...our 'higher schools' are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims. ... Everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as if something would be lost if the young man of twenty-three were not yet 'finished,' or if he did not yet know the answer to the "main question": which calling? A higher kind of human being, if I may say so, does not like "callings," precisely because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes time, he does not even think of 'finishing': at thirty one is, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

Nietzsche as precursor of deconstruction

We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language — in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere reason sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing." Everywhere "being" is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word.

Very much later, in a world which was in a thousand ways more enlightened, philosophers, to their great surprise, became aware of the sureness, the subjective certainty, in our handling of the categories of reason: they concluded that these categories could not be derived from anything empirical — for everything empirical plainly contradicted them. Whence, then, were they derived?

And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake was made: "We must once have been at home in a higher world (instead of a very much lower one, which would have been the truth); we must have been divine, because we have reason!" Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. "Reason" in language — oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

"First, one has the difficulty of emancipation oneself from one's chains; and, ultimately, one has to emancipate oneself from this emancipation too! Each of us has to suffer, though in greatly different ways, from the chain sickness, even after he has broken the chains."

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

On Specialization

"Researchers learned that ants that perform specific tasks are no more efficient than regular ants. 'It turns out,' said scientist Anna Dornhaus, 'that the ones that are specialized on a particular job are not particularly good at doing that job.'"

(Harper's Weekly Review, Harper's Magazine, 12/02/08)

"The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not society, but the only sort of happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes them intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization."

"Whispered to the conservatives. — What was not known formerly, what is known, or might be known, today: a reversion, a return in any sense or degree is simply not possible. We physiologists know that. Yet all priests and moralists have believed the opposite — they wanted to take mankind back, to screw it back, to a former measure of virtue. Morality was always a bed of Procrustes. Even the politicians have aped the preachers of virtue at this point: today too there are still parties whose dream it is that all things might walk backwards like crabs. But no one is free to be a crab. Nothing avails: one must go forward — step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern "progress"). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

"The first adherents of a creed do not prove anything against it."

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Transvaluations of All Values

"Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and -- existing reality will collapse. "

(Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, The German Ideology)

"The charges against communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

When people speak of the ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.

'Undoubtedly,' it will be said, 'religious, moral, philosophical, and juridicial ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.'

'There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.'

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to communism."

(Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, The Communist Manifesto)

"Let us not under-estimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a 'transvaluation of all values,' a visualized declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of 'true' and 'not true.' The most valuable intuitions are the last to be attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine methods."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization of philosophy.

By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order, the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has raised to the rank of its principle, what is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society without its own participation. The proletarian then finds himself possessing the same right in regard to the world which is coming into being as the German king in regard to the world which has come into being when he calls the people his people, as he calls the horse his horse. By declaring the people his private property, the king merely proclaims that the private owner is king."

(Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

"The most difficult and the highest form which man can attain is the most seldom successful: thus the history of philosophy reveals a superabundance of bungled and unhappy cases of manhood, and its march is an extremely slow one; whole centuries intervene and suppress what has been achieved: and in this way the connecting link is always made to fail. It is an appalling history, this history of the highest men, of the sages.--What is most often damaged is precisely the recollection of great men, for the semi-successful and botched cases of mankind misunderstand them and overcome them by their "successes." Whenever an "effect" is noticeable, the masses gather in a crowd around it; to hear the inferior and the poor in spirit having their say is a terrible ear-splitting torment for him who knows and trembles at the thought, that the fate of man depends upon the success of its highest types."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power Manuscripts)

The Demise of Grand Narratives?

Age of comparisons.— The less men are bound by their tradition, the greater the internal stirring of motives; the greater, accordingly, the external unrest, the whirling flow of men, the polyphony of strivings. Who today still feels a serious obligation to bind himself and his descendants to one place? Who feels that anything is seriously binding? Just as all artistic styles of the arts are imitated one next to the other, so too are all stages and kinds of morality, customs, cultures.

Such an age gets its meaning because in it the various world views, customs, cultures are compared and experienced next to one another, which was not possible earlier, when there was always a localized rule for each culture, just as all artistic styles were bound to place and time. Now, man's increased aesthetic feeling will decide definitively from among the many forms which offer themselves for comparison. It will let most of them (namely all those that it rejects) die out. Similarly, a selection is now taking place among the forms and habits of higher morality, whose goal can be none other than the downfall of baser moralities. This is the age of comparisons! That is its pride—but also by rights its sorrow. Let us not be afraid of this sorrow! Instead, we will conceive the task that this age sets us to be as great as possible. Then posterity will bless us for it—a posterity that knows it has transcended both the completed original folk cultures, as well as the culture of comparison, but that looks back on both kinds of culture as on venerable antiquities, with gratitude.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human)

"The public sucks. Fuck hope."

