Deleuze's Nietzsche and Post-Structuralist Thought - Pecora

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Deleuze's Nietzsche and Post-Structuralist ThoughtAuthor(s): Vincent P. PecoraSource: SubStance, Vol. 14, No. 3, Issue 48 (1986), pp. 34-50Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684995

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Deleuze's Nietzsche andPost-StructuralistThought

VINCENTP. PECORA

But you should always try to replace my hesi-

tating explanation by a better one. For the

origin of historical culture, and of its abso-

lutely radical antagonism to the spirit of a new

time and a "modern consciousness," must it-

self be known by a historical process. Historymust solve the problem of history, science

must turn its sting against itself.

-Nietzsche, The Use and Abuseof History

We have now had roughly a quarter century of "post-structuralism"-

if, that is, one can decide that something called "structuralism" ever

happened, if one uses the earliest work of Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault

as some sort of historical marker, and if (perhaps most of all) one is

interested in calculating such things in the first place. It is clearly possiblenow to take stock of this situation and explain post-structuralism to a

wider audience-for example, by reading it against the current of other

competing theoretical positions, as Terry Eagleton has most recentlydone. Yet, in many ways, the philosophical, cultural, and political densityof any mode of thought that might be called post-structuralist is still

weirdly difficult to articulate-or to hear articulated-in America; it is as

if we had engaged countless tutors and adopted a wide variety of points of

view-in the truest sense of a democratic pluralism-and had remained

somehow in the dark, groping for an intellectual wall to follow. "Post-

structuralism" becomes "deconstruction" becomes "free play," andlargely what this means is a style of literary criticism that has adopted as its

goal the displacement of any center of meaning in a text and the disrup-tion of any thematic reading, sometimes for the purposes of descrying the

forces of domination inherent to the literary construction that would

compel the reader toward such conclusions. No matter how many theo-

retical analyses are produced to correct the flat, reductive quality of this

reception, the American literary community as a whole-both "pre-"and

Sub-Stance N? 48, 1986 34



Deleuze's Nietzsche

"post-" structuralist-seems constitutionally unable (or unwilling) to

argue the full historical significance of the new discourse, even in its

reductive form,unwilling

in

many

cases to

penetrate

or examine what

appear to be wonderful streams of jargon in order to grab hold of

something that could at least be wrestled with.

To a large degree, of course, it is precisely the unmatched efficiency of

American pluralism that has in fact stimulated such a condition-at a

table with no etiquette, ingestion is often more important than taste.

Post-structuralism has indeed become a fact of contemporary literary life,

but, to borrow from Benjamin, merely as a "lived moment," not as

something truly experienced. In spite of the hostility engendered at first,

it has quite simply been appropriated like any new commodity on themarket. Various reasons have been given, ranging from the pragmatics of

accommodation elaborated by Stanley Fish to the Marxian indictment of a

late-capitalist market environment. Though I have certain sympathieswith each view, I still sense that something vital is missing, and Benjamin'sdistinction keeps invoking itself: why has so much contemporary intellec-

tual work been received here, and produced here, only as something

present and useful to conscious, daily existence (for example, to a career),

rather than as something that might have any effect on those more deeplyfelt levels where what is lived becomes a part of experience-a part of a

lasting, meaningful relationship with the world? The absence of a real

process of confrontation and engagement that would make such an

impression in this country-as opposed, for example, to shoutingmatches over the question whether a text means one thing or not-is a

crucial aspect of recent American intellectual life that cannot be ex-

plained simply by invoking market forces or a pragmatic spirit.What I would like to inject into the discussion is the question of table

manners. That is, what would an etiquette that prevented a value-less

consumption look like? The answer has in many ways already emerged in

the degree to which post-structuralism is understood in America as a

school of literary criticism rather than as a broader philosophical, psycho-

logical, and political critique. The etiquette that is missing here, the set of

commonly accepted intellectual practices that formed the heritage in

Europe against which post-structuralism took shape, is a long and fruitful

tradition of dialecticalthought: from Plato to Hegel, from Marx to Husserl

and Heidegger. It is the dialectic-understood now as a philosophical,and political, wayof life for the European thinker, and notjust as a style of

literary analysis-that set the table and wrote the rules for a generation of

French writers who came, or at least tried, to reject wholesale what it

offered. And it is the Nietzsche elaborated by Gilles Deleuze that becomesa pivotal figure in the reaction against this dialectical tradition. If Deleuze

is among the least known French philosophers in America, while for

Foucault we live in what might eventually be called a "Deleuzian" century,it is only one more

sign

of a failure here to sense where the real action was

35



Vincent P. Pecore

taking place. For that reason, if for no other, this might be the right time

to take a hard look at what Deleuze found so compelling in Nietzsche

nearlytwenty-five years ago.

Post-structuralism, then, if we are to follow Deleuze, may be said to

emerge out of the replacement (or what I would call, polemically, the

negation) of "le travail de la dialectique" by the play of "difference." For

modern philosophy, the "dialectic" is evoked most powerfully by Hegel,

whose shadow hangs large even after the intervention announced byNietzsche. But more generally, dialectics represents the entire history of

Western philosophy after Plato and beyond Hegel's phenomenologicalscience-in a sense, that is, the history of Western "rationality"itself. As

