File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_2002/nietzsche.0207, message 150


Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 16:39:01 +0100
From: Ruth Chandler <R.Chandler-AT-ucc.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 'The rotting ruling classes have ruined the image of




>>> Kevin Sanchez <heliogabalus-AT-eudoramail.com> 07/17 1:14 pm >>>
ruth,


the letter i sent to a college debate listserv two days after 9/11 is here, (http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200109/0488.html), including the aforementioned Nietzsche quotation in the middle (between Steinbeck and Burroughs).

thanks-i'll get back to you on it

to your comments below, i didn't say Nietzsche offered an ahistorical critique of nobility but a historical condemnation ('piss') of modern-day nobles - they're soft, pitiful, and have surrendered to the herd. Bush is a puppet for the legislative branch and the press; he's there to aid the wage-slaves in nationalistic self-glorification ('the blessings of work' & 'god bless america') 

the point i was making was that the superhistorical is ahistorical for N-despite my repugnance to Bush and the fact that articulates precisely the structure of stupidity that Deleuze ( who i probably admire more than you) finds in reactive forces, my ambivalence stems from the fact that Bush's stupidity is also ahistorical in the manner N admires. i am not suggesting that N would admire the content of american foreign policy. simply that he writes with a cultural imaginary that has never witnessed war on a mass scale.  

i am scarcely middle class-i was brought up in institutional 'care' from which i ran away as soon as i could.  basically, i have simply been on the receiving end of enough physical violence to not romanticise it as a way of life-it fucking hurts and always involves a power imbalance of sime kind- i have bad physical scarring down one side of my face from a guy, a hells angel out of his head on acid, who ran amok at a festival insdicrimately punching women with a sharp ring, simply because he felt like it. perhaps you would celebrate his evil?  i also live on a council estate  whose favourte occupation appears to be throwing bricks through my window. they throw bricks because they perceive me to be different from them and because a woman living alone is also perceived to vulnerable within the small c conservatism of family values. so, from the collection of forces that i am,  these kinds of physical experience are bad news. i do not support intellectual quietism and acknowledge that i have bad conscience towards these people-however changing the direction of ressentiment is not about creating more evil ones, it is about converting the violence of death industries into something more positive. i think this depends on a refusal of actual war in the name of a creative agon that may well be very warlike-a different kind of agon. i think the bush administration demonstartes the inadeuacies of N's visions on these points.

i agree that Foucault's attempt at 'history of the present', a gray history of multiplicities, the best appropraition of Nietzsche yet, escapes the duality between superhistorical and unhistorical by linking discursive ruptures along a genealogical chain. whether this implies a 'pathos of distance' is interesting, but i think there's a form of scientific 'objectivity' even Nietzsche would find potent, namely one that focuses on dynamic quanta and power relations, instead of subjective fictions and objective laws. (Deleuze's 'transhistorical' is derivative, like most everything else that academic fuck writes.)

can you explain what you mean by scientific objectivity? i don't think Deleuze's transhistorical is derivative of F- F presents counter memory as a new form of time-in relation to the historical enclosure of heidegger's reading of Nietzsche's essay on history- Deleuze's transhistorical opens onto becoming-woman and becoming-animal conceived as a way out of freud's thesis of totem and taboo-they are not the same, although they can be amde to work together


in the face of the nobles' selling-out to herd-mentalities, and the herd thinking themselves noble, a new underground of nobles is required - a new monkey-barrel of barbarians: cynics, experimenters, conquerors united in the dyonisian joy of destruction. and in this context, acceleration requires extreme stillness - to be strong enough to remain solitary and calm while one speeds up the tempo of the civilizational centrifuge speaks to the self-discipline, the indifferent hardness, needed among the new barbarians. (as for slowing the actual machines down, or what amounts to same thing, that is, slowing down labor-commodities, this is again impossible without significant destruction. 'zero-growth' economies and massive 'de-development' is a pipe-dream, and no amount of study in ancient martial arts will change that.)

i was using an example of how relative slowness can also put the spanner in the works-also one does not have to retain a centrifugal ( narcisstic) model of the self) there is no reason why allopoesis rather than autopoesis might not become a creative principle. however, i  do privilege slowing down because of ecological concerns-i would like to preserve a world for the yet to come even if i have no desire to preserve its moral order. N writes at a time where the world is seen as an unlimited resource and so his arguments make sense in this context. however, eco-feminisms force the question of what  one materially needs that, at least, connects up with everyday politics. 