"One person can head a rebellion, but one person cannot head this leveling process, for that would make him a leader and he would avoid being leveled. Each individual can in his little circle participate in this leveling, but it is an abstract process, and leveling is abstraction conquering individuality. The leveling in modern times is the reflective equivalent of fate in the ancient times. The dialectic of ancient times tended towards leadership (the great man over the masses and the free man over the slave); the dialectic of Christianity tends, at least until now, towards representation (the majority views itself in the representative, and is liberated in the knowledge that it is represented in that representative, in a kind of self-knowledge); the dialectic of the present age tends towards equality, and its most consequent but false result is levelling, as the negative unity of the negative relationship between individuals."

"In order for leveling really to occur, first it is necessary to bring a phantom into existence, a spirit of leveling, a huge abstraction, an all-embracing something that is nothing, an illusion—the phantom of the public. . . . The public is the real Leveling-Master, rather than the leveler itself, for leveling is done by something, and the public is a huge nothing."

"The public is not a people, it is not a generation, it is not a simultaneity, it is not a community, it is not a society, it is not an association, it is not those particular men over there, because all these exist because they are concrete and real; however, no single individual who belongs to the public has any real commitment; some times during the day he belongs to the public, namely, in those times in which he is nothing; in those times that he is a particular person, he does not belong to the public. Consisting of such individuals, who as individuals are nothing, the public becomes a huge something, a nothing, an abstract desert and emptiness, which is everything and nothing. . . ."

(Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age)

"Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it -- so high, indeed, that no fulfillment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world. (Precisely because of this power that hope has of making the suffering hold out, the Greeks regarded it as the evil of evils, as the malign of evils; it remained behind at the source of all evil [in Pandora’s box].)"

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

The Actors / "Great Men": a reflection on the U.S. Presidential Debates

Where solitude endeth, there beginneth the market-place; and where the market-place beginneth, there beginneth also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.

In the world even the best things are worthless without those who represent them: those representers, the people call great men.

Little, do the people understand what is great -- that is to say, the creating agency. But they have a taste for all representers and actors of great things.

Around the devisers of new values revolveth the world: -- invisibly it revolveth. But around the actors revolve the people and the glory: such is the course of things.

Spirit, hath the actor, but little conscience of the spirit. He believeth always in that wherewith he maketh believe most strongly -- in himself!

Tomorrow he hath a new belief, and the day after, one still newer. Sharp perceptions hath he, like the people, and changeable humours.

To upset -- that meaneth with him to prove. To drive mad -- that meaneth with him to convince. And blood is counted by him as the best of all arguments.

A truth which only glideth into fine ears, he calleth falsehood and trumpery. Verily, he believeth only in gods that make a great noise in the world!

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

The Pale Criminal (Nietzsche's Response to Crime and Punishment)

[As I read this I thought, "Is not Raskalnikov the Pale Criminal par excellence?"]

Ye do not mean to slay, ye judges and sacrificers, until the animal hath bowed its head? Lo! the pale criminal hath bowed his head: out of his eye speaketh the great contempt.

"Mine ego is something which is to be surpassed: mine ego is to me the great contempt of man": so speaketh it out of that eye.

When he judged himself—that was his supreme moment; let not the exalted one relapse again into his low estate!

There is no salvation for him who thus suffereth from himself, unless it be speedy death.

Your slaying, ye judges, shall be pity, and not revenge; and in that ye slay, see to it that ye yourselves justify life!

It is not enough that ye should reconcile with him whom ye slay. Let your sorrow be love to the Superman: thus will ye justify your own survival!

"Enemy" shall ye say but not "villain," "invalid" shall ye say but not "wretch," "fool" shall ye say but not "sinner."

And thou, red judge, if thou would say audibly all thou hast done in thought, then would every one cry: "Away with the nastiness and the virulent reptile!"

But one thing is the thought, another thing is the deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The wheel of causality doth not roll between them.

An idea made this pale man pale. Adequate was he for his deed when he did it, but the idea of it, he could not endure when it was done.

Evermore did he now see himself as the doer of one deed. Madness, I call this: the exception reversed itself to the rule in him.

The streak of chalk bewitcheth the hen; the stroke he struck bewitched his weak reason. Madness after the deed, I call this.

Hearken, ye judges! There is another madness besides, and it is before the deed. Ah! ye have not gone deep enough into this soul!

