Deleuze's Nietzsche and Post-Structuralist Thought Author(s): Vincent P. Pecora Source: SubStance, Vol. 14, No.

3, Issue 48 (1986), pp. 34-50 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684995 . Accessed: 17/10/2011 17:52
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Deleuze's Nietzsche and Post-StructuralistThought

VINCENTP. PECORA

But you should always try to replace my hesitating explanation by a better one. For the origin of historical culture, and of its absolutely radical antagonism to the spirit of a new time and a "modern consciousness," must itself be known by a historical process. History must solve the problem of history, science must turn its sting against itself. -Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History

We have now had roughly a quarter century of "post-structuralism"if, that is, one can decide that something called "structuralism" ever happened, if one uses the earliest work of Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault as some sort of historical marker, and if (perhaps most of all) one is interested in calculating such things in the first place. It is clearly possible now to take stock of this situation and explain post-structuralism to a wider audience-for example, by reading it against the current of other competing theoretical positions, as Terry Eagleton has most recently done. Yet, in many ways, the philosophical, cultural, and political density of any mode of thought that might be called post-structuralist is still weirdly difficult to articulate-or to hear articulated-in America; it is as if we had engaged countless tutors and adopted a wide variety of points of view-in the truest sense of a democratic pluralism-and had remained somehow in the dark, groping for an intellectual wall to follow. "Poststructuralism" becomes "deconstruction" becomes "free play," and largely what this means is a style of literary criticism that has adopted as its goal the displacement of any center of meaning in a text and the disruption of any thematic reading, sometimes for the purposes of descrying the forces of domination inherent to the literary construction that would compel the reader toward such conclusions. No matter how many theoretical analyses are produced to correct the flat, reductive quality of this reception, the American literary community as a whole-both "pre-" and
Sub-Stance N? 48, 1986

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"post-" structuralist-seems constitutionally unable (or unwilling) to of the new discourse, even in its full the historical significance argue reductive form, unwilling in many cases to penetrate or examine what appear to be wonderful streams of jargon in order to grab hold of something that could at least be wrestled with. To a large degree, of course, it is precisely the unmatched efficiency of American pluralism that has in fact stimulated such a condition-at a table with no etiquette, ingestion is often more important than taste. Post-structuralism has indeed become a fact of contemporary literary life, but, to borrow from Benjamin, merely as a "lived moment," not as something truly experienced. In spite of the hostility engendered at first, it has quite simply been appropriated like any new commodity on the market. Various reasons have been given, ranging from the pragmatics of accommodation elaborated by Stanley Fish to the Marxian indictment of a late-capitalist market environment. Though I have certain sympathies with each view, I still sense that something vital is missing, and Benjamin's distinction keeps invoking itself: why has so much contemporary intellectual work been received here, and produced here, only as something present and useful to conscious, daily existence (for example, to a career), rather than as something that might have any effect on those more deeply felt levels where what is lived becomes a part of experience-a part of a lasting, meaningful relationship with the world? The absence of a real process of confrontation and engagement that would make such an impression in this country-as opposed, for example, to shouting matches over the question whether a text means one thing or not-is a crucial aspect of recent American intellectual life that cannot be explained simply by invoking market forces or a pragmatic spirit. What I would like to inject into the discussion is the question of table manners. That is, what would an etiquette that prevented a value-less consumption look like? The answer has in many ways already emerged in the degree to which post-structuralism is understood in America as a school of literary criticism rather than as a broader philosophical, psychological, and political critique. The etiquette that is missing here, the set of commonly accepted intellectual practices that formed the heritage in Europe against which post-structuralism took shape, is a long and fruitful tradition of dialecticalthought: from Plato to Hegel, from Marx to Husserl and Heidegger. It is the dialectic-understood now as a philosophical, and political, way of life for the European thinker, and notjust as a style of literary analysis-that set the table and wrote the rules for a generation of French writers who came, or at least tried, to reject wholesale what it offered. And it is the Nietzsche elaborated by Gilles Deleuze that becomes a pivotal figure in the reaction against this dialectical tradition. If Deleuze is among the least known French philosophers in America, while for Foucault we live in what might eventually be called a "Deleuzian" century, it is only one more sign of a failure here to sense where the real action was

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taking place. For that reason, if for no other, this might be the right time to take a hard look at what Deleuze found so compelling in Nietzsche nearly twenty-five years ago.