Theodor Adorno, in his own critique of this tradition, wrote: "As early as

Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of nega-tion; the thought figure of a 'negation of negation' later became the

succinct term."' Gilles Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche, in his Nietzscheet la

philosophie (1962),marks an

important stepin the subversion of this

tradition in contemporary critical thinking-a step that of course has its

own predecessors, its own genealogy. But it is through Deleuze that the

negative power of the dialectic is called so radically, so categorically,nto

question: "Difference reflects itself and repeats or reproduces itself. The

eternal return is this highest power, the synthesis of affirmation which

finds its principle in the will. The lightness of that which affirms againstthe weight of the negative; the games of the will to power against the labor

of the dialectic; the affirmation of affirmation against that famous nega-tion of the negation."2 It is, I would suggest, in this opposition (for lack ofa better, less "dialectical," word) between the "labor of the dialectic" and

the "games of the will to power" read as the reproduction or repetition of

difference that the beginnings of "post-structuralist" thought are to be

found. It is with Deleuze's particular elaboration of Nietzsche's "will to

power" as the play of difference, and with its consequences, that I will be

primarily concerned in this essay."Difference" is itself a term appropriated and reshaped by Deleuze,

not one invented out of nothing. It has its own history, beginning perhapswith Saussure's description of language as a system of differences without

positive terms: "Dans la langue il n'y a que des diff6rences sans termes

positifs."3 It is important to note, at this point, only that Saussure's de-

scription obtains at the level of the system as a structural whole: there

would be no reason to introduce the notion of difference as a definingcharacteristic if meaning were immanent in individual "positive" terms.

What is immanent in language as a whole is nothing but difference. Later,

in his 1950 lecture "Die Sprache," Heidegger named the intimacy of the

separation between world and things "derUnter-Schied""difference," but

36



Deleuze's Nietzsche

with the sense of "mutual separation") and goes on to say: "Language

speaks, in that the command [or bidding] of the difference calls world and

thingsinto the

simplicity ["Einfalt":the

one-fold]of their

intimacy...Language, the ringing of stillness, exists, in that difference occurs. Lan-

guage is efficacious as the occurring of difference for world and things."4That is, for Heidegger, the relationship between world and things-between what Hegel might have called the universal and the particular-is already non-dialectical: it is not man that dialectically struggles to speakthe truth-a subject naming objects-but language that speaks, and what

language speaks is ... difference, the non-identity of world and thingsthat finds an "intimacy"in man. The "labor"of Hegel's dialectic is already

being supplanted in Heidegger's phenomenal "intimacy."But why, it will properly be asked at this point, should the history of

philosophy as dialectic have become so oppressive-so laborious-in cer-

tain kinds of postwar European thought? The answers are naturally

complex and range from a disenchantment in some quarters of the

political left with material dialectics as a practical guide after Stalin, to a

growing sense that nineteenth-century "historicism," criticized by mod-

ern phenomenology for its tendency toward relativism and passive skep-

ticism, had itself only been reconstituted, rehabilitated, by the twentieth-century notion of structure.The work of Jacques Derrida may provide a

useful guide to this development. In a lecture on Husserl given three

years before the publication of Nietzsche et la philosophie,Derrida articu-

lates such a dissatisfaction with the notion of structure in paradigmaticterms:

The Idea of truth, that is the Idea of philosophyor of science,is an infinite

Idea, an Idea in the Kantiansense. Everytotality, every finite structure is

inadequateto it. Now the Idea or the projectwhich animatesand unifiesevery determined istoricalstructure,every Weltanschauung,sfinite:on thebasis of the structuraldescriptionof a visionoftheworld ne can account for

everything except the infinite opening to truth, that is, philosophy.More-

over, it isalwayssomethinglike anopeningwhich will frustrate he structural-ist project.What I can never understand,in a structure, s thatby meansofwhich it is not closed.5

In this early lecture, Derrida goes on to use "difference"-now with a

consciously doubled significance-to step behind, and ultimately subvert,the opposition he draws between an historical structure and an infinite

conceptual field.

Thus, the theoryof the Weltanschauungustrevertbackorbe reduced to thestrict imitsof its owndomain;its contours aresketchedbya certaindifferencebetweenwisdom andknowledge.... This irreducibledifference is due to aninterminabledelaying differance]f the theoreticalfoundation.The exigen-cies of life demand that a practicalresponse be organizedon the field ofhistorical

existence,and thatthisresponse precedeanabsolutesciencewhoseconclusionsit cannot await."

37



Vincent P. Pecore

Derrida comes to see this difference that always already delaysor defers

presence as constitutive of signification itself, of all systems of meaningand truth. But it should be no surprise to find here an echo of Hegel's

opposition of finite and infinite, particular and universal, Selbstand Sein,in Derrida's formulation-an opposition whose reconciliation Hegelcould prevent from being delayedonly by declaring an end to history itself.

It is a gesture that Derrida, following Heidegger, will be led to make use of

as he situates himself at the problematic closure of philosophy-a closure

now marked, not by a Napoleon, but by the irruption of the play of

difference into the history of dialectical thought.The point of all of this is that, after Saussure and Heidegger, "differ-

ence" for Derrida already functions as an "irreducible" subversion of thedialectic, a dialectic caught between the historical finite and the infinite

absolute, largely because"historical existence" could no longer be under-

stood to provide a way of reconciling them infact. What Derrida providesin this early essay, and what will later be taken up by TelQuel,is an analysisthat finally yields a celebration of "the play of difference" as the onlyalternative to a deadlocked dialectical tradition-to reason itself-as

reason tries in vain to overcome its oppositional nature. That is, "differ-

ence" functions todisrupt

theideological

character ofany "practical

response" to the "exigencies of life" before an "absolute science" can be

attaiied. In a later lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play"of 1966, Derrida

invokes Nietzsche's name as a source for this move:

Turned towards the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, thisstructuralist hematicof brokenimmediacy s therefore the saddened,nega-tive,nostalgic, guilty, Rousseuisticside of the thinkingof play whose otherside would be the Nietzscheanaffirmation,hat is thejoyousaffirmationof the

play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of aworld of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which isoffered to an activeinterpretation.Thisaffirmationhendetermineshenoncenterotherwisehan as lossof center.And it playswithoutsecurity.7

