Which One is “Nietzschean”?
François Laruelle
From Nietzsche contre Heidegger: thèses pour une politique nietzschéenne (Paris: Payot, 1977), p.67-83
I. Machinic Propositions
1. We substitute the varying historian, hermeneutic or textual projects with a political intervention within Nietzsche. We do not pose to Nietzsche a question on behalf of the historian (the sources, the readings, the themes), the philologist, the rhetorician or the psychoanalyst. Doing so would be to measure him to objects and goals that are not his own. We pose one philosophical and political question to him: “which one” [qu’est-ce qui] is specifically Nietzschean?
This is a doubly incongruent question. On the one hand, everyone feels that the name “Nietzsche” cannot define a philosophical membership, designate an allotment of themes, or to serve a doctrinal banner. On the other hand, nearly everyone makes this impossibility an ideal, ascetic and sublimated use, and derive the reasons from a shameful expedient: by only making that which is Nietzschean be identical to the ideas that circulate under this name, one makes these ideas in fact define that which is Nietzschean. The historians, psychologists, rhetoricians, etc., are those who renounce posing this nevertheless crucial question prior to any reading and unabashedly rally around the all-coming of identifications (the psychological individual, his history, his thought, his themes, his madness, his destiny, his style, etc.).
Against this point of view that defines Nietzsche-thought in exteriority with historicizing, psychological and linguistic criteria, we must despite everything re-activate the question of the “Nietzsche” criterion, rendering it incongruent otherwise. This is subject to this reservation, which is the (negative) half of the criterion and in the same way grounds the possibility of a criterion that is neither empirical nor ideological: we suspect that for Nietzsche, the question of his psychological identity affects the identity of the thinker, the writer, the artist, etc., and that we must go up to identifying this negative half of the criterion of which one is Nietzschean with the destruction of Nietzsche as an individual, writer and thinker.
The determination of this criterion is a difficult task, but it is necessary to be able to define the intrinsically political character of any reading of Nietzsche, from the most active to the most passive, and then evaluating them within their own political positions. The determination is not complete or does not exhaust the historical labour. However, differently from the more or less “immediate” readings, de facto guided ideologically, abstract or broken from any non-empirical justification, the determination is concrete or immanently contains its criteria of validity. This critical recurrence of a “Nietzschean” position of Nietzsche’s question allows us to respond to other crucial questions, in general the obscured questions: is the Will to Power [WP] a technologically dominated natural energy? Where does the strictly Nietzschean text stop? And if this exists, is it confounded with the corpus or the completed works? Is the one which is Nietzschean identified with the text bequeathed under this name, or rather what happens outside of this text? Indeed, is it what happens outside of the thought explicitly formulated by Nietzsche, like so many pre-traced but undetermined lines that criss-cross a practical “Nietzschean” space, a “Nietzschean” political space and nevertheless without a stylistic, signifying or thematic landmark? In order to perceive such a cruel humour that such questions suppose, and if it is elsewhere rather necessary to cite Nietzsche, to write his name, if the secret recognition that we have for him is not accommodated by a sovereign indifference for his works and sufferings, to be able to comprehend that many Nietzsches [les Nietzsche] are rare and that nevertheless the earth is completely covered with their sufferings and joys – it is this question that we must raise once more.
Therefore, let us pose it in another way: how does this “Nietzsche-run” [fonctionne nietzsche] (in the sense of: this runs well, badly, or too strong) in a text, in a political practice, in whatever unconscious? What is a “Nietzschean” effect? Such questions assume a criterion that is undoubtedly not between the maximum or the minimum in the mathematical fashion; nor between good or evil in the moral fashion; nor between contradiction or revision in the Marxist fashion; nor between the optimum and yield maximization in the technico-economic fashion; nor lastly between the investment and disinvestment of unconscious representations in the psychoanalytic fashion. Nietzsche himself gives us four categories whose interlacing is enough to fulfill the criterion: active/reactive, affirmative/negative. Regardless of their meaning or function, it is their complex unity that defines the specificity of the Nietzschean Break within politics and in some other less important domains. It is these four mundane and fragile words that he chooses to break the history of humanity in two.
