aporia finds its origin only in the will itself. If the latter can will to know, to walk, to grasp, etc., then it is not in itself a will to something that would be internal and essential to it. By thus posing the unity and uniqueness of the will, Schopenhauer presupposes that the willed as such is indifferent, that is to say external to the will, or again that the will does not strictly want anything, since it can will anything and everything without being modified in the slightest. The will is therefore destined to its own annihilation. This is indeed that to which Nietzsche objects: “My thesis is: that the will, according to psychology up to now, is an unjustified generalization, that this will absolutely does not exist, that instead of grasping the development of a a will determined as so many forms, we have crossed out the character of the will by subtracting its content, its toward what?” And, he immediately specifies: “This is in the highest degree the case with Schopenhauer: what he calls ‘will’ is but an empty word.”44 Consequently, and if only to allow for the phenomenal difference of the organs, we must begin conversely by describing the body as a plurality without presupposing its unity, in such a way that it becomes possible to determine its unity from this plurality and, by the same token, define the content or, as it were, the intentional correlate, of the will, which Schopenhauer said was “the internal essence of the force that is externalized.” What then is this plurality that Nietzsche emphasized early on since, from the summer of 1875, he observed: “Man seems to be a plurality of

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beings, a unification of several spheres, from which each can have a vantage on the others.”45 What are these entities that constitute the body and, above all, what are their relations to each other? Ten years later, in a long and magnificent note entitled “Morality and Physiology,” which no doubt forms the most complete and profound of his several analyses of body, i.e., of our subjective unity,46 Nietzsche wrote: “We consider that it is by a premature conclusion that human consciousness was for so long taken to be the supreme stage of organic development and most astonishing of terrestrial things, [and] even as their flourishing and their goal. What is more astonishing is rather the body: we endlessly admire how the human body became possible: how such a prodigious unification of living beings, all dependent and obedient, but in another sense commanding and acting by their own will, can live as a whole, grow and subsist for a certain time—: and this obviously does not happen through consciousness! Of this ‘miracle of miracles,’ consciousness is but an ‘instrument,’ and nothing more—in the same sense in which the stomach is an instrument.”47 Following Schopenhauer, Nietzsche also qualifies the body as the “miracle of miracles.” According to Schopenhauer, the body is “the miracle καθ’ έξοχήν”48 because, in it, will and representation, subject and object, coincide and are but one. For Nietzsche, the miracle of the body is due to the coherence of its plurality. Indeed, if the body is made up of living beings, each one acting according to its own will, and if consciousness is not the ground of its unity, then this cannot fail to astonish us. Conversely, the unity of the body could not concern Schopenhauer, since it rested on the unity of the will. For Nietzsche, then, it is a matter of securing his starting point by understanding how the body is possible, whence its unity comes and, in other terms, what this new love is to which we have already alluded. But in seeking the unity of the subject elsewhere than in consciousness, Nietzsche in turn gives himself the task of understanding this same consciousness starting from the body, as one of the body’s functions, or as the symptom of one of its modes of being. We will come back to this problem, which is none other than the egological character of modern metaphysics, and whose solution must amount, in the final analysis, to an advance destruction of transcendental phenomenology, which is the ultimate fulfillment of this egology. The subjective unity, or better, “unification”49 that body denotes, could only come from relations maintained by the plurality of its parts, since “it is first the relations that constitute beings.”50 Thus, it behooves us to specify what those living beings are that make up the body. Nietzsche described their plurality under several headings, which we must now enumerate. As plurality of minds: “Man is inhabited by as many minds as there are sea animals—they fight one another for the ‘I’ mind: they love

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it and want it to ride on their backs. They hate one another because of this love.”51 As plurality of drives: “In contrast to the animals, man has cultivated an abundance of contrary drives and impulses within himself: thanks to this synthesis, he is the master of the earth.”52 As plurality of forces: “Man is a plurality of forces situated in a hierarchy, in such a way that some command, but those commanding must also create, for the ones that obey, everything needed for their preservation, in such a way that they are themselves conditioned by the existence of those they command. All these living beings must be of a similar kind, or else they could not serve and obey one another in this way.”53 As plurality of souls: “our body is but a social structure composed of many souls.”54 As plurality of wills to power: “Man as plurality of ‘wills to power’: each with a plurality of means of expression and forms.”55 From these multiple designations, it follows that the unity of the body, which is always that of an antagonistic hierarchy, should not be thought as a state or a being, but rather as an event or a becoming. That being said, is it possible to unify these various designations? If, as Nietzsche claims, “our drives are reducible to the will to power,”56 then we must attempt to understand how these same “living beings” can at the same time be called “force” or “drive,” “will” or “will to power,” and in what sense thought belongs to them, failing which they could not be qualified as “minds” or “mortal souls.”

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2

The Criterion

Let us begin with force. And first, how to accede to it? “Has a force ever been observed? No, only effects, translated into a totally foreign language.”1 What are these effects then and where are they exerted? We could not answer these questions without specifying the nature of force itself. In 1885, after having opposed a plurality of subjects to the unique or single subject—a plurality whose play and struggle are the grounds for all thought and all consciousness; after having thus substituted the plural body for the self-identical I, and under what he calls “my hypotheses,” Nietzsche noted the following: “The only force that might be is of the same nature as that of the will: a commandment given to other subjects and according to which they are modified.”2 Thus, it is because one force relates to another that it can be named “will.” Consequently, the will is no longer unique, but complex and plural—“a mechanism that is so well practiced that it all but escapes the observing eye.”3 And it becomes possible to determine its effects. While any command implies obedience, in one way or another, the commanding will presupposes an obeying one, and force could only produce effects on another force, since “two things foreign in-themselves cannot act on one another.”4 Moreover, and to sum up more directly the analysis of the body, the will should not be conceived, following Schopenhauer, as acting on the organs through the nervous system; but rather as acting on other wills. “ ‘Will,’ of course, can affect only ‘will’—and not upon ‘matter’ (not ‘nerves,’ for example). In short, one has to risk the hypothesis whether will does not affect will wherever ‘effects’ are recognized—and whether all mechanical occurrences are not, insofar as a force is active in them, will force, effects of will.”5 Before being a system of organs, the body is thus a complex of wills related to one another and, in a certain sense, on this point, Saint Paul already knew what Schopenhauer did not. The hypothesis according to which the will acts upon the will presupposes, however, that the content and the “intentional” side of the will be determined—through a determination whose absence characterizes and invalidates Schopenhauer’s concept of will. How should we thus conceive will or force that it be capable of being exerted on another will? Nietzsche answered this question in the following way: “The victorious concept of ‘force,’ by means of which our physicists have created God 136

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and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as ‘will to power,’ that is to say, as an insatiable desire to manifest power; or as the employment and exercise of power, as a creative drive, etc. Physicists cannot eradicate ‘action at a distance’ from their principles; nor can they eradicate a repellent force (or one of attraction). There is nothing doing: one is obliged to understand all movements, all ‘phenomena,’ all ‘laws,’ merely as symptoms of internal events, and to use the human analogy. In the case of an animal, it is possible to trace all its drives to the will to power; likewise all the functions of organic life derive from this single source.”6 While starting from the physical concept of force, Nietzsche in fact proceeds according to “the human analogy,” that is, according to the guiding thread of the body. This proves—if proof were required—that the concept of will to power indeed stems from an interpretation of the body. In other words, if, relative to the physical mechanistic concept of force, the will to power is understood as a supplement, then conversely and concerning the drives and functions of organic life, this supplementarity has no reason for being. In thus resorting to the methodological principle according to which one should move from the richest to the poorest phenomenon, we would simply emphasize that the will to power is not added on to force from without. The determination of the will to power as “inner will” of the victorious force thus means that power is that which, within force itself, wants and is wanted, and this, in such a way that it might defeat other forces. The will to power is therefore that through which forces relate the ones to the others, as dominant or dominated; it is consequently the synthetic principle that ensures “the prodigious junction” of the forces or wills that constitute the body. How does this synthesis take place? Every force is a magnitude, a measurable quantum. “Our knowledge,” writes Nietzsche, “has become scientific to the extent that it is able to employ number and measure . . . We should attempt to see whether a scientific order of values could not be constructed simply according to a numeric scale of force . . . —All the other ‘values’ are prejudices, naiveties, misunderstandings . . . —They are everywhere reducible to this numeric scale of force—Progression up this scale represents an increase in value: regression down this scale represents a diminution in value. Here, we have appearances and prejudice against us.”7 If every force is a measurable magnitude, whose effects are exerted on another force, that is, on another measurable magnitude—Nietzsche will speak of “quanta of force whose essence consists in exerting power over all the other quanta of force”8—then is the relation between forces an equilibrium, or can it be reduced to a pure quantitative difference? Neither the one, nor the other is the case. First, there is no equilibrium,

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that is to say, equality of forces, because “ ‘change’ belongs to the essence of force,” and then, if “the measure of force, as magnitude, [is] fixed, its essence is fluid, tensorial, restrictive.”9 Second—and as Nietzsche never ceased insisting—in the realm of forces there is no adiaphory, no indifference, and “the isolation of a force is barbaric.”10 Finally, the relation between forces, constitutive of the force itself, is not only quantitative; for, in the absence of all equilibrium, the quantitative relation between forces—which is that of the greater to the lesser or the lesser to the greater—becomes a qualitative relation between superior and inferior forces. Why and how does the quantitative relation between forces become qualitative? When distinguished quantitatively, forces are ipso facto related to each other hierarchically, as superior and inferior, dominant and dominated. Consequently, would the greatest force not unfold its effects from a completely different perspective than that of the weaker ones? Will it not be with respect to the first that the latter appear as obedient or resistant? Will it not thus impose an evaluation? And will it not, by the same token, have a value different than the other forces, since value “is measured solely by the quantum of enhanced and organized power, according to what occurs in every event, a will to more”?11 Should we not then qualify the one differently from the others since, on the one hand, the first commands the others, which obey it, and which it thus subjects to its own growth perspective; and since, on the other hand, qualities are reducible to value judgments?12 To the question: “Might all quantities not be signs of qualities?” Nietzsche responds: “The greater power corresponds to another consciousness, to another feeling, desire, to another perspectival vantage; growth itself is an aspiration to be more; the aspiration for an increase in quantum grows from a quale; in a purely quantitative world everything would be dead, stiff, motionless.—The reduction of all qualities to quantities is nonsense: what appears is that the one accompanies the other, an analogy—”13 And, in a note dedicated to the physiology of power and to the body, he specifies: “ ‘Mechanistic interpretation’: allows nothing but quantities; but force is to be found in quality. Mechanistic theory can therefore only describe processes, not explain them.”14 What then are the qualities that forces derive from their relation with each other? Nietzsche calls the dominating forces active, and the dominated ones passive or reactive.15 Indeed, if, on the one hand, he asks: “What do active and passive mean? is it not to be master and mastered?,”16 on the other hand, in a note devoted to hierarchy, he declares: “—One needs to have a criterion [Maasstab]: . . . I distinguish activity and reactivity.”17 What is the criterion mentioned here? It is the criterion of hierarchy, the “criterion according to which we should determine the value of moral valu-

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ations.”18 This is, in a word, the highest criterion, since it is the criterion of the critique of values. If the criterion is what allows us to judge and if, in a general way, there can be no critique without a criterion, then every criterion establishes a partition. The distinction between the active and the reactive is at the basis of every project of revaluation. When Nietzsche holds the confusion between active and passive to be humanity’s “everlasting grammatical blunder”;19 when he recalls that “the criterion remains the efflorescence of the body,”20 and defines “the criterion of force” as the “fact of being able to live under inverted evaluations and to will them again eternally”;21 or finally, when he declares that he is “the first to hold in [his] hands the measure for ‘truths’ in hand, . . . the first who is able to decide,”22 it is always, as we will progressively see, relative to the distinction between active and reactive, whose function is fundamental because it is properly decisive. How to understand activity, reactivity, and the double designation of dominated forces? No force can be divested of its own power for, whether dominant or dominated, it always remains nonetheless a force.23 The qualitative difference between forces can thus only concern the mode and perspective under which the force produces its effects and unfolds its power. A force is active when it reaches out spontaneously for power; reactive, when it reaches out for it following stimulation from without. But since passive is equivalent to being mastered, is reactivity not the same thing as passivity? If, to the question, “what is ‘active’?” Nietzsche answers: “to reach out for power”; then to the question, “what is ‘passive’?” he answers: “to resist and to react. To be inhibited in moving forward: thus an act (Handeln) of resistance and reaction (Reaktion).”24 Consequently, passivity comes under reactivity. Does it denote a structural moment of reactivity? And if such is the case, then how should we characterize it? A force is reactive when it obeys an outside solicitation. But for that to occur, it is necessary that its inner tension toward power be inhibited, that it consequently be prepared to receive a command, and that the latter be followed by effects; in short, that it unleash an exercise of power proper to the obeying force. No force could thus be reactive without a prior inhibition of its own power. Consequently, passivity is a structural moment of reactivity. Have we thereby exhausted the meaning of passivity? We have not, because Nietzsche not only assimilates passivity to the suspension of the progressive movement of power, but also to an “act of resistance and reaction.” How to understand this act, and this uncommon activity within passivity? Passivity qualifies forces in reference to other forces superior to them. It can be thus considered from a double perspective: if, for the dominant force, a force that is not enacted is passive; the dominated force, in its turn, could not give itself up to domination

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without having previously resisted, and without having thus reacted to its own power. Indeed, the inhibition of a force—which, by its nature, reaches out for power spontaneously—would be impossible if this force did not oppose itself. Passivity should therefore be conceived as a resistance of self to self and as a reaction against oneself. Thus restored to its verbal sense, passivity can be assimilated to reactivity. The distinction between the quantity and quality of forces immediately raises the following question: from the moment that knowledge, using number and measure, is essentially quantitative, can we “know” qualities? “Qualities,” Nietzsche responds, “are insurmountable barriers for us; we cannot help feeling that mere quantitative differences are something fundamentally distinct from quantity; namely, that they are qualities which can no longer be reduced to one another. But everything for which the word ‘knowledge’ makes any sense refers to the domain of reckoning, weighing, measuring, to the domain of quantity—; while inversely, all our sensations of value (that is to say, simply, our sensations) adhere precisely to qualities, that is to say, to our perspectival ‘truths’ which belong to us alone and can by no means be ‘known’! It is obvious that every creature different from us senses different qualities and thus lives in a different world from that in which we live. Qualities are our authentic human idiosyncrasy; to require that our human interpretations and values be universal and perhaps constitutive values, is one of the hereditary follies of human pride, which, ever and again, finds in religion its most assured seat. Need I add, contrariwise, that quantities ‘in themselves’ are not present in our experience, that our world of experience is only a qualitative world, that consequently logic and applied logic (like mathematics) belong to the tricks of the ordering, dominating, simplifying, abbreviating power, called life, and thus are something practical and useful, namely something that preserves life but nevertheless, as far as possible from something ‘true’?”25 Qualities thus lead knowledge to its limits. But how is that possible if each quality draws its source from quantitative conditions,26 which can be known as such? Quality is a difference of quantity that “we cannot prevent ourselves from feeling” as irreducible to quantity, once it is reduced to a value judgment.27 However, to understand the modality of this reduction, we need to specify the constraint to which our sensibility is subject. In a note that directly echoes the one we just cited, Nietzsche explains that “our senses have as their milieu a determinate quantum within which they function; that is to say that we sense greatness and smallness in relation to the conditions of our existence.” This means that “if we sharpened or blunted our senses tenfold, we should perish,”28 or again that the degree of precision of our senses is relative to our

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conditions of existence. But is it not absurd to imagine such a thing; is it but an imaginary variation pure and simple? By no means. Does not rapture, which is nothing but a high feeling of power, have the effect of refining our organs, of making us perceive minute and fugitive things? Does it not modify the sensations of time and space?29 In other words, if the intensity or the power of our senses is prescribed by our conditions of existence, and if the latter prescribe the general laws within which we can see and touch what we see and touch as we see it and touch it, then it is for the maintenance of our own life and for the sake of its preservation, that we have this degree of sensibility rather than another. In short, our sensibility is governed by values, which, as thoughts, are by essence liable to be modified. It is therefore possible to assert that “qualities are our authentic human idiosyncrasy” or, which comes to the same, “that all sense perceptions are wholly permeated by value judgments (useful, harmful—consequently, pleasant or unpleasant).”30 By reducing qualities to value judgments—and our sensuous experience of the world is essentially qualitative—Nietzsche, who exhibits the axiological a priori according to which our senses function, radically transforms the concept of sensibility. Resting on value judgments, that is to say, on a new class of judgments whose structure could not be purely and simply apophantic, sensibility should henceforth be conceived as an intellectual phenomenon, which as such is liable to be modified. Failing this, Nietzsche could never have ventured to “learn to think differently—in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.”31 The question of knowing how and why qualities—which characterize the very vitality of experience—lead knowledge to its limits, thus takes on a greater clarity. Keeping in mind that “in a purely quantitative world everything would be dead,” Nietzsche once defined values as “conditions of preservation and enhancement with regard to complex formations of a relative life-span within becoming.”32 If qualities, that is to say values, merge with the very conditions of our life, then it follows that any living being different from us will feel other qualities and live according to another perspective and other values, according to a morality that is other. Qualities are thus inseparable from our very being, and we could not perceive or know anything other than against the horizon previously opened and circumscribed by our own conditions of existence. It is thus forever impossible for us to know a thing as it is or could be in itself, that is, as such. It is only possible for us to know from that point of view imposed a priori by our conditions of existence33 or human values. Consequently, if to know is to reach things in their true essence, independent of any perspective, then qualities that are always likewise perspectives are in

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principle unknowable. This means, conversely, that the apophantic “as such,” as a structure of the λόγος, implies the negation of the perspectival character of all life, and therefore of all knowledge. It likewise implies that a judgment of the kind “this, as such, is that,” which manifests an entity on the basis of itself, is rigorously unverifiable. This is because the self-identity of the entity, which is thus presupposed outside any perspective, is purely and simply inaccessible. As the traditional locus of truth, apophantic judgment is, in the final analysis, truth undermined. Thus, qualities indeed constitute the limits of knowledge, and that is why Nietzsche is justified in substituting, for “epistemology,” a “perspectival doctrine of the affects.”34 What is, however, the legitimacy of such argumentation? Is it possible to describe the perspectival character of forces and of life; in a word, perspective as such, when all description presupposes a determinate perspective? From whence is it possible to recognize as such “our authentic human idiosyncrasy,” and who has the right to do so? Or, again and at last: can we radically cast truth into doubt without falling back onto skepticism, which itself continues in one way or another to presuppose truth?35 To all these questions, only the death of God permits an answer. Indeed, two paths are open to us to recognize and conceive perspective as such. The first requires that our gaze go beyond any perspective, to reach “the essence of things.” Nietzsche himself examined and precluded this possibility by attacking the distinction—here more Schopenhauerian than Kantian36—between the phenomenon and the thing in itself. “In order to make such a distinction,” he notes, “we would have to think our intellect as having a contradictory character: on the one hand, oriented according to perspectival seeing, as is necessary for creatures of our species to keep themselves precisely alive; and on the other hand, at the same time, with a capacity to grasp this perspectival seeing as perspectival, [to grasp] the phenomenon as phenomenon.”37 It is thus impossible to posit a “reality in itself” without contradiction and risk of death, since “if we would leave the world of perspective, we would perish.”38 From where, then, comes the right to name the perspectival character of knowledge? The only path henceforth available consists not in exceeding perspective, but in varying it. To recognize perspective as such it is not necessary to look beyond the angle proper to us, it is enough to modify its aperture. An angle may indeed appear as an angle from the point of view of an angle that is wider—superior by comparison. “Our privilege: we live in the age of comparison.”39 In other words, the values governing us can only appear as such at the moment of their revaluation. And our human idiosyncrasy would appear as human, all too human, when this humanity is overcome. It is thus in the light of the overman that it becomes possible,

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and legitimate, to recognize the perspectival character of knowledge. But since the overman presupposes the death of God—“all the gods are dead: now we want the Superman to live,”40 says Zarathustra—it is ultimately of the latter that assertions could arise according to which “there is neither thing in-itself nor absolute knowledge,” and “the deceptive perspectival character belongs to existence.”41 There is no doubt that this was Nietzsche’s thought. On the one hand, in saying that he had the will to live “the state from which each of these angular perspectives on the world that we call a philosophy or a ‘religion’ had arisen,”42 he thus asserts that he varied the degree of aperture of that angle without which, and outside of which, no world could appear. On the other hand, he explicitly linked “monotheism” to the reduction of the multiplicity of perspectives. Indeed, in a paragraph from The Gay Science, entitled “The greatest advantage of polytheism,” after having noted that individuals have up to now never dared to institute their ideal other than under the mask of a god, and that, consequently, hostility toward the creation of proper ideals is the law of all morality, Nietzsche goes on to say: “There was only one norm, man—and every people thought that it possessed this one ultimate norm. But above and outside, in some distant overworld, one was permitted to behold a plurality of norms: one god was not considered a denial of another god, nor blasphemy against him. It was here that the luxury of individuals was first permitted; it was here that one first honored the rights of individuals. The invention of gods, heroes, and overmen of all kinds, as well as near-men and undermen, dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, and devils was the inestimable preliminary exercise for the justification of the egoism and sovereignty of the individual: the freedom that one conceded to a god in his relation to other gods—one eventually also granted to oneself in relation to laws, customs, and neighbors. Monotheism, on the other hand, this rigid consequence of the doctrine of one normal human type—the faith in one normal god beside whom there are only pseudo-gods—was perhaps the greatest danger that has yet confronted humanity. It threatened us with premature stagnation that, as far as we can see, most other species have long reached.” To polytheism, understood as “the wonderful art and strength of creating gods” or as “the strength to create for ourselves our own new eyes—and ever again new eyes that are even more our own,”43 in short, as a plurality of perspectives, Nietzsche thus opposes “monotono-theism,”44 which normalizes them all by eternalizing and absolutizing one of them. From what was just said, it follows that the death of God implies a simultaneous modification of both the essence of the body and of knowledge. How to account for this simultaneity? If we must take the body as

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starting point and guiding thread, this is because “we thereby obtain the correct representation of the nature of our subjective unity; namely, as regents at the head of a community.”45 This community is constituted by forces of the same kind, whose relations are ultimately qualitative. As long as the unity of the body, as a complex of forces or wills, is ensured by God, these can only be reactive since, obedient or disobedient, they all react to the divine will. The Christian body is thus essentially and exclusively reactive and, in the presence of God, it is impossible to distinguish the active forces from the reactive ones; impossible to distinguish between the quantity and quality of forces by interpreting their difference of power, their hierarchy, as a difference of value. Only his death allows this, and it is by right that Nietzsche counted among his “innovations” the discovery of “the active force”;46 a discovery in principle impossible for Saint Paul and for all the Christian theology that depends on him; a discovery liable to modify bodies and which ultimately supposes the discovery of will to power—one that implies “the hegemony of physiology over theology,”47 and the priority of the active body to come over the reactive body to be destroyed. Since any modification in the status of our subjective unity necessarily entails a modification in the status of knowledge, we can understand still better how the consideration of qualities invalidates and limits the scope of knowledge. Indeed, if the world of our experience is exclusively qualitative, and does not offer quantities “as such,” then logic and applied logic—in which Nietzsche includes mathematics—which proceed only according to numbers and measures, can not fail to appear, by ineluctably reducing qualities to quantities, as wholly dependent on the sole, numerical perspective. “Number is a perspectival form as much as time and space.”48 This is to say, finally, that logic and applied logic appear superficial, since they level out all qualitative and hierarchical differences by examining them under the enumerable face of the same common denominator. “Anytime something is thought in a purely arithmetic manner, the quality is excluded from the calculation.”49 Conversely, and seen from the will to power, whence the qualitative difference between forces as dominant or dominated, active or reactive, derives, the scientific, logico-mathematical knowledge will be held as a simplifying artifice, as far as possible from the truth to which it pretends; in a word, as mendacious. In the manner of Husserl, although in a different sense, Nietzsche could thus have asserted that “genuine science, so far as its real doctrine extends, knows no profundity.”50

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3

Pleasure and Pain

After having distinguished active from reactive forces, let us return more frontally to the analysis of the body and, to do this, take up our reading of the 1885 note, “Morality and Physiology,” where we left it. We will leave aside, for now, the elucidation of the instrumental status that consciousness takes on once it loses its sovereignty and ceases to be the instance of subjective unification. Struck by the coherent plurality of the body, Nietzsche continued: “The magnificient cohesion of the most multiple life, the disposition and arrangement of higher and lower activities, the variously enacted obedience that is neither blind nor much less mechanical, but rather elective, prudential, considerate, even grudging—this whole phenomenon of the ‘body’ is, from the intellectual point of view, as superior to our consciousness, our ‘mind,’ our conscious willing, sensing, thinking, than is algebra to the multiplication table. The ‘neuro-cerebral system’ has not been so subtly and ‘divinely’ constructed to produce willing, sensing, thinking; on the contrary, it seems to me rather that willing, sensing, thinking have, in themselves, no need for an ‘apparatus’ at all, but that they are, and they alone—‘the thing itself’ [die Sache selbst]. On the contrary, this prodigious synthesis of living beings and intellects that we call ‘man’ can only live once this fine system of relations and mediations is created, and thereby, that understanding, quick as lightning, between superior and inferior beings—namely, only through living mediators: but this is a moral problem and not a mechanical one!”1 Once established that the will to power ensures the “prodigious synthesis” of the multiple living beings constituting the body, it becomes possible to pursue their conjoined analysis. As a “domination-formation [Herrschafts-Gebilde], which signifies unity but is not a unity,”2 the body is a hierarchy between commanding wills and obedient ones. What does this hierarchical relation presuppose? Since no will can obey without understanding the order to which it is, the hierarchical relation presupposes reciprocal understanding—which does not imply a symmetrical relation—between its terms. To the question of knowing “the type of constraint exerted by a stronger soul on a weaker one,” Nietzsche answers: “it might be possible that the apparent ‘disobedience’ to the superior soul rested on the non-comprehension-of-its-will; a rock, for example, cannot be commanded. But—a gradual distinction of degree and rank 145

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is required: only beings best related to each other can understand each other and thereby give rise to obedience.”3 From the moment the body is a plurality of forces synthesized by the will to power, which refers them to each other like a sovereign will over the multiplicity of wills it rules, and by which it must always be understood and heard, that body cannot but be a thoroughgoingly intellectual phenomenon; even, a “great intelligence,”4 according to Zarathustra’s word. But in what way is it a great intelligence? In what sense is the body intellectually superior to mind as to consciousness? If this superiority is comparable to the superiority of algebra over arithmetic, that implies that mind, consciousness, or reason, in the metaphysical sense, must derive from the body, since the arithmetic of whole numbers was integrated—that is, dissolved into algebra thanks to the theory of Abelian groups. Therefore, the correlative analysis of the body and the will to power necessarily goes together with a critique of the privilege of consciousness, whose essential form is reason; in a word, it is accompanied by the anticipated subordination of transcendental phenomenology, which, according to Husserl, is the telos of all modern philosophy. Nietzsche described, we have seen, the multiplicity of living beings constituting the body under many headings. One of these is the “drive,” from which it is possible to bring out the intellectuality of the body. What is a drive? Every drive is a thrust toward something; a force arranged and subordinated to an end that it intends. That toward which the drive thrusts itself must be a priori accessible and appropriate to it, for if that is not the case, then it could not tend to its end and, by the same token, to its proper work, to the unfolding of its own quantum of power, or even to its own satisfaction. Stated otherwise, “every ‘drive’ is a drive toward ‘something good,’ and this, from whatever point of view considered; there is there an evaluation, which, for that reason alone, was incorporated.”5 In what sense can this end, toward which the drive thrusts, be characterized as “good”? If every drive takes possession of itself in the movement and tension that carries it toward an end, then not only does that end belong to it, but it is also “good” for it, since it is only through that end that the drive can be what it is. Nevertheless, what is good for one drive—and which is none other than the condition of its energy—could not be good for another drive. The “good” is thus liable to variation, since it “is seen as something different from the standpoint of two different beings.”6 What is more, there is no isolated drive and all our bodily drives are organized in a hierarchy. Consequently, the drive which imposes itself upon others, imposes at the same time its own point of view—“every drive is a certain need for domination; each has its perspective that it would impose as norm on all the other drives”7—and what

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is good for the former becomes, ipso facto, if not what is good for the latter taken in themselves, then at least what they are good for and what they serve. Being subordinated to a directive drive, all the other drives of the body cannot then fail to unfurl their power in service to the whole that they constitute, and thereby and at least contribute to the preservation of that whole. “Following the guiding thread of the body,” writes Nietzsche, “we know man as a plurality of animated beings that partly fight each other mutually, and partly, being ordered and subordinated to each other, also assert the whole involuntarily, through the assertion of their individual beings.”8 Drives are not only commanded by values, liable to change by virtue of their hierarchical relations. But more fundamentally, they are themselves the late effects of old evaluations, still persisting because they have been incorporated. “All evaluations are the result of determinate quantities of force and of their degree of consciousness: these are the perspectival laws attuned to the being of a man and a people—that which is proximate, important, necessary, etc. All human drives, as much as the animal ones, have taken, under specific circumstances, the form of conditions of existence, and have been placed in the foreground. Drives are the subsequent effect of long-preserved evaluations, which now function instinctively as a system of judgments of pleasure and pain. At first constraint, then habit, then need, then natural tendency (drive).”9 Values result from the quantitative difference of forces, since this difference, irreducible to quantity, is qualitative or hierarchical, and there could not be hierarchy without evaluation. Values should thus be conceived as the conditions of existence of a domination-formation, that is, of a set of forces, subject to and unified by the greatest among them. Initially, the union of these forces is the product of chance—“within the chemical world, the organism is the exception and the accident”10—but at length, the perspective or value imposed by the dominant force becomes the very condition of existence of the dominated ones. This is ultimately because, starting from dominant force, what is “proximate, important, necessary, etc.” may be defined for the hierarchical structure constituted by the totality of forces. Thus, in the midst of that relatively durable structure that is the body each dominated force is first compelled to deploy its own power, within the perspective or according to the value of the sovereign power. This constraint thereafter becomes “habit, then need, then drive.” The becoming-drive of the forces is fulfilled once the evaluation becomes an instinct. “I speak of instinct,” writes Nietzsche, “when some kind of judgment (taste, at its lower level) is incorporated in such a way that it henceforth sets itself in motion spontaneously, without waiting for excitations.”11 What does this “spontaneity” mean? By thrusting

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itself toward its end, which is always the result of an evaluation, the drive asserts ipso facto a value judgment. Its drive activity is thus in itself “spontaneously” moral, and this is the reason why Nietzsche can say of the body, not only that it is the moral phenomenon par excellence,12 but above all he can marvel that “the effective morality of man in the life of his body is a hundred times greater and finer than any conceptual moralizing has ever been. The multiple ‘thou shalt,’ continually working in us! The consideration between those commanding and those obeying! The knowledge of the superior and inferior functions!”13 Yet why do the drives function as “a system of judgments of pleasure and pain”? We should first emphasize that “there is no striving for pleasure: but pleasure steps in when what was striven for is attained: pleasure accompanies, pleasure does not move . . .”14 Indeed, if the will to power is the internal principle of the force or that “all driving force is will to power,”15 then it is not pleasure but power that is at the source of the drive movement. What then is this pleasure which is, in any event, tied to drive activity? “Pleasure is but a symptom of the feeling of power attained, a consciousness of difference.”16 However, concomitant with the increase of power, pleasure—which presupposes comparison, without which the difference could not become conscious—consequently never comes without displeasure. Indeed, if the intensification of power is always a victory, there is no victory without resistance. Only the effort reveals the obstacle. “This is the case, for example, in tickling, also the sexual tickling in the act of coitus. It seems, a small inhibition is overcome and immediately followed by new inhibition that is again overcome—this game of resistance and victory arouses more strongly the general feeling of superabundant, excessive power, which constitutes the essence of pleasure.”17 Pleasure is thus of a rhythmic and tensorial nature: “Pleasure is a sort of rhythm in the succession of minimal pains and in their gradual relations; a stimulation through rapid succession of intensification and relaxation, as in the excitation of a nerve or a muscle; and taken as a whole, a rising curve: tension is essential therein, and relaxation. Tickling.”18 This determination of pleasure calls, however, for three remarks. (1) If pleasure is made up of pains, there could not be great pleasure without “the pains being protracted and the tension of the bow, tremendous.”19 (2) It is not enough to make pain an ingredient of pleasure to define its nature. Indeed, since the sensation of pain does not increase thanks to small stimulations of pleasure, “pleasure and pain are two different things and not contraries.”20 (3) From the moment that pleasure is the feeling of an intensification of power, not only would pleasure be stronger when intensification is higher, but also pleasure and displeasure are based in being. “If the innermost essence of being

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is will to power, if pleasure is any increase in power, and displeasure any feeling of not being able to resist or dominate: should we not then posit pleasure and displeasure as cardinal facts? Is will possible without these two oscillations of yes and no? But who feels pleasure? . . . But who wants power? . . . An absurd question: if essence itself is power-will (Machtwille) and consequently a pleasure-displeasure-feeling!”21 Relative to this feeling, will to power is indeed a “tensorial force [Spannkraft]”;22 however, “pleasure is more original than pain,” since there can only be resistance in regard to a will to domination or to victory. From this point of view, it is then possible to consider pain as “the consequence of a will to pleasure,” even as “a sort of pleasure.”23 Having thus described and interpreted pleasure against the horizon of will to power, we can henceforth bring out its intellectual character and understand in what sense the drives operate as a system of judgments of pleasure and pain. Arising from the quantitative difference of forces, values must be instituted by will to power, which could not grow without them. Consequently, pleasure presupposes the values required for the intensification of power, of which pleasure is merely the symptom. This is the reason why, in another note on instinct, Nietzsche can write: “The instincts as judgments based on prior experiences: not experiences of pleasure and displeasure: for pleasure is first a form of judgment of instinct (a feeling of increased power or: as if power had been increased). BEFORE the feelings of pleasure and displeasure there are on the whole feelings of strength and weakness.”24 In short, and to sum up: if pleasure is always the result of an evaluation, if “pleasure and displeasure are accidental and not originary things, value judgments of a secondary rank that are derived from a ruling value,”25 then drives do indeed work as a moral system. This latter statement does not go without difficulty, however. Indeed, if pain is of a wholly different nature than pleasure, can we assert about judgments of pain what we just claimed for judgments of pleasure? In other words, is pain as intellectual as pleasure? If this were not the case, it would become impossible to claim that drives function instinctively as a system of judgments of pleasure and pain. What then is pain? When, for example, I burn my hand in contact with fire, I do not suffer before recoiling, but afterward. Thus, pain does not precede the reaction but follows it. “That pain is the cause of reflex actions has appearance and even the prejudice of philosophers in its favor; but, if one observes it closely, in cases of sudden pain the reflex comes noticeably earlier than the sensation of pain.”26 This “description”27 implies that pain “does not indicate what has been damaged at the moment, but the value of the damage in relation to the individual as a whole.”28 Indeed, to burn one’s

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hand is to be unable to take hold of this or that as before. This impossibility reveals the importance—or the lack thereof—and thus the value of the possibilities of which the burned hand temporarily deprives me. Pain is thus inseparable from an evaluation, and we must conclude from this that it is “an intellectual process in which a definite judgment is resolutely expressed—the judgment ‘harmful,’ in which long experience is accumulated. In itself, there is no pain.”29 Consequently, bodily pain is as intellectual as pleasure, and it is legitimate to consider the drive body a system of judgments of pain and pleasure. The process itself of corporeal pain is not yet described for all that. Nietzsche will do this in the following fashion: “It would go ill with me if, when I stumbled, I had to wait for the fact to ring the bell of consciousness and for instructions about how to act to be telegraphed back . . . What I notice with the greatest possible clarity is rather that the reflex of my foot follows first to prevent my falling, and then, following a measurable lapse of time, a sort of painful wave that is suddenly felt in the front of my head. Thus one does not react to the pain. Pain is projected after the fact onto the wounded site:—but the essence of this local pain is nevertheless not the expression of the specificity of the local injury; it is a mere place-sign whose force and tone correspond to the injury, which the nerve centers have undergone. That, as a result of this shock, the muscular strength of the organism is measurably lowered, does not warrant our seeking the essence of pain in a diminution of the feeling of power . . . To repeat, one does not react to pain; displeasure is not a ‘cause’ of action. Pain itself is a reaction, the reflex is another and earlier reaction—both of them originate in different places.—”30 We must first emphasize that pain is not originally local, since it is not the lesion as such—nor is it at the moment at which it occurs—that hurts. Pain is thus not initially relative to the sole place at which an excitation occurs. How is that so and why? Pain always comes after a break in equilibrium, of which stumbling is a perfect example, and which concerns the body as a whole. “What is properly specific in pain is always the protracted tremor, the prolonged trembling of a terrifying shock in the cerebral center of the nervous system:— one does not really suffer from the cause of pain (from some kind of injury, for example), but rather from the long disturbance of equilibrium that occurs as a result of the shock.”31 If pain is the aftereffect of an imbalance, it cannot fail to be a way of getting back on foot, a recovery, a restoration, in short, a defense. Pain should be thus understood as “a disease of the cerebral nerve center [Krankheit der cerebralen Nervenheerde]—pleasure is certainly not a disease . . .”32 How is this defense set in motion? “The most violent excitation is not in itself a pain: rather, in this shock that we feel, the nervous

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center is morbidly attacked and it is only that which projects pain toward the site of the excitation. This projection is a defensive and protective measure. The shock entails a multitude of affects: aggression, fear, resistance, irritation, fury, prudence, reflection on safety measures—movements of the entire body result from these. Pain is a deep restorative movement, with at the same time a mass of thoughts; a disease following a loss of equilibrium and a violence momentarily done to the will.”33 The neuro-cerebral center reacts to the concussion received by localizing the pain post facto, which is thus projected onto a bodily site which is not its seat.34 The localization of pain, which is equivalent, then, to its reduction, is thus indeed a defensive process.

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4

To Will, to Feel, to Think

This description of pain nevertheless remains insufficient, since we have not yet determined the status of the neuro-cerebral center nor the conditions of possibility of pain’s localization. Let us begin with the problem of localization. It goes without saying that pain could not be localized unless the totality of the body, as a structure of domination, were itself spatialized. It likewise goes without saying that this spatialization must be founded on the synthetic principle that ensures the “magnificent cohesion” of the manifold living beings constituting the body; will to power. It is through will to power, as we have seen, that one force relates to another by acting upon it. “Not a being, not becoming, but pathos—is the most elementary fact from which becoming and acting emerge . . .”1 The will to power is what enables a force to act on, or for the sake of, another. But for a force to act on another—and the body is a hierarchized plurality of distinct forces—these forces must be diversely localized: “If A acts on B, then A is first localized separately from B.”2 In other words, it is will to power itself that requires the spatialization of the body and the localization of pain, and it makes both of them possible. Furthermore, at the moment he conceived the will to power as the essence of being, Nietzsche— who had already related space to the will in 1870–71—pointed out, in 1877, that “force . . . is bound to a site.”3 He thereupon noted in 1884 that “ ‘force’ and ‘space’ are but two expressions and two ways of regarding the same thing.”4 Nietzsche presented this correlation clearly in the following remark: “With solid shoulders, space resists nothingness. Where there is space, there is being.”5 The localization of pain, the spatialization of the body, which makes it possible and, more generally, space, all derive from will to power itself. Let us note in passing that it is not only space but also time which are thus brought back to the essence of force, that is, to will to power. Indeed, for want of general equilibrium, force “cannot stand still. ‘Change’ belongs to its essence, and with it, temporality.”6 If the spatiality of body and the body itself remain incomprehensible within ecstatic temporality, this is not the case for the will to power.7 It is henceforth possible to specify the status of the “neuro-cerebral center,” which Schopenhauer had considered as the objectivation of consciousness. The body is a hierarchical plurality of variously localized forces, which must be able to understand each other, failing which, there 152

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would be neither command nor obedience. Now, on the one hand, to command is not only to make an order known, and on the other hand, to be obeyed, is rather to be in relation to an inferior; in short, to communicate and present oneself as a hierarchical superior. “To communicate oneself [sich mitteilen] is thus, originally, to extend one’s power over the other,” writes Nietzsche who, having transformed the traditional concept of sign and referred the origin of language to will to power, continues in this way: “An old sign language is at the foundation of this drive—the sign is the imprint (often painful) of one will on another will. To make oneself understood through blows (ants).”8 There is no commanding without communication, and the body is a domination-formation whose unity is that of a “joust” or “struggle,”9 whose multiple constituent forces can “temporarily exchange roles” such that “the one that ordinarily commands obeys for a time”10 and the center of gravity of the whole thereby shifts. For this reason, a center of transmission, communication, and even telecommunication of orders, a directing authority, is necessary to the understanding and coordination of all these forces. Such is the neuro-cerebral center: “the nervous system and brain are a system of direction and a centralization apparatus for the innumerable individual minds of different ranks.”11 But why call the multiple constitutive forces of the body “minds” here? Because the obedience of the ones to the others never goes without a mutual and asymmetrical understanding, which is, Nietzsche noted, “neither blind nor mechanical, but rather elective, prudential, considerate, even grudging.” And if this is so, it is because the understanding of a command— which “originally is a feeling of suffering and the recognition of a foreign power”—is as painless as it is prompt: “To understand quickly and easily, becomes highly advised (to avoid as many blows as possible), the fastest reciprocal understanding is the least painful mutual relation.”12 Now, on the one hand, and relative to those relations established “brutally” in the realm of inorganic nature, in which “the absolute instantaneousness of the will to power” reigns, the relations of power peculiar to organic life are “softened through the anticipation of the future, prudence, cunning, in short, through the mind.”13 On the other hand, Nietzsche did not fail to emphasize the characteristic rapidity of spiritual processes.14 This is a rapidity we become aware of, comparatively speaking, by absorbing hashish or by simply dreaming.15 This center of transmission and direction, which permits the “lightning fast understanding between superior and inferior beings” combined in a body, should not, however, be mistaken for consciousness or the ego. Why not? First, by virtue of the unconscious character of the activity of those multiple beings that constitute the body. If, from the incipience of the thought of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche could assert

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that “the great, fundamental activity is unconscious”16—while adding that “the consciousness of the ego is the last thing added when a completed organism operates, something almost superfluous: the consciousness of unity, something extremely imperfect in any event and often lacking in comparison with the effective, innate, incorporated, laborious unity of all the functions”—then, somewhat later, when he justified the methodological priority of the body, he would urge, in a nota bene, that “even if the center of ‘consciousness’ does not coincide with the physiological center, it is nonetheless possible that the PHYSIOLOGICAL center might also be the MENTAL center. The intellectuality of feeling (pleasure and pain), that is to say, that it is commanded from this center.”17 Consciousness could not therefore be assimilated to the center of transmission and direction implied by the multiplicity of living beings constituting the body. But notably thereafter, Nietzsche refuses to distinguish between a neuro-cerebral center, that is, a set of coordinated organs, and the effects of its functioning—i.e., willing, feeling, and thinking. Why? To posit the neuro-cerebral center apart from willing, feeling, and thinking amounts to positing a constant being under the changing multiplicity of corporeal events. Such a hypothesis implies the separation of what comes into being and what brings it about, between becoming and being. It goes hand in hand with “the mythology of the concept of the subject.”18 How should we understand this? If we ascribe to the neuro-cerebral apparatus the production of volitions, feelings, or thoughts, we make the former into the author of the latter. This conclusion is mythological, because it “separates what acts from the acting,” says Nietzsche, who thus continues: “When I say ‘the lightning flashes,’ I have posited the flash in one moment as an activity and, at a second moment, as a subject, I have thus posited, beneath the event, a being that is not one with that event but is, instead, fixed, is, and does not ‘become.’ ”19 The logico-grammatical interpretation of the event, which is based on the distinction between subject and verb, is inadmissible because it implies that the force is something more and other than its effects. “For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed— the deed is everything.”20 Because what holds for lightning and flash also holds for the neuro-cerebral apparatus and willing, feeling, or thinking, it is thus most illegitimate to dissociate a set of coordinated organs from the effects of their operation.

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That it might be impossible to conceive the neuro-cerebral apparatus as a subjective agent producing willing, feeling and thinking in no way prevents us from understanding its formation out of the mere play and relations between the multiple volitions, feelings, and thoughts of which it is the center—quite the contrary. To begin with, what does this repeated conjunction of willing, feeling, and thinking denote? Nothing other than force itself. “Would it not suffice,” asks Nietzsche, “to think of ourselves, as ‘force,’ and thus as a unity in which willing, feeling, and thinking would still be muddled and indistinct? And to think of organic beings as the beginning of a division, such that all organic functions were assembled in this unity, thus self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, metabolism?”21 How do willing, feeling, and thinking belong to force? Since we have already seen that every force is a will inasmuch as it is, by essence, exerted on another force to command or obey it; [and again] that any force is, by virtue of this hierarchical relation, inseparable from a value—that is to say from a thought—it remains for us to determine whether the will to power does not likewise entail that every force is a feeling. It occurred to Nietzsche to define willing as “a pressing, very agreeable feeling”; as “the phenomenon accompanying any discharge of force.”22 This no doubt means that pleasure is a symptom of an intensification of power, but also that from the standpoint of the will to power itself, the “will,” in Schopenhauer’s sense or, more narrowly, as a power of the soul, is but a result, an outcome. If this were not the case, then never could Nietzsche have said of the “will” what he would later say about pleasure; namely, that “the will does not move, [that] it is rather an accompanying phenomenon”23—or again, if self-control is an equilibrium of multiple forces, that “voluntas is ultimately an overweight [übergewicht], unconditional and mechanical, a victory that comes to consciousness.”24 However, it goes without saying that the “will,” in the traditional sense of the term, could not appear as a feeling if the latter did not also belong to the will to power from which this “will” derives and which founds it. In what sense does force, or will, include feeling as one of its elements? Replying to Schopenhauer, who maintained that the will is simultaneously simple and well known, and who therefore did not realize that “every word is a prejudice,”25 Nietzsche responds in an important paragraph of Beyond Good and Evil: “As I see it, the act of willing is above all something complex, something that has unity only as a word—and this common prejudice of using only one word has overridden the philosophers’ caution (which was never all that great anyway). So let us be more cautious for once, let us be ‘unphilosophical.’ Let us say that in every act of willing there is first of all a multiplicity of feelings, namely the feeling

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of the condition of the away from [weg], the feeling of the condition towards which, that feelings of this ‘away’ and this ‘towards’ themselves, and then also an accompanying feeling in the muscles, which, without our actually moving ‘arms and legs,’ comes into play out of a kind of habit, as soon as we ‘will.’ Therefore, just as feeling (and indeed many kinds of feelings) are to be recognized as ingredients of the will, so, secondly, should thinking also: in every act of will there is a ruling thought—let us not imagine it possible to sever this thought from ‘willing,’ as if any will would then remain over! Third, the will is not only a complex of feeling and thinking, but it is above all an affect: and specifically the affect of the command.”26 It is apposite first to emphasize that the theme of this analysis is not the will to power itself, but our “will” as it appears to us. And we can describe it in relation to the guiding thread of the body, that is to say, in the light of the will to power. From a general manner, as we have sufficiently seen, to will is to act on a will, to make oneself understood and obeyed by it. But what happens when we are at the same time the ones commanding and those obeying, when we want something from or for ourselves, when we experience the “freedom” of the will? In that case, we cannot fail to experience both the feeling of constraint and that of control. To this is added the feeling of passing from the one to the other, that is, the feeling of being victorious over a resistance. But why do constraint and control, resistance and victory present themselves as feelings? What then is a feeling or, rather, what is it to experience a feeling? It is to be in oneself open to something other than self, to be in oneself concerned by something other than self. Feeling consequently implies openness and relation. Now, no force could act on another unless the one and other could accede to each other, each in its own way and this, in the dual sense of an exposition unto . . . , which means openness, and of a blow delivered against . . . , which marks the relation. “For the will to power to express itself . . . it should feel when something comes close to it that this [thing] is apt to be assimilated,” specified Nietzsche right after having asserted, again with respect to will to power, that “ ‘remote action’ must not be set aside: something attracts something else, something feels attracted. Such is the fundamental fact.”27 Consequently, if the will to power can be described and understood as a feeling, it is because it is not exerted on matter or on an organ, but on another will, which must be a priori accessible and open to it. Accessibility and openness constitute the formal characteristics, as it were, of any feeling in general. However, and we must again insist on this, this feeling is commanded by a thought or a value, since each force can relate to the others only within the perspective opened to it by the unfolding of its quantum of power. That is

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why the will is nothing without the thought commanding it. That is also the reason why “thoughts are actions.”28 That is [finally] the reason why the will and the body can be known, for, as Nietzsche maintains against Schopenhauer: “Of the will, we can only know what is knowable in it— thus, supposing that we know ourselves as willing, there must be something intellectual in the willing.”29 This intellectuality of the will, which ultimately only denotes its perspectival character, extends all the way to the “muscular feeling” that accompanies every volition. Indeed, muscular activity, whose metaphysical substratum is constituted by the will, according to Schopenhauer, is always the symptom of an intensification of power, for Nietzsche. It is thus that love can be described as a tonic: “The muscular strength of a young girl grows the moment a single man comes into her vicinity; there are instruments to measure this. When the relation between the sexes becomes closer still, in dancing for example, or in any other social customs, this force increases to the point of allowing real feats of strength [Kraftstücken]: one ends up disbelieving one’s eyes—and one’s watch! Here, in fact, it should be considered that already dancing, in itself, like any rapid movement, gives rise to a kind of rapture in the whole vascular, nervous and muscular system. In this case, one should count on the combined effects of a double rapture.”30 The latter, defined as “the feeling of intensification of force [Kraftsteigerung] and fullness,” as “the feeling of a surplus of force,” or as “an exalted feeling of power ” whose “most ancient and most originary form is the rapture of sexual stimulation,” thus implies as constitutive moment “vigor, as a feeling of dominion in the muscles, as pleasure and suppleness in movement, as dance, as lightness and presto.”31 It is also thus and above all, that thought can itself be described as a muscular and, more generally, corporeal phenomenon. Nietzsche never ceased observing this. After revealing that the chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra entitled “On Old and New Tablets” was composed “on the most onerous ascent from the [Nice] station to the marvelous Moorish eyrie, Éze,” he immediately added: “the suppleness of my muscles has always been greatest when my creative energies were flowing most abundantly. The body is inspired; let us keep the ‘soul’ out of it.— Often one could have seen me dance; in those days I could walk in the mountains for seven or eight hours without a trace of weariness. I slept well, laughed much—my vigor and patience were perfect.”32 The muscular feeling that accompanies the will is thus ultimately none other than a feeling of victory. And if it comes into play from the moment we “will” independently of the movement of our members, this is because that victory, whose highest form is dance, belongs essentially to the will as will to power. That is why Nietzsche asserts, against Hegel, that “the spirit of a philosopher could wish for nothing more than to be a good

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dancer. For dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally also his only piety, his ‘divine service.’ ”33 But that the accompanying muscular feeling be a feeling of victory means that it is indissociable from a value. Indeed, the victory of one will over another is only possible by virtue of the axiological superiority of the former over the latter, since every value can be reduced to a quantum of power. Consequently, muscular activity itself must be understood as a value judgment. And Nietzsche can write, by way of recapitulation, that “our most sacred convictions, our immutability in regard to the highest values, are the judgments of our muscles.”34 Notwithstanding, the will is not only a complex of feeling and thought, it is “above all” an affect: the affect of commanding. What does this mean? If the will is “above all” the affect of commanding, the latter must include in itself, as a moment, both feeling and thought—or value. How is that possible, and what should we understand under “affect” here? Like feeling, affect is characterized by an openness and a relation. To affect or to be affected is always to be in relation to what affects or is affected, and this relation would be impossible without a foregoing openness that can be reciprocal without being symmetrical. But an affect is not a passion, and it is rightly that Heidegger, following Kant, considers anger as an affect, and hatred as a passion, both being considered feelings.35 What is it, then, that distinguishes an affect from a passion, if both are feelings? Two distinctive characteristics differentiate the affect from the passion. The first is its suddenness, and its instantaneous quality. Contrary to passion, an affect does not last. The second characteristic is the fact that an affect is always either pleasant or painful. Now, on the one hand, pleasure is, as we have seen it, the symptom of intensification of power and, if commanding is compelling obedience, then commanding will always be a source of pleasure, since any force that affects another by dominating, is increased accordingly. This is why Nietzsche can say that “the most powerful affects are the most valuable, inasmuch as there are no greater sources of force.”36 On the other hand, and as we have also seen, relations between the forces must be as rapid as possible, both in order to reduce pain and because “every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.”37 In short, the will can be defined as the affect of commanding; for to command is suddenly to affect another will, which must have been previously felt, and by subordinating it through a higher quantum of power—that is, through a higher value—to feel pleasure in the increase of one’s own power. The will to power must therefore be understood as “the primitive form of affect, of which all other affects are but derivative configurations.”38 Psychology, whose object is traditionally feeling, willing, and thinking, must be conceived “as morphology and the doctrine of the development of the will to power.”39 Finally, morality, which is

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nothing but the system of value judgments constituting the conditions of life of a relatively enduring being within becoming, must be interpreted as “a semiology of affects for which the body is the instructor.”40 However, the body could not assume this function as guiding thread unless the will to power were the principle and the condition of possibility of incorporation. If to will is to command—and this is its primary determination—and if “a man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience,”41 then the will, possible only amidst a hierarchy of multiple forces to each of which belongs by essence “the trinity of ‘thinking,’ ‘feeling,’ ‘willing’ ”42—a trinity that traditionally forms the soul—then the will implies the body as the domination-formation which is the necessary seat of its activity. The trinity “thinking, feeling, willing” no longer refers to separate faculties—“there are not three faculties in the soul”43—but is peculiar to force as such. And, after having asserted that the belief in an “indestructible, eternal, indivisible” soul “must be excluded from science,” Nietzsche will add that “it is not at all necessary to get rid of ‘the soul’ at the same time, and thus to renounce one of the most ancient and venerable hypotheses—as happens frequently to clumsy naturalists, who can hardly touch on ‘the soul’ without immediately losing it. But the way is open for new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as ‘mortal soul,’ and ‘soul as subjective multiplicity,’ and ‘soul as social structure of drives and affects,’ want henceforth to have citizens’ rights in science.”44 Summarizing his entire analysis of the will, Nietzsche can then conclude that “the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful ‘under-wills’ or under-souls—indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls—to his feelings of delight as commander. . . . In all willing it is absolutely a question of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as already said, of a social structure composed of many ‘souls.’ ”45 The body is thus indeed required by the will to power as the cardinal structure of its unfolding. Moreover, we must recall—even if this is but a philological confirmation, i.e., an external one—that from the time Nietzsche began to see in the will to power the essence of life46 and “the ultimate fact to be attained,”47 he would note: “I conceive but one being, which is at once one and many, which changes and remains, knows, feels, wills—this being is my originary fact.”48 At the moment, only the word “body” was missing. What are the repercussions of such a conception of the will on its freedom? How should we think freedom when it no longer belongs to the ego but to the body—i.e., to a domination-formation? In a general and formal way, a will is said to be free when it is not constrained. “Free means,” as Nietzsche specifies: “ ‘not to be pushed and shoved, without

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a FEELING OF CONSTRAINT [ZWANGSGEFÜHL].” When related to the will to power, which, as victorious, always implies resistance, the will is free when it constrains: “Where we encounter resistance and are forced to yield to it, we feel unfree: where we do not yield to it but force it to give in to us, free. That is to say that by ‘freedom of the will’ we designate the feeling of our SURPLUS of strength; the awareness that our strength compels in comparison to another force, which is coerced.”49 Thus interpreted, as a feeling of superiority and sovereignty, as an affect of command, freedom can no longer be imputed to the will, as the latter is no longer one but many. Conversely, it is the presupposition of the unity of the will, or the ego, which is at the root of the doctrine of freedom of the will. The will was taken to be free, because an action seemed to derive from it as from its exclusive origin or cause. This illusion supposes the identification of the will that commands with that which follows it with effects. It is clearly not without foundation in things themselves. Indeed, if “in the great majority of cases there has been exercise of will only when the effect of the command—that is, obedience; that is, the action—was to be expected, the appearance has translated itself into the feeling, as if there were a necessity of effect.” The will gives itself the illusion of freedom by providing itself with that of its unity. This is the case when he who wills— attributing to the will that commands what pertains to the will that executes—believes that to will and to act are one and the same, a belief that does not fail to increase his feeling of power. “ ‘Freedom of the will’—that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order—who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his will itself that overcame them.”50 Let us add, in conclusion, that, by referring the freedom of the will to the affect of command, Nietzsche is not unaware of its transcendental determination as absolute spontaneity and as abrupt beginning, since he wrote (in a note partly integrated into paragraph 19 of Beyond Good and Evil): “To will is to command: but to command is a determinate affect (this affect is a sudden explosion of force)—tense, clear, one thing exclusively in sight, the most intimate conviction of superiority, assurance of being obeyed—‘freedom of the will’ is the ‘feeling of superiority of him who commands’ toward the one who obeys: ‘I am free and this one must obey.’ ”51 Having thus established that the constitutive forces of the body imply, as moments, will, feeling, and thought—in other words, that the body is a hierarchy of mortal souls—it remains for us beyond this to understand how these forces can form an apparatus or an organ-complex and, more generally speaking, how the forces of body can organize themselves. This

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task is necessary for at least two reasons. The moment the neuro-cerebral apparatus (which we are attempting to explain through the sole play of the body’s manifold forces to which the trinity of willing-feeling-thinking belongs, and thanks to which each force may command or obey the others, understand or make itself understood by them as quickly as lightning) cannot be distinguished from the system of hierarchical relations fostered by these forces, does it not become impossible to imagine its central status? Is there not an incompatibility between the unity of the center of direction, or even transmission, and the plurality of drives that alone are constitutive? The difficulty would be lifted if we could show that the organization is dissolved in the hierarchy, and that the organ-formation arises from will to power. By the same token—and this is our second reason—the body as a system of organs, or organism, would be definitively led back to the body as domination-formation—and this, in such a way that the body as a structure or formation would become the foundation of the body as system.

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5

Organization and Reproduction

What then is an organ? Before we answer this question, we must first determine its necessity and recall the horizon in which it is inscribed. When Schopenhauer refers the body to the will, he thereby reduces the plurality of the organs and functions to a single undifferentiated principle. The complexity of the body is therefore metaphysically obscure to him, since the differentiation of its organs and functions does not come from the will as such. It comes simply from the hierarchy in the degrees of its objectivation; that is, from representation. Identifying “the will to live” with “this primary animal,” Schopenhauer attributes “the shape and organization”1 of the body to “circumstances” of life, and to its simple reactive adaptation to external conditions. Conceiving the body as metaphysically devoid of organs, he assimilates its complexity to a pure fact of representation, without foundation in things in themselves. On the other hand, when Saint Paul acknowledges behind the plurality of organs a plurality of wills, it is essentially impossible for him to distinguish them qualitatively, since they are all, whether submissive or rebellious, dependent on the divine will; that is, reactive. In Schopenhauer’s case, the plurality of organs is unconceivable for a metaphysical reason: the will is one. In Saint Paul’s case, the qualitative difference of wills is unthinkable for a theological reason: in the presence of God, all forces are equal, of the same worth, and there is no active force. The Pauline and Schopenhauerian concepts of the body, respectively theological and metaphysical, do not allow us then to think its organization or activity. Conversely, the body’s organization and activity could not be understood without first questioning the metaphysics that culminates in Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the will, and without thereafter proclaiming, in the same act, the death of God—that God who reveals himself to the bodies upon which he exerts his justifying, salvific power. The organs should therefore be conceived in function of their adherence to the body as domination-formation, and relative to will to power. How does the will to power allow us to understand the formation of the organs, and how do organic functions, like digestion or reproduction, derive from it? It is not enough, in effect, to reduce the organs to drives; we must first describe the way in which the drives give rise to the organs. In other words, and supposing that the organs refer to drives as 162

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to their “conditions of possibility,” it remains to be shown that these “conditions” are indeed their own. If the body, whether active or reactive, is a domination-formation, it nonetheless remains that it could and still can be considered an organism. It is therefore only after having explained how the concept of organism draws its meaning and possibility from the concept of domination formation, that we will ultimately have completed the transformation of the concept of the body, without which the opening of new corporeal possibilities—an opening that stands at the horizon of this essay—would be simply inconceivable. In a general fashion, an organ is something used for something else. The eye is an organ because it is used to see, because it is useful to the organism to which it belongs. But what should we understand by utility, here? Can we derive from it an understanding of the organ itself? “When one has demonstrated that a thing is of the highest utility,” Nietzsche warns, “one has however thereby taken not one step towards explaining its origin: that is to say, one can never employ utility to make it comprehensible that a thing must necessarily exist.”2 Why is it impossible to account for the formation and existence of an organ on the basis of its utility? Utility does not allow us to reach the origin of an organ, because it is not itself originary. Utility could not be an explanatory principle, because it is itself but a consequence derived from an evaluation. How to understand this latter proposition, and to what state of affairs does it refer? On the one hand, the utility of an organ is subject to variation, since it can play vicarious roles—lacking eyes, it is hearing that serves our orientation in space.3 On the other hand, and above all, utility should never be dissociated from that to which it relates. In a note directed explicitly against Darwinism, but whose argument is also valid against Schopenhauer, Nietzsche brings this out clearly: “—The utility of an organ does not explain its formation, to the contrary!—over the longest time, during which a [particular] property is forming, it does not preserve the individual and is of no use to him, least of all in the struggle with external circumstances and enemies.—What, ultimately, is ‘useful’? One must ask ‘in relation to what, useful?’ For example, that which is useful for the long life of the individual might prove inauspicious to its strength and splendor; what preserves the individual might at the same time arrest and hold fixed its evolution. On the other hand, a lack, a degeneration, can be of the highest utility, insofar as it acts as a stimulant to its other organs. In the same way, a state of need can be a condition of existence [Existenzbedingung], insofar as it reduces an individual to that measure of expenditure which holds it together but prevents it from squandering itself.”4 To say that utility differs according as it refers to the enduring life of the individual alone, or to the intensification of its power, amounts to

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saying that it varies according to quanta of force; that it depends on the perspective in which it is engaged, and that it is always relative to a prior evaluation. This is because the life that seeks its own preservation or becomes disorganized could not have the same values as that which seeks the splendor of additional power. The reason why utility does not allow us to explain the formation of the organs nevertheless indicates the path to follow to that end. If “utility is a very elevated principle,” that we should “above all not underestimate,” it remains that it “refers to the means,” to “subordinate ends,” and that it presupposes an “evaluation” and a “table of goods [Gütertafel].”5 Utility is thus always dependent on and correlative to an appreciation of good and bad, since any determination of the useful “necessarily”6 implies that of the harmful. While identifying “useful” with “good for . . .”7 and once translating το άγαθόν by “the useful” in the “Neoplatonic” expression κρείττον τ’άγαθόν άληθείας, which he rendered by “the useful is more useful than truth,”8 Nietzsche distinguishes two kinds of philosophers. If the first “serve the human task that consists in making all things useful,” the second, who rank higher, “command and state: thus shall it be! they begin by determining the useful, that which constitutes utility for man; they dispose of the preparatory work of scientific men, yet knowledge is for them but a means to create.”9 From the moment the determination of the useful is an act of command, and the latter the essence of will to power, utility must be founded on the will to power.10 It is thus to the will to power that we must go back, to understand the formation of organs, as well as that to which they may be useful. How to retrace the genesis of an organ, once we have reduced the “naiveté” that consists in “believ[ing] that the eye has been formed for the sake of seeing”?11 In other words: how does will to power explain the formation of an organ, to what structure of the will to power should this formation be attributed? However, is posing the question in this way not abstracting the organ from the organism to which it belongs? Can we understand the formation of an organ independently of the plurality from which it arises? Should we not, on the contrary, and here more than anywhere, start from the principle according to which it is first their relations that constitute beings? What kind of relation then do the different organs establish within the same organism? The body is not a juxtaposition but a hierarchy of organs. Thus, some organs, for example, matter more than others in the preservation of the whole that they constitute. From this perspective, their value is therefore greater and the hierarchical distinction between superior and inferior constitutes the organ as such. The organ is a moral phenomenon. In noting that “the judgments ‘superior functions’ and ‘inferior functions’ should already be present

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in all organic formations, well before any sensation of pleasure and displeasure,”12 Nietzsche is saying precisely the same thing, since an organ is indissociable from one or several functions. It is thus indeed from the hierarchy of organs that their formation should be understood; this, the more so that “the ‘superior’ and ‘inferior,’ the choice of what is more important, more useful, more urgent, already exists in the most inferior organisms. ‘Living’: this already means to evaluate.”13 An organ, as the word indicates, serves for something. However, before serving for something, it is in service to something. The eye could not serve for seeing if it were not initially in service to the body. The proof is that the capacity of the organs varies according to the strength of the body. Nietzsche himself gives an example of this when he relates that “his visual forces increased as his vital force did.”14 Thus, to explain the formation of an organ, it is fitting to begin by understanding the way in which something can be put into service of something else, and become useful to it. To explain the formation of an organ is not to proceed to some “morphological exposé,” which, “even were it complete, explains nothing, but only describes a prodigious state of affairs. How an organ can be used to achieve some end, that is not explained.”15 It is therefore not a matter of accounting for a form identical to itself. The prior task is to grasp, in its very movement, the “becoming-organ,”16 that is, that subjugation from which the organ precisely receives its meaning as organ. Now, since there cannot be any possible subjugation except between wills or forces, organ formation comes under the will to power. This shows that the drive hierarchy is indeed the condition for the organ, and that the concept of organism presupposes the determination of the body as “a socialization of the drives.”17 How does will to power give rise to the formation of an organ? How is it an organizing force? “However well one has understood the utility of any physiological organ . . . this means nothing regarding its origin: however uncomfortable and disagreeable this may sound to older ears—for one had always believed that to understand the demonstrable purpose, the utility of a thing, a form, or an institution, was also to understanding the reason why it originated—the eye being made for seeing, the hand for grasping. . . . But purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function; and the entire history of a ‘thing,’ an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations, whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion.”18 When it imposes the meaning of a function on a dominated force, the dominant

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force makes it ipso facto into an organ. That is first to say that to subjugate is to organize, and that there is no priority of function over the organ or, conversely, of the organ over the function. The one, as the other, have a common origin in domination. This is then to say that the organ, so far as it can be the object of morphological description, is constituted by will to power. This immediately raises the question of knowing how will to power can convey a constant spatial form to an organ, without which no morphological description would be possible. We will come back to this later on. Now, this is finally, and above all, to argue that the formation of an organ is that of a meaning, or rather a chain of meanings. Before examining the way in which will to power can impose the meaning of a function, it is necessary to understand how meaning in general is required by will to power. If meaning is that in which the possibility of any sort of comprehension resides, then meaning is founded on the will to power, whose essence is the relation of command. Indeed, to command implies making oneself obeyed, and making oneself obeyed implies making oneself understood. No command would thus be possible without the foregoing introduction of meaning, which permits the enactment of command. This is why “meaning [is] . . . necessarily relational and a perspective,”19 reducible to will to power. “All meaning is will to power,”20 all meaning is hierarchical in nature, is value, and the supreme will to power resides in the very positing of values or meaning, since meaning defines in advance the possibility of all obedience; that to which obedience in general is itself formally subject. To introduce, posit, or impose a meaning—what is this if not to interpret? The formation of an organ is an interpretation. “The will to power interprets: when an organ is formed, it is interpretation that is at work; it delimits, determines degrees, differences of power. Mere differences of power could not yet feel themselves as such: something must be present that wants to grow and that interprets according to its value whatever else seeks to grow. In this, similar—in truth, interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something. (The organic process presupposes continuous INTERPRETING.)”21 An organ is thus at once the monument to a domination and the document of an interpretation. What does this mean? In determining the differences of power, the will to power, which is the very principle of such a determination, institutes a hierarchy. Hierarchy is “the first result of the evaluation,”22 since a force imposes itself on others, owing to the value that commands it. What then does hierarchy imply, when, deriving from evaluation, it comes from interpretation as an imposition of meaning? The institution of a hierarchy means that one force sets others into its service, grows from their power by having them serve its own, subjects them to its perspective by interpreting them

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“according to its own value,” thereby rendering them utilizable, useful. “All the functions of organic beings are invested with evaluations.”23 And what does “to make something useful for oneself” mean, if not precisely to make it one’s instrument and organ? To conceive the organ as an interpretation of will to power is thus to understand it, simultaneously in its verbal meaning as a “becoming-organ” and relative to its constitutive dependency. But the body is not made of a single, unique organ. Consequently, how and why does will to power give rise to a plurality of organs? Each organ is distinguished from the others through its “specialization.”24 It is thus a question of determining the reason why the will to power “is specialized as will to nourishment, to property, to tools, to servants,”25 or again of determining—if every organ is a subjected one—the reason why “a singular force separates from a synthetic one.”26 What should we understand hereby? A force is synthetic or “creative” when it “binds contraries,”27 that is, what commands and what obeys; the commanding instance and the executive organs. Synthetic is thus here a synonym for organizing—the will to power is the “organizing force.”28 And to look for the reason why will to power gives rise to a plurality of organs, amounts to looking for the reason why will to power comes to diversify itself and to organize its own diversification. To this end, and in order to explain the way in which the organs are formed, let us consider the example of the protoplasm to which Nietzsche often refers. The term “protoplasm” comes from botany and designates the colloidal substance that, along with the nucleus, constitutes the living cell. It is thus a concept belonging to the cellular theory of the living being.29 But is starting from the protoplasm, in order to account for organization, not to give up philosophical explanation for the benefit of scientific explanation? In no sense. On the one hand, by showing that “matter extends its power as far as it is able,”30 chemistry shows that will to power rules also in the inorganic world. On the other hand, and above all, Nietzsche subordinated the chemical complexion of the body to morality. In a note that defined morality as the figurative expression of bodily states, Nietzsche summarizes his project in the following terms: “Thus, apparently, to change the body without chemical means— —in truth, it is a matter of changing, with morality, the chemical complexion [chemische Beschaffenheit] of the body.” To this he adds immediately: “Vast detour. To what extent is it possible to achieve this more directly?”31 In asserting that the creation of a higher body is a matter of morality, before being one of chemistry, Nietzsche brings chemical forces back to evaluations and to will to power. But in so doing, he also raises the question of the relations between body and technology. Indeed, while it is no longer out of the question that the

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body be modified directly, without detours, in a chemical or technological way, this transformation never ceases to depend on the values that had previously allowed its perspective to exist, by setting its aims and meaning—or even its lack thereof. Thus, far from blindly subordinating the body, that is, the essence of man to a bio-technology—whose possibility he had clearly seen—Nietzsche refers all possible chemical modification of the body to a prior critique of moral values which, in any case, constitute that body as a domination formation. And if he is justified to set, on the same level, the “artificial reinforcement” of the body through chemical means or through the “delirious idea” of a protector god, this is because these two means are ultimately from one and the same evaluation.32 Without the “vast detour” via revaluation, the modification of the body could not be the transformation of man’s essence. It could only reassure nihilism. It is through this “vast detour” that Nietzsche’s thought differs from all “biologism,” even as it uses its language. Before being the object of an ethics, the body is already in itself a morality. And, as long as the evaluations presupposed by the medical interpretation of the body as organism have not at least been elucidated, “bio-ethics” shall only misinterpret itself and contribute to the extension of nihilism, whose secondary effects it attempts naively, blindly, to control. Let us come back to the protoplasm, which is “a plurality of chemical forces” or “a plurality of beings in struggle the ones against the others.”33 Does it allow us to explain “the masterpiece of the construction of an organism starting from an egg”?34 That is to say, can it explain the formation of multiple and coordinated organs? In 1887, Nietzsche noted this: “The will to power can manifest itself only against resistances; it seeks that which resists it—this is the original tendency of the protoplasm when it extends pseudopodia and gropes about itself. Appropriation and incorporation are above all a will to overcome, a forming, an information and transformation [An- und Umbilden] until, at length, what was overcome has passed entirely into the power of the aggressor and augmented it.— If this incorporation does not succeed, then the formation dissociates; and duality appears as a consequence of will to power: to avoid letting go what has been conquered, the will to power divides itself into two wills (and, if the circumstances allow, without wholly giving up its connections).”35 It is impossible to understand the way that will to power gives rise to a multiplicity of organs, coordinated with one another, without beginning by recalling that will to power always, by essence, wants more power. What does this mean if not that the will to power tends to subject an ever-increasing number of forces, whose quantum of force is itself greater and greater? But there is no infinite force. While noting that this proposition best expresses the new supremacy of scientific over re-

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ligious thought, Nietzsche warns: “We forbid ourselves the concept of an infinite force as something incompatible with the concept ‘force.’ ”36 What should explain this incompatibility? An infinite force would have to be infinitely increasing.37 Whence could it then get that from which it could grow, if not from other forces, likewise infinite? But to posit this way a plurality of infinite forces is necessarily to presuppose their equality. Moreover, indifference, adiaphoria, ruins the concept of force which, whether “tensorial,” “constraining,” or “victorious,” never goes without a hierarchical difference and inequality. The infinity of force thus implies its unity, and this unity implies Schopenhauer’s concept of the will, on the basis of which it is impossible to explain the formation of different organs. How does a finite force increase its power? “The feeling of power, at first conquering, then dominating (organizing)—regulates what it overcomes for the sake of its preservation, and to do this, preserves the very thing that it has overcome.”38 The will to power, which we need not distinguish here from the feeling of power, could never grow without preserving that from which it grew. In this respect, the intensification of the will to power can be compared to a colonial process, and Nietzsche did not refrain from doing this when, after noting that “the individual is an egg,” he added: “the formation of colonies is the task of each individual.”39 But to colonize is not only to conquer, but above all to place under mandate, under tutelage, to administer and to organize. Will to power preserves itself through self-organization. But there is no organization without a hierarchical division of command, and the preservation of what has been colonized requires that will to power split into a multiplicity of wills to power. “Likewise function is created out of the feeling of power in the fight with still weaker forces. Function preserves itself in dominion and the control exerted over functions still inferior to it—whereby it is supported by the superior power!”40 The formation of organs carrying out different functions is the work of will to power itself, and man should be understood as “a plurality of wills to power,”41 because the will to power requires, qua preservation, its own plural. Nietzsche has clearly said this: “The weaker thrusts itself toward the stronger out of a need for nourishment; it wants to find refuge, and perhaps become one with it. The stronger drives others away; it does not want to collapse in this way; on the contrary, growing it divides itself into two or more. The greater the thrust toward unity, the more we may conclude that weakness is present; the greater the impulse towards variety, differentiation, dissociation, the more force is present.”42 The formation of multiple organs is thus a sign of force, and the construction of the organism from the egg is the masterpiece of the will to power, because complexity and organization

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are but functions of power. “Greater complexity, sharp differentiation, the coexistence of developed organs and functions, with the disappearance of intermediate members—if that is perfection, then there is a will to power in the organic process through which the dominant forces that command, inform, invariably increase the domain of their power, a domain in the midst of which they continuously simplify: the imperative growing.”43 It is thus because complexity is a variable of power, and because perfection increases with complexity, that it is not only possible to say that “the human body is a formation much more perfect than any system of thoughts and feelings, and even superior to a work of art,”44 but also that it can and must be raised to the rank of guiding thread. That will to power gives rise to a plurality of organs is nevertheless not enough to explain their coherence. Indeed, in order that the different organs be ordered the ones to the others, they must not be too distant from each other. How is this possible, if domination does not go without distance—the stronger defending itself from the weaker by repelling and distancing it. Whence comes the relative proximity between organs, without which there cannot be a coherent organization? “Force organizes what is closer and closest.”45 What does this mean? Each organ, as we said, is the document of an interpretation of the will to power, which, by projecting a meaning or values, determines by the same token what is useful and what is not. Now, “only very closely related beings can understand each other, and consequently, give rise to obedience”;46 or again, nothing that is far can be useful. A hammer is completely useless when out of reach, and “ ‘useful’ is but a point of view for proximity.”47 All the while being “the pathos of distance,”48 the will to power is indeed what ensures the cohesion of the organism, for “the probabilities of preservation are at their highest when rapprochement and adaptation are at their greatest.”49 Let us return once again to the splitting of the protoplasm, which Nietzche gave the following form: “½ + ½ does not = 1 but = 2.”50 What does this strange equation signify? By positing that “one makes two and two make one,” the formula expresses that which we “see in the generation and multiplication of inferior organisms.”51 It is thus a solution to the problem of the reproduction of living organisms, which is not essentially sexuate reproduction, since “in the domain of the living, sexual generation is but an exception.”52 Sexuality is not an invariant of generation. What happens during the division of a protoplasm? When the latter is no longer able to incorporate what resists it, it separates from itself by dividing, and will to power can thus preserve itself by pursuing its work through delegation. This is because the relation between the two fission-products cannot fail to become a relation between two un-

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equal forces, between two forces of which the one becomes a function of the other. Nevertheless, the “circumstances”—that is to say, chance since “the organism is the exception and chance”53—do not always lend themselves to the maintenance of this “liaison of subordination,” which is the principle of all organization. What happens when circumstances do not permit this liaison? If the formation of an organism depends on the inequality of forces, then conversely, only the equality of the forces can prevent this formation. In other words, when chance makes the formation of an organism impossible, two are formed. Relating generation to the will to power, Nietzsche writes: “The separation of the protoplasm in the case where a form is created such that gravity is equally distributed in 2 places. Starting from each, a centripetal, constricting force is produced: this tears the intermediary mass apart. Thus: equality of relations of power is the source of generation. Perhaps every further development is bound up with the originary power-equivalences [entstehende Macht-Äquivalenzen].”54 This last statement does not contradict the thesis according to which morphological development is fulfilled parallel to transformations in the will to power, since, on the one hand, development should not be confused with the organization that is, contrariwise, its presupposition and, on the other hand, in the absence of a general equilibrium of forces, nothing forbids the formation of local and temporary equivalences. This explanation of generation through the equality of forces amounts to making it, in a sense, into “the consequence of impotence.” Indeed, “a protoplasm divides into two when its power is no longer sufficient to control what it has appropriated.”55 Generation and organization thus have for their common origin an impotence in the will to power which, in order not to let what it conquered escape, organizes what it has already acquired by dividing off from itself, to continue ruling over what it already seized. What then distinguishes organization from generation? “Where one will was not enough to organize the entire appropriated material, there came into force a counter-will, which proceeds to the separation; a new center of organization, following a battle with the original will.”56 If, at the end of this struggle, the original will is victorious, then the tie of subordination is maintained and there is the formation of an organism—“two make one.” But if it is defeated, the counter-will becomes autonomous and there is the formation of two organisms—“one makes two.” In the one as in the other case, the will to power, unable to grow further, stabilizes itself so as not to decline, and reproduction is a “pure advantage.”57 This means that the organism—we do not say the body—is a preservation structure and not a form of intensification of the will to power.