And it is Deleuze who, in 1962, most powerfully introduced Nietzsche

into the problematics of structure outlined earlier by Derrida. For De-

leuze will read Nietzsche as one who provides the alternative not only to

the "unhappy consciousness" that is one moment of the Hegelian dialec-

tic, but to dialectics as the medium and support of that consciousness-todialectics as the suffering, guilty, negating thought of ressentimentwhich

can only affirm by negating twice. What must be understood is that

Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche takes place at the point where an irreduc-

ible "difference" had already been elaborated, by means of the work of

Saussure, Heidegger, and Derrida, as the never ending delay between the

articulation of a particular historical structure and a theoretical founda-

tion that gives it meaning, or between a particular representation and the

total system within which it emerges. It is in a sense this delay, this

"differance"within the history of dialectics, between, in the final analysis,

38



Deleuze's Nietzsche

the intelligible concept and its identification with an objective reality, that

allows the playof difference to be used as an intellectual and political tool,as a means of obviating once and for all the delay inherent in all attemptsat "identity" and "presence," and the guilt that has always attended this

delay. That Deleuze should use difference to elaborate the will to powerin Nietzsche must be seen as a way of relating Nietzsche's attempt to cure

the "bad conscience" of his time through the transvaluation of all values to

Deleuze's own particular historical and political circumstances. If, for

Deleuze, difference is precisely that which is created and affirmed by the

will to power, we should note to begin with the full resonance of this

reading.

All of the above forms, then, the genealogy of Deleuze's use of differ-ence in his description of the function of the will to power in Nietzsche's

work. It is important to take account of this background at the outset, for

"difference"-as Unterschiedor Differenz or in any other form-is not a

concept given any particular privileges in Nietzsche's work itself. But it is

for Deleuze preciselythat which is at the root of Nietzsche's genealogicalmethod and, ultimately, of the will to power.

Nietzsche creates the new concept of genealogy. The philosopher is a

genealogist rather than a Kantian tribunal judge or a utilitarianmechanic .... Nietzsche substitutes he pathosof differenceor distance(thedifferentialelement) for both the Kantianprincipleof universalityand the

principleof resemblancedearto the utilitarians .... Genealogy s asopposedto absolutevalues asit is to relativeorutilitarianones.Genealogysignifiesthedifferential element of valuesfrom whichtheirvalue itself derives.Geneal-

ogy thus meansoriginor birth,but also difference or distance n the origin.(NietzschendPhilosophy, . 2)

The first point that must be noted here is that Deleuze has performed aSaussurian operation on the body of Nietzsche's work. That is, treating"values"as "signs"Deleuze can show that if one were to understand values

in their structural whole, they would appear as terms whose meaningderives from the "element," or groundwork, of difference within the

system, and not from any origin or source posited outside the system, that

is, as some infinite absolute or Kantian Idea. Deleuze will more or less

state this when he writes: "The whole of philosophy is a symptomatology,

and a semeiology" (3). Now there is clearly evidence in Nietzsche's workfor such a view; Nietzsche will point out, for example, that "the will to

overcome an affect is ultimately only the will of another, of several other,affects."8Thus, by systematizing the dominance of one force over another

as the primary fact of all organic life, Deleuze can refer to the difference

in quantity of force displayed by the affects as what is named by the will to

power.But the second thing to note here is that, for Deleuze, Nietzsche's

values are not

simply

relative-that is,meaningless-for

"thetrulygenealogical and critical element" of values is a sense of nobility and

39



Vincent P. Pecore

baseness in the origin of values as well as their differential structure. What

this means is that, for Deleuze, the value of values in Nietzsche is also a

typological question-a question not only of a quantity of force, but of a

quality:those values are noble whose origin is active, base whose origin isreactive. Thus, though values emerge only within a systematic whole that

determines them, this determination is itself marked by the active (that is,

affirmative) or reactive (that is, negative and hence dialectical) quality of

its emergence. While genealogy will aim to evaluate all values according to

this differential process, named by Deleuze the will to power, it is the

eternal return that will be the guarantee that "what is better and better

absolutely is that which returns, that which can bear returning, that which

wills its return. The test of the eternal return will not let reactive forces

subsist, any more than it will let the power of denying subsist" (86). In this

way, will to power will not only name the "differential element" that is the

structure of mutually defining valuations, but will to power will be the

affirmation of the play of that difference, and through the eternal return,the affirmation of that which is active:thus, in the end, an affirmation of

affirmation instead of a negation of negation.What we find in Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche is, then, what I will call

a dualistic, or binary, coding of genealogy and of the will to power itself.

That is, genealogy "means origin" but also "difference ... in the origin";and will to power is both the "differential element" through which values,like signs, define themselves and a motive force behind the creation of

values that is either active or reactive, affirmative or ... dialectical. It is

this stubborn binarism-between "will to power" as finite "element" or

mechanism or structure, and "will to power" as motivating, affirmative,and infinitely creative force outside (yet within) the domain of that finite

structure-that remains fundamental to Deleuze's reading throughout,

and that, I believe, is the "dialectical" turn at the heart of his interpreta-tion.

Now it should not be surprising to anyone familiar with Nietzsche's

work and the history of its reception that the most problematic interpre-tive issues should arise out of the notion of the will to power. As much as

Deleuze wants to redirect our attention away from the dialectical ques-tion, Qu'est-ce que ... ? toward the genealogical one, Qui?, he must

inevitably ask in dialectical fashion: "What does the 'will to power' mean?"

(79). Deleuze's answer will try to maintain both the multiplicity, what he

calls the "pluralisme essentiel," of the will to power and a sense of value-

creating "hierarchy" within that pluralism. On the one hand, when we ask

what the will to power means, Deleuze responds: "Not, primarily, that the

will wants power, that it desires or seeks out power as an end, nor that

power is the motive of the will"(p. 79). That is, in one way, will to power is

not force or affect, not in any sense the feeling that comes with power (as

Nietzsche sometimes implies), but a regulative mechanism, a "structur-

ing" of the evaluating process as such. But, on the other hand, if "power is

the one that wills in the will," we must ask, as Deleuze does, "what does itwill?"