Thus speaketh the red judge: "Why did this criminal commit murder? He meant to rob." I tell you, however, that his soul wanted blood, not booty: he thirsted for the happiness of the knife!

But his weak reason understood not this madness, and it persuaded him. "What matter about blood!" it said; "wishest thou not, at least, to make booty thereby? Or take revenge?"

And he hearkened unto his weak reason: like lead lay its words upon him—thereupon he robbed when he murdered. He did not mean to be ashamed of his madness.

And now once more lieth the lead of his guilt upon him, and once more is his weak reason so benumbed, so paralysed, and so dull.

Could he only shake his head, then would his burden roll off; but who shaketh that head?

What is this man? A mass of diseases that reach out into the world through the spirit; there they want to get their prey.

What is this man? A coil of wild serpents that are seldom at peace among themselves—so they go forth apart and seek prey in the world.

Look at that poor body! What it suffered and craved, the poor soul interpreted to itself—it interpreted it as murderous desire, and eagerness for the happiness of the knife.

Him who now turneth sick, the evil overtaketh which is now the evil: he seeketh to cause pain with that which causeth him pain. But there have been other ages, and another evil and good.

Once was doubt evil, and the will to Self. Then the invalid became a heretic or sorcerer; as heretic or sorcerer he suffered, and sought to cause suffering.

But this will not enter your ears; it hurteth your good people, ye tell me. But what doth it matter to me about your good people!

Many things in your good people cause me disgust, and verily, not their evil. I would that they had a madness by which they succumbed, like this pale criminal!

Verily, I would that their madness were called truth, or fidelity, or justice: but they have their virtue in order to live long, and in wretched self-complacency.

I am a railing alongside the torrent; whoever is able to grasp me may grasp me! Your crutch, however, I am not.—

Thus spake Zarathustra.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra)

Why the philosopher rarely turns out well.

His requirements include qualities that usually destroy a man:

1. a tremendous multiplicity of qualities; he must be a brief abstract of man, of all man's higher and lower desires: a danger from antitheses, also from disgust of himself;
2. he must be inquisitive in the most various directions: danger of going to pieces;
3. he must be just and fair in the highest sense, but profound in love, hate (and injustice) too;
4. he must not be only a spectator, but also a legislator: judge and judged (to the extent that he is a brief abstract of the world);
5. extremely multifarious, yet firm and hard. Supple.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power Manuscripts)

Notes Towards a Most Compelling Thought

"A traveller who had seen many countries and peoples and several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere; and he answered: men are inclined to laziness. Some will feel that he might have said with greater justice: they are all timorous. They hide behind customs and opinions. At bottom, every human being knows very well that he is in this world just once, as something unique, and that no accident, however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity such a curious and diffuse plurality: he knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience why? From fear of his neighbour who insists on convention and veils himself with it. But what is it that compels the individual human being to fear his neighbour, to think and act herd-fashion, and not to be glad of himself? A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases. In the vast majority it is the desire for comfort, inertia - in short, that inclination to laziness of which the traveller spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are timorous, and what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them. Only artists hate this slovenly life in borrowed manners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil the secret, everybody's bad conscience, the principle that every human being is a unique wonder; they dare to show us the human being as he is, down to the last muscle, himself and himself alone even more, that in this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and worth contemplating, as novel and incredible as every work of nature, and by no means dull. When a great thinker despises men, it is their laziness that he despises: for it is on account of this that they have the appearance of factory products and seem indifferent and unworthy of companionship or instruction. The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass must merely cease being comfortable with himself; let him follow his conscience which shouts at him: 'Be yourself! What you are at present doing, opining, and desiring, that is not really you.'"

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Challenge of Every Great Philosophy)

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. ... the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue."

(Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

"It is by History which is created, lived, and really remembered as 'tradition' that Man realized himself or 'appears' as a dialectical totality, instead of annihilating himself and 'disappearing' by 'pure' or 'abstract' negation of every given whatsoever, real or thought. It is in the lack of historical memory (or understanding) that the moral danger of Nihilism or Skepticism resides which would negate everything without preserving anything, even in the form of memory. A society that spends its time listening to the radical 'nonconformist' Intellectual, who amuses himself by (verbally!) negating any given at all (even the 'sublimated' given preserved in historical remembrance) solely because it is a given, ends up sinking into active anarchy and disappearing. Likewise, the Revolutionary who dreams of a 'permanent revolution' that negates every type of tradition and takes no account of concrete past, except to overcome it, necessarily ends up either in the nothingness of social anarchy or in annulling himself physically or politically. Only the Revolutionary who manages to maintain or reestablish the historical tradition, by preserving in a positive memory the given present which he himself has relegated to the past by his negation, succeeds in creating a new historical World capable of existing."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"'The truth will not run away from us' – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past that threatens to disappear with every present that does not recognize itself as meant in it."

(Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History)

"It may be that continuity of tradition is mere semblance. But then precisely the persistence of this semblance of persistence provides it with continuity."

(Walter Benjamin, "Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress", The Arcades Project)

"How could something come from history? Without history, becoming would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but becoming is not historical."

"...becoming is the concept itself. It is born in History, and falls back into it, but is not of it. In itself it has neither beginning nor end but only a milieu."

"History is not experimentation, it is only the set of almost negative conditions that make possible the experimentation of something that escapes history. Without history experimentation would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but experimentation is not historical. It is philosophical."

(Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?)

The Despisers of the Body from Thus Spake Zarathustra

To the despisers of the body will I speak my word. I wish them neither to learn afresh, nor teach anew, but only to bid farewell to their own bodies,—and thus be dumb.

“Body am I, and soul”—so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children?

But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith: “Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body.”

The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.

An instrument of thy body is also thy little sagacity, my brother, which thou callest “spirit”—a little instrument and plaything of thy big sagacity.

“Ego,” sayest thou, and art proud of that word. But the greater thing—in which thou art unwilling to believe—is thy body with its big sagacity; it saith not “ego,” but doeth it.

What the sense feeleth, what the spirit discerneth, hath never its end in itself. But sense and spirit would fain persuade thee that they are the end of all things: so vain are they.

Instruments and playthings are sense and spirit: behind them there is still the Self. The Self seeketh with the eyes of the senses, it hearkeneth also with the ears of the spirit.

Ever hearkeneth the Self, and seeketh; it compareth, mastereth, conquereth, and destroyeth. It ruleth, and is also the ego’s ruler.

Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage—it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body.

There is more sagacity in thy body than in thy best wisdom. And who then knoweth why thy body requireth just thy best wisdom?

Thy Self laugheth at thine ego, and its proud prancings. “What are these prancings and flights of thought unto me?” it saith to itself. “A by–way to my purpose. I am the leading–string of the ego, and the prompter of its notions.”

The Self saith unto the ego: “Feel pain!” And thereupon it suffereth, and thinketh how it may put an end thereto—and for that very purpose it IS MEANT to think.

The Self saith unto the ego: “Feel pleasure!” Thereupon it rejoiceth, and thinketh how it may ofttimes rejoice—and for that very purpose it IS MEANT to think.

To the despisers of the body will I speak a word. That they despise is caused by their esteem. What is it that created esteeming and despising and worth and will?

The creating Self created for itself esteeming and despising, it created for itself joy and woe. The creating body created for itself spirit, as a hand to its will.

Even in your folly and despising ye each serve your Self, ye despisers of the body. I tell you, your very Self wanteth to die, and turneth away from life.

No longer can your Self do that which it desireth most:—create beyond itself. That is what it desireth most; that is all its fervour.

But it is now too late to do so:—so your Self wisheth to succumb, ye despisers of the body.

To succumb—so wisheth your Self; and therefore have ye become despisers of the body. For ye can no longer create beyond yourselves.

And therefore are ye now angry with life and with the earth. And unconscious envy is in the sidelong look of your contempt.

I go not your way, ye despisers of the body! Ye are no bridges for me to the Superman!—

Thus spake Zarathustra.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra)

Eternal Return: Taking the Point of View of Reproduction

"Everything begins with reproduction."

(Jacques Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing", Writing and Difference)

"Whatever the form of the process of production in a society, it must be a continuous process, must continue to go periodically through the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and as flowing on with incessant renewal, every social process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction."

(Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1)

"The tenacious obviousnesses (ideological obviousnesses of an empiricist type) of the point of view of production alone, or even of that of mere productive practice (itself abstract in relation to the process of production) are so integrated into our everyday 'consciousness' that it is extremely hard, not to say almost impossible, to raise oneself to the point of view of reproduction. Nevertheless, everything outside this point of view remains abstract (worse than one-sided: distorted) -- even at the level of production, and, a fortiori, at that of mere practice."

(Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses)

"For the real truth of the matter -- the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium -- is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself. Hence everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions; production of recording processes, of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference; productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties and of pain. Everything is production, since the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptions directly reproduced."