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In showing that “our entire drive life [is] the development and ramification of one basic form of the will—namely, of the will to power,” and that we “could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and . . . also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment—it is one problem,”58 we have explained ipso facto how the formation of the organs arises from will to power and show that organization does not proceed from the mind or from consciousness, but from the sole hierarchy of forces to which mind and consciousness are likewise subject.59 Let us add that this explanation of the organism by the will to power confirms the privilege customarily accorded to touch. “There must have been thought well before there were eyes: ‘lines and forms’ are thus not initially given, it is from the feeling of touch that, for the longest time, thought took place: this, however, lacking the support of the eyes, taught degrees of feelings of pressure [Drückgefühls], not yet forms [Gestalten].”60 The will to power thus permits the intensive differentiation of the kinesthetic forces. At the same time, it creates organs and is a principle of organization. This means that the body as organism is definitively referred back to the body as a domination-formation—and this, in such a way that this latter body lies at the foundation of the body qua organism What then is the quality of the forces constituting the organism? Is this a domination formation, commanded by active or by reactive forces? If the preceding analyses have not yet allowed us to pose this question, then this is because they did not allow its solution. We should therefore pursue further our study of the organism, by taking up its point of departure, namely, the proposition according to which each organ results from an interpretation of the will to power the moment that “the organic process presupposes a continuous INTERPRETING.” Now, if the organic process implies a continuous interpretation, then the body is a becoming and its organs themselves never cease changing, since the interpretations from which they result never stop varying. After having asserted that the history of an organ was but a succession of interpretations, Nietzsche continued thus: “the ‘evolution’ of a thing, a custom, an organ is thus by no means its progressus toward a goal, even less a logical progressus by the shortest route and with the smallest expenditure of force—but a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions. The form is fluid, but the ‘meaning’ is even more so. The case is the same even within each individual organism: with every real growth in the whole, the ‘meaning’ of the individual organs also changes—in certain circumstances their partial destruction,

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a reduction in their numbers (for example, through the disappearance of intermediary members) can be a sign of increasing strength and perfection.”61 If the meaning that constitutes the organ is fluid, how should the organ itself not be? Consequently, is referring organization back to the will to power not tantamount to dissolving the organism in becoming? Such would be the case if it were impossible to explain, starting from will to power, the relative duration and constancy of the organism. To take up an expression we previously set aside as a toothing-stone [pierre d’attente], it is now a matter of knowing if and how the will to power is liable to confer on the organs, and on the organism as a whole, a constant spatial form. The constancy of an organ could only be due to the meaning to which it owes its being. But how is this possible if its being is fluid? Fluidity must not be understood absolutely, here. Relative to universal becoming, the difference between fluidity and stability is but one of tempo, and to say, for example, that meaning is more fluid than form, is to say that the becoming of the one is more vivacious or rapid than that of the other. It is to say that the form remains constant only with regard to the variation of meaning, but not absolutely.62 Would it then be possible that the meaning projected by will to power, qua principle of organization, have a form liable to ensure the constancy of the organs? Indeed, what is it, in meaning itself, that could be as constant as form, if it were not the form of meaning? “Form counts as something enduring.”63 What then is the form of meaning, required by the will to power broken down into organs? And where should we look for it if not in the hierarchical relations between the organs, since meaning is always relational and imperative? Abstracting from their hierarchical character, relations between the organs are always stamped or marked by mercy. To the question, “is there ‘compassion’ between the different organs in the human organism,” Nietzsche answers, in effect: “To be sure, in the highest degree. A strong resonance and diffusion of a pain: a propagation of pain, but not of the same pain. (The same goes for individuals among themselves!)”64 What is the signification, here, of this compassion, mercy, or charity65 by which Saint Paul already characterized the relations between different members of the body, and especially of the ecclesiastical body?66 For the will to power, to organize is to institute a hierarchy, an articulated sphere of multiple commands that are never else than the violent exercise of one will upon another, and that are consequently always accompanied by pain. To command is thus to make suffer, and the pain is renewed unceasingly because, as multiple and variable, the commands constituting a body in incessant becoming are never the same. If “ ‘pain’ is an organic function,”67 then is not the body but a long pain reverberating

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itself in multiple echoes? From a principle of organization, would the will to power not transform itself ipso facto into a principle of disorganization? Stated otherwise, how could the organism simply preserve itself if pain, which increases in proportion to power, were not abridged and reduced, or if the different organs did not show each other a reciprocal compassion? Would solicitude and kindness—morality in the usual and restricted sense of the term—not be necessary to the preservation of the organism? “Problem: how deeply does the will to the good [Wille zur Güte] penetrate into the essence of things? Everywhere, in plants and animals, we see the contrary: indifference, callousness or cruelty. ‘Justice’ ‘punishment.’ The development of cruelty. Solution. Sympathy is present only in social formations (to which belongs the human body, whose living individuals [Einzelwesen] feel each another), as a consequence of the fact that a greater totality wills to preserve itself in the wake of another totality, and again because in the general economy of the world, where there is no annihilation and loss is possible, the good would be a superfluous principle.”68 But how does this compassion, sympathy, or charity occur? What form does it take for the organism? The organism is a complex structure made up of hierarchical relations, painful in essence. The complexity of the organism means that each organ, under different relations, commands and obeys in turn or simultaneously. Each organ ongoingly understands and makes itself understood, differently each time, since the body is a becoming, a dynamic. The innumerable “thou shalt” and “it is necessary”69—which make the body the moral phenomenon par excellence—thus never have the same meaning. This inconsistency or fluidity of meaning makes comprehension—that is, obedience—as slow and difficult as it is painful, even impossible, and in the latter case, organic unity never fails to break up under the impact of an excess of suffering. Reciprocal incomprehension among organs then places the organism in danger and threatens it with extinction. How does will to power manage to ensure the preservation of the organism, whose organizing force it is? How does it ensure a prompt, proper understanding—i.e., reciprocal comprehension and sympathy—among its organs? In a note devoted to gregarious morality, Nietzsche wrote the following: “Fear. Will-to-understand-one-another [Sich-Verstehen-wollen]. To-make-oneself-identical [Sich-gleich-geben]. Becoming-identical—the origin of the gregarious animal.”70 In other words, in order for the organs to understand each other unequivocally and, communicating as quickly as possible, to manage to cut short the pain inherent in any hierarchical relationship, they must make themselves identical to one another, equal, for “from below to above misunderstanding is necessary.”71 Understood as “positing-oneself-as-equal ” [sich-gleich-setzen],72 mercy thus becomes the

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very condition of all understanding among the organs and beyond that, of the preservation of the organism itself. Thanks to compassion, the organs can agree rapidly among each other and protect themselves from the suffering they impose on one another. But since an organ is, moreover, always an interpretation of will to power—a meaning—mercy and the comprehension through it comes about, require that this meaning or command, projected by will to power, be easily communicable and intelligible. Required by the preservation of the organism, communication among the multiple organs would be impossible without a certain standardization of meaning. “Communication is necessary, and . . . for there to be communication something has to be fixed, simplified, specifiable (above all in the identical case),” writes Nietzsche, adding: “but in order that this be communicable, however, it must be felt to be ready in the sense of ‘recognizable.’ The material of the senses prepared by the understanding, reduced grossly to broad strokes, made similar, subsumed under what is related. Thus: the fuzziness and chaos of sense impressions is as if logicized.”73 Necessary to the preservation of the organism, communication between organs would thus be impossible without the reduction of the innumerable multiplicity of different events, which constitute its very life, to identical meanings or cases. Indeed, if the rapidity of execution of a command—alone liable to attenuate its pain—is proportional to the rapidity of comprehension (which is the object of command), then meaning will be understood as quickly as it is promptly identified, recognized. The constitution of identical cases—more easily recognized for being consistently equal to themselves—is thus the requirement of all communication, since it foresees, within meaning, equivocations of meaning. And if, by “sense impression,” we are pointing to the trace or stamp of one will upon another, then communication between hierarchized wills, from which organs arise, will be the more rapidly followed by effects as the meaning remains consistently communicable and discernible. Now, “communicability and discernment” characterize “logical processes.”74 It is thus by imprinting on meaning a logical form that will to power foreshortens the suffering inherent to organization, and ensures the preservation of the organism. From this last statement, we can already draw several consequences. (1) The constancy of organs is henceforth explained, since the meaning to which they owe their being possesses an enduring form. And since will to power is also a principle of spatialization—insofar as a force could not act on another without being locally separated from it—it is the entire organism, as constant spatial form, which is thereby referred back to will to power. (2) Relative to the will to power qua organization principle, logic is the form under which reciprocal compassion among the

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organs takes place. Should we conclude that logic is charity itself, or that the λόγος is άγάπη [agapeˉ ] and in essence Christian? It is impossible to answer this question, which ultimately concerns metaphysics as ontotheo-logy without first answering that of the value of logic. (3) Because it makes communication between different organs possible, logic is, in this regard, the essential structure of the organism. But if Nietzsche indeed argues that “logic is a kind of spinal cord for vertebrates,”75 he likewise notes that “the oldest errors provide, as it were, the spinal cord on which everything else holds.”76 And he adds, “the will is our spinal cord” and this will is a “compensation” for belief in God.77 Why should will to power, logic, and the oldest errors all take the name of “spinal cord”? How can we refer logic back to the will to power, when, as an organizing force, it may justly be qualified as a spinal cord? By what right is logic—as an essential structure of the organism whose spinal cord is will to power— an error, and in regard to what truth? How does truth, and knowledge more generally, whose organon is logic, pertain to the organism? As long as these problems—which are, in one way or the other, all relative to the value of logic, of knowledge, and of truth—remain without a solution, it will be impossible to describe the constitutive forces of the organism.

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Part 4

The Logic of the Body

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1

Dehumanization as a Method

How to explain the formation of logic? To what configuration of the will to power can it be led back? Why can it be understood as an error incorporated and, along with it, the truth that inhabits it? Or, again, conversely, and to let Nietzsche himself recapitulate these questions in a singular form: “to what extent can truth endure incorporation?”1 To attempt to respond to this question whose mere wording misplaces the site of truth and offers knowledge to the body to confer on both of them, conjointly, new possibilities, is first to attempt to respond to a question that Nietzsche never ceased posing, or addressing to us in multiple forms. Without proceeding to draw up a comprehensive inventory, we propose to hold two of its numerous metamorphoses apt at bringing out the “ultimate” character of the question.2 (1) In asking: “how much truth can a spirit endure, how much truth will it risk?” Nietzsche determines the principle of every critique of values, since he adds immediately after: “more and more that became for me the real criterion of value.”3 In other words, the harder the value is to incorporate the more it requires and allows power, the more it has value, to the point where value can be defined as “the highest quantum of power that man can incorporate—man, not humanity.”4 (2) In asserting: “—We are making an attempt with the truth! Perhaps humanity shall perish from it! Let us go!”5 Nietzsche is alluding to the doctrine of the eternal recurrence, since Zarathustra, who is its proclaimer, declares: “I have given you the heaviest thought: perhaps humanity shall perish from it, perhaps it will raise itself by eliminating, once overcome, the elements hostile to life.”6 In leading back to the revaluation of values as much as to the eternal return, to the destruction of the last man as much as to the creation of the overman, the question of the relations of the body to truth, to logic, and to knowledge in general is as central a question as it is ultimate. Yet this question, and the setting in play of the truth that it implies constitutes a dangerous trial—and Nietzsche never lost sight of it—the trial of the supreme danger. Immediately before engaging us in it, Zarathustra addressed us these words, in which our history and the outline of our world is announced and can be anticipated: “I have taken everything from you, God, duty—now you must provide the greatest demonstration of nobility. For HERE the path is open to scoundrels [Ruchlosen]—look there!—the 179

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struggle for domination, at the end the most herdlike of herds, and the tyrant more of a tyrant than ever.”7 To determine how and to what point it is possible to pose the truth in a body, to determine what the body must be in order to open itself to truths whose incorporation was up until then impossible, to create a body possessed of superior power, this is then and above all to attempt to accede to that great thought to which Nietzsche did not cease to be exposed starting from August 1881. Indeed, the question concerning the possibilities of knowledge of the body and the incorporation of the truth appears initially in the long addition entitled “Philosophy of Indifference,” which follows the first note dedicated to the eternal recurrence. What does this title signify and what should we understand here by “indifference”? Far from having simply a negative or privative meaning, indifference consists positively in seeing things as they are. “Indifference! Something does not concern us, we can think of it what we want, there is nothing there that might be useful or prejudicial to us—this is one foundation of the scientific spirit.”8 How do we come to this? In endeavoring to see “with other eyes: in working to see without a human reference, therefore as such! To heal human megalomania! Whence comes this? From fear . . .” Thus understood, indifference is the high courageous reason that protects from the “fundamental madness”9 that consists in taking man as the sole measure of all things and humanity all too human, for the sole possibility of “his” being. We could not reach this then through the mere variation of human perspectives, themselves too human, but exclusively through “the formation of new beings.”10 To be indifferent is to abjure the stupidity that is never but a shrinking of perspective,11 never but an annulment of perspectives to the benefit of one perspective; to be indifferent is to see with other eyes, provided notwithstanding that this adjective [“other”] likewise marks a difference of essence; it is therefore to open the path to the over-man by means of a de-human-ization of knowledge. Understood as a remedy for fear, as a method of knowledge, and as access to the things-themselves, or even to truth, how can indifference contribute to the metamorphosis of man? Nietzsche answers this question in the text of an addition. Having noted—and the observation is still valid—that “we behave like children in regard to that which at one time constituted the seriousness of existence,” Nietzsche continues: “but our aspiration to seriousness is to understand everything as becoming [als werdend], to deny ourselves as individuals, to see the world with greatest number of eyes possible, to abandon ourselves temporarily to life and IN ORDER thereafter to lay our eyes on it temporarily: to maintain the drives as the foundation of all knowledge, but to know where they become adverse to knowledge: in some TO AWAIT AND TO SEE up to where the

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science and truth [das Wissen und die Wahrheit] can be INCORPORATED— and to what degree a transformation of man comes to pass when, finally, he lives only in order to know [um zu erkennen].”12 The practice of indifference which Nietzsche also calls renunciation [Verzichtleistung],13 since to see the word with multiple eyes is to give up one’s own and to vary the evaluations means to give up holding a single one for the true in jutting and flying over all of them: “as thinker we must also learn to fly.”14 This practice of indifference or of renunciation is none other than a great play of the drives with themselves, through which knowledge can grow; it is thus prior to the creation of a superior body to the precise degree that it allows us to determine that part of truth that is liable to be incorporated. What then is the connection between this creation and eternal recurrence? The one is the content of the other. To show this—which does not yet mean to explain it—it is enough to return to what Nietzsche wrote in memory of August 1881. The addition whose text we just examined is tied to the fourth paragraph of the note, which ends with the “transition,” preceded by a dash that accentuates its significance. Let us recall what the two extremes are between which there is a transition. The incorporation of the new doctrine follows or is substituted for the incorporation of fundamental errors, passions, of knowledge and the knowledge that abjures. Eternal recurrence is thus the principle of a superior body whose coming signifies the destruction of man: “to come back to illusions already incorporated destroys humanity.”15 However, in order that the modification of human essence flow into the creation of a superior body, it is necessary, on the one hand, that man be none other than a body and that this body be the site of knowledge; moreover and on the other hand, the “fundamental errors” among which Nietzsche inscribes precisely logic, most have been constitutive of that older body that eternal recurrence allows us with justification to disqualify. Thus it is only from eternal recurrence starting from “the most powerful consciousness [mächtigste Erkenntnis]”16 that the essentially corporeal character of all knowledge and therefore, secondarily, of logic, can and must come to light. Conversely, the interpretation of the latter as a structure of the organism cannot fail to contribute in its turn to that of the thought of thoughts [eternal recurrence]. Let us add this: to make the body the essence of the human necessarily comes down to taking the drives hierarchy for the foundation of knowledge. In science “all our drives are at work, however according to a particular order that is quasi-statelike, and according to a reciprocal adaptation such that there results not a phantasm of this: one drive excites another, each one of them fantasizes and seeks to impose its type of error [will seine Art Irrthum durchsetzen];

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but each of these errors becomes immediately and anew malleable for another drive (for example, contradiction, analysis, etc.). Thanks to all these multiple phantasms we divine finally and almost necessarily reality and truth . . .”17 Consequently, the critical question must inevitably take the following form: can the drive-life [vie pulsionnelle] turn back against knowledge, even making it impossible; or again: what are the limits that the drives ground assigns to knowledge? But also, we should ask: are there sorts of knowledge favorable, or contrary, to the intensification of the drive-life? In other words, how does knowledge founded upon error accede to the ultimate truth that risks ruining this knowledge, and of what truth is the body capable when its very life rests upon error? In 1880 Nietzsche already noted that “no one knows to what point our drives can increase.”18 The critique of knowledge or cognition [connaissance] that must respond to this question: are there limits to the incorporation of knowledge [savoir] and truth, and what are they?—could have no other status, consequently, than that of an experience or a trial, since alone the drive-life is apt to decide what agrees with or hinders it. Philosophy is thus an épreuve de force unlike any other where knowledge is measured against life and life against knowledge, where the body is exposed to truth and truth to the body, and philosophy must become “the warrior of experiential knowledge [Kriegsmann der Erkenntniss].”19 Thus understood, philosophy will bestow glory—or power—to its true dimension,20 which is that of the truth of the truth and, at the same time but secondarily, will reduce the glory of God to impotence. This means first that philosophy has no task that is more its own than to surmount the Judeo-Christian tradition and thereupon, that the death of God must be understood on the basis of the thinking of recurrence. Yet again, how do we explain the formation of logic and, to begin with, what are its originary presuppositions? “Logic is tied to this condition: let us suppose that there are identical cases. Actually, in order to be able to think and conclude logically, this condition must first be fulfilled. That means: the will to logical truth [Wille zur logischen Wahrheit] can only be completed once a fundamental falsification [Fälschung] of all events has been carried out. It follows from this that here reigns a drive apt to accomplish both means: first, falsification and second, the application of a point of view. Logic does not derive from the will to truth.”21 What should we understand by “identical cases”? A case is what occurs by chance like a throw of the dice; it is what comes to pass suddenly like an event. Yet, whether it be a throw of the dice or an event in the midst of becoming, each case is unforeseeable and new, singular and different, in such a way that the concept of “identical cases” is as contradictory as that of the squared circle. Let us emphasize this once and for all, to neglect this

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contradiction or falsehood forbids our understanding anything in Nietzsche’s analysis of logic and experiential knowledge [connaissance]. What sense can there then be in presupposing identical cases and raising this supposition to the level of a foundation of logic and of all knowledge? To answer this question is not possible without a long detour. Logic is related to the world, it is a logic of the world and “the total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms [ästhetischen Menschlichkeiten].”22 Nietzsche gives several names to this chaos to which the logic of the world refers: “chaos of representation,” “jumble of sensations,” “chaos of sensations.”23 Stated otherwise, chaos is as much the character of the world as it is our character, and the logic whose genealogy we attempt to retrace could hardly be anything other than transcendental, even speculative, since it must be simultaneously “objective” and “subjective.” But nevertheless, how can we have access to the chaos that we were before the formation of logic? Starting from the chaos that we have again become. In fact, “modern soul is a chaos,” European man “is a cosmopolitan chaos of affects and intelligences,” “a chaos of contradictory evaluations.”24 It is therefore because “we live in the age of atoms, of atomistic chaos,”25 opened by the death of God, that we can come back to the chaos prior to the creation of the world and the revelation of God. No doubt the chaos prior to logic is not the chaos posterior to theology, but we could not think the first without the trial of the second. And this implies, we repeat, that logic is of the same essence as Christianity. Nietzsche says nothing else when, after having noted that “the great synthetic man in whom different forces are yoked together without difficulty, is lacking”; he continues: “We have multiple man, the most interesting chaos that, perhaps up to now, has yet been given: not the chaos of before but that of after the creation of the world, the multiple man [der vielfache Mensch] . . .”26 Under these conditions, what is the meaning of the determination of man and of the word? To assert that the world is chaos is to proceed to its dehumanization. Proof of this is found in the outline dating from 26 August 1881, where Nietzsche envisions dividing his coming work into four books. While the first treats of the “ring of eternity,” the third of the new and perfect ego that no longer belongs to God, the second devoted to the incorporation of experiences defines knowledge as “an error that becomes organic and organizes,” and the first (in which the equivalence chaos sive natura is posed) opens the entire work with a “dehumanization of nature.”27 To understand the world as chaos is thus to dehumanize it, but what then is the scope and aim of this dehumanization?

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We must first observe that Nietzsche never ceased insisting on the humanization of the world, which finds one of its most beautiful expressions in the proposition, “we are an arable ground for things.”28 From 1870, he will quote Goethe according to whom “man never conceives to what degree he is anthropomorphic.”29 In 1872, he points out that if “for the plant the entire world is a plant, for us it is man,” or again, that “the philosopher does not seek the truth but to metamorphose the world into man,” and he emphasizes that “all constructions of the world, and even all the sciences, are anthropomorphisms.”30 This observation is progressively augmented by a challenge. At the beginning of 1881, he writes in Daybreak that “things are only the boundaries of man”; and to the question, “why does man not see things?” Nietzsche answers: “he is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.”31 But it is above all after August 1881, in light of the thought of eternal recurrence, that the requirement of dehumanization comes to be fused with what Nietzsche will henceforth recognize as his task. “My task: the dehumanization of nature and thereafter the naturalization of man, once the pure concept of ‘nature’ has been won.”32 What then is the extent of this dehumanization? It is obviously a function of the extent of the initial humanization. Now, if the latter is at work in all the valuations of which we are the inheritors, since “the existing world in its entirety is also a product of our evaluations—in addition to those that have remained equal to themselves,”33 then the initial humanization is likewise at work in knowledge itself, because causality “is not a truth but a hypothesis—through which, moreover, we humanize the world.”34 In short, the humanization of the world is complete and without remainder. Nevertheless, and considering the global character of this humanization, is it possible to proceed to any kind of humanization without in one way or another presupposing a world, a nature, and things in themselves? After having assigned himself the task of “seeing things such as they are,” Nietzsche thereby defines the “means: to be able to look with hundreds of eyes . . .”35 To see things such as they are, outside of what man attributes to them, is therefore not to see them prior to any gaze but according to other gazes, higher, vaster gazes. “It is not our perspectives through which we see things; but rather the perspectives of a being of our type [eines Wesens nach unserer Art], of a being greater: through whose images we gaze.”36 The dehumanization of the world thus implies neither the positing of an “in itself,” which Nietzsche always took to be an absurdity, nor an abandoning of the “world of perspective from which, in seeking to get out of it, we would perish.”37 But why then speak of dehumanization?

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Once we allow that there is no world in itself and that it is impossible to escape all perspective, dehumanization can signify nothing other than a setting in question of the too human essence of man. Nietzsche did not fail to state this, whether in highlighting “the antagonism between the humanization and the aggrandizement of man,”38 or in noting that “the request for ‘humanization’ (which believes, altogether naively, that it posses the formula ‘what is human?’) is tartuffery under which one well determined species of man attempts to come to domination: more specifically, a well determined instinct, the gregarious instinct [der Heerden Instinkt].”39 Dehumanization, which must precede “the naturalization of man,” [is a] prelude to sur-humanization, since the “pure concept of nature” (which Nietzsche had not used in August 1881) is that of will to power.40 However, this double movement draws its possibility from the death of God. Must we recall Zarathustra who, after having proclaimed this death and while addressing the people to teach them the overman and the last man, pronounces words that also bespeak the urgency to which all of Nietzsche’s thought answers: “Alas! The time is coming when man will no more shoot the arrow of his longing [Sehnsucht] out over mankind, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to twang! I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you. Alas! The time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars.”41 Because it allows us to accede to this chaos which we continue to harbor in us at least for a while, dehumanization aims only to avert this unequaled misfortune, lacking any common measure that might be “or that already perhaps is” détente, even the breaking of the bow. In that sense, the chaos that we still are holds within it the future of the overman that we are not yet, for “IT IS NECESSARRY that Zarathustra come, or else everything on earth is lost.”42 This name of Zarathustra thus means that man has not yet exhausted his highest and most noble possibilities. As we have just seen, dehumanization has for its function to allow all that man has given to the world to come forth, in order to grasp its dimensions and inform its critique. Prior to any critique of reason, dehumanization is not a reduction to the given, for to be given in this sense is to be received, and if every reception is dependency, then something is given only for the reactive man.43 We must not forget that the finitude presupposed by the given is a concept whose origin is theological, and being finite does not mean the same thing as being mortal. As a reduction of the given that could not proceed blindly, dehumanization would be impossible without some foregoing acknowledgment of the very principle of humanization, a principle whose identification will alone allow the ultimate determination of the point of application and of aim, the

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target of dehumanization. If chaos—which does not mean the absence of necessity but the absence of order, or articulation of form, beauty, and wisdom, of identity and constancy—qualifies the world once it is deprived of (or better, protected from) “our aesthetic humanizations,” then the entire question amounts to knowing what is the meaning of the last adjective here. In the same period in which he reduces the world to chaos, Nietzsche notes that “aesthetic judgments (taste, discomfort, disgust, etc.) constitute the foundation of the table of goods [Gütertafel]. The latter is, in turn, the foundation of moral judgments.”44 If morality—which is never but the totality of valuations that make the existence of a body possible— arises from aesthetics, and if the body is the moral phenomenon par excellence,45 which comes on the same, then “aesthetic humanizations” could designate none other than the conditions thanks to which a body can durably exist in the midst of the chaos of the world. However, specifying the function of the humanizations is nevertheless not enough to determine the way in which they fulfill that function. What is the essential trait thanks to which these judgments can be qualified as aesthetic? What do art and humanization have in common? The one and the other cannot do without ordering [mise en ordre], or shaping [mise en forme]. Now, ordering and shaping are above all logical in nature. “The majority of aesthetic evaluations,” Nietzsche says, “are more fundamental than moral valuations; for example, the satisfaction derived from what is ordered, from what is clear and distinct, circumscribed, from repetition—this is the sense of well-being [Wohlgefühle] of all organic beings relative to the danger of their situation, or the arduousness of their nourishment. The well known does good, the sight of something one hopes to master easily does good, etc. The logical, arithmetical, and geometrical senses of well-being form the basis of aesthetic evaluations: certain life conditions [gewisse Lebens-Bedingungen] are felt to be so important and their contradiction with reality so frequent and great, that pleasure originates with the perception of such forms.”46 “Aesthetic” thus signifies logic, and the aesthetic humanization of the world is a “logicizing of the chaos.”47 Consequently, and also conversely, the determination of the world as chaos, prior to the true critique of reason, signifies a methodical reduction of all that (in one way or another) comes out of logic “without which, facing the jumble of impressions, no living being could live”;48 thus ultimately it is a reduction of identical cases. That is first to say, and we thereby arrive at the end of our aforementioned detour, that the supposition of identical cases that founds logic draws its meaning from the comfort and pleasure that a living organism wants to feel relative to the chaotic, flowing “reality” in

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unceasing becoming, which is unforeseeable, dangerous, and threatening—that reality in which it attempts to live. It is then to say that logic springs from this latter feeling, i.e., the pleasure accompanying any intensification of the will to power. Before explaining the constitution of identical cases, which should allow us to determine the scope and status of logic qua principle of all human mastery and of all humanization—“ ‘to humanize’ the world means always to feel ourselves more like masters in it”49—let us pause at the reductive implications of Nietzsche’s dehumanization.50 In Husserl’s sense of the term, the reduction (which is dehumanization insofar as it is demundanization) reduces the word to a pure datum of consciousness. The transcendental reduction nevertheless observes at least two limits: (1) it does not concern “logical axioms,” like the principles of contradiction and identity, for which, according to Husserl, descriptive phenomenology “could make their universal and absolute validity evident, on the basis of examples included among its own data.”51 But how can these serve as an example, if on the one hand, that of which they are exemplary is not previously given, or presupposed, and if, on the other hand, “identity is wholly indefinable”?52 (2) Even if it is quite thinkable that the discordance of lived experience annihilates things and world, it remains that, in making the perceived thing into the guiding thread of phenomenological analysis, Husserl presupposed its unity only to reconstitute it after the fact. In other words, if each object provides a rule for concatenating lived experiences, the world as a set of objects is the universal rule for all subjectivity—and this, notwithstanding the contingency of the initial givenness of that world. In thus supposing the unity of thing and world, the constitutive analysis is colored from the outset with irremediable contingency, which contradicts phenomenology’s vocation as absolute science.53 In contrast with Husserl’s reduction, which allows the constituting work of the absolute and temporal, transcendental subjectivity, without touching identical cases—since “it is a universal and fundamentally essential fact that every now, in sinking back into the past, maintains its strict identity”54—Nietzsche’s dehumanization of the world is more radical, as it presupposes neither unity, nor identity, nor the thing given. It is also not demundanization, since it consists “in overcoming the world and ourselves in it.”55 And more radically, Nietzsche’s dehumanization alone brings out all the human munificence, all that man has conceded, given away, even abandoned to the world; all that consequently belongs only to him: his very essence. Without this foregoing dehumanization, Nietzsche could never have conceived his task in the following terms: “my task: all the beauty and sublimity that we have attributed to things

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and to fictions, to reclaim them as the property and product of man and as his most lovely adornment, his beautiful apology. Man as poet, thinker, God, power, compassion. Oh, the royal munificence with which he gratifies things, to impoverish himself and to feel himself miserable! This is his greatest ‘abnegation’ [‘Selbstlosigkeit’], how he wonders and adores and knows not and would not know that he created that which he admires.— It is poems and paintings of originary humanity, all these ‘realistic’ natural scenes—there was a time when man knew none other than to rhapsodize and paint by seeing something into [Hineinsah] things. And we have made this heritage.—This sublime line, this sentiment of mournful grandeur, this feeling of the moving sea, all poetically dictated by our forebears. This firm and determined seeing above all!”56 What is this vision that reigns over all the forms of humanization if not precisely the logical vision? The λογος, as Aristotle already pointed out, immobilizes thought on something, and without this brief stop nothing is determinable or thinkable.57 The dehumanization of the world or again, and which comes on the same, the recognition of its globally chaotic character, restores to man all that belongs to him by isolating the logic of the world with which it could be fused, a logic whose formation and constitution it then (but only then) becomes possible to explain. From the moment humans pose the λογος as their most essential good, dehumanization cannot fail to be its reduction. To dehumanize is to suspend the work of logic in order to question its ultimate foundations. In a word, if identical cases—without which there is no logic—must be understood relative to chaos, then dehumanization amounts to a suspension of logic, about which we may perhaps begin to think that it was “the originary poem of humanity,” and which we have inherited “as though it were reality itself.”58 The affirmation of chaos, which puts logic out of play and with it “reality” as well, gives dehumanization a reductive scope vaster than that of the phenomenological reduction. It thus opens to a higher knowledge, to great knowledge [à la grande connaissance], such that the intentional analytic of constituting consciousness gives up its rank to the morphology of the will to power.

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2

Fear and the Will to Assimilation

Asserting the globally chaotic character of the world, Nietzsche also cautions against the thinking that holds that the world would be a living being. “The hypothesis that the whole [das All] would be an organism contradicts the essence of the organic.”1 Nevertheless, though the world is not an organism, all organisms live in the world in which they find something, for example, to nourish them. This claim immediately raises the following question: how can an organism live in a chaotic world of multiple and finite forces, in a world that “suffers no immobility” and “never has an instant’s rest,”2 in an unstable, changing world in becoming? The question is all the more unavoidable as “the formation of the organic [is] the exception of exceptions.”3 In other words, the body is a product of chance. What does this mean if not that the individual himself is no longer an “eternal singularity” but “the most complex state of affairs in the world, the supreme ACCIDENT [der höchste Zufall]”?4 How, consequently, could the body, as a domination-formation and an organized hierarchy of forces, draw its origin from mere chance when the latter is none other than “the collision of creative impulses”?5 How could such body keep itself alive if the forces constituting it are at once essentially variable and fortuitously connected, and when “chance breaks everything up anew”?6 In a world in becoming, and in the midst of the “absolute flux of the event,”7 how is a durable, hierarchical formation possible, and how could the most complex state of affairs preserve itself there without itself ensuring the constancy of the world? To last is to preserve oneself, and no body could preserve itself in the world without ensuring its own constancy and that of the world. How is that possible, and how does the necessity of this come to be felt? In a chaotic world, from the moment unequal forces enter accidentally into relation to give rise to a body—and inequality is the very condition of this relation—that body is ipso facto threatened with dispersion upon the slightest hierarchical dysfunction as with the slightest change in its relation to the world: from one instant to the other. As soon as they are conjoined in a body, forces can come apart and, since the world is originally dangerous for the body, the latter could not live other than in fear. What should we understand by “fear,” here? Is it a matter of the “pain or disturbance due to imagining some destructive or painful evil 189

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in the future,” to take up Aristotle’s definition?8 No doubt, the fear that the body experiences is tied to a possible, imminent destruction. However, as there is only one kind of force,9 the threat comes as much from the body as from the world in the totality of its becoming—and not from some kind of intra-worldly entity. With “the entity” ends both becoming and danger. Fear is thus not one sentiment or feeling among others but rather—on the account of him who called himself the conscientious man of the spirit—“man’s original and fundamental sensation.” It is a feeling on the basis of which “everything is explained . . . original sin and original virtue. From fear grew also my virtue, which is called: science,”10 he adds. Nietzsche never ceased making fear the fundamental disposition of man. Fear is, first, the originary feeling of humanity, since “man was for many hundreds of thousands of years an animal in the highest degree accessible to fear.”11 If “the age of fear [was] the longest of all the ages,”12 we must grasp fear as “that which was earliest implanted in man.”13 But fear is then, and above all, the sentiment from which humanity originates, humanity’s formative sentiment. It is the “instructor in understanding,”14 “that bids us to know,”15 the “mother of morals.”16 And it gives rise to the will to truth and certainty.17 Fear not only lies at the source of all morality and of all science, but equally at that of all philosophy, since astonishment—which Plato and Aristotle place at the origin of philosophy—is but a “weakened fear.”18 What is the essential character of that fear that, qua feeling of weakness,19 is opposed to the feeling of power? When fear is consecutive to the approach of a danger arising from the world or from another person [autrui], I become ipso facto dependent. When fear is fear of self, and I grow afraid of myself, this is because I can be an other yet not have the force to appropriate, that is to say to dominate, all the possibilities that arise from the multiple forces that constitute me. And when fear is fear for self, this is because the self aims only to preserve and to keep itself. Whether obeying an external solicitation or one that reveals my own weakness, fear is thus “servile”;20 it engenders gregarity—“the necessity of the formation of the herd lies in fear.”21 To think on the basis of fear, whatever the objects of that reflection or that fear, is always “to think basely.” If fear leads to deliberation,22 as Aristotle again observes, then this could only be a “poor manner of thinking.”23 More generally, however, it is all Europe “that bears the mark of a frightened manner of thinking, accustomed to servility.”24 Fear is thus essentially reactive, and with it our whole being and whole knowledge, once they are traversed and inhabited as if by their ultimate pathetic foundation. To what is fear reacting, or what is it that every domination-formation dreads? After reasserting that “for primitive man, fear of what is bad

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[Fürcht vor dem Bösen] is preponderant,” Nietzsche asks: “What is bad?” and immediately responds: “There are three sorts: the accidental, the uncertain, the sudden.”25 Bad thus denotes everything upon which it is impossible to rely. Now, if the accidental, the uncertain, and the sudden characterize events and becoming, then no one could protect himself from fear without converting the accidental into necessity, uncertainty into certainty, suddenness into predictability, the event into a state, and becoming into being. Yet how is this conversion possible, outside the formation of identical cases, which precisely imply “the fundamental falsification of every event”? As fundamental, this falsification could only concern the essence of events [événementialité] itself. With regard to a flow of ever-new events, there are no identical cases. Consequently, and if truth is an adequation to the “real,” presupposing identical cases falsifies the event-like or chaotic character of the world, since it posits an identity where everything differs, and constant being where everything is becoming. To what necessity does this falsification respond? Why is logic indispensable to maintaining the unity of the body, which is to say also that of the world? Let us return to the analysis of the body, in order to understand its logical structure. As a domination-formation or a society of mortal souls, the body is at once a political phenomenon and an intellectual one. It is political provided we understand by that term “the art of enduring the difficult, tension relations [Spannungsverhältnisse] between the various degrees of power.”26 It is intellectual because our lives are none other than the concert of a plurality of drives or intelligences, once every force is commanded by a thought. But how are the political and intellectual dimensions of the body conjoined to each other? As corporeal life is a combination of forces which it behooves us to obey or command, to command and obey, it is important to the preservation of the body that the dominant force not annihilate the force being dominated. While to command may be to hypnotize,27 it could not be to paralyze for, if “dominating is bearing the counter-weight of the weakest force, and therefore a kind of continuation of the struggle, to obey is also a struggle: in proportion to the force that remains to resist.”28 If the exercise of commanding is always “a sudden explosion of force”29 and if it alone can ensure the durable cohesion of the multiple forces constituting the body, then how does commanding manage to prevent the paralysis consecutive to fear, whose suddenness could not fail to provoke it? The question is not only one of knowing how the dominant force softens its domination, but rather how all the forces of the body—which may be dominant or dominated, or even simultaneously dominant and dominated according to different relations—come to understand each other and communicate,

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to constitute a society living in security; or again, how it is possible to reduce the fear inherent in the always violent exercise of command. To attempt to respond to this question and to examine the articulation of the logical and political dimensions of the body, we can follow Nietzsche’s injunction according to which “the LAST organisms whose formation we see (peoples, States, societies) should serve to teach us about the first organisms.”30 According to this, it is consequently fitting to proceed not from the most complex to the simplest organism—the human organism is not less complex than a political one, to the contrary—but from that whose formation we can see, to that whose formation is imperceptible since it is older than our gaze. Is it legitimate, all the same, to explain our organism on the basis of a political organism? It is without the slightest doubt, insofar as life is will to power and the relation between quanta of power, which is proper to it, is understood as “political.”31 An additional proof is to be had in that the reversal of moral or servile values into naturalist or aristocratic ones has as its consequence the replacement of “sociology” by “a doctrine of domination-formations.”32 Now, while the one and the other have the same theme—relations between the multiple, living beings in a body or an organism—they positively do not have the same principle. Whereas sociology “knows no instinct other than that of the herd, that is, of zeros added together . . . , where each zero has ‘equal rights,’ where it is virtuous to be a zero,” the theory of domination-formations works out a hierarchical principle, “the instinct of an aristocratic society” by virtue of which “the meaning of the sum depends on the value of its constituent units.”33 Once again, how do the manifold living beings that constitute a body—indeed by reason of their difference of force—nevertheless protect themselves from the danger that they represent the ones to the others, as well as from that which the world represents to their fortuitous conjunction? Once it is established that social organization exemplifies the living organism, we are justified in elucidating the latter by proceeding from the former. “The necessity, at times of great danger, of making oneself understood—whether in order to help one another or to subject another—was only possible to that sort of primitive men who could express comparable experiences through comparable signs; should the signs through which they attempted to understand each other be too different, they would understand each other wrongly: thus the rapprochement, and so ultimately the herd, would not succeed. It follows that, generally speaking, the communicability of experiences [die Mittheilbarkeit der Erlebnisse], or of needs, or expectations, is a power of selection and breeding [züchtende Gewalt]: people who are similar remain. The necessity of thinking, consciousness as a whole, first comes about on the basis of

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the necessity of understanding one another. First signs, then concepts, finally “Reason” [“Vernunft”] in the habitual sense of the term. The richest organic life can play out its game, in itself, without consciousness: however, as soon as its existence is tied to the coexistence [sein Dasein an das Mit-dasein anderer] of other animals, the necessity of consciousness arises. How is this consciousness possible?”34 Let us leave aside the problem of consciousness to which we will return later. If the body, as the product of chance, never ceases being threatened with dispersion, then it could hardly protect itself from such a danger and from the fear that this peril elicits, unless all its forces cooperated toward their common cohesion; that is, in pursuit of the combat that assembles them. Yet they could not achieve this without understanding each other, or making themselves reciprocally understood. Moreover, this comprehension could not take place without a system of communication that, to create commonality, inevitably effects a reduction to the smallest common denominator. “If the absolute condition of man is a community [Gemeinschaft], then it is the drive thanks to which this community is protected that will develop most strongly in him.”35 By protecting itself from the forces of the chaotic world that, at any moment, threatens its cohesion, the body simultaneously protects itself from the fear proper to the hierarchy that is the very reason and foundation of its existence. In other words, if from above to below, or below to above, misunderstanding is necessary, then every good understanding implies, conversely, an equalization and leveling of the intellects or forces that arrive at this understanding. At once necessary and equalizing, communication becomes ipso facto a selection instance or function. The empire of communication is that of consensus, that of gregarity. What are the requirements of this communication that guarantees the unity and duration of the body by holding together (that is, by assimilating the ones to the others) the multiple entities that compose it? It must be as “clear and univocal” as possible, in order to forestall the “mistrust” that is a “waste of spiritual force.”36 It must be “rapid ” and “immediately comprehensible”; for, if “it is the need to make their needs rapidly and easily comprehensible that ties people most firmly to each other,”37 then the same goes for that society of multiple souls that is our body. Nevertheless, to clearly grasp the signification of these requirements and the problem that they pose, we must recall once again that the body is a domination-formation. Thus, when a sovereign body gives an order and communicates its instructions, this is not to establish a relationship of equality with subordinate forces, but to make them into its executive organs. “Originally, all communication is properly a willing-to-take, a grasping and (mechanically) a willing-to-appropriate. To incorporate the

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other—ultimately to incorporate the will of the other, to make it one’s own, is a matter of the conquest of the other. To communicate oneself is thus, originally, to extend one’s power over the other.”38 Is there not a contradiction, then, between the originally hierarchical principle of communication and the equalization that its work requires? The clearer and more rapid is the communication between multiple forces in the body, the more it ensures its cohesion and favors its preservation. However, if the communication is clearer and faster for taking place inter pares, then does its development not tend to reduce every hierarchy and, thereby, weaken the body? Does the necessity of self-preservation, confronting the body, not then operate at the expense of any possibility of intensification? No doubt the rapidity of communication between the multiple mortal souls, whose society forms the body, attenuates the pain and fear inherent in all command; however, and conversely, by assimilating these same souls to each other, this rapid communication likewise ruins the hierarchy, which is the synthetic principle of that body. If comprehension of an order is always painful, since it implies acknowledgment of a superior power and conceding a privilege or right, suffering will diminish with the acceleration of comprehension and the reduction of hierarchical differences. “Understanding quickly, easily is highly recommended (to receive the fewest blows possible). The fastest mutual comprehension is the least painful relation: this is why we aspire to it. Negative sympathy—originally creative of the herd.”39 When the constitutive units of the body become equivalent to each other, the body is no longer but the summation of units of the same power, an “addition of zeros,” if zero is the sign of indifference, that is, of gregarious equality. The perfecting of communication between the multiple wills of the body, a perfection that is but a form of pity, has the same consequence as the death of God: the weakening, even the dispersion, of the body and the individual. In this respect, the man—or the body that is henceforth only communication because the values that govern it are exclusively conservative—is “the last man,” whom Nietzsche reminds us that he created him at the same time as the overman, as his contrary.40 Now, the stage of communication that is confused with that of “credit and world commerce, wherein an immense and gentle confidence in man is expressed,”41 is the stage of the “last man,” to whom commanding and obeying have become toilsome, and whose will to power (the body’s spinal column) is made of the will to equality.42 This is the last stage of a man “determined to remain in the state of a super-ape”43 or again “a kind of Chinese.”44 What should we understand here by “Chinese”? Chinese morality is essentially “stationary,”45 the Chinese way of thinking is “the most remarkable monument to the spirit of duration”; the Chinese person is “the man who endures,” a man “virtually immutable for millennia” and

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for whom “the great man is a public disaster.”46 However, if the communicative leveling of the constitutive forces of the body gives rise to the last man, the intensification of their tensions under the yoke of one of them is liable, conversely, to give rise to a superior body, to an overman who is in no way destined to become the master of the last men. Nietzsche will say this as clearly as possible and it is not irrelevant to our understanding of his politics.47 How then to lead this equalizing and helpful communication that reassures and keeps watch back to the will to power? Or again, how does the latter become a will to equality? Let us return to the analysis of communication. Cooperation among the manifold living beings that constitute our bodies is indissociable from a clear, univocal, rapid, and rapidly intelligible communication. Under what conditions is this communication possible? As we have already seen, such a communication supposes identical cases and must have a logical form.48 Yet if it is thus, then it must be possible to explain the formation of these cases on the basis of the forces or drives of the body. Let us begin by recalling that in a world dehumanized and reduced to chaos, there is nothing identical or, to reuse an example common to Leibniz and to Nietzsche, relative to a similar overall situation, “no leaf is ever completely identical to another.”49 However, contrary to Leibniz who holds identity to be the ultimate degree of resemblance—“there is no perfect similarity anywhere,”50 as goes the statement of the principle of indiscernibles—Nietzsche considers that the “similar (das Ähnliche) is not a degree of the identical (das Gleichen), but something entirely different from the identical.”51 Wherein lies the difference between the similar and the identical? “That which is similar . . . arises when there is hardly any difference of degree between the quantity of forces. ‘Scarcely’ different for us! And ‘similar’ for us! Similar qualities, we should say, rather than ‘identical’—even in chemistry. And ‘similar’ for us. Nothing happens twice, the atom of oxygen has not its identical part, in truth the hypothesis SUFFICES us for there to be innumerable identicals.”52 In fact, in the absence of an equilibrium of forces, the world does not cease becoming and nothing could be identical to anything. Yet if the universal flux renders the coexistence of two identical things impossible,53 this does not exclude our perceiving resemblances. In the midst of the world of forces, resemblance appears to us at its maximum when the difference between forces appears to us to be at its minimum; when it is hardly perceptible at all. Now, the finesse of our sensibility is not set once and for all, it varies in function of our knowledge and our valuations. In other words, the world of identical cases loses breadth as our experience expands,54 and conversely our oldest experiences, on which all the others rest, cannot

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fail to be founded on “a weak view that has, as its characteristic, the vision that assimilates and identifies,”55 that is, on an original myopia. To the question “Whence, in man’s head, did logic arise?” Nietzsche once responded: “Certainly out of illogic, whose realm originally must have been immense. Innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different from ours perished; for all that, their ways might have been truer. Those, for example, who did not know how to find often enough what is ‘like’ or ‘the same’ [das “Gleiche”] as regards both nourishment and hostile animals—those, in other words, who subsumed [subsumirte] things too slowly and cautiously—were favored with a lesser probability of survival than those who guessed immediately upon encountering similar instances that they must be like or the same. The dominant tendency [überwiegende Hang], however, to treat as the same what is merely similar [das Ähnliche]—an illogical tendency, for nothing is really the same—is what first created any basis for logic. In order that the concept of substance could originate—which is indispensable for logic although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it—it was likewise necessary that for a long time one did not see or perceive changes in things. The beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those that saw everything ‘in flux’ [‘im Flusse’].”56 A certain coarseness of intellect, a particular form of stupidity, is thus at the origin of logic. The formation of identical cases that, in supposing diminished vision, responds to fear as the defense against attack, is dictated by the will to self-preservation and rests on “the penchant toward treating the similar as the identical.” Logic is thus indissociable from a reduction of differences of forces, a reduction of their inequalities; in a word, indissociable from equalization. If every difference is hierarchical, then every identity is egalitarian. To identify is to level off, to equalize, and logic is by essence democratic. “For nothing is more democratic than logic.”57 This proposition not only signifies that “logic appeals to what is most common in minds,” that it “is nothing more than a criterion of utility in the interest of the greatest number”58 but, moreover, that the reign of logic merges with that of democracy.59 In a world of events, where each event is a difference of force, where “equality is a grand illusion,”60 supposing identical cases is a falsification that draws its origin from a will to myopia, from a will that—not to let itself be surprised and to maintain its domination—assimilates the seen to the already-seen, the new to the old. The mode of logical thinking, which is never but a defensive way of living, and which is thus true in the Roman sense of verum, is not only preventative [conservatoire] but also conservative [conservateur]. Let us note in passing that this is to say that Nietzsche’s critique of logic and its truth could not be the final consequence of the translation of αλήθεια

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[alˉe theia] by verum, the ultimate figure of the military, imperial interpretation of αλήθεια. What is the will to assimilation; what is its primary form, and where does it come from? No doubt, from the will to power itself; but how? Let us return to the protoplasm, that is, to the simplest, perfect61 organism, which for this reason is the most apt to let the will to power show through. “Such a being,” Nietzsche writes, “assimilates what is closest to it, transforms it into its property (property is first nourishment and the accumulation of nourishment), it seeks to incorporate the greatest possible amount, and not only to compensate for loss—it is RAPACIOUS [HABSÜCHTIG]—it divides itself into two beings. Growth and generation derive from the drive to unlimited appropriation [unbegrenzten Aneignungstriebe].—This drive leads it to the exploitation of the weakest, and in jousts with those of a similar force, it battles, which is to say, it HATES, fears, dissimulates. To assimilate, is indeed: to render identical to oneself something that is foreign, to tyrannize—CRUELTY.”62 If will to power is a will to incorporation, assimilation, appropriation, identification, then the same goes for any drive in the body that, in one and the same movement, tends to its own good and to dominate the others to set them in service to it and make them its organs, to incorporate them into itself. To reduce the similar and the different to the identical is thus the very destiny of the will to power qua principle of organization. Is this will to assimilation at work in the formation of identical cases? Without any doubt, for “before logic, which everywhere works with identifications, the making-equal, the assimilating must have ruled: and it continues still to rule, and logical thought is itself a durable means of assimilation, a means in service to the will-to-see of identical cases.”63 Yet how does the will to assimilation give rise to identical cases or, once again, how does the will to power become a will to equality? In a note whose scope is at least equivalent to the text Husserl devoted to The Origin of Geometry, Nietzsche writes: “The formation of arithmetic must be preceded by lengthy practice and a long apprenticeship of the seeing-identically, of the will-to-take identically, through the presupposition of identical cases and through ‘counting.’ The same goes for logical deduction. More even than the belief: ‘this and that is true,’ judgment is originally an ‘it is precisely such and such that I want to be true!’ The drive to assimilation, that fundamental, organic function on which all growth rests, is also internally adapted to what it appropriates in proximity: the will to power functions in this comprehension of the new, under the form of the old, the already experienced, that is still alive in memory: and this is what we call ‘to conceive’!”64 What is the meaning of the internal adaptation of the drive to assimilation to that which it assimilates? Why does a

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dominant, organizing force come to adapt itself to the forces that it dominates and organizes? Assuming that the body is domination-formation, the dominant force could not exert and maintain its domination without likewise permitting the preservation of the dominated forces. How is this possible? All forces being of the same nature, the only thinkable alterity is the difference—first quantitative, then qualitative—between forces, and assimilation could only be an equalization. Now, to equalize is not to absorb, and equality is a relation between distinct magnitudes. Therefore, in order that the assimilation of one force by another not disturb the preservation of the body—that is, their common preservation—is it not the case that the dominated force must not only be preserved, but also that the dominant force adapt itself (and this, in order to preserve the former) to the dominated force by making itself equal to the former internally? But how could a force become the equal of a lesser force without inhibiting its own power, and how to inhibit this superior power itself without turning it back against itself? In other words, and to give an interrogative form to a Nietzschean affirmation: “is democracy indeed, for all time, the declining form of the power to organize [die Niedergangs-Form der organisirenden Kraft]?”65 If the drive to assimilation is cruel and tyrannical, then it must also exert this cruelty and this tyranny upon itself. To assimilate is consequently to reduce the distance inherent to commanding by weakening the power that exerts it and by turning the will to power back against itself: to decline. The internal adaptation of the will to power to that which it orders and organizes thereby modifies its quality, for “adaptation” is never but an “activity of the second rank, a mere reactivity.”66 Once the body is exclusively governed by an imperative to preservation, this adaptation comes to the foreground and “one overlooks the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions, although ‘adaptation’ follows only after this; the dominant role of the highest functionaries within the organism itself in which the will to life appears active and form-giving is denied.”67 As a principle of organization, assimilation, and above all of preservation, the will to power could only be reactive in the final analysis. Principally directed toward its own preservation, the body qua organism is then just like the Christian body but for different reasons, a reactive body. Henceforth, we can begin to understand why philosophy let itself be Christianized at the level of the body.

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3

Simplification and Judgment

It is not enough to say that identical cases are formed on the basis of the drive to assimilate, itself starting from the will to power; this does not explain the way in which identical cases take shape. In a note dedicated to the birth of logic, which takes up what we showed in the previous chapter, Nietzsche writes that “the fundamental inclination to equate, to perceive as equal, is modified, curbed by the useful and the harmful [durch Nutzen und Schaden], by success: an adaptation is formed, a degree attenuated in which this inclination can be satisfied without simultaneously denying life and placing it in danger. This process corresponds altogether to that external, mechanical one (which is its symbol), according to which the plasma continually makes that which it appropriates equivalent to itself and integrates it into its form and its series [Formen und Reihen einordnet].”1 If the formation of identical cases responds to the absorption, in the blood plasma, of organic nutrients resulting from digestion, then this is because there reigns, throughout, the same will to power, the will to assimilation, to equality. Nietzsche will recall, under the title “Equality and Resemblance”: “1) that the crudest organ sees much apparent equality; 2) that the spirit [der Geist] wants equality, that is, to subsume a sense impression under am available rank or series: just as the body assimilates to itself something inorganic. For the understanding of logic ::: the will to equality is the will to power.—The belief that something is such and such, or the essence of judgment, is the consequence of a will, that it should be as much equal as possible.”2 It is thus indeed the same will to assimilation and to equality that is at work in nutrition and the formation of identical cases. Nietzsche often emphasized the kinship between the mind and the stomach, intellectual processes and those of digestion. Not only should the stomach be described morally, intellectually,3 but the intellect should be understood as the stomach of the affects.4 This kinship, which finds its foundation in the assimilative force working throughout, was never so clearly brought to the fore as in a beautiful paragraph from Beyond Good and Evil where spirit of mind receives its proper name. That commanding something which the people call “the spirit” wants to be master in and around its own house and wants to feel that it is 199

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master; it has the will from multiplicity to simplicity, a will that ties up, tames, and is domineering and truly masterful. Its needs and capacities are so far the same as those which physiologists posit for everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The spirit’s power [die Kraft des Geistes] to appropriate the foreign stands revealed in its inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, and to overlook or repulse whatever is totally contradictory—just as it involuntarily emphasizes certain features and lines in what is foreign, in every piece of the “external world,” retouching and falsifying the whole to suit itself. Its intent in all this is to incorporate [Einverleibung] new “experiences,” to file new things in old files—growth, in a word—or, more precisely, the feeling of growth [das Gefühl des Wachsthums], the feeling of increased power. An apparently opposite drive serves this same will: a suddenly erupting decision in favor of ignorance, of deliberate exclusion, a shutting of one’s windows, an internal No to this or that thing, a refusal to let things approach [ein Nicht-heran-kommen-lassen], a kind of state of defense against much that is knowable, a satisfaction with the dark, with the limiting horizon, a Yea and Amen to ignorance—all of which is necessary in proportion to a spirit’s power to appropriate, its “digestive capacity,” to speak metaphorically—and actually “the spirit” is relatively most similar to a stomach.5

Such a parallel would evidently be impossible if the same will to assimilation were not at work equally in the labors of the stomach as in those of the spirit or mind. No doubt, the will to assimilation is but a moment or a form of the will to power—the will to equality is not the pathos of distance, it is not victorious—but this moment and this form are essential to the preservation of the body and the constitution of logic. But is that not already to say that the latter is necessary to the former and that it is possible, for this reason, to confuse them? How does the will to power equalize events or differences of force, to give rise to “a world of identical cases,” to a world “of concepts, species, forms, ends, laws,” but also to a world of “identical things,” of “subjects,” of “predicates,”6 to a world knowable and known, to a world in which life is lastingly possible? The concept of “identical cases” thus defines the form of any possible knowledge, the form of any possible form, and it constitutes the highest “formal” concept of knowledge. Consequently, the problem of the formation of identical cases is that of the foundation of formal logic, in the double sense of formal apophantics and formal ontology. But we must recall further that if the equalization of the constitutive forces of the body is necessary to its preservation, then the problem of the formation of identical cases is likewise that of the foundation

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of transcendental logic since there is, on the one hand, only a single type of force and since it is the body and not consciousness, on the other hand, that is the original site of knowledge. To retrace the genesis of identical cases thus amounts to seeking the sole foundation of all logic in general, whether it be formal or transcendental. The formation of identical cases results from a simplification, a falsification of the “real.” Nietzsche often insisted on the essentially simplifying character of the intellect. “The entire knowledge-apparatus [Erkenntniss-Apparat] is an abstraction and simplification apparatus—not aimed at knowledge but at the mastery and overpowering of things.”7 Knowledge is not prior to the mastery of the world as its condition of possibility, it is mastery itself. Knowledge is technology. Further, having affirmed that the true world of causes, unspeakably complex, is hidden from us, Nietzsche adds: “the intellect and senses are above all a simplification apparatus [vereinfachender-Apparat]. False, shrunken, logicized, our world of causes is nonetheless the world in which we can live. We are ‘knowledgeable’ [‘erkennend’] insofar as we can satisfy our needs.”8 And a few years earlier, he had already observed: “Low intellectuality, non-scientific being is the condition of existence, of acting, short of which we would have died of hunger. Skepticism and circumspection were permissible only later on and very rarely.”9 Let us begin by removing one difficulty. What sense is there in arguing that the knowledge apparatus is not destined to know, that the world such as we know it is false or again, that “truth is the sort of error without which a specific type of living being could not live”?10 Since such assertions require the confrontation between the world as such and its logicization, and between becoming and being, it is a matter of knowing how it became possible to accede to this chaos and this becoming despite the logicization of the world—or again to what inversion of knowledge we owe our ability to undertake its critique. To this question we must first respond that it is not despite but because of the logicization of the world that chaotic becoming is accessible. Already in August 1881 Nietzsche noted that “without the hypothesis of a sort of being opposed to true reality, we would have nothing according to which to measure it, compare and depict it: error is the presupposition of knowledge. A partial persistence, relative bodies, identical, or resemblant processes—it is with this that we falsify the true state of affairs, but it would be impossible to know something about it without having first falsified it in this way. No doubt, each instance of knowledge [jede Erkenntnis] is always false, but there is nevertheless a representing thereby and, among representations, again a multiplicity of degrees OF THE FALSE. To establish the degrees of the false and the necessity of the fundamental error as condition of the

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LIFE of the representing being—task of the science.”11 In other words, on the one hand, becoming is accessible on the basis of being by virtue of the principle according to which it is impossible to change without permanence; on the other hand and consequently, “truth does not designate the contrary of error, but rather the position of certain errors relative to others, the fact for example that they might be older, more profoundly incorporated, or that we might not know how to live without them.”12 Yet if becoming is today more accessible than it was in the past, if logic itself can henceforth be put into question, then it is, subsequently, that the degree of falsehood of knowledge is today no longer what it was yesterday. In what sense has it varied? If the crudest organ is that which sees the greatest equality, then those types of knowledge that are the oldest are necessarily more crudely false, while the more recent ones are relatively less so. “From etymology and the history of language, we have it that all concepts have become, that many are still becoming; and this, in such a way that the most general concepts, the falsest ones, must also be the oldest. ‘Being,’ ‘Substance’ and ‘unconditioned,’ ‘equality,’ ‘Thing’—: thinking invented first and earliest these Schemata that effectively contradicted most fundamentally the world as becoming, but which, relative to the obtuse and uniform character of the initial and less than animal consciousness, seemed first to correspond to it [the world]: each ‘experience’ seemed again to underscore them and them alone. With the sharpening of the senses and the attention, with the development and the struggle of the most manifold life, equality and similarity gradually became increasingly rarely established: while, for the most inferior beings, everything seemed ‘eternally identical to itself,’ ‘one,’ ‘persistent,’ ‘unconditioned,’ ‘quality-less.’ ”13 It is thus because the senses and the intellect have gained in subtlety that knowledge [connaissance] can, by itself, turn back upon and against the archaic errors that found it. The “crisis of foundations” no longer concerns this or that region of knowledge or science [savoir], it touches the very idea of science and truth. It is no longer a matter of comprehending how error is possible but of explaining “how a sort of truth is in general possible, despite the fundamental untruth of knowledge.”14 Nevertheless, would learning that knowledge is a crude error necessary to the preservation of the life of our body not place that body in peril? And are we not thereby rejoining the question of knowing to what point truth is liable to incorporation? Without the slightest doubt, this question sets the philosopher before his ultimate responsibility. Nietzsche realized this very clearly. “In order that there might be some degree of consciousness in the world,” he writes under the effect of the thought of the return, “an unreal world of error had—to be born: beings with belief in the persistent, in the individual, etc. It is only after the formation of

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an imaginary counter-world, in contradiction to the absolute flux, that something was able to be known on this foundation—even the fundamental error, on which everything rests, can finally be seen through (because contraries can be thought)—nevertheless this error could not be annihilated otherwise than with life itself: the ultimate truth of the flow of things does not tolerate incorporation, our ORGANS (for living) are set up according to this error. Thus is born, in the sage, the contradiction of life and his ultimate decisions; his drive toward knowledge has belief in the error and the life therein as its presupposition.”15 Once again, the final question concerns knowing how knowledge, founded upon error, can nevertheless reach the ultimate truth that ruins its possibility, or again of what truth the body is capable the moment its very life rests upon error. To this ultimate contradiction that strikes at the very principle of knowledge, the philosopher, to whom it is the sole and unique passion, can only respond by an ultimate decision—one that could have no other form than that of a thought, of the thought of thoughts. To comprehend how the eternal return saves the knowledge of the flux,16 which deprives it of all foundation (for it is indeed that which is at stake), let us return to the formation of identical cases, to simplification. In a general manner, to simplify is to reduce something complex to one of its components to facilitate its comprehension and use. The moment the formation of identical cases is imputed to the body and to its drives, we have to know if and how simplification is at work therein. “There have been innumerable modi cogitandi,” Nietzsche remarks, “but only those that made organic life progress were preserved—were they the finest ones?—Simplification is the principal need of the organic; to see relationships more summarily to grasp cause and effect without multiple intermediaries, to find similarity in much that is dissimilar—that was necessary—thus an incomparably greater quest for nourishment and assimilation took place, because the belief that there was something to find with which to nourish oneself was more often excited—a great advantage for the growth of the organic!”17 However, does this simplification, which is always a mode of thinking, characterize exclusively the relations of the organism and the world in which it draws nourishment and lives, or is it, simultaneously, at work in the hierarchical relations maintained by the multiple corporeal drives? In order to respond to this question, let us reread the great note of 1885 entitled “Morality and Physiology.” We have today forbidden ourselves to fabulate about of the “unity,” of the “soul,” of the “person”: with such hypotheses one makes the problem more difficult, that much is clear. And even these smallest

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living beings that constitute our body (more correctly: from whose collaboration that which we call “body” is the best comparison—) do not count for us as soul-atoms, but much more as something growing, struggling, self-expanding, and dying-off-anew [Sich Vermehrendes und Wieder-Absterbendes]: in such a way that their number changes variably, and our life like every life is at the same time an ongoing dying. There is thus in man as many “consciousnesses” [“Bewusstseins”] as there are beings—in every moment of his existence—which constitute his body. What distinguishes the “conscious,” habitually thought to be single, to be intellect, is precisely that it remains protected and closed off from the innumerable manifold of these many consciousnesses in experiences, and, as a consciousness of a higher rank, as a ruling multitude and an aristocracy, only a choice of experiences is presented to it, what is more these are experiences simplified, clarified and comprehensible, thus falsified—such that for its part, the intellect might pursue this simplification and clarification, thus this falsification, and prepare what one generally calls “a will”—each such act of the will presupposes as it were the nomination of a dictator. But what presents this choice to our intellect and what has already, beforehand, simplified, assimilated, interpreted lived experiences is in any case not at all this intellect: the less so that it is what carries out that will, what takes on a pale, thin, and highly imprecise representation of force and value and translates it into a living force and a precise measure of value [lebendige Kraft und genaue Werth-Masse]. And the same sort of operation that unfolds here must unfold continually at every deeper level, in relation to all the higher and lower beings together: these same choices and presentations of experiences, this abstraction, and this thinking that assembles, this willing, this retranslation of the always highly indeterminate willing into determinate activity. From the guiding thread of the body, as stated before, we learn that our life is possible through the interaction of many intelligences highly unequal in value, and thus only through a continual thousandfold obeying and ordering—stated in moral terms: through the uninterrupted exercise of many virtues. And how could one stop speaking morally!18

Let us first set aside an objection liable to weaken the preceding argument in its entirety. Is it only by comparison, or qua image, that our subjective unity receives the names of a body, and if this is not the case, then for what reasons is it not so? On the one hand, texts in which Nietzsche understands by “body” the subjective unity itself are too numerous for our preceding note to stand as an exception. Set between quotation marks, the “body” is taken there in its common understanding as

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an organism. Now, as we have seen, the concept of an organism does not cover the concept of body as a domination-formation into which, by contrast, it blends. But on the other hand and above all, having recourse to comparison and images, Nietzsche never thought to contradict the requirements of truth. In regard to what “poets of strong ages have called inspiration,” and thinking of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he will write in effect: “Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree but as in a gale of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity.— The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all; one no longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor: everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression. It actually seems, to allude to something Zarathustra says, as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors [zum Gleichnisse] (‘Here all things come caressingly to your discourse and flatter you: for they want to ride on your back. On every metaphor you ride to every truth’).”19 That much said, let us look at the relationships that multiple beings have among themselves—those multiple beings, consciousnesses, or intelligences that make up our body, with the reciprocal behaviors of those multiple “subjects,” since it is permissible to allow for “a multiplicity of subjects whose combined interplay as a whole, and whose combat lies at the basis of our thinking and especially our consciousness.”20 As a domination-formation, the body is indissociable from a constant and polymorphous command and obedience exercise. Each force must therefore be apt to comprehend orders received or to make given orders comprehensible. The body is therefore, indeed, a society of intelligences and intelligences, differing by rank and power. Yet how is the execution of a command by a force possible, if, on one hand, every force can have, simultaneously and in various rapports, to obey and to command, even simultaneously to obey several commands issuing/issued from one or several other forces; or if, on the other hand, the constancy of the organism requires the rapid and perfect execution of orders received? No force can act without excitation. Obedience shall therefore be the more perfect that the excitation be easily understood. However, to comprehend one by one these excitations, or to comprehend one excitation among others, without confusing it with the others, and to be able thereby to respond, that is to say thereby to obey, it is necessary to identify the force from which it comes, since only the latter projects the meaning through which its own commands are intelligible. This identification—which cannot fail to proceed according to the single perspective of the order received—is ipso facto a simplification, since it isolates one excitation from all the others without differentiating the other excitations. To simplify is

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therefore to abstract according to a determinate perspective and evaluation. Conversely, to give an order is to consider the subordinate from the single angle of its possibility of executing that order, and therefore to effect anew a simplification. Nietzsche says nothing else when, having pointed out that a subject would be impossible without “something persistent,” without “much equality and resemblance,” he continues, Without something enduring there would be no mirror there in which a juxtaposition and a succession could be shown: the mirror already presupposes something enduring [etwas Beharrendes].—But this is now what I believe: the subject could arise insofar as the error of the identical takes shape, as when for example the protoplasm receives diverse forces (light, electricity, pressure) from a single excitation and, from the unity of that excitation, conceives the identity of the causes: or when, capable of a single excitation, it feels all the others as though they were identical—and it is thus that things should occur in the lowest levels of the organic. First arises belief in persistence and the identity outside us—and only later do we grasp ourselves following enormous practice with what is outside us [nach der ungeheuren Einübung am Ausser-uns] as something enduring and self-identical, as unconditioned. The belief ( judgment) must therefore have arisen BEFORE self-consciousness: in the process of the assimilation of the organic, this belief is already there— that is, this error!—That is the secret: how did the organic come to the judgment of the equal and the similar and the enduring? Pleasure and displeasure are only consequences of this judgment and its incorporation, they already presuppose the habitual excitations of nutrition starting from the identical and the similar!21

In inferring from an excitation received, the unity and the identity of the different forces liable to produce it in assimilating all the excitations to which it does not respond, in supposing constancy, the protoplasm proceeds to a simplification. This is not simply at work in the protoplasm’s relation to its environment, but also in the entirety of the relationships that the constitutive forces of a body maintain among themselves, because, if the protoplasm is “the lowest degree of the organic,”22 then it exemplifies the will to power as every relationship of forces in general, and what is true for the simplest organism is so a fortiori for the most complex. All living beings, all those drives whose cooperation constitutes our body, proceed and never proceeding toward simplifications; they tend and never stop tending toward assimilation, to equalization. In other words, the moment the formation of identical cases is imputable to drives and to their combined interplay, logic cannot fail to be a structure of the body. “The

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logic of our conscious thought is only a crude and lightened form of that thinking which is necessary to our organism and even to each of its organs.”23 But in what sense does the organic judge the identical, the resemblant, and the enduring? Why speak of judgment here? In what sense does the simplification result from a judgment? To judge is to utter something about something else, λέγειν τι κατα τινός [legein ti kata tinos]. Kant takes up this Aristotelian definition, recalling that “in all judgment . . . the relation of a subject to the predicate is thought.”24 But predication draws its sense and possibility from the apophantics of judgment. Judgment shows and reveals the subject to which it attributes or denies this or that predicate.25 But in order that judgment could thus let us see and re-see what is intended, it is first necessary that that which it manifests be continually accessible, or a being. It is thus a matter of knowing how on the basis of the universal becoming that knows no constancy, a being could be constituted as a constant being. Nevertheless, this constitution could not be the work of apophantic judgment since it presupposes it. In that respect, logic, as the doctrine of judgment, and ontology, as the science of beings, have the same age and origin, and to enquire into ontology is tantamount to seeking the ultimate principle of all possible knowledge. How does Nietzsche determine the essence of judgment? We have already encountered two definitions of judgment, albeit without stopping. Let us recall them here. According to the first one, “more again than the belief ‘this and that is true,’ judgment is originally ‘it is this or that, which I want precisely to be true!” And, according to the second definition, “the belief that something is such and such, the essence of judgment, is the consequence of a will, this must be as equal as possible.”26 Other notes say the same thing. In 1884, Nietzsche writes: “in the judgment stands a belief ‘it is so and so’; as if, precisely the belief itself were the closest fact that we could grasp! How is believing possible??”27 And in 1886–87, as against Kant, for whom “to compare something as a characteristic mark with a thing is to judge. The thing itself is the subject; the characteristic mark is the predicate. The comparison is expressed by means of the copula is or are. When used absolutely, the copula designates the predicate as a characteristic mark of the subject. If, however, it is combined with the sign for negation, the copula then signifies that the predicate is a characteristic mark which is incompatible with the subject.”28 Against Kant then, Nietzsche emphasizes that “comparing is not an ORIGINARY activity, equalizing is. JUDGMENT is not originally the belief that something is thus and so but the will that a thing be thus and so.”29 Following this, Nietzsche opposes more distinctly the Kantian thesis according to which to know is to judge, exclaiming, “But judgment is a belief that something is thus and so! And not some knowledge!”30

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From these multiple, concordant definitions that open the possibility of a new class of judgments more fundamental than predicative judgments, it appears clearly that, on the one hand, the essence of judgment does not lie in predication but in belief and, on the other hand, that belief is tied to the will to equality as its foundation. What does this mean, and how can this double proposition be justified? Let us start from a predicative judgment as simple as “the hammer is heavy.” The effect of this judgment is first to make the hammer visible. Yet how does it discover the hammer? In asserting that the hammer is heavy, the judgment shows first a hammer without weight only to make the weight appear immediately afterward and inasmuch as it belongs to the hammer. Apophantic judgment—which is always and essentially disposed to double vision— shows the hammer as the subject of a predicate. Yet this double position of the subject and the predicate, inscribed in the apophantic function of judgment, would be impossible if the hammer were not taken for a being, that is, for something relatively durable in the midst of the universal chaos and which remains equal to itself through the flow of becoming. “The assumption of the being [des Seienden] is necessary, to be able to think and conclude: logic only wields formulas for what remains equal.”31 How is this possible? It is certainly not possible by way of respect for truth. Indeed, if by the latter we understand the adequation of the thing to the intellect, and of the intellect to the thing, then no truth is possible where, in principle, there is neither a being nor a thing. Truth presupposes identical cases. Such is the reason why the predicative or apophantic judgment—there is no difference between these—could not be knowledge in the veritable sense of the term. However, that judgment might not be knowledge subject to or capable of truth is nevertheless insufficient to preclude knowledge resting upon judgment. In fact, nothing forbids knowledge from resting on judgment otherwise than as on a foundational truth. In holding judgment (which could not be fundamentally true) to be the very site of truth, the traditional analysis of knowledge ultimately has done nothing else than to hold it to be true. Now, to grasp something as true is to rest upon it . . . , to rely upon . . . , to believe in . . . If “every belief is a holding-for-true [Für-wahr-halten],”32 it then becomes possible to begin to comprehend in what sense judgment is our most ancient belief. Echoing the Greek definition of man as a ζωον λόγον έχον [zoˉon logon ekhon], Nietzsche writes: Man is above all a judging animal; in judgment, however, lies hidden our oldest and most abiding belief, in all judgment there lies a fundamental holding-for-true and an assertion [Für-wahr-halten und Behaupten],

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a certitude that something is so and not otherwise, that herein man has really “cognized” [“erkannt”]: what is this, that in each judgment is believed to be true?—That we have a right to distinguish between subject and predicate, cause and effect—that is our strongest belief; indeed, belief in the cause and in the effect, in the conditio and the conditionatum is already itself, fundamentally, only a particular case of the first and universal belief, our arch-belief in subject and predicate (namely as the assertion that assumes that every effect be an activity, that everything conditioned be conditioning, every activity an actor, in a word, a subject). Would this belief in the subject- and predicate-concepts not [be one great stupidity?]33

Yet how was this “great stupidity,” on which all knowledge rests, possible? Why did such a belief take shape and what does it signify? To what necessities does it respond? What we say of belief can be said of the will, we could not dissociate it from what we call, in grammatical terms, its direct object. If Yahweh is the rock of Israel and Christ a cornerstone,34 then this is because the faithful, the believer, can rest on these as on something unshakeable, firm, and constant—which then bestows the same constancy on him, in return. When Isaiah says, “If you will not believe, surely you cannot be trusted,”35 he determines the proper content of belief. To believe is to strengthen oneself, to reinforce oneself, to establish oneself in Yahweh: “Do you not know? Have you not heard? Yahweh is an eternal God, he created the earth from end to end, He never grows faint or weary, His wisdom cannot be fathomed. He gives strength to the weary, Fresh vigor to the spent. Youths may grow faint and weary, And young men stumble and fall; But they who trust in Yahweh shall renew their strength As eagles grow new plumes; They shall run and not grow weary, They shall march and not grow faint.”36 Independently of the form its object can take, every belief posits what it intends as constant and enduringly equal to itself. Yet, in so doing, and in return, it likewise posits the constancy of the believer himself. To believe is to rest upon . . . and there is always in belief a moment of submission. Is faith not an obeisance? In a paragraph from The Gay Science, dedicated to “believers and their need to believe,” Nietzsche observes: “How much one needs a faith in order to flourish, how much that is ‘firm’ and that one does not wish to be shaken because one clings to it, that is a measure of the degree of one’s strength (or, to put the point more clearly, of one’s weakness). Christianity, it seems to me, is still needed by most people in old Europe even today; therefore it still finds believers. For this is how man is: An article of faith could be refuted before him a thousand times—if he needed it, he would consider it ‘true’ again and

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again, in accordance with that famous ‘proof of strength’ [‘Beweise der Kraft’] of which the Bible speaks.”37 From whence does the belief in constancy, which is to say, in Being [l’être], draw its necessity? Before answering this question, we should emphasize that Nietzsche defines belief and judgment in the same terms. After having noted in 1884 that “in every sense impression, belief is already the prime originary [das Uranfängliche]: a sort of yes-saying, first intellectual activity! A ‘Holding-for-true’ in the beginning! Thus what is to be explained: how a ‘holding-for-true’ arose! What sensation lies behind ‘true’?”38 In 1887 he will write, “the essence of judgment (positing the yes).”39 To what is this silent “yes” addressed, which is stated in every judgment and which makes them fundamentally a belief? To the constancy of Being. But to say “yes” has meaning only where it is possible to say “no,” and if each “yes” marks a preference, every “no” implies a rejection. There could nevertheless not be preferences and rejections without a foregoing evaluation, without a division between the useful and harmful, without a table of goods and ills. If to believe is to say “yes” to being but not to becoming, if believing being reduces our fear before chance, the uncertainty, the suddenness, and the unpredictability proper to becoming, then this yes-saying affirms that the preservation grounded on an erroneous constancy is better than the truth of becoming, is an evaluation—and if predicative judgment is essentially a belief in being, then such a judgment would be quite simply impossible without a foregoing evaluation. Value judgments are thus one species of predicative judgment, but rather judgments whose structure and possibility differ radically from those of apophantic judgment, which conversely derives from value judgments. Predicative judgment is thus identical with a determinate sort of value judgment, that is, those which posit the preservation of the body as being preferable to any other thing and which, in order to do this, assume the fiction of identical cases. Value judgments are not one “class” of predicative judgments, rather predicative judgments are a “class” of value judgments, and it is just as impossible to assign, as Heidegger does, a Kantian ascendancy to Nietzsche’s concept of value, as it is to argue that the work of the “last thinker of metaphysics” must be conceived “independently of value-representation.”40 We can henceforth understand why “judgments are 1) the belief ‘that is so’ and 2) ‘that has this and that value.’ ”41 Indeed, in a chaotic world in which everything becomes without there being anything that might be truly constant, the belief that holds being to be true by affirming that “this is that,” must result from an evaluation according to which those errors or fictions that are Being, apophantic judgment, truth, in a word onto-logic, are more favorable to the preservation of living beings than is an unpredict-

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able becoming which never stops threatening their security, or exposing them to fear. “The sense for truth . . . is really the sense for security.”42 And belief qua holding-from-true is a necessity of preservation. “It would be possible in itself that to the preservation of living beings fundamental errors were necessary and not ‘fundamental truths.’ One might for example think an existence in which knowledge itself were impossible, because there is a contradiction between absolute fluidity and knowledge [Erkenntnis]: in such a world, a living creature would have first to believe in things, in duration, etc., in order to be able to exist: the error would be its existence-condition [Existenz-Bedingung]. Perhaps it is so.”43 Thus understood according to its full intentional structure—qua condition of possibility of knowledge and requirement for preservation—belief is a work in the formation of identical cases. Without the belief in being, which is none other than a manner of making identical cases possible, no judgment, no knowledge, no truth in the traditional sense of these terms could be possible. An original fiction thus lies at the ground of truth—and this up to the present time. “That there are identical things, identical cases, is the basic fiction [Grund-fiktion] already in judgment, then in concluding.”44 Yet that the entire edifice of knowledge should rest on a belief that essentially has an error, a lie, or a fiction for an object need not imply that the transcendental imagination be the ultimate ground. On the one hand, positing a faculty which as such separates the actor from its activity is already to posit an identical case—the subject. On the other hand, the double homogeneity of the transcendental schematism to the category, as to the phenomena, maintains the division of the sensible and the intellectual, a division that is undermined by the discovery of judgments of value that destroy any idea of sensuous data or pure sensibility. And when Nietzsche underscores the poetic character of logic, noting, for example, that “we do not poetize: we calculate but in order to calculate we first poetized,”45 this is solely because, “as Homer says: ‘many lies tell the poets.’ ”46 The belief in the stability and the constancy of being—and being is the identical case par excellence, the “pure form” of every possible identical case—is thus necessary to the preservation of any living organism, because it is necessary to the combined interplay of the multiple intelligences of unequal value that constitute organisms and that only understand each other by simplifying the ones for the others. Now this necessity governs as much the relations of the body in this totality with the external world in which it strives to live, as it governs the relationships among the multiple drives or “miniscule living beings” whose socialization precisely shapes the body. Belief in being is useful to preservation and assumes that preservation has been raised to the rank of a principle

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of evaluation, for the viewpoint of the preservation of self differs from the viewpoint of growth [Optik des Wachsthums],47 and what is useful to the one is not necessarily useful to the other. To the question of knowing “why the philosopher wants to know . . . and accords more value to the ‘truth’ than to appearance?” Nietzsche responded once, and indeed once and for all: “the true is more useful (preserves the organism better).”48 Judgment, as the adequation to constant being held for true by belief, and upon which logic and knowledge rest, is not only the work of the body but above all at work in the body. And if constant being (there is no other, for constancy is the very meaning of being as distinct from becoming) is equality to self, and if constancy simplifies the multiplicity of difference proper to becoming, then it is the drive to assimilation that states such a judgment and proceeds to such a simplification where statement and simplification define its very activity or “essence.” The drive judges because it evaluates, and the apophantic or predicative judgment is ultimately a judgment exclusively given over to value of preservation. Judgment, truth, logic preserve the living being. Every bodily drive is thus a subjectivating and subjectivated intelligence; it is subjectivating because the judgment it sets in motion posits identity outside itself; it is subjectivated because identity outside itself identifies, in return, the self with itself. Organized in view of its own preservation, the body is a society of subjects identical to themselves, equalized and, for that reason, liable to cooperate enduring in all security. Collective security is required by the self-preservation of the body as a society of mortal souls having to communicate rapidly among themselves. Nietzsche perhaps never better defined judgment in its corporeal function (and the corporeal function of judgment) than when he countered Schopenhauer’s thought with the following thesis. “Judgment (that is, belief in a reality, and therefore a designation) is older than the drive in the development of organic life. Judgment belongs to the functions of self-regulation that the most inferior organic creatures already exercise.”49 Thus it is in judging, and through judgment, that the drive to assimilation or will to power given over to the preservation and self-regulation of the body, gives rise to identical cases.50 In other words, and to recapitulate, the identical cases on which judgments of knowledge are made, the identical cases that are these vey judgments, are the work of the body inasmuch as they result from judgments of determinate value, values of preservation.

