9
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
Inexorably, hesitantly, terrible as fate, the great task and question is approaching: how shall the earth as a whole be governed? And to what end shall “man” as a whole—and no longer as a people, a race—be raised and trained?
WP §957
Let your will say: the Übermensch shall be the direction of the earth!
TSZ I, ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’ §3
In the long run, it is not at all a question of human being; it is to be overcome.
WP §676
In the following chapter, I want to explore the manner in which Nietzsche’s ‘overhuman’ (Übermensch) is related to his articulation of physiology and thus to the politics of ‘thinking the future transhumanly.’1 By ‘politics’ I do not mean discourses analysing or criticizing institutions, norms or ideologies; for this sense of politics we would find more cohesive resources in thinkers such as Kant, Marx and Hegel. My focus instead is on Nietzsche’s peculiar materialist view of politics as the physiological activity of ‘overcoming’ within a living environment for which he coins the term known as ‘will to power.’ ‘Life is not the adaptation of inner circumstances to outer ones, but rather the “will to power” which, working from within, incorporates and subdues more and more of that which is “outside”,’ writes Nietzsche.2 As we see in this passage, will to power is not based on the application of laws of ‘adaptation’ as articulated in biological, economic or social theories of evolution, production and signification (e.g. Darwin’s theory of natural selection). The engine of Nietzsche’s physiological will to power is primarily driven by the movement of ‘overcoming’: the activity of Überwindung (over-turning) that guarantees the continuity of life-forming processes that work by incorporating and subduing ‘that which is outside.’
Operating upon this physiological platform, all of Nietzsche’s thinking is driven by the ontogenic vision of will to power’s constitutive or ‘form-shaping’ activity of over-powering, which consists in ‘incorporation’ and ‘subjugation’ at the physical, biological and technical levels of life, but also, simultaneously, at the political, symbolic and normative levels of life (hence Nietzsche’s lifelong interest in pre-Platonic physiology and philosophical materialism on the one hand, and in domination/subjugation and resistance to mastery, or ‘affirmation,’ on the other). The physiological engine of overcoming produces life in all forms – including human bodies – and while it is certainly propelled by human values and codes, it is not itself oriented towards the human being, but rather towards the overhuman. Nietzsche’s conception of physiology is driven by an overhuman engine in which all dominant value codes (cognitive, textual, social, hermeneutic) are subordinated to a-signifying forces that cannot be resolved, synthesized or mediated once-and-for-all by any higher or metaphysical operation. In this sense, a-signifying forces are autochthonous3 materials belonging fundamentally only to the earth (chthon) (‘In man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos. . .,’ BGE aphorism 225); they are not for humans and therefore do not indigenously correlate to any human system (they cannot be ‘gathered’ in the Heideggerian sense of legein and cannot be domesticated by Olympian devices).
These irreducibly heterogeneous a-signifying forces are nonetheless politically and materially active in shaping humans (in developing mnemonic, affective/sensory and linguistic constructs). Reading Nietzsche physiologically is not a ‘question of taking refuge in a neutral and historical reading, nor in the labour of a Nietzschean reading, without having to enter as contradictorily and without mediation into an intense scene of forces, pulsions and relations of power that are no longer textual or signifying “in the last instance”,’4 as François Laruelle argues in Nietzsche versus Heidegger: Theses for a Nietzschean Politics, and as I will emphasize throughout this chapter. Nietzsche himself points out the erroneous and misguided interpretations of the term:
The word “overman” as the designation of a type of supreme achievement (as opposed to “modern” men, or to “good” men, to Christians and other nihilists), a word that in the mouth of Zarathustra—the annihilator of morality—becomes a very pensive word, has been understood almost everywhere with the utmost innocence in the sense of those very values whose opposite Zarathustra was meant to represent: that is, as an “idealistic” type of a higher kind of man, half “saint”, half “genius”.5
So, the chthonic (material/physical) answer to Nietzsche’s question of ‘how shall the earth as a whole be governed?’ (WP 947) is this: the governance of the earth shall be returned to the earth, and the human shall be the agent and amanuensis (and also ‘bridge’ as Zarathustra proclaims) of this inevitable occurrence/recurrence. In what follows, I will suggest that Nietzschean physiology is oriented towards affirming this chthonic, subversive (self-overcoming, overhuman, a-signifying) drive which is ‘never given upon the surface of the text, never reparable by the labour of the signifier, never decipherable by the grid of Marxist politics, never interpretable as historical meaning,’6 but only interpretable in terms of will to power: ‘Thus the essence of life, its will to power, . . .[involves] the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions.’7 The aim of this chapter is to explore will to power’s ‘form-giving’ activity in light of this overhuman, a-signifying force of resistance through which, to use Laruelle’s words, ‘Nietzsche invents a new concept of revolution as active resistance to dominant powers—the politics, if we can call it that, of the resistant instead of the excluded quarter.’8 In contrast to what many others would argue,9 my underlying contention is that the Nietzschean notion of the overhuman is one of the key notions bequeathed to us by Nietzsche. In posing the political question of rule in terms of the physical, physiological question of the production and direction of form-giving (but ultimately authochthonous, a-signifying) forces, the notion of the overhuman appears to be Nietzsche’s strategy for (but not his solution to) radically re-thinking the place and the fate of human life-forms in relation to wider non-signifying, non-conscious, non-human, often inhuman as well as transhuman form-shaping forces. Will to power is synonymous with the im-mediacy of forces and pulsions that are generative (‘form-giving’) but fundamentally a-signifying and a-textual. It is in this im-mediate (non-mediated, hence non-resolvable) fact of ‘physiology’ that, I argue, the Laruellean reading locates the inherently ‘political’ aspect of Nietzsche’s thinking:
