1) Nietzsche As Myth And The Mythmaker 1

2) Nietzsche On Truth And Lie 13

3) Nietzsche as Master of Suspicion and Immoralist 23

4) On The Death Of God 33

5) Nietzsche And The Eternal Recurrence 44

6) The Will To Power 54

1) Nietzsche As Myth And The Mythmaker

The first lecture will be an introduction to Nietzsche that I have called “Myth and Mythmaker”. I’d
like to say a little bit about his life because there is really not too much to say about it. It will only
take a few minutes, I think, to summarise. He had a really unexciting life, and so we need to
distinguish right away two things. One is what I like to call “The Nietzsche Effect”, and I am a
child of the sixties, so I am very familiar with the so-called “Nietzsche Effect”, and that’s the
effect that Nietzsche has on adolescent young males who read him for the first time [crowd
laughter] and begin to name their cars “Ubermensch” wagons, ah, and begin to quote Nietzsche
in order to date women who dress in black, as I am dressed today, and the Nietzsche
fascination. That characterises one’s first encounter and certainly it characterised my first
encounter with Nietzsche as well.

We need to distinguish the Nietzsche Effect and also the effect of his texts from his life radically
because his life is – in my opinion, you know, from what I know about it – extremely boring.
Someone asked me before the class ah, “Well, was Nietzsche gay?” Well, you know, he wrote a
book called “The Gay Science” but he didn’t publish it, you know, in San Francisco in anything,
and it’s not about gays. Nietzsche probably only had one sexual encounter in his life, it’s likely
that that encounter… that he contracted syphilis in that encounter, so this is hardly the subject
for a mini series. I mean, this won’t make it to Dallas.

He was a brilliant young man who got a job teaching at a German university at a very, very
young age. In fact, if you know the German university system, a remarkably young age. But
because of migraine headaches and problems with faculty meetings – things that I am very
familiar with – he quit and travelled and wrote books. So in a certain important sense, the books
that I will be talking about – the texts that I will be discussing – are his life, and ah, so questions
about his biographical history, I’ll give you just and outline, because Nietzsche in an important
sense is the last thinker of the 19th Century, and also in another important sense that I will be
arguing, I hope, throughout the course; one of the most important figures for our present
moment.

Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Germany. Of course I only talk about Germans, I guess this is
established policy now, right? To concentrate all our policy on Germany, Japan and the Soviet
Union. He was from one of those three; he was from Germany. He had a rather famous but brief
friendship with the composer Wagner. That’s the most exciting thing, so… I am not going to say
much about it, but… he had a famous friend.

He wrote a lot of books that we will talk about. He was raised by his mother; his father was a
minister – a rather sickly person – as he was throughout his life. So if any of you have had some
brief acquaintance with Nietzsche and the doctrine of the affirmation of life, and all the
hyperbole about health and the superman that appears in his text, it would be a shocking
contrast to meet the real Nietzsche at one of the little resort towns where he used to hang out
and find this dapper, rather quiet European man who was extremely ineffectual, this wouldn’t be
your view of Superman, for sure.

Anyway, the Nietzsche we know in the texts isn’t dead yet – Nietzsche as writer – but Nietzsche
died in… 1900 on the nose, which is nice if you are a historian and you like to periodise, he died
at the end of the 19th Century, but as some of you may also know, Nietzsche went mad ten
years before that, much to the delight of various commentators, Christian commentators and
others who argue that anyone who took some of the extreme positions – and series of positions,
if one wants to attribute them to Nietzsche – ah, about God, the argument is that, you know,
you’ll go mad or you’ll change your mind in a foxhole or whatever. So his madness has been a
consolation to many and certainly it was a consolation to his sister who made the most obscene
uses of him afterwards.

The familiar picture we have of Nietzsche as a person is… if you look at this Portable Nietzsche,
I suggest to everyone as the first encounter you should have, it was sort of designed for that.
You may have seen other books in this series, the Portable so and so and so and so and so and
so… well this actually is an excellent little text, but look at the sort of sketched in picture of
Nietzsche with the big moustache… well, this is the way his sister would have him wear his hair
and dress him. During his life he had very short hair… very dapper… his sister had him grow
this sort of prophet like beard and dressed him in a cloak and then would bring people in to
show them her famous brother. This is very Germanic, it’s just strange “Here is Nietzsche”, you
know… beard… cloak [crowd laughter]. So again, I am not going to say very much about his life
because his life was a pathetic ruin. His texts on the other hand have not suffered the same fate
that he did as an embodied suffering human being.

To approach the text of Nietzsche is difficult and this format adds one additional paradox to the
paradoxes with which we are about to begin. There are at least two sets of paradoxes that
concern Nietzsche as myth and mythmaker. The first of those paradoxes are within his writings,
for example – and we will cover these as the courses go on – Nietzsche will suggest that
morality has an immoral origin, that rationality has an irrational origin, that truth has its origin in
fiction, and so on. So those are the paradoxes that we will deal with within the text of Nietzsche.
Those are paradoxes that any interpretation of Nietzsche would have to address. Any
interpretation of his work would have to address those… and my task of doing a course on
Nietzsche would be difficult enough if I just had to address those. Those are tough.

The second sets of paradoxes make it even more of a problem, and that’s the paradox
generated by what might be called… generated by his writing instead of the paradoxes within it.
The paradox generated by his writing; by his pluralism of styles. He wrote in fragments,
aphorisms, jokes, all kinds of metaphoric tropes, he also wrote treatises, and in fact in a plurality
of different styles. Many of them, the most famous and most discussed ones are these either
short parables or aphorisms which are hyperbolic, exciting, brilliant, and as I say have received
a lot of attention.

But the paradox generated by his writing is that the clear sense emerges from Nietzsche’s
project that it is, and this will be a central issue. Now I am not saying we are going to settle this
in here for goodness sake, I don’t know if it’s settleable. But a central issue of his writing will be
the so-called impossibility of interpreting, and many of the issues we are going to discuss will
concern interpretation. So, please don’t think that interpretation here is a special philosophical
term. I want to try to bring home to you the practical importance of interpretation, and then I will
return to the paradox.

We interpret all the time. I mean whether… you know… we don’t interpret in a specialised
scholarly sense, but we interpret all the time. When we look in the mirror, when we dress in the
morning… and you may notice that we are similarly dressed. I mean you know, an
anthropologist would notice that we share much more in common in our dress than differences.
There are many background conditions and interpretive conditions that go into dressing,
presenting one’s persona, and so on.

There are many background conditions and interpretations that go into an act as simple as
stopping at a red light. We don’t call all these interpretations up and explicitly discuss them, but
there was a time when you didn’t know to stop at red lights. There is an entire set of traffic
regulations, mutually adhered to, which embody all kinds of legal interpretations. And that’s the
background within even a simple act like that would be performed.

Interpretation in a more obvious sense takes place in the political realm all the time. So if you
followed the Clarence Thomas hearings… and I have promised in the lectures not to go off on
my political digressions, so I will try to keep this one brief. But if followed the Judge Thomas
hearings, you will notice that questions of interpretation arose again and again in a quite
practical context. By that I mean something hung on both what he interpreted he had said in the
past and on how he would interpret in the future. So, interpretation is very important.
This can also be made clear historically. Although we don’t make a big deal out of interpreting
the Bible anymore… we adopt a kind of “live and let live” attitude, based upon our real smudgy
belief in God now; that USA Today belief, you know. They ask on USA Today “How many
Americans believe in God, and 98% say “Well… yes”, in the normal American factoid way of
believing… it’s just… you’re asked if you do, you don’t want to be embarrassed “Yeah sure, you
know”. There was a time in the history of western civilisation when people burned because they
read a book with the wrong interpretation. I want you to see that interpretation… a lot depends
on interpretation. Because they interpreted the Bible – the Biblical text – wrong, whole groups of
people might burn.

So there are stakes to interpretation. So as we discuss this throughout the course, please don’t
think this is some airy, stupid, academic dispute. In fact I would argue that the last ten years of
political life have been about the attempt to kill the very desire to interpret. In a certain way…
there has been a certain social trajectory which the text of Nietzsche addresses, that involve
accepting surfaces and to kill the urge to interpret in anything but the most superficial way. And
that will be part of the social and political aspect of the argument I will develop, okay.

Now, no thinker… and I am going to avoid calling Nietzsche a philosopher. The reason is I know
a lot of professional philosophers and I don’t want to sully Nietzsche’s memory in this way
[crowd laughter]. Ah, Nietzsche “the writer” – we will call him; a kind of writer – is importantly
engaged in interpretation that will lead us not only into these contemporary issues, and into
theoretical issues; but he won’t stay with just theoretical issues, they will be profoundly,
importantly practical issues.

Okay, well now back to the second paradox. Nietzsche’s work suggests that, in a certain sense,
it may be impossible to find what many people think they find when they interpret; namely “the
right interpretation”. One of Nietzsche’s primary targets is the notion that there is such a thing as
“the right interpretation”, in general. See that’s what makes it a theoretical point. However, the
paradox now is obvious, right? Because the paradox generated by his writings… if that thesis
suggested by his writings were correct then the ideal way to present Nietzsche would not be to
present an interpretation of Nietzsche; but to do what he suggests in other places in his work,
which is to develop a creative, brilliant performance of one’s own. That sort of created oneself in
a new way and if one used Nietzsche’s name it wouldn’t matter whether one – well, it might
matter, if it made the performance better – in what way one used it.

