Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories: Genealogy and Convalescence PDF
Preview Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories: Genealogy and Convalescence
Genealogy and Convalescence JEFFREY M. JACKSON Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories Jeffrey M. Jackson Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories Genealogy and Convalescence Jeffrey M. Jackson University of Houston–Downtown Houston TX, USA ISBN 978-1-137-60152-0 ISBN 978-1-137-59299-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59299-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937463 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Illustration: © johnwoodcock Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. For Alli A cknowledgements This book is dedicated to Alli Antar—my best friend. Her uncompromis- ing commitment to beauty, justice, and truth allows little rest for my lazy sensibilities. Without her, who knows where I would now be. I am grateful to Stefan Bird-Pollan for many years of conversation about Adorno and other matters. I also want to thank other colleagues and friends who did me the great honor of reading my first book or of taking an interest in its argument: Tammis Thomas, David Ryden, Greg Getz, Ed Hugetz, Mohsen Mobasher, Kristin Anderson, Camilo Garcia, and Brad Rappaport. Thanks to Jason Winfree for the hospitality at CSU Stanislaus. Norman Whitman provided feedback on the draft of parts of this book. I am grateful to John Rocco for the inspiration through his tireless leadership of roc4nbcure.org, and for discussions about future cover art. If there is anything valuable in this or my other work, it was surely shaped by the many great teachers that I have been fortunate to know, especially—in alphabetical order—Rudolf Bernet, James Chastain, John Compton, Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Cynthia Hampton, Michael Hodges, Gregg Horowitz, Girard Krebs, Ursula Lawson, Algis Mickunas, Jeffrey Tlumak, David Wood, and Arthur Zucker. I am the beneficiary of consistent support from amazing parents. And, as it is sometimes the case that younger siblings take the benefits of hav- ing older siblings for granted—oblivious to the lessons, examples, and opportunities afforded by having someone around to show them how to vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS live—I want to thank my older brother James for everything, including that which I was too young to remember. And, thanks to Eleanor, the naughtiest puppy in the world. An earlier version of Chap. 1 was published as “Nietzsche on Cultural Convalescence” in Subjectivity. c ontents 1 Introduction 1 2 Convalescence, Mourning, and Sociality 43 3 Relationality, Trauma, and the Genealogy of the Subject 69 4 Nietzsche’s Negative Dialectic: Ascetic Ideal and the Status Quo 107 5 Working-Through Perspectives in Nietzsche and Object Relations Psychoanalysis 143 Bibliography 179 Index 183 ix CHAPTER 1 Introduction This book draws on psychoanalysis and critical theory to interrogate the ways in which Nietzsche’s work explores the suffered sociality of reflec- tion. For Nietzsche, that which seems independent—or is symbolically or metaphysically sanctified as independent—is the symptom of a more fundamental socio-historically conditioned dependence. In other words, Nietzsche interrogates the way in which social history produces sub- jects that are allergic to their own socio-historical conditions of possibil- ity, taking various forms of a symptomatic insistence on independence. There is therefore a reflexivity between the reproduction of social crisis and the reproduction of subjectivity, such that social critique must also be a critique of the subjectivity which is socially reproduced and which engages in that social critique. Adorno expresses a similar thought in Negative Dialectics, where he writes: “Identity is the Ur-form of ideol- ogy … the critique of ideology is not something peripheral … but philo- sophically central: the critique of the constitutive consciousness itself.”1 One might say that there is a parallel in the conception of the dominant form of subjectivity as identity-thinking in Adorno and as grounded within the ascetic ideal in Nietzsche. For both thinkers, as will be dis- cussed in Chap. 4, reflection on social crisis implies a need for the self- critique of reflection that is a symptom of the suffered crisis it attempts to conceptualize. On this reading, for Nietzsche, thinking is a symptom of suffered, social histories. New thinking is therefore symptomatic of new forms of suffered socio-historical life. Consciousness and will are themselves © The Author(s) 2017 1 J.M. Jackson, Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59299-6_1 2 1 INTRODUCTION expressions of suffered, social histories and Nietzsche’s concepts of gene- alogy and convalescence might be seen as characterizing the working- through of our suffered social pasts as the condition of possibility of overcoming that past and creating a new world. Instead of an appeal to free will or other form of subjectivism—which express the reproduction of the status quo—Nietzsche suggests that any overcoming must take a path through the ordeals of breaking from the relational histories that have left us fixated in our ressentiment. From this perspective, Nietzsche’s philosophy is not anti-reflection, nor the assertion of some sort of direct expression of the body or dynamism, but rather reflection avowing its conditions and limits in its imbrication within suffered, social histories. Put another way, the main thesis of the following discussion is that Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy needs a concept like that of convales- cence to be coherent. Genealogy is a form of thinking, but one in which thinking encounters its condition of possibility and limit in suffered his- tory. In other words, for Nietzsche, there is a primacy placed on socially mediated suffering—not merely the reflection on that suffering, but also the suffering of reflection—the conditioning and rupturing of that reflec- tion by that suffering. This includes reflection on “the body,” “life,” “nature,” and so on. Here then, emancipation, or however one conceives of the salutary norm asserted by Nietzsche’s philosophy, would need to be characterized as a mode of suffered life which includes reflection as one of its moments—as in convalescence, for example—rather than as the result of a spontaneous subjective action. Convalescence is a concept for the subject’s negotiation of the objectiv- ity which conditions and ruptures reflection. In illness, our objectivity has primacy over our subjectivity. Our vulnerable bodies suffer as objects; our ideas are undergirded, exceeded, and ruptured by this objectivity; thoughts, goals, and desires are thwarted and interrupted, and we are forced to work- through and adapt them to an embodiment that was taken for granted. Our desire, concepts, and anticipations arise from and are destroyed by the objec- tivity with which they can never catch up and can never freeze or fix. In this sense, “objectivity” refers not merely to epistemological correspondence with the object, but to that which exceeds, conditions, and ruptures ideas. Objectivity is both reflected upon, and the suffered basis and limit of reflec- tion. Genealogy does not simply interrogate history, but rather the non- identical character of suffered relationality; genealogy is itself symptomatic of that relationality; that is, it is symptomatic of that which it interrogates. Nietzsche’s genealogical narrative is, as we will see, a kind of primal scene,
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