15
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
Nietzsche is and was a thinker of imminent nihilism, and in this regard, he is particularly interesting and important to those who, following Foucault’s famous challenge, aim to engage in a diagnosis of the present. Nietzsche saw his culture, his environment, and their future in terms of the devaluation, self-destruction, and annihilation of humanity—its projects, people, and values. Instead of shying away from this destruction, he turned toward it. Nietzsche affirmed the symptoms of his time and engaged them by using them as tools for the development of a social machine that would produce the “Übermensch”: the transformation of the “Human-All-Too-Human” into the “Overhuman.” Why did he think this was important? For him, the “Overhuman” was both the culmination and the overcoming of nihilism. He saw nihilism not as an end but as a “transitional pathological phase” which, however destructive, could nonetheless trigger a “phase shift”1 leading to the emergence of a new ontology beyond that of the human. Nietzsche wanted a politics conducive to this coming ontology, I argue, and I will suggest that his invention of the concept of “will to power” as a “physiological process” can be articulated within the framework of such a politics of emergent ontology.
One fundamental assumption of a Nietzschean political physiology is that the engine of transformation that drives the formation of individual personality, identity, and values in the human realm can also be found in other living forms or vital processes. Humans, in this regard, are like other organism and animals; but in having striven to forget and overcome their animality, humans have become sick organisms. Going back to the historical source of occidental thought, Nietzsche would find the illness of European culture at the speculative root of western civilization: “indeed, one may ask as a physician: ‘how could such a malady attack this loveliest product of antiquity, Plato’?”2 What were considered by most to be the signs of human flourishing—Platonic philosophy, Christianity, and parliamentary democracy—Nietzsche saw as signs of degeneration of a collective organism. Nietzsche would thus approach the fundamental political question of human beings—who rules and over whom?—as a malady to be diagnosed and treated. As pathological as Nietzsche’s writings became over the course of his fertile but fragile thinking life, they are nonetheless exemplary in their attention to the particularly pathological nature of modern human existence.
The three stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche
This chapter comes directly out of an extended argument I develop in my book, The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism. It is a speculative study that seeks to offer a possible and plausible theory of “political physiology” in Nietzsche’s thought and so I beg your indulgence as I refer to it throughout.
This speculative study presents Nietzsche’s political physiology by interrelating three concepts not usually taken and treated together by the secondary scholarship: first, in the domain of his political thought, the concept of “great politics”; second, in the phenomenological domain, his concept of “eternal return”; and finally, set against the backdrop of his materialist theory of the self-overcoming subject, the concept of “the philosopher of the future.” These three key concepts are ill-defined in Nietzsche’s work: none are given an explicit or systematic explanation, all of them are stigmata emblematic of other operations, and each of them is unequivocally a crucial strand of his thought. In drawing together these three concepts and attempting to examine them explicitly in light of one another, this study presents Nietzsche’s speculative materialism as a politics of the transformation of the Human into the Overhuman directly within the context of the immanent intensification of nihilism.