Post-structuralism, then, if we are to follow Deleuze, may be said to emerge out of the replacement (or what I would call, polemically, the negation) of "le travail de la dialectique" by the play of "difference." For modern philosophy, the "dialectic" is evoked most powerfully by Hegel, whose shadow hangs large even after the intervention announced by Nietzsche. But more generally, dialectics represents the entire history of Western philosophy after Plato and beyond Hegel's phenomenological science-in a sense, that is, the history of Western "rationality" itself. As Theodor Adorno, in his own critique of this tradition, wrote: "As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the thought figure of a 'negation of negation' later became the succinct term."' Gilles Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche, in his Nietzscheet la philosophie (1962), marks an important step in the subversion of this tradition in contemporary critical thinking-a step that of course has its own predecessors, its own genealogy. But it is through Deleuze that the negative power of the dialectic is called so radically, so categorically,into question: "Difference reflects itself and repeats or reproduces itself. The eternal return is this highest power, the synthesis of affirmation which finds its principle in the will. The lightness of that which affirms against the weight of the negative; the games of the will to power against the labor of the dialectic; the affirmation of affirmation against that famous negation of the negation."2 It is, I would suggest, in this opposition (for lack of a better, less "dialectical," word) between the "labor of the dialectic" and the "games of the will to power" read as the reproduction or repetition of difference that the beginnings of "post-structuralist" thought are to be found. It is with Deleuze's particular elaboration of Nietzsche's "will to power" as the play of difference, and with its consequences, that I will be primarily concerned in this essay. "Difference" is itself a term appropriated and reshaped by Deleuze, not one invented out of nothing. It has its own history, beginning perhaps with Saussure's description of language as a system of differences without positive terms: "Dans la langue il n'y a que des diff6rences sans termes positifs."3 It is important to note, at this point, only that Saussure's description obtains at the level of the system as a structural whole: there would be no reason to introduce the notion of difference as a defining characteristic if meaning were immanent in individual "positive" terms. What is immanent in language as a whole is nothing but difference. Later, in his 1950 lecture "Die Sprache," Heidegger named the intimacy of the ("difference," but separation between world and things "derUnter-Schied"

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with the sense of "mutual separation") and goes on to say: "Language speaks, in that the command [or bidding] of the difference calls world and things into the simplicity ["Einfalt": the one-fold] of their intimacy... Language, the ringing of stillness, exists, in that difference occurs. Language is efficacious as the occurring of difference for world and things."4 That is, for Heidegger, the relationship between world and thingsbetween what Hegel might have called the universal and the particularis already non-dialectical: it is not man that dialectically struggles to speak the truth-a subject naming objects-but language that speaks, and what language speaks is ... difference, the non-identity of world and things that finds an "intimacy" in man. The "labor"of Hegel's dialectic is already being supplanted in Heidegger's phenomenal "intimacy." But why, it will properly be asked at this point, should the history of philosophy as dialectic have become so oppressive-so laborious-in certain kinds of postwar European thought? The answers are naturally complex and range from a disenchantment in some quarters of the political left with material dialectics as a practical guide after Stalin, to a growing sense that nineteenth-century "historicism," criticized by modern phenomenology for its tendency toward relativism and passive skepticism, had itself only been reconstituted, rehabilitated, by the twentiethcentury notion of structure.The work of Jacques Derrida may provide a useful guide to this development. In a lecture on Husserl given three years before the publication of Nietzsche et la philosophie,Derrida articulates such a dissatisfaction with the notion of structure in paradigmatic terms: The Idea of truth, that is the Idea of philosophyor of science, is an infinite Idea, an Idea in the Kantian sense. Every totality,every finite structure is inadequate to it. Now the Idea or the project which animates and unifies historical structure, every Weltanschauung, is finite: on the every determined basis of the structuraldescriptionof a visionof theworld one can account for everything except the infinite opening to truth, that is, philosophy. Morewhichwillfrustratethe structuralover, it is alwayssomething like an opening ist project. What I can never understand, in a structure,is that by means of which it is not closed.5 In this early lecture, Derrida goes on to use "difference"-now with a consciously doubled significance-to step behind, and ultimately subvert, the opposition he draws between an historical structure and an infinite conceptual field. must revertbackor be reduced to the Thus, the theory of the Weltanschauung strictlimitsof its own domain; its contoursare sketchedby a certaindifference between wisdom and knowledge.... This irreducibledifference is due to an interminabledelaying of the theoreticalfoundation. The exigen[differance] cies of life demand that a practicalresponse be organized on the field of historicalexistence, and that this response precede an absolutesciencewhose conclusions it cannot await."

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Derrida comes to see this difference that always already delaysor defers presence as constitutive of signification itself, of all systems of meaning and truth. But it should be no surprise to find here an echo of Hegel's opposition of finite and infinite, particular and universal, Selbstand Sein, in Derrida's formulation-an opposition whose reconciliation Hegel could prevent from being delayedonly by declaring an end to history itself. It is a gesture that Derrida, following Heidegger, will be led to make use of as he situates himself at the problematic closure of philosophy-a closure now marked, not by a Napoleon, but by the irruption of the play of difference into the history of dialectical thought. The point of all of this is that, after Saussure and Heidegger, "difference" for Derrida already functions as an "irreducible" subversion of the dialectic, a dialectic caught between the historical finite and the infinite absolute, largely because"historical existence" could no longer be understood to provide a way of reconciling them infact. What Derrida provides in this early essay, and what will later be taken up by Tel Quel, is an analysis that finally yields a celebration of "the play of difference" as the only alternative to a deadlocked dialectical tradition-to reason itself-as reason tries in vain to overcome its oppositional nature. That is, "difference" functions to disrupt the ideological character of any "practical response" to the "exigencies of life" before an "absolute science" can be attaiied. In a later lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play" of 1966, Derrida invokes Nietzsche's name as a source for this move: Turned towards the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, this structuralistthematicof broken immediacyis therefore the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseuisticside of the thinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzscheanaffirmation, thatis thejoyous affirmationof the of the world and of the of innocence play becoming, the affirmationof a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an activeinterpretation.Thisaffirmation thendetermines thenoncenter otherwise thanas lossof center. And it plays without security.7 And it is Deleuze who, in 1962, most powerfully introduced Nietzsche into the problematics of structure outlined earlier by Derrida. For Deleuze will read Nietzsche as one who provides the alternative not only to the "unhappy consciousness" that is one moment of the Hegelian dialectic, but to dialectics as the medium and support of that consciousness-to dialectics as the suffering, guilty, negating thought of ressentiment which can only affirm by negating twice. What must be understood is that Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche takes place at the point where an irreducible "difference" had already been elaborated, by means of the work of Saussure, Heidegger, and Derrida, as the never ending delay between the articulation of a particular historical structure and a theoretical foundation that gives it meaning, or between a particular representation and the total system within which it emerges. It is in a sense this delay, this within the history of dialectics, between, in the final analysis, "differance"

