The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1999) Vol. XXXVII, Supplement

The Politics of Decadence

Daniel W. Conway The Pennsylvania State University

I am, in questions of de‘cadence, the highest authority on earth.

-Letter to Malwida von Meysenbug on 18 October 1888.’

Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of de‘cadence-Z had reasons. (CW P)

Whoever fights monsters should see to it tha t in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into a n abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (BGE 146)

I. INTRODUCTION

On the topic of “Nietzsche and Politics,” there seems to be so much to say. Nietzsche is widely regarded as a trenchant critic of democracy, liberalism, egalitarianism, abstract rights, and various other hallmarks of modern political philosophy. He is also a n expert debunker and a fearless iconoclast, who continued, in his own perverse way, the de-mystifying project of the Enlightenment. In the eyes of many readers, he is a powerful ally in virtually any skirmish with established authority. Even unsympathetic readers are often eager to harness his explosive power to serve their own, anti-Nietzschean ends.2

Nietzsche is also the author of several beguiling teachings, which his readers have deemed pregnant with political promise. There is, for example, the teaching of the Ubermensch, the superman whom Zarathustra heralds as the “meaning of the earth,” who might yet lead humankind from its protracted nonage to full maturity as a species. There is also his enigmatic teaching of eternal recurrence, which some readers have appropriated as the impetus for secular redemption, cultural reform, and even political revolution. There is also the teaching of the will to power, which is believed by some readers to secure the ontological ground from which Realpolitik might finally proceed, unencumbered by the

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childish prejudices of folk psychology and humanistic morality. Finally, there is Nietzsche’s intimation of a “revaluation of all values,” which will break history in two and free humankind at last from the antiaffective animus of Christian morality.

Why is it, then, that there often seems to be so little to say on the topic of “Nietzsche and Politics”? Understandably wary of philosophical system-building, he conveys his political insights via lightning epigrams and apothegmatic proclamations, generally ignoring the quaint Alexandrian custom of furnishing evidence, arguments, and justifications. Unlike Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Wollstonecraft, Hegel, Berlin, and Rawls, among others, Nietzsche never advanced a fully-articulated political theory; nor did he deliver a single comprehensive treatise tha t he intended to convey and disseminate his political teachings. This does not mean, of course, that he has nothing to say about politics. What it does mean, however, is that any attention to his political thinking involves one in a complicated and delicate philological endeavor. Indeed, any attempt to extract his political philosophy from assorted passages mined from his various books and notes implicates his readers in a speculative enterprise that could easily lead well beyond anything he actually says.

But the problem of “Nietzsche and the political” can not be traced solely to Nietzsche’s writerly idiosyncrasies. His contributions to politics, and to political philosophy, a r e notoriously difficult to reckon. He not only stands in defiant opposition to the general political trends of modernity, but also refuses the “scientific” methodologies preferred by his contem- poraries. Foreseeing the cultural leveling tha t a t tends the ascendancy of democratic reforms, liberal ideals, and abstract rights, Nietzsche stumped for aristocracy, elitism, privilege, and a general preservation of what he calls the ”order of rank.” Indeed, despite his unmistakably “modern” orientation and concerns, he often seems to belong to another e ra altogether, an era in which manly warriors would test them- selves in mutually-elevating contests of will and strength, an e ra in which the resources of a n ent i re culture could be directed without apology t o the production of an elite van- guard of exemplary human specimens.

There is also widespread consensus t h a t Nietzsche’s contributions to political philosophy are exclusively negative: He can destroy, but he cannot create. Apart from the probing criticisms he levels against the basic principles of modern democracy and liberalism, a distinctly Nietzschean political theory is difficult to specify. The clarity of his critique of nineteenth-century politics quickly dissolves to the cloudiness of his vision for the future. When he does attempt to articulate something resembling a political vision for the future of humankind, he tends to favor lofty ideas that he never quite

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tethers to concrete anchorage. In fact, he never manages to articulate in any detail the celebrated teachings with which he is now most closely associated. The Ujberrnensch, eternal recurrence, will to power, the revaluation of all values-all more closely resemble political slogans than political theories. Indeed, when one considers the myriad l imitations of Nietzsche’s political thinking, one is perhaps persuaded by Alasdair MacIntyre’s decree that “the oberrnensch . . . belong[sl in the pages of a philosophical bestiary rather than in serious discu~sion.”~

Onward, then, into the bestiary!

