1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 83.

2. James Miller, “The Politics of Limits” (paper delivered at the 1991 convention of the American Political Science Association, September 1-4, Washington, DC), para. 13.

3. Michel Foucault, “Revolutionary Action: `Until Now,' ” in Donald Bouchard, ed., Michel Foucault: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 226.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid, 230. I bypass here Miller's crude charge that, in calling in the same essay for an attack on the “whole of society,” Foucault legitimizes attempts to eradicate all social institutions. It becomes clear what Foucault has in mind when he says, “I believe, on the contrary, that this particular idea of the `whole of society' [single quotes in original] derives from a utopian context.” Foucault attacks “the dream” of “the whole of society” because the dream of wholeness and harmony it pursues requires the destruction, elimination, or repression of everything that does not fit in with it.

6. Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Foucault Live, edited by Sylvere Lotringer and translated by John Johnston (New York: Semiotexte, 1989), 208.

7. I hope it becomes clear as we proceed that not all those who anchor their morality in the Law or the Good are locked into transcendental egoism. Only those who insist that the “other” cannot devise a morality unless he or she accepts these fundaments are so locked in. Thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, and Nietzsche are excellent at bringing out the subterranean fundamentalism of many who otherwise deny it.

8. A world with no commanding or designing god is likely to be marked by discordances, accidents, and chance. This is exactly the world in which Nietzsche and Foucault cultivate an ethical sensibility. Such a world, in turn, is not a likely source of a teleological ethic. A world with an omnipotent god, as the nominalists tried to show the Thomists, is unlikely to be one limited by any prior design of the world, for an omnipotent god flourishes in a highly contingent world it can vary in any way at any time; its omni-potence is threatened by any design that restricts it. A teleological morality without a good is problematic, then, but it is also difficult to construct one with an omnipotent god. It is not that a god filling the bill is impossible to construct, but such a delicate construction raises the question as to whether it is discovered or invented to fill the exact purpose it is supposed to reveal. On the other hand, an omnipotent god seems most compatible with a morality grounded in a transcendental imperative, and neo-Kantians have had a hell of a time demonstrating this imperative without recourse to such a deeply contestable faith. Hans Blumenberg pursues these issues, in his history of onto-theological aporias and debates that have marked the West since the inception of Augustianism. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983). A last “theological” point: Although there are powerful pressures binding the command and design traditions to the authority of a god, a “post-Nietzschean” ethic need not resist every conception of divinity. A god as “absence,” for instance, might be compatible with a post-Nietzschean sensibility. So might some versions of polytheism. I prefer “nontheistic reverence for the ambiguity of being.”

9. In these comparisons I take Charles Taylor to represent the “teleological” model. His version of it, I think, brings out effectively assumptions implicit in the other formulations. He might resist the title I have bestowed on him, but the language through which his morality is couched is very teleological by comparison to the Nietzschean/Foucauldian sensibility defended here. Those are the only terms of comparison that interest me at the moment. See Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers, vols. 1-2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

10. Notice how the favorite critique that neo-Kantians pose against teleocommunitarians loses its bite against post-Nietzscheans. They contend that it is impossible to reach universal agreement on the nature of the good, commending instead the same quest with respect to rights or the procedures of justice. I concur that a grounded consensus on the good is unlikely, even though I emphasize much more than neo-Kantians do how much established conventions are treated implicitly by neo-Kantians and teleocommunitarians as if they were so grounded, for both parties tend to eschew genealogy, limiting their ability to identify limits to pluralism in established regimes.

11. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 96. A powerful argument in Taylor's study is that advocates of “disengaged” morality are unable to account for the sources of their own moral inspirations. Bernard Williams, in an insightful review of this study, points to the strength of this argument, while claiming that Taylor's framework of analysis is not well suited to come to terms with Nietzschean thought: “I think that Taylor, in his search for the sources of value, seems not to have taken seriously enough Nietzsche's thought that if there is, not only no God, but no metaphysical order of any kind, then this imposes quite new demands on our self-understanding.”New York Review of Books, November 4 (1990): 48. I concur with this judgment.

12. In Identity and Difference, translated by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), Martin Heidegger speaks of “the oblivion of difference.”“We speak of the difference between Being and beings.... That is the oblivion of difference. The oblivion here to be thought is the veiling of the difference as such” (p. 50). The thought is similar to Nietzsche's elusive presentations of life. You never lift the veil of difference as such, for difference is that which differs from the organ-ized, conceptualized, fixed, and determinate. But you might encounter the oblivion of difference through artful techniques; you might experience the way in which the organ-ization of experience draws on that which is itself not yet organ-ized.