40



Deleuze's Nietzsche

It wills precisely that which derives from the genetic element. ... In

Nietzsche'sterms, we must say that every phenomenon not only reflectsa

type which constitutesits sense and value, but also the will to poweras the

element from which the significationof its sense and the valueof its valuederive.In thisway,thewill topowersessentiallyreativendgiving: t does not

aspire,itdoesnotseek,itdoes notdesire,aboveall it does not desirepower.It

gives: . power is in the will as "thebestowingvirtue," hrough power the

will itself bestowssense and value. (85)

Leaving for the moment the apparent elision of "desire" as a psychologi-cal component here-an elision Nietzsche constantly warns against-weshould understand the inescapably binary nature of Deleuze's formula-

tion: will to power is both the finite structure,and the infinite

truth,of

evaluation; passive mechanism and motive force; differential element

and absolute bestower, of sense and value.

None of this is objectionable, of course, if we assume a more purelyfunctional-hence arbitrary and relative-connection between value and

power. That is, power can easily be both the differential element that

defines values, and itself the creator of value, if power is the onlyarbiter, if

all value is determined purely and simply by power, and if all values are

thus relative in value. But, clearly, Deleuze is uncomfortable with this

reading, so much so that the opposition between a quantitative structural

description of valuation and a qualitative hierarchy within (or outside of)this structure is reformulated at the end of Nietzscheet la philosophieas

Deleuze wrestles with the problem of how true valuations might be

produced out of a history of false ones, how "affirmation" can occur in a

history marked so far only by the triumph of reactive forces, of "ressenti-

ment,"the bad conscience, and the ascetic ideal. For Deleuze this means a

peculiarly Heideggerian distinction: "We 'think' the will to power in a

form distinct from that in which we know it.... What we in fact know ofthe will to power is suffering and torture, but the will to power is still the

unknown joy, the unknown happiness, the unknown God" (172-173).This distinction is then codified by Deleuze in terms reminiscent of

scholastic philosophy. The ratiocognoscendiof the will topowerin general is

that aspect from which "by nature" derive "all known and knowable

values" (172), that is, the history of the herd mentality, the triumph of

ressentiment.But this is only one aspect of the will to power. "The unknown

side, the otherquality

of the will topower,

the unknownquality,

is

affirmation. And affirmation, in turn, is not merely a will to power, a

quality of the will to power, it is the ratio essendiof the will topower n general"

(173). For Deleuze, "creation akestheplace of knowledge tselfand affirma-

tion takes the place of all known negations."9 Thus, if the ratiocognoscendiis how values are actually known and put into use by us in theworld,then

the ratio essendi s precisely that sense of the creation of values freed from

all particular conditions, the rational essence of the will to power itself.

What, then, has happened to the will to power in Deleuze's reading? It

has been interpreted as a structural whole that is the "differential ele-ment" by means of which force and value play-but a structural whole

41



Vincent P. Pecore

that is profoundly "dialectical"at its core. What Deleuze has achieved is a

series of sliding translations: the dissatisfaction that attends the delayinherent in

formulatinga

particularhistorical

response-inDerrida's

words-before an absolute science can be achieved will now be found at

the core of the will to power. Deleuze will begin and end with the replace-ment of dialectics by the play of difference, the subversion of Hegel byNietzsche. But the stubbornness of dialectical thinking will remain em-

bedded in this field of difference. Dialectics will be fragmented, for

Deleuze, by the will to power both as "differential element" and as

"origin" of values. From there we move first to the will to power as the

reactive history of ressentiment nd the bad conscience and then to the will

to power as the active creator of value. Finally, the will to power is codifiedby a Kantian distinction between how it actually appears and what it is in

itself, or, perhaps more accurately, a Heideggerian distinction between

the will to power as it has been knownso far and how it may be thought n

the future. The point I would like to make in all of this is that, for Deleuze,these "oppositions" are not oppositions at all-they are simply one more

kind of difference, a difference that is in time merely a function of the

transmutation of the negative into the affirmative, a transmutation that is

in no sense astruggle: "Negation

isopposed

o affirmation but affirmation

differsfrom negation"; affirmation is thus "the enjoyment and play of its

own difference" (188). When affirmation affirms itself, difference is

reflected,"raised to its highest power. Becoming is being, multiplicity is

unity, chance is necessity. The affirmation of becoming is the affirmation

of being . .. "(189).

But opposition can only be dissolved in this way by positing "the playof its own difference" as the ratio essendiof the will to power-that is, as an

aspect of the will to power completely unconditioned, completely outof the

world of those conditions endured by the ratiocognoscendi-that is, valuesas so far known, values as the history of ressentiment,as dialectics. What

Deleuze has not, cannot, dissolve so easily is the most fundamental

opposition (not simply difference now) in his reading: the oppositionbetween dialectics and the play of difference, between a thinking that

constantly takes account of itself, that reflects upon itself, and a thinkingthat is allowed a claim of infinite movement as if freed from all condi-

tions-physical, psychological, ideological. And the truest test that this

final dialectic has stubbornly remained is that Deleuze still wants his playof difference to be, through the eternal return, somehow progressive,somehow reflective:"In relation to Dionysus, dance, laughter, play are

affirmative powers of reflection and development."'0 If opposition were

in fact dissolved, there would be no need for "reflection and develop-ment"-two essential features of the dialectic. In this sense, the opposi-tion between dialectics and the play of difference that is the founding one

for Deleuze is constantly recapitulated throughout his reading of Nietz-

sche-not only as twin poles of the will to power, but even embedded

inside the play of difference that is the affirmative, creative pole itself.

42



Deleuze's Nietzsche

"Dialectics" has not been dissolved, it has been reinscribed as an inherent

and constitutive moment in Deleuze's formulation of "difference" as a

developmental process.