From the Nietzschean point of view, hence also from the point of view of the political self-critique of Nietzsche’s text, the classic codes that fulfil linguistic or hermeneutic functions are unintelligible outside of their essence: force as pulsion and power. Abstracted from this political process or from these complex relations of power that make them produce their own effects, these codes induce readings [that are] not immediately political, or political by secondary delegation and effect.10
In so far as it driven by the a-signifying engine of a physiological process, I interpret the ‘overhuman’ as the non-linear, unequal, heterogeneous, reticular (or ‘networked’) process of overcoming as it is inscribed and embodied in living media through human and non-human materials. I take the Nietzschean overhuman not as an ideal to be reached (or conversely impossible to reach), but rather as a presently-unfolding overhuman physical process in which the ‘human being’ is but one material and informational expression. As Zarathustra says, the human is ‘a dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting: it is a “rope” stretched across the abyss between the animal and the overhuman—a “bridge” (eine Brücke), not a “purpose” (kein Zweck).’11 In this chapter, the human will be considered, not in terms of its individualized formal characteristics, but as a bridging function within an extra-human field of forces. ‘Man is a bridge, not a goal, but the bridge (man) and the goal (overman) are one, related immanently, as in the “lightning-flash” that emerges from out of the “dark cloud” that is “man”.’12
Historically interpretations of the Nietzschean Übermensch have been framed in the language of type and typology13 (even by Nietzsche himself), and consequently scholarship has tended to approach the term juridically – that is, from a framework that sets out laws, morals and ideals to be followed. But when articulated physiologically, the Übermensch becomes the choreographic motor of a transhuman chthonic machine which orients and directs will to power’s incessant ‘form-giving’ and ‘self-overcoming’ activities by way of a-signifying (qua autochthonic) forces. Indeed, I translate the Nietzschean term as ‘overhuman’ to highlight the perpetually overcoming, emergent and non-linear mechanics of such a-signifying but form-shaping forces. Nietzschean physiology, as such, does not merely encompass a study of the biological basis of life, but also refers to ‘an active science of material becomings’ that asks ‘how forces vie with each other and how some become formative of a body.’14
While my proposed perspective moves away from humanistic interpretations of Nietzsche’s thought (namely those that place a premium on a speaking or textual subject), positing the overhuman as the ‘engine’ of a Nietzschean physiological machine – as I do – does not amount to jettisoning the human altogether. Rather, it involves an accounting for how the human is the material to be ingested, incorporated, assimilated, and thereby transmuted by overhuman form-shaping forces that take the human beyond ‘the human’ by way of its animal machinery (its mnemonic, affective/instinctual and sensory networks). As Nietzsche notes,
hitherto the human is like “an embryo of the man of the future”; “all the form-shaping forces directed toward the latter are present in the former”; “because they are tremendous, the more a present-day individual determines the future. This is the profoundest conception of suffering: the form-shaping forces are in painful collision.—The isolation of the individual ought not to deceive us: something flows on underneath individuals”.15
The human is the material that is to be shaped, individuated and directed within a wider overhuman (autochthonic) matrix of complex and heterogeneous activity that continuously creates and overcomes.
In so far as it is concerned only with tuning into the vicissitudes of will to power, Nietzschean physiology is not primarily concerned with the language of man and its paradigm of the speaking or thinking subject, but rather with an overhuman physis and physiology of forces that make use and abuse of the human – in addition to nonhuman formations – as its material and medium of inscription hence articulation (a type-writing rather than a type, in this sense). ‘Linguistic means of expression are useless for expressing “becoming”; it accords with our inevitable need to posit a crude world of stability, of “things,” etc. . . . There is no “will”: there are treaty drafts of will that are constantly increasing or losing power.’16 Commenting on ‘reason’ in philosophy, Nietzsche laments that ‘I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.’17 Nietzsche’s writings continuously acknowledge that humans are animals that communicate linguistically and symbolically, but from a primarily physiological view of will to power, language and knowledge are already products of a political and physiological translation (übertragen) process in which collisions of force-quanta are translated into nerve-stimuli, which are then subsequently translated into image and then into language.