Yet precisely: are these philosophical words, concepts, categories, or signifiers and metaphors?
To determine the criterion “Nietzsche,” two correlative tasks must be fulfilled: a principal task that will occupy nearly the whole Second Section: to define the functional, both syntactic and material content of the four cited “categories,” their unity and complexity. A secondary task, which we are beginning (chapters 6 and 7): define the unity of the two kinds (propositions and the problematic or the theoretical body) that compose the multiplicities of power, here the theoretical ones. However, for internal reasons, the elements cannot be dissociated from their arrangements or syntaxes: the definition of that which is a “machinic” proposition or problematic already assumes some syntactic considerations.
2. Therefore, what is a “Nietzschean” proposition?
Nothing of this kind is evidently given. Even the historians who make an appeal to the facts of the “text” surreptitiously help themselves to the ideologically marked criteria (perspectives, horizons, problematics) to determine the level where Nietzsche-thought becomes visible (the stylistic level, the ontological level, the psychological level, the philological level, etc.). Rather, the difference passes between two great kinds of criteria. On the one hand, the criteria in exteriority: Nietzschean is everything that which is contained in the Corpus of inscriptions, or in the doctrinal system of themes, or in Nietzsche’s psychological experience, etc. They are incapable of defining which one is specifically Nietzschean: nothing is more banal, more stereotypical than the phrases, the inscriptions, the concepts, signifieds and themes, than the signifying and metaphorical scenes of the Eternal Return of the Same [ERS]. From this point of view, Nietzsche’s oeuvre is a reproduction of all of Western culture, a parody of its scenes and values. Its effect is necessarily nihilism, its theoretical and political signification is necessarily ambiguous: we only stop repeating the fascistic reading of Nietzsche standing at this level and proceed with such criteria in exteriority, that Nietzsche’s fascism is the artifact of the epistemological and political presuppositions that ground this type of reading.
On the other hand, the criteria in interiority or in immanence, but which do not precisely reconstitute, in the paradoxical way of the previous ones, a psychological, political or logical interiority of Nietzsche-thought. Rigorously, we mean: criteria in interiority and in exteriority, or criteria in supplementarity, and whose specificity is exactly to destroy any exterior or transcendent use of Nietzsche’s text. These are the only criteria adequate to his thought because they are entirely immanent to it. Indeed, they are confounded with the exposition of the machinic and material syntaxes of the process of production.
3. Why must we insist on the fact that there are specific criteria to Nietzschean propositions? It is because these propositions – neither being phrases in relation to the discursive context, nor propositions of the logical or judicative type, nor propositions of the speculative type in the Hegelian fashion – could be confused with statements in Foucault’s and Deleuze’s fashion.[1] It is because Nietzsche emits genuine propositions with a determined syntax that is not reducible to either logico-grammatical syntax or to the dialectical-speculative articulation. These propositions are therefore not “simple” statements in a discursive formation, but true propositions that do not nevertheless reconstitute any judicative interiority or speculative object of a hermeneutics.
Here, there is a delicate point and a problem of symptomatology. We have distinguished the Relations of Power according to Foucault and Nietzsche, the ones more abstract and broken from the material instance that determines them, the others really concrete or complete, i.e. related to a material instance determinant in the last instance: the intensive libido. We must make the same distinction between the statements that make the object of the archaeology of knowledge and the Nietzschean propositions that at once assume a machinic syntax, a materiality of power unto which are deduced their discursive, signifying and signified properties, and finally a matter that determines them to function and fills their syntax. Here, it is the syntactical point of view that interests us, but precisely it is not separable from the questions of the materiality and matter of machinic propositions. How do we then distinguish a statement and a Nietzschean proposition?