Why do I call these three central but ephemeral Nietzschean notions “stigmata”? I invoke them as physiological symptoms, as bodily marks that resemble or mimic another condition and as that which enables the diagnosis of that condition. From this perspective, the three concepts under scrutiny are signs or symptoms of a larger vital process conceived as an entire living “theater” of contesting individuations. But stigmata are also “wounds,” understood not in the sense of mere aftereffects but as virulent loci of active and actual suffering (pathos). The task of political physiology and of the philosopher-physician is thus to contend with a thought that “wounds” its thinker. As Alain Jugnon has recently claimed, Nietzsche’s philosophy of life is a theater of material genesis that goes beyond a mere metaphorical description of movements and of the passions of the “soul.” As a theater of material genesis, the operation of “pathos” is itself identified as the fundamental gesture and movement of living matter. Methodologically, according to Jugnon, this theatrical movement announces its own technique:
In such a staging of life in which matter and movement are interposed, the central question of each and every aim and framework, of every open window on the real becomes: “What is underway? (Que se passe-t-il?) Like all spectators, philosophy gazes across a scene and manages to construct, by this movement, the mobility of the dramatic matter itself: like all actors, philosophy surveys the scene, mimes the sentiments, is penetrated by pathos, and attempts to establish by these displacements the very direction (sens) of drama.”3
Nietzsche’s political physiology: Nihilism and the pathology of health and illness
Political physiology begins with this virulence in and of Nietzsche’s thought. As Nietzsche himself acknowledged, in the historical condition of nihilism (a condition in which Nietzsche found himself and in which we find ourselves today), health and illness are not so easy to distinguish and may lead to many misunderstandings:
Health and sickness are not essentially different . . . In fact, there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena constitute the pathological state (Claude Bernard). Just as “evil” can be considered as exaggeration, disharmony, disproportion, “the good” may be a protective diet against the danger of exaggeration, disharmony, and disproportion.4
The politico-physiological perspective is attentive to the problem of “health” and “illness,” psychophysiological states that are problematic for Nietzsche because “health and sickness are not essentially different.” Although the concepts of “great politics,” ‘eternal recurrence,” and “the philosopher of the future” are ill-defined in Nietzsche’s thought and therefore can be said to be complicit with the very illnesses that Nietzsche sought to name, they are also “signs of health”5 that are meant to be part of the curatives characteristic of “great health.”6 Because the difference between “health” and “illness” is intensive not substantial—that is to say, “health” is not a different substance forming a qualitatively different state than “illness,” “health,” and “illness” are only “differences in degree.”7 The symptoms of health and illness can only be distinguished by their toxicological effects on the organism in question (and in this passage, Nietzsche juxtaposes two symptomatic states that Deleuze would later strongly develop: “strong/active” and “weak/reactive”).
The three stigmata of Nietzsche’s thought—“great politics,” “eternal recurrence,” and “the philosopher of the future”—thus form a pathology, the politico-physiological force of which can be interpreted within the terms of “symptomotology,” as Nietzsche himself notes in the preface to The Gay Science and as Deleuze reiterates in the introduction to Nietzsche and Philosophy. Following Nietzsche’s declaration of the task of the philosopher-physician as interpretation of the “hints and symptoms of the body,”8 Deleuze develops the critical force of Nietzsche’s political physiology by emphasizing that this bodily symptomotology proceeds by way of a conceptualization of the relation between “active” and “reactive” forces that cannot avoid encountering a fundamental difficulty or confusion: if active forces “by nature . . . escape consciousness” and “consciousness is essentially reactive,” then “it is inevitable that consciousness sees the organism from its own point of view . . . that is to say, reactively.” “The real problem is the discovery of active forces without which the reactions themselves would not be forces.”9
As Deleuze rightly shows, when the “whole of philosophy” is interpreted symptomologically, the political physiologist is forced to confront the untenability of maintaining the strict metaphysical opposition between “appearance” and “essence,” as well as the scientific opposition between “cause” and “effect.”
A phenomenon is not an appearance or even an apparition but a sign, a symptom which finds its meaning in an existing force. The whole of philosophy is a symptomatology, and a semeiology. The sciences are a symptomatological and semeiological system. Nietzsche substitutes the correlation between sense and phenomenon for the metaphysical duality of appearance and essence and for the scientific relation of cause and effect.10
The mutual implication of “health” and “illness,” the “active” and the “reactive,” the “conscious” and the “unconscious” is the pathology of effects most pertinent to the politico-physiological perspective because it directly confronts and exposes these two central misunderstandings or “prejudices” of metaphysical and scientific knowledge (e.g., “appearance” and “essence,” “cause” and “effect”—what Nietzsche calls in Beyond Good and Evil 2 the “belief in antitheses of values”). When viewed toxicologically, the relation between health and illness is not an issue regarding the qualitative and substantial properties of antithetical states, but rather it is a vital relation connecting a dynamic organizational network. The challenge of such a toxicological perspective would be to understand health not chiefly as the synthetic interplay of negativity or negation, but negativity itself as a poison that is necessarily part of the vital engine of an ongoing metastable process of becoming (in this sense, negativity becomes part of an experimental art/science in administering dosages of poisons).
