"The homogenizing of European man is the great process that cannot be obstructed:
one should even hasten it." - nietzsche,
will to power #898
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zizek writes there are
three main readings of nietzsche: a traditional one, a modern one, and a postmodern one. first, there's the nietzsche of the return to premodern aristocratic warrior values against decadent judeo-christian morality. second, there's the hermeneutics of doubt and ironic self-probing. and lastly, there's the aesthetic play of appearances and differences.
klossowski effectively turns this three-part distinction on its head; he writes of
three interpretations of the all-important doctrine of the eternal return: (1) either the doctrine of the eternal return selects in and through itelf, apart from any conscious or unconscious intervention or else the return was revealed to nietzsche so that a conscious and voluntary selection might intervene (as it has been revealed innumerable times). (2) if it's been revealed numerous times, it doesn't matter, because the experience of nietzsche at sils-maria poses the question with a new urgency. (3) either the selection depends on the disclosure, or it's a selection that will take place in secret and undertaken in the name of this secret, i.e. a political project.
notice how these correspond to zizek's dictonomy. an eternal return which goes on without any need of us, or uses us only as its tools, is postmodernity - the play of appearances and differences that move through us without our conscious intervention (memes in a simulacrum). in the modern version, we're still not in charge, but our self-probing is what's important (oddly enough, this is
the oracle's philosophy in the second matrix film: 'you've already made the choice; you're here to try to understand
why you made it'.) lastly, however, is an eternal return that's still capable of calling us to a
willed project of training and selection (one that can/may or cannot/may not change the future, dependent on what we do).
what klossowski demonstrates is that this last option -
the nietszchean political project - has nothing to do with any traditionalism: that's
the misreading of nietzsche that we must resist. chapter six, p114:
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Nietzsche's 'aristocratism' has nothing to do with a nostalgia for past hiearchies, nor, in order to realize this aristocratism, does he appeal to retrograde economic conditions.
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(remember also that the over-man isn't an individual, but a state of being/becoming.)
instead of returning to the past, nietzsche is focused on
untimely interventions which sow the seeds of a neo-barbarian collective ready to push the empire over its breaking point. there's no room for either nihilism or nostalgia here - it's a practical creativity that's most needed. this will happen due to a necessary excess, a surplus of industrialism that won't fit into the general interest. p119:
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The importance of increasing gregariousness and the growth of populations is only the obverse side of the industrial phenomenon. If there are more and more needs to satisfy, even if new needs imply a so-called 'rise in the standard of living', they are vulgarized by their very multiplication as well as by their satisfaction - a new form of gregariousness.
Nietzsche registers the distant moral and social consequences of this phenomenon with the precision of a seismograph. As exploitation developed, it demanded, under the pretext of a massive (and thus average) saturation, that completely conditioned reflexes be substituted for the appetitive spontaneity of individuals on a vast scale. Consequently, it also arrogated to itself the 'moral' and 'psycho-technical' mission (inherited from the essentially punitive element of the economies of the two world wars, which were prototypes of planetary planning) of exterminating any impulse that might induce human nature to put its 'useful' specificity at risk by seeking that which exceeds it as an agent: namely the most subtle states of the soul, which are capable of inducing a rapture that surpasses congenital servitude, and therefore of producing an intensity that corresponds to the impulsive constraint of its own phantasms - even if they are themselves due to this congenital servitude, thus magnified...
{S}uch is the luxury (but such is also culture) - the 'aristocratism' which, according to Nietzsche, must be represented by at least one group, one particular case, not as a fraction of humanity but as its surplus (and hence, for the totality, as an exterminable, shootable, odious leech). This group or particular case - if it wants to assume a surplus existence - can live only in the distance it must maintain, morally speaking, from the totality, drawing its strength from the indignation, hostility and reprobation heaped on it by the totality, which necessarily rejects its own 'surplus', since it is unable to see it as anything other than a rebellious, sick, or degenerate fraction of itself.
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it's here we get to the point of realizing who really wears the pants in the societal hierarchy: it's not
the rulers (capitalists, militarists, bureaucrats); it's
the rare souls hidden among the masses, so-called parasites, who're cultivating an insurrection that's waiting for the right time to erupt. this dispenses with all the guilt trips thrown at those labeled 'non-productive'. it affirms imperial structures as essentially self-destructive. it displays the positivity of being isolated and useless - provided one has the spiritual discipline to do so. and there's the rub: there's a big difference between disciplinary training and a taming that's akin to domestication. in fact, that distinction is what makes the political project of experimentation necessary in the first place -- p99:
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If the meaning of all eminent creation is to break the gregarious habits that always direct existing beings towards ends that are useful exclusively to the oppressive regime of mediocrity - then in the experimental domain to create is to do violence to what exists, and thus to the integrity of beings. Every creation of a new type must provoke a state of insecurity: creation ceases to be a game at the margins of reality; henceforth, the creator will not re-produce, but will itself produce the real.
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what does this mean for
the nietzsche kritik? - that claiming we shouldn't say should (a self-refutation in itself) is only half the story. the love of fate brings us back to the concrete question of the fate of our cultures, but specifically, for nietzsche's debaters, it's not an excuse for incoherence... it's a challenge of direct action: will you remain a game at the margins of reality, satisfied to reproduce the dominant discourses? or will you put forth real experiments in terror?
if you don't relate to any of this, if you're not up to the task, then be glad... you're one of the herd.