In his 1873 essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Nietzsche writes:
What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason. . . . To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one.18
Nietzsche does not abandon this physiological view even a decade later when he writes in an 1884 note: ‘First images. . . . Then words, applied to images. Finally concepts, possible only when there are words—the collecting together of many images in something nonvisible but audible (word).’19 Another note of 1885–86 reads: ‘Has a force ever been demonstrated? No, only effects translated into a completely foreign language.’20 ‘The mechanistic concept of “motion” is already a translation of the original process into the sign language of sight and touch.’21 ‘[W]e have not got away from the habit into which our senses and language seduce us. Subject, object, a doer added to the doing, the doing separated from that which it does: let us not forget that this is mere semeiotics and nothing real. Mechanistic theory as a theory of motion is already a translation into the sense language of man.’22
Nietzschean physiology refuses any metaphysical structuring that would posit the priority of the suprasensible or mental (‘mind’) over the material physiological (‘body’), as in any form of idealism: ‘To study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist that the sense organs are not phenomena in the sense of idealistic philosophy; as such they could not be causes!’23 Nietzsche argues that sensory information cannot be a ‘cause’ because he believes that even the senses are an effect of something more fluid and conditional. ‘[A]ll organic functions can be traced back to this will to power,’24 but will to power can neither be conceptualized monadically nor reductively, as in materialistic atomism in which the source of causation lies is some kind of indivisible substance or monad (‘as an atomon’),25 nor in terms of a mechanistically-determined law. Willing-to-power is nothing other than the play of unequal and colliding force quanta, the transient but ongoing ‘establishment of power relationships,’26 a struggle ‘between two or more forces’27 of ‘unequal power.’28 On this conceptual basis, Nietzschean physiology would also ultimately have to reject the idealist account of phenomenological consciousness in which causal power is attributed to the human mind, because for Nietzsche, human cognition does not differ fundamentally from that in any other living structure:
the same equalizing and ordering force that rules in the idioplasma, rules also in the incorporation of the outer world: our sense perceptions are already the result of this assimilation and equalization in regard to all that is past in us.29
Even subjective experience is not a cause but a sign or symptom of will to power. It is will to power that interprets physiologically, not a subject: ‘The will to power interprets (—it is a question of interpretation when an organ is constructed—): it defines limits, determines degrees, variations of power’30; ‘The mistake lies in the fictitious insertion of a subject.’31
Nietzschean overhuman physiology takes the process of embodiment (i.e. the form-shaping of forces) as a methodological starting-point, and for this reason it is tied to a discourse of naturalism that does suffer from its own anthropomorphisms and contradictions. Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s physiology squarely sets itself against metaphysical and metaphysiological discourses, which posit, maintain and reify the distinction between the ‘natural’ (the empirical, affective, physical, apparent, contingent, transitory) and the ‘extra-natural’ (the rational, moral, mental, essential, necessary, eternal).32 Such a physiological perspective rejects the metaphysician’s ‘faith in opposite values’33 in favour of a view in which there are no substantive or essential differences between the organic and the inorganic – the human, the animal and the machinic – or even between life and death (‘Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, a very rare type’34). ‘The general imprecise way of observing sees everywhere in nature opposites (e.g. ‘warm and cold’) where there are only differences of degree.’35 For Nietzsche, metaphysical schemas are primarily identifiable by their faith in hierarchical dichotomies (the positing of separation between two distinct realms or orders in which one realm is valued as superior or prior to the other): ‘metaphysical philosophy has hitherto surmounted this difficulty by denying that the one originates out of the other and assuming for the more highly valued thing a miraculous source in the very kernel and being of the “thing in itself”.’36 Hence Nietzsche argues that ‘. . .“being conscious” is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive’:37 ‘[e]ven if language . . . will not get over its awkwardness and will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation.’38
At once engaging and condemning Darwin’s theory of evolution (based largely on his adoption of Wilhelm Roux’s notion of ‘inner’ rather than ‘external’ evolutionary forces39), a Nietzschean physiological perspective starts with ‘the body’40 but does not seek to make the human body an idée fixe. As Nietzsche notes in 1885,
The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness. . . . My hypothesis: The subject as multiplicity.41
Again, in a note from 1886 to 1887, he echoes this thought about body as multiplicity:
Everything that enters consciousness as a “unity” is already tremendously complex: we always have only a semblance of unity. The phenomenon of the body is the richer, clearer, more tangible phenomenon: to be discussed first, methodologically, without coming to any decision about its ultimate significance.42
What makes ‘body’ a better starting point for Nietzschean physiology than ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ is the fact that the former affirms a matrix of irreducibly multiple and heterogeneous forces upon which all forms – from single-cell organism to human social and techno-scientific systems – emerge as transduced stabilities or metastable equilibria. According to Nietzsche, all instances of cognition are first and foremost physiological occurrences primarily channelled through the ‘instincts’43 (also called ‘drives’).44 Every idea – every norm, law or value – is to be viewed as emerging out of the collision of instinctive (autochthonous) forces within a complex physiological process or condition involving (but not limited to) organisms within an environment and leading to the ongoing transmutation of these organisms and environments (in this sense, Nietzschean physiology would rely on an ecologically emergent model rather than either atomistic or holistic ones predicated on the interactional dynamics of wholes and parts).
Man as a species does not represent any progress compared with any other animal. The whole animal and vegetable kingdom does not evolve from the lower to the higher—but all at the same time, in utter disorder, over and against each other.45
Nietzschean physiology ‘overcomes’ unitary, stable, essential and substantive interpretations of consciousness46 by affirming methods, aims and conclusions that preserve overhuman multiplicity and contingency.