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the intelligible concept and its identification with an objective reality, that allows the play of difference to be used as an intellectual and political tool, as a means of obviating once and for all the delay inherent in all attempts at "identity" and "presence," and the guilt that has always attended this delay. That Deleuze should use difference to elaborate the will to power in Nietzsche must be seen as a way of relating Nietzsche's attempt to cure the "bad conscience" of his time through the transvaluation of all values to Deleuze's own particular historical and political circumstances. If, for Deleuze, difference is precisely that which is created and affirmed by the will to power, we should note to begin with the full resonance of this reading. All of the above forms, then, the genealogy of Deleuze's use of difference in his description of the function of the will to power in Nietzsche's work. It is important to take account of this background at the outset, for "difference"-as Unterschiedor Differenz or in any other form-is not a concept given any particular privileges in Nietzsche's work itself. But it is for Deleuze preciselythat which is at the root of Nietzsche's genealogical method and, ultimately, of the will to power. Nietzsche creates the new concept of genealogy. The philosopher is a genealogist rather than a Kantian tribunal judge or a utilitarian mechanic .... Nietzsche substitutesthe pathos of difference or distance(the differential element) for both the Kantianprinciple of universalityand the principleof resemblancedear to the utilitarians .... Genealogyis as opposed to absolutevaluesas it is to relativeor utilitarianones. Genealogysignifiesthe differential element of values from which their value itself derives. Genealogy thus means origin or birth, but also difference or distancein the origin. and Philosophy, (Nietzsche p. 2) The first point that must be noted here is that Deleuze has performed a Saussurian operation on the body of Nietzsche's work. That is, treating "values" as "signs" Deleuze can show that if one were to understand values in their structural whole, they would appear as terms whose meaning derives from the "element," or groundwork, of difference within the system, and not from any origin or source posited outside the system, that is, as some infinite absolute or Kantian Idea. Deleuze will more or less state this when he writes: "The whole of philosophy is a symptomatology, and a semeiology" (3). Now there is clearly evidence in Nietzsche's work for such a view; Nietzsche will point out, for example, that "the will to overcome an affect is ultimately only the will of another, of several other, affects."8 Thus, by systematizing the dominance of one force over another as the primary fact of all organic life, Deleuze can refer to the difference in quantity of force displayed by the affects as what is named by the will to power. But the second thing to note here is that, for Deleuze, Nietzsche's values are not simply relative-that is, meaningless-for "the truly and critical element" of is values a of sense genealogical nobility and

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baseness in the origin of values as well as their differential structure. What this means is that, for Deleuze, the value of values in Nietzsche is also a typological question-a question not only of a quantity of force, but of a quality: those values are noble whose origin is active, base whose origin is reactive. Thus, though values emerge only within a systematic whole that determines them, this determination is itself marked by the active (that is, affirmative) or reactive (that is, negative and hence dialectical) quality of its emergence. While genealogy will aim to evaluate all values according to this differential process, named by Deleuze the will to power, it is the eternal return that will be the guarantee that "what is better and better absolutely is that which returns, that which can bear returning, that which wills its return. The test of the eternal return will not let reactive forces subsist, any more than it will let the power of denying subsist" (86). In this way, will to power will not only name the "differential element" that is the structure of mutually defining valuations, but will to power will be the affirmation of the play of that difference, and through the eternal return, the affirmation of that which is active: thus, in the end, an affirmation of affirmation instead of a negation of negation. What we find in Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche is, then, what I will call a dualistic, or binary, coding of genealogy and of the will to power itself. That is, genealogy "means origin" but also "difference ... in the origin"; and will to power is both the "differential element" through which values, like signs, define themselves and a motive force behind the creation of values that is either active or reactive, affirmative or ... dialectical. It is this stubborn binarism-between "will to power" as finite "element" or mechanism or structure, and "will to power" as motivating, affirmative, and infinitely creative force outside (yet within) the domain of that finite structure-that remains fundamental to Deleuze's reading throughout, and that, I believe, is the "dialectical" turn at the heart of his interpretation. Now it should not be surprising to anyone familiar with Nietzsche's work and the history of its reception that the most problematic interpretive issues should arise out of the notion of the will to power. As much as Deleuze wants to redirect our attention away from the dialectical question, Qu'est-ce que ... ? toward the genealogical one, Qui?, he must inevitably ask in dialectical fashion: "What does the 'will to power' mean?" (79). Deleuze's answer will try to maintain both the multiplicity, what he calls the "pluralisme essentiel," of the will to power and a sense of valuecreating "hierarchy" within that pluralism. On the one hand, when we ask what the will to power means, Deleuze responds: "Not, primarily, that the will wants power, that it desires or seeks out power as an end, nor that power is the motive of the will" (p. 79). That is, in one way, will to power is not force or affect, not in any sense the feeling that comes with power (as Nietzsche sometimes implies), but a regulative mechanism, a "structuring" of the evaluating process as such. But, on the other hand, if "power is the one that wills in the will," we must ask, as Deleuze does, "what does it will?"