Under the pretext that the statement does not necessarily have a linguistic or canonical judicative construction, that it forms in the last instance a multiplicity associated by chance, one risks forgetting that there is always a syntax of chance, a rule, if not a law, of the association of terms. Defining Nietzschean chance excludes arbitrary-chance and statistical-chance, conditioning the other syntaxes, in particular the syntax of the repartition of the singular points of statements, or the statements between them within the quasi-totality that they form (what we call later on the Nietzsche-problematic). We will examine these syntaxes in their diversity later on. Here first, as a matrix of propositions that are called machinic, the canonical syntactic form of a machinic proposition, exemplified by the case of the Eternal Return: Being is at once Differance and is said of Differance, the Eternal Return is at once the Will to Power and is said of the Will to Power; the Universal is at once determined and is said of its determination, etc.
4. Of course, nearly any phrase or any manifest statement from the Nietzschean text does not have this syntactic form, but this does not matter: the whole “revolutionary” political practice of the text and thought “of” Nietzsche precisely consists in producing and reproducing the statements, phrases, and texts in the form of this complex syntax, and in reducing (= criticizing) if not their semantic, formal, stylistic and judicative (discursive) properties, at least the ideological reflection of these properties within the definition of their being-Nietzschean or being-machinic-materialist. In short, the concrete machinic proposition is not opposed to the statements, it is the “statement” with its still barely nuanced and detailed articulations and a fortiori the phrases with their signifieds and signifiers, the judicative propositions with their discursive meaning, that are abstractions of the machinic propositions.
Yet, the category of the statement, to take only one, would already respond to a revolutionary category, and can only be systematically introduced within the history of knowledge on the Nietzschean “terrain.” However, we must distinguish between the positivity of the statement and the positivism that its abstract practice risks inducing. The statement (deduced in the Nietzschean text or elsewhere) is by itself a positivity. It is in a certain way manifest, given, transparent, and does not respond to any unconscious or hidden representation, to any lack, defect or failure: it is not a signifier. However, the recognition of this positivity becomes an abstraction and gives rise to positivism as soon as the statement (which returns to the Relations of Power and is itself the relations of power) is broken from its immanent premises, from its material determination in the last instance or from its immanent material cause, the libido that Nietzsche names “the Will to Power” and that he distinguishes from the Forces or Organs of power. If no one produces a statement, it is because there is a determinant power of their machinic syntaxes. This power transforms the statement into an objective appearance, making the statement the very reality or materiality of discursive formations and distinguishes this appearance or positive manifestation of perceptive or empirical manifestation where phrases are kept.
If the statement – but as a machinic proposition – is not an unconscious representation, it remains tributary to an unconscious of production immanently and without representing its effect. Thus, the positivity of the statement assumes the nonpositive (factual) dimension, nor otherwise negative dimension, of a material power as the immanent quasi-cause of its positivity. To really become critical and revolutionary, the materiality of power of the statement must return to a determinant matter, i.e., a matter that is at once productive, reproductive and critical. Such is the use of Nietzsche’s thought as a political intervention, and what distinguishes it from the ideological criteria of his historian, psychoanalyst and linguist “interpreters”: transforming the signifying materiality of the text (of his text) into a materiality of statements, and relate this materiality of power to its determinant matter. The most active reader produces desire with the Nietzsche-text, hardly producing statements, and even less themes, signifieds, a doctrine, or a signifying scene. It is on this rigorous condition that one is not, or not only this “hound” that Nietzsche would “pounce” upon his thought of the Eternal Return…to falsify him: a fascist hound, and another, who makes it into an eternal return of the identical.
More simply, the productive and critical reading of the Nietzschean “text” implies that one is aware to carry out the distinction between a descriptive phrase or a judgment and a machinic proposition (or the critique of the Nietzschean statements in their ideological appearance); that one is aware to distinguish a true Nietzschean and machinic evaluation from a traditional evaluation that Nietzsche notes; to distinguish, for example, between the concept of the Eternal Return of the same, the real machinic function that it designates, from that of the Eternal Return of the Other (what authorizes us to give this formula as authentically Nietzschean even though it was never formulated by him), or to distinguish between the technical concept of the WP as raw natural-technical energy, the WP as machinic (trans-natural and trans-technical), etc. This is all the reading that we will do with the Heideggerian interpretation of Nietzsche that will thus distinguish in a critical way between the Nietzschean statements major to the technical appearance of which Heidegger (and some others) lets himself be taken, and their recurrent “interpretation” in terms of the criteria in the immanence of “Machinic Materialism.”