In what sense could Nietzschean physiology be both a-signifying (and thus im-mediate) and still readable? Wouldn’t its read-ability imply signification? The Nietzschean notion of physiology would be a method for deciphering processes involving the confrontation of a multiplicity of a-signifying, unequal forces networked through a ‘common mode of nutrition . . .[called] “life”.’47 When combined with genealogy, physiology offers a mode of interpreting relationships of power quanta by tracking and reading the signs of will to power’s machinations in becoming em-bodied. Cognition, language, textuality: these are all only signifying effects of an underlying a-signifying and ‘machinic’ ‘syntax’ to which all signification is subordinated. ‘[It] is predominantly from the point of view of the genetic difference of this syntax that Nietzsche breaks with the linguistic ideal of the formal-transcendental reduction of the given,’ argues Laruelle.48 In other words, the syntax underlying Nietzsche’s kind of physiological thinking is a-signifying, but nonetheless ‘genetic,’ or ‘generative’/‘productive’ of difference, but it is not a syntax primarily located in any linguistic, logical or legal model. It is a syntax that is ‘genetic’ in that it has a ‘form-shaping’ function; Laruelle calls these syntaxes ‘machinic’ (what I have herein called ‘autochthonous’) to distinguish them ‘from nihilist ideologies of the signifier and of the dialectical form of contradiction’:49
In the sense that one speaks of logical or mathematical machines, reading machines, calculators, infernal machines, there is a “Nietzsche Machine”, but with a way of operating that is specific to it since it is an intrinsically political machine rather than logical or mathematical. First and foremost, machine here means an ensemble of relations (of power) without terms, crossed within a chiasmus or a problematic. . . . No doctrine, the Nietzsche-thought is a question of immanent syntax and of fluid matter proper to this syntax.50
Nietzschean physiology articulates the genesis of the human programmatologically as an inscription and translation process (from force-quanta, to cell, to word, to concept) in which will to power’s form-giving capacities are programmed into the very constitutive informational nexus of life. Writing, for Nietzsche, is not merely a representation of the spoken word as it was for Plato; it is will to power’s very mode of expression and materialization. ‘Of all that is written I love only that which one writes with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit.’51 Nietzsche is the one to tells us that it is will to power, not a subject, that interprets: things, institutions, values – all life – is, physiologically speaking, a production of will to power’s ‘interpretative’ process, which proceeds by way of an overhuman transcriptive, programming, material, form-shaping activity from the quantum and subcellular levels of life (‘force-quanta’ to ‘nerve-stimulus’) and programmes the memory-making (neural) structures of the human organism,52 which are simultaneously given form within the grammatical, metaphorical and symbolic practices.53 Friedrich Kittler also proposes a similar view when he suggests that in his use of the typewriter to philosophize, Nietzsche envisioned the human itself is a kind of type-writing, a kind of formative, informational, or better yet, telegraphic54 technology (or a ‘teletechnic’55) beyond human determination: ‘it is thus Nietzsche’s “philosophical and scandalous surmise that “humans are perhaps only thinking, writing, and speaking machines”.’56
Plato’s dialectical philosophy is a paradigmatic instance of metaphysical thought that posits speech as ontologically prior to writing. In his retelling of the tale of Thoth and Thamus, Socrates tells Phædrus that the written word, like painting, is but the image and representation of something far more fundamental: ‘an intelligent writing which is graven in the soul of learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.’57 Were it not animated by truth, writing would only be ‘dumb characters which have not a word to say for themselves, never adequately expressing the truth.’58 Even in his early 1871–72 introductory lectures on the dialogues of Plato (in the days when he was still a professor at the University of Basel),59 Nietzsche found that the status of writing is key to understanding Plato’s dialectical philosophy. Why does Plato write?
Plato says that writing has no signification exception for one who already knows, and is hence like a means of remembering. . . . This is why the most accomplished writing must imitate the oral form of teaching: with the aim, consequently, of reminding the one who knows how he acquired his knowledge.60
We should not, as such, consider the Platonic dialogue from the point of view of an aesthetic criterion such as the perfection of a norm: ‘the dialogue should not be considered something dramatic but like a recollection of the dialectical approach. As such, the degree of perfection is not a critical principle whereas the goal of recollection is a truth.’61
The Platonic view of dialectical writing founds a metaphysics of writing in which the written word is justified only as a means for remembering and signifying a previously stated (oral, voiced) truth; dialectical writing is the technique for remembering and signifying the voice of truth. Against the Platonic metaphysico-metaphysiological view which defines the human primarily in terms of speech and language or rational consciousness, Nietzsche’s genealogical physiology begins with forgetfulness and privileges writing by considering the human in terms of an ongoing process of grammatization wherein forces (‘unequal power-quanta’) are continuously transcribed into the organic – specifically ‘mnemotechnical’ or memory-making – fabric of the animal organism. These nerve-stimuli (‘instincts’ and ‘drives’) in turn undergo translation and inscription, establishing the signifying, discursive, textual infrastructure of values that is necessary to uphold and reproduce any symbolic system. In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche lays out his physiological account of how the ‘forgetful animal’ without speech (i.e. the ‘barbarian’62) evolves through a technical process of grammatization in which memory and will are inscribed into the animal system, transforming the animal into a speaking subject capable of making promises and of honouring them:
To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises—is that not precisely the paradoxical task nature has set itself where human beings are concerned? . . . The fact that this problem has to a great extent been solved must seem all the more astonishing to a person who knows how to fully appreciate the power which works against this promise-making, namely forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is not merely a vis interiae [a force of inertia], as superficial people think. Is it much rather an active capability to repress, something positive in the strongest sense, to which we can ascribe the fact that while we are digesting what we alone live through and experience and absorb into ourselves (we could call the process mental ingestion [Einverseelung]), we are conscious of what is going on as little as we are with the entire thousand-fold process which our bodily nourishment goes through (so-called physical ingestion [Einverleibung]).63
Before the animal can be transformed into a speaking subject capable of making and honouring contracts and of paying debts, it must undergo a technical process of memory-inscription which physiologically transforms the actual organism; this ‘mnemotechnics’ of pain (pathein-mathein)64 corporealizes ‘bad conscience’ by imprinting and thereby giving form to the affective force-network of the body.65 Physiologically, the emergence of the bad conscience (and the priestly, sickly, but nonetheless interesting animal) occurs in tandem with the mnemotechnical process of transcription which forges an internal space (choreo-graphein) that comes to be known as the ‘soul.’66 Again, Nietzsche’s physiological approach does not adopt the metaphysical or metaphysiological – logocentric or phonocentric – model of the speaking subject, but instead hypothesizes the subject as a process of mnemotechnical inscription and mental and physical ingestion (‘Einverseelung’ and ‘Einverleibung’), albeit one beyond the bounds of its own consciousness. Whereas the humanist conceives of the human in subjective, discursive and textual terms, the Nietzschean physiologist approaches it from the perspective of an overhuman physiology which sees subjectivity – this discursive entity – as the grammatization of im-mediate form-giving forces inscribed as and into the animal flesh. In ‘Nietzsche and the Machine,’ an interview with Jacques Derrida, Richard Beardsworth suggests that ‘the problematic of will to power exceeds the axiomatic of subjectivity’: ‘life, in the difference of its forces, precedes both “being” and “humanity”.’67 Derrida agrees with Beardsworth on this point: ‘any living being in fact undoes the opposition between phusis and techne’; ‘life is always inhabited by technicisation’; ‘life is a process of self-replacement’; ‘the handing-down of life is a mechanike, a form of technics’; ‘in Nietzsche there is indeed no opposition between technics and life.’68
