Force from Nietzsche to Derrida

Clare Connors

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351193610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

"What is the pervasive character of the world? The answer is force. But, as Heidegger asks next: ""What is force?"" Connors sets out to answer this question, tracing a genealogy of the idea of force through the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. These thinkers try to pin down what force is, but know too that it is something which cannot be neutrally described. Their vigorously literary writings must therefore be read as much for the stylistic and rhetorical ways in which they render force's powerful elusiveness as for the content of their arguments. And it is perhaps literature, rather than philosophy, which best engages with force. Certainly, for Connors, these philosophical positions are foreshadowed in remarkable detail by Shakespeare's Henry V - a play shot through with forces, imaginary, military, rhetorical and bodily."

CHAPTER 1
Nietzsche: Force and Will

'Alles ist Kraft’

NIETZSCHE (KSA x, note 3)

‘Everything is force.’ This three-word sentence might be read as summing up the guiding assumption of Nietzsche’s whole oeuvre. From the first (Die Geburt der Tragödie) to the last (Der Wille zur Macht, Ecce Homo), the idea of force is certainly essential to his understanding of life, of human interactions in the world, and of history, and it also seems to provide the dynamo for all language, thought, and interpretation, including his own. The tone of this three-word sentence, on the other hand, is hard to gauge. Does it simply express his philosophical or ethical credo? Or is it haunted by a desire for something other than force? The tension between these two possible readings of the note drives the reflections on force across his work.

Nietzsche’s interest in force covers the disciplines of the natural and physical sciences, philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, politics, philology, and rhetoric. Generalizing only a little, we can say that earlier Nietzsche scholarship reads Nietzschean force in terms of his supposed metaphysics (Heidegger, Kaufmann) or anti-metaphysics (Deleuze).¹ Such readings disclose an ontological questioning in Nietzsche’s work, and his treatment of force emerges as providing an account of, as Heidegger has it, ‘der durchgängige Charakter der Welt’. More recent, overtly context- and archive-based criticism, such as that by Whitlock, Poellner, and Pearson, has drawn on evidence of his engagement with thinking in the natural and physical sciences, as well as with the philosophical treatment of dynamics, and elaborated his debts to and interventions in these fields.² Here, Nietzsche is taken seriously as a reader and philosopher of the science of his day. Running alongside these developments there has been, from the work of Sarah Kofman and Paul de Man to that by Douglas Thomas, a consideration of Nietzsche as a philologist or philosopher of language and rhetoric, whose theories are also themselves enacted in his own language, rhetoric, and style.³ The force of language, and the notion of rhetoric qua dynamis, are issues explored in these studies.

What remains unclear — perhaps for essential reasons — is the relationship in which these different approaches to force stand. To suggest, for example, that Nietzsche took up Boscovich’s physical understanding of force and reapplied it analogically to other areas of human behaviour and history is to overlook his criticisms of the ways in which ‘force’ is figured, or analogically imagined, by scientists themselves, and of the metaphysical assumptions which ensue from the grammatical and rhetorical structures at work in their writing. At many moments in his work, Nietzsche reads scientific activity itself as in the grip of a will to power which it cannot theorize and does not know. On the other hand, simply to read Nietzsche as arguing that a fundamental force of rhetoric governs all scientific inquiry, or all thought, is to beg the question of the nature and status of force in this account. His attention to force, then, brings into troubled relation a range of discourses and modes of intellectual inquiry. My aim in what follows is to trace that trouble across his work, exploring his thinking of force and the ways in which ‘force’ redounds on his own thinking and writing.

Die Geburt der Tragödie

Die Geburt der Tragödie represents Nietzsche’s first attempt to offer a dynamic account of culture, history, and human life. At the level of literary and cultural criticism, he takes on the generally accepted understanding of ‘der “griechischen Heiterkeit” ’ [Greek serenity] (KSA 1, 65 / BT 53) and replaces it with an altogether stormier sense of Greek culture, governed by the interrelation between Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies. At the same time, these tendencies are accorded a pertinence beyond the language of aesthetic criticism, and are used to offer a more general, ‘metaphysical’, account of how the world is.

Dionysias ‘redet [...] durch Kräfte’ [speaks through forces] (KSA 1, 64 / BT 53), and represents a primordial and non-phenomenal state of force and flux. The Dionysian is felt in everyday life in the states of intoxication and rapture, in those non-experiences, like that of the Romantic sublime perhaps, which while they last disperse the unity of the subject supposed to ‘experience’ them. Such experiences point, for Nietzsche, to the most fundamental nature of the world, namely its existence as a force field. He describes the Dionysian as something ‘das jenseits des Apollinischen liegt’ [that lies beyond the Apollonian] (KSA 1, 154 / BT 130). The Apollonian, conversely, is the realm of form, order, and memory, presided over by the sun god Apollo, who is the ‘das herrliche Götterbild des principii individuationis’ [the glorious, divine image of the principium individuationis] (KSA 1, 28 / BT 16).⁴ The Apollonian, then, furnishes a way of thinking about human embodiment and subjectivity. It represents the gathering of dissonant forces into a supposed identity. The individual figure of Dionysus ‘himself’ (less often referred to, as Henry Staten has pointed out, than the abstract ‘Dionysian’)⁵ occupies the point of extreme tension between the two, ‘die Leiden der Individuation an sich erfahrende Gott’ [the god experiencing in himself the sufferings of individuation] (KSA i, 72 / BT 59). Dionysus lives the tension between the forces that traverse him and make up the world, and the necessity of being in the world as an individual.