But that’s a very peculiar way to look at a book. In other words, a series of texts that suggest
that there is an impossibility in getting it right. And it’s not what we standardly – I think most of
us – standardly do when we interpret. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with things like
Southern Baptist conventions. I don’t attend them, but they take interpretation very seriously,
and when they debate it, someone’s is right; generally the person that just offered it, arguing
with someone else. I mean, the underlying idea is that an interpretation can be the right one.
Especially in regard to texts like the Bible.
This is a deep belief that also runs throughout universities, and has generated a current debate
at the universities over the losses of standards and objectivity. Because according to, for
example, Allan Bloom in “The Closing of the American Mind“, and according to Buckley, and
many other Conservatives… now labelled “Neo“. Most of them have gotten older, and as they
get older they are now they are called “Neo” [crowd laughter] I will drop that, I will call them
“Paleo” [crowd laughter] conservatives. Paleo-Conservatives find in Nietzsche a very troubling
figure because of this effect generated by his writings; that interpretations are multiple,
contestable, and might finally be judged by which end up being the most interesting. On the
other hand they might be – some interpretations might be in place – simply because they are
backed by the most power. A point we will get to in a later lecture; that many interpretations are
in place not because they are rational or argumentatively supported, but simply because they
are backed by the most power.

Well, once this spectre has been raised about interpretation in general, then it looks like we
have attained sort of an insight. If we do – and we are going to follow the text of Nietzsche… for
which I am just preparing us now – if we do, it seems to make the university a very, you know,
odd place because then when the philosophy professor puts his Plato notes on the board, or her
Plato notes on the board, the student has no reason to think that’s any more interesting than
their own notes based on their own readings. Apart from the institutional power of the person
presenting, apart from that.

Well this is the notion, of course, that has outraged Bloom, because this destroys “standards”.
Well, whose standards? Well of course, people like him; academics, their standards. It reminds
me of the scene in Full Metal Jacket, where the drill instructor says “It’s okay to believe in God
when you are in the Marine Corps… your heart can belong to Jesus when you are in the Marine
Corps… we play our games, they play their little games… you know, God plays his little
games… He loves marines…” That’s not the actual line, I can’t… you know… “He loves
Marines, we keep his Heaven filled with souls, so he lets us play our little game” Well
Academics are kind of like that drill instructor, and if it turned out that they didn’t have some
special – this is in the Humanities in particular – but the argument might even hold across many
areas of Science.

But I hope you follow the point; if Academics didn’t hold a certain key to interpretation that their
students needed to decipher and pay money in order to learn to decipher, they wouldn’t have
anything to do for a living. You follow me? They wouldn’t have anything to do for a living. And I
don’t want to make that sound crude, but on the other hand I don’t want to lie. It is crucially
important in the political economy of the university to try to deny Nietzsche’s insight for this
reason, if it is one. We will argue that. Because if it is one, it’s paradoxical because it would
mean that what I am now saying and the lessons I am drawing from this insight, which is that
interpretation may prove to be undecidable, or impossible, or whatever. If that is an insight, the
challenge it poses is that people would have to begin their lectures by saying things like this “I
am paid a lot of money, and have tenured at a very famous place; you will now take notes.
Instead of beginning with “This is my methodology carefully developed over years of study”. In
other words, one would begin to see then what Nietzsche suggests in text after text, which is
that the origins of such a methodologies are in relations of power. That the methodological
method, however sophisticated, will in some sense instantiate those institutional powers. Traced
to their origins they will themselves prove to rest upon undecidable and interpretable material,
and not upon the fact themselves.

So it will be a consequence of the effect of Nietzsche’s text to make us at least question

whether we can come up with the right interpretation of a text, of a situation, of a person, I mean
interpretation again – to try to make it concrete and not some academic matter – interpretation
is very important. For example, you have fallen in love for the first time and things have been
going great. One night you are out and the person looks and frowns for a few minutes, and a
whole train of interpretations may start off that are humanly important. This is not, you know,
Grad School, this is stuff you want to know about “What is this frowning business? It’s been
going great, I don’t know… the frowning” So interpretation is a rich human matter and not a
theoretical one.

Okay, now let me get back to my starting points. The first one will have to deal with the text
generated by Nietzsche specific positions and the work within his writings and we will do that.
The second is the paradox generated by his writings – the paradox… what I will call paradox of
interpretation – one that I have not spelled out his case for, but I will as we go along. Now we
come to the third and for me most interesting paradox which arises from my own situation here,
lecturing on Nietzsche in a new medium at the trajectory of a culture that Nietzsche saw as one
that was leading to what he referred to as “Nihilism”, “The last man”, the death of a certain form
of being human.

And to present that… to present the first set of paradoxes, and to try to give you a sense for the
paradox generated by his work, and then thirdly to do it from this position, and in this context,
and in this culture presents for me a third and deeper personal subjective paradox. Because on
the one hand, I don’t want to leave the text of Nietzsche as the possession – some esoteric
possession – of snooty elites. I am not happy with that. On the other hand, I don’t want it to lose
its striking power, by being somehow trivialised in the process of presenting it. Which puts me in
a third position, and I guess that given the second one it also generates another problem, which
is why I am here doing this instead of one of you, so I have to give and answer to that right
away, and I’ll start with a blunt one. And that’s that I have probably read more of this than you
have. That would be the answer you would get from your mechanic when fixing a carburettor
“Well, I have read the carburettor book, I have fixed these things” and you go “I’ve never fixed
it”, and you go “Okay, you try to fix it this time”. So there is one analogy… and if you have read
more, you can come up here now. Its okay, I mean I won’t be offended… whatever, we will have
to leave that joke out, we’ll cut that one.

Anyway, another kind of example might be this. Doing Nietzsche might be something like
housework that has to be done over and over again. Not trying to denigrate the unwaged labour
under capital performed by women. That’s how I describe housework. Unwaged labour,
valorising capital, done by women… unwaged. I don’t want to put housework down, because I
think it should be waged at the very least, it should have a wage. But in any case, it may be that
interpreting Nietzsche will have to be something like housework, work to be done over and over
again by whole series of people who read and reread Nietzsche. In other words, I won’t be up
here trying to claim the authority of Nietzsche for anything. I will be making a kind of use of him.
That won’t release me from the full paradox as you will see as we begin to look through his
work. In fact, we’ll just have to deal with a lot of paradoxes as we look through his work.

And for people who enjoy neat and tidy lecture courses that have a lot of demonstrative
arguments with conclusions that are necessary, this is really the wrong morning or afternoon for
you to have shown up. Because that will not be what Nietzsche offers. What Nietzsche offers is
a lot less, if you are a professional philosopher today, by that I mean a lot less meaning there
are a lot less arguments that can be symbolised and then put into one of our journals which are
read by eleven people, who if they were all killed on the same bus, no-one then would ever
know about the journal again. Eleven people read some of these things, or twelve, if you are
popular. In any case, those are the three sets of paradoxes; paradoxes within the text, paradox
generated by the reading of Nietzsche, and then the third, the paradox that belongs to anyone
who attempts to present Nietzsche’s text.

Okay, now that’s an introduction to what I will do. Now, the first topic – and it’s listed in the
lecture – is myth. And one of the things Nietzsche is, among many things… and now that I say
“Nietzsche is”, Nietzsche as proper name refers not to this pathetic little man, you know, and his
terrible little life, but to the text of Nietzsche, okay. Remember that I have made that distinction,
and I will try to explain that one too as I go along. But ah, one of the things that we need to look
at as we go through that is that myths will be one of the topics of the text of Nietzsche that’s
very important. And it won’t be that Nietzsche discusses myth in detail – although frequently he
does discuss myth – or that he uses myth in his writings, which he not only does, but in the case
of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra“, he creates one of his own; quite beautiful, quite brilliant.

I am sure some of you have heard, at least you know; there is a famous piece of music based
on it. And you are probably familiar with the prelude to it which opens 2001: A Space Odyssey;
sort of Ubermensch, overman prelude. Anyway, myth is not only used by him, he doesn’t only
create one, but the topic of the relationship between myth and what some other philosophers
have called “modernity”, modern life – I am tempted sometimes simply just to call it capitalism,
and usually will – modern life. To try to make that come alive you need to think about films like
Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”, you know, a kind of pastural life – you know, pastural;
farming and stuff – then all of a sudden real fast machines… that’s one way visualise modernity.
Another way is in the text of Kafka; these lines of bureaucrats, faceless little Joseph K’s
wandering towards an impossible justice; that’s another way of imagining it. A way to theorise it
is to read thousands of pages of Max Weber, bore you to death. Boring, but it will help you
theorise it.
So, modernity is connected – importantly connected – with the Enlightenment, and we will have
to discuss Nietzsche as – in a very important sense – involved in what I have referred to as “The
dialectic of Enlightenment”. He will be involved in both a critique of the Enlightenment, a
criticism of it, but then of course he will also make use of its insights at the same time. And the
critique of Enlightenment that Nietzsche originates accounts for the title of the overall lecture
series, which is “The post-modern condition”, because if in any sense at all we are either in or
headed toward a situation after modern life – or post-modern, a term that some of you are
familiar with – then certainly an important figure will be Nietzsche, both for the myths he
constructed about such a life, and for the myth I just constructed that he may have had a role in
constructing such a life, which is probably a myth as well.

Okay, ah, now. The importance of Nietzsche. Now we are going to do a little standard academic
treatment here. Ah, the importance of Nietzsche. One of the reasons I selected this course is
because it’s always good to discuss a thinker who is discussed in Time Magazine and becomes
the topic of routine polemics on Buckley and elsewhere. That’s important because that’s a part
of out objective culture. It’s a topic for a conversation, and that makes your remarks more
understandable and gives the real social purpose to doing it. So Nietzsche’s importance is, as I
said, in a sense obvious.