Although Nietzsche uses the term physio-logy, he does not privilege logos (speech, human reason) over physis (growth, will to power), nor signifying forces over a-signifying ones; quite the opposite, in fact: privilege is given in his physio-logy to the force of physis, the a-signifying form-giving process. ‘Nietzsche . . . has written that writing—including his own—is not in fact subordinate to the logos . . . . Heideggerian thought would reinstate rather than destroy the instance of the logos and of truth of being as primum signatum.’69 Metaphysiology would uphold the primacy and authenticity of the human–its speech, its voice, even its hand, notes Friedrich Kittler. Indeed for Heidegger, ‘man himself acts [handelt] through the hand [Hand]; since the hand, together with the word, is the essential distinction of man . . . . And the word as script is handwriting.’70 But for Nietzsche – after his turn to the typewriter, that is, after 1882 – ‘the hard science of physiology did away with the psychological conception that guaranteed humans that they could find their souls through handwriting and rereading.’71 Pointing to the second essay of The Genealogy of Morals, Kittler brings to the fore the difference between Heidegger and Nietzsche:
[K]nowledge, speech and virtuous action are no longer inborn attributes of Man. Like the animal that will soon go by a different name, Man derived from forgetfulness and random noise—the background of all media. To make forgetful animals into human beings, a blind force strikes that dismembers and inscribes their bodies in the real, until pain itself brings forth a memory. . . . Writing in Nietzsche is no longer a natural extension of humans who bring forth their voice, soul, individuality through their handwriting. On the contrary: . . . humans change their position—they turn from the agency of writing to become an inscription surface. Conversely, all the agency of writing passes on in its violence to an inhuman media engineer. . . .72
This process of incorporation and grammatization, physiologically speaking, is not dialectical/dialogical/dualistic; its operationality does not depend on the mediation of two hierarchically positioned logoi by negation (this would be a metaphysiological approach); but can be considered ‘emergent’ and ‘transductive’ in that its ‘syntaxes’ are adaptive to the aleatory interplay of autochthonous, sub-individual, non-linear, unequal, multiple, networked events. As Laruelle writes,
Nietzsche invents in a latent manner a new discipline that we will call “political Materialism”73 destined to occupy and displace the positions of “historical materialism”. He gives himself his object by posing all reality (equivalent to relations of production and superstructures) as power and relations of power. He gives himself his determining material cause in the last instance: the libido. He gives himself his “laws”, syntaxes or articulations: they are not dialectical, and presuppose a new concept of contradiction. We will call them “machinic”.74
What Laruelle means by ‘machinic’ here bears close resemblance to that which the ‘mechanologist’ Gilbert Simondon elaborates in terms of his methodologically non-dialectical model of ‘transduction’:
The method consists in not trying to compose the essence of a reality by means of a conceptual relation between two extreme terms, and [not trying] to consider all true relation within ranks of being [ayant rang d’être]. Relation is a modality of being; it is simultaneous with respect to the terms the existence of which it assures. A relation must be grasped as relation within being, relation of being, manner of being and not simply [as a] relation between two terms that can be known adequately through concepts because [these latter] effectively have a separate existence. It is because the terms are conceived as substances that the relation is [understood as] relation of terms, and being is separated within terms because being is primitively conceived as substance anterior to all examinations of individuation. . . . By “transduction” we mean an operation—physical, biological, mental, social—by which an activity propagates itself, slowly but surely, within a domain, by grounding this propagation within a structuring of the operative domain from place to place: each constituted region of structure serves the next region as constitutive principle, such that a modification spreads progressively at the same time as this structuring operation. . . . [T]he result is an amplifying reticular structure.75
The dynamism of transductive systems does not come from the dialectical tension between two homogeneous terms (e.g. matter and form, or cause and effect) but rather from the latent, pre-individual and conflictive in-formational tensions or tendencies that are characteristic of heterogeneous, non-linear and emergent environments (what I have herein called its chthonic, ‘overhuman’ matrix). Nietzsche’s physiological account of the human as a transcriptive process (of will to power from quantum/sub-atomic to cellular then cognitive/linguistic levels) is, I would argue, transductive rather than dialectical in so far as the goal of the human is to propagate an environment of heterogeneous complexity, not synthetic unity. As Simondon notes – very much consistent with Nietzsche’s physiological axiom concerning the non-distinction of seeming opposites – in the example of temperature (indented below), transduction attends to the medium that generates heterogeneity rather than to explaining the relation between opposing terms (as in hylemorphic76 schemas that begin with the essential distinction between ‘matter’ and ‘form’):
The primary use of sensation is transductive rather than relational: sensation enables [one] to grasp how the medium is prolonged into more hot on one side, and more cold on the other; it is the medium of temperature that spreads and divides into directions of more hot and more cold; the dyad is grasped from its centre; it is not synthesis but transduction.77
Against the (Platonic and dialectical) view of the human as the text upon which Logos writes its truth, a pro-grammatologically informed reading of Nietzschean physiology would offer a view of the human characterized not by dialectical, subjective and textual thinking, but as formative and informational material that conducts an overhuman in-formation processing machine. It is Nietzsche himself who connects the overhuman to this ongoing autochthonous, machinic, physiological process (or ‘secretion’ as he calls it):
The need to show that as the consumption of man and mankind becomes more and more economical and the “machinery” of interests and services is ever more intricately integrated, a counter-movement is inevitable. I designate this as the secretion of a luxury surplus of mankind: it aims to bring to light a stronger species, a higher type that arises and preserves itself under different conditions from those of the average man. My concept, my metaphor for this type is, as one knows, the word “overman”. . . . Once we possess that common economic management of the earth which will soon be inevitable, mankind will be able to find its best meaning as a machine in the service of this economy—as a tremendous clockwork, composed of ever smaller, ever more subtly “adapted” gears . . . the production of a synthetic, summarizing, justifying man for whose existence this transformation of mankind into a machine is a precondition, as base on which he can invent his higher form of being.78
In this notable passage, Nietzsche – consummate critic of mechanistic metaphysics and modern decadence – tells us that to think of the human as a ‘machine in the service’ of an overhuman ‘economy’ is a ‘precondition’ for the ongoing invention of our living forms. But what is most notable, perhaps, is that this passage can be read both physiologically (from a perspective that is directed towards the overhuman) and metaphysiologically (from a perspective that is directed towards the human). When read metaphysiologically (i.e. positing the essentialist distinction between natural matter and extra-natural form), the economic machine is interpreted as producing a messianic individual being – the ‘overman’ – which represents synthesis (rather than contradiction), and which will come in the future to redeem humanity. Dualistic and dialectical, this viewpoint interprets ‘counter-movement’ and ‘transformation’ in terms of negation between two terms/units: machine/organism, synthesizing/fragmenting, higher being/average man, economic management/transformation and so on.