11. NIETZSCHE CONTRA ZARATHUSTRA: THE SELF-REFERENTIAL TURNING

This is not to say, however, t ha t Nietzsche offers us no assistance in our contemporary explorations of the political. Such thinkers as Heidegger, Bataille, Foucault, Deleuze, Blanchot, and Derrida all unfold the political articulations of their thinking through apertures originally opened by Nietzsche. The problem of Nietzsche and the political is rather more complex, and difficult to address directly, for he often closes the doors that he has so audaciously opened for us. That is, we often have strong Nietzschean reasons for not pursuing the various political alternatives tha t a r e explored in his name. A tension within the economy of his own evolving project places his political thinking on a collision course with his emerging critique of modernity.

This endogenous tension is perhaps at t r ibutable to a number of causes, but it is most clearly the product of a fundamental development within the historical development of his thought. What I have in mind here is the unprecedented event of his philosophy turning back upon itself, whereupon it summons itself as the focal point of an ongoing confrontation with modernity. This self-referential turning intersects the twin economies of Nietzsche’s life and thought in the post- Zarathustran period of his career, comprising the period 1885- 1888, and it governs the development of his political thinking throughout this period. This turning is precipitated, or so I claim, by Nietzsche’s growing at tunement to the self- referential reverberations of his original confrontation with modernity, which he advanced in such early works as The Birth of Tragedy (1872). This original confrontation, he slowly comes t o understand, was prosecuted under a number of methodological assumptions tha t he now has good reason to reject. To take one example: The grand, integrated music- drama of Richard Wagner is not likely to reanimate the tragic muse, for Wagner himself is representative of the general

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cultural malaise that the young professor Nietzsche was eager to treat. This of course means that Nietzsche, who originally hoped to abet Wagner as a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice in the rejuvenation of tragic culture, is also implicated in the mysterious sclerotic affliction that has crippled the sustaining institutions of Western European culture. The turning in Nietzsche’s thought thus leads him to intensify, rather than to abandon, his conviction tha t modernity stands in crisis; if anything, his original confrontation with modernity under- estimated the scope and magnitude of this crisis.

In an operation constitutive of the self-referential turning in his thought, Nietzsche calls himself to order. In his 1886 “Attempt at a Self-criticism,” which he appends as a Preface t o the new edition of The Birth of Tragedy, he ruthlessly exposes the complicity of The Birth of Tragedy in the romantic pessimism it ostensibly sought to combat. In a passage that his enemies might have envied for i ts biting sarcasm, Nietzsche asks himself:

But, my dear sir, what in the world is romantic if your book is not? Can deep hatred against the “Now,” against “reality” and “modern ideas” be pushed further than you pushed it in your artists’ metaphysics? believing sooner in the Nothing, sooner in the devil than in “the Now”? ... Is your pessimists’ book not it- self a piece of anti-Hellenism and romanticism? (BT P7)

As this interrogative passage perhaps suggests, Nietzsche now realizes that his youthful desire to orchestrate a rebirth of tragic culture actually manifests the cultural crisis he had naively presumed to diagnose. The guiding conviction that modernity stands in need of redemption, that its goals and accomplishments fall short of some shadowy trans-historical standard of cultural “health,” is itself symptomatic of the facile moralizing that he now associates with the crisis of modernity.

Nietzsche publicly announces this turning in 1886, in the retrospective prefaces that he appends to his pre-Zarathustran books.* But the turning seems to have commenced a year or so earlier. Having gained some welcome critical distance from his beloved Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he resolved late in 1884 to add a fourth, self-parodic installment t o his masterpiece, which he had proclaimed “complete” in tripartite form only one year earlier. The period 1885-1888 thus falls in the shadow of the failure of the tripartite Zarathustra and of Nietzsche’s recognition of this failure. Indeed, his decision to pen a fourth installment to Zarathustra was prompted in part by his realization that the failure of the tripartite Zaruthustra, like the book itself, is strongly and inadvertently autobio- g r a p h i ~ a l . ~ Zarathustra, it turns out, is not the only one who has ugone under.”