Nietzsche is the main target in Bloom’s book; the study of Nietzsche along with – I think –
looking at Woody Allen films.

Let me try to locate the fall of Western universities in Bloom, okay. If Mr Bloom is in the crowd I
am sorry, but anyway… Nietzsche – German philosophers, but mainly Nietzsche – Woody Allen
films, and the dark music from Africa that started influencing American music. Sort of… we don’t
want to call anyone a racist, but that sounded funny to me, when I read it in “The Closing of the
American Mind”, this “Dark music of Africa”, you know, what could he be talking about? You
know. Well, we all know that Mick Jagger looks like a photo negative of Little Richard, but I
wondered what he was talking about [crowd laughter].

In any case, the Neo-Conservative attack – the Paleo-Conservative attack – on Nietzsche

makes him an interesting topic of debate in one sense. The current debates over interpretation
in areas of law, politics and elsewhere make him an interesting figure to discuss. And then there
is this issue of Nietzsche’s return, which I would like to make historically contextual for you. I
discussed being a product of the sixties, my first encounter with him, and many young people
encountered him at the time, and it was exhilarating because as we read through these texts,
we will see that Nietzsche’s always valorising youth, creativity, life affirming activity, always
valuing misinterpretation, polemically, hyperbolically, you know, inciting people to laugh at
authority and so on.

And so there was a great exhilarating effect of Nietzsche in the sixties, which I think sort of
washed out in the seventies… early… mid… late eighties, the way most things did. Kind of
settled into a Thirtysomething whining. I mean I don’t know the people who make that show, I
am sorry, but I mean, I watched it a few times and it was just [makes pained whining noises]
[crowd laughter]. It’s just you know… suicide, please… anything but this, you know. Andy
Hoffman, whatever, anything but this whining, pathetic, pale shadow of a human life.

But a younger generation comes along and we have what’s called “Nietzsche’s Return”, and this
began in the late eighties, and the return to Nietzsche at first was quasi nostalgic, and then it
became humorous. And I also want to bring some of that in, because there are many
humorous… I mean it would be absolutely out of the spirit of Nietzsche not to do this. There are
many humorous uses for the text of Nietzsche. There was an issue of Semiotexte magazine,
which I really enjoy. I don’t know how many of you have ever even seen Semiotexte, but it’s a
bizarre little out of the way journal that publishes all kinds of strange esoterica on the edge of
academic discourse. Bizarre conspiracy theories, strange political theories and they did an issue
on Nietzsche that began with a box that checked off “Style of interpreting Nietzsche”. The first
one was “Shameless opportunist”, you know, the second one was “Joker who has never read
Nietzsche”, third was “Serious but confused academic”, and you just checked off your box and
mailed in the result of the survey to Semiotexte after having read some of the articles on “The
New Nietzsche”.

And actually the thing that was most in the spirit of Nietzsche in the whole issue was that box.
Because Nietzsche has a tremendous, and I mean one of the reasons that one can stand
Nietzsche at his darkest moments in his text, one reason that one can tolerate looking some of
Nietzsche in the face and being able to stand it, is because of these moments of incredible
hilarity. I mean just absolutely hilarious. I am going to try to generate some of those as we read
through here, because Nietzsche does… I think as we proceed, we will see that Nietzsche isn’t
a place to go for consolation.

You know, this is not a place one would go for consolation, you wouldn’t pick it up like one of
these feel good pop psychology books that I find in the airports all the time. For every group
imaginable, you know. Unbelievable culture. You know, books for depressed housewives, ages
25 to 31. I mean, I didn’t know you needed a book. You have got eight talk shows, why do you
need a book? [crowd laughter] Books for depressed husbands, ages 27 through 40, and so on.
Just everything depressed… Nietzsche…

Well Nietzsche’s text are not a place to go for consolation along any of those dimensions. In fact
one of the things that will be importantly denied in my account – it may just be mine – but in my
account of Nietzsche will be the very impossibility of anything like a psychology as anything
more than just one more narrative about yourself that you decide to adopt. I mean, you could do
that, right? I mean, in fact, it’s disheartening today how frequently you meet someone a few
years later “Oh no, I am off the Valium now, and I am in Reverend Moon’s church, and I am off
the Valium” I mean, who knows. Today, what Nietzsche saw as an incredible project, which was
to invent oneself now is a marketable thing. I mean at the mall, you can go The Gap and invent
a persona, read a few of the right magazines that go along with the clothes you buy at The Gap
and so on.
Self creation in an intensified market economy is something that Nietzsche would have had to
deal with had he unfortunately lived longer, but he claimed to have lived out of season and I will
claim that his view is relevant to our own times. Now, let me return for a moment to this
interpretation business, and then a few quotes from Nietzsche. I think we should use a little
Nietzsche to spice up the opening. Ah, we have talked about these three sets of problems; three
paradoxes, including my paradox in trying to present this, both by doing justice to the wit, the
interpretation – developing my own strong interpretation – and doing it under a changed mode
of communication, which is extremely important to Nietzsche. He is a writer; a “writerly” writer.

He has been referred to as someone who wanted to play Plato to his own Socrates. Let me
explain that remark briefly. And this may help introduce you to Nietzsche a little bit. Playing
Plato to your own Socrates means this: Socrates didn’t write anything, some of you may know
that. Socrates didn’t write, Plato wrote about him. So it was though Socrates sort of lived this
character that comes down to us in the constructed form of Plato’s narrative, about which it has
always seemed to me to be totally uninteresting to ask “Was that really what he was like?” For
God’s sakes… we don’t even normally want to know that, really! If you have seen a great “Billy
the Kid” movie, and there have been so many that a few of them have had to be good, right?
And you see a really good “Billy the Kid” movie; it’s not fun to go “Was Billy really like that?”
Who cares, you know, I mean, because that one was interesting and fascinating.

So Plato’s Socrates is such a fascinating character I am not sure what Socrates was really like.
There are reasons, I think, and Nietzsche makes some of them clear, why in principle I couldn’t
be sure about that. Part of our fascination with time machines might be with interpretation
actually. Maybe our fascination with time machines, you know, like “Back to the Future“, back to
the past and now, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures” three times. Ah, well I like some of
those, but I am digressing a bit, forgive me here.

Bill and Ted’s latest Bogus Adventure is a parody of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal”,
they go to hell and play Twister and Battleship with the Devil, instead of Chess. That would be a
symptom of a post-modern culture. See, modernist humans would be worried about death. It will
reverberate in their being, and because there won’t be a field of meaning to answer it – the
problems of life and death – we will get the problem called Nihilism.

But when you cross a certain threshold point, a threshold point where people’s real issue is “Am
I alive now?” and that question seems radically undecidable, then you get cultural artefacts like
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, where the best response seems to be a giddy, silly ecstasy
at the very inability to have a self. And I can’t say that I don’t share some of the fun of it, for our
younger generation of quasi-cyborgs that will be raised in this post-modern culture. They will be
unrecognisable, perhaps within a few generations. Everyone says “Oh, well that’s impossible”.

Well, let me try to generate this historical change that Nietzsche was one of the first to foresee
and to discuss. And which I will discuss throughout this course under the heading of “Nihilism”,
and that will be the social and experiential side of the problems of interpretation, although they
are also experiential, to me. And that’s the problem of Nihilism is the problem of finding meaning
in a world that is no longer God centred.

That did not mean for Nietzsche, any more than it did for Marx or Weber or the other people
who gave accounts of modern life, that there would no longer be a lot of religious people, you
follow me? And it didn’t mean that there still wouldn’t be churches and believers and that there
wouldn’t be holy wars and so on. It meant that an overarching cosmological story into which you
could fit, that provided a background of meaning and a place for you would be radically missing,
and in its place there would be market relations. In which what you were would amount to what
you do for a living.

So all that a lot of you know about me – I do have a few of my ex students in here – but all that
a lot of you know about me is that I do university stuff for a living. And that isn’t a remark about
my predilections, which is something I will talk about before this is over, my predilections. It’s a
remark about my profession, but it’s more than that under these social conditions, it is an
absolutely ontological remark about what I am.

When people at a dinner party say “What do you do?” That is not a trivial remark; it’s a story
about your culture. “What do you do”, the answer is “What you are”. Now, I know people resist
this, and I enjoy the resistance. You know, at dinner parties, you go “Well, I am a writer”, almost
a joke if you at a dinner party in New York; “I am an artist”, “I am a performance artist”, “I am a
writer”, you know. And you say “Well, what do you do?”, and they go “Well, I drive a cab”, “I wait
tables… but I am really… you know… my third novel, I am working on”. Yeah, you know.

This is a culture full of market relations where the construction of meaning becomes the burden
of a newly constructed category; the individual. The bourgeois individual. The individual of
modern life. The individual competitor on a market… in a market. No longer a member of like,
the community of God in the broad sense, you know, of the feudal period. But someone who
must construct the meaning of their lives in singularity. Let me say that instead of alone. You
know, sort of in singular with their own resources, and that is a task that Max Weber thought
would overburden them. It is a task that Nietzsche thought almost impossible, but one he
undertook, as I said earlier, by trying to become Plato to his own Socrates. In other words, not
to actually live an interesting life like Socrates, but to write one as though he had lived it. A kind
of deferred relation, but still, to make meaning out of his own life in a context, and again this
word “Nihilism” I’ll… I’ll say a bit more about.