When read physiologically, however – that is to say, materially, non-dialectically and transductively – any essential opposition between human and overhuman, machine and organism, is undone: the human is a ‘machine’ the materiality of which produces and ‘secretes’ ‘a luxury surplus’ which Nietzsche conceptualizes metaphorically in terms an ‘overman.’ But this ‘higher form of being’ does not transcend its materiality (‘the human’ being the material in question); it is itself only conceivable as an overflowing expression of its materiality (or ‘secretion’): in this case, ‘the human’ is not identified dialectically (i.e. primarily as linguistic, textual, subjective) but rather transductively, as a function of a transindividual informational process that uses the human to produce and express the overhuman (in biological, linguistic and symbolic terms). In the hierarchy of types loosely traced in various parts of Nietzsche’s œuvre, a ‘higher type’ is characterized by its capacity to direct, affirm and overcome its overhuman (that is to say, its form-shaping/in-formational, emergent, manifold and heterogeneous) activities: ‘the higher type represents an incomparably greater complexity—a greater sum of co-ordinated elements: so its disintegration is also incomparably more likely. The genius is the most sublime machine there is—consequently the most fragile.’79
In conclusion, I would argue that the political question in Nietzsche’s thought can be interpreted in light of the paramount methodological and material importance of overhuman physiology. To this end, my strategy has been to emphasize not textual, discursive or subjective interpretations, but readings that emphasize hypertextual, a-signifying and emergent/transductive interpretations (chiefly drawn herein from Laruelle, Simondon and Kittler, and secondarily from Deleuze). While Simondon does not draw upon Nietzschean thought in any explicit or concerted manner, Laruelle, Kittler and Deleuze do. Deleuze indeed highlights – as I do – the fact that ‘Nietzsche’s method,’ as a ‘truly active science,’80 is ‘opposed to dialectics.’81 I should not over-emphasize Deleuze’s interpretation however, since (on the one hand) it is based in large part upon Simondon’s transductive schema82 and (on the other hand) because Deleuze seems to fall back into a dialectical – hence metaphysiological – account of Nietzsche in his actual accounts of the latter. For instance, in Nomadic Thought, he sets up a kind of dialectical schema between the kind of thinkers and thinking that ‘code’ (through ‘the law, the contract and the institution’83 which characterize State discourses) and those that try to ‘uncode’ rather than ‘encode’ (this being characteristic of Nomadic discourses), for example, Nietzsche.84 Deleuze further deepens the dichotomy between these two terms when he argues that Nietzsche stands squarely on the side of ‘extrinsic nomadic unity opposite intrinsic despotic unity’ founding a discourse that is ‘first and foremost nomadic, whose utterances would be produced not by rational administrative machine . . . but by a mobile war-machine.’85 Although the Deleuzean thinking of Nietzschean immanence gestures towards the claim that Nietzschean thought operates along the lines of something beyond a merely dialectical model, Deleuze places Nietzsche within a binary logic that leaves unanswered the problem of just what kind of non-dialectical schema would account for the overhuman envisioned as a productive ‘secretion’ of the ‘common economic management’ of the earth (see WP §684).
In order to think politically with Nietzsche in physiological (or machinic) rather than metaphysiological or dialectical terms, François Laruelle’s distinct and developed interpretation of Nietzsche is a refreshingly instructive and compelling one for schematizing the specifically non-dialectical but nonetheless political design of Nietzsche-thinking. Although Laruelle does not articulate his interpretation within the context of physiology – but rather, in terms of ‘political’ and ‘machinic’ materialisms – he does carefully sustain the fundamentally overhuman orientation of Nietzschean physiology: its non-linguistic, non-subjective and non-dialectical material tendencies. For Laruelle, the specifically political feature of the ‘Nietzsche-machine’ resides in its intensive a-signifying (non-linguistic, non-subjective, non-dialectical) tendencies, not its extensive, signifying functions. ‘[A] scene of signifying practice or of textual domination on the one hand,’ writes Laruelle; ‘on the other: a-textual, intrinsically political, forces, and Resistance against textual mastery. . . . [T]he Nietzschean practice will imply, at once, an intervention or a detachment of a-textual forces, of anti-signifying powers within the signifying scene, and a ‘supremacy’ of the relation of terms upon those terms themselves.’86 Unlike Deleuze, who places Nietzsche on one side of a dichotomous relation (e.g. ‘the nomadic’ against the ‘fascistic’), Laruelle articulates Nietzsche’s thought (what he calls ‘Nietzsche-thinking’87) along the lines of a fourfold/quadripartite/chiasmic political operation. Fascism, Revolution, Mastery and Rebellion make up the syntactical elements of Laruelle’s ‘Nietzsche-Machine’ which operates, not unlike Kafka’s penal apparatus,88 along two bisecting polarities or tendencies that ‘cut’ through the political subject (Mastery/Rebellion and Fascism/Revolution). Laruelle introduces this complex relation of four terms in ‘Theses’ Two and Three of Nietzsche versus Heidegger: Theses for a Nietzschean Politics. Since no published English translation is currently available, it is useful to quote these at length:
Thesis 2.