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Part 5

The System of Identical Cases

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1

Sensation and Evaluation

The previous parts of this work show clearly that logic is the structure necessary to a body organized in view of its own preservation. Logic fulfills this role by favoring rapid understanding between the multiple, constitutive forces of the body and through the presumption of identical cases, without which the rapidity of this antalgic comprehension would be impossible. Yet, since the presupposition of identical cases and of the logical form is tantamount to belief in being, it is not so much logic, as onto-logic that ensures the preservation of the body. This onto-logic is the necessary structure of a body organized in view of self-preservation. It is the will to power as will to assimilation and equalization, as will to powerlessness. It is the will to power turned against itself. “ ‘Will to truth’— impotence of the will to create.”1 These statements, which lead ontology back to will to power, imply that an enduring body is never other than the persistence of an organized error, and that corporeal life could only maintain itself at the price of a truth that exceeds it. This is the truth of the flow, the flux, because the latter reaches the very principle of the body’s preservation. If every belief is a taking-for-true, and if the taking-for-true differs from the ultimate truth of the flow—which, by not allowing itself to be incorporated, is strictly unbearable—then the body, to preserve itself, must be a believing body. Nietzsche says nothing else when, having considered “the evaluation: ‘I believe that this and that is such’ as the essence of ‘truth,’ ” he asserts that “in evaluations are expressed conditions of preservation and growth,” that “all our organs of knowledge and our senses have developed only with respect to conditions of preservation and growth,” and that “trust in reason and its categories, in dialectic, [and] therefore the evaluation of logic, proves only its utility for life, a utility proved by experience—and in no way its ‘truth.’ ”2 We already had the opportunity to see that values are the conditions of preservation and intensification of the will to power. But are they primarily conditions of preservation and only then conditions of growth, or the converse? The question is not of secondary importance for, if growth is function of preservation, growth will never exceed what is necessary for preservation. The will to power would only be a will to adaptation, assimilation, and equalization, a reactive will. Whereas if, on the contrary, preservation is a function of intensification, then the will to 215

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power will be a will to conquest, to victory, an active will. Once again, the perspective of preservation is not a perspective of growth. Preservation wants being; intensification requires at least becoming. Opposed to “selfpreservation” is “the will to appropriate, the will-to-become-master, the will-to-be-stronger.”3 The preservation of its own power is perhaps not the only thing to which a living being aspires, it is rather but a consequence of the will to intensify this same power. “Physiologists,” writes Nietzsche, “should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results. In short, here as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles—one of which is the instinct of self-preservation (we owe it to Spinoza’s inconsistency). Thus method, which must be essentially economy of principles, demands it.”4 To raise self-preservation to the highest rank is to take the result for the foundation, and this misunderstanding stands at the origin of ontological knowledge, of onto-logic itself. Although preservation would derive from intensification, it remains that logic first, and the knowledge that thereupon merges with it, are ordered according to preservation alone. Logic and truth preserve life, because “we have projected our conditions of preservation as predicates of being in general.” And if we have made being the highest condition of our preservation—Nietzsche will not talk about intensification here— then this is because “to prosper, we must be stable in our beliefs”—and, to satisfy this requirement, “we have made the ‘real’ world, a world not of change and becoming, but one of being.”5 Being, logic, and truth, which Nietzsche understands as forms of constancy—and thus in a temporal way—have the function of making the world stable, preparing it, through knowledge, for the preservation of life. And what holds for being, logic, and truth also holds for language: “Linguistic means of expression are useless for expressing ‘becoming’; it belongs to our ineradicable need for preservation [unablöslichen Bedürfnis der Erhaltung] to continually posit a cruder world of stability, of ‘things,’ etc.”6 Language, as means of expression, and according to the grammatical comprehension it offers through itself, preserves because it fixes, and fixes in order to preserve. But knowledge is not simply in thrall to the preservation of the body. It is also founded on belief and error. Is it then possible to liberate it, make it sovereign, by acceding to the truth of ‘truth’? Is it possible to direct knowledge in an entirely other direction? “It is improbable that our ‘knowing’ should extend further than what is strictly necessary for the preservation of life.”7 Nevertheless, in thus writing the word ‘knowledge’ between brackets, Nietzsche intends only the ontological and preserving

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mode of knowledge. This is demonstrated in an important note of 1884, where Nietzsche opens the possibility of a mode of knowledge different from the one that preserves, different from the ontological one: “Of the multiplicity of modes of knowledge. To enquire into one’s own relationship to multiple other things (or into the relationship of kinds)—how should that be ‘knowledge’ of something other! The mode of knowing and of becoming knowledgeable is already itself part of the conditions of existence: to conclude from this that there could be no other modes of intellect (for us) than that which preserves us, would be precipitous: this de facto condition of existence is perhaps only fortuitous and is perhaps absolutely unnecessary. Our apparatus for knowledge is not designed for ‘knowledge.’ ”8 What should this mean if not that a different knowledge and intellect are possible, but which would not be primarily and above all means to preserving life by falsifying the world? To preserve oneself is to lie, to prevaricate with full knowledge, and to turn knowledge into an imperative of preservation. It is finally to ground knowledge on the fear of death. When he emphasizes that “the principle of preservation of the individual (or ‘the fear of death’) should not be derived from sensations of pleasure and displeasure, but is something directive, an evaluation, which is already at the base of every feeling of pleasure and displeasure,” Nietzsche means by the same token that the preserving values are reactive since fear, as we know, is reactive. But can reactivity extend to the ontological knowledge, which in any case could not be individual? Certainly, because what holds for the individual holds still more for the species. The same note continues immediately with the following: “This holds still more for the ‘preservation of the species’: the latter is but a result of the law of ‘preservation of the individual,’ and in no way an original law.”9 The will to preservation, that is, “the fear of death as European sickness,”10 therefore grounds reactive values in general, and if the ontological knowledge peculiar to Europe is its instrument, this knowledge cannot fail to be integrally reactive. Referred to will to power, ontological knowledge and onto-logic itself are reactive structures. And, supposing another knowledge is possible, it should no longer be an instrument of preservation but should actively open for the body the possibility of intensifying its power. It should create a superior body by revaluing reactive values. “For a higher kind of creature, knowledge, too, will acquire new forms, which are not yet necessary today.”11 Is it not absurd to entrust knowledge alone with the task of elevating the body to a superior power? Indeed, how would knowledge be able to change bodies, if the world in which they live, and from which they live, remains unchanged? The body is in the world the moment it nourishes itself, and in order for knowledge to transform the body, it must

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necessarily transform the world. Is this possible? Is it even sensible to ask this question? To be sure. For knowledge has never been other than a means to inform chaos, to build a cosmos, a world. A note dedicated to the “will to power as knowledge” begins with these words: “Not ‘to know,’ rather to schematize, to impose on chaos enough regularity and form to satisfy our practical needs.”12 No body could live enduringly amidst chaos; the constancy of the world is necessary for the constancy of the body, whose preservation requires a world of identical cases. We have already seen it, “first is created the belief in the persistence and identity outside us—and only later do we grasp ourselves following enormous practice with what is outside us as something enduring and self-identical, as unconditioned.”13 This is not to say that the unity of the body lags behind that of the world. While confirming the mundanity of the subject to the world, Nietzsche emphasizes, on the contrary, that “the feeling of a subject grows insofar as we build, with memory and imagination, the world of equal things. We invent ourselves as unities in this world of images that we have created, as what remains stable through change.”14 Given that, it is not the case that we borrow our unity after the fact from that which we attributed to the world to survive, it is rather that the apprehension of this unity, our consciousness of unity, comes late. If our unity and constancy are interdependent with regard to those of the world, then identical cases are not only necessary to the relations between the constitutive drives of the body. They are also necessary to relations between the drive-body [corps pulsionnel] as a whole and the world in which it is attempting to survive. Let us recall that the quest for nourishment supposes the constitution of identical cases. Moreover, after having asserted that “without the transformation of the world into forms and rhythms, there would be nothing ‘equal’ for us, and thus, nothing that returned, neither any possibility of experience, appropriation, or nutrition,” Nietzsche could then say that “from this point of view, ‘knowledge’ proves to be but a means of nourishment.”15 An ontological body could thus remain alive only in an ontological world, that is, in a world ontologically equalized: leveled down. If science is democratic, onto-logic is still more democratic. Once knowledge has already transformed the world, by informing chaos, it is not impossible that another form of knowledge allows the creation of a superior body in a transfigured world. But how can we reach this knowledge without first bringing ontological knowledge back to its ultimate foundation, and without thereby modifying this foundation, in order to subordinate preservation to intensification, and being to becoming? We must begin by analyzing the way in which ontological knowledge has, up to now, assured the constancy of the body and world,

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to determine thereafter how another knowledge could authorize the intensification of power and the creation of a superior body in a world appropriate to these—all this, even as it ensures for world and body a constancy that is no longer false, fictitious, and reactively grounded on the belief in being. This is to say that the difference between ontological knowledge subordinated to preservation, and the great sovereign knowledge liable to raise the body up, must be led back to two different ways of guaranteeing constancy. This will be—indeed, contrary to Kant—a matter of suppressing belief, to make room for higher knowledge, higher power, and a higher will. To analyze ontological knowledge, we must first suspend what it does. Yet how to determine its extent, without proceeding to a radical dehumanization—since knowledge is the factum of man. The return to chaos is prior to the elucidation of knowledge and as we said, it has the sense of a reduction. To determine the world as chaos is to think of it independently of any connection to possible knowledge; it is to think it as a world deprived of any order, a-cosmic, in-becoming, in which nothing makes knowledge possible because there is nothing yet to know. That is to say, there is no constant being on which to set a judgment of any kind. This chaotic world—flowing and in becoming—is not only foreign to knowledge, it is moreover incompatible with knowledge. “Knowledge of what is totally fluid is impossible.”16 In his own way, Husserl will restate this when describing the constitutive flow of time—the phenomenological absolute—as “a flow of continuous ‘change’; and this change has the absurd character that it flows precisely as it flows and can flow neither ‘faster’ nor ‘slower.’ ” Amidst this absolute phenomenological flow, Husserl specifies, “any object that changes is missing here; and since ‘something’ runs its course in every process, no process is in question. There is nothing here that changes, and for that reason it also makes no sense to speak of something that endures. It is therefore nonsensical to want to find something here that remains unchanged for even an instant during the course of its duration.”17 Where there are no objects, no beings, and where consequently no nominal positing could take place, no knowledge could evidently be possible. This is no doubt what Husserl wanted to show when he noted that the constitutive flow “is something we speak of in conformity with what is constituted,” or again, when he concedes that to designate the flow of the absolute subjective time “we lack names.”18 The moment there is a principial discrepancy between knowledge, which up to now was never but a way of tarrying with an entity by slowing down its becoming, and the world of forces whose chaotic fluidity excludes any global equilibrium or definitive standstill, knowledge is only possible against-the-world, much the way we say against-the-grain. But

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what does it mean to-be-against-the-world if not to be in another world? And how could knowledge have this other world as its theme, if it did not create it—and this, in such a way that the other world were wholly appropriate to it and completely mastered by it? Those operations by which knowledge stabilizes becoming, convert every event into a state, every verb into a noun. They are ultimately none other than operations through which man created a world, over which he became master in order to preserve himself in it. In this way, he mastered it through falsification—not merely the falsification of nature with its own order, but rather through the falsification of chaos. What ontological knowledge had always taken as φύσις [phusis] is but τέχνη [techneˉ ], technological domination. It is therefore by analyzing the structures of this knowledge—which always created what is knowable through the same process by which it became aware of it—and by determining its ultimate axiological principle, that we will be able to accede to the essence of technology and qualify the domination that up to now has been its own. Indeed, and provided we understand “creation” here as the effective incidence of method on its object—“it is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over science”19—the general characterization of knowledge as creation is appropriate not only for quantum physics or “theoretical physics,” which Heidegger said was “the true, pure technology,”20 but to all knowledge as such—and this, regardless of the values commanding it. In other words, nuclear physics merely corroborates the technical essence of all ontological knowledge in general. Nietzsche’s analysis of knowledge thus responds in advance to the epistemological upheavals following the quantic revolution. Bohr or Heisenberg’s opposition to Kant, which constituted their properly scientific oeuvre, often rejoins that of Nietzsche, whether concerning causality, the status of classical concepts, or the constitutive function of language. Bohr, for whom “classical concepts become images, metaphors,”21 is simply echoing Nietzsche, for whom “time, space and causality are but metaphors of knowledge by which we explain things.” To analyze the structures of knowledge, let us start with a note from 1885. “Continual transitions,” writes Nietzsche, “do not allow us to speak of ‘individuals,’ etc.; the ‘number’ of beings is itself in flux. We could know nothing of time and motion if we did not, in a coarse fashion, believe we see ‘what is at rest’ beside what is in motion. The same applies to cause and effect, and without the erroneous conception of ‘empty space,’ we would certainly never have acquired the conception of space. The principle of identity has, as background, the ‘evidence’ that there are equal things. A world in a state of becoming could not, strictly speaking, be ‘comprehended’ or ‘known.’ It is only to the extent that the ‘com-

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prehending’ and ‘knowing’ intellect encounters a coarse, already-created world, exclusively crafted out of mere appearances but solidified, and to the extent that this sort of appearance has preserved life—it is only to this extent that there is anything like ‘knowledge’; that is to say, a measure for earlier errors against later ones.”22 If the world in becoming is, in principle, a world in which everything changes and passes, it could not be known since the operators of knowledge, like causality, number, time, space, and movement, are always relative to identifiable things— to identical cases. In other words, if knowledge is incompatible with the flux, this is because the former rests on the principle of identity, whereas the latter excludes any identity and all difference, so far as difference presupposes identity. Thus, to analyze the processes of knowledge comes down to analyzing the way in which space, time, and causality have permitted the creation of a counter-world, where identities could always be controlled; of a counter-world that appears as true, and represents itself as true in order to preserve life: the true world. If knowledge of the world starts with sensation—“no one can learn or understand anything in the absence of sense [perception]”23—we must start from what Nietzsche calls “the formless and unformulatable world of the chaos of sensations.”24 Concerning such a starting point, it is first a matter of explaining how sensation becomes possible. Contrary to Kant, Nietzsche does not hold sensation to be something given. Indeed, if chaos is the global character of the world reduced to itself, this means that “we always feel the outer world differently, since each time it detaches itself from the drive predominant in us. And as the drive, qua living being, grows and disappears and is nothing enduring, our sensation of the outer world is, in the briefest of moments, always becoming and passing, and therefore changing.”25 In the midst of the chaotic world, and for a living being that becomes, there could only be a chaos of sensations, or some unique sensation of chaos. Yet, both a chaos of sensations and a sensation of chaos prevent a single sensation—in the dual sense of act and object—from being discriminated, that is, from being given. Now, discrimination is essential to sensation the moment that it is a sensation of something, and in order for it to point to something. If sight distinguishes white from black, taste differentiates the sweet from the bitter and thereby is distinguished from sight.26 Every sensation, in the dual sense of the act of sensing and the sensed object, is discriminating with regard to other objects or acts, and it is only through this discrimination that something is sensed as such. Under what conditions is a sensation given? Under what conditions is a sensible datum possible? A sensation could not be given, and a given could not be sensed, as long as its own “object” is not itself discriminated, identifiable; consequently, just as long

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as the chaotic becoming of the world has not been relatively stabilized. And how indeed could it be stabilized, if not relative to the conditions of preservation of some organism? This is to say that every sensation presupposes an evaluation. “Every sensation contains a valuation” and “all the activities of the senses are invested with value judgments.”27 Not only “every sensation is morally colored”28—and we need to understand sensation in both dimensions of acts and objects—but colors (and with them the set of properly sensuous objects, which Aristotle considered as invariably true)29 are also evaluations. “All sensations, all sense perceptions, are in a certain way originally related to the pleasure and displeasure of the organic being: green, red, hard, soft, light, dark mean something with regard to its living conditions (that is to say, to the organic process).”30 If pleasure and displeasure are correlative to the will to power, which always posits values, then “green, blue, red, hard, soft, are hereditary evaluations and their distinctive signs.”31 Understood as evaluations, properly sensuous objects are thus always false, by virtue of a falsehood that is not the contrary of truth but one that constitutes truth’s origin and ground. There is thus no sensation or impression without a preliminary evaluation. The structures of receptivity, and receptivity itself, depend on a primary intellectual activity, and if “the intellect seems to be older than sensation,”32 this is because intellect is an identifying and falsifying apparatus. After having asserted that, without informing the world, we could not feed ourselves, Nietzsche continued: “In every perception, that is to say, in the most original form of appropriation, the essential event is an act or, more strictly: an imposition of form [Formen-Aufzwingen]:—only superficial minds speak of ‘impression.’ Man thereby becomes aware of his strength as a resistance force and even more so, as a determining force—a force that refuses, elects, shapes properly, serialized in its schemata. There is something active in the fact that we accept a stimulation in general and that we take it as this stimulation [Reiz].”33 This activity consists in receiving this particular stimulation instead of another; in saying “yes” to this stimulation and not to another; in letting oneself be affected by one stimulation, excluding the others; and these discriminations and distributions are grounded on an evaluation, on value judgments. To perceive is then to evaluate.34 Perception is a moral phenomenon, and the phenomenology of perception could not permit the elucidation of the origins of knowledge, because “in every so-called sense perception, there is a judgment, which approves or denies the process before it ‘penetrates into’ consciousness.”35 An organic being could not sense a sensation without first accepting it, without letting itself be affected by it, without judging this sensation acceptable with regard to the conditions of preservation and growth of this existent in the midst of becoming, with

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regard to its values. And this also holds for any primal impression or sensation of self by self, since such a sensation could not sense itself without being capable of identifying itself by differentiating what is proper to it from what is foreign. Now, the proper and the foreign are never determined once and for all absolutely. They vary according to the values of the existent to which they are relative. According as a body wants first to preserve itself or first to grow, the proper and the foreign will have neither the same meaning, nor the same value, and will be differently distributed. “Our value judgments determine the things we accept and how we accept them. But these value judgments are inspired and regulated by our will to power.”36 Again, there is no pure primal impression without a prior intellectual activity, and if the former derives from the will to power, then intentionality could also be brought back to it. Thus, Nietzsche is from the outset opposed to Husserl, for whom “the primal impression is something absolutely unmodified, the primal source of all further consciousness and being.” Nietzsche would thus reject Husserl’s claim that “the primal impression is the absolute beginning of this production [to wit, production of temporal modifications], the primal source, that from which everything else is continuously produced.”37 The moment any impression—and particularly the primal impression—presupposes a primary intellectual activity, the insurmountable difficulties of hyletic or passive constitution, and those of the self-constitution of the ego on which all constitution in general rests, find a solution; no doubt, to the detriment of the egological and transcendental character they have in Husserl, but with the advantage of a higher and vaster intelligibility. What is the meaning of this process of sensation-constitution out of the chaos of sensations in which nothing allows us to distinguish one from one another? Moreover, how is this constitution realized? Governed by value judgments, dependent on prior intellectual activity, sensations are not given but constituted as identical cases. No sensation can be felt without having been previously equalized to other sensations. “That weak sensations are regarded as alike, sensed as the same, that is the fundamental fact.”38 The equalization of the chaos of sensations, which implies the reduction of their difference in intensity, is above all the condition of possibility of any sense perception. “This same equalizing and ordering force that governs in the idioplasm, also governs in the incorporation of the outer world: our sense perceptions are already the result of this making-similar and this equalization relative to the entire past in us; they do not follow directly on the ‘impression.’ ”39 But then, and above all, the equalization of sensations is necessary to life and to knowledge, which is why it is a fundamental fact. The equalization of sensations is necessary to life for, without it, we would be continually threatened by chaos [menacé

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par le chaos], that is to say threatened with chaos [menacé de chaos]. “The pleasure we take at simplicity, clarity, regularity, brightness, from which a German ‘philosopher’ could ultimately deduce something like a categorical imperative for logic and for the beautiful—from that, I conceive the presence of a strong instinct [einen starken Instinkt]. It is so strong that it governs all our sense activity and reduces, regulates, assimilates, etc., for us, the fullness of the effective perceptions (which are unconscious) and presents them to our consciousness only under this prearranged form [zurechtgemachten Gestalt]. This ‘logic,’ this ‘art,’ is our continuous activity. What is it that made this force so sovereign? Obviously, the fact that without it, and facing the confusion of impressions, no living being could live.”40 Necessary to the preservation of the body and to the maintenance of its coherence, the equalization of sensations is likewise—and for the same reason—necessary to knowledge. If, on the one hand, knowledge aims at the real world, whose reality we reach through sensation and, on the other hand, the world is originarily chaotic, then no knowledge would be possible so long as we do not feel the world as real. Now, if “in a world of becoming, ‘reality’ is never but a simplification for practical ends, or an illusion founded on the coarseness of our organs, or [again] a difference in the tempo of becoming,”41 then to feel the world as real is to posit something as constant, to which sensation provides an initial access. Consequently, and on the basis of chaos, no knowledge would be possible without foregoing equalization of the imperceptibly and unconsciously different sensations; that is, without an arrangement—a falsification— of the chaos of sensations, through which these same sensations could be felt as being constant and identical to themselves, or again, as being homogeneously distinct, the ones from the others. After noting that communication required the formation of identical cases, Nietzsche added: “The material of the senses prearranged by the understanding, reduced to rough outlines, made similar, subsumed under related things. Thus the fuzziness and chaos of sense impressions are, as it were, logicized. The world of ‘phenomena’ is the prearranged world which we feel as real. ‘Reality’ lies in the continual recurrence of related, known, and equal things in their logicized character, in the belief that here we can calculate and predict. The antithesis of this phenomenal world is not ‘the true world,’ but the formless unformulatable world of the chaos of sensations—thus another sort of phenomenal world, a world ‘unknowable’ for us.”42 Equalization and assimilation do not concern sensations alone but operate on all levels of knowledge with which they are merged. With knowledge understood as a regulation of chaos, Nietzsche could then specify that “in the formation of reason, logic, the categories, it was need that served as norm: need, not ‘to know,’ but to subsume, to schematize for the pur-

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pose of intelligibility and calculation . . . Prearrangement, the fabrication of the similar, the equal—the same process that every sense impression goes through, is the development of reason!”43 If the categories, logic, and reason derive from the same process of equalization at work starting from sensations—since no sensation could be given, that is, distinct and conscious, without being a prior logicization—then, on the one hand, aesthetics and logic in their Kantian sense, and consequently, the transcendental deduction, are led back to the will to assimilation as a preserving, conservative, and reactive form of will to power. And, on the other hand, knowledge—far from deriving in some way or in part from experience—is the very thing that makes experience possible. “Knowledge: the possibilization of experience through which actual events are simplified, [and this,] as much on the side of impacting forces, as on the side of our shaping, immense ones: in such a way that there appears to be similar and equal things. Knowledge is FALSIFICATION of the multiple and innumerable into something equal, similar, enumerable. Thus, life is possible only thanks to such a falsification-apparatus. Thinking is a falsifying rearrangement, feeling is a falsifying rearrangement, willing is a falsifying rearrangement—: in all of these resides the force of assimilation: which provides a will, to make something equal to us.”44 We cannot emphasize enough this priority of knowledge over life and experience, a priority without which, we note in advance, the thought of thoughts would remain unintelligible. This domination means first that life and experience, such as we know them today, are essentially false, but thereafter and above all, it opens the possibility of another life, another experience, since the foundation of this human all too human knowledge—that is, ultimately, this all too credulous knowledge—is not invariable. The moment that knowledge makes possible both life in the world and the experience of the world, it is also the only thing that could allow its transformation. It is henceforth possible, then, to assert that any modification of the foundation of this knowledge will modify the world itself. And if, up to now, philosophers have never done so, it is because they have always interpreted it in the same way. To give to knowledge a foundation other than ontological may therefore suffice to creating a superior body.

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2

The Formation of Categories

Toward what does the process of constitution of a sensation tend, when it starts from an undifferentiated chaos of sensations? At what does the making-equal, proper to all operations of reason, aim? And, if equalization is as much at work in sensations as in the categories, then what difference is there between the former and the latter? By forming distinct sensations, knowledge gives rise to identical cases. Now, liable to repetition, an identical case is, in principle, calculable and predictable. “The calculability of an event does not consist in the fact that a rule was followed, or that a necessity obeyed, or again that a law of causality was projected by us into each event. It consists in the recurrence of ‘identical cases.’ ”1 Without the formation of such identical cases, no causal prediction of events would be possible. Moreover, in a chaotic world in the process of becoming—absolutely unpredictable and uncontrollable—the preservation of the organism would be hazardous, that is, very quickly impossible. “One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, ends, laws—‘a world of identical cases’—as though we were thereby apt to fix the real world; but rather as a compulsion to prearrange a world for ourselves, in which our existence becomes possible—we thus create a world for us, calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc. This same compulsion exists in the activity of the senses that reason supports— this simplification, coarsening, emphasizing, and fabrication on which rests all ‘re-cognizing,’ all being-able-to-make-oneself-intelligible. Our needs have made our senses so precise that the ‘same [gleiche] apparent world’ always reappears and has thus acquired the semblance of effectivity [Wirklichkeit].”2 In principle, reality is always coarse and, by creating the simplified world of identical cases, by falsifying the chaotic world, by instituting a world equal to itself, knowledge therefore only makes it usual and habitable; in short, livable. Conversely, a world wherein nothing is equal to itself, a world without any recurrence of the identical would be precisely unlivable, and it is worth our pointing out here that not only do “knowledge” and logic, but also reality and causality, presuppose such a recurrence. This should suffice to confirm that the thought of thoughts could be nothing less than the foundation of knowledge itself. Allowing calculation and prediction through the formation of identical cases, the will to power, as a will to assimilation, reduces and attenu226

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ates fear before chance, uncertainty, and suddenness. If by culture we understand the very work of knowledge, “the whole history of culture,” says Nietzsche, “represents a diminution of this fear before chance, before the uncertain, before the sudden. Culture means precisely learning to calculate, to think causally, to forestall; learning to believe in necessity.”3 The formation of identical cases thus aims at the creation of a world on which we can rely, a safe world in which the organism can live in security, failing which it could not durably preserve itself. The formation of identical cases through equalization is the very essence of security, and logic essentially makes secure [sécurisant], even is a security device [sécuritaire]. This not only means that the “sense for security” is the very heart of the “sense for truth.” It also means that equality among humans, democracy, is the condition of this public security, which industrial society raises ever higher, to the rank of “supreme divinity,”4 as the technological mastery of the world is founded on and against fear. Is it possible to specify further the way in which logical security is assured? In a long note dedicated to the will to truth and to logical thought, Nietzsche writes: “B. Differentiating thought as the result of fear and caution in the will to appropriation. The adequate representation of an object is originally but a means for seizing, grasping, and taking hold. Later, this adequate representation itself is felt as a seizing, as a goal whereby satisfaction arises. To think ultimately as domination and exercise of power: as assemblage, as insertion of the new in old series, etc. C. The new FRIGHTENS: on the other hand fear must already be there for the new to be seized as new[;] astonishment is weakened fear[.] The known inspires confidence[—]‘true’ is something, which arouses a feeling of security[—]inertia attempts first the equalization of each impression: that is, to equalize the new impression and the memory; it wills repetition. Fear teaches to differentiate, to compare[.]”5 What is this differentiating thought that stems from fear? What is this securing thought? It is obviously that which presides over the creation of identical cases. Indeed, to posit identical cases is to introduce differences amidst chaos; recognizable differences, that is, difference as such. In this regard, difference comes from identity. Identity and difference—that is, without any doubt, knowledge itself, the entire science of logic, and the logic of science. As we have already seen, the formation of identical cases is prior to any sensuous datum insofar as it must be distinguished from other sense data and, more generally, only that which has first assumed the value of an existent can be given. To what does this differentiating thought tend? It aims at an “adequate representation.” The conformity of a representation to what it represents is none other than its truth. Consequently, as the formation and differentiation of identical cases, thought—without which there would be no conformity, since it

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institutes the very terms of any relationship of conformity (and makes all conformity between things possible)—thought is consequently originary. Indeed, this frightened, logical thought lies at the origin of all intentionality and all truth. Once again, it is knowledge, understood as the formation of identical cases, that makes experience possible. Arising from fear before uncertainty, suddenness, and chance; arising from fear before chaotic becoming, differentiating thought could aim at nothing less than their mastery. Now, to master chaos on the basis of the fear it provokes is to dominate the world with a counter-world, in a reactive manner. Fear of technology should be understood in the dual sense of the genitive, and if technology can cause fear, this is above all because it is made up of it. To be sure, differentiating thought is an exercise of power, but it rests on a prior falsification, and “truth” is the very expression of this fallacious, servile domination of the world. “The fictitious world of subject, substance, ‘reason,’ etc., is necessary—: there is in us a power to artificially separate, falsify, simplify, order. ‘Truth’—the will to become master of the multiplicity of sensations—to serialize phenomena according to determinate categories—in so doing, we start out from a belief in the ‘in-itself’ of things (we take phenomena as real). The character of the becoming world as unformulatable [unformulirbar], as ‘false,’ as ‘self-contradictory.’ Knowledge and becoming shut each other out. Consequently, ‘knowledge’ must be something else: there must first be a will to make-knowable, a sort of becoming must itself create the deception of the existent [Täuschung des Seienden].”6 If truth (to which logic and the whole work of knowledge is bound) can be understood as the will to master the plurality of sensations, and as causing a feeling of security, then this is because the will gives rise to that security. Together, the mastery of the chaotic and indistinguishable flux of sensations and the falsifying constitution of sensation as a given, form the first moment of this domination of the world, without which no living thing could be preserved enduringly. No entity, whatever it be, for “appearances of the void and the full, of the firm and the loose, of what is at rest and what is moving, of the equal and the unequal,” constitute “the human-animal criteria of security.”7 How does this domination unfold, which starts with and through the recognition of a given? At what price does it unfold? To the question, What is truth? Nietzsche once answered: “inertia; the hypothesis which gives rise to contentment; the smallest expenditure of spiritual force, etc.”8 What should we understand with this pacifying, satisfying, and lazy inertia, which is at the basis of truth or the domination of the world? Nothing other than the reduction of the multiplicity of perspectives to a single one. Moreover, by the same token, we understand the triumph of gregarity over hierarchy.9 It is because inertia

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is at the basis of truth that logic is democratic: “Reduction of logical value judgments to moral and political value judgments (value of security, of rest, of laziness [‘the smallest force’]), etc.”10 If the will to inertia, which is simply the will to assimilation, creates the knowable entity, in whose midst any organism can be preserved, it forbids, at the same time, the creation of a superior body. The possibility of the overman is thus the price paid for the technico-democratic domination of the world. But once again, how is such domination exerted? To raise this question is to inquire about the quality of the will to power at work in the human domination of the world, beyond the forms it could take. It is therefore to inquire into the nature of the operations by which knowledge secures the chaotic world. “What is ‘to know’? To lead something unknown back to something known, familiar. First principle: what we are accustomed to no longer counts for us as an enigma, a problem. Blunting of the feeling of the new, of the unknown: all that occurs regularly no longer seems questionable to us anymore. This is why the search for the rule is the first instinct of the knower: whereas, naturally, with the establishment of the rule, nothing yet ‘is known’ at all!—Hence the superstition of the physicists: where they endure, that is, where the regularity of phenomena allows the use of abbreviated formulas, they consider having known them. They feel ‘security’: but behind this intellectual security lies the alleviation of fear: they want the rule because it strips the world of its frightening character. Fear of the incalculable as the ulterior-instinct of science. Regularity puts the questioning (that is to say, frightened) instinct to sleep: ‘to explain,’ that is, to indicate a rule for the event. The belief in the ‘law’ is the belief in the dangerous character of the arbitrary. The good will to believe in laws helped science to triumph (particularly in democratic ages).”11 The first operation whereby knowledge masters the world by creating it consists in reducing the new to the old, in converting any event into a reproducible state, in slowing down or immobilizing becoming. Nietzsche often insisted on this assimilation. Not only does the will to inertia, which stems from fear, attempt to equalize any new impression to the memory of old ones but, more generally, “ ‘to know’ is the means to make us feel that we already know something: therefore, the struggle against the feeling of something new and the transformation of the apparently new into something old.”12 Or again: “In our thought, essential is fitting new material into old schemas (= Procrustes’ bed), making equal what is new.”13 However, if knowledge, following the example of Procrustes, who violently adapts bodies of different sizes to the dimensions of his bed and who by forcing different bodies to take their place in that same bed, equalizes them; if knowledge, consequently, starts by eliminating the new

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from any event or case, to reduce them to the identical, it carries on this task by inscribing these identical cases in series. How does this serializing take place? As we have already seen (without dwelling on it), serializing consists of assimilating the new to the old, the event to the memory, and proceeds according to determined categories.14 Does this mean that serializing is the work of a categorial memory or rather, that memory and the categories have a common origin? Let us leave memory to the side for a moment and begin with the categories. “The inventive force that forged the categories labored in service to our needs, namely to our need for security, to quick understanding on the basis of signs and sounds, to means of abbreviation:— ‘substance,’ ‘subject,’ ‘object,’ ‘being,’ ‘becoming’ have nothing to do with metaphysical truths.—It is the powerful who made the names of things into law, and among the powerful it is the greatest artists in abstraction who created the categories.”15 Derived from the need for security, categories are the auxiliaries of the will to preservation. Further, because they result from the inventive force of artists specialized in abstraction, they are useful instruments of the falsification of the world. They cannot lay claim to the slightest truth, although without them no enduring life would be possible. The categories of logic are categories of need, and logic is essentially drudging. Nietzsche is saying nothing else when he asserts that “all our categories of reason have a sensual origin,” for sensualism is “plebeian.”16 How then should we understand that the categories were the work of the “powerful”? Having qualified sensualism as plebeian, Nietzsche went on: “Conversely, the charm of the Platonic way of thinking, which was a noble way of thinking, consisted precisely in resistance to obvious sense-evidence—perhaps among men who enjoyed even stronger and more demanding senses than our contemporaries, but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of the senses— and this by means of pale, cold, grey concept nets which they threw over the motley whirl of the senses—the mob of the senses as Plato said.”17 The categories are the work of the “powerful” by virtue of the mastery and domination that made their creation possible. But if this mastery is bound to preservation alone, and if the falsification of the world is its corollary, then it could only be reactive. Praised as legislator but blamed for having instituted a counter-world of values purely conservative and reactive, Plato is then a figure as ambiguous as the Jewish priest who created a reactive morality and law, which were fulfilled by Christianity. We can now understand why, when he undertook to revalue all reactive values— the adjective is essential here—Nietzsche ended up qualifying Plato as a Jew, and speaking of “Pauline Platonism.”18 We can understand, too, how much these qualifications—legitimated by no philology but which

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ultimately undermine the authority of all philology—are rich in meaning, the moment that Judeo-Christian values and ontological ones are understood simultaneously, if for different reasons and to different degrees, as reactive values. Let us return directly to the categories according to which identical cases are serialized. The categories do not only originate from a need for security but also from the need for rapid comprehension, from that for abbreviation. To abbreviate is at the same time to simplify and to accelerate. The categories abbreviate, because they allow us to dominate in a single move a multiplicity of identical cases, more or less affiliated with each other. Without this abbreviation, the successful mastery, case by case, of the plurality would inevitably be slower and more painful to obtain. What then is the function of this acceleration and how is speed constitutive of knowledge? We have seen previously that pain, which is inherent in any hierarchical relation, varied in inverse proportion to the speed of transmission of commands. And, consequently, we have understood that the speed of communication among the multiple forces constituting a domination formation favored its cohesion, duration, and unity. Speed thus has a synthetic function, and this is founded on will to power. “N.B. ‘The struggle for existence’—this designates a state of exception. The rule is rather the fight for power, for ‘more’ and ‘better’— ‘faster’ and ‘more often.’ ”19 Is the same thing true for knowledge? Does speed operate there as a synthetic principle, and what would be its result? On the other hand, speed contributes to the formation of identical cases and to all unity in general. Nietzsche early on gave a description of this in a paragraph of Human, All Too Human. “All stronger moods bring with them a sympathetic resonance on the part of related sensations and moods: they as it were root up the memory. Something in us is provoked to recollection and becomes aware of similar states and their origins. Thus there come to be constructed habitual rapid connections between feelings and thoughts which, if they succeed one another with lightning speed, are in the end no longer experienced as complexes but as unities. It is in this sense that one speaks of the moral feelings, of the religious feelings, as though these were simple unities: in truth, however, they are rivers with a hundred tributaries and sources. Here too, as so often, the unity of the word is no guarantee of the unity of the thing.”20 Thus, the faster a series can be scanned, abridged, the more it takes on the figure of unity, and the abbreviation constituting the categories, which accelerates its domination of multiplicities, unifies by reducing comprehension (that is, conformity and truth) to increase extension—that is, to increase domination. Domination and truth thus vary in an inversely proportionate fashion.

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No doubt, speed unifies in a rough and falsifying manner, but knowledge and the formation of identical cases, which always come with simplification and myopia, are founded on errors. Speed is not added on top of knowledge: to accelerate is already to know, and if the speed proper to the operations of knowledge never ceases increasing with the accumulation of knowledge, then the acceleration of knowledge—in the double sense of the genitive, since speed is a logical function—has for effect to slow down, or even immobilize becoming. How should we understand this paradox? “Our logic,” says Nietzsche, “our sense of time, our sense of space are prodigious capacities of abbreviation for the purpose of commanding. A concept is an invention that does not correspond fully to anything, but rather somewhat to many things: a statement such as ‘two things equal to the third are equal among themselves’ presupposes 1) things, 2) equalities: there is neither the one nor the other. However, with this invented and fixed world of numbers and concepts, man acquires a means of mastering a prodigious quantity of facts, as with signs, and of inscribing them in his memory. This sign apparatus is his superiority, as he thereby distances himself as much as possible from singular facts. The reduction of experiences to signs, and the ever-increasing multiplicity of things that can be seized in this way: that is his highest force. Spirituality as the faculty of mastering a prodigious multiplicity of facts through signs. This spiritual world, this sign-world is pure ‘appearance and deception’ [‘Schein und Trug’], just like every ‘thing-appearance’ [‘Erscheinungsding’]—and the ‘moral man’ is wholly carried away.”21 To conceive is to grasp-with or grasp-together, and every concept unites. But what does it unite? The concept does not unite identical things, since the identity of things results from it. “Thingness [Dingheit] was first forged by us, out of logical need, thus for the purpose of designation, intelligibility.”22 Lacking things, the concept can only unite passing events, fleeting intuitions do not really reveal anything, fugitive visions, motions of mind, or “images.”23 How does the concept—or “general case”—assemble those multiple “special cases”?24 How does it assemble equalized sensations? Through the word. “The small sum of emotion that is born with the ‘word,’ and thus with the intuition of similar images for which a word is already present—this weak emotion is the common element, the basis of the concept.”25 Without words there would not be concepts— which does not mean that to each word corresponds a concept—and lacking words there could not be things. Heir to the nominalist tradition, Nietzsche had early on identified the identifying, conceptual function of the word. In a text from 1873, which he sought to “keep secret,”26 “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche already wrote the following: “Every word immediately becomes a concept precisely because it

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is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique, entirely individualized primal experience to which it owes its existence, but because it has to fit at one and the same time countless more or less similar cases, which, strictly speaking, are never equal or, in other words, are always unequal. Every concept comes into being through the equation of nonequal things.”27 It is for two reasons, then, that concepts and categories are signs. On the one hand, simplification governing perceptible experience implies that the smallest common denominator in a multiplicity of events should pass for the unique event itself; and to take the part for the whole amounts to making the former the sign of the latter. On the other hand, this simplification never goes without words, which cannot be considered as the signs of things, but rather as the signs of these signs of events, which are already things. As identical case, each thing grossly condenses a multiplicity of events or relations, for which it is thus the abbreviating sign. This is the reason why the relation between concepts (or the intellect) and things is no longer the locus of truth or error. “The opposition is not between ‘false’ and ‘true’ but between the ‘abbreviations of signs’ and the signs themselves. The essential is: the constitution of forms that represent numerous movements, the invention of signs for entire species of signs.”28 If by categories we understand the most general concepts of knowledge, and if knowledge is the condition of possibility of experience, then the categories constitute the most powerful abbreviators of becoming. Indeed, to reduce a multiplicity of events, movements, or different cases to a sign or a category appropriate to them (and which represents them at the same time), is to permit their quasi-instantaneous mastery. Categories thus have a temporal meaning, since thanks to them, that which becomes and flows by can be given more rapidly than its passing, and even before it passes. Succession turns into simultaneity, and becoming into being. The acceleration peculiar to categorical knowledge thus has as its paradoxical effect that of slowing down becoming—and falsifying abbreviations lie at the source of the onto-logic.

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3

Space and Time

Yet what are space and time without which there is no speed? In what way do “our sense of time and our sense of space” constitute, like the logical categories, these “prodigious capacities of abbreviation”? From the moment it is a matter of “our sense” of time and space, real time and space are not concerned. This precision is important insofar as Nietzsche never excluded the hypothesis of a time, or even of a space, peculiar to becoming. With the thought of recurrence, he noted: “We know nothing of space, which belongs to the eternal flux of things,”1 and almost immediately thereafter: “An effective time must correspond to the effective course of things, if we abstract the feeling of spaces of time more or less long or short, as experienced by knowing beings [erkennende Wesen]. In all likelihood, real time is inexpressibly slower than the one that we, humans, feel.”2 What can we say about the time and the space peculiar to becoming? Let us start with space. Nietzsche not only asserts that “ ‘force’ and ‘space’ are but two expressions and two modes of considering the same thing.”3 He also declares: “I believe in absolute space as the substratum of force: the latter determines and forms.”4 But what does force inform and determine if not space itself? On the one hand, indeed, space is not infinite and, on the other, the eternity of movement must have, as its cause, the form of space. Let us explain these two theses. (1) If space were infinite, then force would have already dissipated in it, since it is essentially finite. “It is only on the false hypothesis of an infinite space, in which force, as it were, fades away, is the last state unproductive, dead. The simplest state is at once − and +.”5 This last proposition means that the simplest state is the simple hierarchical difference between the plus and the minus, and the will to power, as primal fact; for this reason, will to power is no more in-becoming than it has-become. Since “the ‘will to power’ cannot have become,”6 the eternity of space is thereby founded. (2) But the eternity of space wherein all movement of forces occurs is not the eternity of that movement, itself. If by virtue of the infinity of time, finite forces are always in movement, this is because equilibrium is impossible for them. This impossibility is not explained only by the infinity of time, for if space were infinite as well, i.e., undetermined as to its form, or if it were spherical, then equilibrium of forces would already have been reached—if only through their dissipation. As this is not the case, “the 234

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FORM of space must be the cause of eternal movement, and ultimately of all ‘imperfection.’ ”7 What about the time peculiar to becoming, to which we just alluded? “Time, in which the whole exerts its force, is infinite, which is to say that the force in it is eternally equal, eternally active:—up to this instant, an infinity has already elapsed, which is to say that all possible developments must already have taken place. The instantaneous development must, consequently, be a repetition, just like the one that engendered it, and the one that will emerge from it, and so on forward and backward! Everything has already occurred innumerable times, inasmuch as the integral situation of all forces [Gesamtlage aller Kräfte] always returns. Apart from this, were something equal to exist, that [would be] indemonstrable.”8 What does this infinity of time mean? It marks out the farthest point of dehumanization; for if, in an infinite time (whether backward or forward), in a ring-shaped time, each instant is a repetition, then the repetition of all the instants separates each one from all the others. In other words, the real instants do not succeed to one another. This is the reason why time, here, is not properly speaking cyclical. In cyclical time, the instants follow one another and this succession is repeated. In other words, if each instant is repeated therein, each instant is nevertheless not itself a repetition.9 But why does this infinity of time manifest the furthest point of dehumanization? Quite simply because we consider succession to be the essential character of time. Upon having the thought of thoughts, Nietzsche noted: “Only succession produces the representation of time. Supposing that we did not feel causes and effects but a continuum, we would not believe in time. For the movement of becoming does not consist of points at rest, of equal slots at rest. The external periphery of a wheel is, as much as its inner part, always in movement and, although the first already moves more slowly than the second which goes faster, it is not at rest. By means of ‘time,’ we cannot separate slower or faster movements. In absolute becoming, force can never be at rest nor ever non-force: ‘the slow or fast movement of the latter’ is not measured according to a unit, which is lacking here. A continuum of force is without succession and without juxtaposition (that would suppose the human intellect and gaps between things). With neither succession nor juxtaposition, there would be neither becoming nor plurality for us—we could only assert that this continuum would be one, at rest, immutable, and not a becoming, without time or space. But this is, precisely, but the human contrary [Aber das ist eben nur der menschliche Gegensatz].”10 By describing becoming as a continuum of force, in which nothing momentaneously identical to itself becomes, and which we cannot

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for this reason even grasp as a becoming opposed to being; by specifying that this primal becoming is incommensurable to any unity and to any plurality, such that it excludes all identity and difference in general, Nietzsche is not proceeding from the reduction of objective, mundane time to a subjective one. But conversely, he is reducing subjectivity or the subjectivation of time, if not to a real or absolute time, then at least to the horizon of its possibility.11 From this reduction, it follows that succession and juxtaposition are projected onto becoming, to give rise to our representations of space and time. What does this mean? To say there is no time without succession, or even without juxtaposition, is to say there is no time without a “one-after-the-other,” without a “one-next-tothe-other.” But all difference between “the one” and “the other” presupposes the identity of “the one” and “the other,” and thus the formation of identical cases. Thus, space and time are not forms of sensibility, but forms of intellect or knowledge, and as such, they can and should be considered as abbreviators, as instruments for the domination of chaos in service to preservation. In leading space and time back to knowledge— which, up to now, was never but an error necessary for the preservation of life—immediately raises two questions. (1) Will the modification of the essence of knowledge imply a modification of our sense of space and time? Nietzsche seems to have excluded such a possibility. “We cannot look around our own corner: it is a hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be; for example, whether some beings might be able to experience time backward, or alternately forward and backward (which would involve another direction of life and another concept of cause and effect).” Nevertheless, he immediately adds: “But I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. Rather has the world become ‘infinite’ for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.”12 In other words, if our concepts of space and time are indeed bound up with our intellect, the latter nonetheless remains an interpretation among other possible ones, related to a determinate angle, and nothing consequently forbids us from thinking that a modification of the aperture of this angle might lead to another interpretation, that is, to another sense of time and space. (2) What precisely are the concepts of space and time arising from this organized error that is knowledge? Let us start with space. On many occasions, Nietzsche criticized the concept of an empty and infinite space: “Space, an abstraction: in itself, there is no space and above all no empty space. A lot of nonsense arises from the belief in ‘empty space.’ ”13 Or again: “ ‘empty space’ is a con-

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tradiction, just like ‘absolute end’ (in Kant), ‘thing in itself’ (in Kant), ‘infinite force,’ ‘blind will’———”14 And finally: “It is necessary to deny empty space; [necessary] to think space as determined and limited; likewise, the world as repeating itself eternally.”15 What comes out of these foregoing remarks is that the concept of infinite empty space is bound up with everything that Nietzsche opposes. Indeed, if finite space and force are but two ways of saying the same thing, then the concept of an infinite empty space—a concept peculiar to Newtonian mechanics—is a concept of a space separated from force; i.e., ultimately, from will to power. Need we recall that the latter binds only finite forces, which, if they are to work on each other, must be differently localized? Abstracted from the will to power, or—which comes to the same—stemming from the will to assimilation, the concept of infinite empty space is also incompatible with the thought of recurrence, which requires a finite and determinate space. A concise note provides the reason for this: “Finite as space: infinite as time – – with indestructibility, eternity is given and the absence of beginning – – with determination [Bestimmtheit], a boundary on the plurality of new forms.”16 The moment the world of eternal recurrence requires a finite space, it is no longer that of classical mechanics which, on the contrary, presupposed the infinity of space. But whence comes our belief in empty space, in space tout court? An empty space is first a separated space, isolated from force because the will to power has transformed itself into a will to assimilation, giving rise to enduring things, which find therein one of the conditions of their constancy. An empty space is thus an emptied space, isolated from the things that occupy it and move in it. It is a space understood as the common site of all constancy. In other words, the belief in empty space is a modality of the belief in being and in identical cases. And this is why Nietzsche can say, first, that “space, like matter, is a subjective form, time is not” and thereafter specify that “space was only formed at first through the presupposition of empty space. There is no such thing. Everything is force. We cannot simultaneously think the moved and the moving, but this is what constitutes matter and space. We isolate.”17 Only an empty space, ontologically separated from force, can be a subjective form, and it is because we presuppose a mover distinct from the mobile, a subject distinct from its action, that we [likewise] presuppose an empty space; a distinction which, as we will see, is the condition of possibility of the subject itself. Just before asserting that we know nothing of space, which belongs to the eternal flow of things, Nietzsche wrote again: “Space and the human laws of space presuppose the reality of images, forms, substances, and their durability, which is to say that our space concerns an imaginary world.”18 It is by virtue of this falsifying presupposition that Nietzsche can rightly

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consider mechanics, that is, mathematical physics, to be an application of logic. He notes, for example: “If mechanics is but logic, it then follows, for mechanics, what goes for all logic: it is a kind of spinal cord for vertebrates, nothing true-in-itself.”19 After having asserted “the indestructible unity” of space and force, he adds: “Mechanics is fundamentally a logic.”20 And another note provides the reason for this: “Mathematics and mechanics have, for a long time, been considered to be sciences endowed with absolute validity, and it is only now that we dare suspect that they are no more and no less than logic, applied to the determinate hypothesis—which remains to be proved—that there are ‘identical cases.’ ”21 If mechanics is “a logic applied to space and to time,”22 then the infinite and empty space of Newtonian mechanics, which pertains to knowledge as organized error, is indeed a fiction as falsifying as logic itself is. But can we say the same of time, and above all, of what time can we say this? Indeed, contrary to space, which, when dissociated from the force, is but a subjective form, Nietzsche allows for a real or absolute time, distinct from our representation of time. What are the characteristics of the real time that we cannot qualify as false, since it is the time peculiar to becoming, and how do we reach it? The only possible starting point is the becoming of the world itself. If the world of finite forces is always becoming, it is because the real time of this becoming is infinite and continuous. Indeed, only the infinity or eternity of time allows us to account for the impossibility of a global equilibrium between finite forces, and only the continuity of this same time allows justification of the continuity of becoming, i.e., the continuity of global disequilibrium. Real time is thus infinite, eternal, continuous, and as Nietzsche adds, “no doubt inexpressibly slower than the time that we, humans, experience.”23 What then is erroneous in our representation of time? As it cannot concern the time aimed at by representation (since that time is absolute, real time)—this question therefore necessarily concerns the subjective representation itself, whose conditions of possibility we must now determine. Observing that the subjectivity of time and space is not a proof for their nonexistence,24 and by claiming that “the fact that we have a time instinct, a space instinct, a foundations instinct, has nothing to do with time, space, causality”25—or again, that “our derivation of the feeling of time, etc. presupposes time, ever and again, as absolute,”26 Nietzsche clearly distinguishes a subjective time from an effective, absolute one. But how legitimate is this distinction? How to be sure that our feeling of time presupposes absolute, effective time? Or better, how can we reach the difference between subjective and real time, that is, move past our own time toward real time? For the subject, and from its point of view, to

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move past the subjective form of time amounts to suspending or reducing time, itself. During the period of the thought of recurrence, Nietzsche indeed described such an experience: “There is a part of the night, about which I say: ‘Here time stops!’ After each night’s watch, especially after nightly journeys and wanderings, one has in regard to this space of time [Zeitraum] a wondrous feeling: it was always much too short or much too long, our time sensibility feels the anomaly. It might be that we have also to atone for it while awake, [and] that habitually we spent this time in the time-chaos of a dream! enough, at night between one and three o’clock, we no longer have time in mind. It seems to me that this is precisely what the Ancients expressed as well by intempesta nocte and έν άωρονυκτί (Aeschylus) ‘the moment in the night, where there is no time.’ ”27 The experience of the heart of the night is thus one of a slowing down, or a suspension of time, even of an absence of it. What time is at stake here, and above all, what does the anomaly of our nocturnal sensation of time signify? In a general fashion, anomaly denotes something irregular, disunited, uneven. But here, how could an unevenness of sensation, and a sensation of unevenness, undermine subjective time, or conversely, how are evenness, equality essential to subjective time? If equality and inequality, evenness and unevenness, mark relations, then the only equality required by humanized subjective time is that of the moments composing it. Unequal, these could never relate regularly to one another, nor give rise to a sequence, i.e., to a series and a succession. By understanding the now as a number—and recall that Nietzsche considers the number, space, and time as perspectives—did Aristotle not already presuppose the common measure and equality of these nows? Breaking up the regular succession of nows, this inequality cannot but disrupt the normal course of time by revealing in it the nocturnal standstill as a modification of its tempo. But then—and if there is no time where we have none in mind—this is because time is understood as a succession of hours and days, and as αριθμός κινήσεως κάτα το προτερον και ύστερον [arithmos kineˉseoˉs kata to proteron kai husteron], the “number of motion in respect of ‘before’ and ‘after.’ ”28 This strange experience shows that time—which, through its very absence, is revealed to me in the depths of the night—is subjective and successive. It shows that the leveling off of sensations is the condition of possibility of their succession. Recall, too, that when he retraced the existential genesis of the common concept of time, Heidegger also spoke of “the leveled-off sequence of ‘nows.’ ”29 By contrast with real time, to which we can only accede as to something atemporal, this succession of equalized sensations is what is proper to the ontological time that is human, all too human.

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Yet, if “succession alone produces the representation of time,”30 this is because time is a succession of representations. How is this succession itself possible? To pose this question is to raise two questions at the same time: (1) How is it possible to distinguish, the ones from the others, those representations that succeed each other? (2) The moment that no succession could appear without permanence—“without something persisting, there would be no mirror in which succession and juxtaposition could appear: the mirror already presupposes something persistent”31—what is the permanent specular instance in which the succession of representations comes to be shown? If the first question concerns the identity of representations, the second concerns the identity of the I that accompanies each representation. And there is no other way possible to attempt to respond to the one or the other than to start from representation itself.

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4

Representation

Under the influence of the most powerful thought, Nietzsche penned the following note: “The antinomy: ‘The elements in given reality that are foreign to the true essence of things, could not be due to this [essence] and must therefore be added to it—but from whence? Since there is nothing outside true essence—consequently an explanation of the world is as necessary as it is impossible.’ I solve the antinomy in this way: the true essence of things is a fabulation [Erdichtung] of the representing being, without which it is unable to represent. These elements in given reality, which are foreign to this fabulated ‘true essence,’ are properties of the existent, [they] are not added. But the representing being, whose existence is bound up with this erroneous belief, must also have originated [entstanden sein] if these qualities (of change, relativity) are to be proper to its esse: representation and belief in what is self-identical and persistent must have been simultaneously formed.—I mean, that already everything organic presupposes representation.”1 To begin, whence comes the antinomy that Nietzsche is here attempting to solve? Its formulation is borrowed from a work by African Spir, which Nietzsche read and quoted on several occasions between 1873 and 1885, and to whose epistemological theses he continually referred, from a stance of opposition. The work was entitled Denken und Wirklichkeit [Thought and Reality].2 Spir’s entire enterprise aimed at reviving critical philosophy. It was founded on the opposition between the unconditioned (assimilated to substance) and the thing in itself, being and the conditioned (assimilated to the empirical world, to becoming). That is, it rested on the opposition between the unconditioned as expressed by the identity principle, and the objects of experience, which never satisfy that principle.3 With what antinomy are we thus confronted? Spir formulates it this way: “The fundamental antinomy consists in that the unconditioned itself can never be thought as a condition or a cause; that a cause or a condition can never itself be thought as unconditioned, and that the conditioned simultaneously requires and forbids foundation or explanation.”4 In other words, if the unconditioned alone possesses being proper, is “normal,” then the things offered to experience have no proper being; they are abnormal. But how then to understand “the elements of given reality, which, foreign to the normal essence of 241

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things, could not come from it”? Spir continues: “As foreign, they should have to be added to it. But since, outside the unconditioned and the essence of things in themselves, there is nothing from which anything could derive or come to be, it follows that it is simply impossible to conceive the foundation of presence of these foreign, abnormal elements. We have here reached, as it were, the antinomy inhabiting the essence of the conditioned, of the abnormal. Thesis and antithesis there have their sole common foundation. It is precisely because the conditioned empirical constitution of things is foreign to their unconditioned normal essence, that this constitution must have an external condition. However, since this constitution is precisely foreign to the essence of things in themselves, it could have neither an external nor any other condition, because outside the essence of things, there is nothing that can serve as condition. It is thus for the same reason that an explanation of the world is [both] necessary and impossible.”5 Nietzsche thus solves the antinomy by destroying the hypothesis on which it rests. If there is no true essence of things, or if the belief in such an essence is a fabulation necessary to the preservation of organisms, then the antinomy disappears by itself. But this neither explains how such a fabulation opens the dimension of representation—in which a “representing being” relates to something “represented”—nor does it clarify the claim that states that there is no organism without representation. What should we understand, here, by representation? Unlike sensation, which, according to Spir, is “a content present in consciousness that has no intrinsic relation to things outside of consciousness and that contains no claims about them,” representation is “a content present in consciousness that contains the assertion of external things, that is, the belief in objective existence or in the past existence of what is represented in it [consciousness].”6 Representation thus denotes the relationship of the thinking subject to the external world, which is objective and real—a relationship mediated by contents of consciousness. But how is representation possible amidst becoming, if it presupposes the double constancy of the subject and the object, and contradicts becoming? In any case, representation has first a verbal meaning and, here more than elsewhere, it is important from the outset not to separate the agent and the act. The representing activity has for its primary characteristic that of being certain: “The representing being is CERTAIN, even our sole certainty: that which it represents and the way in which it must represent, that is the problem.”7 As our sole certainty, the representing being is nevertheless not a subject in the sense of the ego cogito. Indeed, representing activity is in-becoming [en devenir]; it never ceases changing, without ever being in movement, strictly speaking, for all movement presupposes the

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constancy of the thing that moves. What then is this representing being, which, being certain, must furnish its point of departure and guiding thread to the knowledge of all that is? It is obviously the body, which, organized by will to power, never ceases thinking and representing. Need we repeat here what we have continuously argued in a host of ways: “The whole organism thinks, all organic formations participate in thinking, feeling, willing”?8 Despite the absence of the word, the long note of 1881, entitled “Fundamental Certainty,” is clearly about the body, as cardinal structure of the will to power. Against any form of distinction between the certain existence of the acts of representation and the uncertain existence of their contents, Nietzsche there writes: “ ‘I represent, therefore there is a being,’ cogito ergo EST.—That I might be this representing being, that to represent might be an activity of the I, is no longer certain: no more than is all that I represent.—The only existent we know is the representing being. If we describe it rightly, then the predicates of beings in general must be in it. (But in taking representing itself for the object of representing, does it not become saturated by the laws of representing, is it not falsified and made uncertain?—) It is change and not movement that is proper to representing: wholly passing away and emerging, and in representing itself all persistence is lacking.”9 As the random product of a chaotic becoming, the body can disappear as soon as it appears. That such is not the case and that the organism manages to keep itself enduringly alive can only be due to the fact that it represents and likewise to the way it represents, since “everything organic presupposes representation” and representation belongs to will to power. What then is the distinctive feature of representation in its conservative mode? After having asserted that representing knows no persistence, Nietzsche continues: “On the other hand, it posits two persistent things, it believes in the persistence 1) of an I; 2) of a content: this belief in the persistent, [i.e.,] the substance, that is, this belief in the same’s remaining-equal to itself, is contrary to the process of representation itself. (The moment I speak in a general manner about representing activity, as I am doing here, I make it into a persistent thing.) But it is clear in itself that representing is never at rest, nor something unchanging, [nor] equal to itself: thus the only being that is assured us is changing, non-identical with itself, [it] has relations (conditioned, thought must have a content in order for it to be a thought).—Such is the fundamental certainty of being. Now the act of representing asserts precisely the contrary! But this need not be true for all that! Perhaps the assertion of the contrary is but a condition of existence for this kind of being, the representing kind! That means: thought would be impossible if it were not fundamentally unaware of the essence of esse: it must assert substance and equality, for a

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knowledge of what is completely fluid is impossible; it must fabulate [andichten] the properties of being to be able to exist. There is no need for a subject and an object for representing to be possible, but representing must no doubt believe in both.—In short: what thought grasps as reality, [what it] must grasp, may well be the contrary of the existent!”10 What is the sense of this note, in which Nietzsche designates—using the words “Being,” “esse,” “existents”—the absolute flux of becoming amidst which nothing is ever equal or identical to itself? It answers the question of knowing what representation is, the moment that representing makes persistence possible; that is to say, persistence as the preservation of the representing being. Considered in its unceasing change, in the verbal sense of the term, representation is none other than the relationship of a force to another. Consequently, it is a constitutive moment of the will to power, or of life itself. Thus understood, representing—whose meaning is partly merged with that of the preposition in the expression “will to power”—never stops changing and implies neither subject nor object. But the body—the representing being—could not preserve itself without the will to power turning into a will to assimilation and equalization. What then is the representational form of such a reversal? It must obviously satisfy this condition for lasting existence that is the belief in being, in identical cases, in short, in the ontological. Aligned with preservation, representing in its verbal sense turns into representation in a nominal or substantive sense. But why does this reversal give rise to an ego and a content, to a subject and an object? The question does not concern the constancy of the subject and the object of representation. Rather, it concerns the constancy of the division of representation between subject and object. In order that representation be capable of continually referring subjects and objects to each other, it is essential that the act of representing possess this possibility. And it must initially be the site of a relationship other than that of the subject and the object. This is in fact the case, since representing, inherent to the will, is a moment of the will to power through which forces come into relation, the ones with the others. Now, if will to power only binds and relates unequal forces, in such a way that the ones depend on the others, then every object, in essence—and continuously—is relative to, and dependent on, a subject. The dissymmetrical division of representation between subjects and objects draws its origin from the hierarchical character of will to power and from the representing activity that constitutes it. This explanation of the schism of representation into subject and object means that the object is ultimately but a subjected force, a subject reduced to obedience. Is this conceivable? Without the slightest doubt, for if the will to power is the command that a subject exerts on another subject, then any force,

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whether dominating or dominated, is a subject. After having asserted that representing is our only certainty, Nietzsche can then write that “the subject alone is demonstrable; HYPOTHESIS, that only subjects exist—that ‘object’ is but a kind of effect produced by a subject on a subject . . . a modus of the subject.”11 The object is but a subject durably settled in a position of weakness. And this duration assumes the self-identity of a relationship of forces. If, as Husserl said following Brentano, every experience of consciousness is a representation, or rests on a representation, then the intentionality of consciousness is founded on the will to power qua will to equalization, assimilation, falsification, and the constitutive transcendental phenomenology is but a figure of the onto-logic.12 What is more, the falsification of the verb into a noun, of the representing into representation—a falsification from which intentionality is derived—is as old as the grammatical interpretation of language itself. By emphasizing that the mere fact of speaking about representing as such suffices to make it a persisting thing, Nietzsche echoes Aristotle’s remark according to which pronouncing a verb comes down to creating a noun, a substantive, which immobilizes thought. But to stop the incessant flow of thought is quite simply to think and perhaps, to think too simply. In any event, ignorance about becoming is the very condition of all logical knowledge and thought—that is, human, all too human knowledge. It is, however, not yet possible to explain the succession of representations, and with it, the representation of time. No doubt we accounted for the identity of objects of representation, as well as the hierarchically superior identity of the subject of representation. Yet this in no way explains the reasons why the subject refers to its own contents of representation, according to the mode of succession. To attempt this, let us return to the subject itself, to the cogito. “What separates me most from metaphysicians,” writes Nietzsche, “is that I do not grant them that the ‘ego’ is that which thinks: conversely, I hold the I itself to be a construction of thought, having the same rank as ‘matter,’ ‘thing,’ ‘substance,’ ‘individual,’ ‘end,’ ‘number’: thus, as a mere regulative fiction, whereby a sort of constancy, and consequently of ‘knowableness’ [‘cognoscibilité’] is introduced into, and poetically imposed on, a world of becoming. The belief in grammar, in the linguistic subject and object, in verbs, has up to now subjugated the metaphysicians: I teach the renunciation of this belief. Thought posits first the I: but up to now, and following the example of the ‘common people,’ one believed that the ‘I think’ included something of immediate certainty, and that this ‘I’ was the given cause of thinking, a cause thanks to which we ‘understood’ by analogy all the other relations of causality. As usual and indispensable as this fiction might well be, it proves nothing concerning its poetic character: something can be a vital condition

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and despite this false.”13 To say that the I, like matter, substance, or number, is a thought construction—which evidently does not exclude that the I be an effect of the play of the drives, since there is no drive devoid of thought—or to say (which comes to the same) that representing qua constitutive moment of the will to power gives rise to the subject and the object of representation, this is above all to assert that the I pertains to the falsifying system of identical cases, whose function is to make the world knowable, enduringly livable, dominatable. But it is then, and especially, “to posit a certain perspective in vision as the cause of vision itself ”; whereupon Nietzsche immediately adds: “that was the legerdemain in the invention of the ‘subject,’ the ‘I.’ ”14 What then is, in the midst of the system of identical cases, the distinctive feature of the I ? It is double. On the one hand, it grounds the certainty of “knowledge” and, on the other, as the cause of its own representations, it is at the source of all causality, that is, of the universality of the “knowledge” of the world. Let us examine these two features. The “fundamental certainty” that we mentioned previously should not be misunderstood. Indeed, if, in a functional and systematic fashion, we entitle “fundamental certainty” the ultimate fact to which it is possible to accede, then becoming is liable to receive this title. However, if, following Descartes, we understand certainty as something firm and constant, a fixed and immovable point, an unshakable foundation, then becoming is a “fundamental certainty” only in an ironic sense. In that case, what should the position of a subject certain of itself mean, if not the fictitious and false stabilization of becoming? Nevertheless, if poetically establishing [conster poétiquement] becoming through the ego cogito makes the world knowable by turning it into a representation, or an object for a subject, then this implies in return that the will to certainty that grounds knowledge is as servile and reactive as that knowledge, which stems from fear, as we have seen. “The will to truth and certainty arises from the fear of uncertainty.”15 In other words, a subject, apodictically certain of itself, and the knowledge it thereby grounds, will never be sovereign but always gregarious—and the sort of privilege granted to the cogito is none other than the sign of the weakness of the ego. How can the ego be the cause of its own representations and, at the same time, stand at the ground of all causality? If the I is a thought construct, whence comes the plan that this construct follows? Let us return to the cogito. “In this famous cogito, there is: 1) it thinks, 2) and I think that I am that, which thinks, 3) yet, even admitting that this second point remains in abeyance, being a matter of belief, the first, ‘it thinks,’ likewise and once again contains a belief; namely, that ‘to think’ is an activity for which a subject—though it were but an ‘it’—must be thought;

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and the ergo sum signifies nothing less than this! But that is a belief in grammar. One is already positing ‘things’ and their ‘activities,’ and we are far from immediate certainty.”16 The construction of the subject thus depends on grammar. Yet, what should we understand by that? Nothing other than the distinction between the agent and the action, the noun or pronoun, and the verb. In a note dedicated precisely to “causalism,” Nietzsche writes: “The separation of the ‘deed’ from the ‘doer,’ of the event from something that brings it about, of the process from a something that is not a process but is enduring: substance, thing, body, soul, etc.—the attempt to conceive the coming about as a sort of displacement and change of position of the ‘existent,’ of something constant: this ancient mythology established the belief in ‘cause and effect’ after it had found a fixed form in the grammatical functions of language.—”17 Why is the grammatical subject liable to be assimilated to a cause, and the action to an effect? To separate the subject from the verb is to distinguish the agent from the action. However, an agent distinct from its acts remains an agent, even when it abstains or refrains from acting. Free to act, such a subject alone can take the initiative of performing them, or of being their cause. This evidently holds for those acts that are representations, and the ego is indeed the cause of its cogitationes. In this sense, the ego precedes the cogitationes, and these follow the ego. But that does not yet mean that representations follow each other in succession. Yet, it is that succession which constitutes time. In order for representations to follow each other, it would necessary that each one of them be at once cause and effect—albeit variously related. Is this the case? Only by pursuing the analysis of representation will we be able to decide. If representation is an act of the ego, what is represented is not limited to the object but extends to the ego that represents itself. “Every ego cogito,” said Heidegger, “is a cogito me cogitare; every ‘I represent something’ by the same token represents ‘me’ as representing.”18 If, on the one hand, the I precedes its representations as their cause and, on the other hand, this I is represented in the representation whose cause it is, then it is likewise the effect of that cause. As representing, the I therefore never ceases following itself, and its representations may succeed each other. No doubt, beyond the distinction between representing and represented, this analysis presupposes the grammatical difference between active and passive. No doubt, it implies that causality is constitutive of time. But the nocturnal experience of the absence of time, which is also the experience of an absence of causality, is there to attest that the one never goes without the other: “nox intempesta where cause and effect seem to be out of joint and where, at each instant, something can arise suddenly from nothingness.”19 Nietzsche had himself led causality—which never goes without

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succession—and the representation of the ego back to the opposition between active and passive. “ ‘It changes,’ no change without reason— always already presupposes a something that stands and remains behind that change. ‘Cause’ and ‘effect’: psychological reconsidered, it is belief that is expressed in the verb, in the active and the passive, in doing and undergoing. That means: the separation of the event into doing and undergoing, the presupposition of an agent, have come before. The belief in the agent hides behind [this]: as though, once all the deeds were deducted from the ‘agent,’ this latter would still subsist. It is always the ‘I-representation’ whispering here: each event has been interpreted as a doing: with the mythology of a being that corresponds to the ‘I’———”20 From whence comes this authority of grammar and the grammatical interpretation of language? Is it absolute or does it rest upon determinate evaluations? It is not absolute, and Nietzsche never ceased questioning it. “Is it not permitted to be a bit ironical about the subject no less than the predicate and the object? Shouldn’t philosophers be permitted to rise above faith in grammar? All due respect for governesses—but hasn’t the time come for philosophy to renounce the faith of governesses?”21 This injunction would nevertheless be devoid of meaning if the subjection of thought to the order of grammar—by virtue of which the categories of thought could pass for mere copies of the categories of language—were not made possible by certain value judgments. “The spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological valuations and racial conditions.”22 In other words, it is because the system of identical cases is necessary to the preservation of the body that the thought of the latter—there is no other, for only the body thinks—came to be subject to grammar. The ontological body is a grammatical body and grammar, like judgment, is a bodily matter. Nietzsche suggested this incidentally when, after having asserted that “we shall in the end be free of that oldest ground of metaphysics,” he specified: “this ground that was incorporated into language and grammatical categories, and had become so indispensable that it might seem that we would be unable to think if we gave up this metaphysics.”23 How indeed could this old ground of metaphysics—and by metaphysics we must here understand onto-logic or the system of identical cases—how could this ground have been incorporated in language and grammatical categories, if these did not already belong to the body, to allow its preservation and thereby to find in it their reason for being? Contrary to absolute time, which is not a succession of instants, human time is thus subjective and successive, and the one because of the other. This not only implies the identity of time and the I think, but above all their common belonging to the ontology of identical cases.