In a context where the threat was Nihilism. A culture where there was no fabric from which to
construct meaning. Now, Nihilism, in a certain way won’t be used by me to describe a
philosophical position. Because to the extent it does, it’s supposed to be some silly position like
this: “Nihilists are people who believe in nothing”. Well, if that’s what Nihilists were, there
wouldn’t be any, and that’s not what we are diagnosing. We are diagnosing a Nihilistic culture,
where no enduring beliefs can provide meaning for the overwhelming majority of members of
that culture. That’s the problem that Nietzsche identifies coming along with modern life. And
also, not coming along as a mystification, but coming along as part of the insight of modern life.
Comes along with Darwin… in other words, being demystified about our origins. It comes along
with a new view of the cosmos. Being demystified about the importance of the Earth. You know,
where it is, how big it is, and in the centre of what. Being demystified concerning a whole series
of things, about which earlier there were powerful, important, meaning giving myths.

Part of the work of the enlightenment was this destructive work of destroying myth. That was the
work carried out by the bourgeois class and its ideologues. You know, it’s not bad… you
remember, they said you won’t have a decent world to live in until the last priest is hung on the
guts of the last king and stuff. Those are the mottos of the great revolutions. This is Washington
DC, right? These are the great bourgeoise revolutions. We love them, and they may be in fact a
world of historic destiny. Nietzsche’s worry was that this kind of demystification… without
creating new festivals, new games, new myths… would lead to a situation in which human
beings willed only not to will any longer. Who wanted, sort of, only not to want any longer. And
Nietzsche saw this emerging culture as one that would be inimical to human life. About which,
as I said, he doesn’t have a lot of consoling things to say.

So I am going to read a little passage of Nietzsche, and try to stop there, to give us a frame
within which Nietzsche views human beings. Now I don’t think this is all that theoretic, and I
don’t want it to be. I want it to be something that you can grab a hold of and understand,
because this is kind of a modern myth that I am about to spell out for you. In fact I may not read
it, I may just gloss it. It’s a modern myth that I’d like to spell out for you that many of us believe.
And lets see, after we have examined this myth if this is more or less comforting than the
beautiful myth of redemption in say, for example, the Bible.

Ah, the myth is something like this: “There are billions and billions of stars. The Earth’s is a tiny
one. We crawl across it for a few seconds, and then we individually are gone, and billions and
billions of eons of time before, and billions afterwards pass, and the earth eventually goes out
like a cinder, and perhaps the whole universe collapses into itself. And after all that has
happened, absolutely nothing will have been done.”

Now, that’s a very important myth, many of us believe that one too. But against that
background, it becomes difficult as we chip away at our daily little lives… selling shoes, selling
tyres, teaching class… to try to find any damn thing that means anything. So our search through
Nietzsche will not be a search for dogmatic answers to that question, but to follow his quest and
ours for a form of self creation under circumstances and with a background of myth that do not
make it seem likely that we will have a happy result. So the end of my first lecture is that our
interpretive efforts here too, are bound to fail.
2) Nietzsche On Truth And Lie

Lecture two will attempt to answer one of the paradoxes I raised in the first lecture – and this will
be a specific form of it – and that’s a rather famous charge in philosophy. In fact this is the
charge of relativism and one of the things that professional philosophers do in order to display
their professional credentials is to respond to the relativist and to the sceptic. Nietzsche has
been accused of being a relativist. One form of this accusation is a kind of mislabelling – in my
opinion it’s a mislabelling – of Nietzsche’s view about the function of truth and lie; he opposes
that to true and false. Truth and lie; the function of that within philosophical discourse, he has an
account of that we are going to discuss.

One of the ways that philosophers have labelled this position is “perspectivism”, and the reason
I hate that label is like “relativism”, it makes someone think that someone – in this case
Nietzsche, or someone else – might hold the absolutely ridiculous view that every view was as
good as every other view. That is a complete straw person argument. No-one has ever, or does
now; hold the view that every view is as good as every other view.

So whenever the spectre of relativism is raised, you know, by someone for you, either in the
popular press or in a university setting, the first small thing that should come to your mind is
there aren’t any. So the refutation in a certain sense is bound to miss at least one point; namely
that you are not arguing against anyone. Now it could be the case that my audience today, or
the audience that will watch the tapes, I will find someone in the United States, or across the
world that will hold the view that every view is as good as every other view. But if I do, it will be
very idiosyncratic, and in my experience so far… ah, no.

Nietzsche is not a relativist, and I think perspectivism is also an unfortunate term to describe
Nietzsche’s style of thinking. Because perspectivism calls up the idea that “Well, I am right from
my perspective, and you are right from your perspective, and everybody is right from their
perspectives, and I also don’t believe that that’s a view that anyone can hold or has ever held.

I think, and this is the way that I will try to discuss Nietzsche’s paradox in terms of relativism, is
that Nietzsche was opposed to what might be called the dogmatism, not only the Western
Philosophical tradition, but the Western Theoretical tradition in general; its dogmatism in this
regard. Believing about its beliefs that they were good not only for them and their tribe, because
after all Western Civilisation is a big word… it’s a strange word… you know, big words and
strange words, but after all it is just a very large tribe with very large armies and lots of
televisions and a large historical project, but still its a tribe; big, big tribe.

I think Nietzsche considered it dogmatic to hold that your beliefs – or the beliefs of your tribe –
were binding on all. That is the way I want to present Nietzsche’s perspectivism. In other words,
he didn’t believe that all beliefs are equally good, interesting, or whatever. In fact, I am sure he
considered some of his own beliefs to be far more interesting than for example the beliefs of
John Stuart Mill; who he referred to as “That blockhead”, or I think he found his views more
interesting than the views of the English Utilitarians in general, about whom he said “No human
beings want to be happy. Only the British want that”. So I think he thinks his views were more
interesting than those.

And I think where the dogmatism for Nietzsche came in was when you search for views and
then develop your beliefs, and then think that they should be binding on all. This is not a
criticism that you shouldn’t have beliefs, or that all your beliefs are no better than anyone else’s;
it’s just the further belief about your beliefs that everyone else should believe the same damn
way. So it’s a meta-belief, if you will; a belief about your beliefs.

In fact I think that it’s perfectly consistent to believe a wide number of things with a great deal of
passion, and then believe about those beliefs that you could be wrong. I hope that’s not a
further paradox, I do not think that it is. It seems to me to be perfectly consistent to believe
something passionately, to believe it in a very deep way and have a belief about that belief that
“Well, you know… I could be wrong…”

So the dogmatism that Nietzsche is after runs very deep in our theoretical traditions. I can’t
overestimate this, it’s a dogmatism that has continued throughout what might be called the
project of the west, and it’s even built into the Socratic pursuit. When Socrates asks the
question “What is X?” and what fills in the “X” are those famous Greek ideals; virtue, excellence,
beauty, goodness, and so on. Now Nietzsche had the highest respect for Socrates, and as I just
said… as I said before, Nietzsche considered him to be an exemplary person; coupled with
Plato’s construction of him, they in a way were ideal for Nietzsche.

But the dogmatic part of Socrates was that Socrates wanted – for Nietzsche – Socrates wanted
an answer to the question “What is X”, like what is beauty, goodness, truth, excellence. It
wouldn’t be good for just Socrates, or good for the Greeks, but once discovered had to bind
everyone. In other words, it wouldn’t be enough just to believe it, which seems… what
Nietzsche calls the gay, happy theorist to be enough; to just find a belief that you can live with
and believe. No, the theoretical enterprise of the West is imperialistic in a way. It’s got to find a
belief that others then have to believe, and that he considered dogmatic.

This by the way you may notice is not – in my view – a relativist position at all. Because it’s not
inconsistent with the view that you think your beliefs – precisely because they are your beliefs –
are superior to some other ones. In fact I take it to be banally the case that if you didn’t think
that, they wouldn’t be your beliefs. In other words, somebody comes up to you and gives you
some other ones and you go “Oh hell, those are better than mine”… then they will be yours after
you have heard them out, right? So it seems fairly natural that you believe your beliefs. The
dogmatic assumption is that everyone else should believe your beliefs. And this is not
relativism. There have been some modern philosophical names attached to this position called
fallibilism, and yet Nietzsche is too interesting in a certain way to be called that either.
In other words, I want to present Nietzsche not specifically within that philosophical context, but
I do want to present him as addressing it, which he does. And anyone who has ever addressed
any issue in philosophy knows that the irritating thing is how the simplest questions can turn into
philosophical ones. Sometimes philosophers realise that what we do is ask a series of rhetorical
questions that come up whenever people are very frustrated. In other words, we ask questions
like “What the hell does that mean?” you know, generally in a fight – a domestic fight – a
rhetorical question. “I can’t do the dishes now”; “Well what the hell does that mean?” Well, the
philosopher takes that rhetorical question and just places it in a foreign context. Someone goes
“There’s an object” and you go “Object… what the hell does that mean?” [crowd laughter]. In the
other context, the remark had a home and a meaning; so it means the person’s pissed, I
guess… or upset, okay. In this other context though, “What does it mean?” doesn’t seem to
have any purchase.

About those, sort of, metaphysical beliefs, Nietzsche was no metaphysician. In fact, he thought
that was, in a way, a very pompous thing to be. Trying to answer those kinds of questions in a
way binding for all. I call that a kind of imperialism; and I didn’t use that political term without
thinking about it for a while. Its the kind of imperialism – this dogmatic tradition against which
Socrates saw himself fighting – is the kind of imperialist position we might have in some of our
educational institutions when we have an African-American student who speaks eloquent rap
street language talk. And I am not trying to say that’s all that African-Americans speak. Some of
them are Neo-Conservatives that garble around as bad as others – Paleo-Conservatives –
some as just as unfortunately stupid as their Anglo-American, or Anglo-Saxon counterparts.