The at least partial and theoretical dissolution of the “misunderstanding” passes through this work of the materialist critique of statements concerning the WP and the ERS and responds to complex dimensions, to conditions that are both machinic and materialist. One cannot separate them: for example, the book that undoubtedly contains the most systematically of such explicit propositions does not belong to Nietzsche – but Heidegger. Sein und Zeit not only advances one of the most celebrated machinic formulae (the issue [il y va de]…: Dasein is a being for which issue is its being (and Being in general) in its being), but many of his propositions bear the mark of the machinic syntax and distinguish his “style,” even more than the words or the “fundamental sayings” do, through his refusal to judicative and speculative propositions. However, the discussion with Heidegger will show how much on the plane of materiality of this syntax, that he nevertheless suspected, he remains below the conditions of a “theory” of proposition-machines as the most apt for this active destruction of ontology that Nietzsche “wants.”[2]
5. As for the syntaxes themselves, we always risk – from Nietzsche’s texts to his statements, from his statements to his propositions – of re-introducing a transcendent syntactic interiority. Yet precisely, if it is too soon to show it, we must quickly say that the machinic syntaxes have this in particular: they do not reconstitute a transcendent form in the way of the copula or the logico-grammatical syntax, or in the way of the dialectic, all of which are codes destined to assure the appropriation and domination of statements and fluent machinic propositions. Rather, they are what assures the fluency and metamorphosis of Nietzschean propositions, their permanent transformation and the critical destruction of their discursive, semantic or signifying interiority and finally only form a syntactic invariant in the appearance [apparence] (the appearence [apparence]), their invariance (which we will return to) being rather like an effect of their variation or metamorphosis. This is why they constitute criteria in interiority (but not of interiority) or rather in supplementarity of which one is Nietzschean, of the one which is not and above all the one which can, and how, become so.
Supplementarity means this: in relation to its phrases, which are the very stupidity of Nietzsche’s text, the machinic propositions are always very rare – rare rather than absent, partial rather than rare – never accumulable within a Corpus, a system or a text, as irreducibly partial and incomplete. However, they are always also in excess, if not excessive: we must produce them through the reduction and transformation of given statements. The historian does not find account either in a case or in another, crying out for arbitrariness and interpretive violence. For example, a “positive” statement of the ERS defects in Nietzsche: what does this mean? WE cannot say that it is absent in the way of a signified that absolutely is missing, nor even in the way of a signifier, whose absence is fully effective – nor that it would exist in Nietzsche’s mind which didn’t have the time to exposit it (in the way in which Marx didn’t have the time to exposit his dialectic?). Against these two inactive, both reactionary solutions, the genuine political intervention consists in producing this manifest statement of the ERS, in producing it through existing and so-called “imperfect” or “programmatic” statements, but through the critique of what there is of the ideological, the idealist and metaphysics, for example in the literal statements of the Gay Science and its “unreleased” statements.
This is not only valid for the ERS/WP, but all the so-called Nietzschean themes: to stop defining Nietzsche from what he said, from what he forgot to say, what he couldn’t say, what he didn’t mean, and to define him through his way of producing statements that include the machinic functions of their reproduction, their critique, and their consummation in an affect (a Stimmung or a jouissance). This is not a banal primacy of philosophizing over philosophy, operations over objects, or the signifying scene of the Übermensch, the ERS, etc., over their signifieds: but a primacy of syntax (and its specific matter) over the objects and operations, syntax over the signifier and formal codes. From where does Nietzsche’s revolutionary virulence come, where does his power to destroy ontological codes come from? It comes from what he solely produces of the fluent syntax, arrangements of objects and statements that are both (supplementarity) interior and superior to the objects and statements, fluent schema for moving statements. In particular, one will understand that the subject only represents one occasion of interiorization of the Nietzschean text among others, and that the problem is not to decapitate the statements of their constituent subject, but all the ends that recast an interiority for them. The subject is an important function, but beside others, whose place is pre-traced by machinic syntaxes. This place is a variable in relation to Nietzsche’s multiplicities who work here and there in giving back a meaning to the earth and who can fill it, but a function in relation to the machinic articulation of propositions.