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The ontological character of the subject, of time, and of subjective time allows us to understand—we note in passing—the strange Nietzschean statement according to which “time [is] a property of space.”24 In effect, we cannot conceive of space as void, homogenous, and undifferentiated without having previously separated it from force; a separation that presupposes the separation of forces themselves, and that forces be abstracted from the hierarchical relationship that constitutes them. If this abstraction is the initial form taken by the reversal of will to power into a will to assimilation—a reversal whose consequence is first empty space and then the system of identical cases to which time pertains— then Nietzsche can say, elliptically, that time in the subjective sense is a property of space. Onto-logic not only comprises being qua constancy, but also time as a numerable succession of nows. Indeed, the series of representations— which, abstracting from the represented content, can be reduced to pure now moments—is a succession of identical cases apt to be enumerated since they are, at once, equal to themselves and equal among themselves. Time, as metaphysics had conceived it since Aristotle, is thus indeed an abbreviator and a structure for regulating and dominating chaos. Is it possible then to assert, as Heidegger does, that “Nietzsche’s reflections on time and space are as a whole insufficient, and sporadic his rare thoughts on time that hardly move beyond the tradition”? In making it possible to explain the formation of our representation of time, Nietzsche at least brought out the solidarity between Aristotle’s determination of time and the understanding of being as constancy. In his own way, he articulated being and time. Can Heidegger then take, as the “infallible proof ” of this insufficiency, the fact that Nietzsche never posed “the question of time with a view to unfolding the guiding question of metaphysics”? To be sure, Nietzsche does not explicitly raise the fundamental question of metaphysics: “what is Being?” But, in a language and horizon proper to him—which amounts to saying, in ones different from Heidegger—he never ceased asking and re-asking metaphysics’ guiding question: “what is an existent?” This, just as he never ceased highlighting, in his way, the temporal meaning of constancy starting from what was never an existent at all, but rather chaos. This is the same chaos whose initial sense, according to Heidegger, is inseparable from the meaning of αλήθεια [alˉe theia] itself.25 If, as Descartes says, “earlier and later in any duration are known to me by the earlier and later of the successive duration which I detect in my own thought, with which the other things co-exist,”26 then does not the causal succession of acts of representation imply that the objects of these acts—“the other things”—are themselves subject to the causality

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from which succession precisely derives? Is this possible, and how does causality contribute to the construction of the true world? After having determined the way in which the identical subject relates to those identical cases that it represents to itself, it is now a question of determining the relationship of the represented identical cases with each other.

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5

Coordination and Necessity

Reduced to its chaotic becoming alone, the world is a continuum of force. Lacking causes, effects, and time, it is clear that we would never experience distinctly any sensation, but only a feeling of chaos. “Time, space, and the sensation of causality,” wrote Nietzsche in 1872–73, “seem to be given with the first sensation.”1 To be sure, but on condition that we specify that, here, to-be-given-with signifies to-be-constructed-beforehand. As belonging to the system of identical cases, time, space, and causality constitute each sensation as such, since, by differentiating chaos, they articulate a continuum, which, as transitive and transitory, excludes all identity and difference. A paragraph from The Gay Science, from the note of summer 1881 [“Fundamental Certainty”], highlights very clearly the isolating and discriminating character of causality: “Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there is an infinite number of processes that elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality.”2 However, to free the chaotic world and becoming from causality in general, is this not by the same token to relieve them of necessity? Is that possible, when chaos does not designate the absence of necessity but only the absence of order, articulation, laws?3 Can we dissociate necessity from causality, or is it possible that the flux of the event does not obey what Kant called “the principle of production”—according to which “everything that happens (begins to be) presupposes something which it follows in accordance with a rule”?4 The dissociation of necessity and causality, or conversely, the association of chance and necessity, is not without precedent since “when the ancients speak of necessity: άνάγκη [anangkeˉ], they think of a kingdom in which everything comes to pass in an arbitrary fashion (by chance), in which from each cause an effect may not follow.”5 But what then is the necessity governing the world if, following its dehumanization, there is no longer a set of identical cases, but only a play of forces? Lacking an 251

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answer to this question, it will clearly be impossible to determine the value of causality, and above all, that of the knowledge of the world, since this knowledge depends on setting causality to work. Yet, if it is indispensable to set down the ultimate value of knowledge and truth, this is because it became progressively obvious that knowledge and truth had never been but falsification and error, or again, that this falsifying knowledge and this erroneous truth merged with the technological domination of the world. “Science must more and more establish the succession of things in their course, in such a way that the processes become practicable for us (e.g., such as they are practicable in the machine). Cause and effect are nevertheless not understood thereby, but a power over nature is thus obtained.”6 The mastery of nature and the very concept of nature result from an initial falsification, and nothing is more false than the essence of technology. Thus, in order to determine the quality of will to power required by this technological domination of the world—which, when misunderstood, can dispense with truth, and for which the ontological body is but a servile agent—is it not fitting to come to the world as it is, restored to its own necessity because relieved of all forms of causality; which is to say, of all forms of humanization? The world is a world of finite forces and, since the plural is essential here, each force is either dominant or dominated. It is important nevertheless not to misunderstand the meaning of the concept of force. Force should not be conceived as a possibility distinct from some effectuation, or even as a reserve of energy apt to be used or not. That would amount to positing a subject apart from its activity, and dissociating force from its exercise. Outside the subject and dehumanized, force is its event or its very exercise. And nothing else. The reduction of force to its exertion means that every force is always at its limit [au bout d’elle-même], or again, that “every power draws its ultimate consequences at every instant.”7 However, if every force is always at its limit and therein possesses itself (έν τέλει έχει), then, on the one hand, it is really έντελέχεια and, on the other hand, relations of power cannot fail to have a quality of absolute instantaneousness. Consequently, the becoming of the chaotic world of forces is unrelated to any form of causality, that is, to any ordered succession. And, contrary to Kant, for whom force derives from causality, causality falsifies the relations between forces.8 How to think the interdependence of the world’s forces once their relationship is no longer causal? After having asserted that there is neither matter nor space, Nietzsche went on to say: “There is also neither cause nor effect. Rather: when here a tension arises, then a release must occur throughout the rest of the world. (That a tension comes to pass is, once again, the ‘consequence’ of a release elsewhere.) It is neverthe-

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less impossible that there be succession here: rather, it is simultaneously that tension increases here and decreases there. Processes effectively tied together must take place in an absolutely simultaneous fashion. From a process, we sample a particular point as ‘effect,’ for example, a man’s fall following a gunshot. But it is an extraordinary chain of interrelated ‘effects.’ If time were necessary for the ‘effect,’ there would be a more WITHOUT the less that belongs to it, if for only an instant: that is to say, the force would be now greater, now smaller.”9 Comparable to forces, and because it is made up of them, the world is similarly finite. On the one hand, this means that “the measure of the force of the whole is determined and not ‘infinite.’ ” On the other hand, it means that “the number of situations, modifications, combinations, and developments of this force is no doubt extremely large and virtually ‘immeasurable’; yet, in every case, also determined and not infinite,”10 since the global quantum of force is itself not infinite. If the quantity of force constitutive of the world is determined and finite, then not only what diminishes here must increase over there, but also this redistribution must be realized in constant aggregates. “The in-stability of the force, something wavelike,” as Nietzsche further says with the same intent, “is completely unthinkable to us.”11 This is the reason why time does not intervene in the production of “effects” for, if the redistribution of an invariable quantum of force were effected in time and according to it, we would then have to admit its quantitative variation. Thus, “supposing that the world disposed of a certain quantum of force, it is obvious that any displacement of power [Macht-verschiebung] at any point would affect the entire system—therefore, along with the causality of the one after the other [sequential], there would be a dependency of the ones among and with the others.”12 The interdependence of the forces of the world understood as chaos therefore does not arise from causality, but exclusively from a general coordination. “Instead of cause and effect, coordination,”13 that is the principle of Nietzsche’s entire critique of causality. Is this instantaneous coordination compatible with becoming? And how can we maintain that the correlative distribution of forces never ceases changing? By considering the distribution of forces at this instant, first, and in light of the infinity of time that preceded it. In the first note devoted to the world of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche wrote: “The world of the forces allows no diminution: for, otherwise, it would have been weakened and would have disappeared in the infinity of time. The world of forces suffers not interruption: for, otherwise, this would have already been reached and the pendulum of existence would have stopped. The world of forces thus never reaches equilibrium, never has an instant’s rest; its force and movement are at all times of equal magnitude.

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Whatever state the world might reach, it must have already reached it, not once but an innumerable number of times. Thus, this instant: it has already been here once, many times, and will likewise return, with all the forces distributed exactly as they are now: and this goes for the instant that produced it, as also for the one to which the present instant will give birth.”14 As we have already seen, the activity of representing is our only certainty. Yet, since change belongs to representing activity, and since the latter is relative to the world, the changing character of representing activity implies the changing character of the world. “If the world were capable of persistence and fixity and were there, in its course, but one instant of ‘being,’ strictly speaking, then there could no longer be any becoming, and also no thinking, nor observation of becoming.”15 Reconsidering this note four years later, Nietzsche added: “The fact of ‘spirit’ as a becoming proves that the world has neither goal, nor final state, and that it is incapable of being.”16 At this instant, forces are not in equilibrium; and if this really is the case, then forces were never in a state of equilibrium because an infinite time has already elapsed. But how should I think such a retro-infinity of time? To this question, Nietzsche once answered in a note against the hypothesis of a creation or beginning to the world. “On a number of occasions, one has recently sought to find a contradiction in the concept of a ‘backwards temporal infinity of the world’ [nach hinten]: one has even found it, though at the cost of confusing the head with the tail. Counting backwards from this instant, nothing can prevent me from saying ‘I shall never thereby reach an end’: just as, from the same instant, I can count forward to infinity. Only if I made the mistake—I shall guard against doing so—of equating this correct concept of a regressus in infinitum with an utterly unrealizable concept of an infinite PRO-gressus up to now, only if I posit the direction (forwards or backwards) as logically indifferent, would I have to conceive the head—this instant—as the tail.”17 Why is direction not indifferent but, on the contrary, essential? To move backward from this instant toward the infinity of elapsed time is to start from the “fundamental certainty,” whereas moving from an initial state toward this same instant is admitting a beginning, which, because inaccessible, is as uncertain as it is arbitrary. According to the direction taken, becoming changes meaning. To go toward the instant is not only to advance—in one way or the other—the hypothesis of a created world—and “the concept ‘creation’ is today completely indefinable, unrealizable”—it is also to understand becoming with moral and “theological ulterior motives.”18 Contrariwise, to start from the instant by unfolding its vaguely intentional reverberations is to understand becoming as it becomes in itself, outside of any humanization.

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That the distribution of forces at this instant demonstrates the impossibility of their equilibrium does not exclude the possibility that an identical distribution already occurred. Quite the contrary. If, on the one hand, “the energy of all becoming [Energie des Gesammt-werdens] remains constant”19 and if, on the other hand, at this instant an infinity has already elapsed, during which time only a finite number of combinations of forces could have occurred, then all possible configurations must already have been produced, not only once but an infinity of times. Moreover, once this instant has already occurred, the same goes for the moment that generated it as for the one it will generate. Not only has this moment occurred and will occur an infinity of times, but “everything has been here innumerable times to the degree that the integral situation of all the forces always returns. It is quite indemonstrable that something equal was already there, abstracting from this recurrence.”20 Thus, not only is the ring of recurrence the very thinghood of things—a thinghood independent of any humanization—but also, it is because forces return eternally that the world is always this same world, identical to itself. If such were not the case, eternally the case, then clearly no philosophy qua thought of the world would be possible. This obviously does not mean that up to now, philosophy had truly measured itself according to its proper possibilities, and to its most intimate ones. Signifying that “all of becoming moves in the repetition of a determinate number of perfectly equal states”21 (equal indeed because of this iteration), eternal recurrence describes the movement to which forces are necessarily subject. And forces are instantaneously coordinated with each other by virtue of the constancy of their total sum. As the law of becoming, eternal recurrence has not itself become. Nietzsche warns: “Let us be wary of thinking the law of this circle as something that has become, according to the false analogy of circular movement within the ring: there was not first chaos and then, progressively, a more harmonious movement, and finally, the definitively circular movement of all forces: on the contrary, the whole is eternal, not something that has become: if there were a chaos of forces, then the chaos too would be eternal and would have recurred in each ring. The circular course is not becoming, it is the originary law, just as the quantity of force is an originary law, with neither exception nor transgression. All becoming is within the circular course and the quantity of force; therefore, one should not use, to characterize the eternal circular course, the false analogy of circular courses that become and pass, as for example the stars, the movement of the tides, day and night, the seasons.”22 The doctrine of eternal recurrence is thus not cosmological: it concerns the movement of chaos, not that of the cosmos. The eternal ring encloses and precedes all cosmic movement as

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its possibility. That is why it should not be understood relative to what it circumscribes, relative to stellar orbits, or to the alternation of day and night. Eternal recurrence is the “originary law (Gesetz)” of the world, in the sense that, in making all position (Setzung) in general possible, it is what makes the world possible, or in non-Nietzschean terms, eternal recurrence is the universal a priori of all identity, of any constitution of the world. In this respect, eternal recurrence makes intentionality itself possible. Nevertheless, this originary law does not go without a twofold presupposition: the finite character of force and the infinity of effective time. The second presupposition is explained and justified through circularity itself. When Zarathustra asked the dwarf whether the two eternities, the two infinities, that start from the instant are contradictory or not, the latter said: “All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.”23 What then of the first presupposition? The finite character of force implies its plurality qua the relation of the more to the less. Yet this relation, which as we have seen defines “the simplest state,” is will to power itself. “Neither a being, nor a becoming, but a pathos—will to power is thus the most elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first emerge—”24 If the will to power is “the simplest state,” “the most elemental fact,” the “primordial fact,”25 this is because it is the very origin of the movement whose form is fixed by eternal recurrence. A note devoted to the critique of the concept of cause thus begins: “I require the starting point of ‘will to power’ as the origin of motion. Hence motion may not be conditioned from outside—nor caused . . .”26 Will to power is thus none other than mobility itself, the true content of “fundamental certainty,” movement in its pure state. By making the will to power the origin of movement, Nietzsche completes the task of divesting the world of causality. No doubt that does not yet allow us to clarify the meaning and value of the will to power qua fundamental structure of knowledge, nor again the quality of the will to power at work in the world known according to causality. However, by determining the necessity proper to the world as such, the ground is reached starting from which this clarification may be made. To conceive the essence of movement is, at least since Aristotle, to conceive the essence of φύσις [phusis], of nature. Nietzsche is aware of this, as he notes that “to conceive a state that is + and −” is the “problem of physics [physikalisches Problem].”27 This is to say that it is the fundamental problem of nature. To interpret mobility thus outside of causality amounts, ever and again, to dehumanizing nature. But this dehumanization in no way amounts to some return to a natural state, since it aims at a nature that our technological knowledge prevented us from reaching. This is the same knowledge that was based only on the values of

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preservation, which were for that reason falsifying values, and created a counter-world, a counter-nature. “Not ‘return to nature’—for there has never yet been a natural humanity. The scholasticism of un- and anti-natural values is the rule, is initial; man reaches nature only after a long struggle—he never re-turns to it . . . Nature: that is, daring to be immoral like nature.”28 Thus understood, the dehumanization of nature is a prelude to the creation of the overman. And Nietzsche understood this clearly when, upon having the thought of recurrence, he defined his task in this way: “Dehumanization of nature and thereupon naturalization of man, once the pure concept of ‘nature’ is acquired.”29 To preserve nature as counter-nature is thus to defend the last man and, understood on the horizon of will to power, nature is not man’s immemorial past, but the future of the overman, who alone shall know how to restore nature to itself. Was it not in the same spirit that Heidegger once confided: “I often ask myself (this has long since become a great question for me) what nature would be without man—should it not quiver in him to recover its own power?”30 We may henceforth specify the relationship between eternal recurrence and the will to power. Like eternal recurrence, the will to power has not become. It is not a becoming, but rather that from which all becoming emerges. Nietzsche stated this as clearly as possible: “It is not by way of research into evolution that we can discover that thing [das], that x, whose cause it is, that there is evolution in general; one should not wish to grasp it as ‘becoming,’ and even less as having become . . . the ‘will to power’ cannot have become.”31 The will to power is thus tied to eternal recurrence as the mobility of the circle to the circularity of movement. In other words, will to power explains the existence but also the essence of becoming, since “the innermost essence of being is will to power.”32 And, in its turn, eternal recurrence explains the way in which the will to power unfolds, as both essence and existence. As the essence and existence of becoming, the will to power nevertheless cannot be related to eternal recurrence as essentia is to existentia. Yet, as we pointed out at the beginning of this study, such was clearly the fundamental claim of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche. For example, Heidegger writes: “Will to power says what [was] the being ‘is.’ The being is that which (as power) it empowers [machtet]. Eternal recurrence of the same designates the how [wie] in which the being that processes such a ‘what’ character is. It designates its ‘factualness’ as a whole, its ‘that it is’ [sein ‘Dass es ist’]. Because Being, as eternal recurrence of the same, constitutes the permanentizing of presence [Anwesenheit], it is most permanent; it is the unconditioned that [Dass].”33 Or even: “ ‘Will to power’ says what a being as such is, namely, what it is in its

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constitution. ‘Eternal recurrence of the same’ says how being is as a whole when it is so constituted. The ‘how’ of the Being of all beings is determined in tandem with the ‘what.’ The ‘how’ affirms from the outset that every being at every moment receives the character of its ‘that’ (its ‘factuality’) from its ‘how.’ ”34 These exemplary statements both say that if the will to power defines what a being is, i.e., its quid, then eternal recurrence not only determines how this being is, but also that it is, i.e., its quomodo and its quod. Heidegger, who does not speak of becoming but of the Being of beings, thus attributes the existence of beings to eternal recurrence and not to will to power. Why? What is the horizon of such an attribution? The constancy of presence is, and can only be, the being that is supremely constant in metaphysics understood as onto-theo-logy. In other words, to attribute the existence of becoming to eternal recurrence is to interpret eternal recurrence against the horizon of the history of Being and its truth. Conversely, to acknowledge that the essence and existence of becoming depend solely upon will to power, not only amounts to coming back to what Nietzsche said. It is also to be able to gauge—since we have ceased considering Nietzsche’s thought as the ultimate, fundamental metaphysical position35 or as a negative onto-theo-logy—the death of God otherwise than as an originary event in metaphysics or as having a Greek origin. The solidarity of will to power and eternal recurrence no doubt has never been as magnificently brought to light as in the resplendent note from the summer of 1885. There, Nietzsche describes in a single stroke, that is, in one sentence, the “Dionysian world of the eternally-self-creating, the eternally-self-destroying,” the “world of will to power.” He performs this by gathering under the ring of the return: the conjoined finitude of space and force, the eternity of movement and of time, the instantaneousness of the configurations of forces, the indefatigable play of the simple and the multiple, and the natural innocence of becoming beyond good and evil. “And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a giant of force without beginning, without end; a quantity of immutable implacable force, which neither grows nor diminishes, and which does not expend itself but transforms itself; a whole of invariable magnitude, an economy without expenditure or loss, but also without increase, without income, enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by its limit; nothing confused or wasted, nothing unendingly-extended, yet as determinate force inserted in a determinate space and not in a space that, somewhere, would be ‘empty,’ on the contrary as force everywhere, as play of forces and force-waves simultaneously one and ‘many,’ accumulating here and at the same time diminishing there, a sea in

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itself of tempestuous flowing forces, eternally changing, eternally flowing back, with enormous years of return, with an ebb and flow of its forms, thrusting forth from the simplest to the most manifold, from the calmest, most fixed and coldest, forth into the most incandescent, wildest, most self-contradictory, and then out of abundance returning home to the simple, out of the play the play of contradictories back toward the pleasure of accord, affirming itself as self again in this equality of its paths and years, blessing itself as that, which must forever return, as a becoming that knows neither satiety, nor tedium, nor fatigue—”36

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6

The Subject of Causality

Having thus analyzed thoroughly the a-causal necessity that reigns in the world, let us return directly to causality without which there is no knowledge. If we have undertaken the analysis of knowledge, it was first because knowledge makes possible life and the preservation of the body in a counter-world (or world counter-nature), which it institutes to that effect. It was thereafter in order to determine the foundations of knowledge before risking modifying it. In other words, the moment we consider knowledge as the being-in-the-world of the ontological body, it becomes necessary to recast it, in order to raise that body—for only the modification of the foundation of world-creating knowledge is liable to transform that world in such a way that a higher body—as sur-logical as it is sur-Christian—could live therein. This clearly requires that all structures of knowledge have one and the same foundation, that they form one and the same system. Now, while sensation and concept, space and time, indeed belong to the onto-logical, we cannot yet include causality therein. Indeed, in order that causality—which, for Kant, means that something follows something else according to a rule or a law—arise wholly from the system of identical cases, it is not enough that temporal successivity, the self-equality of what precedes and what follows, be integrated therein. It is also necessary that the rule or law as such be inscribed therein. Is this the case, and does Nietzsche have the right to assert that “there is no such thing as a sense of causality, as Kant thinks”?1 At the end of the second section of the “Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding,” and to establish that the latter have no simple, empirical origin, Kant considers the example of the concept of cause. The concept of cause implies a quality of necessity that recourse to experience does not allow us to grasp. To be sure, we know from experience that one phenomenon usually follows another, but what is empirically consecutive need not be a necessary consequence. Now, in saying that every phenomenon presupposes another which it follows—and there is no causality without this—we are attributing universal scope to the empirical rule of association. But by what right, and how is this possible? If we call affinity of the manifold that which in the object makes its association possible, then it is a matter of making this universal affinity of phenomena intelligible, thanks to which they can and must be subject 260

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to constant laws, i.e., to the universal laws of nature. “On my principles it is easily comprehensible. All possible appearances belong, as representations, to the whole possible self-consciousness. But from this, as a transcendental representation, numerical identity is inseparable, and certain a priori, because nothing can come into cognition except by means of this original apperception. Now, since this identity must necessarily enter into the synthesis of all the manifold of appearances insofar as they are to become empirical cognition, the appearances are thus subject to a priori conditions with which their synthesis (of apprehension) must be in thoroughgoing accord. Now, however, the representation of a universal condition in accordance with which a certain manifold (of whatever kind) can be posited is called a rule, and, if it must be so posited, a law. All appearances therefore stand in a thoroughgoing connection according to necessary laws, and hence in a transcendental affinity, of which the empirical affinity is the mere consequence.”2 The universal affinity of phenomena is thus due to their standardization through rules. What does this mean? Every phenomenon is a representation and, as such, belongs to transcendental self-consciousness, which is a priori certain and numerically identical to itself. If knowledge is inseparable from this transcendental consciousness (or original apperception), and if the I think accompanies all representations, then the identity of the latter governs all knowledge and thus also the synthesis of the manifold of phenomena. However, for original apperception to govern this synthesis, it is evidently necessary that the phenomena themselves be apprehended or posited—and this, in such a way as to make possible—that is, to establish conformity with— the originally synthetic unity of transcendental apperception. Now, to be liable to be apprehended or posited only under a sine qua non condition means to have to satisfy a rule or a law, whose exclusive source is the understanding. If understanding is the faculty of rules—“sensibility gives us forms (of intuition), but the understanding gives us rules”3—and if by nature we mean the “object of all possible experience,”4 then we must conclude that the understanding “is itself the lawgiver for nature, i.e., without understanding there would not be any nature at all, i.e., synthetic unity of the manifold of appearances in accordance with rules.”5 Subject to laws, outside of which it is impossible, nature is in this way formally subject to the originally synthetic unity of apperception, of which Kant will say, in the second version of the transcendental deduction: it is “the highest point to which one must affix all use of the understanding, even the whole of logic and, after it, transcendental philosophy; indeed, this faculty is the understanding itself.”6 From this brief explanation of Kantian concepts of rule and law of nature, it becomes clear that causality pertains fully to the human, all

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too human system of identical cases, to onto-logic. This is true for three reasons. First, because rules and laws unify the manifold by reducing multiple differences to identity. Thereafter, because rules and laws humanize nature by subjecting it to the unity of apperception, to understanding. Kant acknowledges this: “Thus we ourselves bring into the appearances that order and regularity in them that we call nature.”7 To be sure, the subject of knowledge who organizes phenomena by prescribing its laws to nature is not the empirical man; instead, humanization is logicization, and the identity of the transcendental subject is a logical one.8 Finally, and this is the most important reason, because there is no causality without subject. That is, without the fiction of an agent distinct from its acts, remaining equal to itself no matter what it does, without the fiction of “a subject-substratum in which every act of thinking . . . has its origin.”9 As subsuming the manifold under a rule, by virtue of which something follows something else, causality implies that the I would be at the source of all these rules. Kant’s posthumous note from 1775 states this clearly: “When something is apprehended, it is received in the function of apperception. I am, I think, thoughts are in me. In sum, it is here a matter of relationships, which certainly do not provide the rules of the phenomenon, but which allow each of them to be represented as contained within rules. The I constitutes the substratum of a rule in general, and apprehension brings every phenomenon to it.”10 There is thus a “myth of the concept of the subject” just as there is a “myth of the concept of causality.”11 The one is as inseparable from the system of identical cases as the other is. However, if the concepts of subject and causality are each as mythological as the other, or if, more generally speaking, the “natural sciences have let themselves be intimidated by discourse on the ‘world of phenomena,’ in which reigns a completely mythic concept of ‘pure knowledge’ against which the world is measured,”12 it nevertheless remains the case that belief in causality is the fact of a subject. What then is the relationship between causality and the positing of a subject? And to begin, from whence does causality take its origin? To this question, Nietzsche invariably had but one response. In an initial version of paragraph 127 of The Gay Science, he writes: “We all firmly believe in cause and effect; and many philosophers call this belief ‘a priori knowledge’ because of its rigidity and firmness . . . The origin of this invincible belief seems quite transparent to me, and even an object of derision rather than an object of pride. Man thinks, when he accomplishes something, like hitting for example, that he is the one doing it and that he has done it because he wanted to do so, in short, that his will is the cause. He sees no problem in this; rather, the feeling of the will is enough to make intelligible for

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him the relationship between cause and effect. Of the mechanism of the event, and the work a hundred times more subtle, that had to be accomplished in order to reach this act, he knows nothing; just as he knows nothing of the incapacity of the will in itself to accomplish the slightest part of this task. The will is for him a magical operating force: belief in the will, as in the cause of effects, is the belief in forces operating magically, the belief in the immediate influence of thoughts on moving or unmoving matter.”13 This is first to say that belief in causality is based on the belief in the will. It is then to say that natural causality is founded on the causality of freedom, since all causality in general is founded on the original causality of the free will. “The popular belief in cause and effect is built upon the presupposition that free will is the cause of all effects: it is only from this that we derive the feeling of causality.”14 This is finally to say that the modus operandi of this will is obscure to the point of passing for magical. But wherein lies the obscurity of the modus operandi of free will that founds causality? If believing in the will as cause is believing in the immediate influence of thought upon matter, then the obscurity of the modus operandi of the will resides precisely in this influence. But is this influence possible, and could the will exert itself on something radically foreign to it? Schopenhauer never doubted it; notably, when, setting forth the hypothesis that willing is everywhere, he “enthroned a primeval mythology” and when, believing, as most everyone did, that the will was as simple as it was immediate, he failed to understand that “willing is actually a mechanism so well ordered that it all but escapes the observing eye.”15 Moreover, he failed to understand that a will could only act on another will. In short, no will exists in the sense in which he understood it, but we may speak of a will to power as complex as it is “protean.”16 The obscurity of the modus operandi of the will is thus due to the very concept of will, itself. “Will—to me a hypothesis that no longer explains anything. For the knower, there is no willing.”17 Nietzsche would repeat indefatigably that there was neither will, nor freedom in the traditional sense of these terms. “I laugh about your free will, but also about your servile will: there is no will. Pain and thoughts have given rise to an illusion—which we call ‘will.’ ”18 But to assert that “the will is but a simplifying conception of the understanding,” “a fabulation,” or “a superfluous hypothesis”19 is to say that it arises from the falsifying system of identical cases, and that the willing subject [le sujet volontaire] is its foundation. A contrario, questioning the onto-logic requires that we reject the concept of the will and, when he defined his task as “the fulfillment of fatalism,” Nietzsche specified that this would be effectuated through “1) the eternal recurrence and preexistence, 2) the elimination of the concept of ‘will.’ ”20

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What is the scope of this elimination of the will? They remove Nietzsche’s thought from the age of the determination of Being qua will. In recapitulating the history of Being through its guiding names or leitmotifs, from άλήθεια [alˉe theia] to Gestell, Heidegger noted the following concerning modern philosophy: “certitudo—res cogitans vis—monas (perceptio—appetitus), exigentiae essentiae objectivity freedom will—representability practical reason will—as absolute knowledge: Hegel as will to love: Schelling will to power—eternal recurrence: Nietzsche.”21 After leaving a blank, Heidegger continued: “Action and organization—pragmatism the will to will machinery (Ge-stell).”22 This is to argue, first, that the thought of the will to power completes and perfects [parachève] the history of the determination of Being as will, initiated by Leibniz and Kant, and second, that this history is but a gradual preparation of the unfolding of the essence of technology. Thus, there is no break, according to Heidegger, between Kant, Hegel, or Schelling on the one hand, and Nietzsche on the other. But does this not contradict Nietzsche’s own understanding of himself and his relationship to the metaphysics of the will? After having brought out the resignation and compromise peculiar to Hegel and Schopenhauer’s ways of thinking, Nietzsche added: “One sees so little will here that the word becomes free to designate something else.”23 Is he not thereby marking a break, and does the nihilism of the will—whose simplest exemplification was Schopenhauer—not have, as its consequence, the evacuation of all meaning from the word “will”? But is it not nihilism to void words of their meaning to reduce them to signs or data abbreviation devices?24 No doubt, and if the word “will” is divested of meaning, then, on the one hand, it can open to any sort of meaning, or even to another system of meanings and, on the other hand, it becomes impossible to take the will to power as a figure of the metaphysical will. That is, it becomes impossible, for example, to conceive will to power on the basis of Kant’s determination of the will—“a kind of causality belonging to living beings insofar as they are rational”—and to take freedom to be Kant’s “property of this causality that makes it effective independent of any determination by alien causes.”25 This clearly does not keep the will in its metaphysical sense from being a special case of the will to power. Yet, if the metaphysical will is not a species of will to power, then the inverse also should not hold. In the same manner as truth, which is but a special case of its inverse, or error—the [metaphysical] will, as causality, is but a special case of will to power, which shows the vacuity and derivative character of [the metaphysical will]. “Formerly man was presented with ‘free will’ as a dowry from a higher order: today we have taken even will away from him, in the sense that will may no longer be understood as a faculty. The old word

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‘will’ only serves to designate a resultant, a kind of individual reaction which necessarily follows a host of partly contradictory, partly congruous stimuli—the will no longer ‘effects’ anything, no longer ‘moves’ anything . . .”26 Understood starting from the subtle mechanism of will to power which connects feeling, willing and thinking, whereby it becomes possible to make the entire “mechanical or material”27 world intelligible, the will is no longer a cause but a “resultant,” no longer a faculty or power to act but an impotency, a reaction. Against the horizon of the will to power, the old will should be conceived the way truth itself was, as a reactive will to power, a will to impotency, and an impotency of the will to power; in short, as a modality of that great fatigue that is nihilism. The ruin of the will not only entails that of causality—to the proposition “there is no will at all” responds the proposition: “there is no such thing as cause and effect.”28 It also entails the ruin of the single subject and its identity to self. Nietzsche often emphasized that the positing of a unique subject correlates with the belief in the unity of the will and in causality. In a long note wherein he criticizes the concept of cause, he writes, for example: “We have absolutely no experience of a cause: considered psychologically, the entire concept comes to us from the subjective conviction that we are causes, namely, that the arm moves itself . . . But that is an error: we separate ourselves, we doers, from the deed, and we everywhere make use of this pattern—we seek a doer for every event. What have we done? We have misunderstood a feeling of strength, tension, resistance, a muscular feeling that is already the beginning of the act, understanding it as a cause: or we have understood as cause the will to do this or that because action followed upon it . . . ‘Cause’ there is no such thing: in the few cases wherein it seemed to be given, and from which we have projected it to understand an event, the self-illusion has been proved. Our ‘understanding of the event’ consisted in our inventing a subject which became responsible for the fact that something happened and for the way in which it happened. In the concept of ‘cause’ we have assembled our feeling of will, our ‘feeling of freedom,’ our feeling of responsibility and our intention to act: fundamentally the concepts of causa efficiens and causa finalis are but one. . . . The thing, the subject, will, intention—all these are inherent in the concept of ‘cause.’ ”29 This inherence means first that the concepts of thing, subject, will, intention, and causality are linked to each other in such a way that they form a single system, that of identical cases or onto-logic, and which is no doubt the system Nietzsche claimed to have “avoided.”30 But the attachment of causality to a single will, of which we are the subjects, thereupon and above all implies identity to self and the constancy of self. Yet, as we have sufficiently shown, “the hypothesis of a single subject is perhaps

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unnecessary,” and “it is just as permissible to assume a plurality of subjects, whose interaction and struggle are at the foundation of our thought and our consciousness in general.”31 Consequently, and if our body is a domination formation whose unity is that of an organization or community of drives, then the single subject, that is, the subject of causality, the logical subject of knowledge, must be led back to this body as to one of its possibilities. What then is the meaning of the determination of the body as subject, in the traditional sense of the term; how can a plurality of subjects give rise to a unique subject? The moment the plurality of the body is a plurality of forces and its unity, as variable as the dominant force may be, there could not be a subject constantly identical to self without the equalization of the forces constituting the body. The single subject is a leveled subject; a subject whose forces are reduced to the weakest among them; a subject that can no longer bear the pain inherent in commands and hierarchy; a democratic subject lined up with the mere requirements of its own preservation; a subject as identical to self as it is constant. “Subject,” writes Nietzsche, “this is the terminology for our belief in a unity among all the diverse moments of the highest feeling of reality: we understand this belief as the effect of one cause—we believe so firmly in our belief that for its sake we imagine ‘truth,’ ‘reality,’ ‘substantiality’ in general. ‘The subject’ is the fiction that many similar states [gleiche Zustände] in us are the effect of one substratum: but it is we who first created the ‘similarity’ of these states; our adjusting them and making them similar is the fact, and not their similarity (—this ought rather to be denied).”32 Leading the subject back to the ontological body thus means (1) that causality constitutes the subject, and that the subject is fundamentally that of the principle of reason; (2) that the unity of “reality”— and recall that “ ‘reality’ resides in the constant return of related, familiar, equal things in their logicized character ”33—correlates with the unity, equal to self, of the subject; (3) that the world “real,” “effective,” and “substantial,” the world of knowledge, is that of a subject identical to self; (4) that this subject, continuously identical to self, and which Kant calls the “standing and abiding self,” “the vehicle of all concepts whatever,” the “ ‘I Think,’ which even makes possible all transcendental concepts,”34 is, as arch-category, an arch-fiction and the product of an originary falsification. To state this in different terms: “ ‘a priori knowledge’ is not knowledge, but an arch-mythology made flesh since the age of the deepest non-knowledge.”35 And “the most strongly believed a priori ‘truths’ . . . as for example the law of causality are . . . very well acquired habits of belief, so much a part of us that to refrain from believing in them would destroy the race.”36 (5) Finally, it means that the subject of pure understanding

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and the technological world aligned with it—the ontological body and world—are as false as they are, the ones like the others, governed by values of preservation and reactive values. Considered in its most general structures, ontological knowledge thus not only consists in creating a “true” counter-world, by subjecting chaos to falsifying rules whose paradigm is causality; it likewise implies the denaturalization of the plural body (or domination formation) into a single subject. While this dual falsification is required by the necessity of preserving oneself, and while it depends on essentially preserving conservative values, it is also the mark of the essentially technological character of knowledge. This is the same knowledge that creates the world in the very process through which it comes to know the world. The technological or poietic, formative dimension of knowledge—here, they mean the same thing—is nevertheless subject to variation. Knowledge can be commanded by values of preservation, by reactive ones, but nothing keeps us from thinking that it might take another form, apart from onto-logic and aligned with values of intensification, active values. What would then be the first consequence of such a revaluation? Ontological and preserving knowledge is fundamentally false, since it denies becoming and presupposes being. Conversely, when commanded by values of intensification, knowledge would have truth as its foundation, since it would have to conform to becoming, without which intensification is impossible. But can we, and above all how can we, conform to becoming; how to found knowledge on the adequation to becoming? Or is it forever true that the ultimate truth of flux permits no incorporation? Without judging our answer in advance, let us attempt to evaluate the stakes of this question. Supposing that the body that we are might be doomed ineluctably to error, the ontological falseness of man would be definitive. And ontological knowledge—that is, technology—having finished extending its dominion over the entire earth, the last man—“the most contemptible man”37—would be our perpetual present.

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Part 6

From Eternal Recurrence to the Resurrection of Body

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1

Memory

To trace logic back to the structure of a body organized in view of selfpreservation; to trace knowledge back as the creation of a world that allowed for the preservation of the organism; finally, to trace the subject back to a domination-formation in a mode that allowed for its own preservation—these inquiries, tracing logic, knowledge, and the subject back to the system of identical cases, have not yet allowed us fully to understand the identity of these cases.1 Moreover, while we have explained their development, our explanation presupposed identity without inquiring further into its origin and constitution. But as long as we fail to explain identity itself and clarify the possibility of what metaphysics calls the identity principle—logic, knowledge, and the subject will be deprived of their ultimate foundations. Moreover, it will also be clearly impossible to conceive of their modification. Failing that, how should we determine whether truth is apt to incorporation (and to what extent); how should it be possible to expose truth to the body and body to the truth? As we have already seen, though without fully investigating it, “the principle of identity has, as its background, the ‘appearance’ [Augenschein] that there are equal things [gleiche Dinge].”2 This principle, denoting the self-equality of each thing, is wholly ontological. In Thought and Reality, African Spir gave to the “logical” principle of identity the following form: “each thing is equal to itself.”3 This dual scope of the identity principle means first that identity, or self-equality, is a characteristic of any constant being as such; thereafter, it means that logic is absolutely constitutive of being, contraposed to becoming. The identity principle is therefore at the foundation of falsifying knowledge. It is the very principle of falsification, since, in a chaotic world of forces in becoming, there is no identity, which is to say, equality and constancy. And what holds for the identity principle likewise holds for the principle of contradiction, insofar as the latter presupposes the former. If A cannot be at the same time, and in the same mode, A and not-A, then A should be equal to A. After having noted that, according to Kant, “the basic laws of logic, the law of identity and that of contradiction, are forms of pure knowledge, because they precede all experience,” Nietzsche immediately added: “But these are not forms of knowledge at all! They are regulative articles of faith [regulative Glaubensartikel]”4 271

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It is therefore no longer a matter of explaining the formation of identical cases, but rather of accounting for the identity of cases. This identity is the ultimate foundation of logic and ontological knowledge and, as such, it makes possible the preservation of the body. Our preceding analyses of the system of identical cases were nevertheless insufficient for such an explanation. Having focused exclusively on identical cases and their formation, we relegated identity itself to the shadows. The preceding interpretation of knowledge was thus incomplete. But where should we look for what is lacking, and what path can we take to reach identity itself? On several occasions, we postponed the analysis of consciousness and left the analysis of memory in suspense. Should we not then attempt to reach identity starting from what we deliberately held aside in our analysis of identical cases? Are memory and consciousness not precisely two instances inseparable from any knowledge, and which—the one and the other, or even the one like the other—were often taken as the very site of subjective identity, even objective identity? Let us begin with memory. And, to reach it while exposing its corporeal character, let us proceed from the distinction between the organic and the inorganic. What differentiates them when there is but one kind of force, as we have shown? Does the world contain more inorganic beings than organic ones, and is the difference exclusively quantitative between what is living and what is not? In The Gay Science, Nietzsche warned: “Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.”5 This is to emphasize the quantitative rarity of the organic relative to the inorganic, and to maintain that the difference between the one and the other is not due to the nature of their constituent forces: “The inorganic conditions us absolutely: water, air, soil, form of soil, electricity, etc. We are plants under such conditions.”6 Let us note in passing that the relationship of the organic to the inorganic is not the only reason why Nietzsche frequently speaks of “the plant man” or qualifies the philosopher as a “rare plant.”7 Man can be taken for a plant because his relationship to the world resembles that of a plant. The one and the other presuppose equalization. “For plants,” says Nietzsche, “all things are habitually at rest, eternal, each thing equal to itself. From the period of the lower organisms up to now man has received as inherited the belief that there are equal things [gleiche Dinge giebt] (only the highest scientifically developed experience contradicts this principle).”8 But if the living arises from the dead, if the organic comes from the inorganic, it nevertheless remains the case that the inorganic always returns to the organic. In a note slightly prior to the emergence of the thought of thoughts, which announces it and without which that thought

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would be unintelligible, Nietzsche wrote: “Our entire world is the ash of innumerable living beings: and, as rare as is the living, by comparison with the whole, it remains that everything has already once been converted into life, and so on. Let us suppose eternal duration, and consequently eternal change of matter—”9 How to understand this? In an infinite time, the finite quantum of inorganic forces cannot fail to give rise to an infinite number of organic bodies, since the random coming together of inorganic forces, necessary to the formation of such bodies, would occur an infinite number of times. It is thus as fair to assert that in the present state of the world, life is the exception and the living, a mode of that which is dead—as fair as it is to insist, contrariwise, on the ash-like character of what is dead. For, by virtue of the eternal recurrence that constitutes the present state of the world, all that is inorganic has already and necessarily been organic once, and therefore organic an infinite number of times. Thus, there is no contradiction in holding the organic as a mode of the inorganic and simultaneously, the inorganic as the ash of the organic. There is moreover no contradiction in asserting simultaneously the priority of the dead over the living, and of the living over the dead, when we take eternal recurrence into consideration.10 The difference between organic and inorganic is therefore not fundamentally quantitative. Does it converge, then, with the difference between what is eternal and what is not? That our present world would be the dead ash of innumerable living beings means—still taking eternal recurrence into account—that organic life itself has never really begun, strictly speaking: “I do not see why the organic in general had to be born.”11 That is to say, consequently, that there have always been organic beings. “The powerful organic principle impresses me with the facility with which it incorporates inorganic matter,” confides Nietzsche, just before adding: “I would not know how to explain finality with intensification alone. I would rather believe there have been organic beings throughout eternity.—”12 The organic and the inorganic are thus equally eternal, the one as the other. Wherein, then, lies their difference? From eternal recurrence, and from the principle whereby the organic is but a particular case of the inorganic, Nietzsche draws the following conclusion: “Inorganic matter, though it may most often have been organic, has learned nothing, and is still without a past! If it were otherwise, there could never be repetition— for, from matter something would be born always with new qualities, with a new past.”13 The repetition that ensures the constancy of the world and the bodies living in it thus presupposes, as its condition of possibility, that inorganic forces be essentially deprived of past and memory. If this were not the case, then the organic combinations to which these forces give

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rise could never come back as identical, and eternal recurrence would be purely and simply impossible. “Every body,” as Leibniz already said concerning physical bodies, that is, inorganic bodies, “is a momentary mind, or one lacking recollection [recordatio].”14 If inorganic forces had a memory, then the constancy of the world and of bodies would not be guaranteed. But that inorganic forces be radically amnesic means in turn that memory is what distinguishes the organic from the inorganic. “Everything organic is differentiated from the inorganic through the fact that it collects experiences: and that, in this process, it is never equal to itself.—To understand the essence of the organic, one should not consider its smallest form to be the most primitive: on the contrary, each of the smallest cells is NOW the heir of the entire organic past.”15 Less than one year later, and more clearly still, Nietzsche will make memory the very essence of the organic; and this, whether by declaring: “I presuppose memory and a kind of mind in every organic being”; or again by inquiring into the conditions of possibility of memory immediately upon noting that “the birth of memory is the problem of the organic.”16 How is memory possible? In a note almost immediately preceding the first formulation of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche answered: “Our memory rests on seeing as equal and taking for equal: thus on imprecise vision; it is originally of the greatest crudeness and it regards almost everything as equal.—That our representations act as triggering excitations comes from the fact that we always represent and experience many representations as the same (das Gleiche), thus from our crude memory that sees as equal, and our fantasy that out of laziness fabulates as EQUAL what in truth is different.—The movement of the foot as representation could not be more different from the actual movement that follows it!”17 Memory thus draws its possibility from equalization, and this in a twofold sense. On the one hand, to remember is always to remember something, and that toward which memory turns and returns must remain, at least to a certain extent, identical to itself. Without the self-identity of its intentional correlate, anamnesis would retain nothing. On the other hand, memory is an event whose activation itself presupposes a kind of resemblance and equalization between the recollecting representation and the representation recalled. A memory always rests upon a present which, one way or another, resembles the past to which it provides access. “Every memory is a comparison, that is to say, an equalization,”18 noted Nietzsche as early as 1873, before saying the same thing, years later, of judgment.19 Without the crude, lazy, and fictitious equalization of representations, without an originary falsification, anamnesis would take place. But the most important lies elsewhere; it resides in the logical character of memory and the memorial character of logic. Nietzsche

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never ceased describing and explaining memory using the very terms by which he described and explained intellect and knowledge. Enjoining us to rethink memory, he specifies: “it is the host of all lived experiences of all organic life, living, ordering each other, reciprocally forming, struggling with each other, simplifying, concentrating and transforming into many unities. There must be an inner process that behaves similarly to the process of the formation of concepts from several singular cases: a reiterated emphasis and stress on the fundamental scheme, leaving behind accessory traits.”20 The constitution of identical cases is thus indeed at work in memory; better still, the constitution of identical cases is memory itself. That is the reason why Nietzsche can say of memory what he says of knowledge; namely, that it makes experience possible. If the logical mode of thought simplifies experience in such a way as to make it distinct and communicable, then memory, qua logical structure and moment of knowledge, opens the possibility of experience as experience of a constant being. “Experience is possible only with the help of memory; memory is possible only by abbreviating a mental process by means of a sign. ‘Knowledge’: this is the expression for a new thing through the signs of things already ‘known’ and experienced.”21 Thus understood, memory is clearly the distinctive characteristic of the organic. A long note presents and explains this as clearly as possible. “Our ‘memory,’ whatever it is,” writes Nietzsche, “can serve us as term of comparison by which to characterize something more important: in the development of every organic being a prodigious memory is manifested concerning the entirety of its prehistory, inasmuch as organic beings have a prehistory—and this memory is reproductive; it reproduces the initial and oldest incorporated forms in preference to those more recently experienced: it is thus that memory goes back and not, as we might suppose, step by step, according to a regressive movement proceeding from the last lived experience to the most remote one; conversely, memory first leaves aside all fresh and recent impressions. There is here something astonishingly arbitrary:—even the ‘soul,’ habitually called up for help in every philosophical quandary, can be of no help here: at least, not the individual soul, but rather a continuum of souls governing the entire process of an organic series. Once again: since everything is not reproduced, but only fundamental forms [Grundformen], there must constantly be in this memory a subsuming thinking [subsumirendes Denken], simplification, reduction: in brief, something analogous to what we qualify, from the point of view of our consciousness, as ‘logic.’ ”22 We can already draw several consequences from Nietzsche’s leading memory back to life. (1) Like logic, memory is a moral phenomenon aligned with preserving values. To preserve the past is simply to preserve

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oneself; and, if memory is a reactive faculty, conversely, oblivion, as necessary for the intensification of life, is not a force of inertia but an active power.23 (2) As the distinctive trait of the organic, memory is related to no particular organ. “There is no organ proper to ‘memory’: all the nerves, in the leg for example, remember prior experiences.”24 As a result, the life of memory is fully corporeal. “Memory: everything we lived through, lives: is worked, ordered, incorporated.”25 (3) If memory is the living archive of incorporation, then the principle of this archiving is none other than will to power itself qua principle of incorporation and organization. Memory—which is always “memory of the will ”26 and memory of the body, in the dual sense of the genitive—derives from will to power. “The so-called knowledge drive must be led back to a drive to appropriate and to conquer: the senses, the memory, the instincts, etc. have developed as a consequence of this drive . . .”27 (4) As to its very possibility, memory depends on the will to assimilation qua preserving and reactive modality of the will to power. After having shown that the “fundamental will,” from which logic proceeds, consists in simplifying and passing highly complex spiritual processes through the filter of a fictitious and regulative scheme, Nietzsche added: “Where there is ‘memory,’ this fundamental will has dominated.”28 By presupposing identical cases, memory would therefore not permit the elucidation of identity itself.

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2

Consciousness

Since memory is not the source of the identity of cases, should we then consider consciousness as such? However that may be, consciousness could be vested with this eminent function only as a structure of the body. For identical cases could not derive from a domination formation unless that formation implied and contained, in one way or another, the very principle of their identity. Yet the drive life of the body is unconscious. “Whoever has formed the slightest representation of the body,” writes Nietzsche, “of how many systems thereby work together in it, of how much they do for and against each other, of the subtlety of compensations, etc.: he will judge that consciousness is something comparatively poor and narrow: that no spirit even closely suffices for what is here to be borne [zu leisten wäre], and that even the wisest of moralists and legislators might, in the midst of this gear-works of war between rights and duties, feel as clumsy as a beginner. Of how little are we conscious! How readily this little leads to error and confusion! Consciousness is but an instrument: and considering the number and greatness of what is produced without consciousness, it is neither the most necessary, nor the most admirable of instruments. On the contrary: there is perhaps no organ as badly developed as consciousness, as multiply defective, botching its work. Consciousness is the last-born of the organs, and thus still a child—let us forgive it its infantilisms! To these belong among others, morality, as the sum of value judgments uttered up to now about man’s actions and ways of thinking. We must thus reverse the hierarchy: everything conscious is of secondary importance: what is closer and more intimate to us is not a reason, at least not a moral reason, to assess it differently. To take the closest for the most important, that is precisely the old prejudice.— Thus, change our way of thinking! as to the principal evaluation! The spiritual must be taken for the semiotics of the body [als Zeichensprache des Leibes]!”1 Compared to the body, consciousness is thus a derived and superficial phenomenon. It is a phenomenon under which drives unceasingly make war and form alliances.2 As Leibniz already saw, consciousness is “merely an accident of experience and not its necessary and essential attribute.”3 The thoughts of the body, i.e., representations, which never cease interfering in the play of drives, are unconscious; and the 277

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unconsciousness of this game is a sign of health and perfection. Not only does the outstanding cohesion and tremendous synthesis of the drives constituting the body not pertain to consciousness but, conversely, consciousness arises from a weakening of the body. “We have thought better of this too: becoming-conscious, ‘spirit,’ is to us precisely a symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism.”4 Of what imperfection is Nietzsche thinking here, and what necessity does the formation of consciousness obey? Having posited as heuristic principle that social organisms, whose formation we can observe, must serve to teach us about the formation of our own organism, Nietzsche continued: “The I-consciousness [Das Ich-Bewusstsein] is what comes to be added last when a completed organism functions, [it is] something almost superfluous: the consciousness of unity, in any event something extremely incomplete and which is often mistaken in comparison with the effective, inborn, incorporated, and laborious unity of all the functions. The great vital activity is unconscious. Consciousness usually only appears when the whole wants to subject itself anew to a higher whole—firstly, qua consciousness of this higher whole, of the outside-of-self [des Ausser-sich]. Consciousness arises in relation to the being [das Wesen] of which we could be a function—it is the means by which we incorporate ourselves [into the higher whole]. As long as it is a matter of self-preservation, consciousness of the I is unnecessary.— Likewise already for the lowest organisms. What is foreign greater stronger is first represented as such.—Our judgments about our ‘I’ limp along behind it [hinken nach], and are completed only after the introduction of the outside-us, of the power that reigns over us. We signify to ourselves what we are worth in the HIGHER organism [im HÖHEREN Organismus]— universal law.”5 Pertaining to the body, consciousness must thus be understood starting from the hierarchy of drives and the will to power. We nevertheless could not explain its event and advent without beginning by discerning its essential character. Consciousness, which is always consciousness of self and what is outside-of-self, is intentional and reflective. But what can be external to a force if not another force, superior and for that reason, imperious? From the exclusive horizon of the forces, the only exteriority possible is an excess of power. But how is the hierarchy of forces, or the drives, at the source of consciousness, and why is there “in man, and at every moment of his existence, as many ‘consciousnesses’ [‘Bewusstseins’] as there are beings constituting his body”?6 To pose the question in this way is to lead the problem of consciousness back to the problem of becoming-conscious, since the drive-life from which consciousness derives is unconscious. How and

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why can a drive become conscious, or by what right do we assimilate the multiplicity of bodily drives to a multiplicity of “consciousnesses”? As we have seen, there is no isolated drive, and every drive is caught up in numerous hierarchical relations, whose terms are in communication. But if to obey is to understand, and to command is to make oneself understood, then misunderstanding is always possible and through misunderstanding—in the event of a new configuration of forces, for example—the drive-life is disturbed and weakened. The awakening of consciousness, which aims to reestablish communication, comes as a response to this malaise in the body. “In all becoming-conscious a malaise in the organism is expressed: something new must be attempted, nothing suffices here, there is toil, tension, strain—such is precisely becoming-conscious . . .”7 This dysfunction has nothing exceptional to it; for each of the drives constituting a body (subject to the unceasing novelty of becoming) must find itself, at some moment and relative to the others, in a situation of incomprehension, whether it be the impossibility of understanding and obeying, or that of making oneself understood and obeyed. However, the life span of the body is enough to attest that the malaise can be constantly overcome and consequently, that every drive can become conscious, whether as an object or as a subject. And if it is fair to speak here of “consciousness,” and to assimilate the multiple drives constituting the body to as many “consciousnesses,” it is first because a drive, inhibited by incomprehension, finds itself diverted from what it was aiming at, and turned back onto the very tension that propelled it. It is fair, then, because turning back on oneself and reflection characterize consciousness in general. After having noted that “the most habitual form of knowledge is that without consciousness,” Nietzsche added: “consciousness is knowledge of a knowledge [Bewusstheit ist Wissen um ein Wissen].”8 Drawing its origins from inhibition, or even from the paralysis of the relation of command, the consciousness of a drive is always consciousness of another drive. And the original object from which consciousness is inseparable is always another subject. Consciousness is thus simultaneously intentional and inter-subjective. Once again, “the ‘object’ is but a kind of effect produced by a subject on a subject . . . a modus of the subject,”9 and the intentionality of consciousness is founded on will to power. However, occurring on the occasion of some incomprehension between drives organized in a body, the ones incorporated into the others, consciousness is bound up with a disorganization of the body and the will to power, since the hierarchical tie, which constitutes the organ as such, is thereby broken. That is the reason why the privilege granted to consciousness has always been carried out at the expense of the body.

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Consciousness is thus essentially related to communication and sociality. “Consciousness,” writes Nietzsche, “has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication—that from the start it was needed and useful only between human beings (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed), it also developed only in proportion to the degree of this utility. Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings—it is only as such that it had to develop: a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements enter our own consciousness—at least a part of them—that is the result of a ‘must’ that for a terribly long time lorded it over man. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed his peers, he had to learn to express his distress and to make himself understood— and for all of this he needed ‘consciousness’ first of all, he needed to ‘know’ himself what distressed him, he needed to ‘know’ how he felt, he needed to ‘know’ what he thought. For, to say it once more: like every living being, man thinks continually without knowing it, the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this—the most superficial and worst part—for only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness.”10 The moment it is legitimate to reason backward from recently formed organisms to more ancient ones, this analysis confirms primarily that consciousness is a structure of communication, and that consciousness and language have a common structure and origin. According to its origin, consciousness is thus never individual, but always common and gregarious. This analysis then provides indirectly an indication about the nature of the difference between the conscious and the unconscious. Arising from the incomprehension among drives, consciousness will be as vivid as communication between the drives is difficult and slow. “Intensity of consciousness stands in an inverse ratio to the ease and rapidity of cerebral transmission.”11 This is to say that the difference between the conscious and unconscious characteristics of intellectual processes is reducible to a difference of speed. Another note confirms this with an example. “We know,” Nietzsche reports, “from the consumption of hashish, and from dreams, that the speed of spiritual processes is tremendous. Apparently, we are spared the largest part of these processes, which do not become conscious. There must be a multitude of consciousnesses and wills in every complex organic being: our highest consciousness usually holds the others under key. The simplest organic creature must have consciousness and will.”12 Yet how do we pass from the innumerable drive-consciousnesses constituting the body, to that unique consciousness that seems to distin-

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guish itself from them, even to oppose them? The answer is simple. Since the body is a society of drives or consciousnesses, consciousness in the traditional Cartesian sense is simply that of the dominant drive or drives. We have already seen this without pausing to consider it, “what distinguishes the ‘conscious,’ usually thought of as unique, as intellect, is precisely that it remains protected and isolated from the innumerable multiplicity included in the lived experiences of those multiple consciousnesses and, as a consciousness of higher rank, as a ruling and aristocratic plurality, only a selection of lived experiences is presented to it; what is more, [this will be] a selection that has been simplified, made clear and comprehensible, thus falsified—so that on its side, what is ‘conscious’ prolongs this simplification and clarification, and thus this falsification, and prepares what one commonly calls ‘a Will.’ ”13 The privilege of consciousness therefore does not come from its nature as consciousness—whether understood as its immanence, as the absoluteness of its being-given, or as its ideality— but rather from the hierarchical position of the drives to which it pertains. As a domination formation, the body is always political. However, there cannot be a political body without a governing organ, without an executive, and this holds evidently for the body that we are. If it is appropriate to take the body as our guiding thread, this is because it allows us to accede to “our subjective unity,” namely as “regents at the head of a community,” and as “regents dependent on those they govern.” It is appropriate because the “conditions of the hierarchy and the division of labor make possible as much the individual members as the whole.” What is more, the very life of the body is political, since it is but a combat pursued in which the combatants never cease trading roles. Consequently, and in the interest of preserving the whole, it is necessary that the executive remain unaware of the details of these innumerable subordinate polemics. De minimis non curat praetor. This unawareness nevertheless does not go without simplification and myopia—without falsification. “A certain unawareness in which the regent is held concerning individual operations and even collective disturbances of the common-essence [des Gemeinwesens], belongs to the conditions under which rule is possible. In short, we thereby gain a value for non-knowing, for seeing things on a broad scale, for simplification and falsification, for the perspectival.”14 As a structure of the body, consciousness is thus essentially political and, being political, it is fundamentally unaware. Political consciousness is in every respect a tautology, since the nature of consciousness depends on its status as executive organ. Nietzsche would often insist on this. The simplification to which consciousness proceeds, and the unawareness in which it stands are inherent to governmental practice. Unawareness: “Just as a commander in chief should not and wants not to experience

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anything, so as not to lose his total overview, so too there must be above all in our conscious minds an impulse to exclusion and driving away, a selective drive—which only allows itself to be shown certain facts. Consciousness is the hand with which the organism reaches farthest around itself: it must be a firm hand.”15 Simplification: “The development of consciousness as governmental organ: only accessible for generalizations. What the eyes show reaches consciousness already generalized and prepared.”16 It is now possible to specify the status of consciousness. Like the hand or the stomach, it is an organ of the body qua domination formation; an organ of the sovereign.17 Thus, there is consciousness only to the extent of its utility—“consciousness is present only to the extent that consciousness is useful.”18 Moreover, this utility presupposes an evaluation. Like the body to which it belongs, consciousness is a moral phenomenon, and what we call moral conscience (Gewissen), in the older sense of the adjective, is but a modality of consciousness (Bewusstsein) qua moral phenomenon in the more recent sense of the term. Nietzsche moreover defined the old moral conscience as “the feeling under which the hierarchy of our drives” reaches the consciousness.19 Not only is consciousness indissociable from an evaluation that grounds its very possibility, but to become conscious is to take and leave, to choose according to a table of goods and ills, to evaluate. What, in effect, comes to pass in the process of becoming conscious? “In becoming-conscious, I sample, I simplify, I attempt to give form: such is becoming-conscious: an entirely ACTIVE preparation.”20 From what experiences does this description gain its relevance? From the fact, for example, that behind every clear and distinct thought rustles the murmur of innumerable arrière-pensées. Or again, from the fact that alone the “right” word distinguishes a thought, which because confused (i.e., because still merged with other thoughts, as far as consciousness is concerned) is not yet a thought. A clear and distinct thought is one clarified and distinguished—interpreted—by consciousness. This means, conversely, that an unconscious thought can be perfectly clear in itself, and that “ ‘obscurity’ is a consequence of the optics-of-consciousness [Bewusstseins-Optik] and not something necessarily inherent to the ‘obscure.’ ” It is therefore consciousness that makes things obscure and if “becoming-obscure is a matter of consciousness’s perspective,”21 then the light of consciousness can only cast a shadow over the great unconscious activity of the body. If becoming-conscious is to choose and simplify, to abstract and evaluate, then every such act is a kind of conceptualization, of falsification, and it is utterly vain to oppose consciousness to the concept in order to found a doctrine of science, since this amounts to the same thing; that is, to error.22 On the other hand, there are no immediate data of con-

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sciousness, whether these be facts, feelings, volitions or thoughts, and self-consciousness, which is never immediately given to itself and—in the subjective sense of the genitive—an organ of the body. Now, every organ is at once the edifice of some domination and the document of some interpretation of will to power qua principle of organization for the body. From whence does the body draw the meaning of this interpretation that is consciousness? We should keep in mind that this is an interpretation that could not be original, since consciousness is the last-born among the organs, an organ that, moreover, comes to be added onto the functioning organism. After having noted that “everything of which we become conscious is arranged, simplified, schematized, interpreted through and through,” and that “the actual process of ‘inner’ perception, the causal connection between thoughts, feelings, desires, between subject and object are absolutely hidden from us—and are perhaps purely imaginary,” Nietzsche adds: “This ‘apparent inner world’ is treated according to the same forms and procedures as the ‘outer’ world.”23 Adjusted according to those in the “outer world,” the simplification, schematization, and interpretation of the “inner world” make use of identical cases. And the meaning of consciousness originates in knowledge as the creation of a counter-world, allowing the preservation of the organism. Likened to a hand that grasps [greift], and thus comprehends [begreifen], as far as possible, consciousness is essentially turned toward the outer world. “It is essential,” Nietzsche cautions, “that one make no mistake [vergreift] about the role of ‘consciousness’: it is our relation with the ‘outer world’ that developed it. On the other hand, the direction or protection and care in respect to the combined play of the bodily functions does not enter our consciousness; no more than spiritual accumulation: that a higher instance rules over these things cannot be doubted—a kind of directing committee [leitendes Comité] in which the various chief desires make their votes and power felt. ‘Pleasure,’ ‘displeasure’ are hints [Winke] from this sphere: . . . as are the acts of will. As are ideas. In summa: that which becomes conscious is subject to causal relations that are entirely withheld from us—the sequence of thoughts, feelings, ideas in consciousness expresses nothing to indicate that this sequence is a causal one: but apparently it is so, to the highest degree. On this appearance we have founded our entire representation of spirit, reason, logic, etc. (none of these exist: they are fictitious syntheses and unities) . . . and these have been projected into things, behind things! Usually, one takes consciousness itself as the general sensorium and supreme instance: it is, nonetheless, but a means of communicability [Mittel der Mittheilbarkeit]: it has evolved through social relations and in the interests of social relations . . . ‘Relations’ here include the effects produced by the outside world and the necessary reactions

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they provoke in us; [but] just as much our effect upon the outer world. It is not the direction, but rather an organ of direction.”24 What is the meaning of this determination of consciousness as organ of direction in the body, responsible for its external relations and for communication? From the moment the meaning of consciousness is borrowed from the world that appears to it, the worldliness of consciousness is not, as Husserl thought, a contresens, but rather the possibility of consciousness itself. Transcendental psychologism, which takes inner experience for worldly experience, is thus not a “falsifying dislocation,” a “falsification,”25 verified alone by transcendental phenomenology. On the contrary, it is this phenomenology that rests on a falsification. Do we need proof of this? Seeking to trace the path which constituting analysis should take, Husserl assigns it “the regional idea of the physical thing as transcendental clue.” He justifies this assignation in the following way: “The regional idea of the physical thing, its identical X with its determining sense-content, posited as existing, prescribes rules governing the multiplicities of appearances.”26 If constituting consciousness is accessible only from identical things, whose identity is indifferent to the reduction, since for Husserl identity implies no existential positing; if the synthesis of lived experiences conforms to the identity of things, then there is no pure consciousness without falsification. Relative to any identical X, the very concept of “constituting consciousness” is contradictory, since consciousness is an organ of the body, and the body the very site of identity. Supposing this were unavoidable, the only way to preserve meaning for the concept of constitution would consist in recognizing it as the work of the drive-body [corps pulsionnel] and not that of intentional consciousness. The determination of consciousness as an organ of direction of the body then means that my unity as a body—and the body is my very being—is not the work of my consciousness, since the latter is but an organ in service to the body. “If I have in me something of a unity, it certainly does not reside in the conscious I, or in feeling, willing, thinking [Fühlen Wollen Denken], but elsewhere: in the preserving, appropriating, eliminating, regulating intelligence of my entire organism, of which my conscious I is but an instrument.”27 Consciousness, which governs without ruling, is not the center of the body. But this clearly does not exclude that, in the long run, it might not approach what Nietzsche calls “the physiological core” or “biological center” of the individual.28 To define consciousness as an organ of communication, that is, as an organ of simplification, schematization, etc., then signifies that the “inner” world, which is intuitively offered to consciousness, is just as false as the “outer” world—and this, for precisely the same reasons. To become-conscious of lived experiences means to constitute them as identical cases. This is

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so much the case that reflection falsifies everything, because it logicizes everything. Each lived experience is already, and through itself alone, an eidetics. The critique of reason and of logic, proceeding from a return to the life of consciousness, can thus only raise the constitutive falsification of phenomena to a superior power. And if phenomenality is itself an error, then phenomenology has no right to the title of rigorous science. “Phenomeno-Mania,”29 notes Nietzsche dryly. Let us give an example of consciousness’s “extraordinary capacity for error.”30 Analyzing the logic of dreams, Nietzsche points out that we all know from experience “how quickly the dreamer entwines with his dream a sound that strongly impinges upon him from without, the ringing of bells or the firing of cannon, for example; that is to say, he accounts for the sound in terms of the dream, so that he believes he experiences the cause of the sound first, then the sound itself.” What does this observation imply? It attests that, in dreams, the detonation of a cannon could not be heard without having first been explained and led back to a cause as its very own. Thus, oneiric consciousness does not perceive the sound of the cannon in real time, but only after a tiny phase shift, through which it fabulates with “extraordinary rapidity”31 a causal explanation, which enables it to perceive the cannon shot. As long as oneiric consciousness has not inserted the sound that surprises it into a causal chain, it fails to hear it. And oneiric perception draws its possibility from an “inversion of time.”32 But is the inversion of sequential time solely the act of a sleepy, oneiric consciousness? Nothing is less certain. On the one hand, we have already observed the same phenomenon in the analysis of pain that is felt only after having been interpreted and, on the other hand, this inversion of time is required by the schematization of chaos and the formation of identical cases. A note entitled “The Inverted Order of Time” [“Die umgekehrte Zeitordnung”] allows us to understand this. Nietzsche there writes: “The ‘outer world’ has an effect on us: the effect is telegraphed to the brain, there it is prepared, given form, and led back to its cause: the latter is then projected and it is only then that the fact reaches CONSCIOUSNESS. That is to say, the phenomenal world appears to us as a cause only after ‘this cause’ has had an effect, and after the effect has been elaborated. That is, we continually reverse the order of events.—While ‘I ’ see, it already sees something else. It is likewise for pain.”33 The outer world is here the chaos to which the body that we are never ceases being exposed, since it strives to live in it. And the forces of this chaotic world never cease producing their effects on other forces of the same nature, whose organization constitutes our body. The latter could not preserve itself were it not able to predict, that is, to identify the events that happen to it. Commanded by self-preserving values, the body

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must stabilize the flux of those innumerable effects that the world has on it by making them recognizable and predictable. Yet, how to make them foreseeable without constituting them as the effects of a cause? And how could this operation be accomplished if the “effect” of the chaotic world—an effect, itself, chaotic—were not “telegraphed” beforehand to the central intelligence, which gives it form and makes it predictable by ascribing it a cause; [i.e.,] which makes it intelligible and perceptible before it presents itself to consciousness and in order that it come to do so. “In the phenomenalism of the ‘inner world’ we invert the chronological order of cause and effect. The fundamental fact of ‘inner experience’ is that the cause is imagined after the effect has taken place.”34 In other words, if after having been inscribed in a causal chain, the identified case is “telegraphed back [zurücktelegraphirt]”35 to consciousness, then all object consciousness, and therefore all intentionality is preceded, de jure as de facto, by an immense intellectual labor that makes it possible, through the formation of identical cases, through knowledge as the creation or confabulation of a world allowing for the preservation of the body. Intentionality rests on self-preserving and reactive values, and consciousness is essentially false. Thus implying an inversion of sequential time, which is already itself a falsification, intentional consciousness is but a consciousness à contretemps, off the beat. It could not be the originary site of truth, in any case. From this analysis of consciousness and becoming-conscious, we must draw three conclusions. First, it goes without saying that what was said of consciousness is also true for those innumerable consciousnesses “under lock and key.” This is because the drives constituting the body must all be able to communicate with each other. That is also why, after recalling that the organs are formed starting from the hierarchy of the drives, Nietzsche could point out that “the separate parts of the body are telegraphically linked [telegraphisch verbunden]—that means, drive.”36 The drive-body is thus integrally a system of communication or telecommunication. Second, consciousness always lags behind the unconscious or, conversely, the great unconscious intellectual activity of the body is always ahead of consciousness. The difference between consciousness and unconsciousness is therefore one of speed, and thus one of power;37 and that is the meaning of the expression: “While ‘I ’ see, it already sees something else.” Contrary to Freud, the it in question here is not a chaos but a logic, indeed logic itself. In contrast to the I or the ego, Freud indeed acknowledges a chaotic character to the it or the id, which “we picture . . . as being open at its end to somatic influences.” “We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations.”38 And it is by virtue of this chaotic determination of the corporeal, drive-based

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id that Freud can require that psychoanalytic therapy reinforce the ego, such that the latter could make parts of the id its own, according to the following practical maxim: “Where id was, there ego shall be.”39 This maxim nevertheless rests—and with it, psychoanalysis itself—on a misunderstanding, if not an ignorance of the logic of the drive-body. Speaking of the id as of a chaos, Freud stops precisely at the threshold of the great reason of the body. Yet, relative to the body, becoming-conscious is the effect of a malaise, and conversely, unconsciousness is the sign of health and perfection. “Every perfect act is precisely unconscious and no longer willed; consciousness expresses an imperfect and often morbid state. Personal perfection as conditioned by the will, as being-conscious [Bewusstheit], as reason and dialectic, is a caricature, a sort of self-contradiction. . . . The degree of consciousness makes perfection itself impossible . . .”40 To be sure, the unconscious in question here is one reached at the end of a long process,41 and not a chaotic unconscious. But the problem is knowing whether that which Freud takes for chaos is not precisely that drive body, of whose great logic he remains unaware. To assign to psychoanalytic therapy the goal of substituting the I for the it is to make the body less powerful, and thus more reactive and sickly. Thus, psychoanalysis in its domain fulfills the victory of reactive values. As for our third and last conclusion, it is both obvious and responds to our initial question. By assuming identical cases, consciousness could not permit us to explain their identity. Hence, since the identity of cases depends neither on memory nor on consciousness, is it possible to account for it and, in so doing, to found logic, knowledge, but also incorporation on something other than falsification, on something other than some taking-for-true, on something other than the belief in constancy and in being, in the constancy of being—on values other than self-preserving and reactive ones alone?