From a politico-physiological perspective, “great politics” and “great health” are not substantive oppositions of “petty politics” and “illness”; rather they must be viewed as thresholds that form around vital sites of becoming (here we understand will to power as the ongoing formation of metastabilities). This is why for a Nietzschean political physiology, when understood as a vital theater of contesting tensions qua transformations, negativity and pessimism can be forces that strengthen as well as weaken: “Pessimism as strength – in what? In the energy of its logic, an anarchism and nihilism, as analytic. Pessimism as decline – in what? As growing effeteness, as a sort of cosmopolitan fingering, as ‘tout comprendre’ and historicism. The critical tension: the extremes appear and become predominant.”11 The cultivation of critical tensions is the affirmative work of opposing forces, of overcoming.
According to Nietzsche’s own description in the unpublished works (viz., part one of Kaufmann’s redaction entitled Will to Power), nihilism is a historical, epistemological, and psychophysiological condition in which the introduction of an externality into a system first functions to fortify it, but then triggers a cannibalistic response against it. The pathology proceeds as follows: what is first introduced into a system as an antidote preserving the unity of a system turns against itself and results in the dissolution of that system. (This is how modern immunology has characterized diseases of “autoimmunity”). The effect and the affect of this process? Nietzsche says quite succinctly: “The highest values devaluate themselves.”12
. . . In sum: morality was the great antidote against practical and theoretical nihilism.13 . . . But among the forces cultivated by morality was truthfulness: this eventually turned against morality . . . – and now the recognition of this inveterate mendaciousness that one despairs of shedding becomes a stimulant . . . This antagonism . . . results in a process of dissolution.14
In the absence of stasis (the mechanisms of which impose limitations), the affirmation of nihilism becomes the curative force of the poison of nihilism. This is the operative difference between “passive” and “active” nihilism:
Nihilism. It is ambiguous:
A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.15
For Nietzsche, nihilism “represents a pathological transitional stage”16 in the evolution of a subject that is in the throes of dissolution. In this strong sense, Nietzsche’s bodily thought is both a product of nihilism and a theater of production that seeks to overcome nihilism by actively thinking through nihilism. Active nihilism is the force of destruction/creation qua transformation. If we recall that for Nietzsche, reactive nihilism is a situation in which a system begins to eat itself by turning itself against itself (following the pathology of autoimmunity) hanging onto itself in order preserve even a minuteness of its discharge, then active nihilism becomes the transformative activity of force that no longer turns back onto itself. It is the force of morphosis, the “plasticity”17 characteristic of active force in which nothing is carried over. It affirms by dominating, by commanding a weaker force to obey (in this sense force is always hierarchical), but its domination proceeds by expenditure not by recuperation (this is why the overcoming of nihilism for Nietzsche cannot ultimately proceed by Dialectics or by Fascism). Nietzsche even has a name for this active process: the active and most extreme form of nihilism—the process in which existence is lived and expended without limitation or recuperation : “Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: the eternal recurrence.”18 It is, therefore, in Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism that we can start to chart the pathology of this dissolving subject.
The mnemotechnics of nihilism and the genesis of the “human”
Nietzsche had conceived of Beyond Good and Evil as a “prelude” to and anticipation of an impending civilizational and cultural “spectacle” whose enactment was still being put into place, but whose destiny had already inevitably been cast. This spectacle “of a hundred acts that will occupy Europe for the next two centuries”19 is that of nihilism. Although the kind of nihilism he presaged had yet to reach its dramatic historical crescendo in his own age, Nietzsche identified its faint tonalities in his account of the genesis and pathologization of “bad conscience” in The Genealogy of Morals. My main aim here is to highlight that for Nietzsche, the “human” has from its very first emergence been constituted by mnemotechnics (the evolutionary development of a “memory of the will”) which is simultaneously also a process of detachment and abstraction, or what Nietzsche describes as a process of intensive “spiritualization.” The “human” first emerges as the relation between a religious subjective mode that operates by way of intensifications of “spiritualization” and the mnemotechnical ensemble of artifices without which the “human” could not be instrumentalized. This process of spiritualization results in the birth of the “priestly type” and according to Nietzsche, heralds the first dangerous movement toward the “domestication” of the human animal.