Nietzsche was certainly an agitator, and an advocate of violence, but i think he would cringe at the 'advanced' & 'smart' weaponry of the american empire (and its leading terrorist network of arms-sellers) today. the facelessness of its 'civilized' wars does not approach the ambitious and hedonistic will to power of assholes like Napolean, Caesar, and Alexander the Great. though Nietzsche was not tight-lipped about the stupidity of matyrs, i think the suicide bombers and hijackers of recent memory are something different; they're not comparable to a crucified jesus, but are warriors who give the bullies a big 'fuck you!' upon their exit. (say what you will of suicide bombers, but 'cowardly self-preservation' is not one of their character traits.)

suicide bombers are completle interested in self-preservation. if you believ in an afterlife and a secure place for having been the agent of allah's judgement then it makes perfect sense to fly a plane into a building in the hope of a hinterworldy reward. 

perhaps its no longer easy for you, Ruth, to 'celebrate the forces of destruction en masse', 

no i think it is crass- however, i do not think the USA is right by default-there are real material grievances underlying the events of the world trade bombing that the bush administration has chosen to ignore.

but i sense some middle-class morality in there.


 first, the lessons of this past century, the genocide of the Nazis, the Soviets, the Red Chinese, and the American Imperialists, show that the 'chaos' is not in destruction, but in perservation of order. 

as i said before-fine if you already have a job-meanwhile lets all say yes to rwanda as the mobile force of hunger that lets us run a critique of values stemming from the hunger in the first place... 

and Nietzsche's the will to power is nothing if not a wake-up call that a war is (already) on - and you can't be neutral. if you think there isn't a war, and if you still feel uncomfortable about the thought of 'condoning violence' (about what that might mean for your career or credability),

i'm not a careerist-i support myself through freelance learning support work-leaving most of my time free to think what i like
why does the word doctoral student invoke all these assumptions of yours? as i said above-there is abig difference between creative discusrive violence and physical violence-try it sometime if you are not convinced-nothing to say to the rest of your post-i had hoped for a debate not a new form of moral judgement

 then you've already chosen what i consider to be a shitscared side of wimps, a overly-moralistic side that makes one feel good (with prozac and zoloft is necessary) about what amounts to contracting hits; a side that lets one pay others to manufacture bombs, slaughter noncombatants, and fuck over the rest of the world while one sits in the creature-comforts of a bourgeois home, watches the t.v., stuffs one's face with junk food, and finds 'personal meaning' in spawning more spoiled brats. 

peace? is that what you desire? well fine, but you'll have to fight for it like any other terrorist, and even if you're a non-violent solider, your enemy list must include Penis Cheney and Ronald McDumbsfeld as key military targets.

you're right though, Nietzsche did have 'timely values' that he  couldn't shed - his talk of racial clensing fucking disgusts me (though its no worse than today's eugenics called meritocracy (or better labelled, institutionalized mediocrity)). Nietzsche needs updating and correction, but where i differ from the likes of Habermas is that i think what's wanting is not the solid foundation of 'Reason' - you'll never beat the imperialists and their spin-doctors at that game because they've got billions to throw at that problem. you call this a 'weakness' in Nietzsche's argument, but that's perhaps because he's not speaking to you - you must 'forget your umbrella' as it were.

put differently, what's wanting is *strength*, the capacity to overcome social normalization, to toss the brick into the bank window and not fear the pigs (or if you do, to this break through). what's wanting is to throw yourself and others into the ocean's abyss so that we can all learn how to swim again rather than walk on the crutches provided by the 'social welfare state-mass democracy' which also crippled us without telling us, and gave us amnesia so we wouldn't remember that we once breathed fresh air, if only for a milisecond. needless to say, this is not a task for nook intellectuality ...

you've got to learn to make your hands tremble when you write. or, in sum, as Nietzsche would scream, what's needed is MORE EVIL, period, end of sentence, end of story.        :luvkev


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