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3

The Decisive Instant

To explain the identity of cases with no recourse to “the belief in being, [which] is the foundation of all science, and all life,”1 is to begin to answer those questions we have been pursuing throughout. Let us recapitulate. First, we progressively brought to light the system of constitutive errors on which both the drive-life of the body and knowledge rest. At the same time, we showed the falseness of the ontological or technological world to which that knowledge gave rise; this, in order to trace back both the false world and its knowledge to conserving and reactive values. In doing this we invariably exposed the body, if indirectly, to the sole, ultimate truth of becoming. But what does that mean? To ask whether, and to what extent, truth is liable to be incorporated is ultimately to ask whether and how incorporation—which always goes together with constancy and preservation—is compatible with the ultimate truth of flux and becoming, which appears to ruin all constancy and forbid preservation. Insofar as becoming is the necessary condition of intensification in any form; insofar as the intensification of body drives is a kind of becoming [est un devenir], the question of the incorporation of the ultimate truth of becoming is also that of the possibility of a higher body. It is the question of an active body. This necessary condition is nevertheless not sufficient. An active drive-body could not be governed by reactive and preserving values. Indeed, it is a matter of knowing whether the truth of the flux can constitute a principle of incorporation. That is, a principle apt to satisfy the requirements of preservation, giving rise to a sort of constancy—albeit in such a way that this constancy would be but a function of intensification. The moment that values—which is to say, the a priori of incorporation in general—can be first conditions of preservation and thereafter conditions of intensification (reactive values), or again of intensification first and thereafter preservation (active values), the creation of a new body requires in addition the revaluation of reactive values. It requires the revaluation of all reactive values, but especially the most reactive of all. Now, there are two kinds of reactive values: ontological values and Judeo-Christian values, whose common reactivity—which is not to say equal reactivity—allows their conjunction—a conjunction that defines Europe, or again, nihilism. The creation of a truthful and active body never goes without a transformation of the world from which that 288

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body is essentially inseparable. After all, it lives in the world and takes possession of it through knowledge. Consequently, such a creation necessitates the overcoming of onto-logic or the essence of technological knowledge—it requires this, even as it develops a power higher than the one God exerted hitherto by justifying and resurrecting bodies. In other words, without the renewal of the truth to which ontological values are bound, and the justice to which Judeo-Christian values are attached, no body higher than the Judeo-Christian and the ontological one would be possible. Now, the creation of such a body arises from the “new Enlightenment,” whose task consists of “ROOTING OUT THE UNCONSCIOUS TARTUFFERY OF THE BODY OF EUROPEAN MAN.”2 The task is thus to explain the identity of cases and all constancy without presupposing being, without believing in being, and starting from becoming alone with a view to liberating its power. This task amounts not only to assigning another foundation to the system of identical cases and knowledge. It is not simply to elucidate the identity principle, according to which equality to self is the constitutive trait of any constant existent as such. It is also and above all to extract man from this falsification, this myopia and crass intellectuality—from that baseness which remains more than ever his condition of possibility and more and more determines his being, as technological domination extends its rule. When the thought of eternal recurrence came to him, Nietzsche noted: “My philosophy—to pull man out of appearance, no matter what the danger! Also no fear before the collapse of life [Zugrundegehen des Lebens]!”3 And, contrary to what may be the case elsewhere in his work, “appearance” here means lie, falsification, show, and baseness.4 It is because the empire of false appearance is on its way to becoming absolute, and again because this appearance has been almost absolutely incorporated, that Nietzsche could say, somewhat later: “I realized that it was impossible to teach the ‘truth’ where the way of thinking is base.”5 Yet, does any place remain, where the way of thinking is not base? To put it more precisely: has the university, in its principle, really pondered Nietzsche’s thought, and is it not for essential reasons, relative to his philosophical task, that Nietzsche one day wrote: “In principle—not to live in Germany, because European mission.—not among universities—”?6 Where to look for this new Aufklärung, apt to bring us out of our human minority toward a sur-human majority by founding the identity of cases on something other than the belief in being? Do we not already have at our disposal two indications liable to set us on our way? On the one hand, the general movement of Nietzsche’s thought aims to dehumanize nature in order to naturalize man, once we have reached the pure concept of nature qua will to power and eternal recurrence. On

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the other hand, the natural identity and constancy of the world arise from eternal recurrence. This is, moreover, the reason why the reality and the calculability of an event are not founded on causality, but on the recurrence of cases. Eternal recurrence thus suffices to explain the identity of cases independent of any substantialization, any subjectivation, and any ontologization. If we set recurrence aside, then no identity in the world—to be sure, the world of identical cases is “the true world,” the “world as existent”—can be strictly demonstrated. “The ‘real world,’ however one has conceived it up to now—this has always been the apparent world once again.”7 The world of identical cases, “true” being, thus arise from repetition. Moreover, eternal recurrence so truly confers on becoming the false constancy believed of Being that, when placed at the “summit of contemplation,” Nietzsche can say, “That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being.”8 But as the veritable foundation of the world, can eternal recurrence also constitute the veritable foundation of logic qua preserving structure of the body? Can eternal recurrence be the unique demonstrable foundation of ontologico-technological knowledge, through which the body relates to the world? In short, is eternal recurrence the true and ultimate foundation of the constancy of the body, of the “subject,” and, consequently, of all constancy in general? Yet, is raising this question not to suppose that what holds for the identity of the world and its events might also hold for the identity of the knowing body, which, from within the world, relates to the world? Could eternal recurrence then be profitably substituted for the originally synthetic unity of transcendental apperception? In principle, nothing should prevent this for, if the body is in the world, it is also of the world, since the forces constituting it are of the same nature as those surrounding it. Once again, there is but one kind of force. At a time when he did not yet have at his disposal the concept of body qua domination formation, but after the rise of his thought of thoughts, Nietzsche once defined man as “a group of atoms completely dependent in its movements on all the distributions and transformations of forces in the whole—and on the other hand, like every atom, incalculable, an in-and-for-itself.”9 Should we nevertheless not distinguish organic forces from inorganic ones, especially when it is a matter of determining anew the identity and constancy of the knowing body, by establishing a new principle of incorporation liable to make the body at once truthful and more powerful? We should make such distinction. For there is no body without the organic and the inorganic (each of them, equally eternal) being in relation to each other. Thus, the question is not so much one of knowing whether the body is inscribed (or not) within the ring of rings, than it is of determining the way or ways in which the body might relate

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to eternal recurrence, even as it comes under it. It is likewise a matter of knowing to what this relationship obliges that body. It was in starting from the instant,10 with a view to explaining its transitivity, that we reached the circular eternity of time—eternal recurrence. Let us recall: “Counting backwards from this instant, nothing can prevent me from saying ‘I shall never thereby reach an end’: just as, from the same instant, I can count forward to infinity. Only if I made the mistake—and I shall guard against doing so—of equating this correct concept of a regressus in infinitum with an utterly unrealizable concept of an infinite PRO-gressus up to now, only if I posit the direction (forward or backwards) as logically indifferent, would I have to conceive the head— this instant—as the tail.”11 But if the direction according to which the enumeration of instants is not “logically a matter of indifference,” this is because the one who holds the λόγος and comes to think eternal recurrence, counts starting from himself, i.e., from the instant at which he stands, from the instant that he is. In short, to reach the ring of recurrence is to come back to it by instantaneously coming back to oneself. And we would not know how to determine the ways in which the body can be concerned by eternal recurrence without explaining why—notwithstanding the circularity of time that the indistinction of beginnings and ends implies—the instant is a “head” and not a “tail.” If eternal recurrence is the fundamental conception of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it is only at the beginning and the end of the third part, in the pages entitled “Of the Vision and the Riddle” and “The Convalescent,” that recurrence is explicitly discussed. What vision and what riddle are at stake here? When addressing “the bold venturers and adventurers and whoever has embarked with cunning sails upon dreadful seas,”12 Zarathustra made his “abysmal thought” known for the first time, he claims to have first proposed to a dwarf, squatting on a rock before a gateway, the following enigma: “Behold this gateway, dwarf! . . . It has two aspects. Two paths come together here: no one has ever reached their end. This long lane behind us: it goes on for an eternity. And that long lane ahead of us—that is another eternity. They are in opposition to one another, these paths; they abut on one another: and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is written above it: ‘Instant.’ But if one were to follow them further and ever further and further: do you think, dwarf, that these paths would be in eternal opposition?” Questioned this way, and ever according to Zarathustra’s story, “Everything straight lies, murmured the dwarf disdainfully. All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.”13 Though he easily found the key to the enigma, and easily understood that, far from contradicting each other, the two paths formed but one; in

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other words, that time is a circle, the dwarf promptly brought Zarathustra’s wrath on himself, when Zarathustra answered: “Spirit of Gravity! . . . do not treat this too lightly! Or I shall leave you squatting where you are, Lamefoot—and I have carried you high! Behold this instant! . . . From this gateway Instant a long, eternal lane runs back: an eternity lies behind us. Must not all things that can run have already run along this lane? Must not all things that can happen have already happened, been done, run past? And if all things have been here before: what do you think of this instant, dwarf? Must not this gateway, too, have been here—before? And are not all things bound fast together in such a way that this instant draws after it all future things? Therefore—draws itself too? For all things that can run must also run once again forward along this long lane. And this slow spider that creeps along in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you at this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things—must we not all have been here before?—and must we not return and run down that other lane out before us, down that long, terrible lane—must we not return eternally?”14 What is the incomprehension that provokes and justifies Zarathustra’s wrath? If, in the second formulation of the enigma, Zarathustra insists on the instant and adds that eternal recurrence is also ours, it is clearly because by simply answering that time is a circle—all of whose points are indifferently beginnings and ends, ends and beginnings—the dwarf, contemplating the circle from without as a free spectator, has not heeded the ipseity of the instant. This negligence forbids him access to another dimension of the thought of return. Conversely and positively, only the determination of our relation to the instant is liable to make us understand eternal recurrence; that is, to make us understand in what sense we are comprised in it. Let us again take up the course of our story. No longer awaiting any response from the dwarf, and frightened by his thoughts, conscious and unconscious, Zarathustra suddenly hears a dog howling. This howl, which evokes his childhood, at the same time provokes a vision that, though coming after the enigma, indirectly constitutes its solution. “But there a man was lying! And there! The dog, leaping, bristling, whining; then it saw me coming—then it howled again, then it cried out—had I ever heard a dog cry so for help? And truly, I had never seen the like of what I then saw. I saw a young shepherd writhing, choking, convulsed, his face distorted; and a heavy, black snake was hanging out of his mouth. Had I ever seen so much disgust and pallid horror on a face? Had he, perhaps, been asleep? Then the snake had crawled into his throat—and there it had bitten itself fast. My hand tugged and tugged at the snake— in vain! it could not tug the snake out of the shepherd’s throat. Then

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a voice cried from me: Bite! Bite! Its head off! Bite!—thus a voice cried from me, my horror, my hate, my disgust, my pity, all my good and evil cried out of me with a single cry.—”15 Zarathustra then interrupts his story and, inviting his listeners to guess the enigma, to interpret the vision, he asks them the following four questions: “What did I see in images [Gleichnis]? And who is it that must come one day? Who is the shepherd into whose mouth the snake thus crawled? Who is the man into whose throat all that is heaviest, blackest will thus crawl?” After that, without awaiting any response, Zarathustra continues, to bring his story to an end: “The shepherd, however, bit as my cry had advised him; he bit with a good bite! He spat far away the snake’s head—and sprang up. No longer a shepherd, no longer a man—a transformed being, surrounded with light, laughing! Never yet on earth had any man laughed as he laughed! Oh my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter—— and now a thirst consumes me, a longing that is never stilled.”16 Let us begin with the third question. Who is the young shepherd laying on the ground? It is Zarathustra himself. On the one hand, the howl of the dog plunges him into his earliest childhood. On the other hand, it returns him to the animals who, later on, after having sat up with him for seven days, will tell him: “Being begins in every instant; the ball There rolls around every Here. The middle is everywhere. The path of eternity is crooked.” To these animals, Zarathustra will answer, laughing: “Oh you buffoons and barrel-organs! . . . how well you know what had to be fulfilled in seven days: and how that monster crept into my throat and choked me! But I bit its head off and spat it away. And you—have already made a hurdy-gurdy song of it? I, however, lie here now, still weary from this biting and spitting away, still sick with my own redemption. And you looked on at it all?”17 This dialogue with the animals not only confirms that the young shepherd is indeed the young Zarathustra, as he who must become what he is: the doctor of eternal recurrence announcing the overman and denouncing the last man;18 the dialogue also teaches something else. If the animals—who, like the dwarf, maintain that time is a circle—do not say: “Being begins in every instant,” but rather “being always begins now,” this is because they do not distinguish the instant from the now. And this distinction is impossible for them because the instant never offers itself for viewing; in other words, because only the one who stands in it or can stand in it has access to it. Yet what does “to stand in the instant” mean? In the first formulation of the enigma, Zarathustra uses an expression whose uncanniness Heidegger will underscore. The two paths that come to coincide under the gateway “affront one another.”19 Such a frontal shock is possible only

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for someone who, in the instant, is able to confront the future as well as the past, and the instant denotes the mode in which the one who can understand and conceive eternal recurrence belongs to it. Now, to confront or stand up to the future and the past is not to be outside the one and the other; it is not to be an indifferent spectator of the one or the other. To confront means to face, to affront; the instant is the site of a confrontation, and consequently, of a decision. It thus belongs to the very meaning of the instant to be decisive. Is there not, however, an incompatibility between the necessity of eternal recurrence and the decisive character of the instant? From the sudden emergence of the thought of return, Nietzsche asked himself the following question: “If everything is necessary, in what sense do I determine my actions?” To this he immediately answered: “Thought and belief constitute a weight, which in comparison to all the rest, weighs more heavily. You say that the food, the site, the air, society changes and determines you? But your opinions do so still more, since they make you decide for this food, this place, this air and this society.—If you incorporate the thought of thoughts, it will transform you. In relation to everything you want to do, the question: ‘is it such that I would want to do it an innumerable number of times?’—this question is the supreme weight.”20 The decision could therefore not modify the circular movement of forces which, whether organic or inorganic, are subject to eternal recurrence qua the original and necessary law of their movement. But it can modify the thoughts or values that command the distribution of those forces. To decide is not freely to avail oneself of forces, but to freely arrange forces. “The most powerful thought requires much force, previously dedicated to other goals, it thus performs a reorganization [so wirkt er umbildend], it does not create new force, but new laws for the movement of force. Therein lies, however, the possibility for some individuals to determine and order anew their affects.”21 This redistribution of forces concerns not only the body, which, as a domination formation and moral phenomenon, cannot but reorganize itself with a change of evaluation; it also concerns the world in its totality. Indeed, on the one hand, the world, in the midst of which the body lives, is constituted on the basis of the values according to which that body lives—the world of identical cases being correlative to a will to power given to preserving values, and independent of the activity or reactivity of values, the world remains “a product of our evaluations—namely, of those that remained equal to themselves.”22 On the other hand, by virtue of the finiteness of the quantum of force and the form of space, forces are so interdependent that “each instant signifies a global displacement of all the modifications.”23 Nothing is then shielded from the decision.

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Nietzsche often insisted on the tremendous implications of the instantaneous decision. Two years after having noted that “each of a man’s actions exerts on everything that is to come a vast unlimited influence,” he will specify that “the first question is by no means whether we are content with ourselves, but whether we are content with anything at all. If we affirm a single instant, we thereby affirm not only ourselves but all of existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in ourselves nor in things: and if but a single time our soul like a harp string from joy has trembled and rung out, then all eternity was needed to determine this event—and in this single instant of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”24 The instant is thus decisive. It decides everything in sovereignty, and this is why it must be understood to be a “head.” But if the instant is always the instant of decision, then from whence does the decision draw its criterion? Does the decision draw its rule from the instant itself, or conversely, is a rule outside the instant imposed upon it? The importance of this question must not be underestimated, as it ultimately concerns the sovereignty of the instantaneous decision itself. To answer it, let us begin with a note from the summer of 1881. “My doctrine says: live in such a way that you would desire to live anew, that is the task—you will live anew in any case! To the one to whom effort brings the highest feeling, let him strive: to the one to whom rest brings the highest feeling, let him rest; to the one to whom the fact of involving himself, of following, of obeying brings the highest feeling, let him obey. MIGHT he but become conscious of WHAT gives him the highest feeling and not recoil before any means! Eternity is at stake therein!”25 This doctrine sets forth two propositions, one in the indicative mode: “you will live anew in any case,” the other in the imperative: “to live in such a way that you would desire to live anew.” To elucidate the decision’s criterion thus comes down to understanding how these two propositions—conjugated in two different modes (and which might say the same thing if we could disregard this difference)— are conjoined to each other. What does the proposition in the indicative mode mean? It establishes a necessity: whatever the instant about which I decide, it will come back such as I have decided it. To a dying man, Zarathustra said: “See! You die and pass on now and disappear: and there is nothing that remains of you as a ‘you,’ for souls are as mortal as bodies. But this same power of causes that this time created you will return and must create you again: you, grain of dust amidst dust, you belong to the causes on which the return of all things depends. And when one day you are reborn, it will not be for a new life, or a better one, or a similar one; it will be for the same identical life as that in which you now decide on the smallest and greatest things.”26 The necessity described by the indicative

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proposition is thus indeed that of my own return and that of the world from which I am inseparable such as I am at this instant; for, as a product of my evaluations, this world is the correlate of my body. Belonging to the causes on which the return of all things depends, I can decide about them instantaneously, since, in the world of will to power, all forces are instantaneously coordinated, and since there is strictly speaking no causal succession. In other words, “if all things are a fatum, then I am also a fatum for all things.”27 However, while it is necessary for me to decide on my life, and while the life I decide on here, in this instant, is the life that will eternally return, there is no necessity in deciding one way or another, i.e., according to certain values instead of others, or even in favor of certain values rather than others. In short, inasmuch as there is a necessity that I decide, there is no necessity as to what I must decide. And that is why a criterion is required, which will have to take an imperative form since it concerns the will. Assuming we may speak in this way here, the indicative proposition expresses the ratio essendi of the imperative one. What does it mean, then, to urge us “to live in such a way that you would desire to live anew?” To live in such a way is to live with “the highest feeling.” What feeling is at stake here? As Nietzsche attaches no object to it here, the highest feeling could only be that which the highest life has for itself. Now, recall that the will to power as essence of life is a feeling, even a plurality of feelings. At the time when he began to conceptualize will to live as will to power, Nietzsche noted: “To will, a pressing very pleasant feeling! It is the phenomenon that accompanies every outburst of force.”28 The highest feeling thus designates the will to power, and to live in such a way as to want to live anew; to live with the highest feeling of life, is not only to live by the will to power, but also for it. How is that possible? For this, it is necessary to “BE ABLE to become conscious of WHAT gives . . . the highest feeling and not to recoil before any means.” What is the impact of the emphasized clause? To become conscious of what procures the highest feeling is to become conscious of the conditions of possibility for such a feeling. Relative to will to power, these conditions are none other than values. To become conscious of what procures the highest feeling is thus to determine the values that allow the will to power to be itself. But also, and by the same token, it is to identify or recognize the values that allow the will to power not to be itself, by obliging it to turn back against itself. In other words, eternal recurrence is an imperative, because corporeal life and the will to power that is its origin can be commanded by different values. Wherein lies the principle of such a difference? In specifying that becoming-conscious of those values that allow the will to power to be itself, requires “not recoiling before any means,” Nietzsche gives us the answer. Not to recoil before any means is to be

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afraid of nothing. It is thus to be free from the pathic and reactive principle of humanization. To be able to become conscious of what procures the highest feeling thus means being able to perform the revaluation of all reactive values, without which eternal recurrence would be nothing less than “the most supreme form of nihilism.”29 Nietzsche—who will subsequently show that pleasure accompanies every form of intensification of will to power, and for whom, more generally, destroying simply meant overcoming and reconstructing on a vaster scale—wrote in his first note devoted to eternal recurrence: “But now comes the weightiest knowledge, and makes all modes of life frightfully concernful: an absolute excess of pleasure MUST be demonstrated, otherwise our choice must be the annihilation of ourselves with regard to humanity as a means of annihilating humanity itself.”30

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4

The Incorporation of Truth

By opening a possibility, the doctrine of recurrence expresses a necessity, since it means that it is possible to determine the value of the instant whose return is, in any case, necessary. This is to say, first, that the revaluation of values springs from eternal recurrence. The first time that Nietzsche uses the expression “revaluation of all values,” it is as subtitle to a book project entitled “Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence.”1 Shortly thereafter, he will specify that “without freedom for morality,” without “a revaluation of all values,” the thinking of recurrence could not be “borne [ertragen].”2 This is to say, furthermore, that, relative to the revaluation of nihilist values, which is absolutely inseparable from it (and if living in eternity is “a task that lays claim to us at each instant” since each instant returns eternally), the thinking of eternal recurrence provokes the “great crisis,” the “holy resolution,” the “decision.”3 However, if the principal and criterion of the great decision is the distinction between active and reactive values, how can this principial distinction govern the instant itself? Is it possible that the criterion of the instantaneous decision is outside the instant of decision, and can we dissociate the decisive instant from that with regard to which it decides, as from that according to which it decides? Evidently not. The instant would then lose its sovereignty, and with it its own decisive character; it would no longer be more than an indifferent now, liable to be made decisive elsewhere; the institution of new values would then constitute a separate task and the eternal recurrence could no longer be the thought of thoughts, the great knowledge, or the heaviest weight. We must therefore understand how the instant offers, by itself, the criterion for the decision that it indeed is. The instant is only accessible to him who stands fast in it, and it is decisive only for him who stands fast therein. But how to stand fast in the instant when the latter passes like a flash? Is the instant not that which, par excellence, forbids any holding and positing? The moment there is not “a single instant of being in the rigorous sense,”4 the only conceivable way of holding fast in the instant consists not in holding it back, but in holding oneself, in abiding with it eternally. To abide in the decisive instant is to decide for the eternity of its return. However, if a whole eternity flows between two instants, if the instants cannot succeed each 298

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other since they are separated, the ones from the others, by a complete revolution of the great ring, then how would eternal recurrence not destroy the abiding it is supposed precisely to ensure? Nietzsche gave an answer to this question, which attests obliquely that eternal recurrence must never be understood against the horizon of onto-logic. On the contrary and indefatigably, he called for a critique, a setting out of play, and a reduction of ontology. “You suppose you will have a long rest until your rebirth—but do not be deceived! Between the last instant of consciousness and the first glimmer of the new life lies ‘no time [keine Zeit]’—it passes as quickly as a flash of lightning even though living creatures measure it in billions of years and even could not measure it. Intemporality and succession are consistent with each other, the moment the intellect is out of play.”5 The eternal recurrence of the instant as rightly decisive is therefore not something that comes to it from without, but its very structure, its sole conceivable identity. Does that imply a criterion of decision, an evaluation? Yes. Indeed, from the moment that standing fast in the instant is deciding for the eternity of its return, no decision is possible if it presupposes being and conservative or reactive values. This is because the eternal recurrence—which constitutes the instant as such—is that of becoming, for which being is both its halting and its negation. However, if the belief in being contradicts the instanteousness of the decision, this is because every instantaneous decision as such implies values that give free rein to becoming, only to exclude those that give rise to being. The instant is only what it is in returning eternally. And it could not return without all of becoming also returning, and without the decision that it is, drawing, consequently, its rules from the only values liable to agree with becoming by allowing it to become without fixing it in being. To decide on the instant by abiding in it is therefore possible only on the basis of active values, and it is impossible on that of reactive or preserving values. This is first to say that the instant (Augenblick) is in itself revaluing; it is “a gaze [Blick] that posits values.”6 This is because, by itself, it provides the criterion for the decision that it cannot fail properly to be. In the highest sense, which is here the only relevant one, every decision decides—but not according to one or another value, rather in favor of one evaluation against another, in favor of one morality against another. This is to say, then, that considered on the basis of the decisive instant, eternal recurrence includes, as its principle and its consequence, the revaluation of reactive values, and finally that the imperative proposition founds, like a ratio cognoscendi, the indicative proposition, because it alone is capable of accounting for the decisive ipseity of the instant—an ipseity without which eternal recurrence would not concern me and could not be mine.

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This is the same ipseity without which, consequently, the indicative proposition “you shall relive in any case” would be devoid of sense. Before being the site, however, of a confrontation between values and some moral phenomenon, is the instant not that of a confrontation between the past and the future? Is it not a “temporal” phenomenon; in other words, is the revaluing character of the instant really originary? However that may be, the instant is decisive. Yet what would it mean to decide for the past or for the future? If I decide for the future, I also create the past, since in making the old a function of the new I confer on the old the meaning of the new. However, if I decide for the past and make all novelty to come a simple function of that past, then I reproduce identical cases without creating anything new. In the first case, intensification is possible; in the second, only preservation is possible. To decide for the past is to decide for reactive values of preservation, and to decide for the future is to make a decision in favor of active values of intensification. The revaluing character of the instant is thus indeed first, and the instant is not originally a temporal form, at least not in the traditional sense of time. Unaware of the decisive and revaluing character of the instant, unable to understand that the instant is never a simple form, but always the articulation of a drama,7 the dwarf, the animals, and all those who relate to existence in the mode of spectators can assert that time is a circle of nows, all of them equally indifferent, and that everything comes back to the same. Of the two propositions defining the doctrine of recurrence, they retain and grasp only the indicative one. “Everything returns eternally” then means that everything is equal and equally without value, since there is no value without hierarchy and inequality. Reduced to the sole claim that everything eternally returns equally to the same thing, eternal recurrence is, once the belief in being is revoked, the only conceivable foundation for equality in general, the only conceivable foundation of logic, of ontological and technical knowledge, in a word, nihilism. It is thus an essentially incomplete version of eternal recurrence that we find at the basis of the system of identical cases and that justifies the identity of cases. However, and we must insist on this, this foundation could not be recognized as such, in its incompleteness, without a prior understanding of the imperative proposition, which is the ratio cognoscendi of the “everything returns.” To understand that is to proceed to the revaluation of all reactive values. If philosophy has, at least, the task of founding knowledge, then it could not do so without destroying all reactive values, without turning back against that which it was and to which it was tied, that is, subordinated. This destruction nevertheless assumes that the grandeur of what it destroys would not yet have turned into in-

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significance, would not have been totally leveled down, but would remain recognizable in its very grandeur. “I have, from childhood on, pondered the existence conditions of the wise [Existenz-Bedingungen des Weisen]; and I do not want to silence my joyous conviction that he has now again become possible in Europe—perhaps for only a short time.”8 The ultimate foundation of ontological body and of knowledge is thus accessible only in and through its destruction, only in and through the creation of a superior body, only in and through that revaluation that bestows on eternal recurrence its complete meaning. When he asserts that “the essence of the modern power-driven machine” is “one offshoot of the eternal return of the same,”9 Heidegger is saying essentially the same thing. Although he will also add to this, that eternal recurrence does not arise completely from the essence of technology and is therefore perhaps not the thinking through which metaphysics comes to its end. We can henceforth return directly to the vision and to Zarathustra’s questions to interpret the former and respond to the latter. Decapitating in a single bite the heavy black serpent that threatens to strangle him (a bite as instantaneous as a blow or as the wink of an eye [Augenblick]), the young shepherd decides between the recumbent position and the upright stance, between disgust and laughter. Now, here, disgust and laughter have no object other than life itself. They are correlative with two modes of our relationship to life itself, with two types of corporeal life and evaluations. Disgust is the affect of a defeated life. It is that of a will to power ordered according to reactive values, of will to power as will to assimilation and equalization. As Zarathustra explains to his animals, The great disgust at man—it choked me and had crept into my throat: and what the prophet prophesied: “It is all one, nothing is worthwhile, knowledge chokes.”

And he continues: “A long twilight limps in front of me, a mortally weary, death-intoxicated sadness which speaks with a yawn. “The man of whom you are weary, the little man, recurs eternally”—thus my sadness yawned and dragged its feet and could not fall asleep. The human earth became to me a cave, its chest caved in, everything living became to me human decay and bones and moldering past. My sighs sat upon all the graves of man and could no longer rise; my sighs and questions croaked and choked and gnawed and wailed by day and night: “Alas, man recurs eternally! The little man recurs eternally!” I had seen them both naked, the greatest man and the smallest man: all too similar to one another,

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even the greatest all too human! The greatest all too small!—that was my disgust at man! And eternal recurrence even for the smallest! that was my disgust at all existence!10

Yet this disgust at all existence bears exclusively on the human, all too human version of it, on “the earth of little men”; in short, on the world of ontological knowledge and technology, which has, as its principle, eternal recurrence in its single, indicative mode, reduced to its dwarf version, which is to say abstracted from every decisive revaluation. In fact, Zarathustra is not only strangled by disgust for man, but above all by morality, and it is the second disgust that fundamentally gives rise to the first. A note contemporary with the writing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra attests this, confirming the revaluating dimension of the shepherd’s bite, the decisive instant. “Zarathustra: ‘as long as your morality hung over me, I breathed like someone asphyxiated. And so I strangled that serpent. I wanted to live, therefore he had to die.”11 The heavy black serpent, making man into an object of disgust, is the emblem of reactive values, whether these are Judeo-Christian or ontological values. It is the emblem of European nihilism, which threatens the body from within because it is its axiological principle. By deciding to cut off its head, Zarathustra gets back up, instantaneously, and laughs with a laugh that has never yet rung out in the world of men, of little men. Corresponding to a life victorious over nihilism, laughter is the affect of a will to power aligned with active values, on whose basis all of existence is transfigured. By cutting off the serpent’s head in a single blow, Zarathustra becomes the thinker of eternal recurrence and of the overman, the creator of a superior body. “Goal: to reach the overman in an instant.”12 To the question, “What do I see in images?” we can thus answer: Zarathustra sees his own birth. Is this possible, and is it not absurd to suppose that whosoever—even were it Zarathustra—could be the spectator of and actor in his own birth? No doubt it is; yet the birth in question here is that of the thinker to his own thought, that is to say, a birth for which the thinker could only be, in principle, a resolute agent, since the serpent cannot be ripped out from the outside. Of the four questions that Zarathustra addresses to his listeners, two have not yet received an answer. One of them asks, Who is it that must come once again? And the other, Who is the man in whose throat creeps all that is blackest and heaviest? In formulating these questions, at the moment when he does so, Zarathustra highlights the authentically dramatic character of his vision. What is, in fact, the order of the narrative? Zarathustra relates first that he summoned the young shepherd to bite the serpent that strangled him, whereupon he interrupts his narra-

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tion with his four questions. He then takes it up again, describing both the way in which the shepherd bit the serpent and the way in which he got up after having decapitated it. The questions thus intervene before the decision is taken, but after it has become inevitable. Yet, at that moment, if Zarathustra’s listeners already know that everything returns eternally, they do not yet know what it is that returns, since Zarathustra is precisely now attempting to make them understand this—on the basis of the instant. By asking, before the decision is made, Who is it that must once again come? Zarathustra would have those listening to him grasp the ipseity of the instant. This means that what must return is a who and not a what, and Zarathustra would have his audience understand that eternal recurrence concerns the instant insofar as we are it and, above all, such as we decide to be that instant. In short, Zarathustra calls us to the decision. And, in asking, Who is the man in whose throat creeps all that is heaviest and blackest? Zarathustra attempts, with this fourth and final question, to make us understand that—without the decisive and instantly revaluing coup de dent—the situation of the shepherd lying on the ground could well be eternally our own. He thereby points to the stakes of the decision. If the shepherd in whose throat the serpent creeps is the young Zarathustra, the one in whose throat all that is heaviest and darkest will creep is none other than the last man. And, when Nietzsche claims to have created him at the same time as his contrary, the overman, he is describing the ultimate dramatic structure of the decisive instant. As long as we take the instant for a pure, temporal form, and not for a drama, we will not accede to eternal recurrence, which means that we shall be included in it without being able to decide about it and, consequently, without managing to comprehend it. Immediately after having posed that fourth and final question, Zarathustra took up the course of his narrative by way of an adversative, decisive conjunction: “the shepherd, however, bit . . . [der Hirt aber biss . . .].”13 At the end of this explication of eternal recurrence, its double form (indicative and imperative), and the revaluating character of the instant, are we in a position to respond to the question of whether truth is liable to incorporation? Can we determine the conditions of possibility of a body, superior to the ontological body as also to the Judeo-Christian one? Can we establish the conditions of possibility of a veridical and active body, which is also to say the conditions of possibility of a world that would no longer be the product of those reactive values that assure the enduring reign of technology? Yes, but only after adding the following: however fleeting it may be—and precisely because it is fleeting—the instant is the originary and unique truth. In a note immediately following the surfacing of the thought of recurrence, in which he endeavors to

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show that “pursuing the process that constituted the essence of the species,” science works against every hierarchy and against all individualization (in other words, onto-logic is the conservative structure of the body), Nietzsche wrote by way of concluding: “The species is the more vulgar error, the individual the subtler error, it comes later on. He struggles for his existence, for his new taste, for his relatively unique position in regard to all things—he holds this as better than the general taste which he holds in contempt. He wants to rule [herrschen]. But he then discovers that he is, himself, a variable thing, that his taste is variable; with his subtlety he divines the secret that there is no individual, that in the smallest instant he is something other than in the next one, and that his conditions of existence are those of innumerable individuals: the infinitely small instant is the highest reality and truth, a lightning image [Blitzbild] from out of the eternal flow. So he learns: how all knowledge that enjoys rests on the vulgar error of the species, on the subtler errors of the individual, and on the most subtle of errors, that of the creative instant.”14 As the unique flash or sparkle of a becoming that alone is true, the instant is the highest truth and reality, that is to say, the least vulgar of errors, since to name it is already to bestow a minimum of being on it, and thereby suspend its passing. Consequently, all that is founded exclusively on this unique originary truth, qua the least error, all that is founded on the instant will itself be instantaneously averred. And if the instant may decide all things, everything may, conversely, depend on it. But how can the instant be creative and what can it create? The response lies in the question itself. The instant is truly creative when it is truly an instant, and it is truly an instant when, as revaluative, it determines [décider de] the body and the world. If the body is a moral phenomenon, and the world a product of our evaluations, then every radical and instantaneous modification of values instantaneously creates a new body and a new world. Yet we have just shown (1) that the instant is the originary truth; (2) that eternal recurrence is the structure of the decisive instant; (3) that the instant is decisive only in deciding in favor of active values that, in alone allowing becoming and its return, alone allow the instant to be truly the instant. Eternal recurrence is thus the active, originary truth on the basis of which reactive, ontological “truth” can and must be understood as a falsification. Nietzsche never recurs to the expression “active truth,” but he certainly made the concept possible. If to will the truth is to will to make constant a world in becoming, then “the truth is not something that would be there, that would be to find or to discover—but something that is to be created and that gives its name to a process, or still more to a will to overcome [Willen der Überwältigung], which in itself has no end: to in-

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troduce truth as a process in infinitum, an active determination, not as a becoming-conscious of something that would be firmly and definitively ‘in itself.’ It is a word for the ‘Will to power.’ ”15 To this, Nietzsche immediately added, “Life is founded on the premise of a belief in something enduring and regularly returning; more powerful is life; vaster still must be the world estimatable and, as it were, made thing-like [errathbare, gleichsam seiend gemachte Welt]. Logicization, rationalization, systematization as life’s auxiliary means.”16 From truth as the adequation between logical knowledge and things ready-made, from reactive truth that relies on beings as given and rests on the belief in constant being, it is possible, then, to distinguish active truth, which, in willing the eternal recurrence of becoming, creates this adequation itself by creating the terms among which it is liable to come about. In the active sense, truth is not the establishment or the assessment of some adequation. It is rather an originary creation or legislation. It is a way of making-constant, a way of being becoming itself. Now, this no longer proceeds from belief, but from the will to eternal recurrence, which itself does not proceed from weakness, but from strength. In light of the distinction between reactive and active truth, it becomes difficult to maintain, as Heidegger does, that Nietzsche modified the essence of adequation without ever ceasing to hold adequation to be the essence of truth.17 Understood as creating adequation, the truth is no longer adequation but freedom. No doubt, Nietzsche did not explicitly define truth as freedom. However, when Zarathustra teaches that “willing liberates,” and that therein lies “the true doctrine of the will and freedom,”18 he is ultimately not saying anything different, since—in the active and originary sense of a making-consistent by way of eternal recurrence—the truth is another word for will to power. Contrary to the adequation that, as reactive truth, is founded upon fear, the active truth— with which revaluation, as the “highest degree of self-determination,”19 is strictly aligned—is founded upon courage. “Truth and courage only among those who are free. (Truth, a sort of courage.)”20 And it is because he implicitly understands truth as freedom and courage that, after having qualified the path of freedom as “hard,” Nietzsche can likewise qualify truth as “hard,” and hold “the service of truth” to be the “hardest of all service.”21 In willing my own eternal recurrence, I thereby ensure my own constancy and that of the world; I make truth possible. The latter is no longer a means in service to life and the body. It is rather the inverse; the most powerful corporeal life becomes a means in service of the truth. Nietzsche described this reversal when, under the title “In media vita,” he wrote,

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No, life has not disappointed me! On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year—ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge [Experiment der Erkennenden]—and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery.—And knowledge itself: let it be something else for others; for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to such a bed, or a diversion, or a form of leisure—for me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play. “Life as a means to knowledge”—with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily, too. And who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?22

What is more, to raise life and body to the rank of assistants in knowledge—in other words, to intensify the struggle among the drives to increase knowledge—is to live in such a way that truth is possible, and thereby to make it possible that the truth be a task inseparable from the positing of active values, which permit the return of the instant because they permit the return of becoming. To will one’s own eternal recurrence is thus to will to live according to the values that intensify life’s power. It is to will that truth exist, and to will to create truth itself. Further, to will according to active values and to will active values is not to will halfway,23 through reaction or servile adaptation to another will; it is rather to will in the proper sense of the term: to command. The will to active truth is thus the truth of the active will: the will to power in its eternal recurrence. In opposing on multiple occasions the “I will” to the “I must,” Nietzsche ultimately says nothing so very different.24 As the revaluation of reactive values into active values is essential to the decisive instant whose structure is eternal recurrence, to stand in the decisive instant by willing its eternal return is ipso facto to effect a revaluation. In reorganizing forces and modifying ideas or values that rule the drives, this revaluation transforms body and world. The eternal recurrence of the revaluating instant consequently permits the incorporation of the truth, the creation of a body actively powerful, and the transfiguration of the ontological and technological world. By standing in the instant—and doing so is ultimately to think the thought of thoughts— by thus standing in the decision, the body makes itself true and actively powerful. True, because the instant is the originary truth, and because its eternal recurrence cannot fail to eternalize the truth that it is. Actively powerful, because the values that permit the return of the instant free the becoming-of-power, while assuring it a constancy other than false and ontological. Having become true and actively powerful, and as a creator

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of eternal truth, the body can now give rise to world other than the reactive one of ontological knowledge and technology, since, in any case, the world is relative to our values. However, if every force that returns eternally is active, eternal recurrence must be understood, conversely, as the very principle of the activity of forces and values. It must be understood as the principle on whose basis “the active force that creates in the midst of what is accidental”25—that is, in the midst of a configuration of forces owing to chance—can be known and recognized and, along with this active force, the difference between activity and reactivity. Eternal recurrence is thus the ultimate foundation of the difference between values. And if revaluation is the consequence of eternal recurrence, then this is because the latter is the principle that institutes active values. To incorporate the ultimate truth of the flux by willing the eternal recurrence of the revaluating instant is to ensure one’s own constancy. It is to stand, by and thanks to oneself, without relying passively on anything else.26 After having cut off the head of the heavy black snake, the young shepherd who was lying on the ground gets up in a single bound. To put it another way, the eternal recurrence of the decisive instant grants an upright stance to that backbone that is the will to power; and if, after having defined laws—or values—as “backbones,” Zarathustra sets himself the task of abrogating morality as the “law of laws,” thanks to a “superior law,”27 this is because eternal recurrence provides a new uprightness to the spine. What is this new uprightness? Nothing else than a resurrection of oneself by oneself, a resurrection of the body by and unto itself. Indeed, while eternal recurrence is the return of the decisive instant, it remains that the instants are separated from each other by “a great, a long, an immense year of becoming”;28 a year during which the fortuitous, instantaneous domination formation—the body—that I am, will invariably become disordered and dissolve in the chaotic becoming of forces. Consequently, and in the first place: either the great year of becoming returns and, with it, the body that I am; or indeed it does not return and neither do I. In other words, if I did not stand in the decisive instant— and to stand means to effect the revaluation—then I would be carried off in the flux of becoming for having lived in a transient fashion, and for having grasped myself as something fleeting. Conversely, if I do stand in the revaluating instant and will its eternal recurrence, then—upright thanks to myself—I should be eternally revived, not to another life but to this same life and world, for which I decide in the instant. And it is this eternal resurrection that will be my mode of life. Nietzsche says nothing other when, under the impact of the thought of recurrence, he observes, “This doctrine is mild toward those who do not believe in it, it has no hell and no threats. Whoever does not believe has a fleeting life in his

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consciousness.”29 In light of eternal recurrence, the resurrection of the body must not be understood in the objective sense of the genitive, but rather in the subjective one. In fact, it is the very occasion of the uprightness and constancy of the body once these are no longer taken in an ontological and reactive sense and when they cease resting on the belief in being to become functions of becoming and its truth. Hence, this resurrection that is confused with the ipseity of the active body is the condition of possibility of every other form of resurrection of bodies. Does Nietzsche himself not intimate as much when, in regard to “the man of knowledge and conscience,” he writes: “as awkward as a corpse, dead in life, buried, ensconced: he can no longer stand [stehen], this cowering, lurking one: how could he ever—resurrect [auferstehen]!”30 Resurrection according to eternal recurrence nevertheless possesses another implication. Indeed, if the ground of constant being has slipped away under our feet, insofar as ontological knowledge has progressively turned back on and against the vulgar errors that founded it, the death of God has deprived us still further of any support, any holds. “Some trust in chariots and horses, but we will remember the name of the Lord our God; they are brought down and fallen: but we are risen and stand upright,” said the Psalmist whom Saint Paul will later echo, when he declares: “thou standest by faith.”31 Already in 1871, Nietzsche states, “Christianity is overcome and provides no further foothold [Halt].” And when, in 1884, he addresses the “free spirit” to tell him, “Whoever lost That, which you have lost, halts nowhere [macht nirgends Halt],” this is just before giving to the “independent ones” the following advice: “you must teach yourselves to stand, or you fall over.”32 It is clear, then, that, as a counterweight to the death of God, eternal recurrence must allow the overman to hold himself upright by himself, to get up and to get up again, actively to resurrect and not to be passively revived. Nietzsche once said of eternal recurrence that it should take the place of metaphysics and religion33—and, here, “to take the place of” does not mean to take the same place. Eternal recurrence is thus victorious resurrection to the precise degree that it allows the overman to get up again, to recover, from the fall into which the death of God has cast man. “Are we still standing on our feet? Are we not continuously falling?”34 cried the madman as he proclaimed the death of the holiest and most powerful. Yet, this resurrection, as a victory over the death of God whose support it counterbalances, is in no case a victory over death in general. Does that mean, for all that, that it does not concern death? Not at all. On a number of occasions, Nietzsche underscored the necessity of rethinking the latter. “Death is to be reinterpreted [umzudeuten],”35 he noted, slightly before the emergence of his great thought. But from whence could this reinterpretation draw

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its source if not from eternal recurrence? Under the title Noon and Eternity, Nietzsche planned a work whose penultimate part was to have been devoted to “the ring of rings,” and the last part to “a new dying.”36 Drawing its principle from eternal recurrence, this new way of dying was to obey the maxim whereby one must live in such a way as to desire to live again. In the case of death, what can this imperative really mean if not that we live in such a way as to be able to die victoriously, from the death we shall eternally have willed? “Death. We must turn the dumb physiological fact into a moral necessity. To live in such a way as to have also and at the right moment one’s will to death.”37 In short, if the resurrection according to eternal recurrence is not a victory over death, it makes death into victory, that is, into a festival of the will. To reflect on eternal recurrence is thus “to come to the point where the highest feast of humanity is procreation and death.”38 This interpretation of eternal recurrence calls for one final remark, and it raises one last problem. That Nietzsche frequently determines eternal recurrence as a belief does not imply that it might be a belief like the others. If, generally speaking, to believe is to hold-something-astrue, then eternal recurrence—by ensuring the possibility of every sort of “holding” because it allows me to hold myself up without support—can and must be defined as a belief, as the belief of beliefs. But, and here lies the difficulty: does eternal recurrence unfold a resurrectional power greater than what God exerted on bodies by granting them justification? Is resurrection according to eternal recurrence that sur-resurrection we are seeking? As long as we have not examined the question of whether, and how, eternal recurrence permits the justification of all existence; as long as we have not determined the essence of justice on the basis of eternal recurrence, it is clear that we will not be able to answer this final question.

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5

The Priestly Revaluation

If eternal recurrence made the revaluation of certain values necessary, and these values were reactive and preserving, it remains that there are two kinds of reactive values: ontological values and Judeo-Christian values, whose shared reactivity authorizes their conjunction and whose conjunction defines European nihilism. However, although it is shared, the reactivity of these different values is not necessarily an equal reactivity. The moment that God occupies metaphysics to make it his shadow, European “morality” could scarcely fail to be more Judeo-Christian than Greek. Philosophy could only become what it was called to be, that is, the servant of Christian theology, by virtue of the superiority of the values proper to Christianity over those proper to philosophy itself. God became master of metaphysics because Judeo-Christian values are more powerful, which is to say, more powerfully reactive than ontological values. Since, in all things, only the superior degrees matter, the revaluation that shapes the content of eternal recurrence must be fundamentally relative to JudeoChristian values. Nietzsche clearly understood it this way, and a few simple philological considerations will suffice to confirm this. At the end of the summer of 1885, once the last part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra was finished, Nietzsche developed the project for a work entitled The Will to Power. Its subtitles would be, in succession: Attempt at a new exposition of events [einer neuen Auslegung alles Geschehens]1 and Attempt at a new exposition of the world [einer neuen Welt-Auslegung].2 And starting from the summer of 1886, it becomes Attempt at a revaluation of all values [einer Umwerthung aller Werthe].3 The final outline of The Will to Power carries the date 26 August 1888.4 Starting in September of the same year, the work to come takes as its title Revaluation of All Values.5 The two most detailed sketches6 are organized into four books: “The Antichrist: Attempt at a Critique of Christianity” is the title of the first book, “Dionysus: Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence” being the last. The middle books will change positions from one sketch to the next, although they preserve a common content: a critique of philosophy as nihilism and a critique of morality as the most fatal form of ignorance. If the critique of Christianity is placed at the opening of the work, and the philosophy of eternal recurrence at the end, this is because the former is at the foundation of the latter, and the axiological 310

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conflict that revaluation implies opposes Dionysus to the Crucified, and eternal recurrence to the Cross. There is more to be noted. At the moment when he publishes The Antichrist, Nietzsche modified the general organization of his project. In fact, we find two title pages in the copy of the work intended for press. One page reads: “The Antichrist: Attempt at a Critique of Christianity, First Book: the Revaluation of All Values”; the later title page reads: “The Antichrist: [Revaluation of All Values], Imprecation Against Christianity.”7 It is because he ultimately assimilated a part to the whole, The Antichrist to the Revaluation . . . that Nietzsche could declare in a letter to Paul Deussen on 26 November 1888: “My Revaluation of All Values, whose principal title was THE ANTICHRIST is finished.”8 Should we then consider The Antichrist as the work to which the multiple projects—successively entitled The Will to Power and Revaluation of All Values—led? Without the slightest doubt, and Nietzsche himself attested to this. From Turin on 22 December 1888, he confided to Peter Gast: “Most curious! Since four weeks, I understand my own writings—more, I appreciate them. Seriously, I never knew what their range was; apart from Zarathustra, I would be lying if I said that they mystified me. It’s the mother with her child: perhaps she loves him, but in perfect ignorance of what the child is.—Now, I am absolutely convinced that everything has worked out, from the beginning,—it is all one and desires unity.”9 If it was only after having assimilated The Antichrist to the Revaluation that Nietzsche was himself able to grasp the unity of his work in its entirety, then the destruction of Christianity must be the cornerstone. The title of The Antichrist refers to him who, according to Saint Paul, “is raised above all that is called God or divine worship so as to take a place in the temple of God”; and the temple of God is the body. The work opens with a proclamation of identity: “—Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans.”10 Nevertheless, Nietzsche could not claim the name of that people whom the Greek gods called happy, felicitous,11 without having himself acceded to it. “We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit out of the labyrinth of thousands of years.”12 What is this happiness whose discovery allows us to get out of the labyrinth? Does it not reside in the establishment of a new table of goods and ills, in a new determination of what is good, what bad, and finally of happiness itself? No doubt, and from the outset Nietzsche takes care to specify this. “What is good?—All that heightens in man the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself [die Macht selbst]. What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that a resistance is overcome.”13 The discovery of the will to power thus not only renews the essence of happiness and,

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correlatively, that of man, it allows us by the same token to exit the labyrinth, that is, to understand nihilism. How and why is this so? The will to power is life inasmuch as it posits active or reactive values. Need we recall, however, that if active values give rise to the intensification of life, reactive values can only give rise to its mere preservation; and from preservation to decline the path is certain. “I consider life itself instinct for growth, for continuation, for accumulation of forces [Häufung von Kräften], for power: where will to power is lacking, there is decline [Niedergang]. My assertion is that this will is lacking in all the supreme values of mankind— that these are values of decline, nihilistic values, which hold sway under the holiest names.”14 And, if the Revaluation of All Values comes ultimately to be confused with The Antichrist, this is because nihilist values find in Christianity their highest expression, their most radical and in that sense, most essential, expression. It is thus not only by virtue of the violence Nietzsche evinces therein, but by virtue of what he is attacking that The Antichrist is indeed, as Heidegger put it, “the frightful book.”15 Why then is Christianity identified with nihilism, or what is this Christianity such that the eternal recurrence of the re-valuating instant could allow us to overcome it? To answer these questions is to pose the problem of the origin of Christianity, a problem Nietzsche will attempt to solve by observing two principles: Christianity is not the opposite of Judaism but its consequence, and Christianity is founded on the falsification of the gospel proclaimed by Jesus. Let us begin by revisiting the history of Israel. Although we must first specify the nature of our task: here, the tradition of Israel concerns us only and exclusively to the degree that, with Christianity as its intermediary, it invested philosophy. That is, only and exclusively insofar as the tradition of Israel can be understood, rightly or wrongly, as the “old covenant,” since it is exclusively in this way that it became philosophically relevant. The question of whether the Talmud is more germane to the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible than the New Testament is not part of the philosophical horizon of this work, and it goes without saying that this determines neither the answer to, nor the importance of, the question before us. As Nietzsche writes, The Jews are the most remarkable people [Volk] of world history because, faced with the question of being or not being, they preferred, with a perfectly uncanny conviction, being at any price: this price was the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, the entire inner world as well as the outer. They defined themselves counter to all those conditions under which a people was previously able to live, was permitted to live; they made of themselves an antithesis to natural conditions—they inverted religion, religious worship, morality, history,

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psychology one after the other in an irreparable way into the contradiction of their natural values [widerspruch zu deren Natur-Werthen]. We encounter the same phenomenon again and in unutterably vaster proportions, although only as a copy:—The Christian Church, in contrast to the “people of saints,” renounces all claim to originality. For precisely this reason the Jews are the most fateful people in world history [das verhängnissvollste Volk der Weltgeschichte]; their after-effect has falsified mankind to such an extent that today the Christian is able to feel anti-Jewish without realizing he is the ultimate consequence of the Jews.16

What is the meaning of this double thesis according to which the Jews constitute the most remarkable and the most fatal people of all of universal history? The Jewish people are remarkable first by virtue of their vitality. Starting in 1870, Nietzsche notes that “the Jew hangs on to life with prodigious tenacity”; that “the Jewish religion has an unspeakable horror of death,” “that well-being on earth is the tendency of Jewish religion,” or again: “the most terrible threat known to the Jew of the Old Testament is not eternal torment but complete annihilation. An unconditional immortality is unknown to the Old Testament. Non-being is the supreme evil.”17 Ten years later, he writes in Daybreak that the Jews form a people “firmly attached to life—like the Greeks and more than the Greeks” and, in 1888, that “the Jewish nation is a nation of the toughest vital energy.”18 From whence come the vitality and tenacity of Israel if not from its faith? For this faith, in fact, life depends entirely on the word of God: “for you the Law is not a vain word but your life.”19 And death, which makes one impure,20 is a separation from God. To hold fast to life is thus to hold fast to God, to praise him: “For Sheol does not glorify thee, death does not celebrate thee; they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy faithfulness. The living, the living, he shall praise thee as I this day.”21 In a unique sense, Yahweh is thus the God of life and, if death is the most terrible of threats, this is because it separates us from his remembrance and his hand.22 The vitality of the Jewish people is not the sole reason for its greatness, which also resides in its moral genius, in the incomparable power of its morality. There too Nietzsche proves consistent. In 1870, he characterizes the Jewish people by “an incorporated moral rigor [Sittlichkeitsrigorosität verkörpert].”23 Several years later, after having denounced “the propagation of that mean-spirited literature that aims to lead the Jews to the slaughter bench as scapegoats [als Sündenböcke aller möglichen öffentlichen und inneren Uebelstände zur Schlachtbank zu führen] for all that can go wrong in public and private affairs,” he speaks of them as the people who, among all the others, “albeit not without our own fault, has

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had the most painful history and to whom we are indebted for the most noble man (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the most powerful book and the most influential morality in the world.”24 Subsequently, and in manifold ways, Nietzsche does not cease emphasizing how Jewish our European morality is. “In our schools,” he notes in 1879–80, “Jewish history is presented as holy history: Abraham is more to us than any person out of Greek or German history: and what we experience in reading the Psalms of David is as different from what is elicited by the songs of Pindar or Petrarch as the native land from the foreign.”25 In 1880 he confides, “I do not know how to explain how it is that the Jews, from among all the nations, would have carried moral sublimity so high, in theory as in practice. Only they arrived at a Jesus of Nazareth; only they at a holy god, only they at sin against him. Together with the prophet, the redeemer— those are their inventions.”26 In The Gay Science he asserts that the Jews “are the moral genius among the nations,” adding shortly thereafter that “the entire moral turn of mind is Jewish.” He writes, in Beyond Good and Evil, that “Europe owes to the Jews the grand style in morality.”27 It is thus clear that the guiding values of European thought, European nihilism, are not Greek but Jewish, Judeo-Christian, and consequently that Nietzsche’s concept of morality did not originate exclusively from Greek onto-logic. The distinction of the Jewish people is also aesthetic in nature. The grand style does not only characterize morality, but also Old Testament poetry. It should be emphasized straightaway that Nietzsche always refused to make the Old Testament into the “shadow of the future,”28 the cipher or figure of Christian revelation. “What can one expect from the effects of a religion which in the centuries of its foundation perpetrated that unheard-of philological buffoonery [unerhörte philologische Possenspiel] concerning the Old Testament: I mean the attempt to pull the Old Testament from under the feet of the Jews with the assertion it contained nothing but Christian teaching and belonged to the Christians as the true people of Israel?”29 That being said, let us return to the poetic grandeur of Israel, which Nietzsche continually emphasized. In 1880, “never was wrath unfolded to the point of such a dark majesty, and with such a wealth of sublime nuances, as with the Jews! What is an angry Zeus before an angry Yahweh!30 Five years later, he writes: “the solemnity of death and a kind of sanctification of suffering on earth have never, up to now, been presented in so beautiful a way as by certain Jews of the Old Testament: even the Greeks could have gone to their school!”31 Moreover, one of the paragraphs of Beyond Good and Evil, which prepares the one devoted to eternal recurrence, begins in this way: “In the Jewish ‘Old Testament,’ the book of divine justice, there are human beings, things, and speeches

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in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it,” and it continues, a few lines below, asserting that “the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone for ‘great’ and ‘small.’ ”32 What does the superiority of Hebraic poetry over Greek poetry mean? Evidently, the aesthetic grandeur of the Jewish people could not be understood independently from its moral grandeur. But what do the two have in common? The one and the other share a grand style. In the spring of 1884, Nietzsche notes: “Connection of the aesthetic and the moral: the grand style wants to be unique, a strong fundamental Will and, above all, dislikes dispersion.”33 In other words, Israel’s morality and aesthetics are in a grand style because the same concentration, the same will to power, and the same God are expressed in the one as in the other. Is this to say that Israel’s aesthetics—supposing that one may speak here of aesthetics—depends essentially on its experience of God? Without the slightest doubt. Israel not only praised the beauty of the world and its creatures, but above that, of God and of his revelations. If the theophanic descriptions of the Old Testament amount to the privileged site of the Hebraic experience, or trial, of the beautiful,34 then the vitality, morality, and beauty of Israel draw their origin and take their power from Israel’s experience of God. The singularity of this experience, from which comes ultimately the incomparable grandeur of Israel, as well as its nobility, is as much due to its power as to the force required to recognize and bear it. “The tension between the God, thought to be ever purer and more distant—and humanity, thought to be ever more sinful—is one of humanity’s great trials-by-force [Kraftversuche der Menschheit]. God’s love for the sinner is miraculous. Why did the Greeks know no such tension between divine beauty and human ugliness? Or between divine knowledge and human ignorance? The mediating bridges between two such chasms would be new creations [Neuschöpfungen], which were not yet there (angel? Revelation? Son of God?).”35 If the power of Israel surpasses that of the Greeks, it is because the Jews were able to live in and by that tension and, to measure the strength thus required, it is enough to recall that ancient Israel never made the resurrection of the dead into an article of faith. One year later, Nietzsche returned to the origin of Christianity starting from the same tension and chasm. After having noted that “all in all, the morality of Europe is Jewish” and that “a profound strangeness still separates us from the Greeks,” he added: “But, as much as the Jews have held man in contempt, and experienced him as at once mean and contemptible, so they formed their God as purer and more distant than any other people had done: they nourished him with all the height and all the goodness that grew in the human

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breast—and this most unusual of sacrifices progressively let a chasm arise between God and man, which would be experienced as terrible. It was only for the Jews that it was possible, and even necessary, that a being [ein Wesen] should cast himself into this chasm—and, what is more, it had to be ‘the God’ who did this, from whom one alone believed and expected something great: the same man who felt himself to be a mediator had first to feel himself to be God to impose this mediating task on himself.”36 Thus understood—has it ever been otherwise?—Christianity could not fail to signify the weakening of Israel, and from this perspective every Christian is a tired Jew. But why is the most remarkable of peoples also the most fatal? To this question, Nietzsche only ever gave one response, whose meaning grew progressively more radical. In 1876, he noted: “That the Jews are the worst people of the earth agrees fully with the fact that it is precisely from among Jews that the Christian doctrine of the complete sinfulness and abjection [Verwerflichkeit] of man arose—a doctrine which they themselves rejected.”37 In Daybreak, he depicts the Jews as “the best haters there have ever been,” and in The Gay Science he attributes the discovery of sin to them.38 Nevertheless, the clearest text on this question dates from 1887, and it is so important that we shall cite it integrally. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters [geistreichsten Hasser]: other kinds of spirit [Geist] hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness. Human history would be altogether too stupid a thing without the spirit that the powerless have introduced into it—let us take at once the most notable example. All that has been done on earth against “the noble,” “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the rulers,” fades into nothing compared with what the Jews have done against them; the Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values [radicale Umwerthung von deren Werthen], that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge. For this alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the people embodying the most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness. It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying “the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessed-

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ness is for them alone—and you, the powerful and the noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!” . . . One knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation . . . In connection with the tremendous and immeasurably fateful initiative provided by the Jews through this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the proposition I arrived at on a previous occasion (Beyond Good and Evil, §195)—that with the Jews there begins the slave revolt in morality: that revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind it and which we no longer see because it—has been victorious . . . 39

We now know why Nietzsche considers the Jews the most fatal of peoples. It was they who proceeded to the radical revaluation of aristocratic values into servile ones and, unleashing the most fundamental of wars, lie at the origin of Christianity. This assessment immediately calls for three remarks. (1) The Jewish people is the most remarkable because it is the most fatal, and it is the most fatal because it is the most remarkable of peoples. The two adjectives are absolutely indissociable. If the revaluation of aristocratic values is an act of spiritual vengeance whose inner drive is hatred, and hatred is always clear-sighted, then the Jews, which is to say their priests, are remarkable for having introduced spirit into history, but fatal for having founded that spirit on hatred and vengeance, on reactivity. Without the spirit which it owes to the Jews, Europe would have remained that “little peninsula protruding [out of] ancient Asia,”40 and technology would not have had the possibility of unfurling its reign. In 1880 Nietzsche noted that “thanks to its Jewish characteristics, Christianity gave to Europeans that Jewish malaise toward oneself, the idea that inner disquiet is the human norm: whence the European’s flight before himself, whence that unheard-of activity; he sticks his head and hands into everything.”41 The problem that arises, then, is the following: how to inherit the spirit without inheriting the hatred; how to bring about a new transvaluation that would not be a new vengeance? (2) If the Jewish priestly revaluation can henceforth be described, this is because it has come into our field of vision, and because the death of God calls for other values. The Jewish revaluation, as the origin of Christianity, is thus the target and the condition of possibility of Nietzsche’s revaluation which, beyond instituting new active values, aims to substitute a new justice for that of God revealed in Christ. (3) However essentially ambiguous as it might be, Nietzsche’s interpretation of the history of Israel has nothing anti-Semitic to it. While it is often difficult—although difficulty never signified impossibility—to dissociate a critique of Judaism from anti-Semitism, Nietzsche

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always took care to do so. We note in passing that he understood “racial struggles” as a consequence of the “madness of nationalities.”42 He stigmatizes “the baseness of the persecution of the Jews,” “anti-Jewish stupidity,” and qualifies anti-Semites as “rabble [Gesindel]” belonging to the “swamp”43 of European culture. Moreover, not only did Nietzsche take up the maxim “never to frequent anyone participating in the “mendacious racialist fraud,” he further took “him who hates or despises foreign blood for a sort of human protoplasm that is not yet an individual.”44 There is thus no doubt that, on the one hand, anti-Semitism belongs to what Nietzsche’s revaluation sets about to destroy—“I wage a pitiless war against anti-Semitism”45—and, on the other hand, “once Christianity is annihilated, one will be more just [gerechter werden] toward the Jews; and this, even as the creators of Christianity and of the highest moral pathos that ever was.”46 In other words, as long as Christianity, and the philosophy that was subject to it, are not surmounted, it will be impossible to do justice to the tradition of Israel such as the Jews themselves understood it. Consequently and above all, it will be impossible to give rise, in that event, to other possibilities. How and why did the Jews effect the first revaluation of values? At what moment in their history—that is, in their relationship to God (since Israel only ever spoke of the one in the shadow of the events of the other)—did the Jews find themselves “placed before the question of being and non-being”? To what “situation of distress” do the Jews owe “their instinct of self-preservation”?47 And, how did “a yes-saying Semitic religion that comes from the dominant classes,” and from which arise the oldest texts of the Old Testament, give way to “a Semitic religion that says no, comes from the oppressed classes,”48 and finds its fulfillment in the New Testament? By distinguishing layers from significantly different epochs in the Old Testament itself, Nietzsche is tacitly referring to the Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israëls [Prolegomena to the History of Israel] by Julius Wellhausen.49 In that work—which marked a decisive turning point in Old Testament studies and which Nietzsche acquired when it came out in 1883,50 only to read it at the beginning of 1888—Wellhausen proposes a reconstruction of the history of Israel, traces of which can be clearly found in sections of The Antichrist devoted to the Jewish people.51 Wellhausen’s project rests on the hypothesis that the Pentateuch (or, more precisely, the Hexateuch, or the Pentateuch expanded to include the Book of Joshua) issues from three original documents of quite different natures. The first document is the Jahvist, whose redaction goes back to the ninth or eighth centuries b.c.e. The Jahvist assembles texts originating from two sources: the Jahvist one, so named because in the story of creation recounted

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therein God is designated by the name Yahweh—and from the Elohist source, which receives its name because in the story of creation to which it gave rise, God is denoted by the common noun Elohim. The second document is constituted by Deuteronomy and dates from the seventh century. Finally, the third and last document is the priestly Code, on the basis of which the first two were recast in the age of Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth and fourth centuries, during and after Exile. Having thus attained its canonic form, the Torah was promulgated and became the cornerstone of a new phenomenon, Judaism, which, precisely by virtue of this innovation, does not cover the entire tradition of Israel. The documentary hypothesis then led Wellhausen to divide the history of the religion of Israel into three periods. The first period, to which the Jahvist documents bear witness, is that of the Monarchy. The kingdom of God merges with that of David and Yahweh is a national, even a warrior god. The second period, to which Deuteronomy corresponds, and which extends from the division of the kingdom of David to the fall of Jerusalem in 587 b.c.e., is marked by the reign of Josiah. Attempting to restore the royal house, the latter reformed the cult, centralizing it to the benefit of the Jerusalemite clergy. The third and final period, whose charter, as it were, is the priestly Code, is that of the Exile and “Mosaic theocracy,” whose principle is “the Law.” Whatever were the many critiques leveled against it, this reconstruction of the religious history of Israel established once and for all that “the Law” is a late phenomenon, whose appearance accompanies the political disappearance of Israel. Consequently, it is thereby established that Moses could not have been its sole author. The situation of distress that placed the Jews before the question of being or non-being—to which they responded by preferring being at any price, that is, by introducing preserving or reactive values [valeurs conservatoires ou réactives]—is therefore that in which Israel found itself following the destruction of the Temple and the armed capture of Jerusalem by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar. The Jewish revaluation thus coincides with the birth of Judaism. In other words, it merges with the constitution of that “Law” which, according to Saint Paul, Christ came to fulfill. To grasp how “the Law” became the center and principle of unity of the Old Testament, we must clearly begin from the latter. According to the Hebraic decree or canon, “the Law” is the title of the Pentateuch.52 It thus becomes a question of determining the reasons why the Pentateuch, itself presented as a narrative into which multiple laws were inserted, could finally have been assimilated to “the Law” or, stated otherwise, how a set of laws, each differing from the others in their formulation, provenance, date, and content, could end by taking on an

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absolute meaning.53 If, in a general fashion, laws always presuppose a determinate social order, on whose basis and for the sake of which they were established and come into force, what then is the order underlying the totality of Vetero-testamentary laws? There can be no single answer to this question, since the history of Israel and its laws extends across several centuries. What then is the social or sacral institution that, initially, conferred meaning and authority on the multiplicity of laws collected in the Old Testament? Unlike much of the laws of the Middle East, this institution is not the monarchy. The Vetero-testamentary laws are not promulgated by a legislating monarch. While many of the laws effectively date from the age of the monarchy, it remains that the Old Testament never makes the slightest reference to a royal or sovereign legislation.54 For Israel, “kingship . . . appears . . . to have been an institution not unconditioned or based simply on itself, but essentially subject to the will of God, as this revealed itself in the prophet’s word, and to subsequent acknowledgement by the elders of the clans.”55 Once the Decalogue acquires force of law through being introduced by the words, “I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,”56 it is clear that the Old Testament laws concern the community whose exclusive god is Yahweh. Stated otherwise, the community to which the Vetero-testamentary laws are relative, and which bears the name Israel, is determined by its tie to Yahweh, its separation from the “Canaanites” on whose land it settled after having received the promise and departed from Egypt.57 Now, the only historical phenomenon that corresponds to these attributions is the league of twelve tribes, grouped around a single cult, whose center is the Ark of Yahweh. This sacred institution was not abolished by the royalty which, on the contrary, presupposed it.58 If the temple David constructed in Jerusalem became Israel’s central sanctuary, this was solely because the Ark was transferred to it. The confederation of the twelve tribes is thus at the source of the Old Testament laws. But do these not claim a divine origin, according to the tradition? To be sure, and fairly, since the relationship between Yahweh and the twelve tribes goes back to the Covenant by which Yahweh became the god of Israel, and Israel the people of Yahweh. The Sinaitic tradition in its entirety considers this Covenant as the historical foundation of the confederation of the tribes. This does not mean that all the laws were promulgated at the same time, but rather that all of them derive their meaning from the Covenant. In other words, the laws must be understood initially as the clauses and stipulations of the Covenant (or its renewals), and only the sacred confederation of the twelve tribes—founded on the Covenant—confers authority on those laws.59

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What then was the meaning for Israel of the events that led up to the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem? If God is the lord of history, then that disaster should signify nothing less than the end of the Covenant, whose dissolution the prophets had already long foretold.60 And once the Covenant was broken, the laws became null and void, or their authority at least could no longer be founded on a reinstated covenant, much less on the new covenant prophesied by Jeremiah and Ezekiel in their time.61 Initially, hoping for the reconstruction of the Temple and the return of the exiles to Jerusalem, Israel continued to observe those of its laws that could still be kept, under the circumstances. It is for this reason that respect for the Sabbath and circumcision took on a particular significance, bearing the weight of the Covenant and ensuring separation from the nations.62 In other words, expectations concerning a turnabout in the situation and the reestablishment of the earlier powers supported the authority of the laws for a time.63 Later, however, it became obvious that the old order was abolished forever. And while Cyrus, having become the ruler of Babylon in 538 b.c.e., ordered the reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, the cult took up again on the sole basis of the tradition—which is to say, based on the oblivion of the origins, since no historic event warranted any conclusions about the renewal of the Covenant. Thus cut off from what had been the source of their authority, the laws were first prorogated [prorogées] only to acquire thereafter an unconditional validity. In fact, on the initiative of the Persian government, the priest Ezra entered the province of Jerusalem and, to ensure enduring peace and order, proclaimed that the Jerusalemite community would henceforth be ruled by “the law of God.”64 Ezra’s mission realized the integral disruption of the historic and theological situation of Israel. “Whereas it was originally the relationship of God and man depicted as a ‘covenant’ which had constituted the ancient sacral confederacy of the tribes, and whereas it had been the presence of this institution which had provided the necessary prerequisite for the validation of the old laws, it was now the acknowledgement and observance of the law by individuals which constituted the community— for whoever undertook to keep the law joined the community; and the presence of this community appeared to be a sign that the covenant relationship between God and people still existed.”65 This “new evaluation,”66 this reversal of values, immediately had several consequences. Emphasis was no longer placed on the activity of God but on the behavior of men; collective responsibility gave way all the more readily to individual responsibility as faithfulness to the Law sufficed to assemble into one and the same community all those whom events had separated and dispersed. In addition, on the occasion of this reversal in the founding relationship

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between laws and covenant, “the fiction gained ground that, in this form adopted by the Law, the post-exilic community with its diaspora had become the successor of ancient Israel.”67 Notwithstanding the refutation of God’s reign over history, and in spite of the pre-Exilic prophecy whose inspiration was God himself, the Jews allowed themselves to believe that the Covenant had not been truly broken. In continuing to serve as the ground, albeit at the cost of fictionalization, for the perennity of the Covenant—or, as Nietzsche put it, preferring being and preservation at all costs—Israel gradually ceased awaiting its political restoration. Henceforth, “the Law became an absolute entity, valid without respect to the precedent, time, or history; based on itself, binding simply because it existed as law, because it was of divine origin and authority.”68 Now, this absolutization of the Law, diversely attested by the later Old Testament writings,69 is at once an abstraction and a universalization. It is an abstraction because “the Law” would never have become the exclusive site for the relationship to God had the laws not ceased, earlier on, to determine the acts that Israel could perform within the confines of its exclusive relationship to God as instituted by the Covenant. It is a universalization because once dissociated from the Covenant between Yahweh and Israel, the Law no longer addressed exclusively a specific historic community. In this regard, the constitution of the Law as an absolute magnitude implies that the god of the post-Exilic community could by right become the god of all nations and, consequently, of all those nations under whose domination the community lived. It is thus that Cyrus II, the Achaemenid, became “the shepherd” and “the anointed of Yahweh.”70 The absolutization of the Law modified the nature of God more profoundly still. As long as the Covenant remained in force, obeying its laws meant responding to the divine initiative or origin from which the Covenant had come. Here, God is active. However, once the Covenant is broken, God, after having revealed the Law, “really had nothing else to do but react to the behavior of man according to the standard laid down by the Law.”71 The absolutization of the Law is thus, at the least, the becoming-reactive of God. But what form should this divine reaction take if not that of punishment and recompense, that is, if not that of retribution? The correlation between the Law and retribution in fact assumes a situation entirely different from that instituted by the Covenant. Before the latter had become null and void, observance of the Law gave rise neither to gratification nor recompense, while its transgression always called for punishment.72 The Jewish revaluation, whose history we have briefly sketched here, is thus completed by a radical transmutation of the meaning of

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justice. Originally, God’s justice was none other than his fidelity to the Covenant. In the Song of Deborah, which is probably the oldest text of the Old Testament, the victory of the tribes of Israel over the Canaanites is said to be a “vindication of Yahweh.”73 Justice was consequently a function of divine power. Had it not been so, then at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, the “House of Israel” could never have said that “the way of the Lord is not just [Der Herr handelt nicht recht].”74 And never could Yahweh—upon recounting the history of Israel’s apostasies—have made, in the same period, that singular claim according to which divine justice, no longer manifest as a power of life, had come to show itself as a power of annihilation. “I gave them statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they could not live.”75 After Exile, following the defeat of Israel and the end of the Covenant, God’s justice became, inversely, a function of the Law76 and, as retributive, it became as reactive as God himself. Let us return directly to Nietzsche’s interpretation of the history of Israel, which is not founded on the work of Julius Wellhausen, but on the unique project of revaluation. For it is in function of the latter that Nietzsche will use Wellhausen’s work. While appealing to a different historical reconstruction than the one we just followed, Nietzsche arrives already at the same conclusion in The Antichrist. Originally, above all in the period of the Kingdom, Israel too stood in a correct [richtigen], that is to say natural, relationship to all things. Their Yahweh was the expression of their consciousness of power [Macht Bewusstseins], of their delight in themselves, their hopes of themselves: in him they anticipated victory and salvation, with him they trusted that nature would provide what the people needed—above all rain. Yahweh is the God of Israel and consequently the God of justice [Gott der Gerechtigkeit]: the logic of every nation that is in power and has a good conscience about it.77

But if Yahweh and his justice first expressed Israel’s will to power, then what happened when Israel was reduced to powerlessness and all hope of restoration disappeared? The old God could no longer do what he formerly could. One should have let him go. What happened? One altered the conception [Begriff ] of him: at this price one retained him.—Yahweh the God of “justice”— no longer at one with Israel an expression of national self-confidence [Volks-selbstgefühls]: Now only a God bound by conditions. The new conception of Him becomes an instrument in the hands of priestly

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agitators, who henceforth interpret all good fortune as a reward, all misfortune as punishment for disobedience of God, for “sin.”78

Moreover, in the margin of the last chapter of Wellhausen’s work, Nietzsche noted somewhat earlier: “One had the choice ‘to give one’s old God up or to make something else out of him. This is what Elijah and Amos did, for example: they cut the tie or, more precisely, the unity between the people and God; they not only separated but raised one side up and thrust the other side down: they conceived a new relationship between the two parts, a relationship of reconciliation [Versöhnungsverhältniss]. Yahweh was up until then Israel’s god and consequently a god of justice: now he was first and foremost the god of justice and secondarily the god of Israel. The Torah of Yahweh, which originally, like all His dealings, fell under the category of divine aid, especially in the doing of justice, of divine guidance in the solution of difficult questions, was now conceived of as incorporating the demands on the fulfillment of which His attitude towards Israel entirely depended.”79 The inversion of the relations between Covenant, i.e., power, and justice, implies returning against oneself one’s will to power. Indeed, if God is “a culminating moment” and “an apex of power,” “the supreme power,” even “the maximal state,” or again “a point in the development of the will to power ”80—then the subordination of the latter to legal justice forecloses any intensification. One poetic sketch from the summer of 1888 describes this situation clearly: “As no new voice spoke, you made from old words a law: where life stiffens a law towers up.”81 Now, a will to power that cannot grow because it has stiffened is a will to power that negates itself, a will to power turned back against itself: corrupted. This corruption of the will to power entails an entire series of reversals. Happiness and unhappiness are no longer coordinated with the growth or decline of power, they repay or sanction obedience to and disobedience of God’s Law, whose trustees are the priests. At this point, the natural values that allowed for the intensification of power are inverted, and “morality no longer the expression of the conditions under which a nation lives and grows, no longer a nation’s deepest instinct of life, but become abstract, [it] becomes the antithesis of life.”82 The abstraction of morality, the raising of the moral law to the rank of a tribunal of life thus has as condition of possibility a life that loses its life. Abstract, i.e., ultimately ahistorical, morality can only oppose itself now to life qua active will to power. Consequently (and conversely), the eternal return of the decisive instant and of becoming will not fail to effect the revaluation of this exclusively preserving morality.