Nietzsche is, in a double sense, the thinker of fascism: he is, in a certain way, a fascist thinker, but he first and foremost the thinker of the subversion of fascism. The Nietzsche-thought is a complex political process with two “contradictory” poles (without mediation): the subordinate relation of a secondary fascistic pole (Mastery) to a principal revolutionary pole (Rebellion). Nietzsche became fascist to better defeat fascism, he assumed the worst forms of Mastery to become the Rebel.89
Thesis 3.
We are all fascist readers of Nietzsche, we are all revolutionary readers of Nietzsche. Our unity is a contradictory relation (a hierarchy without mediation), just as Nietzsche’s unity is a contradictory and “auto-critical” unity. Nietzsche puts the Master and the Rebel in a relation of duplicity rather than of duality. He liquidates the opposition of monism (the philosophy of the Master or the Rebel) and dualism (the mediated contradiction of Master and Rebel).90
The terms themselves do not constitute a focal point for Laruelle – the task does not entail defining and identifying what would constitute Mastery, Rebellion, Fascism and Revolution:
Let us forget the terms, let us try to move within the quadripartite as a relation-of-relations, let us stretch the political subject to the four corners of the chiasmus. It is precisely the categories of Fascism, of Mastery, of Rebellion, that will change the political sense in function of this complex machine: the fascistic pole makes sense of an unlimited, planetary use, of negation, and the production of effects of technical, organizational powers and of mastery. The revolutionary or rebel, [makes sense] of a certain use of affirmation and of the production of effects of active resistance to all dominant powers.91
The implication here is that addressing the political question in Nietzsche does not entail a grounding for Nietzsche’s thought in dialectical and dialogical operations of linguistic subjectivity, textuality or discursivity; neither does it entail a measuring (i.e. an interpretation) of the validity of Nietzsche’s writings in terms of pre-ordained ideological positions (e.g. determining whether Nietzsche is either fascist or anti-fascist, political or anti-political, an esoteric or an exoteric thinker):
Let us not look for the “meaning” of the Nietzsche-thinking within a theoretical system, a doctrinal theme, or a scene of writing—let us look for the functioning of a process within a production in the last instance of specifically political affects. Changes in productive effects imply a change in means.92
The operating system of a ‘Nietzsche-Machine,’ according to a Laruellean reading, is not structured along lines of a binary (either/or) logic, but along the lines of a (double-crossing/dual-processing) syntactical machine that produces and reproduces ambiguity at various scales of signification (subjective, textual or discursive). ‘It’s not about dividing or about deciding, like the Marxist, between massively political class-positions even when these latter are recognized as entangled and never pure—rather, it’s about putting into motion a process of displacement the engine of which is no longer negativity.’93
It is the operative functionality of the force of duplicity (rather than duality, as Laruelle argues) – its transductive power – that makes Nietzsche a truly materialist political thinker for Laruelle, and one who redefines and thus reinvents the very sense of politics—not thematically, discursively, hermeneutically or lexicologically (e.g. by a certain psychoanalytic usage of the signifier or by class struggle), but physiologically, through the will to power’s activity of resisting or subordinating mastery which is an implicitly political process that always produces political agents with fascistic or critical functions.94
Nietzsche abandons criteria external to politics and, defining this latter by a network of pure contradictory relations without negativity and co-extensive to the social body, ceases to define it by a network of instances and substrates put into relation (of contradiction) . . . [H]e gives, with the ERS/WP [the Eternal Return of the Same/Will to power] device, the possibility of a plastic politics, of an internal political determination of relations of power, neither too broad and transcendent, nor too narrow and restrictive, upon which the practical empirical fields are deduced, specified and qualified.95
To this end, I would suggest that Laruelle, especially when read through the lens of Simondonian transductive systems, provides a distinct approach to Nietzsche’s significance for political thinking (which I have herein attempted to connect explicitly to my articulation of Nietzsche’s overhuman physiology) which goes beyond the extant historicist, hermeneutic and discursive interpretations that seek to resolve, synthesize or idealize contradictory tendencies in his thinking.
Notes
1 ‘The problem that remains is how to think transhumanly the future, a mode of thinking of the future that will inevitably appear as “inhuman” when it comes into contact, and conflict, with all earthly seriousness to date.’ Ansell-Pearson (1997), p. 7.
2 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §681.
3 From the ancient Greek, auto- “self” + khthon “land, earth, soil”.
4 Laruelle 1977, p. 11. All translations from this book are my own.
5 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §1.
6 Laruelle 1977, p. 15.
7 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, essay II, §12.
8 Laruelle 1977, p. 16.
9 Lampert (1986, p. 258) argues that the Übermensch was an ideal that Nietzsche did not intend to seriously promote. Conway (1989, p. 212) suggests that the concept of Übermensch is not intended to have a ‘world-historical’ expression.