No, I am talking now about someone who says “ain’t” and repeats themselves; rhymes and
things. Well, in a way it’s just imperialistic to think that that is somehow less profound than the
Cambridge accent that discusses in detail the problem of relativism. It is not only a class and a
racial device, it’s just stupid. Because as William James once said “The trail of the human
serpent is over all”. There are many forms of life, many cultures, many ways to look at things.
And Nietzsche at his best expresses in his work that diversity and that complexity of the many
ways to interpret, to speak.

Now, “imperialistic” in this educational sense means that we want you to leave our institutions of
higher learning talking like we talk and writing like we write. And we divide through the issue of
whether you think at all, because all the evidence we have for that is what you have said and
what you have written. You may be not thinking at all, or thinking very bizarre thoughts, or you
may be on some hallucinogenic drug, who knows what’s inside. But if you leave there writing
like we write, talking like we talk – in short obeying relations of power – then you are educated.
And certainly Nietzsche saw this as conformity, and not connected with truth.

So before I tell you what… Nietzsche doesn’t give a positive theory of truth… I’ll give you two
things quickly. One is the standard philosophical refutation of relativism. I’ll give you that quickly.
Because there is not much point taking a long time to deliver a banality. The second thing I’ll
give you quickly is the current, I guess most widely accepted theory of truth in philosophy, which
again because it’s a banality I won’t take long in presenting… because it’s just uninteresting.

The refutation of relativism, which is taken to be the view that – as I said – that any view is as
good as any other. Which could be restated as “Any proposition and/or statement is as true as
any other”, right? Views can be turned into statements; “I believe that ‘X'”. All those as true as
any others. Well, here’s the philosophical refutation of that view, which I have already said
no-one holds. Socrates in fact comes up with this refutation. Namely lets take the view that all
views – all statements – are as true as any others; therefore you have a statement like this.

Let’s say you take the strong relativist way of stating that, which is “There is no truth”. That’s the
strong relativist way to state it – if there were any relativists – “There is no truth”. And then the
philosopher asks “Well, if there is no truth binding for all”; “No truth”, for a philosopher, since that
amounts to the same thing… for most mainstream positions. “There is no truth”. What’s odd
about the statement “There is no truth”? Well, we know what’s odd about it. What’s odd about it
is there must be one. Namely that one; the sentence “There is no truth” must be true. This is
how philosophers refute things; because if it’s not true, then there is truth.

So it looks as though the relativist is involved in what philosophers call a “self referential
paradox”. Namely, the relativist can’t state his or her position because in stating it they must
appeal to the notion of truth, which their position attempts to undermine. That’s the Socratic, and
still a standard refutation of relativism.

Well there is another thing, and in the dialogues this works perfectly, because Plato is writing
them, so he gives Socrates his lines and the interlocutors their lines, so Socrates wins a lot of
the debates that way. Which is the same reason that certain political figures that are in power
now do well in a lot of press conferences. When you know both the questions and the answers,
the dialogue, discussion and debate simplifies greatly, rapidly.

The relativist could always say this about someone – if there were such people, again,
Nietzsche perhaps was supposed to be scandalously one – the relativist could always say
“Homie don’t play that”. In other words, “No, no, no, no, when I said there was no truth, I was
just trying to irritate you, I don’t play that truth game, I don’t talk that way” I am talking about
beauty, interesting, good for life, importantly more right than you, and so on, and that would
create another interesting, diverse, and fascinating conversation.

I don’t know how many of you have seen the movie “Lianna” by John Sayles, but this power to
argue and get at the truth is also absolutely, I think, throughout the Western tradition, coded in a
certain way and identified with males. It’s not accidental that all of the so called great
philosophers are male. But there is a great scene in the movie where a woman loses an
argument to her husband, who is a professor. When the argument is over she says “Well I don’t
care if I lost the argument, if what you said is true, you are still wrong”. And if you… in the
scene, she’s right! He was still wrong whether he knew how to argue better or not, you see.
So there’s something that Nietzsche… there’s a kind of dogmatism in here that Nietzsche wants
to root out the origins of. A kind of dogmatism, sort of, control over the instruments of what will
count as true and false. What will count as true and false; it’s very important to get at.

Now, the banal theory that I promised you – that philosophers now hold about the truth – is
Tarski’s theory of truth. It’s the redundancy theory of truth. When I state it, I expect some
laughter, because this is a great product of the modern philosophical imagination. “Snow is
white; if and only if snow is white… snow is white, if and only if snow is white…” That’s the heart
of Tasrki’s theory; it’s the redundancy theory, namely, the thing is the case if and only if it is the
case. Well what’s odd about that theory of truth – you may notice – is that it’s not really a theory
of truth at all now, is it. It’s sort of a deflationary remark about how we use the word “true”. And
we do use it in ordinary contexts that way.

For example, if I ask someone to hand me a coke and they hand me a salt shaker, that
confuses me. If I say “That’s the coke”, and it’s a lizard, they’ll say “That’s not true”, by which
they’ll mean “It’s not a coke, it’s a lizard”, you know. But this incredible theoretical breakthrough
should be not incredible at all, but totally deflationary and remind us that truth in the more
mundane sense is just what all of you thought it was; it’s what is the case. That view of truth is
not exactly what Nietzsche is attacking either, because it is so deflationary that it’s almost in the
spirit of Nietzsche, if you will, almost. Because it’s a deflationary theory, its not some grand
theory about how our sentences hook up with the world, or how our great Western texts; Milton,
Shakespeare hook up with our deeper selves and humanise us so that we all vote Republican.
It’s not that either. It’s not that either, see. It’s a mundane use of the word “true”

So I think it is very unsatisfactory to view Nietzsche as being either a relativist or a perspectivist.

What he’s interested in are those relations of force and power that would cause a species like
ours to develop distinctions like true/false, and then to observe – as he does throughout several
works – how a discourse of true/false is deployed. How it is used; what it makes possible, and
what it makes impossible. And so for me those are much more interesting questions; “How does
the discourse of true/false deploy”.

Nietzsche, the closest that he ever delivers to a serious theory of truth, I am about to read you.
And I think this is, again, hyperbole, but he’s on the right track as opposed to some other
remarks one might make about truth. This is a famous quote of Nietzsche’s, so I’ll give it to you.
It’s from an essay called “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense”. As we get to later lectures
you’ll find out that Nietzsche is going to develop not only criticisms… and genealogies –
something I will have to explain – genealogies of how we use words like “true”, “false”, “truth”,
“lie”; but of how we use words that are – in some sense – closer to us like “good” and “bad”, or
“good” and “evil”, okay.

But in this essay Nietzsche says the following “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors,
metonymies, and anthropomorphisms; in short, a sum of human relations which have been
enhanced, transposed and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which, after long use,
seem firm, canonical and obligatory to a people. Truths are illusions bout which one has
forgotten that that is what they are, metaphors that are worn out and have lost their sensuous
power. They are like coins that have lost their pictures – faces – and which now matter only as
metal, no longer as coins”.

That’s taken to be one of Nietzsche’s outrageous statements about truth, that its metaphoric, it’s
a sum of human relations, deployed in many fields of force, in short; mutually agreed upon
fictions, which after long use seem obligatory to a people. And this… I take it to be one of
Nietzsche’s stronger remarks about truth. And I think that we can make that clear with the
history of our own country.

There are certain things that after long use that have become obligatory for us to believe are
true. I have heard, and I have heard it ad nauseam, and until ah, well, ad nauseam. Let me say
it in my West Texas way; until I want to puke, I have heard it. That the United States is a
democracy. Because after long use, after herd like obedience to this word, we have come to
believe it. The most dangerous thing, in some ways, that threatens our democracy is the belief
of the overwhelming majority of our citizens that perhaps in some sense we do have one. If we
questioned deeply what a democracy is, you know, a government in which the power really
does come from a people or whatever. If we question these worn out metaphors, and looked
behind… in other words, try to look for their origins in power and who deploys them, it might
become interesting to see that this is an illusion about which we have long since forgotten that it
is one.

The power of Nietzsche’s genealogy is to look at how important words to us; like truth, good,
evil, and in the case I just used, democracy. Not in order to destroy these words forever, or to
destroy their deployment, but in order to point out how they become worn out after long use.
And certainly, compared to the vibrancy of the word democracy, you know, its earlier – as he
said – earlier when the word was used in the dawning of the bourgeois revolutions, when it was
used with such sensuous power, with such effect, you know, with little town meetings and public
spheres, people fighting things out… vigorous like that… at least as we idealise it, perhaps that
was an illusion too. But compared to that, our current democracy does seem – to borrow the
metaphor – to be like a coin without a face. A metaphor that is worn out and lost its power.

Now many of you are going to go “Oh it hasn’t lost its power, oh hell, everybody is becoming a
democracy, the whole world is” Which may just simply mean, in Nietzsche’s terms, that Nihilism,
that threat that I mentioned before that comes along with modern life, along with the spread of
the commodity and work as the relation that all humans will be subjected to, it may just simply
mean that that will win. That that will win. And if it’s called democracy, it will just be a herd like
lie, something we say to one another so that we don’t stand out at dinner parties.