II

What, then, are the consequences of such a formulation, one that

functions not only as a radical re-interpretation of the significance of

Nietzsche's work, but also as a crucial moment in the history of postwar

European philosophy and critical theory? To begin with, Deleuze's read-

ing requires a most severe psychological reduction of Nietzsche's think-

ing-a reduction that goes beyond Heidegger's phenomenological dissec-

tion and even the most analytical Anglo-American discussions." As noted

earlier, for Deleuze the will to power "does not aspire, it does not seek, it

does not desire, above all it does not desire power" (85). ThroughoutNietzsche et la philosophie,"desire" as a component of Nietzsche's trans-

valuation of rational thought is systematically devalued-whether as desire

for power or as "struggle" of any type whatsoever-since it is precisely

"desire for" and "struggle against" that represent for Deleuze the opposi-tional, dialectical, negating character of ressentiment.Yet Nietzsche is

nothing if not clear about the fictional nature of any attempt to do awaywith the process of desire and struggle, to posit a "pure, will-less, painless,timeless knowing subject" which is for Nietzsche the first truth, and first

error, of the idealist's position.'2 Deleuze will attempt to confine desire

and struggle to the reactive history of ressentiment,o the herd mentalitythat Nietzsche diagnoses, but Nietzsche's work never really provides a

formulation of the will to power freed from that history, outside of the

realm of desire and struggle Nietzsche exploits in the service of produc-

ing a cruel-and perhaps more honest-appraisal of the progress of

reason and moral truth. Indeed, it is nothing other than "desire"-the

desire to know-that is most cruelly elaborated by means of the will to

power. As Nietzsche writes in BeyondGoodand Evil:

Finallyconsider that even the seeker after knowledge forces his spirit to

recognize things againstthe inclinationof the spirit,and often enough also

against

the wishes of his heart-by wayof

saying

No wherehe wouldlike to

say Yes, love, and adore-and thus acts as an artist and transfigurerof

cruelty. Indeed, any insistenceon profundityand thoroughnessis a viola-

tion, a desire to hurt the basicwillof the spiritwhichunceasinglystrivesforthe apparentand superficial-in all desire to know there is a dropof cruelty.(sec. 229)

The elimination of desire in Deleuze's analysis means that, for Deleuze,will to power in the end can suddenly function somehow outside the

historyof "the basic will of the

spirit."It is in the

verynext section of

BeyondGoodandEvil, in explanation of what he means by that "basicwill of

43



Vincent P. Pecore

the spirit," that Nietzsche offers what could serve as a precisof Deleuze's

project and a model of the proper genealogical response to it:

Here belongs also, finally ... that continual urge and surge of a creative,

form-giving, changeableforce: in this the spirit enjoysthe multiplicityandcraftinessof its masks,it also enjoysthe feeling of its securitybehind them:after all, it is surely its Proteanarts that defend and conceal it best.

This will to mere appearance,to simplification, o masks,to cloaks, in

short,to the surface-for everysurface sacloak-is counteredythatsublimeinclination of the seeker after knowledgewho insists on profundity,multi-

plicity, and thoroughness, with a will which is a kind of cruelty of theintellectual conscience and taste. (sec. 230)

Through his elimination of desire and struggle, through his notion of a

ratioessendiof the will to power posited outside the history of a "basic will

of the spirit" to appearance, simplification, and masks, Deleuze has also

managed to eliminate an absolutely central motif in Nietzsche's genealog-ical method: the cruel and insistent willingness to oppose, and not simplyto "differ from," that history.

But beyond this elision of desire, yet intimately related to it, is De-

leuze's larger attitude toward Nietzsche's project as a whole, an attituderooted in Nietzsche's celebration of the dance and laughter of Dionysus in

the face of the gravity of traditional metaphysics. For Deleuze, Dionysus'dance suggests a context that, like the psychological reduction of the will

to power, disengages Nietzsche's thinking from the philosophical and

cultural history Nietzsche himself is always aware of. That context, reiter-

ated several times in Nietzsche et la philosophieand summarized at the

conclusion, is "le jeu": the games of the will to power, of the play of

difference, that replace the labor of the dialectic.

Nietzscheis right to oppose his own game to the wagerof Pascal."Withoutthe Christian faith, thought Pascal,you will become for yourselves, likenature and history, a monster and a chaos: wehave ulfilledthisprophecy."Nietzschemeans:we havebeen ableto discoveranothergame,anotherwayof playing; we have discovered the overman beyond two human-all-too-human modes of existence;we have been abletoaffirmallchance,insteadof

fragmenting t andallowingafragmenttospeakasmaster;we havebeen ableto make chaos an objectof affirmation nsteadof positingit as somethingto

be denied.'3

There is, I think, a rather large gap between Nietzsche's sense that he had

fulfilled Pascal's prophecy and become, in his own work, a monster and a

chaos, and Deleuze's comment that this means that Nietzsche has found

another way of playing, indeed, another game altogether, outside the

parameters of Pascal's consciousness. Nietzsche does, of course, opposePascal (opposer-not diffrer-a curious verb for Deleuze to use if he is

going

to insist on Nietzsche's nondialectical methodology), but nowhere

in the sense of constructing "sonpropre eu," as if it could simply be a

44



Deleuze's Nietzsche

replacement for another's, never as having discovered merely a different,

more carefree, game to play. It is well to remember that Nietzsche is rarelyso

straightforward,so

un-ironic,for in the middle of

BeyondGoodandEvil

we find a rather different approach to monsters and chaos: "Whoever

fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a

monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into

you" (sec. 146). Or again, in Ecce Homo: "To mix nothing, to 'reconcile'

nothing; a tremendous variety that is nevertheless the opposite of chaos-

this was the precondition, the long, secret work and artistry of my instinct.