(Gillies Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Œdipus)

"My doctrine says that the task is to live in such a way that you have to wish to live again -- you will do so in any case."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power Manuscripts)

"The thought of eternal return thinks being in such a way that being as whole summons us without cease. It asks us whether we merely want to drift with the tide of things or whether we would be creators. Prior to that, it asks us whether we desire the means and the conditions by which we might again become creators."

(Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume 2)

"The new philosopher can arise only in conjunction with a ruling caste, as its highest spiritualization."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power Manuscripts)

"Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization of philosophy."

(Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

"Only those who hold their existence to be capable of eternal repetition will remain: and with such people a condition is possible to which no utopian has ever attained."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power Manuscripts)

Hope?

"Looking back, one may almost ask one's self with reason if it was not actually an aesthetic sense that kept men blind so long: what they demanded of the truth was picturesque effectiveness, and of the learned a strong appeal to their senses."

(Friederich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life."

(Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction)

"The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightaway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

"A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labor, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work of bourgeois government.

"Bourgeois socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

"Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.

"It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois -- for the benefit of the working class."

(Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

"Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it -- so high, indeed, that no fulfillment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world. (Precisely because of this power that hope has of making the suffering hold out, the Greeks regarded it as the evil of evils, as the malign of evils; it remained behind at the source of all evil [in Pandora’s box].)"

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"Just as one might say about Revolutionary Ages that they run out of control, one can say about the Present Age that it doesn't run at all. The individual and the generation come between and stop each other; and therefore the prosecuting attorney would find it impossible to admit any fact at all, because nothing happens in this generation. From a flood of indications one might think that either something extraordinary happened or something extraordinary was just about to happen. But one will have thought wrong, for indications are the only thing the present age achieves, and its skill and virtuosity entirely consist in building magical illusions; its momentary enthusiasms which use some projected change in the forms of things as an escape for actually changing the forms of things, are the highest in the scale of cleverness and the negative use of that strength which is the passionate and creating energy during Revolutionary Ages. Eventually, this present age tires of its chimerical attempts until it declines back into indolence. Its condition is like one who has just fallen asleep in the morning: first, great dreams, then laziness, and then a witty or clever reason for staying in bed."

(Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age)

The Bourgeois and Christianity

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

(Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

"Every enhancement in the type 'man' up to this point has been the work of an aristocratic society — and that’s how it will always be, over and over again: a society which believes in a long scale of rank ordering and differences in worth between man and man and which, in some sense or other, requires slavery."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

"... Man was born and History began with the first Fight that ended in the appearance of Master and Slave. That is to say that Man -- at his origin -- is always either Master or Slave; and that true Man can only exist where there is Master and Slave."

"Now, one can in fact overcome the contradiction of a given existence only by transforming modifying given existence, by transforming it through Action. But in the Slave's case, to transform existence is, again, to fight against the Master. Now, he does not want to do this. He tries, therefore, to justify by a new ideology this contradiction in skeptical existence, which is, all things considered, the Stoic -- i.e. slavish -- contradiction between the idea or the ideal of Freedom and the reality of Slavery. And this third and last Slave's-ideology is the Christian ideology."

"Without Fighting, without effort, therefore, the Christian realizes the Slave's ideal: he obtains -- in and through (or for) God equality with the Master: inequality is but a mirage, like everything in this World of the senses in which Slavery and Mastery hold sway."

"Indeed, the Christian Slave can affirm his equality with the Master only by accepting the existence of an 'other world' and a transcendent God. Now, this God is necessarily a Master, and an absolute Master."

"[With adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire] we have found the solution to the problem that interests us: the Masters have accepted the ideology of their Slaves; the pagan Man of Mastery has become the Christian Man of Slavery; and all this without a Fight, without a Revolution properly so-called-because the Masters themselves have become Slaves. Or, more precisely, pseudo-Slaves, or, if you will, pseudo-Masters. For they are no longer real Masters, since they no longer risk their lives; but they are not real Slaves either, because they do not work in the service of another. They are, so to speak, Slaves without Masters, pseudo-Slaves. And by ceasing to be true Masters, they end in no longer having real Slaves: they free them, and thus the slaves themselves become slaves without Masters, pseudo-Masters. Therefore, the opposition of Mastery and Slavery is overcome. Not, however, because the Slaves have become true Masters. The unification is effected in pseudo-Mastery, which is--in fact--a pseudo-Slavery, a Slavery without Masters."