10 Laruelle 1977, p. 13.
11 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’, §4.
12 Ansell-Pearson 1997, p. 15.
13 See for example Kaufmann 1974; Keith Ansell-Pearson 1994; Müller-Lauter 1999; Haar 1996; Tuncel 2005.
14 Rehberg 2002, p. 41.
15 WP §686; also GM II, §12.
16 WP §715.
17 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, ‘Reason in Philosophy’, §5.
18 Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, p. 116.
19 WP §506.
20 WP §620.
21 WP §625.
22 WP §634.
23 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §15.
24 BGE §36.
25 BGE §12.
26 WP §630.
27 WP §631.
28 WP§ 633.
29 WP §500.
30 WP §643.
31 WP §632.
32 Cox 1999, p. 71.
33 See for example, BGE §2, §3, §24, §34; TI ‘Reason’ §1 and §4; WP §47, §552, §812. Also see Human All Too Human, §1 and §2.
34 Nietzsche, Gay Science, §109.
35 HAH, ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’, §67.
36 HAH §1.
37 BGE §3.
38 BGE §24.
39 See Ansell-Pearson 1997, p. 98.
40 WP §492.
41 WP §490.
42 WP §489.
43 See for example BGE §3.
44 See for example BGE §6.
45 WP §684.
46 ‘[M]ultiple physiological becomings replace ontologies based on assumptions of unity or identity as the methodological starting point. Methodologically, physiology is taken to “overcome” the unitary phenomena of consciousness’, Rehberg (2002), p. 41. ‘With the guiding thread of the body an immense multiplicity shows itself; it is methodologically permitted to use the more easily studied, richer phenomenon as a guiding thread for the understanding of the poorer [the apparent unity of the “I”]’, Nietzsche, WP §518, translation Rehberg, p. 41.
47 WP §641.
48 Laruelle 1977, p. 29.
49 Ibid.
50 Laruelle 1977, pp. 11–12.
51 TSZ I, ‘On Reading and Writing’.
52 See GM II, §3, §6, §12, §16, §17.
53 ‘The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar—I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions—that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems; just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation’, BGE §20.
54 In the following passage, Nietzsche characterizes this ‘telegraphic’ tendency: ‘The former means for obtaining homogeneous, enduring characters for long generations: unalienable landed property, honoring the old (origin of the belief in gods and heroes as ancestors). Now the breaking up of landed property belongs to the opposite tendency: newspapers (in place of daily prayers), railway, telegraph. Centralization of a tremendous number of different interests in a single soul, which for that reason must be very strong and protean.’ WP §67.
55 Cohen 2005, p. 189.
56 Kittler 1999, p. 188.
57 Plato, Phaedrus.
58 Ibid.
59 The original title being Einleitung in das Studium der platonischen Dialoge and published in French as Introduction à la lecture des dialogues de Platon, translated from the German by Olivier Berrichon-Sedeyn (1991).
60 Nietzsche 1991, pp. 9–10 (all translations from Berrichon-Sedeyn’s French translation are my own).
61 Nietzsche 1991, p. 12.
62 GM I, §11.
63 GM II, §1.
64 GM II, §3.
65 ‘[T]he “development” of a thing, a practice, or an organ has nothing to do with its progressus [progress] towards a single goal . . . but rather the sequence of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of overpowering which take place on that thing, together with the resistance which arises against that overpowering each time, the changes of form which have been attempted for the purpose of defence and reaction, as well as the results of successful counter-measures. Form is fluid; the “meaning”, however, is even more so. . . . Even within each individual organism things are no different: with every essential growth in the totality, the “meaning” of the individual organ also shifts.’ GM II §12.
66 GM II, §16.
67 Beardsworth 1994, p. 15.
68 Ibid., p. 52.
69 Derrida 1974, pp. 19–20.
70 Kittler 1999, p. 198.
71 Ibid., p. 188.
72 Ibid., p. 210.
73 The original French word is capitalized.
74 Laruelle 1977, p. 31.
75 Simondon 2005, p. 32. All English translations from the French original are my own.
76 Simondon 2011, pp. 407–24.
77 Ibid., p. 259.
78 WP §866.
79 WP 684
80 Deleuze 1983, p. 75.
81 Ibid., p. 76.
82 Deleuze conceptualizes the Übermensch not in the terms of an ideal type with a more or less fixed set of dispositions, but as a ‘method of dramatisation’ and transpiring within the theatre of the living itself, a genesis (or ‘dynamics of the egg’ and constituting ‘an environment of individuation’. In this choreographic schema, the human is not identified as the ‘individual’ but as ‘embryo’, the larval environment of trans-individuation that Deleuze likens to the ‘Dionysian depth rumbling beneath’ Leibniz’s ‘apparently Apollonian philosophy’. See Deleuze 1983, pp. 78–9; 2004, pp. 94–116.
83 Deleuze, ‘Nomadic Thought’ (2004), p. 253.
84 Deleuze 2004, p. 254.
85 Deleuze 2004, p. 259.
86 Laruelle 1977, p. 10.
87 See Laruelle’s term ‘pensée-Nietzsche’, which could also be translated as ‘Nietzsche-thought’. See for example thesis 1 in Laruelle (1977), p. 9.
88 For a Nietzschean interpretation of Kafka’s Penal Colony, see Nandita Biswas Mellamphy and Dan Mellamphy (2005).
89 Laruelle 1977, p. 9.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., pp. 10–11.
92 Ibid., p. 22.
93 Ibid., p. 28.
94 Ibid., p. 23.
95 Ibid., pp. 24–5.
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