What remains is to examine in what space, Body or Continent, the propositions belong to because they do not belong to any space susceptible to psychological (Nietzsche’s life), textual (the Corpus), or logical saturation (a doctrinal system, a theory of life or knowledge, etc.), susceptible to receiving axiomatic, legal or dialectical closures (through a system of theses without syntheses), etc.
Therefore our task: to not reduce what Nietzsche said and furthermore what he didn’t say, or to think what he did not think and that he should have thought, but to show a dispositif that is both theoretical and practical that fulfills the function of a thinking on a Nietzschean mode, that produces “Nietzschean” substances and moreover “Nietzschean” articulations. Here one will find operations rather than objects, arrangements rather than operations, syntaxes rather than arrangements – a whole use of Nietzsche that makes a political movement or fluency of him, and that contains under a practical form the thesis of the anti-fascist self-critique of Nietzsche: the exposition of his thought is the exposition of the way in which he must be read or in which he must make it function. There is no better adversary for an eventual Nietzschean fascism than Nietzsche himself.
II. Political Bodies
1. Propositions – not more than statements – are not enough to make a theory a political machine. This is why contemporary thoughts contain moreover another piece with a universal function, this new theoretical and practical power that each invents in their own way: the problematic, the Body of propositions. This is an instance that is sometimes differential, sometimes contradictory, sometimes questioning, but always invested in the work of elements or unities, injecting its reproductive power within the practical agents or producers, bringing them a dimension of the Body, reproduction or inscription upon a universal. Nietzsche has his concept of the problematic: nothing other than the aphorism of the ERS as the agent of the reproduction of forces and the object par excellence of the WP: the ERS as the ensemble of the Relations of Reproduction of the libido.
The machinic problematic and proposition are co-extensive to one another. The Eternal Return develops its space interior and exterior to the Nietzschean Corpus, while the proposition-machines enveloped within the statements extend and apportion their multiplicities (partial forces or organs of power) as this space itself. At the limit of this process and making up the unity of the propositions and their aphoristic space, what is there? Precisely the machinic syntaxes, first the one that is proper to the problematic, as the particular piece within a process of “theoretical” production, but also others that do not appear in the modern theory of statements and correspond to the strictly speaking production of statements or propositions as well as their destruction, all finally condensing one another in the “canonical” or “invariant” syntax that we have advanced some examples of in the previous chapter and that is in some sort the internal “law” of the aphorism.
These syntaxes – with which we must make Nietzsche-thought function, and, banally, “read” the aphorisms – are neither empirical laws, nor formal invariants, neither essences nor codes, nor even “rules.” All of these apparatuses would rather be specifications derived from syntaxes that have become transcendent or external. Therefore, they are schemas of production of propositions, rather than the “rules of formation” for statements (Foucault). These fluent schema or syntaxes, both universal or co-extensive to the Political Body and always determined, effectuated or invested (in such and such phrase, aphorism, etc.), never transcendent to Nietzsche’s “text” (and never transcendent to its outside, its “objects,” to “experience”), if not through abstraction, do not reconstitute any interiority, any saturated Body in relation either to interiority or to exteriority with that which it bears or contains. They do not above all make the ERS (the problematic or the aphoristic Body) a fundamental theoretical Body or a Body of a superior degree to the Nietzschean statements as the exegetes and historians assume. In fact, we must understand that the ERS as an aphoristic Body of the Nietzschean “text” is partial, irreducibly partial to it as well, that it is only a statement or a proposition beside others, but crossing all of them, so that nothing at all “beside” others as one theme – sometimes interior, sometimes exterior to others – can be within the relations of expressive semantic interiority or a formal and mechanistic exteriority. The ERS is not a theme, a signified, or a signifier: it is a referance, the specific Political Body of Nietzsche-thought. And yet, the ERS remains a partial force or a fragment of power. It is both within and outside of the empirical and linguistic textual surface of the aphorism where propositions apportion – but this time conforming to the grammatical, semantic, stylistic codes, etc. – their multiplicities of singular elements. Concerning these partial organs of power or “forces,” the codes that are themselves determined relations of power, deduce, select and organize their own properties, the properties of the signifier, the signified, reference, etc. The always partial, moving, and associative ensemble of propositions and their Political Body form a “propositional” multiplicity to which must be produced and reduced the empirical textual diversity as to its objective appearence (which is not therefore confounded with the textual surface determined under empirical conditions: linguistic and perceptive; rather it is – as the objective appearence of the Body or the problematic – an a-textual and in any case a-signifying surface, as we will come to in the following chapter).