Its higherprotection ..."914 That is, just as surely as Nietzsche maintains

that he has become the monster and chaos that Pascal warned against, he

also retains a full awareness of the profound difficulty of such a position,of the suffering and pain that must be surmounted, transformed, nce such

a position has been reached. First, if we look at the section of The Will to

Power from which Deleuze is quoting here, it is obvious that what Nietz-

sche finds denied by Pascal, and later by Schopenhauer, is not simplychaos or chance, and that it is not simply chaos or chance that Nietzsche is

affirming in response: "In an important sense, Schopenhauer is the first

to take up again the movement of Pascal: un monstreet un chaos, conse-

quently something to be negated.-History, nature, man himself."'5 Thatis, by wagering on the Christian faith, Pascal has bet against "history,nature, man himself." If Nietzsche has become a chaos, it is not merely to

affirm "all chance"; rather, it is to embrace this decidedly "gentile" (inVico's sense) trinity he finds systematically denied in the philosophicaltradition before him.

Second, integral to this complexity of tone that is more or less cen-

sored in Deleuze, there is Nietzsche's constant return to the pain such an

attitude nevertheless produces for him, pain that can only be overcome

through Dionysus' lightness of spirit. Citing the pessimism of Voltaire

("Un monstre gai vaut mieux / Qu'un sentimental ennuyeux") and Gal-

iani, and chastising "the inconsequence of pessimism a la Schopenhauer,"Nietzsche claims to have gone beyond them to "the most quintessentialforms (Asia)." He then continues: "But in order to endure this type of

extreme pessimism (it can be perceived here and there in my Birth of

Tragedy)and to live alone 'without God and morality' I had to invent a

counterpart for myself. Perhaps I know best why man alone laughs: he

alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. The unhappiestand most melancholy animal is, as fitting, the most cheerful" (Will to

Power, sec. 91). Now it is precisely this peculiar conjunction of profound

suffering and superhuman laughter that is at once mostNietzschean, and

most dissolved by Deleuze's scholastic distinctions that serve to insulate der

Ubermensch rom ressentiment, hat posit both a ratio essendi and a ratio

cognoscendiof the will to power. In Nietzsche, such absolute distinctions

are never made: the overman never comes to be outside the progress of

the ascetic ideal, and there are notmerely

twomutually

exclusiveaspectsof the will to power but many forms that have appeared throughout its

45



Vincent P. Pecore

history, even to the moment at which Nietzsche is writing. If the overman

is something Nietzsche sees on his horizon, it is clearly not anything that

will be achieved

easily,

or as the

spontaneous

result of an affirmative,

pluralistic dance and play. Rather, the dance of Dionysus appears for

Nietzsche as the only means of accommodating the nearly unbearable

psychological strain the overman must confront.

On the Genealogyof Morals elaborates the paradoxical nature of this

moral history in the final essay devoted to an analysis of the ascetic ideal:

Everywhereelse that the spiritis strong,mighty,and at workwithout coun-terfeit today, it does withoutidealsof anykind-the popularexpressionforthis abstinence s

"atheism"-exceptfortswill otruth.But thiswill,this remnant

of an ideal, is, if you will believe me, this ideal itself in its strictest,most

spiritualformulation,esotericthroughand through,withall external addi-tionsabolished,and thusnot so muchits remnantas itskernel.Unconditionalhonest atheism(and its is the only airwe breathe,we more spiritualmen ofthisage!) is therefore notthe antithesisof thatideal,as it appearsto be; it isratheronlyone of the latestphasesof itsevolution,one of itsterminalformsand inner consequences-it is the awe-inspiringcatastrophef two thousand

years of trainingin truthfulnessthat finallyforbids itself the lie involvedn

belief n God....

As the will to truththusgainsself-consciousness-there canbe no doubtof that-morality will graduallyperishnow: this is the great spectaclein ahundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe-the most

terrible,most questionable,and perhapsalsothe mosthopeful of all specta-cles. (Geneologyf Morals,Third Essay,sec. 27)

Unmistakable, both in the content and tone of these passages, is a metho-

dological irony-an intellectual "cruelty"-directed first at Nietzsche's

cultural heritage and then at Nietzsche's thinking itself, as it is inevitably a

product of that heritage. That Nietzsche's own desirefor truth should bethe result of an ascetic ideal he stands most opposed to, that the coming to

consciousness of the truth of such a relationship should be simultaneously"terrible," "questionable," and (perhaps) "hopeful," is a state of mind-at

once narrowly analytic and grandly historical in its implications-totallyobscured by Deleuze's choice of emphases. Deleuze wants to show that the

will to power is a subversion of traditional rationality-that is, dialectics-

by the introduction of difference as a determinant of values. But if

Nietzsche subverts the history of reason, it is not through an affirmationof the play of difference, but through a transvaluation of the very notion

of dialectics-so that the history of reason in the West becomes, not the

dialectic of pure conception, or pure representation, with an objective

"reality,"but instead the dialectic of reason as power. It is not so much that

dialectics is replaced by a new game of difference, but that dialectics is

shown to be shot through and through by a will to power-by a will that is

always first a question of domination, appropriation, and assimilation

even as it understands itself as "rational."