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Nietzsche’s turning both authorizes and enacts the critical project that informs the post-Zarathustran period of his career. Rather than attempt t o distance himself from the crisis of modernity, or to exempt himself from its totalizing sprawl, he now attempts to situate himself squarely within his revised diagnosis of modernity. The trajectory of his post-Zarathustran philosophizing thus describes a turning inward, as he attempts to articulate an immanent critique of modernity, a critique that is self-consciously self-referential in scope and application.

Nietzsche’s philosophy thus becomes overtly and directly political only when he resolves to read himself into his own critique of modernity. It is precisely his complicated role in the crisis of his age that eluded his original confrontation with modernity. In order to take the full measure of modernity (and thus bring to completion his revised critical project), he must either assay his own share in modernity or prepare others to do so for him. By dint of the self-referential immersion required by his turning, he thus comes to assume a dual relationship to the disintegrating epoch of late modernity: He is not only its faithful chronicler, but its representative exemplar as well. Throughout the post-Zarathustran period of his thought, he operates simultaneously as subject and object, physician and patient, inquisitor and defendant, analyst and analysand.

Nietzsche’s turning articulates itself along a number of intersecting planes and vectors, but I will follow one in particular-not only because of its importance for our topic today, but also because it places his political thinking in such sharp contrast to the inspirational, exhortatory teachings of that self- righteous buffoon, Zarathustra. Indeed, one way of appreciating the operation of this turning in Nietzsche’s thought is to regard it as an enactment of his struggle to distance himself from the naive voluntarism of his “son,” Zarathustra. Rather than vow to kill the primal father, a gambit that backfired embarrassingly in Z’affaire Wagner, Nietzsche designs for his upstart “son” a final Untergang. He thereby regains control of the direction of his philosophical project, but only at the expense of the considerable authority of his most famous spokesman and advocate. In Ecce Homo he goes so far as to correct Zarathustra’s teaching of the Ubermensch (EH “Books” 1; “Destiny” 5) , thereby implying the inadequacy of Zarathustra’s orotund pedagogy.‘j In the period marked by this turning, the period 1885-1888, we thus witness a compelling, self-referential subtext: Nietzsche contra Zarathustra.

111. DECADENCE: THE DEFINING CHARACTER OF LATE MODERNITY

Nietzsche’s immanent critique of modernity almost immed- iately pays handsome dividends. Now fully immersed in the

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epoch in which he labors, he discovers what he takes to be its defining character: Late modernity is marked as an epoch by its besetting decadence. I t is not simply the case, as Zarathustra lamented, that decadent individuals and institutions are littered across the landscape of late modernity. Decadence actually suffuses the epoch itself, independent of the individuals and institutions that Zarathustra so famously lampoons. We might say, then, that decadence enframes late modernity, imbuing the epoch with a n identity and character all its own, while simultaneously circumscribing the domain of human praxis. This means tha t individuals who toil in the twilight of the idols “naturally” inherit as their own the decadence that defines the epoch they involuntarily represent. As such, the decadence of late modernity is both inescapable and ineluctable. For this reason, in fact, Nietzsche can no longer avail himself of his notorious elitism. In matters of decadence, there is no “us us. them,” as Zarathustra wishfully taught. There is only an “us,” and this “us” is inexorably expending its residual stores of vitality.

What then does Nietzsche mean by decadence? He apparently borrows the term from the French psychologist Paul Bourget, whose writings he openly admired. Nietzsche typically uses the French word itself, attempting neither a German translation nor a philosophical redaction of it. The term enters his philosophical vocabulary only very late in his career, appearing exclusively in the writings from 1888.7 While it is true that he employed related terms-such as Entartung, Niedergang, and Verfall- throughout his career to describe the general cultural malaise that gripped European culture, none of these other terms was applied so forcefully and self-consciously to Nietzsche himself. For this reason, in fact, the term “decadence” acquires a quasi- technical s ta tus within the critical apparatus of his post- Zarathustran writings. “Decadence” thus serves as the central category of Nietzsche’s confrontation with modernity in the writings from 1888, and its centrality confirms the consolidation of his post-Zarathustran critical method.