2. Therefore, a machinic proposition possesses a specific space or rather two spaces with an identical structure in the last instance but one diversly qualified according to what is in question concerning the aphoristic space of the strictly speaking propositional multiplicities, or the space of practical multiplicities (institutions, apparatuses, social and political practices). The originality of machinic syntaxes and their own desiring matter is that they are valid for one and the other space, for the propositional substance and the practical substance. They therefore contain the critique of the generic-specific distinction of statements and institutions. Their universality or generality is neither substantial nor formal because it is determined (or “specified”) under material conditions (the libido or the WP) that bears it both below individuality and beyond the generality of the generic type. Phrases, scenes, styles, statements – all the empirical elements of the Corpus maintain a relation internal to the Political Body as Other (Differance) that determines them not as phrases, scenes, etc., but within their materiality of power, their power to be produced and reproduced as partial organs of power in which some alone, the most manifest, fulfil functions of the linguistic, dramatic, theoretical type, etc., so that we must think the empirical reproduction of a statement, theme or a science, from one place of the Corpus to the other, as the effect of a wholly other immanent reproduction where propositional or practical multiplicities are the ones that repeat Differance or determine the aphorism as the Relations of Reproduction of the libido.
Thus related to the Other that they depend on for their constitution, these a-textual multiplicities gain a sort of critical univocity beyond the generic differences of their elements in the rationalist fashion, and beyond their specific differences in the Marxist fashion. It is impossible to make partial distributions, aerial disseminations, archipelagic arrangements return under the iron law of the infra- and superstructure., but it is above all the habitus of historians, philologists, analysts and linguists of Nietzsche that it should be suspected. The historian viciously proceeds at a sudden with identifications, constituting the Nietzschean statements with enunciative elements considered as given, its effects of meaning with manifest significations, its effects of reference with objects and referents of the all-coming. The linguist and the analyst, with their all made unities (phonemes, semes, figures – or the signifying chain), resort to the same procedure. The propositional multiplicities and Nietzsche’s text as the Eternal Return and the critique of its scenes, phrases, statements, descriptions, and symbols, stands on the one hand in a wholly other relation of causality to empirical elements of the Corpus: in a relation of transversal or oblique causality; and on the other hand they are these multiplicities made by partial organs of power within machinic relations that are the active and productive genetic elements of concepts and objects, elements of style and the linguistic construction of the text.