I mean you don’t want to stand out – “Well I don’t live in a democracy, I don’t think”, and you
start giving reasons – you stand out! It makes you feel uncomfortable. So this is part of
Nietzsche’s take here, is that truths become comfortable through long use. So, through long use
it becomes comfortable to say “You know, we are a democracy… Of course Shakespeare is a
great writer…” and by the way, Shakespeare is a great writer, I think. I haven’t been picking on
Shakespeare – I have been, but I like him. I didn’t think I’d live to see a culture where Mel
Gibson would be Hamlet [crowd laughter], but I did. I mean you all did. Most of us probably
went. I went to see it. Very amusing, very amusing.

In any case, let me dispatch with this charge of relativism. Nietzsche does have a view of truth,
and how it is deployed. He takes our traditions, the Western ones, to be dogmatic on the issue.
In fact to return after the little sidetrack down democracy – which was really supposed to be a
clue for some things I want to discuss later – to discuss the way in which this has been a
masculine use of truth.

One of Nietzsche’s famous… Nietzsche is known for all his sexist… let me just say this right up
front. Nietzsche is known for tonnes of sexist aphorisms. I mean it’s an interesting phenomenon
that so many women theorists – brilliant ones that I know – love and read Nietzsche, in spite of
the face that his text is filled with the most virulent sexism. I mean, Morton Downey wouldn’t say
this stuff. I don’t know if any of you even remember him, but things like “When you go to women,
always take a stick”, I mean even Morton didn’t say that. Nietzsche did.

But again, Nietzsche… and I am not trying to get him off the hook for that. I think Nietzsche may
have been making explicit some things that are implicit in theoretical settings, like the university
as well as in every day life. But in any case, Nietzsche had a very intriguing questions for
philosophers. “What if truth turned out to be a woman, what then?” In other words “Plato, my
friend; Kierkegaard, my friend; what if instead of rational argument, that truth were more like
gossip in that small fabric of conversation which has held the world together forever?” You
know. What if it turned out to be that subtle, complex weaving of narratives and stories and
myths, and what we sometimes refer to as “Old wives tales”; ninety percent of which turn out to
be very interestingly right, if you have noticed.

Generally, you know “Oh, it’s an old wives tale that if you’ve got a bad cold that a shot of
whiskey and lemon juice will help” Well great that it’s an old wives tale, it just shows how smart
old wives were, right? [crowd laughter] Because it will help. Well Nietzsche’s challenging
question in philosophy is “What if truth turned out to be a woman?” The underlying thematic
being this. “What if it’s not what you guys think it is? A lecture where you outline five
propositions and then argue for them. And make points. Win arguments.” See, all these sort of
battlefield metaphors “Deploy your arguments”, “Attack their position”, “Win your point”, what if
truth didn’t turn out to be anything like that at all; Nietzsche asks rhetorically.

Of course, the best parts of Nietzsche are rhetorical poetic in my view. I will look at a systematic
argument of his later, but I am not doing that now. Just trying to kid people who are a little too
serious about the word “true”. Maybe not too serious, I am quite serious about it myself; the
problem is I am not serious about a theory like “Snow is white, if and only if snow is white”. The
reason I am not so serious about that is because I already knew it, and so did all of you before
you got here. Obviously that doesn’t do anything interesting.

So the perspectivism of Nietzsche – the so called perspectivism – is more a reminder to us to

guard against the dogmas of our own tradition. And the dogma here that I have examined is this
one about belief; that our ways – our here means our tribes ways of perceiving – are our own.
While they are our own, and we may very much cherish and believe in them, maybe we have
cherished and believed in them long after we should have abandoned them, but that’s another
issue. Our cherished beliefs can be believed without the dogmatic and extra belief that everyone
else ought to believe the same damn way that I do.

And this is a hard lecture to deliver, because it’s difficult when… especially when you are talking
to undergraduate students at a university, because when they write in their notes… this, they go
“Well, why should I believe what you just said?” That only unsettles professors who are easily
unsettled, because you really want students to ask that question about what you are doing. I
mean, it is a very uncritical way to begin a course by just saying “Well hell, you ought to be
interested in this, just because you grew up in this tradition and you know you should” So if you
get a course in Dante, Shakespeare, Eliot or whatever, you just start off doing Eliot, Dante or
Shakespeare, its just a dogmatic assumption that “Hell, every intelligent person ought to know
this”. Why? Why…

Well that unargued for assumption would have to be investigated, you’d have to ask and raise
the issue of what makes this text important. Why is this important? So when I began that little
invitation to follow me for a few lectures on Nietzsche, that’s what I was trying to do; was to
argue that it has some popular importance, and not to argue by giving you a demonstrative
argument with premises and a conclusion, but to try in the spirit of Nietzsche… it would be more
like inviting someone to dance, rather than it would be like convincing someone that your
conclusion is true. For me that’s the metaphor for approaching the text of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche in a way invites you to a new human dance; he doesn’t hit you over the head with a
new four premise argument with a conclusion. In fact, he wants to remind us that that style of
proceeding itself belongs deeply to a certain culture; localisable, certainly localisable. Even if it
were the whole planet, it would still be just one tiny little planet in one tiny little solar system in
one tiny little piece of time and so on. So what haughty animals we must think we are that we
know what the truth is. Nietzsche once said about the New Testament that the most profound
sentence in it was when Pilate goes “What is truth?” He says it negates a lot of mythology in the
New Testament. Not mad at Pilate, Pilate raises a fundamental… you know “What is truth? Is
the Christ the truth? I don’t know, I’m not sure”. There is a little Pilate in everyone, a little bit of
that. Nietzsche is brilliant at bringing out these moments.

Okay, now let me connect the issue – and I hope that I can do this briefly – let me connect the
issue with truth and falsity, about which I don’t want to say much more, because someone will
stop me in a minute and say “Is what you just said true?”. See, then I’ll be back in the paradox
again, right. And of course I won’t be, because I’ll say “Ah yeah, I think so, I hope so, I hope its
interesting anyhow” If you want to talk about that for long, then homie will stop playing because
he’s done philosophy a long time and I know how that goes. You know, I know how you are
going to challenge me, and I know how I am going to answer, so I am not going to play that
way, we’ll talk about something else more interesting and better for the species than that
debate.

So let me try to connect up now my remarks about Nietzsche’s so-called perspectivism, his
so-called relativism, both of which I have rejected as ways of approaching it, and discuss what I
do think is an important insight of Nietzsche’s, and that’s his denial that facts can determine our
interpretations. In fact Nietzsche suggests over and over again, and this is a very similar claim
to the one we have just discussed. Just as we discussed that truth and lie are somehow
constructed rather than found. In other words, truths are constructed, not found like nuggets of
gold in nature. In the same way, we don’t decide between competing interpretations on the
basis of bare facts, for Nietzsche either. It’s a very important point.

The bare facts cannot make us decide between two interpretations. Let me try to give a quasi
scientific example, and then I’ll try to make Nietzsche’s position clear in another way. The quasi
scientific example is this. Ah, many of you are familiar with the cultural dispute between
evolutionary biologists and creationists. Those are two radically different theories about the
origin of the human species. I think we all agree to that, right? Two radically different theories
about the origin of the human species. Now how in the name of God could you settle that one
with the facts? Because those theories, as it were, are interpretations that construct what you
will count as a fact. What gets to count as a fact is going to have to count as a fact within the
framework of that theory. So for example, and this cuts both ways, I am not in here to bash
creationists, I don’t even think there is such a thing as “Creation Science”. It’s oxymoronic to me,
but I am not going to pursue that. I just want to use this example for a moment.

What possible counter evidence could convince a creationist that the world wasn’t God’s
creation? Could you find some special uncreated thing and hand it to them? And go “This is
uncreated. See, it’s a fact, your theory is wrong” No, because whatever you find, if its a dinosaur
track, and they want to argue that, you know, God created everything just like it is, here’s this
dinosaur track and they have got no other explanation… I have even heard people say that the
devil put them there to fool us. You see, because facts can’t overthrow a view like that. You
follow me? Because the interpretation sets the context for what is going to count as a fact.

Now I am not going to get the evolutionary biologists off the hook here either. Because if they
run across a duck billed platypus, and you’ve got all these evolutionary trees and stories, and
this damn thing, you know, it doesn’t walk like a duck and quack like a duck, it quacks like a
duck, has a tail like a beaver, and it swims like a fish, lays eggs like a… flies and all this crap,
and they just go “Well, here’s its branch” That’s the same thing, don’t you see! The theory has
got to put it somewhere, it goes there. But that’s just the same thing as the creationists with the
thing, you know, the theory… the interpretation… is going to construct what will count as a fact
within that interpretation.

Now this is not the strong argument that there are no facts. Again, if you argue this point with
many philosophers, they are going to say “Well you don’t believe in facts” No… I don’t believe in
bare facts. Things we bump into in the world without any notion whatsoever what they are at all
and decide what we ought to think. There aren’t any such things. The reason there aren’t is
because we are socialised into communities, we learn to speak languages, and along with that
process comes many semi-articulated theories we have already developed by the time we are
six. You’d have to be almost a child to be close to the realm of bare facts. See what I mean? It
would not show that you were developed, mature or intelligent. It would just show that you were
so stupid, or… not that children are stupid; actually they are young, pretty and all that stuff. I
have got a lot of them, they are also irritating.