Greek tragedy, Nietzsche suggests, at once offers us a way of perceiving this tension as the (non-human) condition of human being, and provides an aesthetically satisfying rendition of it. He juxtaposes Aeschylus’s tragedy of Prometheus with Sophocles’ Oedipus plays. In a binary which will recur in different guises throughout his work, he aligns the latter with ‘d[ie] Glorie der Passivität’ [the glory of passivity], describing them as ‘das Siegeslied des Heiligen’ [the song of triumph of the holy man], and the former with ‘die Glorie der Activität’ [the glory of activity], which is ‘der herbe Stolz des Künstlers’ [the severe pride of the artist] (KSA 1, 67–68 / BT 55–56). Here, while both are valued (and are seen in their essence later to be debased by the anaemic, second-order, and dialectical movements of Euripidean drama, too Socratic in its dialectical manoeuvres), it seems indisputable that Prometheus is privileged, as he is too, of course, by Goethe and most of the English Romantics. In his wresting of fire from the gods, we can read him not only as forceful but as being, as it were, on the side of force, refusing to accept the tyranny of what is, of the actual, and as championing always the potential. While Prometheus suffers as Oedipus does, his is an active sin, achieved through proud struggle with the gods rather than simply given way to, and this titanically striving individual is thus deeply ‘unapollinisch’ (KSA 1, 70). Nevertheless, the play itself demonstrates too a concern with justice, which, according to Nietzsche, attests to its Apollonian paternity. Aeschylus’s tragedy, as tragedy, is understood thus to have a ‘Doppelwesen [... eine] zugleich dionysische und apollinische Nature’ [a dual being [...] a simultaneously Dionysiac and Apollonian nature] (KSA 1, 71 / BT 58, trans. mod.).

In Aeschylus, Nietzsche therefore finds an ideal synthesis of force and form — an artistic embodiment which renders intelligible the otherwise meaningless welter of forces that make up the world, raising them to a higher power without diminishing their force. And he sees here too artistic and political possibilities for the moment in which he writes, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war and the foundation of the German Empire under Wilhelm I. These possibilities are heralded or instantiated in the music of Wagner. Wagner, Nietzsche suggests, by embracing chromaticism and dissonance, and refusing to subordinate music to words in the way that other contemporary operatic composers do, offers through his works a formal incarnation of force itself. We might of course make comparisons with the work of many literary modernists here. It is in art then, rather than in the self-perpetuating, endlessly unfolding dialectical machinations of ‘der theoretische Mensch’ [theoretical man] (KSA 1, 98 / BT 81), deluded descendant of Socrates, that salvation lies. Tragedy and music in Die Geburt der Tragödie are understood to make force meaningful in its own terms.

But this comforting story, in which Nietzsche proposes a cure for his contemporary political and cultural actuality, is not without its problems. These emerge in particular in the tensions between Nietzsche as literary and cultural critic, Nietzsche as what Ahern has called ‘cultural physician’, and Nietzsche as philosopher.⁶ Insofar as his aspirations in Die Geburt go beyond those of offering Literatur- or Kulturwissenschaft, and propose a general and first-order account of the world’s workings, this book must stand the test of a more philosophical interrogation. And it is a question here of the fundamental, temporal relation in which ‘dionysischer Kraft’ [Dionysian strength (or force)] (KSA 1i, 154 / BT 129) and Apollonian form are understood to stand. Nietzsche seems to describe their interaction in several distinct and incommensurable ways. In one account, the serene continuance and identity of Apollonian order is said to be intermittently and unpredictably interrupted and ruined by the irruption of the Dionysian: ‘die hohe Fluth des Dionysischen [...] zerstörte von Zeit zu Zeit [...] alle jene kleinen Zirkel, in die der einseitig apollinische “Wille” das Hellenenthum zu bannen suchte’ [the high tide of the Dionysian [...] from time to time destroyed all the little eddies (lit. circles) with which the one-sided Apollonian ‘will’ sought to captivate Hellenic culture] (KSA 1, 70 / BT 58, trans. mod.). Here the Dionysian represents excess over the Apollonian, and the insufficiency of its forms and categories.⁷ The stormily Romantic, organic image of the flood tide suggests a sublimity entirely inassimilable to the beautiful Apollonian circle. Dionysian force cannot be contained or averted by it, but periodically ruins it.

