The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism

182 Pages·2011·0.55 MB·English

by  Nandita Biswas-Mellamphy

The Three Stigmata of
Friedrich Nietzsche
Political Physiology in the Age
of Nihilism
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche
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The Three Stigmata of
Friedrich Nietzsche
Political Physiology in the Age
of Nihilism
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
University of Western Ontario, Canada
© Nandita Biswas Mellamphy 2011
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work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2011 by
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ISBN 978–0–230–28255–1 hardback
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Biswas Mellamphy, Nandita, author.
The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche : Political Physiology in the
Age of Nihilism / Nandita Biswas Mellamphy.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–230–28255–1 (hardback)
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. 2. Political science—
Philosophy. 3. Nihilism. I. Title.
B3317.B575 2011
193—dc22 2010042397
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
for Dan
for ever
In Hindu mythology […]
The entire cycle of human evolution is figured […] in the form of a cow,
symbolizing Virtue,
each of whose four feet rests on one of the sectors
representing the four ages of the world.
In the first age,
corresponding to the Greek age of gold and called the Creda Yuga or age of innocence,
Virtue is firmly established on earth: the cow stands squarely on four legs.
In the Treda Yuga, or second age,
corresponding to the age of silver, it is weakened and stands only on three legs.
During the Dwapara Yuga, or third age,
which is the age of bronze, it is reduced to two legs.
Finally, in the age of iron, our own age,
the cyclical cow or human virtue reaches the utmost degree of feebleness and senility:
it is scarcely able to stand,
balancing only on one leg.
It is the fourth and last age, the Kali Yuga,
the age of misery, misfortune and decrepitude.
The age of iron has no other seal than that of Death.
Its hieroglyph is the skeleton bearing […] the empty hourglass,
symbol of time run out, and the scythe, reproduced in the figure seven,
which is the number of transformation, of destruction, and of annihilation.
The Gospel of this fatal age is the one written under the inspiration of Saint Matthew.
Matthaeus, the Greek MatJai¢oV, comes from Ma´Jhma and Ma´JhmatoV,
which means Science. […]
It is the Gospel according to Science,
the last of all but for us the first,
because it teaches us that,
save for a small number of the élite,
we must all perish.
Fulcanelli, Le mystère des cathédrales
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Preface: The Three Stigmata ix
Introduction: The Mnemotechnics of Nihilism and the Political
Physiology of Eternal Recurrence 1
1 The Displaced ‘Origin’ of Political Physiology 20
2 The Economic Problem of Production: Nature, Culture, Life 43
3 The Dynamics of Opposition and the Transformation of the
Übermensch 57
4 Self-Annihilation and the Metamorphosis of Nihilism 73
5 The Pathology of Amor Fati: Eros and Eschaton 83
6 Novum Organum: The Overhuman as the Overmanifold 96
Postface: The Transmigration of Homo Natura 109
Notes 122
Bibliography 144
Index 151
vii
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the love and support
of my husband, Dan, of my parents in Winnipeg and London, of my
sister and her family in Ottawa, of my extended family in Toronto,
of my dear friends (with special thanks to Scott Bakker and Sharron
O’Brien) and of my canine sidekick ‘El Moserino’ (Moses Mellamphy).
My deepest thanks go to John Protevi, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Debra
Bergoffen, Peter Sedgwick and the inimitable Horst Hutter for their
generous comments on various drafts of this manuscript and the inspi-
ration which their work has given me over the years. My appreciation
and admiration also go out to Babette Babitch, Gary Shapiro, Heike
Schotten, Vanessa Lemm, Don Dombowsky, Tracy Strong and Rainer
Hanshe for their kind and constructive feedback at conferences where
I presented portions of this work. I am also grateful to Bernard Stiegler
and Barbara Stiegler for wonderful and productive interchanges that
have directly contributed to the content of this book. I would also like
to thank Francine Prévost at the Maison Gai Saber, Verónica Schild and
Tony Calcagno at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism and
Nick Srnicek at The Accursed Share/Speculative Heresy, for their ongoing
support of The Nietzsche Workshop @ Western and for providing me with
venues to develop and present ideas from this work.
The University of Western Ontario’s Department of Political Science
and Faculty of Social Science, along with the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), have provided both time and fund-
ing for portions of this work. Students who participated in my Nietzsche
Seminars and in the annual Nietzsche Workshop @ Western have helped
me develop many of the ideas in this book. Terence McKenna and
Norberto Crenucci have been exemplars for me of Nietzschean ‘philoso-
phers of the future’. My thanks go to all of the above, to M. Bhuvanaraj,
Melanie Blair and Priyanka Gibbons at Palgrave Macmillan, to The
Brotherhood of Life publishing house for permission to use as epigraph
an extract from Mary Sworder’s translation of Le mystère des cathédrales,
and to you, my dear reader, wherever and whoever you are.
viii
Preface: The Three Stigmata
I am still waiting for a philosophical physician in the
exceptional sense of that word – one who has to pur-
sue the problem of the total health of a people, time,
race or of humanity – to muster the courage to push
my suspicion to its limits and to risk the proposition:
what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was
not at all ‘truth’ but something else – let us say, health,
future, growth, power, life.
GS Preface: §2
You ought to be the one that knows; you remember
what you saw. All three stigmata: the dead, artificial
hand, the [slits for] eyes, and the radically deranged jaw.
Symbols of its inhabitation, he thought. In our midst.
But not asked for. Not intentionally summoned. And we
have no mediating sacraments through which to pro-
tect ourselves; we can’t compel it, by our careful, time-
honored, clever, painstaking rituals, to confine itself to
specific elements such as bread and water or bread and
wine. It is out in the open, ranging in every direction. It
looks into our eyes, and it looks out of our eyes.
Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch (1964)
The stigmatics of political physiology
In the following study, I examine three concepts found in the thought
of Friedrich Nietzsche, but which are not usually treated together in
the secondary scholarship: first, in the domain of his political thought,
Nietzsche’s concept of ‘great politics’; second, in the phenomenological
domain, his concept of ‘eternal recurrence’; and finally, set against the
backdrop of his materialist theory of the self-overcoming subject, the con-
cept of ‘the philosopher of the future’. None of these concepts are given
explicit or systematic definition in Nietzsche’s work, and yet arguably each
one is crucial, and collectively they are the crux of Nietzsche’s thought.
ix