Anyway that wouldn’t show that there are bare facts, if you think they are bare facts, it just
shows how poverty stricken your imagination is in the number of theories you hold about the
world. Because if you hold a reasonable number of them, and all of us do whether we can
articulate them or not. In fact, you know, one of the most insidious forms of interpretations are
the ones about which we have forgotten – to paraphrase Nietzsche – that they are
interpretations, and now think that that’s just the way it is. But no, facts come to us – and they
do come to us – through the nets of interpretation. Through the nets of interpretation. And facts
do not overthrow interpretation directly. Enough facts within your interpretation can wear it out in
a certain way. In other words, certain interpretations can sort of outlive their usefulness for life,
for the species. Can become unfortunate ways to continue to interpret. This process however is
not itself rationally discussable. By that I mean there is no scientific account of that. It just
happens.

I mean, it just happened that there was an Egyptian religion that was around for what? Two or
three thousand years? Today no-one believes it. Christianity has been around a long time, and
in a thousand years no-one may believe it. Because like with individual human lives, with
planets, with nations, with religions, with gods, with whole universes, they just wear out and go
away. And as the poet Yeats once said “Human beings are in love, and they are in love with
what vanishes” Which I think is a beautiful sentiment for Nietzsche, to be in love with what
vanishes.

In any case, on all three points Nietzsche has many interesting things to say. I don’t want to just
read them sero tantum(sp?), I want to reconstruct and gloss them for you. Many interesting
things to say. On the construction of truth as fictions – and I don’t want you to take that in a
strong sense; just made up, no – truths as the products of communities, things that it was good
for life that we believed, in short. Interpretations as our topic of discussion, rather than the facts
which are constructed by them. I also, during this lecture, wanted to lay to rest some of your
doubts about well “This relativism, or perspectivism, or any view is as good as any other view”
and if you believe this, once you start building universities that instead of Shakespeare and
Milton you’ll have articles like “Jane Austen the masturbating girl”, it’s always quoted in the
press as an example of one of these new feminist deconstructive, you know… deconstructionist,
feminist, relativist, Marxist, neo wild things that’s going around at all the universities corrupting
all your children. Aren’t you scared? Hell, aren’t you scared? I wouldn’t be. But the challenge to
traditional interpretations is itself a tradition built into our tradition. To be absolutely ruthlessly
critical is a tradition built into our tradition.

3) Nietzsche as Master of Suspicion and Immoralist

Lecture three will be on a topic I richly enjoy, because I have in a way made suggestive remarks
about Nietzsche, but I hope they have also been substantive at least in this regard. I understand
that there is much debate on these contentious positions concerning the rather untruthful origins
of truth; by that I mean its origin within the human community. Ah, and the contentious
contention that relativism and so-called “perspectivism” are not threats, but rather challenges to
our creative and interpretative imaginations and powers. Also I have tried to make the brief but
substantive case that facts do not occur independent of their interpretations; that facts are
implicated in interpretations.

In this third lecture, I am going to try to do the following. I am going to try to highlight one of
Nietzsche’s most systematic arguments, and here we will see Nietzsche again involved in a kind
of paradox. He will be trying to show us the immoral origins of morality. In the same way that I
briefly but less systematically indicated; he tried to show us the untruthful origins of truth. So in
this section I will be discussing Nietzsche as – a phrase that Paul Ricoeur used about Nietzsche
– was that he was a “Master of suspicion”. So I would like to contrast at least one aspect of what
has been called “Nietzsche’s style”; which I will discuss briefly before I get into the substantive
arguments.

One aspect of Nietzsche’s style that Ricoeur’s phrase “Master of suspicion” captures brilliantly is
that many of Nietzsche’s various arrays of considerations are not intended to be demonstrative,
or to have you necessarily adopt his position. In fact one sometimes feels in that odd position –
talking about Nietzsche – that you may recall from a movie like “The Life of Brian“, where people
think that Brian is the messiah, and Brian screams out – it’s a Monty Python movie – he
screams out to the crowd “Don’t do everything that I do, don’t do everything I say” and the
crowd goes “We won’t do everything you do, we won’t say everything you say” [crowd laughter].
And this is a bizarre feature of that paradox that we discussed in the beginning with Nietzsche.
Its part of what I call “The Nietzsche effect”. So rather than view him in that way, it’s nice to look
at him as a master of suspicion.

Rather than doubt or scepticism, some of what I am about to present now of Nietzsche – after a
brief discussion of his style – is Nietzsche as master of suspicion and immoralist. And what he
wants us to do is to, as it were; suspect along with him the origins of our morality. This will not
necessarily call on us to abandon any specific moral position, but rather to look at its origin
critically in order to suspect it. And suspicion is not necessarily a bad thing; either concerning
theories, governments, or relationships with other human beings. Suspicion can be quite
healthy. It after all is an attitude extremely appropriate to a truly enquiring mind, you know. As
opposed to merely jotting down the familiar canons of knowledge. Suspicion is a quite powerful
exercise, so Nietzsche is in that sense a master of suspicion.

When I get around to that part of Nietzsche, I will be discussing… and I will get around to it
briefly after… we are talking about his style, or styles again for a moment. I want to return to that
just for a moment, because it is very important. After that though, after that brief thing, then I will
discuss “On the Genealogy of Morals”. That is perhaps Nietzsche’s most systematic work, and
in this book “On the Genealogy of Morals”, he proceeds with a genealogical method which I will
contrast with a properly historical one, and then we will look at some of the fruits of this method.
For example; this method, in this case, will be applied to the origins of our morality, both in
Ancient Greece and through the Christian tradition. And we will look at those origins of our
morality, and as I say, the suspicion that Nietzsche will want to raise in “On the Genealogy of
Morals” is that our general moral fabric has itself a rather immoral origin. This won’t be quite as
simple as it sounds, I’ll work through that in a moment.

But I can’t resist a few remarks about Nietzsche’s playful style, and here I want to mention some
of the “New Nietzsche”, Nietzsche’s return and these dangerous characters that lurk around the
university now; deconstructing canons, letting women write about masturbation, having
African-Americans hold courses in their own culture, and these outrageous things like that. So I
think, you know, we’ll talk a bit about Nietzsche’s style, or styles.

There is a famous discussion, and you’d have to know a little about German philology and
scholarship to really appreciate this. When German scholars do the complete text of someone’s
work, they don’t leave much to chance. They dig through a lot of writing. They get the complete
works. So there’s a rather famous scrap of Nietzsche’s writing that I can’t help but discuss
briefly, that will do two things. It will remind us a little bit about Nietzsche’s tricky style, because
without his tricky style or styles or ways of presenting, perhaps this issue I am about to talk
about wouldn’t have come up. And it’s also another way to remind us about the undecideability,
perhaps – by undecideability, I mean of interpretation – I mean how it is impossible to find a way
above the plain of interpreting communities, in which to judge interpretation… as it were, a
God’s eye view of it. I am denying that we have such a view of what philosophers have
sometimes called “the viewpoint from the standpoint of eternity”, or what I prefer to call “the view
from nowhere”, since there ain’t no “there” there. There ain’t no “there” there; there’s no
viewpoint like that.

Well, among Derrida’s… I mean ah – what a slip – some people will appreciate that… among
the fragments of Nietzsche’s work, they found a slip of paper and on it was written the following
brilliant, perhaps brilliant aphorism. It might have been Nietzsche’s most brilliant aphorism; it
says “I have forgotten my umbrella”. So the issue arose, should this be included in the complete
text of Nietzsche. Is this an aphorism that should be numbered and put in “The Will to Power”
for example, or left as an unnumbered aphorism?

In general it raises the issue of how should it be interpreted. Is it part of the complete text of
Nietzsche? Well, if the complete text of Nietzsche means, in the straightforward sense – as
some buffoons think – everything he wrote, then of course it should. But if a text is this special
canonical thing that captures the truly lasting and enduring legacy of Nietzsche, then one might
want an argument why “I forgot my umbrella” should be included, right? I mean, you’d expect to
have such an argument.

Well, this problem wouldn’t come up with a normal writer. I mean, otherwise it would be just “Oh
well, it’s a fragment, throw it away” just a fragment. But because Nietzsche writes in fragments,
aphorisms, and various styles, you have got to pause for a moment before throwing away “I
have forgotten my umbrella”. Now how would one go about solving this puzzle about whether to
interpret the slip “I have forgotten my umbrella” as part of Nietzsche’s text or not – part of his
complete works – how would one bring his works to completion in that way.

Well a famous argument here is in “Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles”, a book by Derrida, where believe
it or not he writes… a small book on this one fragment. [crowd laughter] Now, the interesting
thing about Derrida’s joke is this: by writing a whole book on this fragment, he has
surreptitiously, sneakily, included within the text and the overlapping history of interpretations of
Nietzsche this otherwise undecidable fragment, which has now become a fragment of his text,
which is now part of the history, you see, of the interpreting of the text of Nietzsche, so there’s a
little joke behind the joke.

It’s a very clever book in many ways. But I want to get around to what I take to be its point, and
it also should support what I made last time in too contentious a way – namely that there are
interpretations, its not that there are no facts, but interpretations set the range within which facts
can be appealed to, as well as truths and canons. In fact you may have to interpret the whole
history of your civilisation before deciding what should be a canonical text.

In any case, the issue that Derrida wants to raise there and I will raise briefly before I get onto
Nietzsche and the genealogy. Derrida wants to raise – in the spirit of Nietzsche – the question
of the undecideability of interpretation. The central point that he makes is this “What is style in
writing?” We talk about a writer’s style, well its something like this; the writer finding his or her
own voice… unique way, as it were, of writing. It very odd because they must be selecting a
voice from among that finite ensemble of possible narrative voices in a culture. Even when, as a
brilliant writer might; such as Nietzsche or James Joyce, they extend the bounds of those
possibilities. Not narrow them back to Shakespeare; extend the bounds of possibility.