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The corruption of God and morality—and corruption should always be understood relative to the definition of nature as will to power—is prolonged by that of Israel’s history as the history of the manifestations of God to his people. The concept of God falsified; the concept of morality falsified:—the Jewish priesthood did not stop there. The entire history of Israel was useless: away with it!—These priests perpetrated that miracle of falsification the documentation of which lies before us in a good part of the Bible: with unparalleled disdain of every tradition, every historical reality, they translated their own national past [Volks-Vergangenheit] into religious terms, that is to say they made of it a stupid salvation-mechanism [stupiden Heils-Mechanismus] of guilt towards Yahweh and punishment, piety towards Yahweh and reward.83

What biblical books bear the mark of this “falsification”? They are those that, on the basis of the work of Martin Noth, we call the Deuteronomistic historiography.84 This work, composed after the fall of Jerusalem, seeks to understand Israel’s ruin, and set forth the meaning of its history. According to its author, “God was recognizably at work in this history, continuously meeting the accelerating moral decline with warnings and punishments and, finally, when these proved fruitless, with total annihilation. The Deuteronomist, then, perceives a just divine retribution in the history of the people, though not so much (as yet) in the fate of the individual.”85 Yet, this apostasy is always relative to the Law, and of that Law the Deuteronomist retains above all the demand for a single sanctuary and everything concerning the cult of the “other gods.” Writing after the discovery of the “book of the Law”—during the restoration work on the Temple begun under the reign of Josiah—the Deuteronomist, who tells the story of that discovery,86 “has centered his history [of Israel] on the theme of worship of God as required by the law, or defined in a strict, rather narrow sense; for he is interested not so much in the development of possible forms of worship of God as in the various possible forms of deviation from this worship which could be construed as apostasy as how these were realized in history. Hence, the law is needed not in a positive role to prescribe the forms of worship . . . but rather to prohibit the forms of worship which were wrong; this was in fact one of the Deuteronomist’s main concerns.”87 Moreover, even though the Deuteronomist might not be a priest himself, he takes the Law as the norm for relations between the people and God, or the criterion on the basis of which the history of Israel must be understood and judged. No doubt, the law the Deuteronomist is discussing has not yet taken on its definitive

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and ahistorical meaning. However, in considering the history of Israel as definitively past, the Deuteronomist contributes indirectly to the Law’s absolutization, and to the qualification of justice as retribution. This corrupting of God, morality, and history has as its consequence the gathering of the many dimensions of life under the one law. And so “from now on all things of life are so ordered, then the priest is everywhere indispensable.”88 But why is this so and what should we understand here by the noun “priest”? As trustee, guarantor, and interpreter of the Law, the priest is first he who sets down the rules of behavior that flow from it. But further, and above all, the priest is that type of man on whom the corrupting of natural values confers a new power. How is this possible and in what does the novelty of this power consist, since it is not exclusively reserved to those who perform a sacred ministry, since again “in virtually all nations, the philosopher is only the further development of the priestly type”?89 To this question Nietzsche will respond by explaining the modus operandi of the Jewish revaluation. For one must grasp this: every natural custom, every natural institution (state, administration of justice, marriage, tending of the sick and poor), every requirement presented by the instinct for life, in short everything valuable in itself, becomes utterly valueless, inimical to value through the parasitism of the priest (or the “moral world-order”): a sanction is subsequently required—a value-bestowing power [werthverleihende Macht] is needed which denies the natural quality in these things and only by doing so is able to create a value . . . The priest devalues, dissanctifies nature: it is only at the price of this that he exists at all.—Disobedience of God, that is to say of the priest, of “the Law,” now acquires the name “sin”; the means of “becoming reconciled again with God” are, as is only to be expected, means by which subjection to the priest is only more thoroughly guaranteed.90

What does the Jewish priest do? By raising the Law over the Covenant from which Israel derived all its life and power, the priest subordinates these to the Law, which is foreign to them since, invariable and absolute, the Law knows no becoming. Once the value of life is abstracted from life itself, the latter cannot but find itself devalued. Nevertheless, what could such devaluation really mean, if values are the very conditions of life? It means nothing other than a life whose values are negative; nothing other than a life that negates life. However—and this is the most important point—the priest could never devalue or contravene “a life [that evaluates] through us when we establish values”91 unless he created

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another value, or established a new law or a new sanction.92 Such is his grandeur; the Jewish priest is thus the first creator of value qua value, and that is why the Jews present “the classic example” of “the invention of new tables of value.”93 But how shall we characterize these new Jewish values and what was the upshot of this creation? In a note that echoes the preceding passage from The Antichrist, Nietzsche writes: We should reflect on the damage done to all human institutions in the case where a higher sphere both divine and beyond is posited and alone sanctions those institutions. In becoming habituated to seeing value in this sanction (in marriage, for example), one has reduced its natural dignity, and in certain circumstances one has denied it . . . nature is spitefully judged to the degree that one has honored the anti-nature of a god. “Nature” henceforth amounts to something “contemptible,” “bad”. . . . The fatality of a belief in the reality of the highest moral qualities as GOD: thereby all real values were denied and understood fundamentally as non-values [Unwerthe]. Thus it was that the antinatural ascended to the throne. With an inexorable logic, one arrived at the absolute requirement of the negation of nature.94

The new Jewish values are thus anti-nature values, that is to say, the values of will to power turned back against itself. Yet the will to assimilation or equalization on which ontological knowledge and technology rest is itself a will to power turned back against itself. The common reactivity of Jewish values and Greek, or ontological, values, is nevertheless not a commonality of equal degrees, since European morality is more JudeoChristian than Greek. And if that is the case, it is because the Jewish priest was the first to create values, to make values an object of creation and thus of power. It is thus the creation of reactive or priestly values that constitutes Europe’s authentic moment of birth. The destiny of Europe merges with nihilism not only because the onto-logico-technical knowledge and world are mendacious, but again because the Jewish priestly revaluation, inherited by the Christians, initiates a negation of nature, i.e., of the will to power. What was the upshot of this extraordinary revaluation at the end of which the Law had become the condition of the Covenant, whereas the Covenant had been the condition of the laws; justice had become a function of the Law, whereas justice had been a function of power, and the God of Israel had become that of all the nations? In a long reading note devoted to Wellhausen’s text, we can read the following:

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The “holy constitution of Judaism” [“heilige Verfassung des Judenthums”]: the artificial product . . . Israel reduced to “being a kingdom of priests and a holy people.” Earlier, the natural order of society found support in the belief in God; henceforth, the State of Dieu had to be made visible in an artificial sphere, in any event in the daily life of the people. The idea that hitherto had pervaded nature now had to have a holy body proper to it. A superficial opposition of the holy and the profane arose, and one demarcated the natural sphere, thrusting it always farther away . . . (active ressentiment—). Holiness, empty, antithetical, becomes the directing concept: at the origin = divine, now equal to the priestly, the spiritual—as though the divine were opposed to the worldly, to the natural through external markings—Hierocracy . . . an artificial product imposed in unfavorable circumstances with an energy eternally worthy of admiration, apolitical: the Mosaic theocracy, residue of a disappeared State—it has foreign domination as its presupposition. Closely related to the oldcatholic churches [altkatholischen Kirche], in fact its mother . . . 95

Barring two minor modifications, Nietzsche’s text copies that of Wellhausen, abbreviating sentences and underscoring certain words. The first modification consists in inserting, parenthetically, the words “active ressentiment [Ressentiment thätig].” The second makes foreign domination the “presupposition” of Mosaic theocracy, whereas Wellhausen saw this merely as its “necessary complement.” Nietzsche thus sets ressentiment and enslavement, subservience, at the source of priestly values. What then is the relationship between ressentiment and subservience? Ressentiment is servile because it responds to something on which it thereby depends, as it is reactive and since this reactivity takes the form of a negation. Opposing aristocratic morality to that of slaves, whose greatest tutors were the Jewish priests, Nietzsche writes: While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye—this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself—is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all—its action is fundamentally reaction.96

In order that servile morality be a product of ressentiment, a product of reactivity, however, it is essential that ressentiment be active and that reactivity itself be a sort of will to power. If not, whence would come that

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energy eternally worthy of admiration, whose fruit is hierocracy? Life is will to power, that is, will to surmount that which, in life, resists life. However, when life can no longer be victorious—when, for example, the Temple is destroyed and the Covenant broken—life remains life for all that, and is still will to power. Yet, to a will to power that can no longer surmount that which in life resists life, there remains, for its selfpreservation, only to triumph over life itself, as well as over its conditions of possibility; in other words, “to employ force to block up the sources of force.”97 The negation of will to power is thus the motor of the revaluation and the creation of priestly values; and if Nietzsche counted “active force” among his “innovations,”98 the Jewish priest, as the true initiator of Christianity, is himself the inventor of reactive force. “To employ force to block up the sources of force”—such is the law and formula for this priestly logic by virtue of which ontological values could be associated with Judeo-Christian morality, through which God invested philosophy, and from which technology received a power whose quality was adequate to it and intimately connected with it. Only a will to power turned back against itself—and deriving a surplus of power against nature from this reversal—can, in fact, confer upon ontologico-technical knowledge (founded on preserving values and on a will to power likewise turned against itself) the possibility of an expansion or a dynamism that it does not itself possess. But this turning back of will to power is a negation of will to power by itself. It must therefore be understood as a modality of its own action, as the activity of ressentiment. The priestly revaluation is thus clearly the greatest example of spiritual vengeance.99 In fact, to reduce the gods of nations that won out against Israel to the rank of “nothings,”100 while elevating the god of a vanquished Israel to that of the god of all nations—or again, to make the god of the vanquished into a god upon whom the victors likewise depend—is to obtain reparation, for the vanquished, from the victors. Goodness is, then, and quite naturally, no longer that which intensifies power, but the converse: that to which all power in general is counter-naturally subjected and which, consequently, weakens it. “The same instinct,” writes Nietzsche, “which makes the subjugated people reduce its God to the ‘Good in itself’ makes them expunge the good qualities from the God of their conqueror; they revenge themselves on their masters by changing their masters’ God into a devil.”101 However, in thereby corrupting the concept of god, the Jewish priests simultaneously modified the essence of justice. Meted out by a god absolutely unique and equally good for all nations, for all humanity, justice could no longer be a function of power—which is always hierarchical—but rather one of powerlessness, which invariably levels down. If, in a general sense, we understand justice as life’s highest

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representative, then the universal and retributive justice that represents a life turned against itself could not be other than the highest form of that ressentiment and vengeance by which the Jewish people came to preserve themselves. In observing that “the instinct of vengeance and ressentiment” is “an instinct of self-preservation,”102 Nietzsche meant first that all vengeance aims to reestablish a balance, is compensation or reparation.103 But he also meant that retributive justice ultimately represents a life that, in order to preserve itself, must turn back against life and thereby assert the preserving and reactive character of the retributive justice of God. Yet, if vengeance, ressentiment, and justice are tied to preserving and reactive values, then the eternal return of the re-valuating instant, the eternal recurrence of becoming, will necessarily liberate us from vengeance and give rise to a wholly other justice.

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6

The New Justice

It is time, now, to come to terms directly with Christianity. If its first premise is the history of Israel, as reconstructed in the previous chapter, it remains to be seen in what sense Christianity can be identified with nihilism. What is the relationship between Christianity and the Jewish hierocracy? Christianity comes out of the priestly counter-nature and fulfills its logic. On a soil falsified in this way, where all nature, all natural value, all reality had the profoundest instincts of the ruling class against it, there arose Christianity, a form of mortal hostility to reality as yet unsurpassed. The “holy people,” which had retained only priestly values, priestly words, for all things, and with a consistency capable of inspiring fear had separated itself from everything else powerful on earth, calling it “unholy,” “world,” “sin”—this people produced for its instinct a formula which was logical to the point of self-negation: as Christianity it negated the last remaining form of reality, the “holy people,” the “chosen people,” the Jewish reality itself. The case is of the first rank: the little rebellious movement which is baptized with the name of Jesus of Nazareth is the Jewish instinct once more—in other words the priestly instinct which can no longer endure the priest as a reality, the invention of an even more abstract form of existence [einer noch abgezogneren Daseinsform], an even more unreal vision of the world than one conditioned by an organized Church. Christianity negates the Church . . .1

Arising against the priestly hierarchy as trustees of the Law, that is, against the last form of Jewish political existence, the protest movement claiming to represent Jesus thus finished turning life, or will to power, back against its own conditions of possibility. In fact, coming up against the Jewish priestly authorities, the synagogue, the movement simultaneously attacked “the toughest will to life of a people [zähesten Volks-Lebens-Willen] which has ever existed on earth.”2 It did so by turning against this people the very means and logic that, in a situation of distress, the people had implemented in order to save itself. The movement thus intensified the reactivity of those means and that logic.

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Was the predication of Jesus not meant, however, to free us from all that ressentiment and reactivity? Perhaps, but the question at hand is whether the gospel proclaimed by Jesus did not rapidly give way to priestly logic, and whether Christianity, contrariwise, does not rest on the falsification of the message of him who, “understood or misunderstood ”3 as Nietzsche writes, passes as the instigator of the uprising against the Jewish priestly hierarchy. Having shown that Christianity is not the opposite of Judaism but its most logical consequence, it is now appropriate to examine the second principle whose implementation is necessary to the solution of the problem of the origin of Christianity. This is the principle according to which the psychological type of the savior—that is to say, the possibility of life represented by Jesus—was altered, even falsified. How can we proceed to reach the pure psychological type, that prior to every falsification? We may start from the “yawning contradiction”4 that, in the synoptic Gospels, separates him who proclaims the good news from him who, arguing with the Jewish priests, could hardly be other than a creation of the first Christian community. The good news signifies that “true life, eternal life, is found—it is not promised, it is here, it is within you: as life lived in love, in love without deduction or exclusion, without distance. Everyone is a child of God—Jesus definitely claims nothing for himself alone—as a child of God everyone is equal to everyone else.”5 The message of Jesus, which Nietzsche more than once compares with that of Saint Francis of Assisi,6 is that we are in the kingdom of God; there are no longer oppositions or negations (“denial is precisely what is totally impossible for him”),7 no longer sin nor retribution, the separation between man and God is reduced, and blessedness is hereafter the sole reality.8 This proclamation, which makes Jesus “a Buddha on a soil very little like that of India,” an “anti-realist,” and a “great symbolist,”9 implies that “evangelical practice alone leads to God, it is ‘God.’ ”10 The good news is thus the end of the “great penal machine,”11 and the abolition of the salvific mechanism whereby sin calls for punishment and obedience, for recompense. The good news is “a new way of living and not a new belief . . .”12 Nietzsche insists on this. The sole content of his message is the way of living, and dying, of the messenger himself. Not only is the Jewish conceptual framework to which Jesus recurs an indifferent semiotics. “Among Indians he would have made use of Sankhyam concepts, among Chinese those of Lao-Tsu—and would not have felt the difference.”13 But further, “only Christian practice, a life such as he who died on the Cross lived, is Christian. . . . Even today, such a life is possible, for certain men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will be possible at all

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times. . . . Not a belief but a doing, above all a not-doing of many things [ein Vieles-nicht-thun], a different being . . .”14 In short, while life according to Jesus—which is none other than the life of Jesus—should be understood as a “Buddhistic pacifism,” and the latter as a “passive nihilism,”15 it must absolutely not be confused with life according to the Christ as Paul understood him. And it should be grasped independently of the historic reconstruction to which Paul proceeds; in Nietzsche’s eyes, that is the essential point. But how did it happen that Christianity was built up against the evangel of Jesus? To understand Christianity as a practice is ipso facto to take the death of Jesus as the demonstration of his doctrine. Again Nietzsche emphasizes, “This ‘joyous messenger’ died as he lived, as he taught—not to ‘redeem humanity’ but to demonstrate how one ought to live.”16 His death on the cross is the justification of the evangel itself and, in allowing himself to die as he did, Jesus provided the example and “the sternest proof” of that “freedom from and superiority over every feeling of ressentiment,”17 which is what is essential in his preaching. Consequently, and if it is the case that the crucifixion harbors the meaning of the Gospel, then it was by reinterpreting the former that the good news was falsified. The death of Jesus placed his disciples before an enigma: who was he to die in that way? Far from holding his death to be the abolition of ressentiment and the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth, the disciples demanded, “Who killed him?” That is, they asked whose fault it was, and why. To pose these questions amounted to reimplanting revenge where it had been extirpated, by calling for a judgment and sentence. Jewish priests being responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus (who must not be confused, here above all, with the Son of God), it will be the latter, the crucifixion, that becomes the instrument of revenge used against them. Indeed, it was only when the death of Jesus was attributed to the Jewish clergy that the former came to be understood as the Son of God—and made into the judge of that clergy.18 The revenge of Jesus’s disciples then consisted in “exalting him in an extravagant fashion, in severing him from themselves: just as the Jews in revenge of their earlier enemies, had previously separated their God from themselves, and raised him on high. The one God and the one Son of God: both products of ressentiment . . .”19 Proceeding in this way, the followers of Jesus raised to a higher power—turning it against the other Jews, their neighbors—that vengeful conservative logic through which, from the time of Exile, the entire Jewish people had sustained itself. After the post-Exilic community had separated the god of justice from the god of Israel, and set the first above the second, the JudeoChristians severed the priestly Law—the ultimate condition of their

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existence as Jews—from God himself; thereby denying all that was still Jewish in him. But this negation, as idealizing as it was universalizing, still came out of the same priestly logic, whose extension and victory it consummated. Nietzsche recapitulated this interpretation of Christianity in a striking page whose tone, marked by love and hatred, gratitude and revenge, responds to its content to the point of fusing with it. That, however, is what has happened: from the trunk of that tree of vengefulness and hatred, Jewish hatred—the profoundest and sublimest kind of hatred, capable of creating ideals and reversing values, the like of which has never existed on earth before—there grew something equally incomparable, a new love, the profoundest and sublimest kind of love—and from what other trunk could it have grown? One should not imagine it grew up as the denial of that thirst for revenge, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No, the reverse is true! That love grew out of it as its crown, as its triumphant crown spreading itself farther and farther into the purest brightness and sunlight, driven as it were into the domain of light and the heights in pursuit of the goals of that hatred— victory, spoil, and seduction—by the same impulse that drove the roots of that hatred deeper and deeper and more and more covetously into all that was profound and evil. This Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, this “Redeemer” who brought blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, and the sinners—was he not this seduction in its most uncanny and irresistible form, a seduction and bypath to precisely those Jewish values and new ideals? Did Israel not attain the ultimate goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely through the bypath of this “Redeemer,” this ostensible opponent and disintegrator of Israel? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that “all the world,” namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait? And could spiritual subtlety imagine any more dangerous bait than this? Anything to equal the enticing, intoxicating, overwhelming, and undermining power of that symbol of the “holy cross,” that ghastly paradox of a “God on the cross,” that mystery of an unimaginable ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man? What is certain, at least, is that sub hoc signo Israel, with its vengefulness and revaluation of all values, has hitherto triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals.— —20

We are now in a position to understand why and how Christianity is identified with nihilism. If Jewish priests were the first to create values,

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turning the will to power back against itself, and denying the life within life itself, it was the Christians who, thereupon and according to the same logic, raised priestly reactivity to the “SECOND POWER.”21 Once Greek philosophy let itself be invested with the God revealed in Christ, and because, for any phenomenon, only the higher degrees matter, Christianity can and must then be assimilated to nihilism, since it was the supreme form of the reversal of will to power against itself. To overcome nihilism thus necessarily amounts to effecting the revaluation of Christian values, and only eternal recurrence allows us to do so, as it is incompatible with all reactive and preserving values. However, if Christianity marks the high point of priestly reactivity, what then is the summit of Christianity? Where in it does revenge culminate, and on what Christian article of faith must the revaluation be brought to bear, if it is to be as radical as possible? In other words, where had priestly logic most falsified the evangel of Jesus, and how was it able to make of God “the contradiction of life, instead of being ‘its transfiguration and eternal Yes’ ”?22 Let us return to the death of Jesus. In asking, “Whose fault is it, and why?” the disciples posed a vindictive question that called for a response, itself vindictive. God, they said, “gave his Son for the forgiveness of sins, as a sacrifice.” Whereupon Nietzsche continues, as by way of commentary: All at once it was all over with the Gospel! The guilt sacrifice [Schuldopfer], and that in its most repulsive, barbaric form, the sacrifice of the innocent man for the sins of the guilty! What atrocious paganism!—For Jesus had done away with the concept “guilt” itself—he had denied any chasm between God and man, he lived this unity of God and man as his “glad tidings” . . .23

In thus understanding the death of Jesus, his disciples falsified its meaning according to the logic most familiar to them, the priestly logic. Jesus was no longer he whose death destroyed all ressentiment but, established as the Son of God through his resurrection, he was made judge of the world. The doctrines of judgment, of death as propitiatory and vicarious, and above all the later doctrine of individual resurrection, then contributed toward substituting the type of the Crucified for that of Jesus—and the teaching of the second was falsified by the resurrection of the first. “Paul, with that rabbinical insolence which characterizes him in every respect, rationalized this interpretation, this abomination of an interpretation, thus: ‘If Christ is not resurrected from the dead, then our faith is vain.’ ”24 What is the meaning, for Nietzsche, of the resurrection that Saint Paul—that “genius of hatred, of the vision of hatred, of the inexorable

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logic of hatred”25—proclaims as reward or recompense? In Paul’s predication, The type of the redeemer, the doctrine, the practice, the death, the meaning of the death, even the sequel to the death—nothing was left untouched, nothing was left bearing even the remotest resemblance to reality. Paul simply shifted the center of gravity of that entire existence beyond this existence—in the lie of the “resurrected” Jesus. In fact he could make no use at all of the redeemer’s life—he needed the death on the Cross and something in addition. . . . To regard as honest a Paul whose home was the principle centre of Stoic enlightenment when he makes of a hallucination the proof that the redeemer is still living, or even to believe his story that he had this hallucination, would be a real niaiserie on the part of a psychologist: Paul willed the end, consequently he willed the means . . .26

Whatever the violence of this accusation, it is not without foundation. Saint Paul does not know Jesus’s own message, and the two remarks he cites from Jesus concern divorce and priestly life, which is to say, rules of ecclesiastical life.27 In Saint Paul’s eyes it matters only that Jesus be born Jewish, have lived under the Law, and be crucified and resurrected. Moreover, if the vision at Damascus is indeed the de jure source of Paul’s kerygma, it is, as such, incommunicable and, in principle, as little probative as the eyewitnesses to the resurrection to which Saint Paul will at one point appeal.28 Once again, then, what does the displacement of life’s center of gravity outside of life, and as a retribution of life, mean for Nietzsche? “If one shifts the center of gravity of life out of life into the ‘beyond’—into nothingness [in’s Nichts]—one has deprived life as such of its center of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct—all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering, all that holds a guarantee of the future in the instincts henceforth excites mistrust.”29 The moment that body and life are will to power—“and nothing else”30—transferring the weight of life outside of life, or beyond life, is withdrawing all its weight from life. This withdrawal is nevertheless the work of life itself which, thus, withdraws from itself, exhausts itself, and for eternity wears itself out. The resurrection to eternal life is thereby resurrection to the nothingness made life; it signs the eternal triumph of life over itself, against itself, marking the summit of reactivity. Opening to a life eternally, and thus absolutely, reactive, resurrection gives rise to a life obedient to values that make it radically impossible. A life impossible and the impossibility of life—these are, ultimately, the Christian hope and the meaning of that resurrection which,

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according to Saint Paul, rewards our justification. Thinking of that God wholly defined by the resurrection of the dead, Nietzsche once wrote that “nothing is more dangerous than a desirability that contradicts the essence of life.”31 The resurrection on which all of Saint Paul’s predication is founded is thus the last stage of the Jewish revaluation, the final consequence of priestly logic. The resurrection of the dead, in the metaphysical sense that Saint Paul conferred on it, thus constitutes the highest expression of nihilism because it is, of all its expressions, the one that most powerfully manifests the reactivity of power at work in the counter-nature discussed earlier. In this regard, the resurrection of bodies perfectly reveals the nature of power deployed by technology32 and marks the triumph (that is, the divinization) of reactive and preserving values. Consequently, it is very clearly against the resurrectional power of God that the power unfolded by eternal recurrence must be measured. Nietzsche did not fail to point this out. Indeed, when aligned with the resurrection and Christian values, life has as its maxim, “So to live [So zu leben] that there is no longer any meaning in living: that now becomes the ‘meaning’ of life . . .”33 This formula is literally and rigorously opposed to that which, a few years earlier, characterized eternal recurrence, and which said: “Live in such a way [so leben] that you would desire to live anew, that is the task—you will live again in any case!”34 To a life founded on the hope for eternal resurrection is thus opposed a life founded upon the eternal recurrence of the revaluating instant, and if the Christian God who resurrects the dead is the highest form of negation—“deus qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio”35— then conversely, the thought of eternal recurrence, which makes the resurrection of self by self into the very activity of the true body, “is the highest expression of affirmation that could be reached.”36 Let me specify in passing that this does not mean that eternal recurrence is opposed to resurrection in Christ as one religious doctrine to another. No doubt, eternal recurrence is placed under the sign of Dionysus and, to the question, “Have I been understood?” with which opens each of the last three paragraphs of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche answers by way of ending: “Dionysus versus the Crucified . . .”37 But if the Crucified is indeed he whose apostle Saint Paul intends to be, then what kind of god is Dionysus? It is certainly not the Greek god. On the one hand, it was by taking “a certain liberty” and unaware of the “true name of the Antichrist” that Nietzsche “baptized . . . by the name of a Greek god”38 his antiChristian doctrine. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s Dionysus is a philosopher god. “Even that Dionysus is a philosopher and that gods, too, thus do philosophy, seems to me to be a novelty.”39 Now, if Dionysus teaches eternal recurrence and practices “a divine way of philosophizing,”40

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he is a god who—in doing what no other god, Greek, Jewish, or Christian, ever did—is comparable to no other. Eternal recurrence is therefore not a religious doctrine, but the philosophical doctrine that frees philosophy from all theological tutelage. Saint Paul is certainly not Nietzsche’s only adversary, but he is undeniably the greatest. And when the Antichrist declares that “Paul was the greatest of all the apostles of revenge,” that “Christianity has been up till now mankind’s greatest misfortune,” or again that “nihilist and Christian [Nihilist und Christ]: they rime, and do not merely rime . . .”41 he is saying nothing, absolutely nothing other than that. It is therefore on the resurrection of the body that Nietzsche’s revaluation, whose principle is eternal recurrence, must be effected. Now, while we have already shown that eternal recurrence thoroughly modifies the meaning of Christian resurrection, making it into the true ipseity of the active body, we still do not know whether eternal recurrence allows for the concomitant modification of justice, from which resurrection in Christ is indissociable. As long as we have not come to understand in what sense eternal recurrence is a new justice, superior to the one proclaimed by Saint Paul, in what sense Nietzsche can assert that “Dionysus is a judge”42—we will not have definitively established that the resurrection according to eternal recurrence is indeed the sur-resurrection we are seeking. Once the revaluation concerns the justice of God revealed in Christ, it clearly matters that the latter, justice, not be misunderstood. Is this the case, and does the figure of the Crucified really mark, as Nietzsche asserts, the summit of revenge? Is the Christ not, for us, “justice, sanctification, and redemption”?43 Is there even any sense in taking the justice of God revealed in Christ as the highest form of revenge? However violent his remarks with regard to Saint Paul may be, Nietzsche in no way misunderstood the meaning of this purest of Gospels. Two years before writing The Antichrist, he noted: “Irony toward those who believe Christianity to be overcome by modern natural science. Christian value judgments are thus absolutely not overcome. ‘Christ on the Cross’ is the most sublime symbol—ever yet.”44 Nietzsche is not speaking here of Jesus but of the Crucified; he could not see in the latter the most sublime symbol without having previously recognized the justice of God in the Crucified. What then can Nietzsche’s rejection of Saint Paul’s preaching mean, and on what does it depend? By opposing the Crucified to Jesus, Nietzsche is opposing two modes of redemption. Jesus denies sin and abolishes the abyss between man and God; the Crucified, or Son of God, redeems our sins through his death. The difference between the first and the second thus lies solely in the ways of being freed from sin. Yet, while Nietzsche considers the way

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in which Jesus abolishes sin as a message to which it is and will always be possible to respond, he will invariably take Paul’s predication (and with it, all of Christianity) as something “extreme.” In 1884 he writes, “the Romans are responsible for Europe’s greatest misfortune, the people of immoderation—— they brought extremes to power, and extreme paradoxes like the ‘God on the cross.’ ”45 In 1885, having asserted that “the Christian is shown to be the exaggerated form of self-mastery,” since “to control his desires he seems to need to annihilate them or to crucify them,” Nietzsche declares Christianity superfluous “where no extreme means are necessary any longer!”46 Two years later, in a text devoted to European nihilism, he notes that “ ‘God’ is much too extreme a hypothesis.”47 And, finally, he will emphasize all that is extreme in the resurrection.48 How is it that Christian life is always extreme, always a life that goes to extremes? Let us return more directly to Saint Paul who, in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, writes the following: “Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”49 What does the opposition of Adam and the Christ mean, and how does it mark Christian life? Christ released us from Adam’s sin by opening for us the possibility of a future of reconciliation. Consequently, the Christian lives at every moment between Adam and Christ, between a past time of death and a future of life. According to Luther’s expression, the Christian is always simul justus, simul peccator, simultaneously just and sinful, and if Christian life is extreme, this is because it draws its meaning from the universality of sin and from the superabundance of grace; that is, it is because it is a life in Christ as dead and resurrected. That it could only be the crucifixion of the Son of God that delivers us from the Law and vindicates us before universal sin, is precisely what the “classical taste” invariably experienced as “the gruesome superlative.”50 That is, then, “the all too extreme hypothesis”; and when Saint Paul proclaims the crucified Christ as the “scandal for the Jews and a folly for the Greeks,”51 he is himself bearing witness to the extreme character of his teaching. In pointing out that “the advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth,”52 Nietzsche is himself not saying anything so different and, by the same token, he shows clearly that he never misunderstood the meaning of the Pauline doctrine, whereby the “mystery of Christ” can alone respond to the “mystery of iniquity.”53 Once the extreme character of Christian life is recognized, the question becomes the following: for whom, for what type of man, were such extreme measures necessary? For the weakest, insofar as it is true that “the strongest are always the most moderate, those for whom

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extreme articles of faith are not necessary.”54 However, strength and weakness are, here as elsewhere, always relative to each other, and the overman could not triumph over the reactive man without triumphing over Christianity itself. If the essence of Saint Paul’s predication resides in the justice of God that releases us from Adam’s sin, then Christianity will never be overcome unless a new justice could release us more radically from his sin by annihilating its meaning and its possibility. And if “ ‘sin’ . . . has been the greatest event so far in history of the sick soul,”55 that is, of the European soul, then the new justice will thereby also complete the reduction of nihilism. A few months before conceiving eternal recurrence, and during what he called at the time his “constant inner struggle with Christianity,”56 Nietzsche noted the following: “Formerly, to save [someone] from [his] sins, one recommended faith in Jesus Christ. Yet now I say, the way is: do not believe in sin! This cure is more radical. The former one wanted to make an illusion bearable by way of another illusion.”57 And, in August 1881, in the wake of his great thought [eternal recurrence], he wrote: “It would be terrifying still to believe in sin: moreover, all that which we can do in innumerable repetitions is innocent.”58 It would seem, then, that eternal recurrence provides Nietzsche the means no longer to believe in sin, whose weight he never underestimated, and consequently to be radically released from it—which is to say, justified. Yet, is this really the case and above all, how is it possible? If, for me, Adam’s sin is inherited sin, then there is a past of which my will can change nothing. That sin is thus my will’s limit, the past qua contrary to my will. However, this contrariety, this opposition is not something outside my will, since Adam’s sin is always mine. Under the reign of Adam, my will is thus always intrinsically opposed by its past. But is it not always this way and, in a general sense, is the past not the stumbling block of my will? Was Zarathustra not obliged to recognize this when, having taught that the will is as liberating as it is joyful, he immediately specified: But now learn this as well: The will itself is still a prisoner. Willing liberates: but what is it that fastens in fetters even the liberator? “It was”: that is what the will’s teeth-gnashing and most lonely tribulation is called. Powerless against that which has been done, the will is an angry spectator of all things past. The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time’s desire—that is the will’s most lonely tribulation. Willing liberates: what does willing itself devise to free itself from its tribulation and to mock at its dungeon? Alas, every prisoner becomes a fool! The imprisoned will, too, releases itself in a foolish way. It is sullenly wrathful that time does not run back; “That which was”—that is

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what the stone which it cannot roll away is called. And so, out of wrath and ill-temper, the will rolls stones about and takes revenge upon him who does not, like it, feel wrath and ill-temper. Thus the will, the liberator, becomes a malefactor: and upon all that can suffer it takes revenge for its inability to go backwards. This, yes, this alone is revenge itself: the will’s counter-willing against time and its “It was” [des Willens Widerwille gegen die Zeit].59

Zarathustra is here describing not only the destiny and structure of the will such as Schopenhauer understood it, but moreover the destiny and structure of the sinner’s will. What authorizes such an assertion? First, Schopenhauer took the opposition of Adam and Christ, sin and grace, as the symbol of his own metaphysics. Further, some of the expressions Zarathustra employs in this speech, wherein he redefines redemption as “the transformation of every ‘It was’ into a ‘Thus, I willed it,’ ”60 refer directly to sin. According to the Gospel of Matthew, “the weeping and gnashing of teeth” characterize the darkness of damnation,61 and for Saint Paul “tribulation” is, together with anguish, peculiar to “the soul of man that doeth evil.”62 Finally, a note dating from the period when Zarathustra was drafted suggests that the “fool” is none other than the sinner: “ ‘Fool’ I would say, but not ‘sinner.’ ”63 However, if revenge is indeed a counter-willing inherent in the will itself whenever that will is sinful, i.e., burdened with a past as proper to it as it is properly impossible to redeem voluntarily, then is the Christ not the only one able to free us from it? Is he not the only one able to put an end to this opposition of the will to itself, which is ultimately but the opposition between our will and God’s? Is the Crucified, then, not the only one who can ensure our redemption by delivering us once and for all from revenge? And is Nietzsche’s claim that “Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge”64 (with all that this implies) not devoid of sense? Nothing could be less certain. In effect, Saint Paul can oppose vindication in Christ to the sin inherited from Adam only by admitting that the will cannot return to the past, that it is impossible to will backward. Yet, in light of eternal recurrence, that is no longer the case. To will the eternal return of the decisive instant is to will the eternal recurrence of all becoming and, consequently, its eternal passing and becoming past. Commenting upon Nietzsche’s characterization of revenge, Heidegger explained clearly, The will becomes free from its revulsion [Widerwille] against time, against time’s mere past, when it steadily wills the going and coming, this going and coming back, of everything. The will becomes free from

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what is revolting in the “It was” when it wills the constant recurrence of every “It was.” The will is delivered from revulsion when it wills the constant recurrence of the same. Then the will wills the eternity of what is willed. The will wills its own eternity.65

If it is possible, however, to will backward, then Adam’s sin no longer has meaning or weight, and eternal recurrence so radically discharges us of it that the acquittal at least amounts to justification. “All that which we can do in innumerable repetitions is innocent.”66 It is then possible to assert that the thought of recurrence overcomes the justice of God revealed in Christ and, for those who stand in the decisive instant by willing its eternal recurrence, Paul’s theology cannot fail to appear as the high point of revenge and as a hypothesis far too extreme, by which the weak alone can be satisfied. It appears as the high point of revenge— and Zarathustra does not omit saying so, “the spirit of revenge: my friends, that has been up to now mankind’s best reflection”67—because it makes the impossibility of willing backward into the presupposition of a divine drama and of the economy of salvation. It appears as a hypothesis far too extreme—i.e., far too external to our will—because Christ fulfills that of which the will of the sons of Adam was, by itself, incapable: redeeming its past and thus willing anew. It appears as a hypothesis to which the weak alone can recur, since the highest force consists in willing backward, by willing the eternal recurrence of will to power. In order that eternal recurrence give rise to a justification more radical than the Christian one, it is necessary that eternal recurrence confer a higher power on justice itself. Is this possible and, if so, how? Nietzsche repeated indefatigably that justice is will to power.68 But in what respect is it will to power? A note from the spring of 1884 provides the answer: “Justice as a constructive eliminating annihilating mode of thinking, proceeding from evaluations: highest representative of life itself.”69 This definition of justice amounts to making it the condition of all life, in accordance with the biblical tradition. Indeed, justice could not be a mode of thinking as constructive as it is destructive, if it did not found values which made the distinction between just and unjust possible. Now, values are the very conditions of life and, if founding values amounts to making life possible, then justice is certainly the highest representative of a life that, as will to power, never ceases evaluating. This initial determination of justice, qua ultimate condition of life, is nevertheless indifferent to the distinction between active and reactive values. It is axiologically neutral. This will no longer be the case when Nietzsche defines justice a second time. During the summer of 1884, he notes, in effect, the following: “Justice, as a function of a vastly circumspective power, which sees

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past little perspectives on good and evil, which thus has a vaster horizon of advantage—the intention to preserve something that is greater than this or that person.”70 What should we understand here by “advantage [Vorteil]”? According to its first sense, the word denotes what is prior (Vor) to any distinction or sharing out (Teil).71 But the only thing that can be prior to a distinction is the principle according to which it was effected, that is to say, the values that govern it. If we begin with justice as that from which we determine what is just and what is not, that which favors life or disfavors it, that which intensifies life or weakens it, then justice is always relative to a determinate type of life, to a system of values, or to a morality whose supreme representative it invariably is. By opposing the “little perspectives on good and evil” to “a vaster horizon,” characterized by “the intention to preserve something that is greater than this or that person,” Nietzsche thus opposes the ancient values advocating love of the neighbor to new values advocating love of the distant one, that is, of the overman.72 This opposition, between life according to good and evil (reactive life) and life beyond good and evil (active life), is an opposition of two justices, of a reactive or passive justice and an active justice in Nietzsche’s new sense of “active.” But if the first justice finds its principle in God and his commandments, from whence comes the second justice? It comes from eternal recurrence itself, since, as we showed earlier, eternal recurrence is also the principle that founds active values, which alone make possible a superhuman life and body in a world in becoming. In thus revaluing all preserving and reactive values (of which JudeoChristian values are exemplary), it is eternal recurrence that confers on justice a higher power; and to will the eternal return of the decisive and revaluing instant, to hold oneself to it, is thus actively to justify all becoming by bringing about a revaluation that is no longer revenge, but gratitude, since it acquiesces eternally to all becoming. Do we require further confirmation? Under the title “The Great Trial,” Nietzsche posed us two questions. The first asks, “Are you ready to JUSTIFY life? Or death for you?” The second, “Who bears the thought of eternal recurrence?—He who is annihilated by the proposition, ‘There is no redemption,’ he must die.”73 If eternal recurrence were not a new way of justifying life—and an unjustified life is death—then these two questions would clearly not constitute a single, even a “great trial.” *** Resurrection according to eternal recurrence is thus indeed a veritable sur-resurrection, since it is also a justification. However, it is a justification of itself, by itself, extended to all of becoming. The eternal return

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of the decisive and revaluative instant permits the incorporation of truth and the justification of the active body, whose resurrection constitutes ipseity. It thereby marks the end of the reign of reactive values that Christianity raised to their apogee; the end, then, of nihilism. In certifying that an atheist understanding of the resurrection and the justification of the body is not devoid of meaning—all to the contrary—Nietzsche employs that “irony” that consists in “continuously translating the most atheist and least holy form of modern thought” back into “the language of the world gone-by,” which signifies “a secret triumph over the difficulty defeated and the ostensible impossibility of such an undertaking.”74 Nietzsche thus offers, to the body and to philosophy, new possibilities, as henceforth der Leib philosophirt; 75 it is the body and the body alone that philosophizes.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Martin Heidegger, “Der Spiegel Interview,” in The Heidegger Reader, trans. Jerome Veith, ed. Günter Figal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 313–33, here, p. 326 (“Spiegel-Gespräch,” Der Spiegel, no. 23 [1976], p. 209). Following Heidegger’s wishes, the 1966 interview with Der Spiegel was not published until his death in 1976; see also Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999), III, v. 231, p. 57 (“Lightly a god, if he wishes, can save a man, even from far off”). 2. Martin Heidegger, “Die Gefahr” (“The Danger”), in Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978–), vol. 79, p. 54. The German reads: “das Seyn als Seyn die Gefahr . . . das Seyn in sich als die Gefahr seiner selbst wesen . . .” Untranslated. Hereafter GA followed by the volume number. 3. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 16 (“Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze [Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1954], p. 19). See also Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pt. I, chap. 3, ¶15, pp. 99–100 (Sein und Zeit [Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 1953], p. 70). 4. Heidegger, “The Question,” p. 15 (Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 19). See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who expressed the economic principle as follows: “There is always a principle of determination in nature which must be sought by maxima and minima; namely, that maximum effect should be achieved with a minimum outlay”; see Leibniz, “On the Radical Origination of Things (1697),” in Philosophical Papers and Letters, trans. and ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), p. 487 (“De rerum originatione radicali,” in Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhart [Berlin: Weidmann, 1878–90], vol. VII, p. 303). 5. Heidegger, “The Question,” p. 16 (Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 20), trans. slightly modified. 6. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI, ¶3, 1139 b15ff., in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, rev. Oxford trans.), vol. II, p. 1799.

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7. Ibid., VI, 4, 1140 a12ff., p. 1800, trans. slightly modified; see also Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), chap. I, §7, pp. 28ff. (Platon: Sophistes, in GA 19, pp. 40ff.); Heidegger, “The Question,” p. 13 (Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 17). 8. Heidegger, “The Question,” pp. 11–12 (Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 15), where Heidegger quotes the Symposium, 205b, translation modified. 9. Martin Heidegger, Heraklit, in GA 55, p. 202. Presently untranslated. 10. Heidegger, “The Question,” p. 17 (Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 21). The French “mise à disposition” is rendered “ordering” in the English; we prefer “creation of provisions” for its precision. The German terms are “Her-vorbringen” and “Beunruhigende—Trans. 11. Heidegger, “Die Gefahr,” in GA 79, p. 62, untranslated. See also Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art (1935–1936),” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 53ff. (Holzwege, in GA 5, pp. 70ff.). 12. Heidegger, “The Question,” p. 18 (Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 21; hereafter VA). 13. Ibid., p. 19 (VA, p. 22). 14. See ibid., p. 19 (VA, p. 23). 15. Gestell also means a created structure, or an artifice; its root, gestelli, comes from the Latin statio, sedes, locus.—Trans. 16. Heidegger, “The Question,” p. 21 (VA, p. 24), trans. slightly modified. 17. We are translating the French dispositif as “apparatus”; it pertains to Heidegger’s discussion of Gestell as framing, architectonic, and artifact in the age of technology.—Trans. 18. Heidegger, “The Question,” p. 25 (VA, p. 28). 19. Ibid., p. 24 (VA, p. 28). 20. Ibid., p. 25 (VA, p. 28). 21. Ibid., p. 25 (VA, p. 29), trans. modified. 22. Ibid., p. 26 (VA, p. 31). 23. Ibid., p. 32 (VA, p. 36), trans. slightly modified. 24. Ibid., pp. 26–27 (VA, p. 30), trans. slightly modified. 25. Heidegger, “Die Gefahr,” p. 54, where Heidegger equates what he named, in §7 of “On the Essence of Truth,” “errancy” to the “zone of danger”; see Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth” in Pathmarks, trans. John Sallis, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 150– 52 (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, §7; the German reads: “Das Wesen der Irre beruht im Wesen des Seyns als der Gefahr”). 26. Psalms 97:5; see also Isaiah 41:15–16. 27. Matthew 11:25; Luke 10:21, and Acts 17:24; I Corinthians 10:26 and Psalms 24:1. 28. Genesis 1:27–28. Franck translates Luther’s text throughout.—Trans. 29. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: HarperPerennial, 2004), pt. I, “Lecture VI,” p. 57 (Was heisst Denken? [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1971], p. 24); see also ibid., p. 65 (Was heisst Denken? p. 64);

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and Martin Heidegger, “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” in Nietzsche, trans. Joan Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, and Frank A. Capuzzi, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1979–87), vol. II, pt. 2, p. 215 (VA, p. 102). 30. Heidegger, Heraklit, in GA 55, p. 192. Presently untranslated; the German reads: “. . . der stets gesteigerten Möglichkeit dieses Sichwollenkönnens.”—Trans. 31. Martin Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics” (§27), in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 109 (“Überwindung der Metaphysik,” in VA, p. 94). 32. Heidegger, Heraklit, GA 55, p. 209. Presently untranslated; the German reads: “Woher denn sonst der geschichtliche Bankrott des Christentums und seiner Kirche . . .”; see also p. 213, where the creation thought is characterized as “Judeo-Christian,” and for the emptiness in which logic founders, see p. 208. 33. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 40 (GA 54, p. 59). 34. Exodus 22:2. 35. See Deuteronomy 9:9, 11 and 15. 36. See Exodus 34:28. 37. See Deuteronomy 5:13 and 27:16; Exodus 21:17. 38. Psalms 8:6–7. Luther translates verse 6: “Du hast ihn wenig niedriger gemacht als Gott, mit Ehre und Herrlichkeit hast du ihn gekrönt.” 39. See Matthew 17:20, 21:21; Mark 11:23; and I Corinthians 13:2. 40. Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 39 (GA 54, p. 58). 41. Ibid., p. 40 (GA 54, p. 58). 42. Ibid., p. 40 (GA 54, p. 59), trans. slightly modified. 43. Quoted by Heidegger without giving the source in Parmenides, p. 40 (GA 54, p. 59), and also in “Language” in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 206 (Unterwegs zur Sprache, in GA 12, p. 26). It is in fact verse 5 of Psalm 37. 44. It should be noted, though, that in 1935 in the introduction to Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger translated “οί δέκα λόγοι” as “die zehn Gebote Gottes”; see Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 143 (GA 40, p. 143). 45. Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 41 (GA 54, p. 60). 46. Ibid., p. 46 (GA 54, p. 67). 47. Ibid., p. 46 (GA 54, pp. 67–68). 48. Ibid., p. 47 (GA 54, p. 70), trans. modified. 49. Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1973), bk. III, “Social Status,” chap. 2, “The Four Divisions of Society,” p. 254 (Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes [Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969], vol. I, p. 311). 50. Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 47 (GA 54, p. 70). Like Wehr, έρυμα stems from the Sanskrit vr ̣nóti. 51. Ibid., p. 48 (GA 54, p. 71). 52. See Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, bk. V, “Law,” chap. 3, “Ius and the Oath in Rome,” pp. 389ff. (Le vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropéennes, vol. II, p. 111ff.).

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53. Heidegger, Parmenides, pp. 48–49 (GA 54, pp. 70–71). 54. The French reads: “Et comment cette conformité (ou ομοίωσις) qui présuppose le non-retrait et qui, prenant ce qui n’est pas en retrait pour ce qu’il est, n’est autre que le mode sur lequel s’accomplit le décèlement, comment cette conformité, qui tire sa possibilité de l’αλήθεια, n’aurait-elle pas pour site nécessaire ce par quoi l’homme répond à l’appel qui lui est adressé, ce par quoi il est décelant, à savoir l’énoncé, le λόγος?”—Trans. 55. Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 49 (GA 54, p. 73). 56. Ibid., pp. 49–50 (GA 54, p. 73). 57. Ibid., p. 50 (GA 54, p. 74). 58. Ibid., p. 51 (GA 54, p. 75). 59. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (“Third Meditation”), in The Complete Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91), vol. II, p. 24 (“Méditation III,” in Oeuvres, ed. Adam-Tannery, vol. IX-1, p. 27). 60. Ibid., p. 32 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 36). 61. Ibid., p. 35 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 41). 62. René Descartes, “Fourth Meditation” in The Complete Philosophical Writings, vol. II, p. 39 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 45); see also Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 94ff. (Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, in GA 17, pp. 130ff.), where Heidegger, reading the “Fourth Meditation” starting in the winter semester of 1923–24, interprets Cartesian ontology and the transformation of truth into certitude; an interpretation to which he never returned. We follow this interpretation here and occasionally refer to texts other than those used by Heidegger. 63. Descartes, “Fourth Meditation,” vol. II, p. 40 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 45). We have added between brackets what the French translation omitted (Franck). 64. Ibid., vol. II, p. 40 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 46). 65. René Descartes, “Author’s Replies to the Sixth Set of Objections” (¶6), in The Complete Philosophical Writings, vol. II, p. 292 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 233). 66. Descartes, “Fourth Meditation,” vol. II, p. 40 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 46). 67. Saint Thomas Aquinas once equated error with sin; see Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), vol. I, p. 310 (I, Quaestio 62, art. 8). 68. Descartes, “Author’s Replies to the Second Set of Objections,” vol. II, p. 105 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 116). 69. Ibid., p. 105; also see the letter to Newcastle of March or April 1648 in which Descartes sees in the proposition: I think therefore I am “a proof of the capacity of our soul for receiving intuitive knowledge from God,” which he designates as “our knowledge of God in beatific vision”; The Complete Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. III, pp. 330–31 (Oeuvres, vol. V, p. 138). It is interesting to recall here the rule that Husserl formulated concerning intuitive knowledge of origins and absolute knowledge: “as little interpretation as possible, but as pure an intuition as possible (intuitio sine comprehensione). In fact, we will hark

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back to the speech of the mystics when they described the intellectual seeing which is supposed not to be a discursive knowledge”; The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William. P. Alston and George Nakhnikian (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990), “Lecture IV,” p. 50 (Die Idee der Phänomenologie in Husserliana [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950], vol. II, p. 62). 70. Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, pp. 115–17 (GA 17, pp. 156–57), trans. slightly modified. In a study dedicated to “La question de la vérité dans la philosophie de Descartes,” Pierre Guenancia similarly highlights that “the constraint exerted here [in the case of the truths of faith] by grace over our mind [esprit] is as such no different than the one exerted over the same mind by mathematical truths or common notions and that once discovered appear to have always been in the mind”; Lire Descartes [Paris: Gallimard, 2000], pp. 486–87). Untranslated. 71. Descartes, “Fourth Meditation,” vol. II, pp. 40–41 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, p. 46). 72. Ibid., p. 41 (Oeuvres, vol. IX-1, pp. 47–48). 73. See Saint Anselm who, in his On Truth §11, defines truth as “a rectitude perceptible by mind alone” and again, in his On Free Will §13, defines the librum arbitrium as “the power of preserving the rectitude of the will for the sake of rectitude itself ”; see The Major Works of Anselm of Canterbury, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 166 and 191 respectively (L’Oeuvre d’Anselme de Cantorbéry, ed. M. Corbin, vol. II, pp. 160 and 218). 74. Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, pp. 117–18 and 235–36 (GA 17, pp. 159 and 311). 75. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture (1938),” in Off the Beaten Track, “Appendices,” ¶9, p. 81 (“Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” in Holzwege, in GA 5, p. 107); see also Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 15, pp. 98ff. and vol. III, pt. 3, chap. 6, pp. 239ff. (Nietzsche [Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1961], vol. II, pp. 144ff. and 320ff.). 76. Heidegger, Being and Time, pt. I, chap. 1, ¶10, p. 74 (Sein und Zeit, p. 49); on transcendence as an essential trait of onto-theo-logy as such, see Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 2, p. 211 (Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 349), where, among other things, Heidegger asserts that if “ontology represents transcendence as the transcendental, theology represents transcendence as the transcendent.” 77. See Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. II, p. 1210 (II-II, Quaestio 9, art. 1) and pp. 1196–97 (Quaestio 4, art. 8). 78. Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 51 (GA 54, p. 75). 79. Martin Luther, “Preface to the First Volume of the Complete Edition of the Latin Works (1545),” in Luther’s Works, trans. L. W. Spitz, ed. J. Pelikan (St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 1958), vol. XXXIV, pp. 336–38 (Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Weimarer Ausgabe [Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1883], vol. LIV, pp. 185–86); see Romans 1:17. 80. See Saint Anselm, On Truth, in The Major Works of Anselm of Canterbury, §12, p. 169: “Therefore justice is rectitude of will preserved for its own sake.” 81. See Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. I, p. 1147 (I-II, Quaestio 113, art. 4).

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82. Martin Luther, “Disputation Against Scholastic Theology (1517),” trans. H. J. Grimm, in Luther’s Works, vol. XXXI, p. 12 (Luthers Werke, vol. I, p. 226). 83. Heidegger, Parmenides, pp. 52–53 (GA 54, p. 77), trans. slightly modified. 84. Ibid., p. 53 (GA 54, p. 78). 85. Martin Heidegger, “Nihilism and History of Being,” in Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 2, p. 210 (Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 348); on the concept of the “fundamental metaphysical position,” see ibid., vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 25, pp. 184ff. (vol. I, pp. 448ff.) and vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 14, p. 92 (vol. II, p. 137); on the distinction between essentia and existentia, see vol. III, pt. 2, pp. 168ff. and “Metaphysics as History of Being” in The End of Philosophy, pp. 1ff. (Nietzsche, vol. II, pp. 14ff. and 399ff.). “School metaphysics” refers to the Schuhlmetaphysik of Leibniz and Wolff.—Trans. 86. We cite the works of Nietzsche in their English translation and according to the following German edition: Sämtliche Werke (SW ), or more frequently the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967–77). Posthumous texts will be referred to in the following way: KSA volume number in Roman numerals, year(s), the notebook number, note number, and the page reference. Thus here: KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (54), pp. 312– 13; see Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 26, pp. 199ff. (vol. I, pp. 464ff.). We say “note” and not fragment recalling Nietzsche’s warning to the myopic: “Do you think this work must be fragmentary because I give it to you (and have to give it to you) in fragments?” in Assorted Opinions and Maxims, §128, p. 243 (KSA II, p. 432); also see KSA X (1883) 12 (1), ¶48, p. 387. Published texts will be referred to first in their English translation followed by their location in the KSA. 87. KSA IX (1881) 12 (9), p. 577. 88. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 1, chap. 1, p. 8 (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 480). 89. Parmenides, p. 53 (GA 54, p. 79), trans. slightly modified. 90. Heidegger, “Die Gefahr,” p. 55 n.1: “. . . dass dieser . . . Gott die Gefahr sei für das Seyn?” 91. KSA X (1882) 3 (1), ¶75, p. 62; see also KSA XI (1884–85) 31 (53), pp. 386–87. 92. Heidegger, “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” in Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 2, p. 233 (“Wer ist Nietzsches Zarathustra?” in VA, p. 126). 93. Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics” (§10), in The End of Philosophy, p. 93 (VA, p. 76). 94. Ibid., p. 97 (VA, p. 77). 95. Martin Luther, “Promotion des Cyriacus Gerichius: Die dritte Disputation gegen die Antinomer [Disputatio tertia contra Antinomos],” in Luthers Werke, vol. XXXIX, 1, p. 489. Untranslated. Twenty additional volumes of the American edition of Luther’s Works are being published by Concordia Publishing House, general editor, Christopher B. Brown.—Trans. 96. Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God Is Dead,’ ” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 183 (Holzwege, GA 5, p. 244).

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97. Ibid., p. 183 (pp. 244–45). 98. Martin Luther, “Theses Concerning Faith and Law, The Theses for the Doctoral Examination of Hieronymous Weller and Nikolaus Medler, September 11 1535,” trans. L. W. Spitz, in Luther’s Works, vol. XXXIV, p. 110 (Luthers Werke, vol. XXXIX, I, p. 45). 99. Martin Luther, “Die Promotion von Johannes Macchabäus Scotus (Disputation de Ecclesia), 3 Februar 1542” in Luthers Werke, vol. XXXIX, 2, p. 163. Untranslated; see note 95 above. 100. Martin Luther, “The Disputation Concerning Man (1536),” trans. L.W. Spitz, in Luther’s Works, vol. XXXIV, p. 139. Franck cites the text of the edition established by Gerhard Ebeling in the first part of his work on this disputation in Lutherstudien, vol. II, pt. 1, p. 21. 101. See Martin Heidegger, Zürcher Seminar, in Seminäre, GA 15, p. 437. Untranslated part of a supplement to the seminar of 6 November 1951. This is Heidegger’s answer to the question: “Should Being and God be set down as identical?” Heidegger’s response reads: “Belief does not require the thinking of Being; when it does require it, it is already no longer belief. Luther understood that. Yet, even in his own church one appears to have forgotten this.” (“Der Glaube hat das Denken des Seins nicht nötig. Wenn er das braucht, ist er schon nicht mehr Glaube. Das hat Luther verstanden. Sogar in seiner eigenen Kirche scheint man das zu vergessen.”) 102. See Gerhard Ebeling, “Gewissheit und Zweifel,” in Wort und Glaube (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1969–95), vol. II, p. 172 n.108. Although the first volume of this collection of essays is published in English as Word and Faith (trans. James W. Leitch [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963]), the two volumes that Franck cites are as yet untranslated.—Trans. 103. See note 83 above. 104. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 24, p. 165 (Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 221). 105. Ibid. Franck inserts between square brackets what Heidegger omits citing; see Friedrich Nietzsche, “What I Owe to the Ancients” (§2), in Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, see Twilight of the Idols / The AntiChrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 117 (KSA VI, p. 155). 106. Nietzsche, “What I Owe to the Ancients” (§1), in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, p. 116 (KSA VI, pp. 154–55); see KSA XIII (1888) 24 (1), §7, pp. 623–24; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), “Epilogue,” pp. 260–62 (KSA VI, pp. 50–53). 107. Nietzsche, “What I Owe to the Ancients” (§2), p. 117 (KSA VI, p. 155). 108. The second mention of ideal is left out by Franck.—Trans. 109. Nietzsche, “What I Owe to the Ancients” (§2), p. 117 (KSA VI, p. 155); see also KSA XIII (1888) 24 (1), §8, pp. 624–26. 110. KSA XII (1887) 10 (201), p. 580; KSA XIII (1887–88), 11 (294), p. 114 and (375), pp. 167–69; KSA XIII (1888) 24 (1), §8, pp. 624–26.

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111. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), I, §16, p. 52 (KSA V, p. 286). 112. Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” in Pathmarks, p. 174 (“Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit,” in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 227). 113. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 24, p. 164 (Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 221). The adverb everywhere is not italicized in Heidegger’s text (Franck). 114. KSA VII (1870–71) 7 (156), p. 199. 115. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 1, chap. 2, p. 14 and vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 2, p. 13 (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 486 and vol. II, p. 44). 116. KSA XII (1887) 10 (112), p. 521. 117. Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God Is Dead,’ ” in Off the Beaten Track, p. 165 (Holzwege, GA 5, p. 221). 118. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (147), p. 331. 119. Nietzsche, letter of 9 January 1887 to Franz Overbeck in Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters, trans. and ed. Peter Fuss and Henry Shapiro [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 94 (Sämtliche Briefe, vol. VIII, p. 9. We are citing the correspondence of Nietzsche in the edition Sämtliche Briefe, Kritische Studienausgabe, published by G. Colli and M. Montinari; hereafter SB). 120. KSA XI (1885) 34 (5), p. 425. 121. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), §289, p. 232 (KSA III, p. 530), trans. modified. 122. KSA XI (1885) 40 (65), p. 663. 123. KSA XI (1885) 41 (10), p. 687. 124. “The best evangelists are those who show, best and most, how faith in Christ alone justifies us. This is why the letters of Paul are much more a Gospel than is Matthew, Luke, or Mark. . . . None have better described the grace we have through Christ than Saint Paul, especially in the Letter to the Romans,” says Luther; see “Foreword to the Sermon on the First Epistle of Saint Peter,” trans. M. H. Bertram, in Luther’s Works, vol. XXX, pp. 3–4 (Luthers Werke, vol. XII, p. 260). 125. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The AntiChrist, §10, p. 133 (KSA VI, p. 176); see also KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (5), p. 12. The German reads: “Luther giebt wieder die Grundlogik des Christentums . . .” 126. Martin Luther, “Die Promotionsdisputation von Palladius und Tilemann (1537),” in Luthers Werke, vol. XXXIX, 1, p. 252. Untranslated; see note 95 above. 127. KSA XI (1884) 25 (162), p. 56 and (173), p. 60; see also KSA (1885) 35 (84), pp. 547–48. 128. Nietzsche, letter of 26 November 1888 to Paul Deussen in SB, vol. VIII, p. 492 (not in English translations of Nietzsche’s selected letters); see also KSA XII (1886–87) 6 (4), p. 234, where it is a question of “Zarathustra’s gospel [Zarathustra-Evangelium],” and KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (411), p. 190, where “The will to power, attempt at a transvaluation of all values” is presented as the gospel of the future (Zukunfts-Evangelium).

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129. Gerhard Ebeling, “Thesen zur Frage der Auferstehung von den Toten in der gegenwärtigen theologischen Diskussion,” in Wort und Glaube, vol. III, p. 452. Untranslated; see note 102 above.

Part 1. From the Resurrection of Body to Eternal Recurrence Chapter 1. The Body Under the Law 1. I Corinthians 15:13–14. The citations from the Bible are adapted from Luther’s translation, which was the Bible Nietzsche read, and attention has been paid to fluency with Franck’s extremely faithful translation of Luther’s German text. There exists no direct English translation of the Luther Bibel.—Trans. 2. Ibid., 12:12ff. 3. Ibid., 12:14–17. 4. Ibid., 12:19. 5. Ibid., 12:18. 6. II Corinthians 4:10ff. 7. Romans 6:12ff. 8. These two examples are not the only ones. Bultmann, who analyzed at length the multiple meanings of the Pauline concept of σώμα, quotes other ones. Moreover, it is through the examination of “the most comprehensive [and] complex” concept which “Paul uses to characterize man’s existence” that his interpretation of the Pauline theology and anthropology begins; see Rudolf Karl Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), vol. I, pt. 2, chap. 4, §17, “Soma (Body),” pp. 192–203 (Theologie des Neuen Testaments [Tübingen: Mohr, 1984], §17). 9. I Corinthians 12:19ff. 10. Ibid.,12:22ff. 11. Ibid., 6:13. 12. See Galatians 5:19ff and I Corinthians 6:18. 13. Romans 3:20 and I Corinthians 1:28ff. 14. I Corinthians 15:50. 15. Romans 2:28 and 27. 16. See I Corinthians 1:17–26 and II Corinthians 1:12. 17. Galatians 5:24 and 6:14. 18. Romans 8:5–7. 19. Ibid., 1:23. 20. Ibid., 2:20. 21. II Corinthians 3:14. 22. Galatians 5:14. 23. Colossians 2:8. 24. Romans 10:5. 25. Philippians 3:3. 26. Ibid., 3:19.

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27. Romans 7:7. 28. Ibid., 7:8. 29. Ibid., 7:9–10. 30. See Deuteronomy 30:15ff. 31. See Psalm 119. 32. Martin Luther, “Preface to the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans (1522),” in Commentary on Romans (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Classics, 2003). 33. See II Corinthians 3:6. 34. Romans 7:14ff. 35. Ibid., 12:2. 36. Ibid., 7:16. 37. Ibid., 7:17ff. 38. See Galatians 5:17ff. 39. Romans 7:21ff. 40. See Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), IX, 589 a, pp. 271–72; Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, rev. ed. B. S. Page (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), V, 1, ¶10, p. 378. 41. II Corinthians 4:16.

Chapter 2. Justice and Faith 1. Romans 10:4. 2. Ibid., 8:10. 3. Genesis 15:6 and Romans 4:3, 5, and 22. 4. Galatians 5:5. 5. Romans 3:21–24. 6. Ibid., 1:16–17. 7. II Corinthians 5:17; see also Romans 6:11. 8. Romans 5:18–19. 9. Ibid., 7:24–25. We omit the second sentence of verse 25, which is obviously an additional gloss. 10. Ibid., 8:1–4. 11. We do not need to examine here how Saint Paul claims at the same time that sin goes back to Adam and that it took life with the law. See Bultmann, Theology, vol. I, chap. 4, §25, “The Universality of Sin,” pp. 249–53 (pp. 250–54 in German). 12. Philippians 3:7–11. 13. Romans 10:16; see also 1:5. 14. I Corinthians 1:27. 15. Galatians 2:19–20. 16. See Galatians 4:19 and I Corinthians 13:12. 17. See I Corinthians 6:20 and Philippians 1:20. 18. G. W. Leibniz, “On the True Theologia Mystica (circa 1690),” in Philosophical Papers, pp. 367–70, here p. 368 (“Von der Wahren Theologia Mystica,” in Deutsche Schriften, ed. G. E. Guhrauer, vol. I, p. 412).

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19. I Corinthians 15:35–41. 20. Ibid., 15:42–44 a. 21. Ibid., 13:12. 22. Ibid., 13:10. 23. See Romans 6:4 and I Corinthians 12:13. 24. “Im-perishable” qualifies the glorious body, but clearly not “dis-honor” and “a-sthenia”; the negation proceeds from the perspective of the resurrected body in Christ, even though the latter two negations clearly refer to the carnal body. Franck explains this as follows: “The glorious body presents itself as the negation of the body of the flesh, even if the body of the flesh is understood negatively from the point of view of the body of glory. This is the case, without counting the fact that the body of flesh, in itself, is a negation. That is why it is possible to say that ‘Saint Paul sees the one as the negative of the other.’ The negation works in both directions. Ultimately, the question is one of knowing whether the negation of a negation is the equivalent of an affirmation.” (“Le corps glorieux se présente comme la négation du corps de chair même si le corps de chair est négativement compris depuis le corps de gloire. Sans compter que le corps de chair est en lui-même négation. C’est pourquoi il est possible de dire que ‘saint Paul voit l’un comme le négatif de l’autre’. Cela joue dans les deux sens. Au fond, la question est de savoir si la négation d’une négation peut équivaloir à une affirmation.”) Communication 13 August 2010.—Trans. 25. See Galatians 6:8 and I Corinthians 15:53. 26. The opposition of the spiritual and the psychic is clearer in Franck’s translation of Corinthians, which reads “There is not first the spirit, but the soul, and thereafter the spirit.”—Trans. 27. I Corinthians 15:44 b-47; see also Genesis 2:7. 28. Philippians 3:21. 29. I Corinthians 15:22. 30. Romans 12:4–5. In Franck’s original, the words “in Christ” are not in the text.—Trans. 31. Galatians 3:28; see also I Corinthians 12:13. 32. Romans 10:15 b; see also Isaiah 52:7. 33. See Ephesians 4:16. 34. I Corinthians 12:26. 35. KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (66), p. 27. No English translation available. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), for the fragments translated into English; abbreviated in the text as WP—Trans. See also KSA XI (1884) 25 (344), p. 102 [WP, §874, p. 468]; KSA XI (1885) 35 (74), §4, p. 542; KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (177), p. 154; KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (153), p. 72 [WP, §871, p. 466]; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (5), p. 218; KSA XIII (1888) 15 (30), §2, pp. 424–26, and 15 (110), p. 470; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), §62, pp. 74–76 (KSA V, pp. 81–83) and §219, pp. 147–48 (KSA V, p. 154); Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (§62), in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, pp. 198–99 (KSA VI, pp. 252–53). 36. See I Corinthians 15:5–8.

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37. Romans 2:16 and Galatians 6:15. 38. Romans 10:13–15 a. 39. See I Thessalonians 2:13. 40. See II Corinthians 5:20. 41. I Corinthians 3:10.

Chapter 3. One Vision Out of Another 1. II Corinthians 6:16; see also I Corinthians 3:16–17 and 6:19. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), §68, pp. 39–42 (KSA III, p. 64–68); see also KSA VIII (1879) 42 (57), p. 605. 3. Ibid., pp. 39–40 (KSA III, p. 65). 4. Ibid., §84, p. 49 (KSA III, p. 79). 5. Ibid., §68, p. 40 (KSA III, pp. 65–66). 6. Ibid. (KSA III, p. 66). Nietzsche’s original reads: “resent,” “nachtragen”; not “drag along,” “tragen nach.”—Trans. 7. Ibid., pp. 40–41 (KSA III, p. 66). 8. For the following citations, see Acts of the Apostles 9:1ff., also 22:6ff. and 26:12ff., trans. slightly modified. 9. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §14, “Significance of Madness in the History of Morality,” pp. 13–14 (KSA III, pp. 26–27). 10. Ibid., §68, p. 41 (KSA III, pp. 66–67). 11. Ibid., §68, p. 41, trans. modified according to the original German (KSA III, p. 67). 12. Ibid. 13. Nietzsche, letter of 19 July 1880, SB, vol. VI, p. 31; not in English translations of Nietzsche’s selected letters. The work in question is by Hermann Lüdemann, Die Anthropologie des Apostels Paulus und ihre Stellung innerhalb seiner Heilslehre (Kiel: Universität Buchhandlung, 1872). Untranslated. 14. KSA IX (1880) 4 (164), pp. 142–43. 15. KSA IX (1880) 4 (219), p. 154 and (252), p. 162. 16. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Frühe Schriften, ed. Hans Joachim Mette and Karl Schlechta (Munich: Beck, 1994), vol. III, pp. 100ff. This text, dating from 1865, is not in Writings from the Early Notebooks [1867–1879], trans. Ladislaus Löb, ed. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).—Trans. 17. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Why I Write Such Good Books: Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (§1), in Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 295 (KSA VI, p. 335). 18. KSA IX (1881) 11 (148), p. 498. 19. KSA IX (1881) 11 (196), p. 519. 20. KSA IX (1881) 11 (142), p. 496. 21. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §62, pp. 37–38 (KSA III, p. 62). 22. KSA IX (1881) 11 (143), p. 496.

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23. KSA IX (1881) 12 (226), p. 616 and KSA X (1882–83) 4 (248), p. 180. 24. KSA IX (1881) 11 (141), p. 494. 25. Nietzsche, SB, vol. VI, p. 108ff.; not in English translations of Nietzsche’s selected letters; see also KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (180), p. 156 and KSA XIII (1888) 24 (1), §6, pp. 621–23. 26. Nietzsche, letter of 14 August 1881, in Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters, p. 57 (SB, vol. VI, p. 112). 27. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 11, p. 80 (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 337). 28. KSA IX (1881) 11 (141), p. 494; see also Friedrich Nietzsche, “Assorted Opinions and Maxims” in Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), II, 1, §180, p. 257 (KSA II, p. 458). 29. KSA IX (1881) 12 (21), p. 579. 30. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (129), p. 128. 31. KSA IX (1881) 14 (25), p. 631; this note is in fact a draft of §125 of The Gay Science, “The Madman,” whose title is borrowed from Psalms 14 and 53. On the death of God, see “The Wanderer and His Shadow” in Human, All Too Human, II, 2, §84, p. 331 (KSA II, pp. 590–91). 32. KSA IX (1881) 12 (77), p. 590; another draft of the same paragraph. 33. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125, p. 181 (KSA III, p. 481). 34. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (148), p. 69 [WP, §30, p. 20]. 35. KSA IX (1881) 11 (144), p. 496. 36. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125, p. 181 (KSA III, p. 481). 37. KSA IX (1881) 12 (77), p. 590. 38. KSA XI (1885) 39 (13), p. 624. 39. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (107), p. 114 [WP, §151, p. 95]. 40. Isaiah 43:10. Zarathustra—who separates “the divine” and “the gods”— takes the first of the Ten Commandments (“You will have no other gods before me”) for “the most impious of words”; see KSA X (1883) 18 (35), pp. 575–76. 41. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (333), p. 143. 42. KSA IX (1881) 11 (147), p. 498. 43. KSA IX (1881) 11 (158), p. 503. 44. KSA IX (1881) 11 (160), p. 503. 45. KSA IX (1881) 11 (203), pp. 523–24; see also Nietzsche, Daybreak, §72, pp. 43–44 (KSA III, pp. 70–71). 46. KSA IX (1881) 11 (248), p. 535. 47. KSA IX (1881) 11 (158), p. 503. 48. KSA IX (1881) 11 (339), p. 573; see also KSA IX (1880–81) 8 (94), p. 402, where it is already a matter of a “new religion.” 49. KSA XI (1884–1885) 29 (4), p. 337. 50. See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §137, p. 189 (KSA III, p. 488), where Nietzsche describes the Christian scenery. 51. KSA IX (1881) 11 (159), p. 503. 52. KSA IX (1881) 11 (161), p. 503. 53. KSA XI (1885) 34 (199), p. 488. 54. KSA IX (1881) 12 (192), p. 609.

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55. See Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology: The Theology of Israel’s Traditions, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962–1963), vol. I, pt. 2, B, chap. 4, §6, pp. 239ff. 56. II Corinthians 4:17; see also Romans 6:4 and I Corinthians 6:14. 57. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 11, p. 75 (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 331). 58. KSA IX (1881) 11 (220), p. 526. 59. KSA XI (1885) 41 (7), p. 682; see also (1885) 34 (149), pp. 470–71.

Chapter 4. Circulus Vitiosis Deus? 1. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 21, p. 151, trans. modified (Nietzsche, vol. I, pp. 411–12). 2. See ibid., chap. 9, p. 64 (vol. I, p. 319). 3. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §46, p. 60 (KSA V, p. 67). 4. See ibid., §49, p. 64 (KSA V, p. 70), trans. modified. 5. Ibid., §47, pp. 61–62 (KSA V, p. 68). 6. Ibid., §51, p. 65 (KSA V, p. 71). 7. Ibid., §259, p. 204 (KSA V, p. 208); see also KSA IX (1881) 12 (226), p. 616 and Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125, pp. 181–82 (KSA III, pp. 480–82). 8. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §52, pp. 65–66 (KSA V, p. 72). Nietzsche uses here the titles with which Luther characterizes the two testaments; see Martin Luther, “Preface to the Old Testament (1523),” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 2005). 9. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §54, p. 66 (KSA V, p. 73). 10. Ibid., §53, p. 66 (KSA V, p. 72), trans. slightly modified. 11. Ibid., §55, p. 67 (KSA V, p. 74). 12. Ibid., §53, p. 66 (KSA V, p. 73). 13. See ibid., §54, p. 66 (KSA V, p. 73). 14. KSA XI (1885) 36 (49), p. 571 [WP, §91, p. 56]. 15. KSA XII (1887) 10 (58), p. 491 [WP, §9, p. 11]. 16. KSA XI (1885) 34 (204), p. 490. 17. God, as Paul created him, is a denial of God.—Trans. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §47, p. 175 (KSA VI, pp. 225– 26). Concerning the question mark that comes at the end of the formula circulus vitiosus deus, see KSA XIII (1886–87) 7 (3), p. 254, where Nietzsche speaks of those “agnostics” who “worship a question mark as a god.” 18.Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §19, pp. 140–41 (KSA VI, p. 185). 19. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §57, pp. 68–69 (KSA V, p. 75). 20. Ibid., §58, pp. 69–71 (KSA V, p. 76). 21. See ibid., §59, p. 71 (KSA V, p. 78). 22. Ibid., §60, p. 72 (KSA V, p. 79), trans. modified. 23. See KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (264), p. 99.

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24. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §61, p. 72 (KSA V, p. 79). 25. It is important to recall here what Luther wrote in his commentary to the Epistle to the Galatians: “[Faith] maketh us divine people, and it is the creator of a certain divinity, not in the substance of God, but in us. . . . [It] is the wisdom of wisdoms, the righteousness of righteousness, the religion of religions and the sacrifice of sacrifices. . . . Whosoever then believeth the Word of God . . . is righteous before God . . . which giveth glory unto God: that is, he giveth to God that which is due to Him”; in Luther, Commentary on Galatians, trans. Erasmus Middleton, ed. John Prince Fallowes (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 1979), pp. 125–26 (Luther, Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. XL, 1, pp. 360–61). 26. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (197), p. 164. 27. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §62, pp. 74–75 (KSA V, p. 82), trans. slightly modified. On the new meaning of religion as “doctrine of the hierarchy of souls,” see KSA XII (1886) 3 (13), pp. 173–74. 28. See KSA XII (1887) 10 (118), pp. 523–25 and KSA XIII (1888) 15 (42), pp. 433–36. 29. Romans 6:4. 30. Karl Barth, The Resurrection of the Dead, trans. H. J. Stenning (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1933), p. 109; the English reads: “. . . the resurrection of the dead [is] already effected in God” (Die Auferstehung der Toten [Munich: C. Kaiser, 1924], p. 112). 31. KSA IX (1881) 11 (195), p. 519.

Part 2. The Shadow of God Chapter 1. The Double Status of the Body 1. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §10, p. 133 and §8, p. 131 (KSA VI, pp. 176 and 174); also see KSA XI (1885) 42 (6), ¶3, p. 696. 2. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 27, p. 181 (Nietzsche, vol. II, pp. 238–39); see also Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, pt. I, “Lecture IV,” p. 39 (Was Heisst Denken? p. 15). 3. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), vol. I, §1, p. 3. Henceforth referred to as WWR (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. I, p. 29); German pagination indicated hereafter between parentheses, following the English citation. Franck uses the revised edition of Le monde comme volonté et comme représentation, trans. A. Burdeau, rev. R. Roos (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004, 2nd ed.). However, Franck revises in turn the Burdeau-Roos translation. We follow the Payne translation, altering it in those places where fluency with Franck’s text is primordial.—Trans. 4. WWR, §2, p. 5 (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. I, p. 32). 5. WWR, §1, p. 4 (vol. I, p. 30). Payne translates this as “inner reluctance.” 6. WWR, §6, p. 19 (p. 48), trans. modified.

