Re: Nietzsche and interpretation

On Sat, 18 Nov 1995, Melissa McMahon wrote:

> re Alan:
> >I agree with most of what you say, Melissa, about active and reactive
> >interpretation/forces, but I'd suggest that you get into trouble at the
> >start when you take interpretation as a thing and/or conflate it with
> >"perspective.".....
> 
> Mmmmm, I love trouble....
> 
> I would understand a statement like 'there are no beings' or 'there are no
> things' in the context of Deleuze's or Nietzsche's work as "there are no
> identities" ie. there are no subjects or objects, 'beings' prior to
> 'becoming'. This was not the sense in which I meant "thing". The point of
> the expression "the point of view is itself a thing", as I see it, is to
> displace and in fact usurp the terms of identity that are usually
> considered to the co-ordinates of a point of view ("somethings" point of
> view on "something else"). It is the upsurge and arrogation of the 'middle'
> as autonomous, the relation as prior to the terms it relates, becoming over
> being. Aren't you making the will to power into a subject (hence a term of
> identity), anthropomorphising, when you talk about "it's" point of view, or
> "it's" activity? How do you then make this multiple, if not the multiple of
> the one (cf. "It is not in multiplying the representations and the point of
> view that the immediate, defined as 'sub-representative' is attained.")? I
> also can't agree with the hylomorphic interpretation of the will to power's
> activity as the imposition of a 'form' on a 'flow of becoming'. I think
> it's this interpretation (of interpretation) that is put into question when
> the point of view becomes itself the 'thing', neither form nor matter, nor
> their conjugation. Form and matter would again be the 'terms' of a
> relation, when it's the relation itself that poses all the mystery.
> 
> - Melissa
> 
> 
> 
> 

Throwing in my two cents, though I should probably point out that my 
pennies are very tarnished and misshapen, I'd like to say that the 
question of form and interpretation doesn't necessarily become an issue 
of hylomorphism because Nietzsche is a Kantian.  In the _preface to the 
Phenomenology of Spirit_, when Hegel chastizes Kant for dallying with 
pure formalism and leaving critique devoid of any real content he simply 
misses the point.  Or, it might be said that he makes Kant's point by 
missing it.  Admitedly, in the final analysis, Kant arrives at a place that 
might be called a pure formalism, but where he arrives in the end isn't 
half as interesting as how he gets there.  In _Kant's Critical 
Philosophy_ Deleuze says:  "The Fundamental idea of what Kant calls his 
"Copernican Revolution' is the following: substituting the principle of a 
_necessary_ submission of object to subject for the idea of harmony 
between subject and object (_final_ accord)." (p.14) For the Revolution 
itself both the harmony and the submission are of little concern, in that 
they are but indices of the turning motion which occures in the 
substitution. In order to effect the 'Copernican Revolution'
Kant had to assualt the conditions of possibility by which objects and 
subjects were placed in a knowable relation, the form of knowledge itself 
had to be broken in order for Kant to arrive at his own formalism.  But 
to attempt such a maneuver is to step into the abyse, in that the 
Copernican Revolution is a permanent revolution.  When Hegel 
substitutes the necessity of content for the possibility of form he is in 
effect still playing within the limits of critique.  What Derrida says of 
Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger can just as easily be said of Kant and 
Hegel: "...the Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, the critique of 
the concepts of Being and truth, for which were substituted the concepts 
of play, interpretation and sign...; the Freudian critique of 
consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity...; and more radically, 
the Heideggarian destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, of the 
determination of being as presence.  But all these destructive discourses 
and all their analogues are trapped in a kind of circle.  It describes the 
form of the relation between the history of metaphysics and the 
destruction of the history of metaphysics." (from "Structure, Sign, and Play)
In order for the critique of metaphysics to occure the totality of 
metaphysics must be reproduced within the discourse of critique, even if 
this reproduction only occures at the level of analogy and inuendo.  All of 
this seems to fit quite nicely in relation to Kant since the end of 
metaphysics begins with the Kantian destruction of dogmatic metaphysics, 
with the Copernican Revolution, and with the substitution of one relation of 
limits to knowledge by another.

Deleuze, however, goes even farther than both Hegel and Derrida.  On the 
one hand Deleuze suggests that Kantian critique is not devoid of 
content:  "(Reason) does _not_ say that the totality and the unity of 
conditions are given in the object, but only that objects allow us to 
tends towards this systematic unity as the highest degree of our 
knowledge.  Thus the content of phenomena _does_ correspond to the Ideas, 
and the Ideas to the content of phenomena; but, instead of necessary and 
determined subjection we have here only a correspondence, an 
indeterminate accord.  The Idea is not a fiction, says Kant; it has an 
objective value, it possesses an object; but this object itself is 
'indeterminate', 'problematic'.  _Indeterminate_ in its object, 
_determinable_ by analogy with the objects of experience; bearing the 
ideal of an _infinite determination_ in relation to the concepts of the 
understanding:  these are the three aspects of the Idea.  Thus reason is 
not content to reason in relation to the concepts of the understanding; it 
'symbolizes' in relation to the content of phenomena." (KCP pp.20-21)
On the other hand, there is an implication here that critique can acheive 
a stage in which it is no longer necessary to destroy the form of 
knowledge by replacing it with a new form because form, and its meaning 
are no longer stable. 

It is precisely at the point were 'form' becomes problematic and 
indeterminate that Nietzsche can be called a Kantian. The difference 
being that, rather than focusing on the relation between objects of 
experience and the understanding, Nietzsche takes as his target the analogy 
which expresses this relation.  When you said that the imposition of form 
on the flow of becoming is put into question by the will-to-power as 
an interpretive strategy you were exactly right.  However, the 
will-to-power _is_ an imposition of form, but form no longer says what it 
once did for it is no longer constrained by the traditional relation 
between being and becoming.  By focusing on analogy rather than 
substance, by focusing on the relation of signs by which Being is 
expresses, rather than on Being as such, Nietzsche forces critique to 
function beyond the limits of negativity.  In the will-to-power critique 
constitutes a positive force which constitutes form and meaning through 
the destruction of form and meaning, though neither of these points are 
stable.  This, at any rate, seems to be what Nietzsche is suggesting in 
the Genealogy a couple of paragraphs before the section that Alan sited, 
when he says in relation to purposes that "(t)he form is fluid, but the  
the "meaning" is even more so.

Nietzsche didn't so much get rid of the relation between being 
and becoming as he reversed and conflated it such that being does not 
compose the proper teleological condition of becoming, rather becoming 
constitutes the 'steady' state of being.  When the hammer strikes the 
idol is not evaporated but replaced by the shattering crescendo of so 
many shards of glass exploding from the point of impact.  When one 
becomes what one is it is not a process of becoming what one ought to be, 
rahter it constitutes a lateral motion cutting that which is supposed to 
be given by a past or a future which does not cycle back to the moment.  
As D and G would have it, 'the schiz flows'.

Flannon


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