3. There are three consequences: a) the ERS is said in several significations. We can give very diverse names to this space precisely because it is actively indifferant to its names and that it transcends beyond and below generic, specific or qualitative distinctions. There is a whole set of necessarily paleonymic designations that are inadequate and subject to critique: the problematic, the Foll [plain] Body (rather than the full [plein] Body), Being or the Body of Being, the Body-of-the-Other or the ERS within Nietzsche’s terminology – for the “same” machinic function that is cleaved and tendentially separated from its generic and specific organization that it destroys. For example: from its organization as a Body of a social formation in terms of the Marxist carve-outs (the infra- and super-structure; determined specific practices; instances, apparatuses, base, etc.). B) However, the ERS is said in one political sense of what it reproduces = the Other, the material Productive Forces. This is why what we paleonymically designate in what follows as the problematic for machinic propositions, nothing other than the ERS insofar as it stops being a theme and becomes the space of the reproduction of the text, discourse, thought, or better: Nietzschean statements as propositions – is not a solely “theoretical” Body, which doesn’t mean anything here in any case, but, as we have said, the intrinsically Political Body that receives and inscribes as always-already political all of our interventions within “Nietzsche” and necessarily as well the interventions of his historians and hermeneuts. This is on condition, of course, that the meaning (the function) of the category “politics” changes: subtracting it from its Marxist use that restrains it to one practice, and to one solely specific practice; to then give back to politics a universality co-extensive with the Foll Body, redefining it by a new object: the partial organs of power and their hierarchy.
4. c) Having defined the conditions of a political use in “interiority” (in supplementarity) of Nietzsche-thought, it is on this “basis” that we must define and critique the conditions of its political critique in exteriority, what his bourgeois interpreters practice but also – from Nietzsche’s point of view, there’s little difference – his Marxist interpreters (the better ones being yet to come) who still define in a rather transcendent way – through delegation and mediation – the political functioning of a thought, only drawing from his critique a secondary political benefit, and never a primary one. A critique of Nietzsche in exteriority consists in assuming that the strictly political space (institutions, apparatuses, relations of production, the economic class struggle first, then the “political” struggle in the narrow sense of a political practice of the class or party) is non-discursive, qualitatively other, according to generic and specific differences, than the “proper” space of the text, statements or propositions (the “textual” space, the “theoretical,” “ideological” space, specific theoretical and signifying practices).
We oppose three points to these criteria of a political critique in exteriority. On the one hand, politics is by definition the relation to the Other and in a certain way to exteriority, but the true concept of critical and political exteriority is the supplementarity that gives it. On the other hand, this Other no longer passes within Nietzsche – precisely because it is an internal-external supplement – through the mixtures of Marxist representation of practical and propositional multiplicities, through the abstract qualitative differences, genera and species of practices, even if these species were determined in the transcendental (and not rationalist-structuralist) element of the Form, as is the case in Althusser. Finally, to occupy and displace the Marxist positions of the political critique, to formulate from a word or a landmark the passage from one critique in exteriority to a critique in supplementarity, we must advance a new category that is not in the Nietzschean Corpus but gathers in a complex unity Nietzsche’s four fundamental categories (active/reactive, affirmative/negative): the complex unity of Differance. Differance is not a category or a “textual” function even though it can be produced as a textual value. Furthermore, Differance is not a category produced by the idealization of a physical concept of the difference of quantities of force even though (because) it designates the dialectic of quantities and the qualities of forces and the WP (libido). Differance is the only materialist category that grounds the intrinsically political critique of texts, statements and other substances (the various practices).
There are some consequences to the critique of Nietzschean statements: 1) Relating them to the Marxist theoretical apparatus (specific practices and varying kinds of the class struggle) can be but one strategic passage “in view” of a wholly other critique that will proceed circularly through the “application” of the object of Nietzsche-thought (the ERS/WP) to this thought itself, through the reciprocal production of its machinic functioning and its objects. Not only the great thoughts about the ERS, the Übermensch, Justice, etc., but apparently Bodies most foreign to Nietzsche: for example, its elements said of the “theory of the understanding.” We must produce them within their necessity from the structure of the ERS and its exigencies, without being content with empirically sublating them within the text. Therefore, by “applying” the procedures of production and critique drawn from the syntaxes of the ERS to this theoretical object that Nietzsche or his interpreter first receives in an exterior and contingent fashion.
This auto-critique, which is as much a hetero-critique of “his” thought by “Nietzsche himself” (what does this mean in Nietzsche’s case?), an auto- and a hetero-affection of the thought of the ERS/WP by themselves crosses all their objects and themes. It defines a line of “theoretical” production and critique co-extensive with the aphoristic Body in all its dimensions and towards all the inscriptions that it can never bear, whether these inscriptions belong to “politics,” biology, gnoseology, the psychology of the priest or the artist, etc. (on this hetero-affection, cf. the next chapter).