Nietzsche deploys the term “decadence” not merely as a metaphor for degeneration and decline. He means to describe a condition of systemic physiological disarray, which he apparently believes is subject to empirical diagnosis and verification; indeed, he occasionally refers to a mysterious “dynamometer” that he claims can be used to measure the native vitality of an organism (TI “Skirmishes” 20). This condition of physiological disarray is itself described as a manifestation of a more basic disintegration of an organism’s prevailing system of instincts, which, according to Nietzsche, provide guidance and direction in the form of prereflective patterns of behavior. The “instincts” characteristic of a particular people or epoch thus reflect a specific organization of the primal drives and impulses, such tha t these drives and impulses discharge themselves in accordance with the dominant

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mores of the people or epoch in question. As a regnant instinct system disintegrates, thereby signaling the decadence of a people or epoch, human beings begin to live quite badly, invariably choosing to engage in behaviors that are contradictory, counter- productive, and self-destructive. Nietzsche thus defines “decadence” as the “instinctive preference” for “what disinte- grates, what hastens the end” (TZ “Skirmishes” 39).

Although his pronouncements on decadence often reflect his passing acquaintance with the popular pseudo-sciences of the day, he also offers descriptions of decadence that we may appreciate independent of the suspect etiologies on which he relies. For example, he regularly characterizes decadence as a systemic exhaustion or weakness of will, which he traces to an inherited (and growing) disparity between the cognitive and volitional resources at the disposal of representative agents. Decadents typically know what is wrong with them, but are unable to implement corrective measures. They become, as i t were, mere spectators in their own lives, mere actors in a drama whose unknown author has scripted for them a n ignominious role that they are powerless to decline. As deca- dence runs its inexorable course, human beings experience the need for ever more exotic and bizarre goals to stimulate their weakened wills. Indeed, Nietzsche fears tha t the “will to nothingness,” the will never to will again, has recently darkened the horizon of late modernity. The will to nothingness represents the final will of a declining people o r epoch, as decadent human beings embrace self-annihilation as the sole remaining goal capable of stimulating their enfeebled wills.

This putative insight into the enframing character of decadence has far-ranging implications for Nietzsche’s political thinking. For example, he explains, we late moderns are not free to defy the character of our epoch; the decadence that defines us is both nonnegotiable and intractable. Even Nietzsche himself is decadent, as he cheerfully announces in both Ecce Homo and The Case of Wagner. It is consequently impossible in late modernity to found or to resurrect political regimes that embody a genuine alternative to decadence. Whatever political regimes emerge in the twilight of the idols must reflect the diminished vitality that is characteristic of the epoch. Nietzsche thus submits that the crisis of modernity admits of no political solution:

All our political theories and constitutions-and the “German Reich” is by no means an exception-are consequences, neces- sary consequences, of decline. (TI “Skirmishes” 37)

Although his contempt for Bismarck’s Reich is indisputable, he nowhere indicates t h a t a viable alternative is ei ther available or attainable; indeed, any political reaction o r response to the Reich would be equally expressive of the

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enframing decadence of modernity. We must consequently abandon any hope tha t we might somehow stem (much less reverse) the rising tide of decadence:

I t is a self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists if they believe that they are extricating themselves from deca- dence when they merely wage war against it. Extrication lies beyond their strength _.. they change its expression, but they do not get rid of decadence itself. (TI “Socrates” 11Y

Nietzsche criticizes the various political schemes of late modernity not because he is fundamentally apolitical, bu t because they all trade on a common confusion of the causes and effects of cultural “reform.” These bankrupt redemptive schemes-including his own youthful call for a rebir th of tragic culture-all presuppose a vitali ty t h a t is simply incompatible with the decadence of late modernity:

The whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: perhaps nothing antagonizes its “modern spirit” so much. One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: pre- cisely this is called “freedom.” That which makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, repudiated: one fears the dan- ger of a new slavery the moment the word “authority” is even spoken out loud. This is how far decadence has advanced in the value-instincts of our politicians, of our political parties: in- stinctively they prefer what disintegrates, what hastens the end. (TI “Skirmishes” 39)