13. Hence the indispensability of deconstruction and genealogy to the sensibility in question.

14. “But, in the end, I've become rather irritated by an attitude, which for a long time was mine, too, and which I no longer subscribe to, which consists in saying: our problem is to denounce and to criticize; let them get on with their legislation and their reforms. That doesn't seem to me the right attitude.” Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1988), 209.

15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), #103, p. 104. Alan White gives an excellent reading of this formulation in Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth (New York: Routledge, 1990).

16. Nietzsche, Daybreak, #149, 97. In Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), #1019, Nietzsche lists six practices that have been wrecked by the church's monopoly and misuses of them. They are asceticism, fasting, the monastery, feasts, the courage to endure one's nature, and death. In each of these cases, Nietzsche would refigure the practice in question into one that fends off existential resentment and fosters a “nobility” that reaches beyond the ugly narcissism of good and evil. The notes in Will to Power that focus on the body also focus on the priority of techniques of the self over rational argumentation or direct reform of “the will” in fostering a generous ethical sensibility.

17. Nietzsche, Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), #995.

18. Narcissus loved not himself but his image in the pond. The transcendental narcissist loves the image of itself that it projects into a transcendental command or direction.

19. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), #290, p. 233.

20. Nietzsche himself invokes the vocabulary of life in one way in his early work and in a modified way in his later work. I will not pursue that issue here, but it is the later uses that I am drawn to.

21. I generally try to avoid the language of “essentialism.” It means, variously, a philosophy that pretends that a highest law, nature, or principle can be brought into full presence; the confidence that there is a fundamental law or purpose governing existence that can be more closely approximated in life through hermeneutic piety, and the claim that every actor and every interpreter invokes a set of fundamental assumptions about the character of being in every act and interpretation. Thus anyone can successfully accuse anyone else of “being an essentialist” in some way or another. Foucault, as I read him, is not an “essentialist” on the first two scores but is one on the third. He comes close to what one might call the “vague essentialism” advanced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970). “So how are we to define this matter-movement, this matter-energy, this matter flow, this matter in variation that enters assemblages and leaves them? It is a destratified, deterritorialized matter. It seems to us that Husserl brought thought a decisive step forward when he discovered a region of vague and material essences (in other words, essences that are vagabond, inexact and yet rigorous), distinguishing them from fixed, metric and formal essences” (p. 407). Husserl did not pursue this insight far enough. Deleuze and Guattari do in Plateau 6, “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” The strategies they endorse there are initially more extreme and dangerous than Foucault or Nietzsche would endorse. For American conceptions that cultivate a lawless essentialism more cautiously, see Jane Bennett, Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment (New York: New York University Press, 1986) and Donna Haraway, Primate Visions (New York: Routledge, 1989).

22. Pierre Hadot, “Reflections on the notion of `the cultivation of the self,'” in Timothy J. Armstrong, ed. and trans., Michel Foucault: Philosopher (New York: Routledge, 1992), 229.

23. Ibid., 230. Hadot goes on to say, “For my part, I believe firmly... in the opportunity for modern man... to become aware of our situation as belonging to the universe.... This exercise in wisdom will therefore be an attempt to open ourselves up to the universal.”

24. This ontalogical level is the one that Habermasians, to date, have been hesitant to engage in Foucualt. While they do not postulate a Law or Design in being, the terms through which “communicative ethics” is delineated seems to presuppose a plasticity of bodies and things that is challenged by Foucault. These two competing “communicative ethics” will enter into more reflective engagement with one another when both parties actively consider how differences in their most fundamental projections into nature and bodies enter into their divergent readings of “discourse.” Habermas evinces awareness of this dimension when he engages communitarians. In one note, he indicates how Sandel would have to explicate the normative content of “community, embodied and shared self-understanding” more carefully to sustain his theory: “If he did, he would realize just how onerous the burden of proof is that neo-Aristotelian approaches must bear, as in the case of A. MacIntyre in After Virtue.... They must demonstrate how an objective moral order can be grounded without recourse to metaphysical premises.”Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). Habermas, in turn, would have to show how the conception of nature he presupposes in his discourse ethics is superior to the projection that Foucault endorses in “The Order of Discourse” and elsewhere. It only defers the engagement to reduce Foucault's options to a choice between a morally obnoxious “vitalism” or the model of communication Habermas himself invokes. I pursue this issue between Habermas, Foucault, and Taylor in “The Irony of Interpretation,” in Daniel Conway and John Seery, eds., Politics and Irony (New York: St. Martin's, forthcoming).

25. Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in Michael Shapiro, ed., Language and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 125-27, emphases added. I find the second half of the last sentence to be more credible than the first. The first might suggest that the level of violence is the same in all instances and hence that it is always impossible to curtail violence.