"This Slave without a Master, this Master without a Slave, is what Hegel calls the Bourgeois, the private property-owner. It is by becoming a private property-owner that the Greek Master, a citizen of the city, becomes the peaceful Roman Bourgeois, a subject of the Emperor, who himself is but a Bourgeois, a private property-owner, whose Empire is his patrimony. And it is also in relation to private property that the freeing of the slaves is carried out; they become property-owners, Bourgeois, like their ex-masters."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum,-- overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is not yet understood? The imperium Romanum that we know, and that the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better,--this most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was not to prove its worth for thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed of!--This organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing to do with such things--the first principle of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the corruptest of all forms of corruption--against Christians. . . . These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of all instinct for reality--this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all 'souls,' step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the unio mystica in the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge--all that sort of thing became master of Rome..."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"...the Bourgeois problem seems insoluble: he must work for another and can work only for himself. Now in fact, Man manages to resolve this problem, and he resolves it once more by the bourgeois principle of private Property. The Bourgeois does not work for another. But he does not work for himself taken as a biological entity either. He works for himself taken as a "legal person," as a private Property-owner: he works for Property taken as such--i.e., Property that has now become money; he works for Capital."

"In other words, the bourgeois Worker presupposes--and conditions--an Enstagung, and Abnegation of human existence. Man transcends himself, surpasses himself, projects himself far away from himself by projecting himself onto the idea of private Property, of Capital, which--while being the Property-owners own product--becomes independent of him and enslaves him just as the Master enslaved the Slave; with this difference however, that enslavement is now conscious and freely accepted by the Worker. (We see, by the way, that for Hegel, as for Marx, the central phenomenon of the bourgeois World is not the enslavement of the working man, of the poor bourgeois, by the rich bourgeois, but the enslavement of both by Capital.). However that may be, bourgeois existence presupposes, engenders, and nourishes Abnegation. Now it is precisely this Abnegation that reflects itself in the dualistic Christian ideology, while providing it with a new, specific, nonpagan content. It is the same Christian dualism that is found again in bourgeois existence: the opposition between the "legal Person," the private Property-owner, and the man of flesh and blood; the existence of an deal, transcendent World, represented in reality by Money, Capital, to which Man is supposed to devote his Actions, to sacrifice his sensual, biological Desires."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"And the same is true for nihilistic Skepticism: private property is its real basis and its social, historical reality. The nihilistic skepticism of the solipsistic Slave, who attributes a true value and a true being only to himself, is found again in the private property-owner, who subordinates everything, the State itself, to the absolute value of his own property."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"A 'disinterested' love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all."

(Gilles Deleuze, "Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium")

"Suppose the oppressed, depressed, suffering, and unfree people, those ignorant of themselves and tired out, suppose they moralize: what will be the common feature of their moral estimates of value?... those characteristics will be pulled forward and flooded with light which serve to mitigate existence for those who suffer: here respect is given to pity, to the obliging hand ready to help, to the warm heart, to patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness — for these are here the most useful characteristics and almost the only means to endure the pressure of existence. Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

"It seems difficult for a philosophy of force or of the will to explain how the reactive forces, how the slaves, or the weak can win. If all that happens is that together they form a force greater than of the strong, it is hard to see what has changed and what a qualitative evaluation is based on. But in fact, the weak, the slaves, triumph not by adding up their forces but by subtracting those of the other: they separate the strong from what they can do. They triumph not because of the composition of their power but because of the power of their contagion. They bring about a becoming-reactive of all forces. That is what 'degeneration' means. Nietzsche shows early on that the criteria of the struggle for life, of natural selection, necessarily favor the weak and the sick, the "secondary ones" (by sick is meant a life reduced to its reactive processes). This is all the more true in the case of man, where the criteria of history favor the slaves as such. It is a becoming-sick of all life, a becoming slave of all men, that constitutes the victory of nihilism. We must again avoid misconceptions about the Nietzschean terms 'strong' and 'weak,' 'master' and 'slave': it is clear that the slave doesn't stop being a slave when he gets power, nor do the weak cease to be weak. Even when they win, reactive forces are still reactive. In everything, according to Nietzssche, what is at stake is a qualitative typology: a question of baseness and nobility. Our masters are slaves that have triumphed in a universal becoming-slave: European man, domesticated man, the buffoon. Nietzsche describes modern states as ant colonies, were the leaders and the powerful win through their baseness, through the contagion of this baseness and this buffoonery. What ever the complexity of Nietzsche's work, the reader can easily guess which category (that is, in which type) he would have placed the race of 'masters' conceived by the Nazis. When nihilism triumphs, then and only then does the will to power stop meaning 'to create' and start to signify instead 'to want power,' 'to want to dominate' (thus to attribute to oneself or to have other attribute to one established values: money, honors, power, and so on). Yet that kind of will to power is precisely that of the slave; it is the way in which the slave or the impotent concieves of power, the idea he has of it and that he applies when he triumphs. It can happen that a sick person says, Oh! if I were well, I would do this or that -- and maybe he will, but his plans and his thoughts are still those of a sick person, only a sick person. The same goes for the slave and his conception of mastery or power. The same goes for the reactive man and his conception of action. Values and evaluations are always being reversed, things are always seen from a petty angle, images are reversed as in a bull's eye. One of Nietzsche's greatest sayings is: 'We must always protect the strong from the weak.'"