As i f this diagnosis were not sufficiently indicative of the political impotence of the European cultures of late modernity, Nietzsche elsewhere conveys his evaluation in even more candid terms:

To say i t briefly (for a long time people will still keep silent about it): What will not be built any more henceforth, and can- not be built any more, is-a society [Gesellschaftl in the old sense of tha t word; to build that, everything is lacking, above all the material. All of us are no longer material for a society. (GS 356)

This account of the enframing character of decadence does not exhaust the insights t h a t Nietzsche gleans from his immanent critique of modernity. The story gets much better, or much worse, depending on your perspective. Nietzsche’s immanent critique of modernity also reveals to him that every historical epoch possesses its own defining character, which vigilant critics can discern through careful empirical scrutiny

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of its organizing principles. This claim supports the common interpretation of Nietzsche as a historicist, for he apparently means to attribute to each age a unique character, validity, and integrity all its own. Any age can therefore be described and evaluated as a unitary phenomenon, independent of the indi- viduals and events who come to represent it. Indeed, only by appealing to the defining character of the age can Nietzsche speak meaningfully of the ascendancy or descendancy, the flourishing and the passing, of an historical epoch.

Even more controversially, however, Nietzsche’s immanent critique of modernity reveals to him that all historical epochs are nested in a single continuum of unbroken fatality. S o although each successive epoch boasts its own unique character, the precise character that it possesses is not legis- lated by the individuals who labor within its environs. Indeed, the precise character of any epoch is determined by the character of the epochs tha t preceded it. This is why a “decadent” epoch must follow a “healthy” epoch, why a period of contraction and dissolution must follow a period of expansion and consolidation. Thus we see that decadence is not only the defining character of late modernity, but its enframing destiny as well, prefigured in the traditions and cultures that lead into it. The decadence of late modernity is therefore what Nietzsche calls a fatality: It is accidental neither in its particular, totalizing character nor in its nested placement within the larger totality of Western history. To live within a particular historical epoch is therefore to inherit its defining character as the stamp of one’s own soul, complete with its attendant complement of freedoms and delimitations. Indeed, to live within a particular historical epoch is to enact, involuntarily, the fatality of the age itself.

This insight into the fatality of late modernity within the continuum of Western history thus leads Nietzsche to sketch a surprisingly robust critique of individual agency:

The single one, the “individual,” as hitherto understood by the people and the philosophers alike, is an error after all: he is nothing by himself, no atom, no “link in the chain,” nothing merely inherited from former times; he is the whole single line of humanity up to himself. (TI “Skirmishes” 33)

In light of the critique of individual agency that emerges from the writings of 1888, it is perhaps not surprising that Nietzsche concludes his philosophical career as an unlikely champion of fatalism. Now decamped 180 degrees from the radical voluntarism of the downbound Zarathustra, he decrees:

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward,

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not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it-all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary-but love it. (EH “Clever” 10)

Indeed, when Nietzsche identifies himself in Ecce Homo as a “destiny,” he is not only congratulating himself for his singular accomplishments; he is also conveying the scope of his newly- embraced fatalism.

IV. NIETZSCHE CONTRA NIETZSCHE: COLLISION AND IMPLOSION

What then remains of the political? What is Nietzsche’s response to decadence, understood now as the inescapable, enframing character of the epoch within which he labors? We now know that we late moderns are not free to defy the totality that defines us. But what are we free to do and to become?

