Date: Wed, 23 Mar 1994 02:36:06 -0500 (EST)
From: Gregory Polly <gpolly-AT-husc.harvard.edu>
Subject: MP: Rhizomes, Nietzsche 


 
Ok, I'll join in. 

"Whenever a multiplicity is taken up in a structure, its growth is offset 
by a reduction in its laws of combination. The abortionists of unity are 
indeed angel makers, doctores angelici, because they affirm a properly 
angelic and superior unity. Joyce's words, accurately described as 
having 'multiple roots,' shatter the linear unity of the word, even of 
language, only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or 
knowledge. Nietzsche's  aphorisms shatter the linear unity of knowledge, 
only to invoke the unity of the eternal return, present as the nonknown 
in thought. This is as much as to say that the fascicular system does 
not really break with dualism, with the complementarity between a 
subject and an object, a natural reality and a spiritual reality: unity 
is consistently thwarted in the object, while a new type of unity 
triumphs in the subject."(p. 6)

  I was very struck by the statement about Nietzsche. Is this a 
partial repudiation by Deleuze of his own reading of Nietzsche? In a 
muted way, he comes close to calling Nietzsche a priest here. Hard to 
line up with his 1962 argument in _Nietzsche & Philosophy_: he went to 
such trouble to save the eternal return from this sort of carp, didn't he?

  How many people want to leap in & save Nietzsche here? Or save 
Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche? My experience suggests the answer is: lots. 
Why? Why do we like Nietzsche so much? Why do we try to save him from his
own fascism, like the good son valiantly defending the dysfunctional
Father: yes, he said that about Jews, that about women, yes, that we need
to bring back slavery, yes, that workers should have surplus labor sucked
from their eyeballs so we artistes can write our Zarathrustras; yes, yes,
but he's a nice man once you get to know him. Rilly. It's all a metaphor.
Yes, yes, I know the metaphor business is hard to maintain in light of
certain biographical material, but, still, you misunderstand him. It's we 
who areguilty, we who do not know how to read him, we who are not worthy of him,
mea culpa, mea culpa! Original sin, all over again: but we get credit,
this time, because we say nassssty slavish things about those twerpy
Christians. Oh! Nasty STRONG things, STRONG things, excuse me; *their*
diatribes are ressentiment, but mine are strength, you understand,
strength and nothing but the strength. Despite surface similarites. If you
are strong you will understand. Do you?  I am merely asking you a
question.  If you are strong you will feel exhilarated when reading my 
work. No I am not blackmailing you. The strong do not blackmail. 
Only slaves believe they are being blackmailed. 

Reading Deleuze is exhilarating. It seems to me an immensely generous and 
unresentful writing, one that takes joy in
the joy it can cause others. Reading Nietzsche is like being in a trapped 
in a 10 x 10 pub for all eternity with a slobbering
reactionary, peeing on himself as he sucks the energy out of you 
like a vampire with his shrill double-binds. I have discovered this is not 
something I should confess openly.


And yet in my warm heart I think that, somewhere, others must have thought
what I have thought: reading _Ecce Homo_, they must have drawn up their
lip: uck.  There must be innocent children who would be bold enough to say
that the emperor has no joy. I wonder. Who did write the book of love?
Deleuze, sure. Nietzsche? No way. Nietzsche produces Leo Strauss produces
Allan Bloom. (Betcha didn't know Allan was a right-wing Nietzschean,
hmmm?) Nietzsche produces Harold Bloom produces Camille Paglia. Enough
talk about "vulgar Nietzscheans", already. Nietzschean discourse is always
already vulgarized: hate mail from the start. Deleuze and Guattari slapped
Freud, as noone had before, with a big, undignified fish: Jeeesus, how did
this bald guy get to be such a bossypants? But: When will someone REALLY
set us free and do a job on Nietzsche? Can Deleuze and Guattari give us
the anti-Dionysus? 

I've never understoood Deleuze's attachment to Nietzsche. It
would be one thing if he said: I am selecting from Nietzsche this strata,
this cog, and twistyturning it my way. But in the Nietzsche book Deleuze
uses uncompromisingly *intentionalist* language. Nietzsche meant this.
Nietzsche would never have intended that people read him in *this* way.
Nietzsche makes clear that his argument (*his* argument) is this. For the
most part such intentionalist claims are shaky, and some are downright
falsifiable. I think one risks a lot with this move: either you commit to
a lot of very questionable "affects" or you keep them at bay with a good
deal of historiographic and biographical self-deception. (The Bart 
Simpson school of Nietzsche studies: blame the sister. Lisa did it.)

In some ways Deleuze could be held responsible for the purified,
"linguistic" Nietzsche that we've had since 1962, so nicely perfumed and
rationalized, with some of his ugliest passages now actually suppressed
from standard publications of his work. (See O. Schutte, _Beyond
Nihilism_). Interestingly, his own philosophical commitments have changed 
a lot since those more arborescent days. Is it time to re-evaluate the N-man?

"Unity is consistently thwarted in the object, but triumphs again in the
subject." In Nietzsche's case, according to Deleuze, this has to do with
the deterritorializing aphorism and the reterritorializing eternal return.
But there's another way you could apply the idea. Couldn't we say that
what Nietzsche's aphorisms deterritorialize on the plane of signification,
they reterritorialize on the plane of TONE? Nietzsche may fragment the
representation of ego with his perspectivism and his game of masks, but
ego don't disappear: it reappears in the aggressive tonalities of the
writing. Just think for a minute about neoconservative pundits--they're
aphorists too, and not so different in method from the N-man as we have
hallucinated ourselves into believing. The aphorism may be semiotically
centrifugal and intertextual, but it is affectively centrepital. It is
agonistic, competitive. It retreats into a punctual, fortified
self-presence as a way of *avoiding* dispersal. It extracts a punctual
moment of triumph over the mobile terrain of antagonists (including
language itself), and *freezes* that triumph in an act of display until it
can leap to another equally frozen moment. You can deconstruct yourself
all you like ON THE PLANE OF SIGNIFICATION, and yet such deconstructions
merely accumulate a kind of capital on the plane of tone, where the
competition of "character" goes on. Facing the abyss, I (under erasure) am
more manly than you (right-wing, German). Facing infinite freeplay, I
(under erasure) am more ironic than you (left-wing, French). Isn't this
poststructuralism's dirtiest little secret? 

The posts here have been terrific. Thanks to Michael and whoever else had 
the idea for this net. 

Greg Polly











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