(Gilles Deleuze, "Nietzsche", Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life)

"Yet where arises the urgent cry for the overman? Why does prior humanity no longer suffice? Because Nietzsche recognizes the historic moment in which man takes it on himself to assume dominion over the earth as a whole. Nietzsche is the first thinker [ignoring Marx's entire critical project] to pose the decisive question concerning the phase of world history that is emerging only now, the first to think the question through in its metaphysical implications. The question asks: is man in his essence heretofore prepared to assume dominion over the earth? If not, what must happen with prior humanity in order that it may 'subjugate' the earth and thus fulfill the prophecy of an old testament. Must not prior man be conducted beyond himself, over his prior self, in order to meet this challenge? If so, then the 'over-man' properly thought, cannot be the product of an unbridled and degenerate fantasy that is plunging head long into the void. We can just as little uncover the nature of the over-man historically by virtue of the modern age. We do not seek the essential figure of the over-man in those personalities who, as major functionaries of a shallow, misguided will to power are swept to the pinnacles of that will's sundry organizational forms."

(Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: volume 2)

"Let us not under-estimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a 'transvaluation of all values,' a visualized declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of 'true' and 'not true.' The most valuable intuitions are the last to be attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine methods."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization of philosophy."

"By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order, the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has raised to the rank of its principle, what is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society without its own participation. The proletarian then finds himself possessing the same right in regard to the world which is coming into being as the German king in regard to the world which has come into being when he calls the people his people, as he calls the horse his horse. By declaring the people his private property, the king merely proclaims that the private owner is king."

(Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

"The workers shall live one day as the bourgeoisie do now -- but above them, distinguished by their freedom from wants, the higher caste: thus poorer and simpler but in possession of power."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power Manuscripts)

"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."

(Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

On the mission of youth

"We must in all seriousness despise instruction without vitality, knowledge which enervates activity, and history as an expensive surplus of knowledge and a luxury, because we lack what is still most essential to us and because what is superfluous is hostile to what is essential. To be sure, we need history. But we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it, no matter how elegantly he may look down on our coarse and graceless needs and distresses. That is, we need it for life and for action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and from action or for merely glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act. "

"And here I recognize the mission of that youth, that first generation of fighters and dragon slayers, which brings forth a more fortunate and more beautiful culture and humanity, without having more of this future happiness and beauty still to come than a promise-filled premonition. These youth will suffer from the evil and the counter-measures simultaneously, and nevertheless they believe they may boast of a more powerful health and in general a more natural nature than their previous generations, the educated 'Men' and 'Old Men' of the present. However, their mission is to shake the ideas which this present holds about 'health' and 'culture' and to develop contempt and hatred against such hybrid monstrous ideas. The guaranteed mark of their own stronger health is to be precisely the fact that they, I mean these young people, themselves can use no idea, no party slogan, from the presently circulating currency of words and ideas as a designation of their being, but are convinced only by a power acting in it, a power which fights, eliminates, and cuts into pieces, and by an always heightened sense of life in every good hour. People may dispute the fact that these youth already have culture, but for what young person would this be a reproach? People may speak against their crudeness and immoderation, but they are not yet old and wise enough to be content; above all, they do not need to feign any ready-made culture to defend and enjoy all the comforts and rights of youth, especially the privilege of a braver spontaneous honesty and the energizing consolation of hope."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life)

Notes on the World Historical Individual: Fragments from Marx, Freud, and Deleuze