According to Nietzsche’s account in The Genealogy, all aristocratic systems of value are ones in which the spectrum of value judgments are directly reflective of the power of the highest in social rank. In section 6 of GM, Nietzsche contrasts the political “aristocratic” and the priestly aristocratic: the political aristocratic expresses his power by exercising his material animal instincts; his rule is legitimized by his political superiority. The “priestly” type, on the other hand, does not exercise but controls his material nature through dietary restrictions, control of bodily processes, and forbidding of intermixing with the “impure.” The priestly type was forbidden from externalizing and discharging his instincts and regulated them through strict adherence to a whole panoply of bodily prohibitions. Nietzsche says that this spiritual type embodies a kind of walking psychological contradiction: on the one hand, he feels his superior spiritual power over others, but compared to the warrior type, he also feels his material/physical impotence. Although the priestly types tried to overcompensate for this impotence by highlighting their spiritual superiority, this intensified spirituality was in fact a direct effect of a feeling of impotence, and therefore slowly festered into feelings of “arrogance, revenge . . . love, lust to rule, virtue – but it is only fair to add that it was on the solid of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, that man first became an interesting animal.”20
This psychological separation between mental and physical power internalized by the priestly type actually had the effect of complexifying the consciousness of the human animal; this new human was less animal because he was able to repress his animality through intellectual controls; but this human was also less healthy, increasingly becoming “alienated” from the physical material basis of its animal state. According to Nietzsche then, the effects and influence of this priestification are both the first great spiritualization of the human animal and the first great moment of “domestication” of human animality.
Nietzsche’s account of the emergence of “bad conscience” is a psychophysiological account of the political animal. In this argument, Nietzsche claims that that the founding of the first political societies required a constitutive moment of alienation at the level of the psychophysiological evolution of human beings, a kind of “archi-nihilism.”21 Historically then, nihilism was the catastrophic consequence generated by an “archi-nihilism” that itself first gave birth to and transformed the not-yet-human animal into a potential social and political agent:
I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever experienced—that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society and of peace. The situation that faced sea animals when they were compelled to become land animals or perish was the same as that which faced these semi-animals, well adapted to the wilderness, to war, to prowling, to adventure: suddenly all their instincts were disvalued and “suspended”.22
The constitution of the political life, Nietzsche here argues, develops via psychic and physiological modifications in the human animal. According to Nietzsche, the constitutive moment of the human as “political” rather than merely “animal” occurs precisely at the moment in which the animal instincts cease to become discharged and instead become “internalized,” sublimated and deployed subliminally. Nietzsche describes this process as the early psychophysiological transformation of the “hominid” into the “human” configured and given signification through an economy in which the renunciation of desire is made productive and meaningful:
All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward—this is what I call the internalization [Verinnerlichung] of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his “soul.” The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited. Those fearful bulwarks with which the political organization protected itself against the old instincts of freedom—punishments belong among these bulwarks—brought about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself. Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction—all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the “bad conscience”.23
This transformation is a process of bifurcation in which a process of intensifying alienation resulting from the growing disconnection between the instinctive and sublimative registers results in the complexification of the animal into a human technical (tool-making), principally mnemotechnical (memory-making)—and hence a moralizing political subject. In the second essay of GM, Nietzsche characterizes the “human” with the ability to make promises, which itself requires the ability to ritualize pain by inscribing it into cultural memory:24
How can one create a memory for the human animal? How can one impress something upon this partly obtuse, partly flighty mind, attuned only to the passing oment, in such a way that it will stay there?” One can well believe that the answers and methods for solving this primeval problem were not precisely gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics. “If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory” – . . . Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself; the most dreadful sacrifices and pledges (sacrifices of the first-born among them), the most repulsive mutilations (castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all the religious cults (and all religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties)—all this has its origin in the instinct that realized that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics.25
Just as in Kafka’s stark tale of corporeal inscription in The Penal Colony, the “human” for Nietzsche is a mnemotechnical political animal. If the human animal can become political, it is because the arts of remembering, identifying, ritualizing, and symbolizing become the technical motor for the further psychophysiological evolution. For Nietzsche, the “human” is, constitutionally and constitutively speaking, mnemotechnical: its subjective and objective development is fundamentally linked to memory. The human develops subjectively into the priestly bad conscience by concretizing memory in the form of mnemotechnical objects. When read alongside Nietzsche’s speculation regarding the “subject” as “fiction,” the political animal is revealed to be a prosthetic engendered in tandem with the technical arts of remembering and forgetting.