At this point Nietzsche’s continued influence reveals itself as distinctly and undecidably ambiguous. Although he depicts the enframed space of the political as no longer determined by traditional philosophical categories, he also deems this space of containment to be largely unworthy of extended exploration. All tha t we are free to do in late modernity is to enact our ineluctable historical destiny as decadent epigones. Any attempt t o distinguish between various modes of enactment (save Nietzsche’s own), would be idle and academic. We therefore have no choice but to continue our headlong slide into degeneration:

Nothing avails: one must go forward-step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern “progress”). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more. (TI “Skirmishes” 43)

To be sure , th i s i s not Nietzsche a t his best. Here he indulges in exactly the sort of facile moralizing for which he ridicules other philosophers. In fact, the overripe conclusion of his immanent critique is precisely what his general diagnosis would predict of any decadent: His weakness for summary moral evaluations compromises his insight into the nature of the political in late modernity. In the very gesture of disclosing to us the undiscovered country of politics, he also, and involuntarily, presents this undiscovered country as already charted and mapped-that is, as already “discovered”-by him. He apparently cannot abide prospective explorers who dispute the authority of his own cartography. In Deleuzian termi- nology, Nietzsche’s welcome deterritorialization of the space of

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the political is compromised by a simultaneous reterritor- ialization of this space. In debunking the traditional concepts of agency, will, subjectivity, causality, freedom, and responsibility, he liberates the space of the political from the enduring thrall of its enabling metaphysics of morals. However, he presents these textbook debunkings within the context of a doomsday meta- narrative that mitigates their liberatory promise.

This may not be Nietzsche at his best, but it is Nietzsche at his most real , his most complex, and his most authentic. Indeed, here we see that Nietzsche fully reflects the defining character of late modernity. In fact, the further he strays from his historically specific analysis of late modernity, the more dramatically he enacts the decadent character of the epoch as a whole. J u s t as he would predict of any decadent, he is ultimately not equal to his own greatest insights; he lacks the strength of will to undertake a serious investigation of the historically-specific political space tha t he has disclosed. Instead, he issues a meta-narrative jeremiad tha t explains why any such investigation is largely pointless. We might therefore view Nietzsche’s involuntary manifestation of decadence as the opportunity cost of his project of immanent critique. He has stared long into the abyss of decadence, and the abyss has re turned his gaze. He now exemplifies the decadence he diagnoses, and it now contaminates his political thinking. Could we have realistically expected any other conclusion to his reckless experiment in immanent critique?

If we are to make the most of Nietzsche’s genius, then we would do well to acknowledge his immersion in the decadence of his epoch and the effects of this immersion on his subsequent political thinking. As we have seen, he discloses the space of the political as already enframed in a way that allows us to re-think the basic concepts on which the political has tradit ionally rested. In the process of advancing this insight, however, he embeds it within a n antecedently moralized interpretation. He presents the frame of decadence as a kind of suffocating cage, i n which a once noble beast endures i ts final, wretched days. Although he “invites” us to explore the space of containment sheltered beneath the frame of decadence in late modernity, he also assures us tha t any such exploration will reveal only a cramped stage, whereupon we might “dance in our chains” if we are so pathetic as to wish. At i t s “best,” t h a t is, l a te modernity has come to resemble a satyr-play.

V. RESISTANCE AND POLITICS

In the time remaining, I wish to suggest a partial recup- eration of Nietzsche’s decadence. This interpretation turns on

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my attempt to interpret his greatest perceived success as an unappreciated failure, and his greatest perceived failure as an unappreciated success. As we have seen, his Promethean moment of insight, wherein he spies the undiscovered country of politics, also marks a titanic performance of his decadence. He cannot simply disclose the space of the political in late modernity. He must do so in such a way that reflects his own prereflective colonization of that space-hence his dismissive claims about the promise of politics in late modernity. Under the terms of his own diagnosis, however, this means tha t we must now distrust Nietzsche and treat his own philosophy as symptomatic of decay. Before we read Nietzsche against Nietzsche in this way, however, a caveat is in order. My attempt to articulate a partial recuperation of his decadence presupposes my own placement within the ruined labyrinth of his diagnosis of modernity. Any decadence-induced deforma- tions that are held to compromise his diagnosis must also be presumed to vitiate my own critical standpoint.