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Nietzsche's terms, we must say that every phenomenon not only reflects a type which constitutes its sense and value, but also the will to power as the element from which the significationof its sense and the value of its value andgiving:it does not creative derive. In thisway,thewill topoweris essentially above all it does not desire power. It it not does it not does desire, seek, aspire, "the will as in the . is virtue," through power the bestowing power gives: will itself bestows sense and value. (85) Leaving for the moment the apparent elision of "desire" as a psychological component here-an elision Nietzsche constantly warns against-we should understand the inescapably binary nature of Deleuze's formulation: will to power is both the finite structure, and the infinite truth, of evaluation; passive mechanism and motive force; differential element and absolute bestower, of sense and value. None of this is objectionable, of course, if we assume a more purely functional-hence arbitrary and relative-connection between value and power. That is, power can easily be both the differential element that defines values, and itself the creator of value, if power is the onlyarbiter, if all value is determined purely and simply by power, and if all values are thus relative in value. But, clearly, Deleuze is uncomfortable with this reading, so much so that the opposition between a quantitative structural description of valuation and a qualitative hierarchy within (or outside of) this structure is reformulated at the end of Nietzsche et la philosophieas Deleuze wrestles with the problem of how true valuations might be produced out of a history of false ones, how "affirmation" can occur in a history marked so far only by the triumph of reactive forces, of "ressentiment,"the bad conscience, and the ascetic ideal. For Deleuze this means a peculiarly Heideggerian distinction: "We 'think' the will to power in a form distinct from that in which we know it.... What we in fact know of the will to power is suffering and torture, but the will to power is still the unknown joy, the unknown happiness, the unknown God" (172-173). This distinction is then codified by Deleuze in terms reminiscent of scholastic philosophy. The ratio cognoscendiof the will to power in general is that aspect from which "by nature" derive "all known and knowable values" (172), that is, the history of the herd mentality, the triumph of But this is only one aspect of the will to power. "The unknown ressentiment. side, the other quality of the will to power, the unknown quality, is affirmation. And affirmation, in turn, is not merely a will to power, a quality of the will to power, it is the ratio essendiof thewill topowerin general" (173). For Deleuze, "creationtakesthe place of knowledgeitself and affirmation takes the place of all known negations."9 Thus, if the ratio cognoscendi is how values are actually known and put into use by us in the world, then the ratio essendiis precisely that sense of the creation of values freed from all particular conditions, the rational essence of the will to power itself. What, then, has happened to the will to power in Deleuze's reading? It has been interpreted as a structural whole that is the "differential element" by means of which force and value play-but a structural whole

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that is profoundly "dialectical" at its core. What Deleuze has achieved is a series of sliding translations: the dissatisfaction that attends the delay inherent in formulating a particular historical response-in Derrida's words-before an absolute science can be achieved will now be found at the core of the will to power. Deleuze will begin and end with the replacement of dialectics by the play of difference, the subversion of Hegel by Nietzsche. But the stubbornness of dialectical thinking will remain embedded in this field of difference. Dialectics will be fragmented, for Deleuze, by the will to power both as "differential element" and as "origin" of values. From there we move first to the will to power as the and the bad conscience and then to the will reactive history of ressentiment to power as the active creator of value. Finally, the will to power is codified by a Kantian distinction between how it actually appears and what it is in itself, or, perhaps more accurately, a Heideggerian distinction between the will to power as it has been known so far and how it may be thoughtin the future. The point I would like to make in all of this is that, for Deleuze, these "oppositions" are not oppositions at all-they are simply one more kind of difference, a difference that is in time merely a function of the transmutation of the negative into the affirmative, a transmutation that is in no sense a struggle: "Negation is opposedto affirmation but affirmation differs from negation"; affirmation is thus "the enjoyment and play of its own difference" (188). When affirmation affirms itself, difference is reflected,"raised to its highest power. Becoming is being, multiplicity is unity, chance is necessity. The affirmation of becoming is the affirmation of being . .. " (189). But opposition can only be dissolved in this way by positing "the play of its own difference" as the ratio essendiof the will to power-that is, as an aspect of the will to power completely unconditioned, completely out of the world of those conditions endured by the ratio cognoscendi-that is, values as so far known, values as the history of ressentiment, as dialectics. What Deleuze has not, cannot, dissolve so easily is the most fundamental opposition (not simply difference now) in his reading: the opposition between dialectics and the play of difference, between a thinking that constantly takes account of itself, that reflects upon itself, and a thinking that is allowed a claim of infinite movement as if freed from all conditions-physical, psychological, ideological. And the truest test that this final dialectic has stubbornly remained is that Deleuze still wants his play of difference to be, through the eternal return, somehow progressive, somehow reflective: "In relation to Dionysus, dance, laughter, play are affirmative powers of reflection and development."'0 If opposition were in fact dissolved, there would be no need for "reflection and development"-two essential features of the dialectic. In this sense, the opposition between dialectics and the play of difference that is the founding one for Deleuze is constantly recapitulated throughout his reading of Nietzsche-not only as twin poles of the will to power, but even embedded inside the play of difference that is the affirmative, creative pole itself.