The political and historical problem of nihilism, as such, is also a problem of the psychophysiological transmutation of the animal human. Specifically for Nietzsche, the archi-nihilism that founds the human and later develops into the monotheistic self-consciousness (the “bad conscience”) becomes intensified and reified in modernity as the problem of willing:
We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself—all this means—let us dare to grasp it—a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life, but it is and remains a will! . . . And, to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will.26
“Willing” becomes the hallmark of the mnemotechnical human, in due course becoming a symptom of its decadence as well as the active battleground for its overcoming (i.e., the Overman or Übermensch). In the psychophysiological development of the human then as told by Nietzsche in GM, the process of sublimation eventually makes possible the production of knowledge and becomes the historical motor for the large-scale cultural decadence and degeneration characteristic of modernity (the “ascetic ideal”).
Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of nihilism is not, however, a declaration simply rejecting willing in favor of returning to the animal instinctual state (i.e., through the willing of an economy of drives); because willing is itself a product of sublimation, Nietzsche knows very well that a nostalgic yearning for a bygone psychophysiological state is both undesirable and (what is more) impossible. Rather he will suggest that the overcoming of nihilism must involve the violent playing-out of nihilism to its end, that is, an intensification of nihilism—one which will necessitate a politics of nihilism as a necessary corollary of a “philosophy of the future.” Against this backdrop of nihilism, the “subject” becomes the political and mnemotechnical battlefield upon which the war of life is waged and played out. In order for Nietzschean political physiology to undertake the task of overcoming both the historical problem of nihilism and its constitutive foundations (“archi-nihilism”), the intensification of nihilism (a process of decadence and degeneration) will be forced to play out on the subjective plane. The overcoming of nihilism requires the affirmation of the most extreme form of nihilism itself, the overcoming of willing through the affirmation of nonwilling.
It is Pierre Klossowski’s interpretation of eternal recurrence that forms the foundation for the theory of political physiology offered here. Klossowski understands the body to be an inchoate and primal battleground of affective drives that are translated and communicated into thought within the cultural code of everyday signs.
The body is a production of chance; it is nothing other than the site of conjunction and conflict between a concrescence of individuated impulses which come together for that brief time span we call ‘a human life’, impulses which aspire only to de-individuate themselves.27
From this perspective, the eternal recurrence is twofold: on the one hand, it is an experience of the singular body; an ecstatic unveiling or revelation, a “forgetting” (of all identities, laws, and boundaries) into which all identity is absorbed and revealed in its inchoate multiplicity; and on the other hand, the eternal recurrence must be made intelligible and infinitely repeatable: it must be a necessity that is willed and re-willed.28 Klossowski theorizes eternal recurrence in terms of wave phenomena that interrupt the normal inscription of memory necessary to sustain self-consciousness: all directed exertions of the will commingle and disappear in the multiple swells and surges of the impulses which entail and require a profound subjective amnesis. In the interruption of self-consciousness (the dissolution of “self” that is undergone in the experience of eternity), the subject as a stable entity becomes a fiction, the affirmation of which becomes the means for reconnecting with the joyful but terrible and potentially perilous forces of life. As an experience of the “suspension” of self-consciousness (and the emergence of the unconscious drives and impulses), the eternal recurrence is not primarily a conscious reasoning, a thought-experiment nor a doctrine, but instead, a mechanism of mutation that reorganizes forces within a system (the “in-formational” operationality of any system).