2) However, to avoid a falsifying interpretation of this critique in circularity as void and arbitrary, one will introduce the greatest possible exteriority within the critique of Nietzschean statements (and all their properties, for example stylistic or “aphoristic”). Instead of putting them within a false relation of heterogeneity or supplementarity, as the historians do, with the qualitative multiplicities that they speak of, with their objects and their “historical” referents (biological, aesthetic, political, religious multiplicities), one will expand the heterogeneity and will break the historian identifications by putting them in a relation of alterity with objects or referents that do not appear – either “accidentally” or “by allusion” or “anticipation” – within the said “Nietzschean” text: economic multiplicities (those at least which do not appear in the horizon of the ERS), psychoanalytic multiplicities (to distinguish from his “psychological” remarks with a Freudian allure), and linguistic-formal multiplicities (to distinguish from his semantic, grammatical and rhetorical notations).
Nietzsche’s political critique consists in making the ERS/WP and their syntaxes “work” within the most diverse empirical fields, apparently the most foreign ones: for example to effectuate the ERS/WP or invest them within the problems of the game theory or economic or military strategy; or in the theory of generative grammar, or to carry out the differantial fusion of the ERS/WP with phenomenology or Marxism. Nietzsche and Mao: one against the other, one with the other: have we imagined enough what explosive contradiction their encounter would produce, what subversive fallouts would befall the people? The contradictory (differantial) fusion of Nietzsche-thought with Historical Materialism as the discursive formation (theoretical and practical), but also with the revolutionary masses, the groups in scission and in fusion, or partial, irreducibly partial minorities – here is the task of a political critique that sets an end to the ideological identifications of readings, exegeses, and other interpretations of Nietzsche. It is to make out of the machinic syntaxes, their fluent libidinal matter, their moving materiality of power, a plastic, aerial use co-extensive with the “formations of statements” as to apparently the furthest “formations of practices.” What is an aphorism if not the relationship of an economic multiplicity and an aesthetic multiplicity, of an aesthetic multiplicity with a biological multiplicity, of a biological multiplicity with a political multiplicity, of a political multiplicity with an economic multiplicity, or an aesthetic one, etc., in a uni-lateral circle of the Eternal Return?
Consequently, there are some relations of transversal causality but not only among the multiplicities of the same historical period (energetics at the end of the 19th century, and the texts on the Will to Power; Bismarckian politics, the constitution of the German Empire, and the Nietzschean theory of European imperialism; the medical sciences of the epoch, the new forms of disciplinary society, ethnography at the end of the 19th century, and the second dissertation of The Genealogy of Morals, etc.). To definitively break the mechanistic or expressive causality and what remains of it within structural causality, to make Nietzsche-thought a use that is no longer positivist but experimental and productive, i.e., critical-revolutionary, we must put it in relation with the mundane non-discursive formations beyond the latter intra-historical carveouts (the great ensembles, epochs or the episteme) that are identifiable despite everything and in the last instance as unities of empirical time. If one wants to give their full sense to the idea of “historical multiplicities” and not only overdetermined structural multiplicities (in the way of the overdetermined contradiction of the Marxists), then one must resolve to break up to the thresholds of rupture locate in an intra-temporal way as if the Nietzsche-multiplicity, the Nietzsche-nebula, sovereignly would cross through the epochs and places, periods and regions, only crossing through intra-historical ensembles (the episteme and the modes of production) to show how these multiplicities who stand in his vicinity produce and reproduce themselves in a way that is always co-extensive with a temporalization and a spatialization that are specific to them and whose determinant cause in the last instance is the ensemble of Libidinal Productive Forces.
[1] Cf. The Archaeology of Knowledge and Deleuze “A New Archivist” [Chapter 1 of Deleuze’s study on Foucault – Trans.]
[2] Cf. In the third section: The Conflict Around the End of Technics.
en-demic 