But the strong suggestion that ‘dionysischer Kraft’ is at once prior, and inimical, to Apollonian form, seems to be undercut by the narrative movement and polemical thrust of Die Geburt der Tragödie, which argues that the two can be, were, and ought again to be reconciled, in art. Here, Nietzsche seems to offer a synthesis or sublation of two distinct forces into a truer incarnation of their unity, in a dialectical and Hegelian fashion. And the impulse towards synthesis itself seems to be an Apollonian one. As Paul de Man has argued, the overall narrative structure of Die Geburt is genetic and teleological: ‘The starting point, Dionysos, contains within itself the end-point, the Apollonian work of art, and governs the dialectical path-way that leads from one to the other.’⁸ Nietzsche’s genetic model imagines the Dionysian as a force oriented towards the telos of incarnation. He talks about a ‘Menschwerdung der Dissonanz’ [an incarnation of dissonance] (KSA 1, 155 / BT 130, trans. mod.), overriding his model of a state of forceful f lux in favour of an idea of Dionysian force as an impulse always tending towards its formal instantiation. It seems already to be channelled and directed in the direction of its subsequent, Apollonian, appearance.

This is crystallized in the exhortatory polemic at the book’s conclusion, where Nietzsche writes:

Von jenem Fundamente aller Existenz, von dem dionysischen Untergrunde der Welt, [darf] genau nur soviel dem menschlichen Individuum in’s Bewusstsein treten, als von jener apollinischen Verklärungskraft wider überwunden werden kann, so dass diese beiden Kunsttriebe ihre Kräfte in strenger wechselseitiger Proportion, nach dem Gesetze ewiger Gerechtigkeit, zu entfalten genöthigt sind.

[Only precisely as much of that foundation of all existence, of the Dionysian substratum of the world, may enter into the consciousness of the human individual as can be overcome again by the Apollonian power [or force] of transfiguration, so that both of these artistic drives are compelled to develop their forces in strict proportion to one another, according to the law of eternal justice.]

(KSA 1, 155 / BT 130–31)

Here, the discussion of the Dionysian as ‘Fundament’ and ‘Untergrund’ might be said already to reduce its dynamism by imagining it as substance. And then its supposed metaphysical priority cedes too, to the ‘Gesetze ewiger Gerechtigkeit’. Since Nietzsche has already discussed Gerechtigkeit as an Apollonian property in his account of Sophocles, it seems now that the Apollonian has been raised to a higher power, governing the whole dynamic. Nietzsche is thus able to offer an optimistic conclusion. He argues that ‘wo sich die dionysischen Mächte so ungestüm erheben, wie wir dies erleben, da muss auch bereits Apollo, in eine Wolke gehüllt, zu uns herniedergestiegen sein’ [where the Dionysiac powers have risen as impetuously as we now experience them, Apollo, enveloped in a cloud, must also have descended to us] (KSA i, 155 / BT 131). His view of Apollo’s descent ‘in eine Wolke gehüllt’ is perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek, but the imminent or immanent consolation he announces in sage-like fashion seems genuinely meant.

Nietzsche’s voice here is complicit with the dialectical account he offers. De Man has made this point too, suggesting that the teleological model is sustained by Nietzsche’s tone and mode of address throughout the book: he calls it a ‘harangue that combines the seductive power of a genetic narrative with the rhetorical complicity of a sermon’, and that ‘safeguards the genetic continuity throughout the text, easing the listener over difficult transition by means of helpful summaries’.⁹ In its homiletic hectoring and ostensibly coherent narrative, the book claims for itself the power to offer a single, truthful account, in convincing logical form, of something which in its initial formulation seems inimical to such claims and forms. Thus Die Geburt, in both its meanings and its modes, focuses force towards a single, formal end, from the point of view of a singular source, in such a way that its fundamental intuition that the world is a force field is undercut.

Selbstkritik

These criticisms are not extrinsic to Nietzsche’s work or to his own concerns. In his later writing he questions his initial, pacific, good faith in the redemptive form of Apollo, and repudiates the governing logic of his first book. In the ‘Versuch einer Selbstkritik’ [Attempt at Self-Criticism], which prefaces editions of Die Geburt from 1886 onwards, he upbraids himself in the voice of an imaginary, and scornful, interlocutor:

ist das nicht das ächte rechte Romantiker-Bekenntniss von 1830, unter der Maske des Pessimismus von 1850? hinter dem auch schon das übliche Romantiker-Finale präludirt, — Bruch, Zusammenbruch, Rückkehr und Niedersturz vor einem alten Glauben, vor dem alten Gotte.

[Is that not the good old romantic credo of 1830, lurking behind the pessimistic mask of 1850? Behind which the usual Romantic finale is already introduced — break, breakdown, return and collapse before an old faith, before the old God.]

(KSA 1, 21 / BT 11–12)

The ‘birth’ of tragedy is not the genesis of something new, but a repe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introducing Force
• 1 Nietzsche: Force and Will
• 2 Heidegger: Force and Forcelessness
• 3 Foucault: Force, Power, and History
• 4 Derrida: Force and Impossibility
• Conclusion: Crooked Figures and Imaginary Forces
• Bibliography
• Index