The eternal recurrence becomes a teaching only when it itself becomes a sign—a cultural imperative of a collectivity. In other words, the feeling produced by the experience of eternal recurrence must be translated into thought so that it can be re-willed anew and transmitted by those abundant enough to endure it. The eternal recurrence thus becomes not a return to some authentic or original state, but a dynamic and violent process of individuation in which the human animal literally undergoes a psychophysiological mutation, a playing-out that leads to the death of one form of existence (the decadent form of human as described for example in The Genealogy of Morality) into what Nietzsche hopes is the genesis of a new psychophysiological configuration of self-organization. When interpreted from the perspective of political physiology, the eternal recurrence becomes comprehensible as a process of morphosis in which both the physical and metaphysical mechanisms of subjectivity are forced to organize and individuate anew. It is in this operative sense that the eternal recurrence is the transformative mechanism driving Nietzsche’s political physiology.
The pharmacological approach of political physiology
What kind of politics would be adequate to this? “What is to be done” politically when nihilism has become a “normal condition?” The political physiological perspective is ever vigilant in remembering that what is a cure can also be a poison, and what is a poison can be a cure. The boundary separating values—high/low, noble/base, good/evil, healthy/ill—can no longer be securely differentiated and Nietzsche himself points to this fact:
“It is the value of all morbid states that they show us under a magnifying glass certain states that are normal -- but not easily visible when normal. Health and sickness are not essentially different, as the ancient physicians and some practitioners even today suppose. One must not make of them distinct principles or entities that fight over the living organism and turn it into their arena . . . ”29
As the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler has recently said, the philosopher today must be a toxicologist30; and this echoes something that I have recently also said in relation to Nietzsche’s call for a philosopher that is also a physician: in the politics conditioned by nihilism but which seeks to overcome nihilism by activating the potency of nihilism, the philosopher-physician must be a homeopathic toxicologist governed and guided by the principle of “like cures like” (simili similibus curentor), the administering of the poison as the curative force itself.31 This kind of politics—is there, truly, any alternative to this?—is fraught with so many moral dilemmas precisely because its operative principle works without seeking to—without having to—ontologize the distinction between “true” and “false,” “good” and “evil.” This is also why for Nietzsche, the question of power is not merely nor even primarily a question of property or territory and the negotiating of its representations; but rather, power is a question of production, of morphosis and its transformations, the process of formation that emerges as the result of a tension of forces, the process that imposes “upon becoming the character of being.”32 Following Bernard Stiegler, the question of the “political” must necessarily proceed via a pharmacological perspective: we must look for the signs of health in the very illnesses of the human condition, as well as be able to recognize signs of illness in what may be considered by the majority as signs of “health.”
Notes
1 A term used in wave mechanics to describe the differential effect of phase relations.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann(New York: Random House, 1966), preface.
3 [translation mine]. Alain Jugnon, Nietzsche et Simondon: Le théâtre du vivant (Editions Dittmar: 2010), p. 18.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), § 47.
5 BGE §154.
6 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), §382.
7 WP §47.
8 GS Preface, §2.
9 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Chicago: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 41.
10 Deleuze, p. 3.
11 WP, §10.
12 Ibid., § 2.
13 Ibid., §4.
14 Ibid., §5.
15 Ibid.,§22.
16 Ibid., §13.
17 Deleuze, p. 42.
18 WP, §55.
19 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967) III, §27.
20 GM I, §6.
21 I am grateful to Bernard Stiegler for this term. Roundtable Discussion with Bernard Stiegler, “Trans-individuation, Technology, Politics”, New French Thought conference, Department of Philosophy, Villanova University, 3-4 April 2009.
22 GM II, §16.
23 Ibid.
24 GM II, i.e., §3, 6; GM II: i.e., §16, 17.
25 GM II, §3.
26 GM III, §28.
27 Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux (Paris: Mercure de France, 1975), pp. 52–3.
28 Pierre Klossowski, “Nietzsche’s Experience of the Eternal recurrence,” in David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 115.
29 WP, §47.
30 Questions About a General Pharmacology” Keynote address, New French Thought, conference in the Department of Philosophy, Villonova University, 3 April 2009.
31 Biswas Mellamphy, “Corporealizing Thought: Retranslating the Eternal recurrence Back into Politics,” in Herman Siemens and Vasti Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power, and Politics (Berlin: De Gruyter: 2008), p. 760.
32 WP, §617.