26. The forgetfulness pursued here runs deeper than I have so far intimated. It is built into the very character of shared vocabularies, where the conditions of existence of a common language require an imposition of equivalencies within the concepts deployed that “forget” those excesses that do not fit into these configurations. Nietzsche discusses this level of forgetting in On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random Books, 1967). In the texts in which this logic of equivalences is discussed, he also develops linguistic strategies that cut against it.

27. See “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 381-89.

28. Foucault, “An Ethics of Pleasure,” in Foucault Live, edited by Sylvere Lotringer and translated by John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 267.

29. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #212, p. 137.

30. Foucault, “Politics and Ethics: An Interview,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 379. Foucault refuses the language of “regulative ideal” in pointing out his own double relation to consensus.

31. Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture (New York: Routledge, 1984), 328.

32. These dimensions are developed more fully in Connolly, Identity\Difference, especially the last two chapters, and “Democracy and Territoriality, Millenium,” December (1991): 463-84.

33. Quoted in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, translated by Betsy Wing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 279. Thomas Keenan, in “The `Paradox' of Knowledge and Power,”Political Theory (February, 1987), discusses this statement thoughtfully and extensively.

34. “The Church has at all times desired the destruction of its enemies: we, we imoralists and anti-Christians, see that is to our advantage that the church exists.... In politics, too, enmity has become much more spiritual—much more prudent, much more thoughtful, much more forbearing.... We adopt the same attitude toward the `enemy within': there too we have spiritualized enmity, there too we have grasped its value.” Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), under “Morality as Anti-Nature,” 43-44.

35. When presenting these thoughts, I have found that about the juncture someone will interrupt, charging: “Murder is perverse! Torture is perverse! Your ethics of `generosity' sanctions these perversities. Certainly it lacks the ability to oppose them.” But, of course, it does not carry such implications. Its governing sensibility of care for the interdependence and strife of identity\difference obviously opposes such acts. Indeed, very often, murder and torture express the very dogmatism of identity and abstract revenge against life that this sensibility seeks to curtail. So why is the charge so predictable at this juncture? I suspect that some who wrap themselves in a fictive law they cannot demonstrate would like to punish those who keep pounding away, first, at the paradox of identity and, second, at the cruelties installed in transcendental narcissism. The next time this charge is issued, examine the demeanor of the one who issues it. Does he look like he could kill you? Fortunately, there are still laws to restrain dogmatists from acting on these impulses.

36. These comments on tensions between an ethic of cultivation and a politics of critical engagement are inspired from one side by a critique delivered to me every other day by Dick Flathman and from another by a critique offered by Stephen White of a paper of mine at the 1991 meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, Tampa, Florida entitled “Territoriality and Democracy.” Flathman is tempted by an antipolitics that expects little of politics because of its ugly character. This sensibility is brought out effectively in Toward a Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) and in a study of Hobbes soon to be published by Sage in its “Dialogue with Modernity” series. White finds my “ethic of cultivation” to be in conflict with a “politics of radical hope.” I find the terms in which he recognizes the tension to be too stark for my position. I do not have “radical hopes” for a political transformation; rather, I support radical critiques that might open up new spaces for life to be while supporting new possibilities of democratic change. Together these two put considerable pressure on the position I seek to inhabit. It is only after I compare the tensions in my stance with those in their's, respectively, that my confidence begins to reassert itself.

37. How can resentment find expression against a world lacking the kind of agency capable of receiving this animus? It cannot. That is what makes existential resentment so dangerous, for it preserves itself by manufacturing viable substitutes on which to displace itself. It (re)invents the logic of good and evil to locate evil agents to hold responsible for an apparent contingency of things that should not be this way. But where, asks Nietzsche, comes this last “should not”? From the same pool of existential resentment that keeps refilling itself. The logic of good and evil keeps returning—hence the continuing need for genealogy. Not even an “overman” can simply surpass this logic. It is timely to laugh at the overman, too.

38. Foucault, “Practicing Criticisms,” in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 256. Does Foucault underplay the tendency of “God,”“the Law,”“Nature,” and “Intrinsic Purpose” to reinstate themselves offstage even as the contingencies within them are addressed on stage? Probably. But I prefer to say that he acts as if these enactments can be challenged through counterenactments. Girard, Freud, Lacan, and others show how final markers reinstate themselves even though they lack the transcendental basis that their most earnest supporters yearn for. In Freud, guilt flows from the ambivalent identification with a model that one has just (perhaps in the imagination) killed; it precedes the God and the Law invented retroactively to explain it. Freud and others challenge moralisms that translate the experience of guilt into a transcendental source. But the next step is to develop strategies through which to politicize violences accompanying the conversion process. This is where the genius of Foucault shines.

Beyond Good and Evil

Abstract

Get full access to this article