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"Dialectics" has not been dissolved, it has been reinscribed as an inherent and constitutive moment in Deleuze's formulation of "difference" as a developmental process. II What, then, are the consequences of such a formulation, one that functions not only as a radical re-interpretation of the significance of Nietzsche's work, but also as a crucial moment in the history of postwar European philosophy and critical theory? To begin with, Deleuze's reading requires a most severe psychological reduction of Nietzsche's thinking-a reduction that goes beyond Heidegger's phenomenological dissection and even the most analytical Anglo-American discussions." As noted earlier, for Deleuze the will to power "does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power" (85). Throughout Nietzsche et la philosophie, "desire" as a component of Nietzsche's transvaluation of rational thought is systematically devalued-whether as desire for power or as "struggle" of any type whatsoever-since it is precisely "desire for" and "struggle against" that represent for Deleuze the oppositional, dialectical, negating character of ressentiment.Yet Nietzsche is nothing if not clear about the fictional nature of any attempt to do away with the process of desire and struggle, to posit a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject" which is for Nietzsche the first truth, and first error, of the idealist's position.'2 Deleuze will attempt to confine desire to the herd mentality and struggle to the reactive history of ressentiment, that Nietzsche diagnoses, but Nietzsche's work never really provides a formulation of the will to power freed from that history, outside of the realm of desire and struggle Nietzsche exploits in the service of producing a cruel-and perhaps more honest-appraisal of the progress of reason and moral truth. Indeed, it is nothing other than "desire"-the desire to know-that is most cruelly elaborated by means of the will to power. As Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil: Finally consider that even the seeker after knowledge forces his spirit to recognize things against the inclinationof the spirit, and often enough also against the wishes of his heart-by way of saying No where he would like to say Yes, love, and adore-and thus acts as an artist and transfigurer of cruelty. Indeed, any insistence on profundity and thoroughness is a violation, a desire to hurt the basic will of the spiritwhich unceasinglystrivesfor the apparent and superficial-in all desire to know there is a drop of cruelty. (sec. 229) The elimination of desire in Deleuze's analysis means that, for Deleuze, will to power in the end can suddenly function somehow outside the history of "the basic will of the spirit." It is in the very next section of BeyondGoodandEvil, in explanation of what he means by that "basicwill of

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the spirit," that Nietzsche offers what could serve as a precis of Deleuze's project and a model of the proper genealogical response to it: Here belongs also, finally ... that continual urge and surge of a creative, form-giving, changeable force: in this the spirit enjoys the multiplicityand craftiness of its masks, it also enjoys the feeling of its securitybehind them: after all, it is surely its Protean arts that defend and conceal it best. This will to mere appearance, to simplification,to masks, to cloaks, in short, to the surface-for every surfaceis a cloak-is countered by thatsublime inclination of the seeker after knowledge who insistson profundity, multiplicity, and thoroughness, with a will which is a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste. (sec. 230) Through his elimination of desire and struggle, through his notion of a ratio essendiof the will to power posited outside the history of a "basic will of the spirit" to appearance, simplification, and masks, Deleuze has also managed to eliminate an absolutely central motif in Nietzsche's genealogical method: the cruel and insistent willingness to oppose, and not simply to "differ from," that history. But beyond this elision of desire, yet intimately related to it, is Deleuze's larger attitude toward Nietzsche's project as a whole, an attitude rooted in Nietzsche's celebration of the dance and laughter of Dionysus in the face of the gravity of traditional metaphysics. For Deleuze, Dionysus' dance suggests a context that, like the psychological reduction of the will to power, disengages Nietzsche's thinking from the philosophical and cultural history Nietzsche himself is always aware of. That context, reiterated several times in Nietzsche et la philosophie and summarized at the conclusion, is "le jeu": the games of the will to power, of the play of difference, that replace the labor of the dialectic. Nietzsche is right to oppose his own game to the wager of Pascal."Without the Christian faith, thought Pascal, you will become for yourselves, like nature and history, a monster and a chaos: we havefulfilled thisprophecy." Nietzsche means: we have been able to discoveranother game, another way of playing; we have discovered the overman beyond two human-all-toohuman modes of existence;we have been able to affirmall chance,insteadof fragmentingit and allowinga fragmentto speakas master;we havebeen able to make chaos an objectof affirmationinstead of positing it as something to be denied.'3 There is, I think, a rather large gap between Nietzsche's sense that he had fulfilled Pascal's prophecy and become, in his own work, a monster and a chaos, and Deleuze's comment that this means that Nietzsche has found another way of playing, indeed, another game altogether, outside the parameters of Pascal's consciousness. Nietzsche does, of course, oppose Pascal (opposer-not diffrer-a curious verb for Deleuze to use if he is going to insist on Nietzsche's nondialectical methodology), but nowhere in the sense of constructing "sonproprejeu," as if it could simply be a