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7. WWR, §6, p. 20 (p. 49). 8. See WWR, §15, p. 82 (p. 123). 9. WWR, §18, p. 99 (p. 142). 10. WWR, §18, p. 100 (p. 143), trans. modified. 11. WWR, §18, p. 102 (p. 146). 12. WWR, §19, p. 104 (p. 148). 13. WWR, §22, p. 110 (p. 155). 14. Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature: A Discussion of the Corroborations from the Empirical Sciences That the Author’s Philosophy Has Received Since Its First Appearance, trans. E. F. J. Payne, ed. David E. Cartwright (Oxford: Berg, 1992), p. 36. 15. WWR, §24, p. 125 (p. 172). 16. See WWR, vol. II, chap. 18, p. 198 (in German, vol. III, p. 232). 17. WWR, vol. II, chap. 20, p. 245 (III, p. 286). 18. See ibid., p. 246 (p. 288). 19. WWR, vol. II, chap. 19, p. 212 (III, p. 246). 20. WWR, vol. II, chap. 20, p. 247 (III, p. 288). 21. Ibid., p. 251 (p. 294), trans. mod. 22. Ibid., p. 250 (p. 293). 23. Ibid., p. 251 (p. 293). 24. Ibid., p. 252 (p. 295). 25. Ibid., p. 254 (p. 297). 26. Ibid., p. 255 (p. 298). 27. Ibid., p. 259 (p. 302). 28. See WWR, vol. II, chap. 21, p. 270 (III, p. 316). 29. WWR, vol. II, chap. 19, pp. 214 and 237 (III, pp. 250 and 277). 30. WWR, vol. II, chap. 21, p. 270 (III, p. 316). 31. WWR, vol. I, §23, p. 115 (vol. I, p. 161).

Chapter 2. The Self-Negation of the Will 1. WWR, vol. I, §25, pp. 129–30 (I, p. 177). 2. WWR, “Preface to the First Edition,” p. xii (p. 7). 3. WWR, vol. I, §31, p. 172 (I, p. 224). 4. KSA VIII (1876–77) 23 (22), p. 411. 5. WWR, vol. II, chap. 29 (supplement to §§30–32), p. 365 (IV, p. 433), trans. modified. 6. WWR, vol. I, §32, p. 175 (I, pp. 228–29), trans. modified. 7. WWR, §33, p. 177 (I, p. 230). 8. WWR, §34, p. 178 (I, p. 232). 9. WWR, §38, p. 196 (I, p. 253). 10. WWR, §36, pp. 184–85 (I, p. 239). 11. WWR, §36, p. 185 (I, p. 240), trans. mod. 12. WWR, §39, p. 203 (I, p. 260).

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13. KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (148), p. 44; also see KSA VIII (1876–77) 23 (27), p. 413. 14. WWR, §52, p. 257 (I, p. 324). 15. Ibid., pp. 262–63 (p. 330). 16. Ibid., p. 264 n.50 (p. 332). In his letter of 17 April 1712 to C. Goldbach, Leibniz defined it thus: “Musica est exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi ”; see G. W. Leibniz, Opera Omnia Nunc primum collecta in classes distributa, praefationibus et incidibus exornata, studio (1768), Vol. III: Opera Mathematica, ed. L. Dutens (Hirschberg: Georg Olms, 1989), p. 437. Untranslated, we thank François Duchesneau, Université de Montréal, for his translation. 17. WWR, §48, p. 233 (I, p. 295). 18. WWR, §52, p. 266 (I, p. 334). 19. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §357, p. 308 (KSA III, p. 600); see also Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962), §1, pp. 27–34 (KSA I, pp. 804–9); KSA VII (1872–73) 19 (28), p. 425, and Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator (1874)” (§3), in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 136–46 (KSA I, pp. 350–63). 20. Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, p. 7 n.12. 21. WWR, §54, pp. 278 and 280 (II, pp. 351 and 354). 22. WWR, §56, p. 309 (II, p. 387). 23. WWR, §27, pp. 146–47 (I, p. 197). 24. WWR, §56, p. 310 n.25 (II, p. 388) and Ecclesiastes 1:18: “Qui auget scientiam, auget et dolorem.” 25. WWR, §60, p. 328 (II, p. 410). 26. WWR, vol. II, chap. 45 (supplement to §60), p. 570 (IV, p. 668). 27. WWR, vol. I, §62, p. 335 (II, p. 418). 28. WWR, §63, p. 352 (II, p. 438); see also Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writings, trans. A. V. Miller and Steven A. Taubeneck, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1990), §448, p. 255: “But as a limited spirit it passes into universal world history, the events of which exhibit the dialectic of the particular national spirits, the judgement of the world” (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse [Heidelberg, 1817]). 29. WWR, §65, p. 360 (II, p. 448). 30. WWR, §§66 and 67, pp. 373 and 375 (II, pp. 463 and 465). 31. WWR, §66, p. 374 (II, p. 464). 32. WWR, §66, p. 373 (II, p. 463). 33. WWR, §68, p. 380 (II, p. 470). 34. See WWR, §§55 and 70, pp. 301 and 402 (II, pp. 378 and 497). 35. WWR, §68, p. 380 (II, p. 471). 36. WWR, §68, p. 397 (II, p. 491). 37. WWR, §68, p. 385 (II, p. 477). 38. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (361), p. 159. 39. WWR, vol. I, §71, p. 411 (II, p. 507). 40. WWR, §71, pp. 411–12 (II, p. 508).

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Chapter 3. The Great Coincidence 1. WWR, vol. II, chap. 47, p. 589 (IV, p. 690). 2. WWR, vol. I, §65, p. 362 (II, p. 450). 3. KSA XII (1887) 9 (60), p. 366, Franck’s italics. 4. WWR, §68, p. 385 (II, p. 476). 5. WWR, §60, p. 329 (II, p. 411); see also Romans 5:12–21. 6. See WWR, §70, p. 407 (II, p. 502). 7. See WWR, §70, p. 404 (II, p. 499). 8. See WWR, §64, p. 358 (II, p. 445); see also Romans 12:19. 9. WWR, §71, p. 411 (II, p. 507). 10. KSA IX (1880) 4 (293), p. 172; see also KSA X (1882) 3 (1), §285, p. 87. 11. WWR, vol. II, chap. 19, p. 230 (vol. III, p. 269), Franck’s italics for “of the heart.” 12. Ezekiel 11:19–21. 13. Romans 10:9–10. 14. KSA IX (1880) 4 (218), p. 154. 15. See Romans 1:21; 2:5; 11:25; II Corinthians 3:14–16. 16. Romans 10:2. 17. Heidegger, Being and Time, pt. I, chap. 1, ¶10, p. 74 (Sein und Zeit pp. 48–49); see also Genesis 1:26; Psalm 8. 18. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “The Way Towards the Blessed Life, or The Doctrine of Religion,” in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, trans. W. Smith (Sterling, Va.: Thoemmes, 1999), vol. II, p. 391 (“Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben oder auch die Religionslehre,” in Werke, ed. J. H. Fichte [Berlin: Verlag von Veit, 1845], vol. V, p. 484); see also J. G. Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre 1804, 25th Lesson, vol. X, p. 291. In English, J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. Peter Heathe and John Lachs (New York: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 1982). 19. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986), p. 23 (Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände in Schellings Werke, ed. M. Schröder [Munich: C. H. Beck, 1965], vol. IV [1804–15], p. 242; see also F. W. J. von Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, part 2 in Schellings Werke, vol. VI [1841–54], pp. 427 and 402). 20. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), ¶797, p. 485, trans. mod. (Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. F. Wessels and H. Clairmont [Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988], p. 522); see also G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971–75), Vol. III: Philosophy of Mind, §573, pp. 302–13. 21. KSA XI (1884) 26 (248), p. 215 and KSA XI (1885) 35 (66), p. 539. 22. G. W. Leibniz, Die Leibniz-Handschriften, annotated by Eduard Bodemann (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966), I, p. 39, untranslated. The rest of the text, which Heidegger does not mention in The Principle of Reason, confirms its importance: “One of my main principles is that nothing is created without rea-

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son. It is a principle of philosophy. Nevertheless, it is fundamentally none other than the admission of divine wisdom, although I do not first speak of this.” 23. KSA XI (1884) 26 (412), p. 262; see also (1884) 26 (8), p. 152. 24. KSA XI (1885) 38 (7), p. 605; see also KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (131), §2, p. 129, wherein German Idealism is interpreted as the attempt to transform Christianity into a gnosis. 25. See KSA XII (1887) 10 (96), p. 511. 26. KSA XII (1887) 10 (150), pp. 539–40; see also KSA X (1887) 9 (42), p. 355. In 1879, Nietzsche had already characterized Schopenhauer’s thought as “Christianity stood on its head”; see “Assorted Opinions and Maxims” in Human, All Too Human, II, 2, §33, p. 223 (KSA II, p. 396). 27. See KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (138), p. 64. 28. WWR, vol. I, §70, p. 405 (II, p. 501); also see §60, p. 328 (II, p. 410). 29. See KSA IX (1881) 12 (192), p. 609. 30. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Vol. I: Introduction and The Concept of Religion, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), “Introduction,” pp. 84 and 153 (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, ed. W. Jaeschke, Part 1, “Introduction,” pp. 4 and 63–64). The term “coincidence” is “coincide in one” in the English.—Trans.

Chapter 4. Speculative Theology 1. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, rev. ed.), p. 178 (Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 24, p. 254). Franck published an initial version of this chapter and the two that follow it in Philosophie, no. 42 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1994), pp. 69–96. 2. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 75 (Zur Sache des Denkens, GA 14, p. 82); see also Martin Heidegger, “Vorwort zur ersten Ausgabe der ‘Frühe Schriften’ (1972),” in Frühe Schriften, GA 1, pp. 56–57. 3. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 43 (Identität und Differenz, p. 32). 4. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane (New York: Humanities, 1955), vol. I, “Introduction,” p. 30 (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Walter Jaeschke [Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1993], p. 27). 5. Franck uses Derrida’s translation of Aufhebung, “relève” (relieved, resolved, taken up again, brought together, raised); see Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).—Trans. 6. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 50 (Identität und Differenz, p. 40), trans. modified. 7. Miller’s translation dispenses with the spatial metaphor present in the French (“Par où la science . . .”), entitling the section “With What Must the

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Science Begin?”; see G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1969), vol. I, bk. 1, p. 67. The German reads: “Womit muss der Anfang der Wissenschaft gemacht werden?”—Trans. 8. G. W. F. Hegel, “The Doctrine of Being,” in Science of Logic, vol. I, p. 72 (“Die Lehre vom Sein [1832],” in Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 61). 9. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 53 (Identität und Differenz, p. 44). 10. G. W. F. Hegel, “Subjective Logic, or The Doctrine of the Notion,” in Science of Logic, vol. II, p. 843 (“Die Lehre vom Begriff [1816],” in Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 305). 11. Hegel, “The Doctrine of Being” in Science of Logic, vol. I, p. 50 (“Die Lehre vom Sein [1832],” pp. 33–34). 12. Ibid., p. 78 (p. 68); see also Identity and Difference, pp. 53–54 (Identität und Differenz, p. 44). 13. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 54 (Identität und Differenz, p. 44). 14. See Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, §17, pp. 58–59 (Enzyklopädie [1817]). 15. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Vol. I: Philosophy of Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), pt. VI, §83 Zusatz, p. 122. 16. Martin Heidegger, “Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ ” trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 288 (“Einleitung zu ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’ ” in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 379). 17. Aristotle, On the Heavens, trans. J. L. Stocks, bk. I, ¶3, 270 b5ff., in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I, p. 450 (De Coelo, 270 b5ff). 18. I Corinthians 1:22–23; see 12:3 and Galatians 3:28. 19. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Ground,” trans. W. McNeill, in Pathmarks, p. 112 (“Vom Wesen des Grundes,” in Wegmarken, GA 9, pp. 143–44). The word filosofia (philosophia) appears only one time in the entire New Testament, when the author of the Letter to the Colossians cautions, “beware that you are not enslaved with philosophy that empty trickery, according to the human tradition and the things of the world and not according to Christ.” Given that “the human tradition and the things of the world” include Mosaic law, “philosophy” could not have an exclusively Greek sense there. See Colossians 2:8 and Galatians 4:3 and 9–10. 20. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 8 (Einführung in die Metaphysik, GA 40, p. 9) and Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 13, p. 88 (Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 132); see also Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” trans. James G. Hart and John C. Muraldo, in Pathmarks, p. 53 (“Phänomenologie und Theologie [1927],” in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 66). 21. See Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Vol. III: Philosophy of Mind, §384, pp. 18–20. 22. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 55 (p. 46), trans. modified. Hereafter ID in English, IuD in German. 23. The same is true for English.—Trans.

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24. In translating the New Testament, Luther always renders ho theos as Gott, God. 25. ID, p. 56 (IuD, p. 47). 26. ID, pp. 55–56 (IuD, pp. 46–47), trans. modified. 27. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), pt. III, sect. 3, chap. 2, p. 319 (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Theorie Werkausgabe, vol. XII, p. 386). In a very different context and critically, Nietzsche will speak of “Christianity” as “the most cardinal event [cardinalstes Ereignis] in the history of humanity”; see KSA XII (1887) 10 (79), p. 501.

Chapter 5. The Prophetic Translation 1. Jean-Dominique Barthélemy, “L’Ancien Testament a mûri à Alexandrie” (“The Old Testament Came of Age in Alexandria”), in Études d’histoire du texte de l’Ancien Testament (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1978), p. 135. Untranslated. Elias Joseph Bickerman writes, for his part, that the “Greek Pentateuch is a non-Greek book”; see “The Septuagint as a Translation,” in Studies in Jewish and Christian History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), vol. I, pp. 180 and 186. The same is argued in the work he finished in 1981 and published in 1988: The Jews in the Greek Age (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1988), p. 107. 2. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, pt. IV, p. 387 (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Theorie Werkausgabe, vol. XIX, p. 418). 3. Philo, De Vita Mosis, vol. II, §§25–28. Franck is citing the French translation of Roger Arnaldez, Claude Mondésert, Jean Pouilloux, and P. Savinel (Paris: Le Cerf, Collection Oeuvres de Philon d’Alexandrie XXII, 1967). In English, On the Life of Moses, vol. II, chap. 5, trans. Charles Duke Yonge, in The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1993). We follow the French for fluency with the text.—Trans. 4. Ibid. 5. See E. Levinas, “The Translation of the Scriptures,” in In the Time of the Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 46ff. 6. Augustine, The City of God, trans. J. W. C. Wand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), bk. XVIII, §43. 7. Jean-Dominique Barthélemy, “L’Ancien Testament,” in Études d’histoire du texte de l’Ancien Testament, p. 139; see also “La place de la Septante dans l’Église,” pp. 111–26, and “Pourquoi la Torah a-t-elle été traduite en grec?,” pp. 322–40. Untranslated. 8. See Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Vol. III: The Consummate Religion, pp. 323–24 n.199 (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion III: Die vollendete Religion, ed. W. Jaeschke, p. 246). 9. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. III, p. 315 (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, pt. III, p. 239), trans. modified.

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10. Ibid., pp. 192 and 358 (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, pp. 125 and 276). 11. Heidegger, ID, pp. 56–57 (IuD, p. 47). 12. Hegel, The Science of Logic, “Preface to the First Edition,” p. 27 (“Die Lehre vom Sein” [1832], in Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 6). 13. Hegel, The Science of Logic, “Introduction,” p. 63 (Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 50). 14. Ibid., p. 51 (p. 35); see also Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Vol. I: Philosophy of Logic, “Introduction,” §9, p. 13. 15. Hegel, The Science of Logic, “Introduction,” p. 58 (p. 44); see also John 16:13. In his lectures on the philosophy of religion, Hegel cites these words several times; see Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. III, pp. 115, 146, 149, 325, and 383, where we read: “The Spirit will lead you to the whole truth—a speculative intuition” (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, pt. III, pp. 50, 82, 84, 249, and 300). 16. ID, p. 57 (IuD, p. 48). 17. Ibid., pp. 57–58 (p. 49). 18. Ibid., p. 70 (p. 62). 19. Ibid., p. 59 (p. 50). 20. Ibid., p. 60 (p. 51). 21. Heidegger, Parmenides, pp. 42 and 45 (GA 54, pp. 62 and 66). 22. Ibid., p. 46 (GA 54, p. 68); see also John 14:6. 23. See Descartes’ “Dedicatory Letter to the Sorbonne” introducing the Meditations in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, p. 4. 24. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Vol. III: Philosophy of Mind, §393 Zusatz, pp. 41–45; see also §384 Zusatz, pp. 18–20 and §381 Zusatz, pp. 8–15. 25. Hegel, “The Doctrine of Being,” in Science of Logic, pp. 89–90, trans. modified. (“Die Lehre vom Sein,” in Wissenschaft der Logik [1830], p. 106); see also Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. III, p. 355 (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, pt. III, p. 274). 26. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, pp. 330–31 (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, vol. XII, pp. 399–401); see G. W. F. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” in Early Theological Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 256–57 (“Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal,” in Frühe Schriften, vol. I, Theorie Werkausgabe, p. 373). In his 1938–41 study devoted to negativity in Hegel, Heidegger notes the following, which—moreover—implies the acknowledgment of the Christian character of all modern philosophy: “Hegel begins with the beginning, a beginning which is the absolute version of the ego cogito—a properly modern interpretation of the εν αρχη ην ο λογος”; in Martin Heidegger, Hegel, GA 68, p. 52. Untranslated. 27. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 3, chap. 6, p. 241 (Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 321), and Martin Heidegger, “Zeichen,” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, GA 13, p. 212, where the German reads: “. . . weil die Grundstellung Hegels, seine christlich-theologische Metaphysik preisgegeben ist.”

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28. Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 98 (Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes, GA 32, p. 141). 29. Ibid., p. 99 (p. 143). For his part, Hegel wrote: “But although it must be conceded that the church fathers studied Greek philosophy, it is still primarily immaterial where the doctrine came from. The question is solely whether it is true in and for itself ”; in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. I, p. 157 n.17 (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, pt. I, p. 67). 30. Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 100 (Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes, GA 32, p. 143). 31. See ibid., p. 112 (p. 162): “Dialectic stands and falls with the matter itself, just as Hegel took it up as the matter of philosophy. To speak more clearly, one cannot be enthusiastic about dialectic and involve oneself in the revival of Hegelian philosophy while at the same time pushing aside—with a wink of the eye and a pitiful smile—things like his Christianity, his Christology, and his doctrine of the Trinity. If one does this, then the whole of Hegelianism turns into a mendacious prattle; and Hegel himself becomes a ridiculous figure.”

Chapter 6. Zeus or Christ 1. ID, p. 61, trans. mod. (IuD, p. 52). Franck’s italics. 2. The French text reads: “l’être est l’être de l’étant, c’est-à-dire l’être qui est l’étant.” Following Heidegger, Franck is placing the ontological difference before the division of beings into higher and lower. In the theological drift that typifies the history of Western ontology, Being becomes the Supreme Being; it becomes “l’être qui est l’étant” (“Being that is a being”).—Trans. 3. ID, p. 64 (IuD, p. 56). 4. Ibid., pp. 64–65 (p. 56). 5. While the English usually distinguishes between Being (Sein) and beings (Seiende) in the plural, we maintain the singular (l’étant) here, because it is precisely a question of how the Supreme Being (l’étant, summum ens) entered into philosophy. That is, how the highest entity came to co-found metaphysics as ontology.—Trans. 6. See Heidegger, “Language” in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 202ff. (Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA 12, pp. 22ff.). 7. ID, p. 65 (IuD, p. 57). “Austrag” tends to mean to carry something out, to transact completely; the Grimm dictionary suggests as its cognates perductio ad finem, exitus, transactio.—Trans. 8. Ibid., p. 66 (p. 57). 9. Ibid., p. 66 (p. 58). 10. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Vol. I: Philosophy of Logic, §13, pp. 18–19; see also ibid., §163, pp. 226ff. 11. ID, p. 66 (IuD, p. 58). 12. Ibid.

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13. Ibid., pp. 67–68 (pp. 59–60), trans. modified. 14. Ibid., p. 68 (p. 61). 15. Ibid., pp. 69–70 (p. 62). 16. After having thus described the essential origin of the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics, Heidegger refers, in a simple reference, to a text of Leibniz, as to “one of the classical examples in the history of metaphysics of this situation.” That is to say that the entirety of the texts in the history of metaphysics must be understood on the basis of this state of affairs. Conversely, any documentary inquiry into the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics— however ample and systematic it may be—is in principle powerless to corroborate or put into question Heidegger’s concept of metaphysics. “Everything that results by way of the step back,” as Heidegger foresaw, “may merely be exploited and absorbed by [the] metaphysics [that carries on] in its own way, as the result of representational thinking”; see ID, pp. 72–73 (IuD, p. 65), and for the remark about Leibniz, see p. 70 (pp. 62–63). 17. Ibid., p. 69 (p. 61). 18. Martin Heidegger, “Logos (Heraclitus, fragment B 50),” in Early Greek Thinking, trans. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 73 (Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 216). This is the Diels-Kranz fragment 32. 19. Ibid. 20. ID, p. 70 (IuD, p. 62). 21. See Heidegger, Parmenides, pp. 121ff. (GA 54, pp. 180ff.). 22. Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’ ” trans. F. A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, p. 267 (“Brief über den ‘Humanismus,’ ” in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 351). 23. See Martin Heidegger, “The Thing: Epilogue,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 184 (“Nachwort zu ‘Das Ding,’ ” in Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 177); see also Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2000), pp. 136–37 (Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, GA 4, p. 114). There, Heidegger defines the Judeo-Christian prophets as announcing “the God on whom the certainty of salvation in supra-terrestrial beatitude counts.” Aside from the fact that it is rather difficult to speak of Christian prophets, Israel’s prophetism concerns neither the “certainty” of salvation nor certainty of the “supra-terrestrial.” To put it differently, Isaiah is not Luther, Luther is not Platonic, and Christ does not prophesy, Christ fulfills. 24. See Heidegger, Parmenides, pp. 109ff. (GA 54, pp. 162ff.) and Martin Heidegger, Heraclitus Seminar 1966/67, trans. Charles H. Seibert (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979), chap. 1, pp. 12–13 (“Heraklit” in Seminäre, GA 15, p. 27): “The gods of the Greeks . . . have nothing to do with religion. The Greeks did not have faith in their gods.” 25. Exodus 3:14. 26. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. I, pp. 124–25 n.31 and p. 127 (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, pt. I, pp. 41 and 43), trans. modified. 27. Ibid., p. 399 (p. 294). 28. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Vol. III: Philosophy of Mind, §377 Zusatz, p. 2.

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29. See Martin Heidegger, “Hegel and the Greeks,” trans. R. Metcalf, in Pathmarks, pp. 333–34 (“Hegel und die Griechen,” in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 441). 30. Although we have proceeded according to an entirely different orientation, we here join the analyses of Jean-Luc Marion, who does not argue for the speculative, i.e., Trinitarian, character of Hegel’s onto-theo-logy; see J.-L. Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), chap. 1, §3, pp. 33ff., and concerning Hegel’s concept of God, see ibid., p. 35 ( Jean-Luc Marion, Dieu sans l’être [Paris: Fayard, 1982], pp. 51ff. and 54). 31. See ID, p. 72 (IuD, p. 64). 32. Zarathustra says, “I could only believe in a god who knew how to dance” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1969), I, “On Reading and Writing,” p. 68, trans. modified. 33. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Religion, vol. I, “Introduction,” p. 73 (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. XVIII, p. 94). 34. See Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 98 (Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes, GA 32, p. 141), which cites a text other than those to which he has already referred. 35. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 1, chap. 22, p. 157, trans. modified. (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 657) and Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §108 (variant), p. 167.

Part 3. The Guiding Thread Chapter 1. The Plurality of the Body 1. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 3, §142, p. 78 (KSA II, p. 138). 2. Novalis, “Logological Fragments II,” in Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 78 (Vorarbeiten zu Verschieden Fragmentsammlungen [1798] [¶256], in Werke, ed. H.-J. Mähl and R. Samuel [Munich: Carl Hanser, 1978–1987], vol. II, p. 376). Final italics are Franck’s. 3. Novalis, Fragmente und Studien I (1799–1800) (¶97), in Werke, vol. II, p. 766. Untranslated fragment. 4. Revelation 23:13. 5. Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia, trans. and ed. David W. Wood (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), ¶557, p. 99 (Das Allgemeine Brouillon [1798–1799], in Werke, vol. II, p. 599); see also ¶433, p. 67 (vol. II, p. 556) and ¶571, p. 100 (vol. II, p. 602). 6. Novalis, Fragmente und Studien III (1799–1800) (¶393), in Werke, vol. II, p. 831. For comparable Novalis fragments and a discussion of Romantic religion, see William Arctander O’Brien, “Romantic Religion: 1799–1800,” in Novalis: Signs of Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), chap. 5, pp. 216–44.—Trans.

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7. Novalis, Fragmente und Studien I (1799–1800) (¶75), in Werke, vol. II, p. 762 (among selected fragments cited in Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays [Ann Arbor, Mich.: Michigan Historical Reprint Series, 2005], pp. 167–85). See I Corinthians 3:16–17, cited by Nietzsche in KSA XII (1887) 10 (179), p. 563. 8. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, §24, p. 95 (KSA V, p. 335). 9. Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia, ¶407, p. 63 (Das Allgemeine Brouillon [1798–1799], in Werke, vol. II, p. 551). 10. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §299, p. 240 (KSA III, p. 538); also see KSA XI (1885) 35 (45), pp. 531–32 [WP, 463, p. 255] and 42 (1), §6, p. 692 [WP, 977, p. 512]. 11. KSA XI (1884) 26 (370), p. 248; see KSA (1884), 25 (120), p. 45 and (362), p. 107; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (151), pp. 332–33 [WP, 394, pp. 211–12]. 12. Ephesians 4:24; see also Romans 6:6 and 13:14; Galatians 3:27. 13. KSA X (1882–83) 4 (83), p. 138; Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator (1874)” (§4), in Untimely Meditations, p. 150 (KSA I, p. 367); KSA IX (1881), 11 (27), p. 452. In the Illuminations, published in 1886, using also the Pauline expression, Rimbaud exclaims: “Oh! Our bones are now reclothed with newly desiring bodies” (“Being Beauteous”) or again: “You turn your head away: new love! You look back again—new love!” (“To a Reason”). See Arthur Rimbaud, Season in Hell and Illuminations, trans. Mark Treharne (London: J. M. Dent, 1998), pp. 73 and 83. 14. KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (216), p. 58; also see KSA X (1883) 3 (1), ¶148, p. 70. 15. KSA XI (1885) 34 (235), p. 499. In one of his ultimate notes, in which his whole enterprise is summed up, Nietzsche announces: “It is only starting from me that there are hopes anew”; see KSA XIII (1888–89) 25 (6), p. 640. 16. KSA XI (1884) 26 (374), p. 249. 17. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §59, p. 194 (KSA VI, p. 248); see also ibid., §13, pp. 135–36 (KSA VI, p. 179) and KSA XI (1884) 25 (135), p. 49. 18. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (91), p. 106 [WP, §518, p. 281]; see also KSA XI (1884) 27 (70), p. 292 and KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (63), pp. 317–18 [WP, §487, p. 269]. 19. KSA XI (1885) 40 (21), p. 639 [WP, §492, p. 272]. 20. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (56), p. 205 [WP, §489, p. 270]. 21. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (55), pp. 313–14 [WP, §519, p. 281]; see also KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (63), pp. 317–18 [WP, §487, p. 269]. 22. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (80), p. 260 [WP, §693, p. 369]. 23. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (485), p. 141. 24. See KSA XI (1885) 40 (15), p. 635 [WP, §532, p. 289]. 25. See KSA XI (1885), 36 (35) [WP, §659, p. 347–48], 37 (4) and 40 (15) [WP, §532, p. 289]; KSA XI (1884) 27 (70), p. 292. 26. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (119), p. 297 [WP, §809, p. 428]. 27. See KSA XII (1886–1887) 5 (56), pp. 205–6 [WP, §489, p. 270]. 28. See KSA XI (1885) 36 (36), pp. 565–66 [WP, §659, p. 347–48]; KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (102), p. 112 (WP, §491, p. 271).

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29. Friedrich Nietzsche, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism” (§2), in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 5 (KSA I, p. 14). 30. KSA XII (1885–1886) 2 (130), p. 129 [WP, §797, p. 419, trans. slightly modified for fluency with the original]. 31. KSA XI (1884) 25 (445), p. 132. 32. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Prologue,” §3, p. 41 (KSA IV, p. 14), trans. slightly mod. 33. KSA XII (1887) 9 (102), p. 394 [WP, §802, p. 422]; also see KSA XIII (1888) 14 (117), pp. 293–95 [WP, §800, pp. 420–21] and (119), pp. 296–99 [WP, §812, p. 430]. 34. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (114), p. 118 [WP, §796, p. 419]. 35. See KSA XII (1885–86), 2 (119), p. 121. 36. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (114) [WP, §796, p. 419]; see also Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 1, §27, p. 26 (KSA II, p. 48), where art is already understood as what ensures the transition between religion and “a philosophical science effectively liberating.” 37. See, for example, KSA XIII (1888) 17 (9), pp. 529–30. 38. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (120), p. 299. 39. After having blamed Wagner for knowing neither to walk nor to dance, Nietzsche comments: “but these are physiological judgments and not aesthetic ones: only—I don’t have an aesthetics anymore!”; see KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (7), p. 285. 40. KSA XI (1884) 25 (408), p.119; see KSA X (1883) 7 (133), pp. 286–87. 41. KSA X (1883) 7 (133), pp. 286–87; see also (1883) 7 (151), p. 292. 42. See KSA VIII (1875) 6 (48), pp. 115–18; see also KSA XI (1885) 35 (45), pp. 531–32 [WP, §463, p. 255]; KSA XI (1885) 42 (6), §6, p. 696. 43. KSA IX (1880) 6 (359), p. 288. 44. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (121), p. 301 [WP, §692, p. 369]; see KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (114), p. 54: “there is no such thing as ‘willing’ but only a willing something: one must not remove the aim from the total condition.” 45. KSA VIII (1875) 9 (1), p. 181. 46. See KSA XI (1885) 40 (21), p. 638 [WP, §492, p. 271]. 47. KSA XI (1885) 37 (4), pp. 576–77. It is possible that Nietzsche had in mind here a text from Kant, read no doubt when he was undertaking in 1867–68 a thesis on teleology and the organism. In “The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1783),” Kant indeed wrote: “For it is astonishing that something like an animal body should even be possible. And even if I could fully understand all its springs and pipes, all its nerve ducts and levers, its entire mechanical organisation, I should still continue to be amazed—amazed at the way so many different functions can be united in a single structure, amazed at the way in which the processes for realising one purpose can be combined so well with those by means of which some other purpose is attained, amazed at the way in which the same organisation also serves to maintain the machine. . . . Nor, indeed, is the ground of my amazement removed once I have convinced myself that all the unity and harmony I observe

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around me is only possible because a Being exists which contains within it the grounds not only of reality but also of all possibility”; see Theoretical Philosophy (1755–1770), trans. and ed. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), sec. III (“Reflection 8”), p. 192 (Akademieausgabe, vol. II, p. 152). We mention this text to show henceforth that Nietzsche’s interpretation of the body and of knowledge holds for a critique of Kant’s transcendental logic. 48. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, §18, p. 102. 49. KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (72), p. 29. 50. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (122), p. 303. 51. KSA X (1882–83) 4 (207), p. 169. 52. KSA XI (1884) 27 (59), p. 289. 53. KSA XI (1885) 34 (123), p. 461; also see KSA X (1882–83) 4 (189), p. 165. 54. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §19, p. 26 (KSA V, p. 33). These are mortal souls; see KSA XI (1885) 40 (8), pp. 631–32 and (42), p. 650 [WP, §490, pp. 271–72]. 55. KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (58), p. 25. 56. KSA XI (1885) 40 (61), p. 661.

Chapter 2. The Criterion 1. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (159), p. 143 [WP, §620, p. 333]; also see KSA XIII (1888) 14 (98), p. 275 [WP, §551, p. 296]: “If I think of the muscle apart from its ‘effects,’ I negate it . . .” 2. KSA XI (1885) 40 (42), p. 650 [WP, §490, p. 271]; also see KSA XIII (1888) 23 (2), pp. 600–601 [WP, §815, p. 432]: “there is only one kind of force.” 3. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §127, p. 184 (KSA III, p. 483). 4. KSA VII (1872–73) 19 (159), p. 469. 5. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §36, p. 48 (KSA V, p. 55); see also KSA XI (1885) 40 (37), pp. 646–47, KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (139), pp. 135–36 [WP, §554, pp. 300–301], and KSA XII (1886–1887) 5 (9), p. 187 [WP, §1018, p. 526]. 6. KSA XI (1885) 36 (31), p. 563 [WP, §619, pp. 332–33]. We read “inner will” (innere Wille) and not “inner world” (innere Welt), following in this way the text of the first edition of the works of Nietzsche, the Grossoktav-Ausgabe, vol. XVI, p. 104, and not the one from the Colli Montinari edition; see also KSA XI (1885) 35 (68), p. 540, where the “internal side of the force” is treated. 7. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (105), p. 282–83 [WP, §710, p. 378]; also see, as early as KSA VII (1869–1870) 3 (23); KSA VII (1872–73) 19 (155) and (156). 8. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (81), p. 261 [WP, §689, p. 368]; also see KSA XIII (1888) 14 (79) [WP, §634 and §635, pp. 337–39] and 14 (82) [WP, §689, p. 368], where in the same meaning, Nietzsche talks about “quantum of power,” “quantum of ‘will to power,’ ” “dynamic quanta,” and “quanta of will.” 9. KSA XI (1885) 35 (55) [WP, §1064, p. 547, trans. modified] and (54) [WP, §1064, p. 547]; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (148), (190), (233), (245), (265), and (305).

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10. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (79) [WP, §634, p. 338] and KSA XI (1884) 25 (196). 11. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (83) [WP, §674, p. 356]; see also (1888) 14 (184) [WP, §567, pp. 305–6]. 12. See KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (94), p. 107. 13. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (157), pp. 142–43 [WP, §564, p. 304, trans. modified]; also see KSA XI (1884) 26 (224), p. 208. 14. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (76), p. 96 [WP, §660, p. 349]. 15. It is Gilles Deleuze who insisted on the importance of the distinction between active and reactive forces; see Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pt. II, “Active and Reactive,” pp. 39–72. 16. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (48), p. 311. 17. KSA XII (1887) 10 (111), p. 520; see also 10 (145) [WP, §1009, p. 522]: “Points of view for my values: . . . whether out of stored-up energy, ‘spontaneously,’ or merely stimulated reactively, and provoked?” 18. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (131), p. 132 [WP, §69, p. 46 (note), trans. modified]. 19. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §120, p. 77 (KSA III, p. 115). 20. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (97), p. 108 [WP, §1013, p. 523, trans. modified]. See also (1885) 41 (7), pp. 681–82 [WP, §1051, p. 541], where “the efflorescence of the Greek body” is presented as a “criterion.” 21. KSA XII (1887) 9 (1), p. 339. 22. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Why I Write Such Good Books: Twilight of the Idols,” in Ecce Homo, §2, p. 314 (KSA VI, p. 355). 23. See KSA XI (1885) 36 (22), pp. 560–61 [WP, §642, p. 342], KSA XII (1887) 10 (138), pp. 535–36 [WP, §639, pp. 340–41]. 24. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (64), p. 209 [WP, §657, p. 346, trans. modified]. 25. KSA XII (1886–87) 6 (14), p. 238 partially in [WP, §565, pp. 304–5, trans. modified]. 26. See Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, §5, pp. 50–56 (KSA I, pp. 822–26); Nietzsche, “Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” in Human, All Too Human, II, 1, §162, p. 249 (KSA II, p. 444); KSA IX (1881) 11 (313), pp. 561– 62; KSA XI (1884) 26 (224), p. 208 and 27 (31), p. 283. 27. See KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (94), p. 107. 28. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (36), p. 197 [WP, §563, p. 304]; see also KSA XI (1884) 25 (205), p. 67 and KSA XII (1886–87) 6 (8), p. 236. 29. See KSA XIII (1888) 14 (117), pp. 293–95 [WP, §800, pp. 420–21] and 14 (170), pp. 356–57 [WP, §794, p. 419]. 30. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (95), p. 108 [WP, §505, p. 275]; see also KSA XI (1884) 26 (72), pp. 167–68 and (75), pp. 168–69 [WP, §987, pp. 515–16]. 31. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §103, p. 60 (KSA III, p. 92); on the morality of taste, see KSA IX (1881) 11 (112), p. 481; on the historicity of sensations, see KSA IX (1881) 11 (252), p. 537; see also KSA XI (1884) 27 (63), p. 290; KSA XI (1885) 34 (255), p. 507; KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (35), p. 81. 32. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (73), p. 36 [WP, §715, p. 380].

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33. Nietzsche assimilates the “conditions of existence” to what is a priori; see KSA XI (1884) 25 (307), ¶5, p. 90. 34. See KSA XII (1887) 9 (8), pp. 342–43 [WP, §462, p. 255]. 35. See KSA IX (1880) 3 (19), p. 52. 36. “The thing in itself (ens per se),” writes Kant in effect, “is not a different object, but a different relation (respectus) of representation to the same object”; see Opus postumum in Akademieausgabe, vol. XXII, VII Convolut., pp. 26, 43, and 45–46). The difference between the thing in itself and the phenomenon being grounded in the distinction between the intuitus originarius and the intuitus derivatus, it is indeed, and through a long series of mediations, to the death of God that the assertion of the perspectival character of knowledge refers. (The recent English translation, Opus Postumum, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], is a judicious selection of passages that does not include all the pages referenced by Franck. The closest corresponding citations are found on pp. 172, 179, and 186.—Trans.) 37. KSA XII (1886–87) 6 (23), p. 241. 38. KSA XI (1884) 27 (41), p. 285. 39. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (374), p. 167; see also KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (108), p. 114; KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (25), p. 194. 40. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, “Of the Bestowing Virtue,” p. 104 (KSA IV, p. 102). 41. KSA XI (1885) 34 (120), p. 460. 42. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (25), p. 194. 43. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §143, pp. 191–92 (KSA III, p. 491). This paragraph, which presents one of the first occurrences of the word “overman,” must be understood in relation to paragraph 125, “The Madman,” which announces the death of God (pp. 181–82); see also KSA IX (1881) 12 (7), p. 577. 44. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §19, p. 141 (KSA VI, p. 185). 45. KSA XI (1885) 40 (21), p. 638 [WP, §492, p. 271, trans. slightly modified for fluency with the French]; see also KSA XI (1884) 27 (8), pp. 276–77 and 27 (27), p. 282; (1885) 34 (123), pp. 461–62. 46. KSA X (1883–84) 24 (28), p. 661 [WP, §417, p. 224]. 47. KSA XII (1887) 9 (165), p. 433 [WP, §126, p. 78]. 48. KSA XI (1885) 40 (39), p. 648 and 40 (42), p. 650 [WP, §490, p. 271]; on number, see also Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 1, §19, p. 22; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §4, pp. 4–5 (KSA V, p. 18) and §21, pp. 28–30 (KSA V, pp. 35–36); KSA X (1883) 8 (25), pp. 342–43 [WP, §574, pp. 308–9], KSA XI (1885) 34 (169), p. 477, KSA XIII (1888) 14 (79), p. 259 [WP, §634, p. 338]. 49. KSA XI (1885) 40 (37), p. 647. 50. Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 144 (“Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” in Husserliana [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987], vol. XXV, p. 59).

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Chapter 3. Pleasure and Pain 1. KSA XI (1885) 37 (4), p. 577. 2. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (87), p. 104. 3. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (69), p. 92. 4. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, “Of the Despisers of the Body,” p. 62 (KSA IV, p. 39). 5. KSA XI (1884) 26 (72), p. 167; see KSA X (1882–83) 4 (147), p. 157 and KSA X (1883) 7 (263), p. 322, where the drive is understood as a “personification” of an activity. 6. Ibid. 7. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (60), p. 315 [WP, §481, p. 267]. 8. KSA XI (1884) 27 (27), p. 282. 9. KSA XI (1884) 25 (460), p. 135; see also Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 2, §99, p. 53 (KSA II, pp. 95–96); KSA IX (1880) 3 (7), p. 49, KSA IX (1881) 11 (289), p. 552, KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (203), pp. 165–66. 10. KSA IX (1881) 11 (313), p. 561; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §109, pp. 167–69 (KSA III, pp. 467–69). 11. KSA IX (1881) 11 (164), p. 505. 12. See KSA X (1883) 7 (133), pp. 286–87; KSA X (1882–83) 4 (217), pp. 172–73. 13. KSA XI (1884) 25 (437), p. 128; see also KSA X (1883) 7 (202), p. 306. 14. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (121), p. 300 [WP, §688, p. 366]. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (173), p. 358 [WP, §699, p. 371]; see also KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (77), p. 38 [WP, §694, p. 369] and KSA XI (1885) 35 (15), pp. 513– 14 [WP, §658, p. 347]. 18. KSA XI (1884) 26 (275), p. 222; on tickling, see KSA X (1882) 3 (1) ¶133, p. 69, in which to the question “What is the best life?” Nietzsche answers: “To be tickled to death”; on rhythm and tension peculiar to pleasure, see KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (18), p. 302, where pleasure is understood while passing as “tickling of the feeling of power”; see also KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (76), p. 38 [WP, §697, p. 370] and (1888) 14 (81), pp. 260–61 [WP, §689, pp. 367–68]. 19. KSA XI (1885) 35 (15), p. 514 [WP, §658, p. 347, trans. slightly modified]. 20. KSA XI (1884) 27 (25), p. 282; see also KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (50), p. 204; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (173), pp. 358–60 [WP, §699, pp. 371–72]. 21. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (80), p. 260 [WP, §693, p. 369, trans. slightly modified]. 22. KSA XII (1887) 9 (92), p. 387. 23. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (18), p. 226; see also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (24), p. 229. 24. KSA XI (1884) 25 (378), p. 111; see also KSA XI (1884) 25 (426), p. 124, (427), pp. 124–25 and (517), p. 148; KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (97), p. 34.

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25. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (61), p. 30 [WP, §701, pp. 372–73, trans. slightly modified]. 26. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (173), p. 359 [WP, §699, p. 372]. 27. See KSA XI (1884) 26 (239), p. 211 and (241), pp. 211–14. 28. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (48), p. 311 [WP, §700, p. 372]; see also KSA XI (1884) 25 (390), p. 114; KSA XI (1884) 27 (21), p. 280. 29. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (173), p. 359 [WP, §699, p. 371]; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (309), pp. 559–60. 30. Ibid., pp. 359–60 [WP, §699, p. 372]. 31. Ibid., p. 359 [WP, §699, pp. 371–72]. 32. Ibid., p. 359 [WP, §699, p. 372]. 33. KSA XI (1884) 25 (402), pp. 116–17; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (314), pp. 562–63. 34. KSA XIII (1888) 15 (90), p. 458 [WP, §479, p. 265].

Chapter 4. To Will, to Feel, to Think 1. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (79), p. 259 [WP, §635, p. 339]. 2. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (80), p. 260. 3. KSA VII (1870–71) 5 (81), p. 114 and KSA VIII (1877) 22 (117), p. 400. 4. KSA XI (1884) 26 (431), p. 266; see also KSA XI (1885) 36 (25), p. 561 [WP, §545, p. 293], where “absolute space” is defined as “the substratum of force.” 5. KSA X (1882–83) 5 (1), ¶179, p. 207. 6. KSA XI (1885), 35 (55), p. 537 [WP, §1064, p. 547, trans. slightly modified]. 7. See Didier Franck, Heidegger et le problème de l’espace (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1986). Untranslated. 8. KSA X (1883) 7 (173), p. 298; see KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (81), p. 220, where the “ants” are opposed to the “synthetic men,” that is to say, to the overmen; concerning the hierarchical origin of language, see Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I, §2, pp. 25–26 (KSA V, pp. 258–60) and KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (156), p. 142. 9. See KSA XI (1885) 36 (22), p. 561; KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (124), p. 40 [WP, §642, p. 342]. 10. KSA XI (1884) 34 (123), pp. 461–62. 11. KSA XI (1884) 26 (36), p. 157. 12. KSA X (1883) 7 (167), p. 298. 13. KSA XI (1885) 40 (55), p. 655. 14. See, for example, KSA XI (1884) 25 (391), p. 114. After having asserted that physical pain is only the consequence of mental pain, Nietzsche talks there about “a multitude of judgments, acts of will and affects concentrated in one single instant.” 15. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (376), p. 110 and (401), p. 116; KSA XI (1885) 40 (49), p. 653.

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16. KSA IX (1881) 11 (316), p. 563. 17. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (56), p. 206. Only the part related to the methodological priority of the body is translated in WP, §489, p. 270; see also KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (72), p. 29. 18. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (78), p. 98. 19. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (84), pp. 103–4 [WP, §531, pp. 288–89]. 20. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I, §13, p. 45 (KSA V, p. 279). 21. KSA XI (1885) 40 (37), p. 646. 22. KSA X (1883) 7 (226), p. 312. 23. KSA X (1883) 20 (4), p. 590. 24. KSA XI (1884) 25 (360), p. 107. 25. Nietzsche, “The Wanderer and His Shadow” (§55), in Human, All Too Human, II, 2, p. 323 (KSA II, p. 577). 26. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §19, p. 25 (KSA V, p. 32), trans. modified; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §99, pp. 152–56 (KSA III, pp. 453–57) and §127, pp. 183–84 (KSA III, pp. 482–83). 27. KSA XI (1885) 34 (247), p. 504. 28. KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (16), p. 14; see also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (107), p. 285 [WP, §458, p. 251]: “[Thinking] is an action, and the former presupposes thought.” 29. KSA XI (1884) 26 (17), p. 153. 30. KSA XIII (1888) 17 (5), pp. 526–27; see also Friedrich Nietzsche, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man” (§20), in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, p. 90 (KSA VI, p. 124) and KSA XIII (1888) 16 (40), p. 499: “All things ugly weaken and sadden man: it reminds him of decline, danger, impotence. One can measure with a dynamometer the impression of ugliness. Where it is depressed, it is under the effect of something ugly. The feeling of power, the will to power—this grows with beauty, declines with ugliness.” 31. Nietzsche, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man” (§8), in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, pp. 82–83 (KSA VI, p. 116), trans. modified; see also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (117), p. 294 [WP, §800, p. 421]. 32. “Why I Write Such Good Books: Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (§4), in Ecce Homo, pp. 302–3 (KSA VI, p. 341); see also KSA XII (1887) 9 (70), p. 372. 33. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §381, p. 346 (KSA III, p. 635), trans. slightly modified. 34. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (376), p. 169 [WP, §314, p. 173] and KSA XIII (1888) 15 (118), p. 480. 35. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), sec. I, bk. 2, p. 154 [note] (Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Akademieausgabe, vol. V, p. 272 [note]); Kant, Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, in Ethical Philosophy, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), bk. II, “Introduction,” §16ff., p. 67ff. (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Tugendlehre, vol. VI, p. 407ff.); Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pt. I, bk. 3, §73ff., p. 149ff.

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(Anthropologie, vol. VII, p. 251ff.); see also Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 45ff. (Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst, GA 43, p. 51ff). 36. KSA XII (1887) 10 (133), p. 532 [WP, §931, p. 491]. 37. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §22, p. 30 (KSA V, p. 37). 38. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (121), p. 300 [WP, §688, p. 366]. 39. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §23, p. 31 (KSA V, pp. 45–46). 40. KSA XI (1884) 25 (113), p. 43; see also KSA X (1882–83) 4 (217), pp. 172–73; KSA X (1883) 7 (60), pp. 261–62 and 7 (268), p. 323. 41. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §19, p. 26 (KSA V, p. 32). 42. KSA XI (1885) 38 (8), p. 607, which constitutes a first version of §19 of Beyond Good and Evil. 43. KSA XI (1885) 40 (39), p. 648. 44. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §12, pp. 20–21 (KSA V, p. 27); see also KSA XI (1884) 25 (7), pp. 10–11. 45. Ibid., §19, pp. 26–27 (KSA V, p. 33). 46. See KSA X (1882–83) 5 (1), ¶1, p. 187 and Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, “Of Self-Overcoming,” pp. 136–39 (KSA IV, pp. 146–49); see also KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (190), p. 161 [WP, §254, p. 148]; KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (71), §10, p. 215 [WP, §55, p. 37]; KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (54), pp. 312–13 [WP, §617, pp. 330–31]; KSA XII (1887) 9 (1), p. 339; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (174), pp. 360–62 [WP, §652, p. 345, §702, p. 373, §703, pp. 373–74]. 47. KSA XI (1885) 40 (61), p. 661. 48. KSA X (1882–83) 5 (1), ¶243, p. 216. 49. KSA XI (1885) 34 (250), pp. 505–6; see also as early as KSA IX (1881) 11 (131), p. 489 and KSA XI (1884) 25 (308), p. 90: “ ‘Freedom of the will’ is the theory of a feeling.” 50. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §19, p. 26 (KSA V, p. 32). 51. KSA XI (1884) 25 (436), p. 127; see also 25 (185), p. 64.

Chapter 5. Organization and Reproduction 1. Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, pp. 56 and 62 (Über den Willen in der Natur, in Werke, vol. V, p. 243). 2. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §37, p. 26 (KSA III, p. 44). 3. See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 5, §224, pp. 107–8 (KSA II, pp. 187–89) and §231, pp. 110–11 (KSA II, p. 194); Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §223, p. 211 (KSA III, p. 510). 4. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (25), p. 304 [WP, §647, pp. 343–44]; see also 7 (9), p. 297 [WP, §649, p. 344]; 7 (44), p. 309 [WP, §649, p. 344] and KSA XI (1884) 26 (85), pp. 171–72. 5. KSA X (1883) 7 (204), p. 306. 6. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (495), p. 144. 7. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 2, §96, p. 51 (KSA II, p. 93). 8. KSA IX (1880) 4 (53), p. 112. This formula is not properly speaking Neoplatonic but expresses, according to Johann Julius Baumann, from whom

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Nietzsche takes it, the “canon of the Neoplatonists”; see J. J. Baumann, Handbuch der Moral nebst Abriß der Rechtsphilosophie (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1879), p. 135. Untranslated. 9. KSA XI (1884) 26 (407), pp. 258–59; see also KSA XI (1885) 38 (13), pp. 612–13 [WP, §972, pp. 509–10]. 10. See KSA XIII (1887) 9 (71), p. 372 [WP, §724, p. 385]. 11. KSA XI (1884) 26 (174), p. 195; see also KSA X (1883), 7 (172), pp. 297–98. 12. KSA XI (1884) 25 (426), p. 124; see also 25 (411), p. 119. 13. KSA XI (1884) 25 (433), p. 127. 14. KSA XIII (1888) 24 (1), §10, p. 630. 15. KSA XI (1885) 36 (28), p. 562 [WP, §645, p. 343, trans. slightly modified]. 16. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (25), p. 304 [WP, §647, p. 344]. 17. KSA X (1883) 7 (94), p. 274. 18. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, §12, p. 77 (KSA V, p. 314); see also KSA XI (1884) 26 (174), p. 195 and KSA IX (1881) 11 (134), pp. 490–92. 19. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (77), p. 97 [WP, §590, p. 323]. 20. Ibid.; see also KSA XII (1885–86), 5 (99), pp. 226–27. 21. KSA XII (1885–86), 2 (148), pp. 139–40 [WP, §643, p. 342]. 22. KSA XI (1884) 25 (426), p. 124. 23. KSA XI (1884) 26 (72), p. 167. 24. KSA XI (1885) 34 (194), p. 486. 25. KSA XI (1885) 35 (15), p. 514 [WP, §658, p. 347]. 26. KSA XI (1885) 40 (38), pp. 647–48; see also KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (105), pp. 35–36. 27. KSA XI (1884) 26 (204), p. 203; see also KSA XI (1885) 34 (125), p. 463; KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (4), pp. 10–11. 28. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (117), p. 293. 29. See Georges Canguilhem, “Cell Theory” in Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, ed. Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 25–56, here p. 31 (“La théorie cellulaire,” in La connaissance de la vie, p. 49); François Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, trans. Betty E. Spillmann (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 117 (La logique du vivant [Paris: Gallimard, 1970], p. 132); and Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pt. II, chap. 4, §53, pp. 223–24 (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, GA 29–30, p. 327). 30. KSA XI (1885) 34 (51), p. 436. 31. KSA X (1882–83) 4 (217), p. 172; see also KSA X (1883) 7 (97), p. 275. 32. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (285), p. 110 [WP, §917, p. 485]. 33. KSA XI (1885) 35 (58) and (59), p. 537. 34. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (76), p. 96. 35. KSA XII (1887) 9 (151), p. 424 [WP, §656, p. 346, trans. slightly modified].

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36. KSA IX (1881) 11 (345), p. 575 and KSA XI (1885) 36 (15), p. 557 [WP, §1062, p. 547]. 37. See KSA IX (1881) 11 (213), p. 525. 38. KSA IX (1881) 11 (284), p. 550. As W. Müller-Lauter showed it, this note is relative to the book of Wilhelm Roux, Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus, which came out in 1881, and to which Nietzsche referred on many occasions. See Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, “Der Organismus als innerer Kampf,” in Nietzsche-Studien, vol. 7, 1978, pp. 189–223. A later version of the same study appeared in Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy, trans. David J. Parent (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), chap. IX, pp. 161–81. The essay was not published in the German original. 39. KSA X (1883–84) 24 (36), p. 664; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (134), pp. 490–92. 40. KSA IX (1881) 11 (284), p. 550. 41. KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (58), p. 25. 42. KSA XI (1885) 36 (21), p. 560 [WP, §655, p. 346]. On the formation of organs from the will to power as a unity of willing, feeling, and thinking, see KSA XI (1885) 40 (37), pp. 646–47 and KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (57), p. 24, where Nietzsche aims to “present the transformations of the will to power, its arrangements, its specializations—in parallel to the morphological development.” 43. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (9), p. 297 [WP, §644, p. 342, trans. slightly modified]; on the concept of perfection, see KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (76), pp. 96–97 [WP, §660, pp. 348–49]. 44. KSA XI (1884) 25 (408), p. 119. 45. KSA XII (1887) 9 (60), p. 366 [WP, §585, p. 318]. 46. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (69), p. 92. 47. KSA XI (1884) 25 (128), p. 47; see also KSA XII (1887) 10 (134), p. 532 [WP, §927, pp. 489–90]. 48. See KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (13), p. 73, where the will to power is qualified as “mystic pathos, aspiring towards ever new expansion of distance”; and KSA XIII (1888) 14 (79), p. 259 [WP, §635, p. 339], where it is specified that “the will to power not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos—the most elementary fact from which becoming and effecting first emerge . . .” 49. KSA XI (1884) 26 (157), p. 191. 50. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (68), p. 92. 51. KSA XI (1885) 40 (8), p. 631. 52. KSA XI (1885) 34 (217), p. 495. 53. KSA IX (1881) 11 (313), p. 561. 54. KSA XI (1884) 26 (274), pp. 221–22; see also KSA XI (1885) 43 (2), pp. 701–2; KSA XII (1887) 9 (98), pp. 391–92 [WP, §488, pp. 269–70]. 55. KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (118), p. 38 [WP, §654, p. 345]. 56. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (64), p. 209 [WP, §657, p. 347]; see also KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (76), pp. 96–97 [WP, §660, pp. 348–49]. W. Müller-Lauter showed that these notes refer to the book by W. H. Rolphs, Biologische Problem zugleich als Versuch zur Entwicklung einer rationalen Ethik, that Nietzche acquired in 1884; see

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also W. Müller-Lauter, “Der Organismus als innerer Kampf,” in Nietzsche-Studien, 1978, p. 222 n.180, and KSA XI (1885) 35 (34), pp. 523–26. 57. KSA XII (1887) 10 (13), p. 461 [WP, §653, p. 345]. 58. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §36, p. 48 (KSA V, p. 55), trans. slightly modified; see also KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (30), pp. 17–18; KSA XII (1886–87) 6 (26), pp. 243–45. On hunger and nourishment as consequences of the will to power, see KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (76), pp. 96–97 [WP, §660, p. 349]; KSA XII (1887) 9 (151), p. 424 [WP, §656, p. 346]; KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (121), p. 57; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (174), pp. 360–62. 59. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (356), p. 106; KSA XI (1884) 26 (68), p. 166; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (144), pp. 328–29. 60. KSA XI (1885) 40 (28), pp. 643–44. 61. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, §12, pp. 77–78 (KSA V, pp. 314–15). 62. See KSA XII (1887) 9 (40), p. 353 [WP, §560, pp. 302–3]; 9 (62), pp. 368–69 [WP, §580, p. 312]; 9 (91), pp. 383–87 [WP, §552, pp. 297–300]. 63. KSA XII (1887) 9 (144), p. 417 [WP, §521, p. 282]. 64. KSA XI (1884) 25 (431), p. 126. 65. See KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (361), p. 159, where Nietzsche, following Schopenhauer, translates Mitleid with caritas. 66. Nietzsche regarded the whole church as a domination-formation and ventured that the Catholic Church, “the oldest of all state-forms in Europe, now best represents the old states”; KSA X (1883) 7 (242), p. 318; see Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §358, p. 313 (KSA III, p. 605) and KSA X (1883) 7 (242), p. 318. 67. KSA XI (1884) 25 (113). Nietzsche immediately adds: “Compassion. For another.” 68. KSA XI (1885) 43 (1), p. 699; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §118, pp. 175–76 (KSA III, p. 476). 69. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (432), p. 126; 25 (437), p. 128; 26 (277), pp. 222–23. 70. KSA XI (1884) 27 (42), p. 286; see also 27 (49), p. 287. 71. KSA XII (1887) 9 (16), p. 346 [WP, §994, p. 518]. 72. KSA XI (1884) 25 (441), p. 130. 73. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), p. 395 [WP, §569, pp. 306–7]. 74. KSA XI (1885) 34 (249), p. 505; see also Heidegger, Being and Time, pt. I, chap. 5, ¶33, pp. 195–203 (Sein und Zeit, pp. 153–60). 75. KSA XI (1885) 35 (67), p. 539. 76. KSA XI (1885) 39 (12), p. 623. 77. KSA XI (1884–85) 31 (41), p. 377; KSA XII (1886–87) 6 (9), p. 236.

Part 4. The Logic of the Body Chapter 1. Dehumanization as a Method 1. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §110, p. 171 (KSA III, p. 471). 2. Ibid.

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3. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Preface,” §3, p. 218 (KSA VI, p. 259), trans. modified; see also KSA XI (1884) 26 (50), p. 161; KSA XI (1885) 35 (69), p. 540; KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (200), p. 55; KSA XII (1887) 10 (3), p. 455; KSA (1888) 16 (32), p. 492 and Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §39, pp. 49–50 (KSA V, pp. 56–57). 4. KSA XII (1888) 14 (8), p. 221. 5. KSA XI (1884) 25 (305), p. 88. In 1880, at the end of a note examining the conditions necessary to the flourishing of the individual, Nietzsche concluded: “perhaps humanity MUST die out from morality.” KSA IX (1880) 6 (153), p. 235. See also KSA VIII (1876–77) 23 (82), pp. 432–33 and Nietzsche, Daybreak, §45, p. 31, §429, p. 184 and §501, p. 204 (KSA III, pp. 52, 264 and 294). 6. KSA XI (1884) 27 (23), pp. 280–81. Humanity here is opposed to higher-humanity [Höheren Menschen]; see KSA XI (1884) 26 (232), p. 210. 7. KSA XI (1884) 25 (305), p. 88. 8. KSA IX (1881) 11 (110), p. 480. 9. KSA IX (1881) 11 (10), pp. 443–44, where “as such” translates sachlich; see also Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III, §12, p. 119 (KSA V, p. 365). 10. This expression is the last one in a note that begins with these words: “Task: to see things as they are!” KSA IX (1881) 11 (65), p. 466; see also KSA IX (1881) 13 (5), p. 619. 11. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §188, pp. 100–102 (KSA V, pp. 108– 10). 12. KSA IX (1881) 11 (141), pp. 494–96; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §110, pp. 169–71 (KSA III, pp. 469–71), for which the entirety of this addition is an outline. 13. KSA X (1882–83) 6 (1), p. 231; see KSA XI (1885) 40 (65), pp. 663–66 and 41 (9), pp. 683–86, where Nietzsche recounts the experience that leads to “a kind of bird’s freedom, to a sort of panoramic gaze of a bird”; see also KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (30), p. 17. 14. KSA X (1883) 8 (3), p. 326. 15. KSA XI (1884) 27 (41), p. 285. 16. KSA IX (1881) 11 (144), p. 496. 17. KSA IX (1881) 11 (119), p. 483. The difficulty of this citation makes it important to reproduce in the original. “ ‘Wissenschaft’ angeblich auf der Liebe zur Wahrheit um ihrer selber willen! . . . In Wahrheit sind alle unsere Triebe thätig, aber in einer besonderen gleichsam staatlichen Ordnung und Anpassung an einander, so dass ihr Resultat kein Phantasma wird: ein Trieb regt den anderen an, jeder phantasirt und will seine Art Irrthum durchsetzen: aber jeder dieser Irrthümer wird sofort wieder die Handhabe für einen anderen Trieb (z.B. Widerspruch Analyse usw.). Mit allen den vielen Phantasmen erräth man endlich fast nothwendig die Wirklichkeit und Wahrheit . . .”—Trans. 18. KSA IX (1880) 6 (18), p. 197. 19. KSA XII (1888) 16 (30), p. 491. 20. See KSA IX (1881) 12 (192), p. 609. 21. KSA XI (1885) 40 (13), p. 634. We already find this in Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 1, §11, p. 16 (KSA II, pp. 30–31).

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22. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §109, p. 168 (KSA III, p. 468); see KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (74), p. 37. 23. KSA X (1883–84) 24 (5), p. 645 (note entitled “On the Origin of Logic”); KSA XII (1887) 9 (91), pp. 383–87 and 9 (106), p. 395; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (121), p. 406. 24. KSA XI (1884) 26 (279), p. 223; KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (31), pp. 117– 18; KSA XI (1885) 44 (5), pp. 707–8. 25. Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator (1874)” (§4), in Untimely Meditations, p. 150 (KSA I, p. 367). 26. KSA XII (1887) 9 (119), p. 404; see KSA XI (1884) 26 (279), p. 223; KSA XI (1885) 43 (8), p. 697, and Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §224, pp. 151– 53 (KSA V, pp. 157–60); with regard to “synthetic man,” see KSA XII (1887) 10 (111), p. 520. 27. KSA IX (1881) 11 (197), pp. 519–20. 28. KSA IX (1881) 11 (21), p. 387. 29. KSA VII (1870) 5 (39), p. 103. 30. KSA VII (1872–73) 19 (158), pp. 468–69; 19 (237), p. 494; 19 (125), p. 459. 31. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §48, p. 32 and §438, p. 187 (KSA III, pp. 53 and 268); see KSA IX (1880) 6 (239), p. 261 and (429), p. 308; KSA X (1883) 12 (1), ¶160, p. 397; KSA XI (1884) 26 (75), §3, p. 169; KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (12), p. 13 and 2 (77), p. 97. 32. KSA IX (1881) 11 (211), p. 525: Nietzsche’s expression is “die Entmenschung der Natur”; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (238), p. 532. 33. KSA XI (1884) 25 (434), p. 127. 34. KSA XI (1884) 25 (371), pp. 108–9. 35. KSA IX (1881) 11 (65), p. 466. 36. KSA X (1882–1883) 4 (172), p. 162. 37. KSA XI (1884) 27 (41), p. 285. In regard to the An-sich, see KSA IX (1884) 25 (192), p. 65 and (377), p. 111; (1884) 26 (86), p. 172; (1884) 1 (120), p. 460; (1885) 38 (14), pp. 613–15; KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (149), p. 140 and (154), pp. 141–42; (1886–87) 5 (11), p. 188; (1887) 9 (40), p. 353; KSA XIII (1887) 11 (134), p. 62; (1888) 14 (103), pp. 280–82. In a note where he recalls that “every sensation includes an evaluation,” Nietzsche gives himself the task of “presenting [his] type of ‘idealism’ ”; see KSA IX (1882) 21 (3), ¶52, p. 685. On the opposition between idealism and realism, see KSA XI (1884) 25 (196), p. 66. 38. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (16), p. 300. 39. KSA XII (1887) 9 (173), p. 438. 40. See KSA XII (1886) 1 (131), p. 153: “homo natura. The ‘will to power’ ”; see also KSA XII (1887) 9 (8), pp. 342–43 and (75), p. 375. 41. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Prologue,” §5, p. 46 (KSA IV, p. 19), trans. expanded with the German; see also KSA X (1882–83) 5 (1), ¶128, p. 201. 42. KSA XI (1884) 26 (222), p. 208. 43. The word “given” is set between quotation marks in the very important §36 in Beyond Good and Evil (p. 47); see also §186, p. 97 (KSA V, p. 54, 105; [the German word is gegeben—Trans.]).

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44. KSA IX (1881) 11 (78), p. 471; see also 11 (79), p. 471. 45. KSA X (1883) 7 (133), p. 286. 46. KSA XI (1885) 35 (3), pp. 509–10; see also KSA XII (1888) 16 (75), pp. 510–11. On the logical character of the grand style of which Wagner’s art, for example, is incapable, see KSA XI (1885) 41 (2), §6, pp. 672–73. 47. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), p. 395; see also KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (111), p. 117. 48. KSA XI (1885) 34 (49), pp. 435–36. 49. KSA XI (1884) 25 (312), p. 92; see also 25 (71), pp. 27–28. 50. Nietzsche did posit “a state of εποχή” as “principle”; see KSA XI (1884) 26 (82), p. 170 and (1885) 35 (29), pp. 521–22. 51. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1982), vol. I, §59, p. 136 (Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, in Husserliana [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977], vol. III-1, p. 113). 52. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities, 1970), vol. I, “Investigation II,” chap. 1, §3, p. 343 (Logische Untersuchungen, in Husserliana [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984], vol. XIX-1, p. 118). 53. See Husserl, Ideas, vol. I, §49, pp. 109–12 and §150, pp. 359–62 (Ideen, pp. 91–93 and 313–17). After he envisioned (§49) the possibility of a chaotic experience whose corollary would be the absence of world, Husserl added: “nevertheless, in that case it could be that, to some extent, crude unity-formations become constituted, transient supports for intuitions which were mere analogues of intuitions of physical things because quite incapable of constituting conservable ‘realities,’ enduring unities ‘which exist in themselves, whether or not they are perceived.’ ” Husserl does not specify what phenomenological givens are liable to justify such an assertion. 54. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), §30, p. 64 (Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, in Husserliana [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966], vol. X, p. 62). 55. KSA X (1882–83) 4 (77), pp. 135–36. 56. KSA IX (1881) 12 (34), p. 58, partially recopied in KSA XIII (1887– 88) 11 (87), p. 41; see KSA IX (1881) 12 (26), p. 580 and 12 (38), p. 583; KSA IX (1881) 14 (8), pp. 624–25 and 14 (9), p. 625; KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (174), pp. 153–54. 57. See Aristotle, De Interpretatione (On Interpretation), ¶3, 16 b19ff., in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I, p. 26. 58. KSA IX (1881) 14 (8), pp. 624–25.

Chapter 2. Fear and the Will to Assimilation 1. KSA IX (1881) 11 (213), p. 525; see also 11 (201), p. 522. 2. KSA IX (1881) 11 (148), p. 498. 3. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §109, p. 168 (KSA III, p. 468).

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4. KSA IX (1881) 11 (72), p. 469; see 11 (7), pp. 442–43, where Nietzsche opposes “imaginary individuals [die eingebildeten Individuen]” to “true ‘life systems’ [‘wahren Lebens-systeme’]”; see also 11 (121), p. 484. 5. KSA X (1883–84) 24 (28), p. 662; on the “prodigiously accidental character of every combination,” see KSA XI (1884) 25 (158), p. 55. 6. KSA XI (1885) 34 (180), p. 481. 7. KSA IX (1881) 11 (293), p. 554. 8. Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, 5, 1382 a21–22, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. II, p. 2202. 9. See KSA XIII (1888) 23 (2), pp. 600–601. 10. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, IV, “Of Science,” p. 312 (KSA IV, p. 377). In regard to the “conscientious man of spirit,” see KSA XI (1884–85) 31 (10), ¶3, p. 362 and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, IV, “The Leech,” pp. 261–64 (KSA IV, pp. 309–12). What Nietzsche ascribes to fear corresponds, mutatis mutandis, to what Heidegger ascribes to anguish, which serves as a reduction in the existential analytic. As proof, if it were needed, note that the division between fear and anguish is often difficult to establish; see Heidegger, Being and Time, pt. I, chap. 5, ¶30, pp. 179–82 and chap. 6, ¶40, pp. 228–35 (Sein und Zeit, pp. 140–42 and 184–91); see also Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Peur et altérité,” in La voix nue: Phénoménologie de la promesse (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1990), pp. 226ff. Untranslated. 11. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 4, §169, p. 89 (KSA II, p. 157); see also KSA IX (1879–80) 1 (96), p. 27. 12. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §48, p. 112 (KSA III, p. 53). 13. KSA XI (1884) 26 (280), pp. 223–24. 14. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §142, p. 90 (KSA III, p. 134: “die Lehrmeisterin jener Mitempfindung”). 15. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §355, p. 301 (KSA III, p. 594). 16. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §201, p. 113 (KSA V, p. 122); see also §262, p. 212 (KSA V, p. 213), where the same thing is said of danger. 17. KSA XI (1884) 26 (301), p. 231. 18. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (3), p. 255; see Plato, The Theaetetus, trans. M. J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), 155 d, p. 277, and Aristotle, Metaphysics, I (A), 2, 982 b12ff. in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. II, p. 1554. 19. KSA IX (1880) 4 (194), p. 148. 20. KSA XI (1884) 25 (88), p. 31. 21. KSA XI (1884) 27 (49), p. 287; see KSA XII (1887) 10 (39), p. 474. 22. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, 5, 1383 a6–7, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. II, p. 2203: “There must be some faint expectation of escape. This appears from the fact that fear sets us thinking what can be done, which of course nobody does when things are hopeless.” 23. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (363), ¶3, p. 160. 24. KSA XI (1884) 25 (160), pp. 55–56. 25. KSA XII (1887) 10 (21), p. 466; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (71), pp. 468–69. 26. KSA XII (1887) 10 (8), p. 458.

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27. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (357), p. 106. “Is there not, in obedience, something like hypnotism [etwas ist wie Hypnotismus]?” and KSA X (1883) 3 (1), ¶96, p. 64: “There is in the moral world a great deal of hypnotism.” If hypnosis is indissociable from any hierarchical relationship, it never ceases to be at work in the life of the body. Nietzsche once defined “the hypnotic state” as the “separation of an awakened intellect and a dormant intellect” to specify, a little later on, that “by day, the inferior intellect is closed to consciousness; by night, the superior intellect sleeps and the inferior one enters into consciousness (dream).” In light of this, the practice of hypnosis does not consist so much in putting “the superior intellect” to sleep as in inverting the relations between wakefulness and sleep, insofar as they are connected to the constitutive hierarchy of the body; see KSA X (1882) 1 (31), p. 16; KSA XI (1884) 26 (34), p. 156; and François Roustang, Influence (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1990), pp. 81ff., as well as his Qu’est-ce que l’hypnose? (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1994). Untranslated. 28. KSA XI (1884) 26 (276), p. 222; see KSA XI (1885) 36 (22), pp. 560– 61, 40 (55), p. 655. 29. KSA XI (1884) 25 (436), p. 127. 30. KSA IX (1881) 11 (316), pp. 563–64; see also 12 (163), p. 604. 31. See KSA XII (1887) 9 (121), pp. 406–7, and (1887) 10 (53), pp. 482– 84, where Nietzsche asserts that he sees nothing else “in politicis than problems of power, of a quantum of power against another quantum.” 32. KSA XII (1887) 9 (8), pp. 342–43; see also KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (61), pp. 207–8. 33. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (40), p. 238; see also KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (76), pp. 96–97. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man” (§37), in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, p. 103 (KSA VI, p. 138), where Nietzsche asserts that the “declining life” is “the ideal ” of French and English sociologists. 34. KSA XI (1884–85) 30 (10), p. 356; see also KSA X (1883) 7 (174), pp. 298–99, and Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §268, pp. 216–17 (KSA V, pp. 221–22). 35. KSA XI (1884) 27 (30), p. 283. 36. KSA XI (1884) 26 (205), pp. 203–4. 37. KSA XI (1885) 34 (86), p. 448. 38. KSA X (1883) 7 (173), p. 298. 39. Ibid. 40. See KSA X (1882–83) 4 (171), p. 162. 41. KSA XIII (1888) 15 (63), p. 450. 42. See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Prologue,” §5, pp. 45–47 (KSA IV, pp. 18–21). 43. KSA X (1882–83) 4 (163), p. 160; see also (1882) 1 (38), pp. 19–20 and KSA XI (1885) 41 (2), §8, pp. 676–77, where Nietzsche speaks of Paganini, Liszt, and Wagner as of “three marvelous and dangerous men bizarrely placed between ‘God’ and ‘apes.’ ” 44. KSA X (1882–83) 4 (204), p. 168. 45. KSA X (1883) 7 (170), p. 297.

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46. In regard to “Chinese,” see KSA IX (1881) 11 (44), p. 458, (262), pp. 540–41 and (274), pp. 546–47; see also KSA XII (1887) 10 (17), pp. 462–63, where “Chinesism” is defined as “a sort of stagnation in the level of man.” It is relative to this signification of China that the qualifier “the great Chinese” must be attributed to Kant. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §210, pp. 134–35 (KSA V, pp. 142–44) and Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §11, pp. 133–34 (KSA VI, pp. 177–78). For the great man, see KSA IX (1881) 14 (15), p. 626; compare this with KSA IX (1881) 11 (287), pp. 551–52, KSA XIII (1888) 16 (9), p. 485 and KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (87), p. 222, where Nietzsche copies Montesquieu’s words to the effect “in order that one man might rise above humanity . . . that costs most dearly to all the rest.” See Montesquieu, “Sulla and Eucrates,” in The Personal and the Political: Three Fables by Montesquieu, trans. W. B. Allen (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2008), pp. 98– 109, here, p. 104 (“Dialogue de Sylla et d’Eucrate,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Roger Caillois, p. 505). 47. KSA X (1883) 7 (21), pp. 244–45. 48. See KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), pp. 395–96. 49. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)” (§1), in Writings from the Early Notebooks, trans. Ladislaus Löb, ed. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 256; KSA IX (1881) 11 (202), p. 523 and G. W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. and ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), bk. II, chap. 27, §3, p. 231. 50. G. W. Leibniz, “On Nature Itself, or on the Inherent Force and Actions of Created Things (1698),” in Philosophical Papers, ¶13, p. 506 (“De ipsa natura . . .” in Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. IV, p. 514); see also G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) ¶9 ibid., p. 308 and the letter to Arnauld of 14 July 1686 ibid., p. 335. 51. KSA IX (1881) 11 (166), p. 505; see also KSA XI (1884) 25 (231), p. 74. 52. KSA IX (1881) 11 (237), pp. 531–32. 53. See KSA IX (1881) 11 (202), p. 523 and 11 (231), p. 530, where Nietzsche shows that there could not be two identical things without there being an absolutely identical genesis—and this, for all eternity—and, consequently, without “all other things being likewise absolutely identical, for all time.” 54. See KSA XI (1885) 38 (14), pp. 613–15. 55. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §228, p. 212 (KSA III, p. 508), trans. modified. The myopia that consists either in seeing being where there is only becoming, or in eternalizing becoming, is the mark of art, of the moral mode of thought, and qualifies God himself; see KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (54), p. 312; KSA IX (1881) 15 (48), p. 651; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (163), p. 347 and (1887–88) 11 (122), pp. 58–59. 56. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §111, p. 171 (KSA III, pp. 471–72), trans. slightly modified. 57. Ibid., §348, p. 291 (KSA III, p. 584); see also Nietzsche, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” (§2) in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The

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Anti-Christ, p. 78: “but la science belongs to democracy”; KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (179), p. 155; see also KSA XII (1887) 9 (20), p. 347 and (29), p. 349. 58. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (18), p. 191; see also Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §268, pp. 216–17 (KSA V, pp. 221–22). 59. It is worth emphasizing here that Nietzsche’s critique of democracy does not amount to the approbation of political regimes that were, or still are, its adversaries, and that in the final analysis it aims at all those forms of political organization proper to the age of technology, since the “German Reich” results partially from this; see Nietzsche, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” (§39) in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, pp. 104–6 (KSA VI, pp. 140–42) and Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 8, §472, pp. 170–73. 60. KSA IX (1881) 11 (32), p. 490. 61. See KSA IX (1881) 12 (163), p. 604. 62. KSA IX (1881) 11 (134), pp. 490–92. This note relates to the work of Wilhelm Roux, already mentioned; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §118, pp. 175–76 (KSA III, p. 476). 63. KSA XI (1885) 40 (33), p. 645; see also KSA XI (1885) 42 (7), p. 697. 64. KSA XI (1885) 40 (7), p. 631. 65. Nietzsche, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man” (§39) in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, p. 104 (KSA VI, p. 140), trans. modified. 66. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, §12, p. 79 (KSA V, p. 316). 67. Ibid.; see also KSA XII (1887) 10 (18), p. 464.