Thus, by describing Nietzsche's achievement as having discovered

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Deleuze's Nietzsche

"another game, another way of playing," and by making the focus of that

game a play of difference in which "becoming is being, multiplicity is

unity, chance is necessity," Deleuze has muted, indeed practically eradi-

cated, the intellectual tension that is so crucial to Nietzsche's thought: that

sense of walking a tightrope between the seemingly inevitable reproduc-tion of one more rationalization of Judeo-Christian morality and the

destructive apathy of late nineteenth-century European nihilism. It is not

that Deleuze is wrong to remind us of Nietzsche's Dionysian playfulnessaimed against a metaphysical gravity that had by Nietzsche's time pro-duced, even in spite of itself, psychological repression, nihilism, and

despair. Rather, it is Deleuze's unfortunate-and perhaps wishful-

idealizationof Nietzsche's work that is objectionable, so that this playful-ness appears over no obstacles, in spite of no suffering, without any

struggle.16

We find in Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche, then, first an attempt to

reveal the nondialectical nature of Nietzsche's thought, a claim that there

could be "no possible compromise" between Nietzsche and Hegel;second, a codification of this thought in the will to power's "playof its own

difference"; and finally, a transformation of the significance of the

"chaos" Nietzsche has become from"history, nature,

man himself' to "all

chance," to "another game, another way of playing." Clearly, there is

some basis for each of these moves in Nietzsche's work; but taken

together, in the exclusive treatment that Deleuze provides, they amount

to a very interesting revision of Nietzsche's writings that systematically

purges them of the "human-all-too-human" marks of their own incep-tion, marks Nietzsche is always very careful to leave visible-desire, espe-

cially desire for "the truth"; struggle, against one's own heritage, againstone's "instincts"; suffering; opposition; tension; reflection; and, perhaps

in the end, the inevitable error of reflection at the very heart of one's needfor it. If any of these factors is an important part of the program of

Nietzsche's critique of philosophy and culture in the late nineteenth

century-his transvaluation of values-then Deleuze has indeed given us

a very limited view of this critique. And it is this limited view that, I would

suggest, lies beneath many of our present difficulties with "post-structuralist" thought.

None of this is meant to deny the importance of Nietzsche for contem-

porary critical thinking, nor to deny the importance of much of thatthinking itself. Derrida's critique of the phenomenological voice and

linguistic "presence," Foucault's journey from structural to archeologicalto genealogical methods, Barthes's emphasis on an "ecriture" that seemsto write itself, and the more or less ubiquitous subversion of the epistemo-

logical subject by networks of codes, practices, and discourses-all owe a

great deal to Nietzsche, and all have been central to the flourishing ofcritical theory in our time. (The other central line-the German one-

has, of course, been the Frankfurt School and its branches, and the debt

here to Nietzsche is equally apparent.) But there is another far less

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Vincent P. Pecore

persuasive side to this critical history, one that emerges at various pointsin Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, and their inheritors and that can be traced,

I believe, to Deleuze. A glimpse of this "other" side may be obtained,

perhaps, by returning to Derrida's 1966 lecture, "Structure, Sign, and

Play." Here, the Nietzschean affirmation represents a becoming that is

"innocent," signs that are without "fault," "truth," or "origin," and "play"that takes place without the "security" of a center. Not only do such

conclusions depend, as I have tried to show, on a severely limited view of

Nietzsche's critique, but they presuppose a "world"that has in fact never

yet appeared and that doesnot now exist. For Nietzsche, "becoming" is no

more innocent than guilty-it is a fact of organic life, at once destructive,

exploitative, and creative; signs may be without truth or origin, in thesense that they are subject to constant reinterpretation, but it is the

specific genealogy of those interpretations that reveals a "truth," even in

the absence of an origin. And if the Nietzschean affirmation "playswithout security," this is not in any sense equivalent to a "joyous affirma-

tion of the play of the world"-it is an affirmation of a particular historical

dramathat, in fact, must inevitably take certain forms, must, in followingits own perhaps destructive-logic, take certain courses and deny

others,must indeed "love" its fate.

Nietzsche's many-eyed perspectivism (" . .the more eyes, different

eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our 'concept'of this thing, our 'objectivity,' be" [Geneologyof Morals, Third Essay, sec.

12]) is central to Deleuze's pluralistic notion of a play of difference. But

this pluralistic methodology is for Nietzsche always inevitably "in the

serviceof knowledge" emphasis mine): "To see differently in this way for

once, to want to see differently, is no small discipline and preparation of

the intellect for its future 'objectivity'-the latter understood not as 'con-

templation without interest' (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the

ability tocontrolone's Pro and Con and to dispose of them ... "(Geneology

of Morals, Third Essay, sec. 12). To the degree that thinkers like Derrida

have elaborated "difference" as a "discipline and preparation" for the

ability to control values, rather than be controlled by them, Nietzsche's

work has been actively, fruitfully extended. But to the degree that "differ-

ence" has come to signify a freedom of play that does not in fact exist, and

that does not seem capable of reflection upon such a condition, Nietz-

sche's work has only been turned into a fantastic escape from "history,nature, man himself"-an escape Nietzsche warned against perhapsmore often than he warned against any of the manifold "escapes" philoso-

phy has so far invented.

It is for this reason that we should be so suspect of Deleuze's denigra-tion of labor or struggle or "reason" itself in Nietzscheet la philosophie,and

of his later views of schizophrenia and psychoanalysis. For, despite all the

service Deleuze has provided in helping to re-awaken a generation of

intellectuals to the power of Nietzsche's writings, there remains the un-

easy feeling that Nietzsche has been once more appropriated and ex-

48



Deleuze's Nietzsche

ploited-a task he would perhaps not have discouraged-but without the

cruel irony of his reflection that would then have attempted to articulate

the reasons for, and effects of, such an appropriation. Of course, this

brings us back to the "delay"between the elaboration of a finite historical

structure and absolute knowing, between Weltanschauungand philoso-

phy, that Derrida analyzed in 1959. It is precisely this dialectical delay that

Deleuze claims Nietzsche overcomes in the affirmations of the will to

power. Ironically, however, it may be a master dialectician-Adorno-

who best sums up the Nietzschean tension Deleuze seems to have putaside: "The freedom of philosophy is nothing but the capacity to lend a

voice to its un-freedom. If more is claimed for the expressive moment, it

will degenerate into a weltanschauung; where the expressive momentand the duty of presentation are given up, philosophy comes to resemble

science."'7 In a sense, this serves as a description of the peculiar habit of

mind-a peculiar joy as well as a sadness-that runs throughout Nietz-

sche's work. It is perhaps most powerfully expressed by Nietzsche in the

final section of BeyondGood and Evil:

Alas,what areyou afterall,mywrittenandpaintedthoughts!Itwasnotlongago that you were still so colorful,young, and malicious,full of thornsand

secretspices-you made me sneeze and laugh-and now?You havealreadytaken off your novelty,and some of you areready,I fear, to become truths:

they already ookso immortal,so patheticallydecent,sodull!And hasiteverbeen different? Whatthingsdo wecopy,writingandpainting,we mandarinswithChinesebrushes,we immortalizersof thingsthatcanbe written-whatarethe onlythingsweare ableto paint?Alas,alwaysonlywhat son thevergeof witheringand losing its fragrance! . . We immortalizewhat cannot liveand fly much longer-only wearyand mellow things! And it is only yourafternoon, ou, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have

colors, many colors perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellowsandbrownsandgreensand reds: butnobodywillguessfrom thathowyoulookedin your morning, you suddensparksand wondersof mysolitude,youmyoldbeloved-wicked thoughts!

Unless the Sehnsuchtof such writing is recognized-the wistful yearningfor a means of representing that which actually "lives"and "flies,"rather

than always only those "things that can be written," the vital force that

propels Nietzsche's work will be missed; and critical thinking will come to

be satisfied with the false colors of an intellectual afternoon it pretendswill never fade.

NOTES

1. Theodor Adorno, NegativeDialectics,rans.E. B. Ashton (New York:Continuum,1983), p. xix. In this context, however, we should also note J. N. Findlay's remarks on

negation and difference in his introduction to ThePhenomenology fSpirit,remarks that are in

sharp contrast to Deleuze's attempt to distinguish rigorously between the two: "On Hegel'sbasic

assumptions negation,

in a wide sense that covers difference,opposition,

and reflection

or relation, is essential to conception and being: we can conceive nothing and have nothing if

49



Vincent P. Pecore

we attempt to dispense with it" (The Phenomenologyof Spirit [Oxford: Oxford University,

1979], p. ix). It will be Deleuze's contention that Nietzsche makes the play of difference

possible without "negation."2. Gilles

Deleuze,Nietzscheet

laphilosophie Paris:Presses universitaires de

France, 1962),and Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University,

1983), p. 197. Unless otherwise indicated, I have used Tomlinson's translation in subsequentcitations. Where Tomlinson deviates in any significant way from Deleuze's original, I have

provided my own translations and have so marked them. Nietzscheet laphilosophiepresents a

number of problems for translation and scholarship; Deleuze usually quotes Nietzsche from

available French versions, but often without precise references, and these naturally providean interpretation of Nietzsche's thinking, often with a change of emphasis or sense. Tomlin-

son generally uses Walter Kaufmann's translations of Nietzsche in place of these French

versions, and the confusion multiplies. See especially my note 13 below.

3. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de

linguistiquegenerale(Paris:

Payot,1967),

p.166.

4. Martin Heidegger, "Die Sprache," in Unterwegszu Sprache Pfullingen: Neske, 1959),

p. 30, my translation. I am indebted to Susan Lhota for her suggestions concerning

Heidegger's terminology.5. Jacques Derrida, "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology," in Writing and

Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), p. 160.

6. Derrida, "'Genesis and Structure,"' p. 161.

7. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play," in Writingand Difference, p. 292.

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:

Vintage, 1966), sec. 117. All subsequent references are to this edition.

9. Nietzsche et la philosophie,p. 199; my translation (Tomlinson, p. 173).10. Nietzscheet la philosophie, p. 222; my translation (Tomlinson, p. 194).11. See Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche,2 vols., one part of which has been translated by

D. F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979); and Arthur Danto's Nietzsche as

Philosopher(New York: Macmillan, 1965).12. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and

R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1969), Third Essay, sec. 12. All subsequent references

are to this edition.

13. Nietzscheet la philosophie,p. 43; my translation (Tomlinson, p. 37). Tomlinson substi-

tutes Kaufmann's translation of Nietzsche here, but alters Nietzsche's (and Kaufmann's) use

of italics to approximate Deleuze's French translation and its emphasis of the fulfillment of a

prophecy, as well as its de-emphasis of Nietzsche's concern for the problem of the Christian

faith. Tomlinson also omits the entire clause beginning with "we have been able to affirm all

chance...."

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, EcceHomo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969),

"Why I am so clever," (sec. 9). All subsequent references are to this edition.

15. Friedrich Nietzsche, TheWill toPower,trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale(New York: Vintage, 1968), sec. 83. All subsequent references are to this edition.

16. Nietzsche may have claimed in certain sections of that last original work, EcceHomo,

that he had never "struggled" for anything-"I do not know any other way of associatingwith great tasks than play"("Why I am so clever," sec. 10)-and Deleuze makes much of such

pronouncements. But Nietzsche's irony is never far removed. When Nietzsche ends thatsection of Ecce Homo with a reference to his "formula for greatness," amorfati, his tone is

hardly an unconditioned affirmation of all chance as necessity: "Not merely bear what is

necessary, still less conceal it-all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is neces-

sary-but love it." Nietzsche's particular fate-for that is his topic here-can in no way be

described as a game, still less as "allchance" or "chaos."Nietzsche, never more aware of how

he would appear to later generations than in this final review of his work, consistently strove

toward a particular affirmation of a particular fate-"my truths," he called his perspective

thinking. That the will to power in general should be seen as the affirmation of the play of its

own difference is a formulation that in the end has little to do with the personal and historical

conditions Nietzsche constantly returns us to.17. Negative Dialectics, p. 18.

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Deleuze's Nietzsche and Post-Structuralist Thought - Pecora