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replacement for another's, never as having discovered merely a different, more carefree, game to play. It is well to remember that Nietzsche is rarely so straightforward, so un-ironic, for in the middle of BeyondGoodand Evil we find a rather different approach to monsters and chaos: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you" (sec. 146). Or again, in Ecce Homo: "To mix nothing, to 'reconcile' nothing; a tremendous variety that is nevertheless the opposite of chaosthis was the precondition, the long, secret work and artistry of my instinct. Its higher protection...."914 That is, just as surely as Nietzsche maintains that he has become the monster and chaos that Pascal warned against, he also retains a full awareness of the profound difficulty of such a position, of the suffering and pain that must be surmounted, transformed, once such a position has been reached. First, if we look at the section of The Will to Power from which Deleuze is quoting here, it is obvious that what Nietzsche finds denied by Pascal, and later by Schopenhauer, is not simply chaos or chance, and that it is not simply chaos or chance that Nietzsche is affirming in response: "In an important sense, Schopenhauer is the first to take up again the movement of Pascal: un monstreet un chaos, consequently something to be negated.-History, nature, man himself."'5 That is, by wagering on the Christian faith, Pascal has bet against "history, nature, man himself." If Nietzsche has become a chaos, it is not merely to affirm "all chance"; rather, it is to embrace this decidedly "gentile" (in Vico's sense) trinity he finds systematically denied in the philosophical tradition before him. Second, integral to this complexity of tone that is more or less censored in Deleuze, there is Nietzsche's constant return to the pain such an attitude nevertheless produces for him, pain that can only be overcome through Dionysus' lightness of spirit. Citing the pessimism of Voltaire ("Un monstre gai vaut mieux / Qu'un sentimental ennuyeux") and Galiani, and chastising "the inconsequence of pessimism a la Schopenhauer," Nietzsche claims to have gone beyond them to "the most quintessential forms (Asia)." He then continues: "But in order to endure this type of extreme pessimism (it can be perceived here and there in my Birth of Tragedy) and to live alone 'without God and morality' I had to invent a counterpart for myself. Perhaps I know best why man alone laughs: he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as fitting, the most cheerful" (Will to Power, sec. 91). Now it is precisely this peculiar conjunction of profound suffering and superhuman laughter that is at once mostNietzschean, and most dissolved by Deleuze's scholastic distinctions that serve to insulate der Ubermenschfrom ressentiment,that posit both a ratio essendi and a ratio cognoscendiof the will to power. In Nietzsche, such absolute distinctions are never made: the overman never comes to be outside the progress of the ascetic ideal, and there are not merely two mutually exclusive aspects of the will to power but many forms that have appeared throughout its

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history, even to the moment at which Nietzsche is writing. If the overman is something Nietzsche sees on his horizon, it is clearly not anything that will be achieved easily, or as the spontaneous result of an affirmative, pluralistic dance and play. Rather, the dance of Dionysus appears for Nietzsche as the only means of accommodating the nearly unbearable psychological strain the overman must confront. On the Genealogy of Morals elaborates the paradoxical nature of this moral history in the final essay devoted to an analysis of the ascetic ideal: Everywhereelse that the spirit is strong, mighty, and at work without counterfeit today, it does without ideals of any kind-the popular expression for this abstinenceis "atheism"-exceptfor itswilltotruth. But this will,thisremnant of an ideal, is, if you will believe me, this ideal itself in its strictest, most spiritualformulation, esoteric through and through, with all external additions abolished,and thus not so much its remnantas its kernel. Unconditional honest atheism (and its is the only air we breathe, we more spiritualmen of this age!) is therefore notthe antithesisof that ideal, as it appears to be; it is rather only one of the latest phases of its evolution, one of its terminalforms and inner consequences-it is the awe-inspiringcatastrophe of two thousand in years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved beliefin God.... As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness-there can be no doubt of that-morality will graduallyperishnow: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe-the most terrible,most questionable,and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles. (Geneology of Morals,Third Essay, sec. 27) Unmistakable, both in the content and tone of these passages, is a methodological irony-an intellectual "cruelty"-directed first at Nietzsche's cultural heritage and then at Nietzsche's thinking itself, as it is inevitably a product of that heritage. That Nietzsche's own desirefor truth should be the result of an ascetic ideal he stands most opposed to, that the coming to consciousness of the truth of such a relationship should be simultaneously "terrible," "questionable," and (perhaps) "hopeful," is a state of mind-at once narrowly analytic and grandly historical in its implications-totally obscured by Deleuze's choice of emphases. Deleuze wants to show that the will to power is a subversion of traditional rationality-that is, dialecticsby the introduction of difference as a determinant of values. But if Nietzsche subverts the history of reason, it is not through an affirmation of the play of difference, but through a transvaluation of the very notion of dialectics-so that the history of reason in the West becomes, not the dialectic of pure conception, or pure representation, with an objective "reality," but instead the dialectic of reason as power. It is not so much that dialectics is replaced by a new game of difference, but that dialectics is shown to be shot through and through by a will to power-by a will that is always first a question of domination, appropriation, and assimilation even as it understands itself as "rational." Thus, by describing Nietzsche's achievement as having discovered