Having placed Nietzsche under suspicion, we can still make use of him-no longer as a guide, perhaps, but as an example. For although he manifests the decadence of the epoch that he represents, he has prepared us for this eventuality. He not only enables his readers to detect his expressions of decadence, bu t also t ra ins them in the symptomatological method of criticism that he practices. He thus furnishes the psychological insights, rhetorical strategies, and historical case studies needed for his readers to subject him to the categories of his own critique. Within the context of his revised critical project, his pronouncement of his own decadence thus functions as a gesture of provocation, as a n invitation to read Nietzsche against Nietzsche. Unlike other critics of modernity, that is, he actually dares his readers to extract from him the “personal confession” and “unconscious memoir” tha t he involuntarily essays. In so doing, his readers continue the self-referential turning begun by Nietzsche, taking up his project of immanent critique at the point where he himself can no longer bear i ts self-referential scrutiny.

As a n example of this sort of strategy, le t us briefly examine Nietzsche’s own account of his “heroic” struggle with the decadence tha t characterizes late modernity. As we have already seen, he candidly owns his share in the decadence that enframes late modernity. But this is not the end of the story. The precise nature of his complicity in fact illuminates the dimension of praxis tha t remains available to him. He thus explains,

I a m , no less than Wagner, a child of his time; that is, a de‘cadent. But I comprehended this, I resisted it. The philoso- pher in me resisted. (CW P)

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Nietzsche speaks here specifically of resisting the influence of Wagner, bu t his general point obtains for all prevailing expressions of decadence. Decadence can neither be reversed nor arrested, but it can be resisted by those in whom “the philosopher” productively resides. He thus explains in Ecce Homo that although he is a decadent, he is “also the opposite [Gegensatz]” of a decadent, an opposition to which he at t r i - butes his abundant “wisdom” ( E H “Wise” 2). Owing to his opposition to decadence, he is “at the same time a decadent and a beginning” ( E H “Wise” 11, which suggests t h a t a decadence turned against itself might yield productive consequences. Indeed, he describes his decadence as something he can use as “an energetic stimulus for life, for living more” (EH “Wise” 2).

These a re encouraging words, for they suggest that the decadent frame of late modernity allows sufficient latitude to enact a practical, political response. Indeed, despite the withering critique of agency tha t emerges from Nietzsche’s confrontation with modernity, a critique which reduces all other “agents” to a bundle of untreatable symptoms and incurable pathologies, he reserves for himself a minimal domain of praxis, wherein he might strategically manifest his decadence for the benefit of those who will follow.

But these are also discouraging words, for they reflect the delusions of grandeur tha t now afflict Nietzsche, and which are telltale symptoms of his decadence. In his writings from 1888, he regularly exempts himself from his otherwise prepotent critique of agency, arrogating to himself sufficient agency and vitality to “break history in two” (EH “Destiny” 8). He presents himself as inaugurating an era of “great politics” (EH “Destiny” 11, even as his critique of modernity suggests that politics may be a bankrupt enterprise. Indeed, even as he exposes the fait accompli of the demise of Western civilization, he nevertheless aspires to choreograph the satyr-play tha t unfolds around him. We know about the decadent Nietzsche that he must remain the center of history, even in the event that he reduces history to a series of epochs whose sequential procession rehearses a preestablished, descensional trajectory.

We need not conclude, however, that a politics of resistance is therefore hopeless. Indeed, this branch of Nietzsche’s legacy is productively explored in their various ways by Heidegger, Camus, Bataille, Foucault, Deleuze, Blanchot, Derrida, and a number of other influential scholars. We learn from these thinkers that a politics of resistance remains productive only as a work in progress-only so long, that is, as we or others on our behalf are able to resist the all-too-human impulse toward simultaneous reterritorialization.

But apa r t from the viability of pursuing a politics of resistance along these more familiar lines, Nietzsche remains

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a valuable resource, even-or especially-in the abject throes of his decadence. Indeed, his involuntary expressions of decadence continue the ongoing process of exploring the space of the political i n la te modernity. By dint of his unwitting performances, he helps us to understand in ever greater detail the na ture and l imits of the decadence t h a t enframes the epoch. He does not take the full diagnostic measure of his epoch, but his performance of the signature contradictions of the epoch-its weakness of will, its tenacious allegiance to bankrupt metaphysical principles, its residual faith in a God it knows to be dead-does provide us with a more complete picture of modernity itself.