Chapter 3. Simplification and Judgment 1. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (9), pp. 295–96. 2. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (90), p. 106. 3. KSA IX (1881) 12 (219), p. 615; the German reads: “der Magen, moralisch beschrieben”; and KSA XI (1884) 26 (211), p. 205. 4. KSA XI (1884) 25 (93), p. 32 and (185), p. 64; (1884) 26 (141), p. 186. 5. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §230, pp. 159–60 (KSA V, pp. 167–68); see also KSA X (1883–84) 24 (14), pp. 650–51. 6. KSA XII (1887) 9 (144), p. 418. 7. KSA XI (1884) 26 (61), p. 164; see also (1884) 25 (377), p. 111, where the Erkenntniss-Apparat is likened to a “shrinking machine” and to a “ReduktionsApparat”; (1884) 25 (409), p. 119, where it is compared to an “AbstractionsApparat”; and (1884) 26 (52), p. 161, where it is likened to a “simplification apparatus.” 8. KSA XI (1885) 34 (46), p. 434. 9. KSA IX (1881) 11 (286), p. 551. 10. KSA XI (1885) 34 (253), p. 506. 11. KSA IX (1881) 11 (325), p. 568; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (268), pp. 543–44. 12. KSA XI (1885) 34 (247), pp. 503–4; see also KSA IX (1880) 6 (411), p. 303; KSA XI (1885) 36 (23), p. 561 and (1885) 38 (4), p. 598.

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13. KSA XI (1885) 38 (14), p. 613; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (286), pp. 550–51 and (320) pp. 565–66 and (335), p. 572; KSA (1883) 9 (38), p. 357. 14. KSA IX (1881) 11 (325), pp. 567–68. 15. KSA IX (1881) 11 (162), pp. 503–4. 16. See KSA X (1882–83) 4 (94), pp. 142–43. 17. KSA IX (1881) 11 (315), p. 563. 18. KSA XI (1885) 37 (4), pp. 577–78. 19. Nietzsche, “Why I Write Such Good Books: Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (§3), in Ecce Homo, pp. 300–301 (KSA VI, p. 340); see also Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, “The Home-Coming,” p. 202 (KSA IV, p. 231). 20. KSA XI (1885) 40 (42), p. 650. 21. KSA IX (1881) 11 (268), pp. 543–44. 22. Ibid. 23. KSA XI (1885) 34 (124), p. 462. 24. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), “Introduction to the B version,” IV, p. 14 (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Akademieausgabe, vol. III, p. 10); see also Aristotle, De Interpretatione (On Interpretation), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I, ¶6, 17 a25, p. 27 and ¶10, 19 b5, p. 31. 25. See Aristotle, De Interpretatione (On Interpretation), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I, ¶5, 17 a16, p. 26. 26. KSA XI (1885) 40 (7), p. 631 and KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (90), p. 106. 27. KSA XI (1884) 26 (65), p. 166. 28. Immanuel Kant, “The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (1762),” in Kant: Theoretical Philosophy (1755–1770), trans. and ed. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), §1, p. 89 (Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren erwiesen [1762], p. 47). 29. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (3), p. 256. 30. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (4), p. 264. In Human, All Too Human, I, 1 §18, pp. 21–22, Nietzsche already considered that belief was the essence of judgment, and grounded belief on the sensation of what is agreeable or painful. 31. KSA XII (1887) 9 (89), p. 382. 32. KSA XII (1887) 9 (41), p. 354. 33. KSA XII (1886) 4 (8), p. 182; see also KSA XII (1885) 2 (83), pp. 101–3 and (84), pp. 103–4; on the stupidity of belief, see KSA XII (1887) 9 (136), p. 413. The words between brackets were inserted by the KSA editors.—Trans. 34. See II Samuel 23:3; Isaiah 28:16, 30:29; and Ephesians 2:20. 35. Isaiah 7:9. Franck’s translation of Luther reads: “If you do not believe, no, you cannot be stable.”—Trans. 36. Isaiah 40:28–31. 37. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §347, p. 287 (KSA III, p. 581). The famous “proof of strength” consists of proving a thought by way of its effects; see Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §50, p. 178 (KSA VI, p. 229); KSA XIII (1888) 14 (57), p. 245; and Matthew 7:16. 38. KSA XI (1884) 25 (168), p. 59. 39. KSA XII (1887) 9 (37), p. 352; see also KSA X (1883) 12 (24), p. 404.

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40. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture (1938),” in Off the Beaten Track, “Appendices,” ¶6, p. 77 (“Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” in Holzwege, GA 5, p. 102); see also Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God Is Dead’ ” in Off the Beaten Track, pp. 157–58 (“Nietzsches Wort ‘Gott ist tot,’ ” in Holzwege, pp. 209–10); and Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 26, p. 174ff. (Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 230ff.). 41. KSA XI (1884) 25 (517), p. 148. 42. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §26, p. 21 (KSA III, p. 37). 43. KSA XI (1884) 26 (58), 163. 44. KSA XI (1885) 35 (57), p. 537. 45. KSA X (1882–83) 4 (131), p. 152. It is fitting to remember that Nietzsche began by explaining the formation of identical cases by way of the intervention of the imagination; see KSA IX (1880–81) 10 (D79), p. 430; KSA IX (1881) 11 (12), p. 445 and (13), pp. 445–46. 46. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §84, p. 140 (KSA III, p. 442); see Aristotle, Metaphysics, I (A), ¶2, 983 a3–4 in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. II, p. 1555 and Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, “Of Poets,” pp. 149–52 (KSA IV, pp. 163–66). 47. See KSA XI (1885) 34 (194), p. 486. 48. KSA XI (1884) 25 (372), p. 109. 49. This is a variant of §127 in The Gay Science (see KSA III, pp. 483–84). 50. On the link between self-regulation and preservation, see KSA XI (1884) 25 (427), pp. 124–25.

Part 5. The System of Identical Cases Chapter 1. Sensation and Evaluation 1. KSA XII (1887) 9 (60), p. 365 [WP, §585, p. 317]. 2. KSA XII (1887) 9 (38), p. 352 [WP, §507, pp. 275–76, trans. slightly modified]. 3. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (81), p. 261 [WP, §689, p. 367]; see also KSA XI (1884) 26 (284), p. 225 [WP, §1059, p. 545] and KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (179), p. 155. 4. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §13, p. 21 (KSA V, pp. 27–28); see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (108), p. 479; KSA XI (1884) 26 (277), pp. 222–23 and 26 (313), p. 233; KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (63), p. 89 [WP, §650, p. 344], and 2 (68), p. 92; (1887), 9 (91), pp. 383–87 [WP, §533, pp. 289–90]. The intensification of power is perhaps not as unfamiliar to the Conatus as Nietzsche seems to have thought. Without any doubt “each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persevere in its being.” But defining joy as “the passive state through which the mind passes to a greater perfection,” does Spinoza not acknowledge that a certain growth in power is correlated with the Conatus? See Spinoza, Ethics, rev. ed. Amelia Hutchinson and James Gutmann (New York: Hafner, 1949), bk. III, prop. 6, p. 135 and note to prop. 11, pp. 137–38.

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5. KSA XII (1887) 9 (38), p. 353 [WP, §507, p. 276]. On the preserving character of logic and truth, see KSA IX (1881) 15 (9), pp. 636–37 and 15 (10), pp. 637–38, as well as KSA XII (1886–87) 6 (14), p. 238 and KSA XI (1884) 25 (372), p. 109; on the preserving character of the Good, the True and the Beautiful “in themselves,” see KSA XII (1887) 10 (167), pp. 554–55 [WP, §804, pp. 423–24] and 10 (194), pp. 572–73 [WP, §298, p. 168]; on values as conditions of existence and preservation, see KSA X (1883–84) 24 (15), pp. 651–53 [WP, §260, p. 150]. 6. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (73), p. 36 [WP, §715, p. 380]. 7. KSA XI (1885) 36 (19), p. 559 [WP, §494, p. 272]. 8. KSA XI (1884) 26 (127), pp. 183–84 [WP, §496, pp. 272–73, trans. slightly modified]. 9. KSA XI (1884) 25 (427), p. 125. 10. KSA X (1883–84) 24 (29), p. 662. 11. KSA XI (1884) 26 (236), p. 210 [WP, §615, p. 329]. 12. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (152), p. 333. 13. KSA IX (1881) 11 (268), p. 544. 14. KSA IX (1880) 6 (349), p. 286. 15. KSA XI (1885) 38 (10), p. 609. 16. KSA IX (1881) 11 (330), p. 570; see also KSA XI (1885) 43 (2), pp. 701–2 and KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (54), pp. 312–13 [WP, §617, pp. 330–31]. 17. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, §35, p. 78 (Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, vol. X, p. 74). Let us note in passing that this “description” raises a question that phenomenology is not sure to be able to answer: from which instance is it possible to characterize as absurd the tempo of the constitutive flux, since on the one hand, meaning and reason are constituted in it, and on the other hand, there are no other fluxes thanks to which it would be possible to compare tempi? 18. Ibid., §36, p. 79 (Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 75). 19. KSA XIII (1888) 15 (51), p. 442 [WP, §466, p. 261]. 20. Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). The Greek term is Άγχιβασίη in Feldweg-Gespräche 1944–45, GA 77, p. 8. 21. KSA VII (1872–73) 19 (210), p. 484. Franck also refers to Catherine Chevalley’s extended “Introduction” to Niels Bohr, Physique atomique et connaissance humaine (Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge) (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), p. 99 and n.223. This movement of classical concepts into metaphors is Bohr’s remark, as reported by Heisenberg, writes Chevalley.—Trans. 22. KSA XI (1885) 36 (23), p. 561 [WP, §520, p. 281]. 23. Aristotle, On the Soul (De anima), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I, p. 687, bk. III, ¶8, 432 a7. 24. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), p. 396 [WP, §569, p. 307]. 25. KSA IX (1880) 6 (62), p. 209. 26. See Aristotle, On the Soul (De anima) in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I, bk. III, 426 b8, p. 678. 27. KSA IX (1882) 21 (3), ¶52, p. 685 and KSA XI (1884) 26 (72), p. 167.

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28. KSA X (1882–83) 6 (4), p. 234; see also KSA X (1882–83), 4 (142), p. 155, and 5 (1), ¶52, p. 193, where the same thing is said about drives. 29. See Aristotle, On the Soul, bk. III, 427 b12, p. 680. 30. KSA XI (1884), 27 (63), p. 290; see also KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (95), p. 107 [WP, §505, p. 274] and KSA X (1883) 13 (1), p. 428: “My thoughts are colors: my colors are songs.” 31. KSA XI (1885) 34 (247), p. 503. 32. KSA VIII (1876–77) 23 (186), p. 470. 33. KSA XI (1885) 38 (10), pp. 608–9; see also KSA X (1883) 7 (33), p. 253. 34. See KSA XI (1884) 26 (71), p. 167. 35. KSA XI (1884) 26 (35), p. 157; see also KSA X (1883) 7 (64), p. 264 and KSA XI (1885) 34 (132), p. 464: “What is it then to perceive? To-considersomething-to-be-true [Etwas-als-wahr-nehmen]: to say yes to something.” 36. KSA XI (1884) 26 (414), p. 262; see also KSA X (1883) 7 (103), p. 277. 37. See Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, §31, p. 70 and Appendix I, p. 106 (Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, pp. 68 and 100). 38. KSA XI (1884) 25 (168), p. 59 [WP, §506, p. 275]. 39. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (92), pp. 106–7 [WP, §500, p. 273]. 40. KSA XI (1885) 34 (49), pp. 435–36. 41. KSA XII (1887) 9 (62), p. 369 [WP, §580, p. 312]. 42. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), pp. 395–96 [WP, §569, pp. 306–7]. 43. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (152), p. 334 [WP, §515, p. 278]; see also KSA XII (1887) 9 (63), p. 369 [WP, §581, p. 312]. 44. KSA XI (1885) 34 (252), p. 506.

Chapter 2. The Formation of Categories 1. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (98), p. 276 [WP, §551, pp. 296–97]. 2. KSA XII (1887) 9 (144), p. 418 [WP, §521, p. 282, trans. slightly modified]. 3. KSA XII (1887) 10 (21), p. 466 [WP, §1019, p. 527]; on the definition of culture, see KSA XII (1887) 9 (72), pp. 373–74. 4. See Nietzsche, Daybreak, §26, p. 21 (KSA III, pp. 36–37); Nietzsche, “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” §31, in Human, All Too Human, II, 2, p. 316 (KSA II, p. 626), and Nietzsche, Daybreak, §173, p. 105 (KSA III, p. 154). 5. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (3), pp. 255–56. 6. KSA XII (1887) 9 (89), p. 382 [WP, §517, p. 280]. 7. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (77), p. 97; see also KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (415), pp. 193–94 [WP, §853, pp. 451–53], where the will to art or to lie is attributed to everything that is. 8. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (126), p. 125 [WP, §537, p. 291]. 9. See KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (117), p. 120 [WP, §600, p. 326] and KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (6), pp. 274–75 [WP, §279, pp. 158–59], where Nietzsche makes the inventory of the major figures of inertia.

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10. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (78), p. 98. 11. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (10), pp. 187–88. 12. KSA XI (1885) 34 (244), p. 502. 13. KSA XI (1885) 41 (11), p. 688 [WP, §499, p. 273]; see also KSA XII (1887) 9 (144), pp. 417–18; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (98), pp. 274–76 and 15 (90), pp. 458–60. 14. See KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (3), pp. 255–56, 9 (89), p. 382 [WP, §517, p. 280] and KSA VII (1872–73) 19 (236), pp. 493–94. 15. KSA XII (1886–87) 6 (11), p. 237 [WP, §513, p. 277]. 16. KSA XII (1887) 9 (98), p. 391 [WP, §488, p. 270], and Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §14, p. 22 (KSA V, pp. 28–29). 17. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §14, p. 22 (KSA V, p. 28), and Plato, The Laws, trans. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), III, 689 b, p. 73; see also KSA XII (1887) 8 (3), p. 330, where Nietzsche depicts Plato as a “classical priest” and KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (294), p. 114. 18. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (356), p. 156; see also KSA XI (1884) 26 (53), pp. 161–62. 19. KSA XI (1885) 34 (208), p. 492. 20. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 1, §14, p. 19 (KSA II, p. 35). 21. KSA XI (1885) 34 (131), p. 464. 22. KSA XII (1887) 10 (202), p. 580 [WP, §558, p. 302]. 23. KSA XI (1884) 25 (327), p. 96 and (463), pp. 136–37. 24. KSA XI (1884) 26 (156), p. 190. 25. KSA XI (1884) 25 (168), pp. 58–59 [WP, §506, p. 275]. 26. KSA XII (1886) 6 (4), p. 233; see also KSA XI (1884), 26 (372), pp. 248–49. 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)” (§1), in Writings from the Early Notebooks, p. 256 (KSA I, pp. 879–80). 28. KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (28), p. 17.

Chapter 3. Space and Time 1. KSA IX (1881) 11 (155), p. 500. 2. KSA IX (1881) 11 (184), p. 513. 3. KSA XI (1884) 26 (431), p. 266. 4. KSA XI (1885) 36 (25), p. 561 [WP, §545, p. 293]. 5. KSA X (1882) 1 (27), p. 15. 6. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (29), p. 17 [WP, §690, p. 368]. 7. KSA XI (1885) 35 (54), p. 536 [WP, §1064, p. 547]; see also KSA XI (1885) 43 (2), p. 701: “the form of the world as a cause for its circular process.” 8. KSA IX (1881) 11 (202), p. 523; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (245), p. 534, where it is a question of “the infinite flowing of time.” 9. This is because in cycle time only the succession itself is repeated, not the instants.—Trans. 10. KSA IX (1881) 11 (281), p. 549.

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11. On two occasions, Nietzsche qualifies time as absolute. First, when he notes that “our derivation of the feeling of time, etc. still presupposes time as absolute,” and then when, in an incomplete note that is difficult to interpret, he warns “that a belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a being, has nothing to do with truth, we can recognize it from this, for example, that we have to believe in time, space, and movement, without feeling compelled to [+++] here as absolute”; see KSA XI (1884) 25 (406), p. 118 and KSA XI (1886– 87) 7 (63), p. 318 [WP, §487, p. 269, trans. modified]. 12. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §374, p. 336 (KSA III, pp. 626–27). This text belongs to book V, which dates from 1886–87, and it is thus subsequent to the thought of recurrence. 13. KSA XI (1884) 26 (384), p. 252. 14. KSA XI (1884) 26 (431), p. 266. 15. KSA XI (1884) 34 (56), p. 438. 16. KSA X (1883) 21 (5), p. 601. 17. KSA X (1882) 1 (3), p. 9. 18. KSA IX (1881) 11 (155), p. 500. 19. KSA XI (1885) 35 (67), p. 539; see also KSA XI (1884) 25 (216), pp. 70– 71; KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (16), p. 190. 20. KSA XI (1884) 26 (38), p. 158. 21. KSA XI (1885) 40 (27), p. 643. 22. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (139), p. 135 [WP, §554, p. 300]. 23. KSA IX (1881) 11 (184), p. 513. 24. See KSA XI (1884) 25 (308), pp. 90–91. 25. KSA XI (1884) 26 (385), p. 252. 26. KSA XI (1884) 25 (406), p. 118. 27. KSA IX (1881) 11 (260), p. 540; see also Virgil, Aeneid, inVirgil: Eclogues; Georgics; Aeneid I–VI; Aeneid VII–XII; Appendix Vergiliana (2 Vols.), trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999– 2000), vol. I, “Aeneid III,” v. 587, p. 411; and Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers in Oresteia, in The Complete Greek Tragedy, vol. I, trans. Richmond Lattimore, ed. David Greene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1959), v. 32–37, p. 94. Five years later, Nietzsche relates the same experience in the same terms; see KSA XII (1886) 4 (5), pp. 178–79. 28. Aristotle, Physics (Physica), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I, bk. IV, 219 b1, p. 372. 29. Heidegger, Being and Time, pt. II, chap. 6, ¶81, p. 477, trans. modified (Sein und Zeit, p. 425). 30. KSA IX (1881) 11 (281), p. 549. 31. KSA IX (1881) 11 (268), p. 543.

Chapter 4. Representation 1. KSA IX (1881) 11 (329), p. 569. The German reads: “Aber auch das vorstellende Sein, dessen Existenz an den irrthümlichen Glauben gebunden ist, muss

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entstanden sein, wenn anders jene Eigenschaften (die des Wechsels, der Relativität) dem esse zu eigen sind . . .” 2. See Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, §15, pp. 97–98 (KSA I, pp. 857–58); KSA VII (1873) 26 (11), pp. 574–75 and (12), pp. 575–79; Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, §18, pp. 21–22 (KSA II, pp. 38–40); KSA XI (1885) 35 (56), p. 537 and (61), p. 538; KSA XI (1885) 40 (12), p. 633, (24), pp. 640–41 and (41), p. 650. On Nietzsche and African Spir, see Paolo D’Ioro, “La superstition des philosophes critiques (“The Superstition of Critical Philosophers”), in Nietzsche-Studien, 1993, pp. 257ff. 3. See African Spir, Denken und Wirklichkeit (Thought and Reality), in Gesammelte Werke, vol. I, pp. 6 and 110ff. The expression “identical cases” is found in A. Spir; see, for example, pp. 68 and 201. 4. Ibid., p. 301. 5. Ibid., p. 303. 6. Ibid., p. 38. 7. KSA IX (1881) 11 (325), p. 568. 8. KSA XI (1884) 27 (19), pp. 279–80. 9. KSA IX (1881) 11 (330), pp. 569–70. 10. Ibid., p. 570. 11. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), p. 396 [WP, §569, p. 307]; see also KSA XII (1887) 9 (40), p. 353 [WP, §560, pp. 302–3], in which objectivity is led back to a difference of degrees—therefore, of force—amidst what is subjective. On the assimilation of force to the subject, see KSA XI (1885) 40 (42), p. 650 [WP, §490, pp. 270–71] and KSA XIII (1888) 14 (186), pp. 373–74 [WP, §636, pp. 339–40]. 12. See Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. II, “Investigation V,” chap. 2, §10, pp. 553–56 (Logische Untersuchungen, in Husserliana, vol. XIX-1, pp. 379–84). 13. KSA XI (1885) 35 (35), p. 526; see also 40 (16), pp. 635–36 and Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §54, pp. 66–67 (KSA V, p. 73), where, against Descartes, Nietzsche understands the “I” as the product of a “synthesis” of thought. 14. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (193), p. 162 [WP, §548, p. 294]; see also 2 (67), p. 91. 15. KSA XI (1884) 26 (301), p. 231; see also 26 (280), pp. 223–24. 16. KSA XI (1885) 40 (23), pp. 639–40; see also 40 (20), pp. 637–38. 17. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (139), p. 136 [WP, §631, p. 336]; see also KSA VII (1872–73) 19 (209), pp. 482–84; KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (38), p. 19 and (39), p. 19; 2 (78), p. 30; KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (34), pp. 306–7; KSA XII (1887) 10 (158), p. 549 [WP, §484, p. 268]. 18. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. IV, pt. 1, chap. 16, p. 106, trans. modified (Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 153). 19. KSA IX (1881) 12 (37), p. 583; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §87, pp. 142–43 (KSA III, pp. 444–45) and Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner (“Where I Admire”), in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of Idols and Other Writings, pp. 265–66 (KSA VI, pp. 417–18). 20. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (1), pp. 249–50. 21. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §34, p. 47 (KSA V, p. 54). 22. Ibid., §20, p. 28 (KSA V, p. 35).

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23. KSA XII (1886–87) 6 (13), p. 237. 24. KSA XI (1884) 25 (211), p. 69 [WP, §862, p. 459]. 25. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 12, p. 90 (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 348). On the distinction between a fundamental question and a guiding question, see Nietzsche, vol. I, chap. 11, pp. 67ff. (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 79ff.); on the difference between Nietzsche’s language and that of Heidegger, see Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 3, pp. 25–27 (Nietzsche, vol. I, pp. 277–78); on chaos, see Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 12, pp. 91–92 and vol. III, pt. 1, chap. 12, p. 77 (Nietzsche, vol. I, pp. 350 and 562). 26. Descartes, letter of 29 July 1648 to Arnauld (¶5), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. III, p. 358 (Oeuvres, vol. V, p. 223).

Chapter 5. Coordination and Necessity 1. KSA VII (1872–73) 19 (118), p. 458. 2. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §112, p. 173 (KSA III, pp. 472–73); see also Nietzsche, Daybreak, §121, p. 77 (KSA III, p. 115). 3. See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §109, pp. 167–69 (KSA III, pp. 467–69) and KSA IX (1881) 11 (201), pp. 522–23. 4. This is the initial formulation of the second analogy of experience, which will be reformulated in 1787 under the title of “Principle of Temporal Succession According to the Law of Causality”; see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 304–5 (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Akademieausgabe, vol. IV, p. 189 and vol. III, p. 233; volume IV corresponds to the A edition of 1781 in English translations, while volume III corresponds to the B edition of 1787 in the same. Hereafter KRV.—Trans.). 5. KSA IX (1880) 4 (288), p. 171; see also Nietzsche, Daybreak, §130, pp. 80– 82 (KSA III, pp. 120–22). 6. KSA IX (1881) 11 (255), p. 538. 7. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §22, p. 30 (KSA V, p. 37) and KSA XIII (1888) 14 (79), pp. 257–59. 8. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 312–13 (KRV, vol. IV, p. 204 and vol. III, p. 249). 9. KSA X (1883–84) 24 (36), p. 664. 10. KSA IX (1881) 11 (202), p. 523; on the finite number of effective states of the world, see KSA IX (1881) 11 (152), p. 500 and (232), p. 530 and (245), pp. 534–35; KSA X (1882) 1 (27), p. 15; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (188), ¶5, p. 376. 11. KSA IX (1881) 11 (292), pp. 553–54. 12. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (143), p. 137 [WP, §638, p. 340]. 13. KSA XI (1884) 26 (46), p. 159. 14. KSA IX (1881) 11 (148), p. 498. 15. KSA IX (1881) 11 (292), p. 553. 16. KSA XI (1885) 36 (15), p. 556 [WP, §1062, p. 546].

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17. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (188), ¶3, p. 375 [WP, §1066, p. 548, trans. slightly modified]. 18. Ibid., ¶2, p. 374 [WP, §1066, p. 548]. 19. KSA XII (1887) 10 (138), p. 535. 20. KSA IX (1881) 11 (202), p. 523. 21. KSA IX (1881) 11 (245), p. 534. 22. KSA IX (1881) 11 (157), p. 502. 23. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, “Of the Vision and the Riddle,” §2, p. 178 (KSA IV, p. 200). 24. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (79), p. 259 [WP, §635, p. 339, trans. slightly modified]. 25. This last expression is found in §259 of Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 204 (KSA V, p. 208). 26. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (98), p. 274 [WP, §551, p. 295 n.22, trans. slightly modified]. 27. KSA XI (1884) 25 (215), p. 70. 28. KSA XII (1887) 10 (53), p. 482 [WP, §120, p. 73, trans. slightly modified]. 29. KSA IX (1881) 11 (211), p. 525; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §109, pp. 168–69 (KSA III, pp. 468–69); KSA X (1882–83), 4 (80), ¶5, p. 137. 30. Letter of 11 October 1931 in Martin Heidegger and Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel (1918–1969), ed. Joachim Storck (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsches Literaturarchiv, 1990), p. 44. Untranslated. 31. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (29), p. 17 [WP, §690, p. 368]. The original reads: “Mann kann das, was die Ursache dafür ist, dass es überhaupt Entwicklung giebt, nicht selbst wieder auf dem Wege der Forschung über Entwicklung finden; man soll es nicht als ‘werdend’ verstehen wollen, noch weniger als geworden . . . der ‘Wille zur Macht’ kann nicht geworden sein.” 32. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (80), p. 260 [WP, §693, p. 369]. 33. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 2, §2, p. 170 (Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 16). 34. Ibid., vol. III, pt. 3, chap. 4, p. 212 (vol. II, p. 287). 35. See ibid., vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 13, p. 98ff. (vol. I, p. 462ff.). 36. KSA XI (1885) 38 (12), pp. 610–11 [WP, §1067, pp. 549–50, trans. slightly modified].

Chapter 6. The Subject of Causality 1. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (98), pp. 275–76 [WP, §551, p. 297]. 2. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 235–36 (KRV, vol. IV, pp. 113–14), trans. slightly modified. 3. Ibid., p. 242 (KRV, vol. IV, p. 126). 4. Ibid., p. 236 (KRV, vol. IV, p. 114). 5. Ibid., p. 242 (KRV, vol. IV, pp. 126–27). 6. Ibid., p. 247 (KRV, vol. III, p. 134). 7. Ibid., p. 141 (KRV, Vol. IV, p. 125).

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8. See ibid., pp. 416–17 and 423 (KRV, vol. IV, pp. 350 and 363). 9. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (113), p. 54 [WP, §477, p. 264]. 10. Immanuel Kant, Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, ¶4676 in Akademieausgabe, vol. XVII, p. 656; see also Reflexionen, ¶5750, wherein order is defined as “the connection according to a rule” and ¶5708, where the rule is understood as “the objective unity of the consciousness of the manifold in representations”; in vol. XVIII, pp. 343 and 331. The partial English translation does not include these paragraphs; see Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics, trans. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 11. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (78), pp. 98–99. 12. KSA X (1884) 26 (413), p. 262. 13. KSA IX (1881–82) 16 (16), pp. 661–62; see also KSA X (1883–84) 24 (9), pp. 647–48 [WP, §664, p. 350]; KSA XI (1884) 25 (308), pp. 90–91 and (371), pp. 108–9 and (427), pp. 124–25. 14. KSA X (1883–84) 24 (15), p. 652 [WP, §667, p. 352]. 15. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §127, pp. 183–84 (KSA III, p. 483), trans. modified. 16. KSA XI (1885) 40 (53), p. 654. 17. KSA X (1882) 3 (1), ¶277, p. 86. 18. KSA X (1883) 9 (10), p. 348; see also KSA X (1883) 9 (48), p. 362; 13 (11), pp. 460–61; 24 (15), pp. 651–53 [WP, §260, p. 150 and §667, pp, 352–53] and (32), p. 663 [WP, §767, p. 403]; KSA XI (1884) 26 (254), p. 216 and 27 (1), p. 275; KSA XI (1885) 34 (53), pp. 436–37. 19. KSA X (1883–84) 24 (34), p. 663 [WP, §671, p. 354]; KSA XI (1884) 27 (24), pp. 281–82; KSA XI (1885) 34 (55), pp. 437–38; see also KSA X (1883) 12 (30), pp. 405–6. 20. KSA X (1884) 25 (214), p. 70. 21. The curious spacing is Heidegger’s.—Trans. 22. Martin Heidegger, “Recollection in Metaphysics” in The End of Philosophy, p. 66 (in German, see Nietzsche, vol. II, p. 471). 23. KSA XII (1887) 9 (178), p. 442 [WP, §95, p. 60]. 24. See Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, pt. I, “Lecture III,” p. 34; Gray translates this as “abbreviations of words” (Was Heisst Denken?, p. 58). 25. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, in Ethical Philosophy, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), bk. I, chap. 3, p. 49. 26. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §14, p. 136 (KSA VI, p. 180); see also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (219), p. 394. 27. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §36, p. 47–48 (KSA V, pp. 54–55). 28. KSA XII (1885–86) 5 (9), p. 183. 29. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (98), pp. 274–75 [WP, §551, pp. 295–96]; see also KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (83), pp. 101–3 [WP, §550, pp. 294–95]. 30. KSA XII (1887) 9 (188), p. 450 and KSA XIII (1887–88), 11 (410), p. 189. 31. KSA XI (1885) 40 (42), p. 650 [WP, §490, p. 270]. 32. KSA XII (1887) 10 (19), p. 465 [WP, §485, pp. 268–69, trans. modified for fidelity to Nietzsche’s text]. 33. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), pp. 395–96 [WP, §569, p. 307].

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34. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 232 and 411–12 (KRV, Vol. IV, pp. 107, 341 and 343). 35. KSA IX (1881–82) 16 (16), p. 663. 36. KSA XI (1884) 26 (12), pp. 152–53 [WP, §497, p. 273, trans. slightly modified]. 37. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Prologue,” §5, p. 45 (KSA IV, p. 19).

Part 6. From Eternal Recurrence to the Resurrection of Body Chapter 1. Memory 1. The French reads: “Reconduire la logique—en tant que structure d’un corps ordonné à sa propre conservation, la connaissance—en tant que création d’un monde permettant la conservation de l’organisme et le sujet—en tant que mode d’être conservatoire d’une formation de domination, reconduire donc la logique, la connaissance et le sujet au système des cas identiques ne permet cependant pas encore de comprendre l’identité de ces cas.” The English translation is based on the kind suggestion of the author.—Trans. 2. KSA XI (1885) 36 (23), p. 561 [WP, §520, p. 281: “the principle of identity has behind it the ‘apparent fact’ of things that are the same”]. 3. A. Spir, Denken und Wirklichkeit (Thought and Reality), in Gesammelte Werke, vol. I, p. 119. Untranslated. 4. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (4), p. 266 [WP, §530, pp. 287–88]; see also KSA IX (1880–82) 6 (49), p. 205, wherein the principles of identity and contradiction are led to “the submission that wants equality [will Gleichheit setzen],” and to “the power that drives, to recognize the difference [Verschiedenheit anzuerkennen].” From 1873, Nietzsche wrote that “the only single form of knowledge which we trust immediately and absolutely and to deny which amounts to insanity is the tautology: A = A”; see Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, §10, p. 77 (KSA I, p. 841). 5. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §109, p. 168 (KSA III, p. 468); see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (150), p. 499. 6. KSA IX (1881) 11 (210), p. 525; see also (1881) 11 (207), p. 524 and (244), pp. 533–34. 7. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §44, pp. 53–56 (KSA V, pp. 60–63); KSA XI (1884) 26 (452), p. 271. Following J. P. Hebel, Heidegger once qualified man as a plant; see “Hebel—Der Hausfreund,” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Out of the Experience of Thinking), GA 13, p. 150. Untranslated. 8. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 1, §18, p. 21 (KSA II, p. 39), trans. modified. 9. KSA IX (1881) 11 (84), pp. 472–73. The first note devoted to eternal recurrence is found in the same notebook as this, under the number 141. 10. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. I, chap. 12, p. 84ff. (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 341ff.).

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11. KSA XI (1885) 34 (50), p. 436. 12. KSA X (1883) 12 (39), p. 408. As illustrated by the example of the protoplasm, the will to power explains the assimilation of the inorganic by the organic. 13. KSA IX (1881) 12 (15), p. 578. 14. G. W. Leibniz, “The Theory of Abstract Motion: Fundamental Principles (1671),” in Philosophical Papers and Letters, ¶17, p. 141 (“Theoria motus abstracti [1671],” in Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. IV, p. 230). 15. KSA X (1883) 12 (31), p. 406. 16. KSA XI (1884) 25 (403), p. 117 and (514), p. 148. 17. KSA IX (1881) 11 (138), p. 493. 18. KSA VII (1873) 29 (29), p. 636; see also KSA VII (1873) 29 (38), §2, pp. 640–41. 19. See KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (3), pp. 254–58. 20. KSA XI (1884) 26 (94), p. 175. 21. KSA XI (1885) 38 (2), p. 597; see also (1885) 34 (249), p. 505. 22. KSA XI (1885) 40 (34), pp. 645–46; see also (1885) 34 (167), pp. 476– 77 and KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (146), p. 139. 23. See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, §1, pp. 57–8 (KSA V, pp. 291–92). 24. KSA IX (1880) 2 (68), p. 44. 25. KSA XI (1884) 25 (409), p. 119. 26. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, §1, p. 58 (KSA V, p. 292). 27. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (142), pp. 325–27 [WP, §423, p. 227]. 28. KSA XI (1885) 34 (249), p. 505.

Chapter 2. Consciousness 1. KSA X (1883) 7 (126), pp. 284–85; see also KSA X (1883–84) 24 (16), pp. 653–56 [WP, §676, pp. 357–58], which constitutes an augmented version of the same note. 2. See KSA VII (1872–73) 19 (48), pp. 434–35; KSA IX (1880) 5 (47), pp. 192–93; KSA XI (1884) 25 (369), p. 108, 26 (49), p. 161 [WP, §476, p. 263] and 26 (52), p. 161; KSA XI (1885) 39 (16), p. 626; KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (20), p. 15, 1 (61), p. 26 and 2 (103), p. 112; KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (1), pp. 247–50 [WP, §666, pp. 351–52]. 3. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §357, p. 305 (KSA III, p. 598); see also KSA IX (1880) 5 (44), p. 191. 4. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §14, p. 137 (KSA VI, p. 180). 5. KSA IX (1881) 11 (316), p. 564. 6. KSA XI (1885) 37 (4), pp. 577–78. 7. KSA XIII (1888) 15 (25), p. 421 [WP, §440, p. 243]. 8. KSA IX (1880–81) 10 (F 101), p. 438; see also KSA XI (1885) 34 (87), p. 448; KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (54), pp. 23–24. 9. KSA XII (1887) 9 (106), p. 396 [WP, §569, p. 307].

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10. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §354, pp. 298–99, trans. modified; see also KSA XI (1884–85) 30 (10), p. 356. 11. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (131), p. 313 [WP, §439, p. 242]. 12. KSA XI (1884) 25 (401), p. 116; see also KSA XI (1885) 40 (49), p. 653. 13. KSA XI (1885) 37 (4), p. 578. 14. KSA XI (1885) 40 (21), p. 638 [WP, §492, p. 271, trans. slightly modified]; see also KSA XI (1884) 27 (8), pp. 276–77 and (27), p. 282; KSA XI (1885) 34 (123), pp. 461–62. On the aristocracy in the body, see KSA XI (1885) 40 (42), p. 650 [WP, §490, pp. 270–71] and KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (76), pp. 96–97 [WP, §660, pp. 348–49]. 15. KSA XI (1885) 34 (131), p. 464. 16. KSA XI (1885) 34 (187), p. 484. 17. See KSA XI (1884) 27 (26), p. 282 and KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (124), p. 40. 18. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (95), p. 108 [WP, §505, p. 275]. 19. KSA X (1883) 15 (51), p. 493. 20. KSA XI (1884) 26 (114), pp. 179–80. 21. KSA XII (1885–86) 5 (55), p. 205; see also (1885–86) 5 (68), p. 210 [WP, §527, p. 285]. 22. See Jean Cavaillès, Sur la logique et la théorie de la science (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942, 1960), p. 78. 23. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (113), p. 53 [WP, §477, pp. 263–64, trans. slightly modified]; see also KSA XI (1884) 25 (336), pp. 99–100; KSA XI (1885) 34 (30), p. 430. 24. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (145), pp. 67–8 [WP, §524, p. 284]. 25. Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), pt. II, chap. 6, §99, p. 253 (Formale und transzendentale Logik, in Husserliana [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974], vol. XVII, p. 260). 26. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. I, §150, pp. 360–61 (Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, in Husserliana, vol. III-1, p. 314). 27. KSA XI (1885) 34 (46), p. 434. 28. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (56), p. 206 [WP, §489, p. 270] and 7 (9), p. 295 [WP, §504, p. 274]; see also KSA X (1883–84) 24 (28), pp. 661–62 [WP, §417, p. 224], in which Nietzsche inscribes, among several innovations, the search for a new center of the “personality.” 29. KSA XII (1886–87) 6 (19), p. 239. On the fallacious character of phenomenology, which Nietzsche divides into phenomenology of consciousness and phenomenology of the sensuous world, see KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (9), pp. 294– 97; KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (113), pp. 53–54 [WP, §477, pp. 263–64]; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (152), pp. 333–35 [WP, §478, pp. 264–65]. 30. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (83), p. 40 [WP, §674, pp. 355–56]. 31. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, §13, p. 17 (KSA II, p. 34). 32. KSA XI (1884) 26 (35), pp. 156–57, Nietzsche writes “Zeitumkehrung”; in Human, All Too Human §13 it was already a question of an inverted succession (ein umgedrehtes Nacheinander).

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33. KSA XI (1885) 34 (54), p. 437; see KSA XI (1884) 26 (44), p. 159; for the inversion in pain, see KSA XI (1884) 27 (21), p. 280. 34. KSA XIII (1888) 15 (90), p. 459 [WP, §479, p. 265]; see also Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Four Great Errors” (§4), in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, pp. 61–62 (KSA VI, p. 92). 35. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (173), p. 359 [WP, §699, p. 372]. 36. KSA X (1883) 7 (211), p. 308. 37. While the French puissance is generally translated as “power,” it also denotes potential in the Aristotelian sense of dynamis. The English translates “Wille zur Macht” as “Will to Power,” generally, and so we use “power” here, recognizing nevertheless that the French pouvoir is preferred in referring to political or institutional power, while puissance concerns the ability to do.—Trans. 38. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), vol. XXII, “Lecture 31,” p. 73 (Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psycho-analyse, in Gesammelte Werke [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1972], vol. XV, p. 80). Freud himself points out that this use of the impersonal pronoun (id) goes back to Nietzsche; see The Ego and the Id (part II) in the Standard Edition, vol. XIX, p. 23 n.3 (Das Ich und das Es, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. XIII, p. 251); see also editors’ “Introduction,” p. 7.—Trans. 39. Freud, New Introductory Lectures, p. 80 (Neue Folge der Vorlesungen, vol. XV, p. 86). 40. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (128), p. 310 [WP, §289, p. 163]. 41. See KSA XIII (1888) 14 (111), pp. 288–89 [WP, §430, pp. 234–35] and Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §57, pp. 188–91 (KSA VI, pp. 241–44).

Chapter 3. The Decisive Instant 1. KSA XI (1884) 26 (328), p. 236. 2. KSA XI (1884) 25 (296), p. 86 and (294), p. 86. Nietzsche entitled many of his outlines for the work devoted to eternal recurrence “The New Enlightenment”; see KSA XI (1884) 26 (293), p. 228 and (298), pp. 229–30; (1884) 27 (79), pp. 294–95 and (80), p. 295; KSA XI (1884–85) 29 (40), p. 346; KSA XI (1885–86) 1 (94), p. 34. As for “Tartuffery,” it characterizes morality, scientism, and humanization; see also Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §24, p. 35 (KSA V, pp. 41–42), §228, pp. 156–58 (KSA V, pp. 163–65), §249, p. 185 (KSA V, p. 192); KSA X (1883) 21 (4), pp. 600–601; KSA XI (1884) 25 (211), p. 69 [WP, §862, pp. 458–59], (213), pp. 69–70, (238), p. 74 and (309), pp. 91–92; KSA XI (1885) 34 (256), pp. 507–8; KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (50), ¶51, p. 204; KSA XII (1887) 9 (173), pp. 437–39 [WP, §315, pp. 173–75]. 3. KSA IX (1881) 13 (12), p. 620. 4. If we are here specifying that “appearance” means “lie,” this is because things are otherwise elsewhere in Nietzsche. From the moment “appearance”

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(Schein), in the traditional sense of the term, denotes what is inaccessible to logic, and this logic is known to be falsifying, it becomes possible to reuse the old word “appearance” to designate “reality” inasmuch as it is not logical, in short, as denoting will to power. See KSA XI (1885) 40 (53), p. 654. Relative to Nietzsche’s language, this example virtually has the value of a rule. 5. KSA XI (1884) 25 (492), p. 143. 6. KSA XI (1884–85) 29 (4), p. 337. 7. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (50), p. 24 [WP, §566, p. 305]. 8. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (54), p. 312 [WP, §617, p. 330]; see also KSA X (1883) 17 (40), p. 551, where Nietzsche, against the horizon of eternal recurrence, comes to speak of “the being in becoming” (der Seiend, der im Werden). 9. KSA X (1882–83) 4 (126), p. 150. “Atom” here designates what, somewhat later on, will be called “force,” “drive,” etc.; see KSA XI (1885) 43 (2), pp. 701–2. 10. We choose to use “instant” throughout, in preference to “moment,” for consistency with Franck’s text and because “instant”—Augenblick—suggests a time possibly briefer than “moment.”—Trans. 11. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (188), ¶3, p. 375 [WP, §1066, p. 548, trans. modified]. 12. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, “Of the Vision and the Riddle,” §1, p. 176 (KSA IV, p. 197). 13. Ibid., §2, p. 178 (KSA IV, pp. 199–202), trans. modified. 14. Ibid., pp. 178–79 (KSA IV, pp. 199–202), trans. modified. 15. Ibid., pp. 179–80 (KSA IV, pp. 199–202), trans. slightly modified. 16. Ibid., p. 180 (KSA IV, pp. 199–202), trans. slightly modified on author’s suggestion. 17. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, “The Convalescent,” §2, pp. 234– 35 (KSA IV, p. 273), trans. slightly modified. 18. See ibid., “Prologue,” §3, pp. 41–43 (KSA IV, pp. 14–16) and §5, pp. 45– 47 (KSA IV, pp. 18–21), trans. slightly modified. 19. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 1, chap. 8, pp. 56–57 (Nietzsche, vol. I, pp. 311–12). In the main and up until now, we have followed Heidegger’s interpretation of these two sections of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, explicitly devoted to eternal recurrence; see also ibid., chap. 6, p. 37ff. and chap. 24, p. 176ff. (vol. I, p. 289ff. and p. 438ff.). 20. KSA IX (1881) 11 (143), p. 496. 21. KSA IX (1881) 11 (220), pp. 526–27. By “new laws,” Nietzsche means “new hierarchies,” and thus “new values,” since they permit the reorganization of affects. 22. KSA XI (1884) 25 (434), p. 127. 23. KSA XI (1885) 39 (11), p. 622; see also KSA XI (1885) 35 (55), p. 537 [WP, §1064, p. 547]. 24. KSA XI (1884) 25 (158), p. 55 and KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (38), pp. 307–8 [WP, §1032, pp. 532–33]; see also KSA XI (1884) 25 (358), p. 107; 26 (117), pp. 180–81 [WP, §907, p. 480]; KSA XI (1884–85) 29 (54), p. 348; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (31), p. 234 [WP, §293, p. 165].

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25. KSA IX (1881) 11 (163), p. 505. One year earlier, Nietzsche already noted: “To live IN SUCH A WAY that our energy be the highest and the most joyful— and sacrifice everything for that. NB”; see KSA IX (1880) 6 (289), p. 271. 26. KSA XI (1884) 25 (7), p. 11. “Now” (Jetzt) is here a synonym for the instant; see also KSA X (1883) 18 (14), p. 570 and Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, “The Convalescent,” §2, pp. 237–38 (KSA IV, pp. 275–77). 27. KSA XI (1884–85) 29 (13), p. 340. 28. KSA X (1883) 7 (226), p. 312; see also KSA X (1882–83) 5 (1), ¶1, p. 187. 29. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (71), §6, p. 213. 30. KSA IX (1881) 11 (141), p. 495. The original reads: “. . . ein absoluter Überschuss von Lust muss nachzuweisen sein, sonst ist die Vernichtung unser selbst in Hinsicht auf die Menschheit als Mittel der Vernichtung der Menschheit zu wählen.”—Trans.

Chapter 4. The Incorporation of Truth 1. KSA XI (1884) 26 (259), p. 218. 2. KSA XI (1884) 26 (283) and (284), pp. 224–25. 3. KSA IX (1881) 11 (161), p. 503; (1884) 25 (322), p. 95; KSA XII (1887) 9 (1), p. 339; KSA XI (1884–85) 29 (14), p. 340; (1884–85) 31 (16), p. 365; (1884) 25 (405), pp. 117–18; KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (118), p. 120 and 2 (131), pp. 131–32. 4. KSA IX (1881) 11 (292), p. 553. 5. KSA IX (1881) 11 (318), pp. 564–65. 6. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I, §10, pp. 36–37 (KSA V, p. 271), trans. modified. 7. We here understand “drama” in the sense of the Greek δραμα: “an action burdened with consequences”; see Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, entry “δραω” (Paris: Klincksieck, 2008). This usage does not contradict Nietzsche’s critique of the translation of the word drama by “action” (Handlung) that intends the theatrical sense of the term; see KSA VIII (1876–77) 23 (74), p. 427. Nietzsche writes: “Aber ‘Drama’ bedeutet ‘Ereigniss,’ factum, im Gegensatz zum fictum” (“But ‘drama’ means ‘event,’ factum, by contrast with fictum”)—Trans. See also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (34), p. 235 and Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem (§9), in The AntiChrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, pp. 249–51 (KSA VI, pp. 32–35). 8. KSA XI (1884) 26 (75), §1, p. 168. 9. Heidegger, “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” in Nietzsche, vol. II, pt. 2, p. 233 (“Wer ist Nietzsches Zarathustra?” in Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 126). 10. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, “The Convalescent,” §2, pp. 235– 36 (KSA IV, p. 274). 11. KSA X (1882–83) 5 (1), ¶184, p. 207. 12. KSA X (1882–83) 4 (198), p. 167.

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13. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, “Of the Vision and the Riddle,” §2, p. 180 (KSA IV, p. 202). 14. KSA IX (1881) 11 (156), pp. 501–2. 15. KSA XII (1887) 9 (91), p. 385. 16. Ibid. 17. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 1, chap. 5, p. 32ff. and chap. 21, p. 137ff. (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 508ff. and p. 632ff.). 18. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, “On the Blissful Islands,” p. 111 (KSA IV, p. 111). 19. KSA XI (1884) 26 (192), p. 200. 20. KSA X (1883) 7 (84), p. 271. 21. KSA XI (1884) 25 (260), p. 80; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §257, pp. 201–2 (KSA V, pp. 205–6); Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §50, pp. 178–79 (KSA VI, pp. 229–30). The expression “ways of freedom” is the title of a number of chapter and book projects. See, for example, KSA VII (1873) 29 (164) and (229), pp. 700 and 722–23; KSA VIII (1876) 16 (8) and (9), pp. 288–89; KSA VIII (1876) 17 (21), p. 300; KSA VIII (1876) 18 (1), p. 314; KSA XIX (1884) 25 (484), pp. 140–41. 22. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §324, p. 255 (KSA III, p. 552–53). In media vita was also the first title under which Nietzsche projected his Ecce Homo; see KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (65), p. 89 and KSA XIII (1888) 24 (2), p. 632. 23. See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, “Of the Virtue That Makes Small,” §3, p. 191 (KSA IV, p. 216). 24. See KSA X (1882) 2 (5), p. 44; KSA X (1882–83) 4 (77), pp. 135–36; KSA X (1883) 7 (1), pp. 235–36; KSA XI (1884) 25 (307), pp. 89–90 and (1884) 26 (353), p. 243; KSA XII (1887) 9 (104), p. 394. 25. KSA X (1883–84) 24 (28), p. 661. 26. See KSA X (1882) 1 (110), p. 40. 27. KSA X (1883) 15 (19), pp. 483–84 and (1883) 16 (86), pp. 529–30; see KSA X (1883) 17 (63), pp. 557–58; (1883) 22 (1), p. 612; KSA XI (1884–85) 31 (41), pp. 377–78, where Nietzsche summons us to create a backbone for the will, and KSA X (1883) 9 (56), p. 364, where revaluation is described as “annihilation and resurrection of morality [Vernichtung und Auferstehung der Moral].” 28. KSA XI (1884) 25 (7), p. 10. 29. KSA IX (1881) 11 (160), p. 503; see also KSA IX (1881) 11 (159), p. 503; (167), p. 506 and (172), p. 507. 30. KSA XI (1884–85) 32 (9), p. 406. 31. Psalms 20:8–9; Romans 11:20. 32. KSA XI (1884) 28 (64), p. 329; see also (1884–85) 31 (37), p. 374 and KSA VII (1871) 9 (58), p. 296. As the German word indicates, the “independents” (die Selbständigen) are those who stand by themselves, and hold or draw their constancy from themselves. 33. See KSA XII (1887) 9 (8), p. 342. The German reads: “An Stelle von Metaphysik und Religion die ewige Wiederkunftslehre.” 34. KSA IX (1881) 14 (25), pp. 631–32; see also Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125, p. 181 (KSA III, pp. 480–82).

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35. KSA IX (1881) 11 (70), p. 468; see also (1881) 11 (82), p. 472. 36. KSA XI (1885) 35 (41), p. 528; see also KSA X (1882) 2 (6), p. 45. The German reads: “Das, was kommt. Eine Prophetie.” 37. KSA XI (1884) 25 (226), p. 73; see Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, “Of Voluntary Death,” pp. 97–99 (KSA IV, pp. 93–96). 38. KSA X (1882–83) 5 (1), ¶137, p. 202. On the meaning of festivals, see KSA XII (1887) 10 (165), p. 553.

Chapter 5. The Priestly Revaluation 1. KSA XI (1885) 39 (1), p. 619; see also (1885) 40 (2), p. 629 and (50), pp. 653–54; KSA XII (1885–86) 1 (35), p. 19. 2. KSA XII (1885–86), 2 (73), p. 94. 3. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (100), p. 109; (1886–87) 5 (75), p. 218; (1887) 9 (164), p. 432; KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (411), §4, p. 190 and (414), p. 192; (1888) 14 (78), p. 257 and (136), p. 320 and (156), p. 340; (1888) 15 (100), p. 466; (1888) 16 (86), pp. 515–16. 4. KSA XIII (1888) 18 (17), p. 537. 5. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (416), p. 194, written in September 1888; see also (1888) 19 (2), p. 542 and (8), p. 545; (1888) 22 (14), p. 589 and (24), p. 594. 6. KSA XIII (1888) 19 (8), p. 545 and 22 (14), pp. 589–90. 7. KSA XIV, “Kommentar zu den Bänden 1–13,” pp. 434–35. The subtitle indicated here, between brackets, was ultimately crossed out by Nietzsche. 8. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe (SB) in Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967–77), vol. VIII, p. 492 (not in English translations of Nietzsche’s selected letters). See also his letter to Georg Brandes from 20 November 1888 in Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters, trans. and ed. Peter Fuss and Henry Shapiro (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 131–32 (SB, p. 482). 9. Nietzsche, SB, vol. VIII, p. 545 (not in English translations of Nietzsche’s selected letters). 10. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §1, p. 127 (KSA VI, p. 169). Trans. slightly modified. See also II Timothy 2:3ff. In Luther’s translation of the second Epistle of John, the Antichrist is also called “the deceiver” (Verführer). Nietzsche takes up this name and applies it to Zarathustra; see II John 7; Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Preface,” §4, pp. 219–20 (KSA VI, p. 260); KSA X (1883) 13 (4), p. 454; KSA XI (1885) 34 (199), p. 487; (1885) 39 (22), p. 628 (Zarathustra als Verführer der Jugend). 11. Nietzsche, “The Wanderer and His Shadow” (§265), in Human, All Too Human, II, 2, pp. 373–74 (KSA II, pp. 666–67); see also Pindar, “Pythian X” in The Complete Odes, trans. Anthony Verity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), verses 29–30, p. 82: “But neither on foot nor by sea could you discover / The fabulous way to the gathering of the Hyperboreans.” 12. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §1, p. 127 (KSA VI, p. 169).

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13. Ibid., §2, p. 127 (KSA VI, p. 170). 14. Ibid., §6, pp. 129–30 (KSA VI, p. 172). 15. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, pt. I, “Lecture VII,” p. 80, trans. modified. (Was heisst Denken?, p. 75. The German reads: “das furchtbare Buch”). 16. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §24, pp. 146–47 (KSA VI, pp. 191–92), trans. mod. 17. KSA VII (1870–71) 5 (34), p. 102; 5 (50), p. 106; 5 (97), p. 119; KSA VII (1870–71) 7 (19), wherein Nietzsche refers to Psalms 1:6 and 9:6. 18. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §72, p. 43 (KSA III, p. 70); and The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §24, p. 147 (KSA VI, p. 192). 19. Deuteronomy 32:47; see also Amos 8:11ff. and Ezekiel 18:4. 20. Numbers 29:11ff. 21. Isaiah 38:18–19, trans. slightly modified. 22. See Psalms 88:6ff. 23. KSA VII (1870–71) 5 (30), p. 100. 24. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, 8, §475, pp. 175 (KSA II, p. 310). 25. KSA IX (1879–80) 1 (73), pp. 21–22. 26. KSA IX (1880) 3 (103), p. 75. 27. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §136, p. 188 (KSA III, p. 487); KSA X (1883) 7 (23), p. 249. The German reads: “Diese ganze Moral-Wendung ist in Europa jüdisch.” See also Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §250, p. 185 (KSA V, p. 192); KSA IX (1880–81) 8 (6), p. 385 and (47), p. 393. 28. Colossians 2:17. 29. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §84, p. 49 (KSA III, p. 79); see also KSA IX (1880– 81) 10 (D 81), p. 431; KSA XI (1885) 42 (6), §5, p. 696. 30. KSA IX (1880) 8 (97), p. 403; see also Nietzsche, Daybreak, §38, p. 27 (KSA III, p. 46). The German reads: “Die Juden haben den Zorn anders empfunden, als wir, und ihn heilig gesprochen.” 31. KSA XI (1885) 36 (42), p. 569. 32. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §52, pp. 65–66 (KSA V, p. 72); see also Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III, §22, pp. 143–44 (KSA V, pp. 392– 94). 33. KSA XI (1884) 25 (332), p. 97. On the grand style, see Nietzsche, “The Wanderer and His Shadow” (§96), in Human, All Too Human, II, 2, p. 334 (KSA II, p. 596); KSA XI (1884) 25 (321), p. 95; (1885) 35 (74), ¶1, pp. 541–42; KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (138), p. 63; (1888) 15 (118), pp. 477–81. Finally, Nietzsche, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man” (§11) in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, p. 85 (KSA VI, pp. 118–19). 34. See Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology: The Theology of Israel’s Traditions, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962–63), vol. I, pt. 2, D, §2, p. 364ff. 35. KSA IX (1880) 6 (357), pp. 287–88. 36. KSA IX (1881) 15 (66), pp. 656–57. 37. KSA VIII (1876) 17 (20), p. 299. 38. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §377, p. 170 (KSA III, p. 246), and Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §135, pp. 187–88 (KSA III, pp. 486–87).

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39. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I, §7, pp. 33–34 (KSA V, pp. 267– 68); see also Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §195, p. 108 (KSA V, pp. 116–17). 40. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §52, p. 65 (KSA V, p. 72). 41. KSA IX (1880) 3 (128), p. 89. The political form of this spiritual extension of Europe is colonization, whose “extreme cruelty” Nietzsche underscored on a number of occasions; see KSA XI (1884) 25 (177), p. 61; (1884) 25 (152), p. 53 and 25 (163), pp. 56–57; see also KSA XII (1887) 10 (29), p. 471. 42. KSA XI (1884) 25 (115), pp. 43–44. On “Nationalitäts-Wahnsinn” and nationalist madness, see Nietzsche, Daybreak, §190, p. 111 (KSA III, p. 163); KSA IX (1880) 7 (280), p. 375; KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (3), pp. 67–68; Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §377, p. 339 (KSA III, p. 630); Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §256, p. 196 (KSA V, p. 200) and KSA (1888) 18 (3), p. 532. In regard to nationalist rage, Nietzsche specifies that the Jews “are today themselves an antidote against this ultimate disease of European reason.” 43. KSA IX (1880) 6 (71), p. 213; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §251, p. 187 (KSA V, p. 193). See also KSA XI (1885) 34 (237), p. 500; KSA XIII (1888) 18 (10), p. 535. 44. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (52), p. 205 and KSA IX (1881) 11 (296), p. 555; see also KSA (1885–86) 1 (153), p. 45: “NB. Against Aryan and Semite. Where the races are mixed, source of great culture.” 45. KSA XIII (1888) 24 (1) §6, pp. 621–23; see Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, §11, p. 75 (KSA V, p. 311). 46. KSA XI (1884) 25 (221), p. 72; see Nietzsche, Daybreak, §205, pp. 124– 25 (KSA III, pp. 181–82). 47. KSA XIII (1888) 22 (5), pp. 585–86. 48. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (195), pp. 380–81. 49. Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, trans. J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies (New York: Meridian Books, 1957). In German, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter/Studienbuch, 2001). 50. See KSA X (1883) 15 (60), p. 494. The first works of Wellhausen date from 1876 through 1878. 51. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §§24– 27, pp. 146–52 (KSA VI, pp. 191–98).—Trans. 52. The division of the Hebraic canon into three parts is first mentioned in the prologue to the Greek translation of Ecclesiastes. The author of that prologue, which dates from the second century b.c.e., distinguishes between “the Law, the Prophets, and the Scriptures.” 53. See Martin Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch and Other Studies, trans. D. R. Ap-Thomas (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1966), pp. 1–6, here p. 2 (“Die Gesetze im Pentateuch,” in Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament [Munich: C. Kaiser, 1966, 3rd ed.], pp. 15–20, whose analyses and historic reconstruction we are following here. Franck translates from the German).—Trans. 54. See ibid. p. 14 n.19, and pp. 19–20 (“Die Gesetze,” pp. 25, 32). 55. Ibid., pp. 16–17 (“Die Gesetze,” p. 28).

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56. Exodus 20:1. 57. See Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, p. 22 (“Die Gesetze,” p. 40). 58. On the league of the twelve tribes, see Martin Noth, The History of Israel, trans. Stanley Godman (New York: Harper and Row, 1960, rev. 1st ed.), pt. I, pp. 53–138. 59. Martin Noth has shown, moreover, that by their contents and before the Exile, all the Old Testament laws presupposed the Covenant between God and Israel. Indeed, to ensure the exclusivity of that Covenant, one excluded all that belonged to other cults devoted to different gods. The diversity of legislative content can be reduced to unity the moment that the laws of Israel have as their function, in the midst of a “Canaanite” world, to implement the first commandment. See Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, pp. 49–60 and especially pp. 56–59, which feature an exemplary explanation of the prohibition on the consumption of pork (“Die Gesetze,” pp. 67–81, esp. 78–80). 60. See Amos 8:2; Hosea 1:9; Isaiah 2:6. 61. See Jeremiah 31:31–35; Ezekiel 16:59–63 and 37:26–28. 62. See Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, pp. 66–67 (“Die Gesetze,” pp. 89–90). 63. Ibid., pp. 67–70, where Noth, discussing Ezekiel 40–48, shows the ways in which Israel’s vision of its future borrows from the old sacred confederation of the tribes (“Die Gesetze,” pp. 90–93). 64. See Noth, The History of Israel, pt. III, chap. 2, §§26–27, pp. 316–45. 65. Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, p. 80 (“Die Gesetze,” pp. 105–6); see also p. 91 (p. 114). On the admission of foreigners into the house of Yahweh, see Isaiah 56:1–8. 66. Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, p. 106 (“Die Gesetze,” p. 140). 67. Ibid., p. 80 (“Die Gesetze,” p. 106); see also pp. 81–83, where chapter 9 of Nehemiah is analyzed (pp. 107–10). 68. Ibid., p. 86 (“Die Gesetze,” p. 114); see also pp. 91 and 95 (pp. 119 and 125). 69. See ibid., pp. 87–95 (“Die Gesetze,” pp. 115–24). 70. Isaiah 44:28 and 45:1. 71. Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, p. 96 (“Die Gesetze,” p. 125). 72. Concerning the problem raised in the chapters of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 in which Yahweh promises blessings to those who observe his laws, and curses to those who do not, see Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, pp. 100–102 (“Die Gesetze,” pp. 131–34). See also the study that takes its title from the word of Saint Paul (Galatians 3:10), “For All Who Rely on Works of the Law Are Under a Curse,” in Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, pt. III, pp. 118–31 (Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, pp. 155–71). 73. Judges 5:11. 74. Ezekiel 18:25 and 29. 75. Ezekiel 20:25. 76. See, for example, Psalm 94. 77. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §25, p. 147 (KSA VI, p. 193); see also KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (88), p. 223. Generally,

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Wellhausen does not grant much importance to the period prior to the kingdom, that is, to that of the holy confederation of the tribes. 78. Ibid., p. 148 (KSA VI, p. 194). 79. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (377), pp. 170–71. The last sentence of this quote is from Wellhausen. There, it is preceded by the following lines: “The relation of Yahweh to Israel was in its nature and origin a natural one; there was no interval between Him and His people to call for thought or question. Only when the existence of Israel had come to be threatened by the Syrians and Assyrians, did such prophets as Elijah and Amos raise the Deity high above the people, sever the natural bond between them, and put in its place a relation depending on conditions, conditions of a moral character. To them Yahweh was the God of righteousness in the first place, and the God of Israel in the second place, and even that only so far as Israel came up to the righteous demands which in His grace He had revealed to him. They [these prophets] inverted the order of these two fundamental articles of faith.” See Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, pt. III, chap. 11, p. 417 (Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, pp. 423–24). 80. KSA XII (1887) 9 (8), p. 343; KSA XII (1887) 10 (90), pp. 507–8; KSA XII (1887) 10 (138), p. 535. 81. KSA XII (1888) 20 (128), p. 570. 82. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §25, p. 148 (KSA VI, p. 194). 83. Ibid., §26, pp. 148–49 (KSA VI, pp. 194–95); see also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (213), pp. 390–91. 84. See M. Noth, The Deuteronomistic History, trans. and ed. J. A. Clines, Philip R. Davies, and David M. Gunn (Sheffield, Eng.: JSOT, 1981) (Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1957]). In this work, published in 1943, Noth showed that the entirety which in the Hebrew Bible extends from Deuteronomy to II Kings had to be attributed to one and the same author; viz., the “Deuteronomist.” Wellhausen had already emphasized the kinship between the Deuteronomist and the Book of Judges, between Samuel and the two books of the Kings; see Prolegomena, pt. II, chap. 7, pp. 272–94. 85. Noth, The Deuteronomistic History, pt. III, chap. 13, p. 89 (Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien, p. 100). 86. See II Kings 22:3–23:3. 87. Noth, The Deuteronomistic History, pt. III, chap. 13, p. 92 (Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien, p. 103). 88. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §26, p. 150 (KSA VI, p. 196), trans. modified. 89. Ibid., §12, p. 135 (KSA VI, §12, p. 178), trans. modified; see also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (189), pp. 376–77. 90. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §26, p. 150 (KSA VI, §26, pp. 196–97). 91. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Morality as Anti-Nature” (§5), in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, p. 55 (KSA VI, p. 86). 92. The “sanction” is in the specific sense of Roman law, that which puts a law into effect. See Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Eliza-

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beth Palmer (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1973), bk. 6, “Religion,” chap. 1, “The ‘Sacred’,” p. 454 (Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, [Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969], vol. II, p. 190). 93. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (6), pp. 275–76. 94. KSA XII (1887) 10 (152), pp. 541–42. 95. KSA XIII (1887) 11 (377), p. 172–73. Nietzsche’s italics read: “als sei das Göttliche dem Weltlichen, Natürlichen durch äussere Merkmale entgegengesetzt.” See Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, pt. III, chap. 11, pp. 421–22. On the “kingdom of the priests” and the “holy people,” see Exodus 19:6 and Isaiah 61:6. 96. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I, §10, pp. 36–37 (KSA V, pp. 270– 71); see also KSA (1887) 8 (4), pp. 332–36. 97. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III, §11, p. 118 (KSA V, p. 363). 98. See KSA X (1883–84) 24 (28), pp. 661–62. 99. In 1875, Nietzsche already interpreted the Jewish religion as “a religion of vengeance and of justice”; KSA VIII (1875) 5 (166), p. 88. See also Deuteronomy 32:35; Isaiah 35:4; Jeremiah 9:8; Psalms 94:1 and 58:11. 100. See Isaiah 41:21ff. 101. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §17, p. 139 (KSA VI, p. 183), trans. modified to include Nietzsche’s italics; see also KSA XIII (1888) 17 (4), §2, p. 524. 102. KSA XIII (1888) 14 (29), p. 233. 103. Nietzsche, “The Wanderer and His Shadow” (§33), in On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 182 (KSA II, p. 566) and Nietzsche, Daybreak, §202, pp. 121–22 (KSA III, pp. 177–78).

Chapter 6. The New Justice 1. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §27, p. 151 (KSA VI, p. 197). 2. Ibid. (KSA VI, p. 198), trans. slightly modified. 3. Ibid. (KSA VI, p. 198). 4. Ibid., §31, p. 155 (KSA VI, p. 202). 5. Ibid., §29, p. 153 (KSA VI, p. 200). 6. Ibid.; see also KSA XII (1887) 10, (51), p. 481; KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (363), p. 160 and (390), p. 183. 7. Ibid., §32, p. 157 (KSA VI, p. 204). 8. See ibid. 9. Ibid., §§31, 32 and 34, pp. 155, 156 and 158 (KSA VI, pp. 202, 203 and 206–7). 10. Ibid., §33 (KSA VI, p. 206). 11. KSA XIII (1888) 15 (42), p. 435. 12. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §33, p. 158 (KSA VI, p. 206). 13. Ibid., §32, p. 156 (KSA VI, p. 204). 14. Ibid., §39, p. 163 (KSA VI, p. 211).

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15. KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (282), p. 108 and KSA XII (1887) 9 (35), pp. 350–52; see also Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The AntiChrist, §42, pp. 166–67 (KSA VI, pp. 215–17). 16. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §35, p. 159 (KSA VI, p. 207), trans. modified. 17. Ibid., §40, p. 165 (KSA VI, p. 213); see also KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (378), pp. 175–78. 18. See ibid. Did Jesus understand himself as the messiah, or was he only taken as such by the Christian community? The question remains open, to say the least. See R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. I, chap. 1, §4 “The Question of the Messianic Consciousness of Jesus,” pp. 26–32 (Theologie des Neuen Testaments [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984], pp. 26–35). 19. Ibid. 20. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I, §8, pp. 34–35 (KSA V, pp. 268–69). 21. KSA XII (1887) 10 (79), p. 501. 22. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §18, p. 140 (KSA VI, p. 185). 23. Ibid., §41, p. 166 (KSA VI, p. 215). 24. Ibid., trans. modified. 25. Ibid., §42, p. 166; (KSA VI, pp. 215–16), trans. modified. 26. Ibid. 27. See I Corinthians 7:10ff. and 9:14. On the relations between Jesus and Saint Paul, see KSA XIII (1888) 15 (108), pp. 468–69, as well as R. Bultmann, “The Significance of the Historical Jesus for the Theology of Paul,” in Faith and Understanding, ed. Robert W. Funk, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1987), pp. 220–46. 28. See I Corinthians 15:5–8. 29. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §43, pp. 167–68 (KSA VI, p. 217). 30. KSA XI (1885) 38 (12), p. 611. The German reads: “Diese Welt ist der Wille zur Macht—und nichts ausserdem!” See also Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §36, p. 48 (KSA V, p. 55). 31. KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (8), §D, p. 292. See KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (122), pp. 158–59; and on the Christian character of what was, up to now, the “supremely desirable things,” see KSA XII (1887) 10 (150), pp. 539–40 and KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (55), pp. 27–28. 32. In 1946, in a speech entitled “The European Spirit and the World of Machines,” Georges Bernanos described, in a Christian fashion, the Christian origins of technology, noting that “man made the machine and the machine became man, by a kind of diabolical inversion of the mystery of the Incarnation.” See Georges Bernanos, The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos, trans. Joan Ulanov and Barry Ulanov (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955), p. 201 (“La liberté pour quoi faire?” in Essais et écrits de combat [Paris: Gallimard, 1995], vol. II, p. 1362). 33. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §43, p. 168 (KSA VI, p. 217). 34. KSA IX (1881) 11 (163), p. 505.

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35. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §47, p. 175 (KSA VI, p. 225). “God, as Paul created him, is a denial of God.” 36. Nietzsche, “Why I Write Such Good Books” (§1), in Ecce Homo, p. 258 (KSA VI, p. 300). 37. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Why I Am a Destiny” (§§7, 8, 9), in Ecce Homo, pp. 332, 333 and 335 (KSA VI, pp. 371, 373 and 374); see also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (89), p. 265 and (137), p. 321. 38. Friedrich Nietzsche, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism” (§5), in The Birth of Tragedy, p. 9 (KSA I, p. 19); see also Nietzsche, “Why I Write such Good Books” (§2), in Ecce Homo, p. 263: “I am, in Greek, and not only in Greek, the Antichrist” (KSA VI, p. 302). 39. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §295, p. 235 (KSA V, p. 238); see also KSA XI (1885) 34 (176 and 181), pp. 478–80 and 481–83; KSA XI (1885) 41 (9), pp. 683–86; Plato, Lysis, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 218a, and Plato, Symposium, ibid., 204a. 40. See Nietzsche, “What I Owe to the Ancients” (§5), in Twilight of the Idols, see Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, p. 121 (KSA VI, p. 160); see also KSA XI (1885) 34 (182), p. 483, for the book project: “Dionysus: Attempt at a Divine Way of Philosophizing.” 41. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, §§ 45, 51, 58, pp. 173, 181 and 194 (KSA VI, pp. 223, 232 and 247). 42. See KSA XI (1885) 41 (7), p. 681. The German reads: “Dionysos ist ein Richter!” 43. I Corinthians 1:30. 44. KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (96), p. 108. 45. KSA XI (1884) 25 (344), p. 103. 46. KSA XI (1885) 44 (6 and 7), pp. 706–7. 47. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (71), §§3–4, p. 212. 48. See KSA XIII (1887–88) 11 (226), §2, pp. 87–88; KSA XIII (1888) 14 (5), pp. 218–20 and 15 (110), pp. 469–71. 49. I Corinthians 15:21–22; see also Romans 5:12–20. 50. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §46, p. 60 (KSA V, p. 67); see also KSA XII (1884) 25 (292), p. 86. 51. I Corinthians 1:23. 52. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, §20, p. 90 (KSA V, p. 330). 53. Colossians 4:3 and II Thessalonians 2:7. 54. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (71), §15, p. 212; see also KSA XIII (1888) 14 (157), p. 341. Here, Nietzsche writes that “extreme means always characterize abnormal states.” 55. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III, §20, p. 140 (KSA V, p. 389). In 1880, Nietzsche had already pointed out that “to invent sin and then the condition of redemption from it is humanity’s most incomparable realization. This tragedy makes the others so insipid!”; see KSA IX (1880) 7 (251), p. 369. 56. Letter to Peter Gast, 21 July 1881, in SB, vol. VI, p. 108ff. (this letter is cited in English only in association with the letter to Franz Overbeck, 23 June 1881, in Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters, p. 55 n.1).

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57. KSA IX (1880) 5 (33), p. 188. 58. KSA IX (1881) 11 (144), p. 496. 59. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, “Of Redemption,” pp. 161–62 (KSA IV, pp. 179–80), trans. slightly modified. 60. Ibid., p. 161, trans. slightly modified. 61. See Matthew 8:12; 13:42 and 50; 22:13; 24:51, and 25:30. 62. See Romans 2:9 and 8:35. This is not the only meaning of the word “tribulation,” which generally denotes the worldly life of the Christian between sin and grace; see II Corinthians 1:4, 7:4 and I Thessalonians 3:3ff. 63. KSA X (1882) 3 (1), ¶330, p. 93. 64. The Anti-Christ, §45, p. 173 (KSA VI, p. 223). 65. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, pt. I, “Lecture X,” p. 104 (Was heisst Denken?, p. 43). After having thus described the way in which eternal recurrence frees us from revenge, Heidegger observes that Christian faith knows another way of re-willing the “It was”: repentance. But Nietzsche defined repentance as “a revenge against oneself,” the Christian manner of re-willing the past always comes out of the economy of revenge; see ibid., p. 105 (Was heisst Denken?, p. 44) and Nietzsche, KSA X (1883) 16 (90), p. 532. 66. KSA IX (1881) 11 (144), p. 496. 67. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, “Of Redemption,” p. 162 (KSA IV, p. 180), trans. modified. 68. See KSA XI (1885) 39 (13), pp. 623–24; KSA XII (1885–86) 2 (122), p. 122; KSA XII (1886–87) 7 (24), p. 303; KSA XII (1887) 8 (7), pp. 337–38 and 9 (135), p. 413. 69. KSA XI (1884) 25 (484), p. 141. The German reads: Gerechtigkeit als bauende ausscheidende vernichtende Denkweise, aus den Werthschätzungen heraus: höchster Repräsentant des Lebens selber.” 70. KSA XI (1884) 26 (149), p. 188. 71. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, pt. 1, chap. 21, p. 148 and pt. 3, chap. 6, p. 245 (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 646 and vol. II, p. 327). Heidegger interprets these two notes on justice quite differently. 72. See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, “Of Love of One’s Neighbor,” pp. 86–88 (KSA IV, pp. 77–79); see also KSA X (1882) 3 (1), ¶225 and ¶229, pp. 79–80. 73. KSA X (1882–83) 4 (271), p. 184, and KSA XI (1884) 25 (290), p. 85. (In both texts, the questions are introduced by the great test or trial.—Trans.) It goes without saying that the “redemption” here must be understood in the Christian sense of the term. 74. KSA XII (1886–87) 5 (39), p. 198. The German reads: “Sprach der Naivetät” and contrasts with “die raffinierste Form des modernen Gedankens.” See also KSA XII (1886–87) 6 (22), pp. 239–40. Here, the world of old forms part of the theme.—Trans. 75. KSA X (1882–83) 5 (32), p. 226.

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Didier Franck is a professor of philosophy at the Université de Paris X, Nanterre, and scholar of Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. He is the author most recently of L’un-pour-l’autre: Levinas et la signification (2008). Bettina Bergo is an associate professor of philosophy at the Université de Montréal. She has edited and translated many works, including Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death of a Certain God” (with Jill Stauffer, 2009). She is the author of Levinas Between Ethics and Politics (2002).

Author and translators: Please review your bios carefully. They will appear both inside the book and on the paperback’s cover.

Philippe Farah is a graduate student in the philosophy department at the Université de Montréal.

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