"Modern Industry never looks upon and treats the existing form of a process as final. The technical basis of that industry is therefore revolutionary, while all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually causing changes not only in the technical basis of production, but also in the functions of the labourer, and in the social combinations of the labour-process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionises the division of labour within the society, and incessantly launches masses of capital and of workpeople from one branch of production to another. But if Modern Industry, by its very nature, therefore necessitates variation of labour, fluency of function, universal mobility of the labourer, on the other hand, in its capitalistic form, it reproduces the old division of labour with its ossified particularisations. We have seen how this absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of Modern Industry, and the social character inherent in its capitalistic form, dispels all fixity and security in the situation of the labourer; how it constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands his means of subsistence, and, by suppressing his detail-function, to make him superfluous, We have seen, too, how this antagonism vents its rage in the creation of that monstrosity, an industrial reserve army, kept in misery in order to be always at the disposal of capital; in the incessant human sacrifices from among the working-class, in the most reckless squandering of labour-power and in the devastation caused by a social anarchy which turns every economic progress into a social calamity. This is the negative side. But if, on the one hand, variation of work at present imposes itself after the manner of an overpowering natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a natural law that meets with resistance at all points, Modern Industry, on the other hand, through its catastrophes imposes the necessity of recognising, as a fundamental law of production, variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied work, consequently the greatest possible development of his varied aptitudes. It becomes a question of life and death for society to adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this law. Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."

(Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1)

"Long ago [Man] formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To those gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him. One may say, therefore that those gods were cultural ideals. Today he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost become a god himself. Only, it is true, in the fashion in which ideals are attained according to the general judgment of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others half way. Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he his truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times."

(Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents)

"What does Foucault mean when he says there is no point in crying over the death of man? In fact, has this form been a good one? Has it helped to enrich or even preserve the forces within man, those of living, speaking, or working? Has it saved living men from a violent death? The question that continually returns is therefore the following: if the forces within man compose a form only by entering into a relation with forms from the outside, with what new forms do they now risk entering into a relation, and what new form will emerge that is neither God nor Man? This is the correct place for the problem which Nietzsche called 'the superman'."

"It is a problem where we have to content ourselves with very tentative indications if we are not to descend to the level of cartoons. Foucault, like Nietzsche, can only sketch in something embryonic and not yet functional. Nietzsche said that man imprisoned life, but the superman is what frees life within man himself, to the benefit of another form, and so on. Foucault proffers a very peculiar piece of information: if it is true that nineteenth-century humanist linguistics was based on the dissemination of languages, as the condition for a 'demotion of language' as an object, one repercussion was none the less that literature took on a completely different function that consisted, on the contrary, in 'regrouping' language and emphasizing a 'being of language' beyond whatever it designates and signifies, beyond even the sounds. The peculiar thing is that Foucault, in his acute analysis of modern literature, here gives language a privilege which he refuses to grant to life or labour: he believes that life and labour, despite a dispersion concomitant with that of language, did not lose the regrouping of their being. It seems to us, though, that when dispersed labour and life were each able to unify themselves only by somehow breaking free from economics or biology, just as language managed to regroup itself only when literature broke free from linguistics."

"Biology had to take a leap into molecular biology, or dispersed life regroup in the genetic code. Dispersed work had to regroup in third-generation machines, cybernetics and information technology. What would be the forces in play, with which the forces within man would then enter into a relation? It would no longer involve raising to infinity or finitude but an unlimited finity, thereby evoking every situation of force in which a finite number of components yields a practically unlimited diversity of combinations. It would be neither the fold nor the unfold that would constitute the active mechanism, but something like the Superfold, as borne out by the foldings proper to the chains of the genetic code, and the potential of silicon in third-generation machines, as well as by the contours of a sentence in modern literature, when literature 'merely turns back on itself in an endless reflexivity'. "

"This modern literature uncovers a 'strange language within language' and, through an unlimited number of superimposed grammatical constructions, tends towards an atypical form of expression that marks the end of language as such (here we may cite such examples as Mallarme's book, Peguy's repetitions, Artaud's breaths, the agrammaticality of Cummings, Burroughs and his cut-ups and fold-ins, as well as Roussel's proliferations, Brisset's derivations, Dada collage, and so on). And is this unlimited finity or superfold not what Nietzsche had already designated with the name of eternal return?"

"The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier. In each case we must study the operations of the superfold, of which the 'double helix' is the best- known example. What is the superman? It is the formal compound of the forces within man and these new forces. It is the form that results from a new relation between forces. Man tends to free life, labour and language within himself. The superman, in accordance with Rimbaud's formula, is the man who is even in charge of the animals (a code that can capture fragments from other codes, as in the new schemata of lateral or retrograde). It is man in charge of the very rocks, or inorganic matter (the domain of silicon). It is man in charge of the being of language (that formless, 'mute, unsignifying region where language can find its freedom' even from whatever it has to say). As Foucault would say, the superman is much less than the disappearance of living men, and much more than a change of concept: it is the advent of a new form that is neither God nor man and which, it is hoped, will not prove worse than its two previous forms."

(Gilles Deleuze, Foucault)