Here we encounter a more human Nietzsche-neither the avenging Antichrist, nor the millennia1 Uberrnensch, nor the multiplex soul tha t dissociatively answers to “all names in history,” nor the Dionysus who must return to wed his beloved Ariadne, nor the pagan martyr whose demise absolves pos- terity of the sins of Western Christianity. He may not succeed in stretching his wearied soul to encompass all the names in history, but he does succeed in showing us what happens when a representative exemplar of late modernity attempts in this way to take the measure of his age. Nothing is more characteristically modern than his attempt to represent, to speak for, t o embody the age as a whole-nothing, that is, save his failure to do so. Or, which may amount to the same thing- nothing except the madness t o which he was delivered upon undertaking this risky project.

Nietzsche may fail in his avowed intention to take the measure of his age, but he unwittingly succeeds in embodying the fragmentary ethos of la te modernity. When forcibly subsumed under his own diagnostic categories, he literally becomes a sign of his times, onto whom modernity has inscribed its distinctive, indelible scrawl. His more promising critique of modernity is etched not on the pages of his post- Zarathustran writings, but on the swollen, scarred surface of his tormented soul, as enacted in the contradictions and prejudices that define (and limit) him as a thinker. His failure to divine the logos of his age actually contributes to our greater appreciation of the disintegrating ethos of modernity. From his philosophical successes and failures, that is, we may acquire a n enhanced sense of what it is like to be ineluctably m ~ d e r n . ~

NOTES

Friedrich Nietzsche: Samtliche Briefe, Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bunden, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, vol. 8, no. 1131 (Berlin: deGruyter/Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986), 452. Hereafter, abbreviated SAB.

See, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre’s engagement with

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“he Politics of Decadence

Nietzsche in After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 19841, especially chapter 9. MacIntyre is happy to allow Nietzsche to discredit the Enlightenment thinkers who stand in the way of an Aristotelian renascence, but he insists that this destructive power is ineffectual against the Aristotelian alternative tha t he recommends.

After Virtue, 22. My attention to the retrospective prefaces of 1886 is indebted to

Claus-Artur Scheier’s Friedrich Nietzsche. Ecce Auctor: Die Vorreden von 1886, collected and introduced by Claus-Artur Scheier (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990). In his commentary on the prefaces of 1886, Scheier persuasively argues tha t the prefaces collectively constitute an event of self-presentation and self-annunciation on Nietzsche’s part (vii-xxxii). On the pivotal importance of Nietzsche’s retrospective prefaces, see also Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Toward the Ubermensch: Reflections on the Year of Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” Nietzsche-Studien 23 (1994): 124-145; and my own essay, “Nietzsche’s Art of This-Worldly Comfort: Self-Reference and Strategic Self- Parody,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 9, no. 3 (July 1992): 343- 357.

Several commentators have speculated that Nietzsche limited the publication and distribution of Par t IV of his Zarathustra in order to avoid offending those friends and acquaintances who are lampooned in his sketches of the buffoonish “higher men.” In light of the strongly autobiographical character of Part IV, however, he may have been more concerned to avoid embarrassing himself. As he explains to Franz Overbeck in a letter of 31 March 1885, Part IV of Zarathustra comprises his attempt to “reckon the sum of a deep and hidden life” (SAB, vol. 7, no. 589, 34).

I develop this point a t greater length,in my essay “The Genius a s Squanderer: Some Remarks on the Ubermensch and Higher Humanity,” International Studies in Philosophy 30:3 (August 1998):

My understanding of the importance of decadence to the development of Nietzsche’s post-Zarathustran project is indebted to Brian G. Domino, “Nietzsche’s Republicanism,” Doctoral Thesis, Pennsylvania State University, 1993.

A persistent theme of Nietzsche’s notes from 1888 is the belief that philosophers, moralists, and statesmen regularly mistake the consequences of decadence for its causes (cf. WP 38-48). Hence the failure of all prescriptive measures for “treating” decadence: “But the supposed remedies of degeneration are also mere palliatives against some of its effects: the ‘cured’ are merely one type of the degenerates” (WP 42).

This essay draws on some materials t ha t were originally published in my book, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). I would like to thank Cambridge University Press for its generous permission to reprint these materials.

81-95.

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