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"another game, another way of playing," and by making the focus of that game a play of difference in which "becoming is being, multiplicity is unity, chance is necessity," Deleuze has muted, indeed practically eradicated, the intellectual tensionthat is so crucial to Nietzsche's thought: that sense of walking a tightrope between the seemingly inevitable reproduction of one more rationalization of Judeo-Christian morality and the destructive apathy of late nineteenth-century European nihilism. It is not that Deleuze is wrong to remind us of Nietzsche's Dionysian playfulness aimed against a metaphysical gravity that had by Nietzsche's time produced, even in spite of itself, psychological repression, nihilism, and despair. Rather, it is Deleuze's unfortunate-and perhaps wishfulidealization of Nietzsche's work that is objectionable, so that this playfulness appears over no obstacles, in spite of no suffering, without any
struggle.16

We find in Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche, then, first an attempt to reveal the nondialectical nature of Nietzsche's thought, a claim that there could be "no possible compromise" between Nietzsche and Hegel; second, a codification of this thought in the will to power's "play of its own difference"; and finally, a transformation of the significance of the "chaos" Nietzsche has become from "history, nature, man himself' to "all chance," to "another game, another way of playing." Clearly, there is some basis for each of these moves in Nietzsche's work; but taken together, in the exclusive treatment that Deleuze provides, they amount to a very interesting revision of Nietzsche's writings that systematically purges them of the "human-all-too-human" marks of their own inception, marks Nietzsche is always very careful to leave visible-desire, especially desire for "the truth"; struggle, against one's own heritage, against one's "instincts"; suffering; opposition; tension; reflection; and, perhaps in the end, the inevitable error of reflection at the very heart of one's need for it. If any of these factors is an important part of the program of Nietzsche's critique of philosophy and culture in the late nineteenth century-his transvaluation of values-then Deleuze has indeed given us a very limited view of this critique. And it is this limited view that, I would suggest, lies beneath many of our present difficulties with "poststructuralist" thought. None of this is meant to deny the importance of Nietzsche for contemporary critical thinking, nor to deny the importance of much of that thinking itself. Derrida's critique of the phenomenological voice and linguistic "presence," Foucault's journey from structural to archeological to genealogical methods, Barthes's emphasis on an "ecriture" that seems to write itself, and the more or less ubiquitous subversion of the epistemological subject by networks of codes, practices, and discourses-all owe a great deal to Nietzsche, and all have been central to the flourishing of critical theory in our time. (The other central line-the German onehas, of course, been the Frankfurt School and its branches, and the debt here to Nietzsche is equally apparent.) But there is another far less

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persuasive side to this critical history, one that emerges at various points in Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, and their inheritors and that can be traced, I believe, to Deleuze. A glimpse of this "other" side may be obtained, perhaps, by returning to Derrida's 1966 lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play." Here, the Nietzschean affirmation represents a becoming that is "innocent," signs that are without "fault," "truth," or "origin," and "play" that takes place without the "security" of a center. Not only do such conclusions depend, as I have tried to show, on a severely limited view of Nietzsche's critique, but they presuppose a "world" that has in fact never yet appeared and that does not now exist. For Nietzsche, "becoming" is no more innocent than guilty-it is a fact of organic life, at once destructive, exploitative, and creative; signs may be without truth or origin, in the sense that they are subject to constant reinterpretation, but it is the specific genealogy of those interpretations that reveals a "truth," even in the absence of an origin. And if the Nietzschean affirmation "plays without security," this is not in any sense equivalent to a "joyous affirmation of the play of the world"-it is an affirmation of a particular historical drama that, in fact, must inevitably take certain forms, must, in following take certain courses and deny its own perhaps destructive-logic, "love" its fate. must indeed others, Nietzsche's many-eyed perspectivism (" . .the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity,' be" [Geneologyof Morals, Third Essay, sec. 12]) is central to Deleuze's pluralistic notion of a play of difference. But this pluralistic methodology is for Nietzsche always inevitably "in the service of knowledge"(emphasis mine): "To see differently in this way for once, to want to see differently, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future 'objectivity'-the latter understood not as 'contemplation without interest' (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability to controlone's Pro and Con and to dispose of them ... " (Geneology of Morals, Third Essay, sec. 12). To the degree that thinkers like Derrida have elaborated "difference" as a "discipline and preparation" for the ability to control values, rather than be controlled by them, Nietzsche's work has been actively, fruitfully extended. But to the degree that "difference" has come to signify a freedom of play that does not in fact exist, and that does not seem capable of reflection upon such a condition, Nietzsche's work has only been turned into a fantastic escape from "history, nature, man himself"-an escape Nietzsche warned against perhaps more often than he warned against any of the manifold "escapes" philosophy has so far invented. It is for this reason that we should be so suspect of Deleuze's denigration of labor or struggle or "reason" itself in Nietzscheet la philosophie,and of his later views of schizophrenia and psychoanalysis. For, despite all the service Deleuze has provided in helping to re-awaken a generation of intellectuals to the power of Nietzsche's writings, there remains the uneasy feeling that Nietzsche has been once more appropriated and ex-

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ploited-a task he would perhaps not have discouraged-but without the cruel irony of his reflection that would then have attempted to articulate the reasons for, and effects of, such an appropriation. Of course, this brings us back to the "delay" between the elaboration of a finite historical structure and absolute knowing, between Weltanschauungand philosophy, that Derrida analyzed in 1959. It is precisely this dialectical delay that Deleuze claims Nietzsche overcomes in the affirmations of the will to power. Ironically, however, it may be a master dialectician-Adornowho best sums up the Nietzschean tension Deleuze seems to have put aside: "The freedom of philosophy is nothing but the capacity to lend a voice to its un-freedom. If more is claimed for the expressive moment, it will degenerate into a weltanschauung; where the expressive moment and the duty of presentation are given up, philosophy comes to resemble science."'7 In a sense, this serves as a description of the peculiar habit of mind-a peculiar joy as well as a sadness-that runs throughout Nietzsche's work. It is perhaps most powerfully expressed by Nietzsche in the final section of Beyond Good and Evil: Alas, what are you after all, my writtenand paintedthoughts!It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious,full of thorns and secret spices-you made me sneeze and laugh-and now?You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths: decent, so dull! And has it ever they alreadylook so immortal,so pathetically been different? Whatthings do we copy, writingand painting,we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizersof things that canbe written-what are the only things we are able to paint?Alas,alwaysonly whatis on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance!. . . We immortalizewhat cannot live and fly much longer-only weary and mellow things! And it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colors, many colors perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellows and brownsand greens and reds:but nobodywillguess from that how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparksand wondersof my solitude,you my old beloved-wicked thoughts! Unless the Sehnsuchtof such writing is recognized-the wistful yearning for a means of representing that which actually "lives" and "flies," rather than always only those "things that can be written," the vital force that propels Nietzsche's work will be missed; and critical thinking will come to be satisfied with the false colors of an intellectual afternoon it pretends will never fade.
NOTES

1. Theodor Adorno, NegativeDialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum,

1983), p. xix. In this context, however, we should also note J. N. Findlay's remarks on negation and difference in his introduction to ThePhenomenology of Spirit,remarks that are in sharp contrast to Deleuze's attempt to distinguish rigorously between the two: "On Hegel's basic assumptions negation, in a wide sense that covers difference, opposition, and reflection or relation, is essential to conception and being: we can conceive nothing and have nothing if

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we attempt to dispense with it" (The Phenomenologyof Spirit [Oxford: Oxford University, 1979], p. ix). It will be Deleuze's contention that Nietzsche makes the play of difference possible without "negation." 2. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzscheet laphilosophie(Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962), and Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University, 1983), p. 197. Unless otherwise indicated, I have used Tomlinson's translation in subsequent citations. Where Tomlinson deviates in any significant way from Deleuze's original, I have provided my own translations and have so marked them. Nietzscheet la philosophiepresents a number of problems for translation and scholarship; Deleuze usually quotes Nietzsche from available French versions, but often without precise references, and these naturally provide an interpretation of Nietzsche's thinking, often with a change of emphasis or sense. Tomlinson generally uses Walter Kaufmann's translations of Nietzsche in place of these French versions, and the confusion multiplies. See especially my note 13 below. 3. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistiquegenerale (Paris: Payot, 1967), p. 166. 4. Martin Heidegger, "Die Sprache," in Unterwegszu Sprache(Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), p. 30, my translation. I am indebted to Susan Lhota for her suggestions concerning Heidegger's terminology. 5. Jacques Derrida, "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), p. 160. 6. Derrida, "'Genesis and Structure,"' p. 161. 7. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play," in Writing and Difference, p. 292. 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), sec. 117. All subsequent references are to this edition. 9. Nietzsche et la philosophie,p. 199; my translation (Tomlinson, p. 173). 10. Nietzsche et la philosophie,p. 222; my translation (Tomlinson, p. 194). 11. See Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche, 2 vols., one part of which has been translated by D. F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979); and Arthur Danto's Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Macmillan, 1965). 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1969), Third Essay, sec. 12. All subsequent references are to this edition. 13. Nietzscheet la philosophie,p. 43; my translation (Tomlinson, p. 37). Tomlinson substitutes Kaufmann's translation of Nietzsche here, but alters Nietzsche's (and Kaufmann's) use of italics to approximate Deleuze's French translation and its emphasis of the fulfillment of a prophecy, as well as its de-emphasis of Nietzsche's concern for the problem of the Christian faith. Tomlinson also omits the entire clause beginning with "we have been able to affirm all chance...." 14. Friedrich Nietzsche, EcceHomo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), "Why I am so clever," (sec. 9). All subsequent references are to this edition. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), sec. 83. All subsequent references are to this edition. 16. Nietzsche may have claimed in certain sections of that last original work, Ecce Homo, that he had never "struggled" for anything-"I do not know any other way of associating with great tasks than play"("Why I am so clever," sec. 10)-and Deleuze makes much of such pronouncements. But Nietzsche's irony is never far removed. When Nietzsche ends that section of Ecce Homo with a reference to his "formula for greatness," amorfati, his tone is hardly an unconditioned affirmation of all chance as necessity: "Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it-all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary-but love it." Nietzsche's particular fate-for that is his topic here-can in no way be described as a game, still less as "all chance" or "chaos." Nietzsche, never more aware of how he would appear to later generations than in this final review of his work, consistently strove toward a particular affirmation of a particular fate-"my truths," he called his perspective thinking. That the will to power in general should be seen as the affirmation of the play of its own difference is a formulation that in the end has little to do with the personal and historical conditions Nietzsche constantly returns us to. 17. Negative Dialectics, p. 18.