So Nietzsche is one of those writers that did extend the bounds of possible writing. Style is a
creation, as you see, of this kind of singularity. Nietzsche’s styles, which should be in plural
actually, because there are many. Nietzsche’s styles open the problem of interpretation in a
radical way because, as Derrida argues; if there is style, there must be more than one. If there
is interpretation, there must be more than one. This point is systematic and theoretic. Style is
only style to the extent that we can distinguish and differentiate it from another style.
Interpretations are interpretations only to the extent that we can distinguish and differentiate
them from other interpretations.

So the very idea that there might be; only one way to write the truth, only one interpretation, one
last and final canon, one last book… is a nonsensical idea. Good books don’t lead to the end of
writing; they produce volumes of writing. Plato’s writings didn’t end writing. For God’s sakes they
write about Plato every year, they write twenty-five more dissertations. Good books create more
writing, more conflict, more canon confusion; not less.

So that’s a point I want to make to reinforce the very important idea that what we are dealing
with here are interpretations; and that it is in the conflict, not the confluence of interpretations
that we can see, as it were, the life of a culture and of a people. Whether they are what
Nietzsche calls “decadent”; in other words on their way out – that’s a nice way to gloss what he
means by decadent – on their way out…

Before I give some of Nietzsche’s quasi positive mythology, life affirming as I have been using it
means on your in and up. Life denying; decadent and on your way out, okay. That’s West Texas
gloss, but it will have to do until we get onto the more positive theoretical work.

Okay now this is a systematic argument and I don’t think that I can finish it within the compass
of this lecture; I may have to return to it. But I wanted to start with that one last note to pin down
that point on interpretation; the point being this, there can’t be a single one, or there is no
interpretation, and there can’t be a single style or there is no style. I mean, if a computer wrote
everything there wouldn’t be a concept of style. It’s all just “computerese”, there’s no style; it’s
“computerese”. There’s got to be more than one to be style. There is no interpretation if there is
just one. There’s got to be more than one. So this is his systematic point.

Okay now we are onto – thank God some of you are going to say – finally onto one of
Nietzsche’s texts where he does make a systematic argument recognisable to philosophers.
That means he takes a theme, he pursues it through a series of essays, he sticks with it, he
stays fairly serious about it, because it’s a fairly serious subject. What he wants to trace is the
origin of our moral values. This is not a discourse in ethics; it is a genealogy of the entire range
of Western ethical discourse.

So this isn’t a utilitarian theory or an Aristotelian theory, communitarian theory, Kantian theory,
the ontological theory; none of those. It’s an exercise in, as it were, going into their genealogy;
their origin, in order to see what are the conditions for the possibility of all those theories and
evaluations. It’s a different project. It’s not that all those other projects are worthless or
whatever, Nietzsche’s after something different. And what will come out of “The Genealogy of
Morals”, which we are on now, or beginning to start. What will come out of it won’t be a moral
theory, but a suspicion about moral theories. Just a suspicion about them.

Okay now let me tell you what I think that… “The Genealogy of Morals”; what is its method? And
I think for a change with Nietzsche, we can actually discuss method for a moment, because we
have now a precedent for discussing Nietzsche and the genealogy. A very well known French
thinker; Foucault, has raised genealogy to an extremely high methodological level in a series of
brilliant studies such as “Discipline and Punish“, the history of madness, and in many other
studies.

So let me try to identify along with Foucault some of the elements that are genealogical as a
method and oppose them to a more historical approach. One would think a historical approach
is what you would want if you were looking for origins. Well let me try to separate the two briefly.
I’ll start by trying to give a brief account of what a genealogy is. A genealogy attempts to
uncover the formation of an entire discursive practice. So in that sense it is not within that
discursive practice as about it. In other words it wants to uncover the conditions for the
possibility of that discursive practice.

Let me try to give an example here without using Nietzsche’s right now. One might take the
following interest in certain medieval texts; like the Maleficarum, which explains the conditions
under which male prelates get to burn women, which they did by the thousands in the medieval
period. Well one might not want to know whether the women really were witches or not… to me
that would be an outrageous kind of question… to me. I lived after that time, see. But I might
want to know this. What were the conditions for the possibility of forming a discourse within
which people even thought they could have a true/false – good and evil distinction – about
women being witches, and making the male organ fly around the room, and decapitating
prelates in the dark, and mating with animals?

Who in the name of the world could have possibly thought they had the conditions for that kind
of discourse, as one that at the time was viewed as rational? I shouldn’t say “at the time”, since
the Maleficarum is a text upon… which has been praised in many circles, and not too long ago,
as a basis for certain legal texts that we read today in law school. Anyway. That’s another little
thing you might suspect. The question here is “What are the conditions?”; not “Are these
sentences true or false?” because in a certain way, this is not a historical question. It’s not like
one wants to interpret them sympathetically and historically to understand them. One might not
want to do that because you see them filled with too much blood and barbarism to stand to do it.
It… it might make you too sick.

But you might want to know a deeper question; “What are the conditions that formed the
discourse?” and I don’t want to make it sound real textual and sort of “Duke” or whatever – a
deconstructive literary – these are not just discursive practices, right? Witch burning isn’t just a
bunch of talk and writing. It’s burning humans. Foucault was always willing to distinguish
between the discursive practice which was purely discursive, and the practice itself which would
be actually burning… women. And I think that’s a distinction – as long as you maintain it in a
commonsensical way – worth maintaining. Sort of like the distinction between “chair” and
“electric chair”. It’s a distinction. Not all distinctions are bad; I can live with that one. I want to
distinguish “chair” from “electric chair”, text about witch burning from witch burning. Okay.

Well, so one of the things that genealogy wants to do is uncover the formation of a certain kind
of practice. What it wants to do too is to attempt what might be called a reversal of perspective.
Now, in the way that Foucault uses it; which I even prefer to Nietzsche’s, to be honest. Foucault
uses it in the spirit – and here I am going to quote Whitman – Foucault uses the genealogical
method to do this. Foucault, like Whitman, “doesn’t come to sing songs for accepted victors
only; but for slain and despised persons”. Nice quote from Whitman, I like that quote…

In any case, Foucault’s genealogies want to reverse perspective, and allow us to see – or
attempt to see – from the standpoint of those upon whom the practice was inflicted. What the
practice might have looked like; and to reverse it, as it were. It’s like a gestalt switch, it’s not
supposed to be a mystical thing, it’s a method. It’s like when you are writing a history of the
working class, and all you are reading are bourgeois historians, you might decide “Oh hell, I’ve
read Studs Terkel, I think I’ll pick up a book where some actual workers talk”.

A historian friend of mine, Larry Goodwyn told a story about the first book he wrote on the
Populist movement. And he realised that all the other books so far, that he read in History on
the Populist movement in the United States didn’t have one damn farmer in any of them. He
thought that was odd; he said I think I’ll write a history about farmers that has some farmers in it.
Ridiculous thing to expect, like having a democracy without citizens… in any case… we expect
a lot of ridiculous things now.

Genealogy has a reversal of perspective built into it. Now this distinguishes the genealogical
method – this third point, besides reversal – the third point distinguishes it from both Marxist – in
the orthodox sense which no-one, I guess, is worried about now – history; and from other kinds
of history writing, is that we don’t look for a singular subject in the manner of great histories; you
know, history made by great men, that tradition. On the other hand we don’t look for collective
subjects either; namely identifiable and specifiable groups with agendas. Instead what we look
for in a genealogy is for the deeper relations of what is sometimes called “micrological power” or
“force to force”. Small, very hard to trace relations of forces to one another. And this relational
perspective is very important for writing this kind of history. Much easier in fact to characterise
after reading one than to do so abstractly like I am now. You don’t look – in other words – for the
subjects of the history, but for how various conflicts and forces and real antagonisms played
themselves out. And it the course of that, in fact… of course… certain subjects will emerge;
collective and single… anyway…

The fourth point, and this one of course comes from Nietzsche and Foucault accepts it too, and
it will be made use of in the genealogy and it will return to an earlier point of mine. Is that one
must see the truth of such accounts or the accuracy of their interpretations as a kind of choice
one has made. In other words, you don’t just accidentally write a book called “Illiberal
Education“. You have to make a choice, and then pick out the anecdotes you want to make your
point. I mean after all, don’t historians do that anyway? Genealogists want to do it self
consciously; with more reflection, in other words. I mean, I have got to say that about some
histories about which I am very familiar, and friendly.

E. P. Thompson’s history of the working class is not really interested in much that goes on in the
drawing rooms. Because he’s made a choice; he has decided on a certain approach. Once he
has decided on the interpretation, my earlier point about facts returns. That means it’s not the
case there are no facts. It’s just that the frame and the interpretation is going to decide for you
pretty much what they are. You know, it’s going to help you decide what counts as one. You
know, there aren’t any anecdotes in D’Souza’s book “Illiberal Education” about the
overwhelming success of programs that relate to the fates and affairs of women and minorities.
And I don’t take that to be accidental; I think he made a choice. He didn’t want any of the good
stories in it, but the bad ones. That was a product of a kind of choice.

The genealogist in writing the genealogy of a certain practice makes a choice. In other words,
takes a perspective. And one of the things I like about the method is this; that I like to know that
there is a perspective there up front so that I don’t have to wait for the hidden agenda to slap me
in the face later. It’s what might be called “The problem of interrogating court justices”. One
would like to know in advance so one won’t be surprised later… what their perspective is. One
becomes profoundly dissatisfied if you are told they have no perspective [crowd laughter]. It’s
the same dissatisfaction one feels when one hears a white male saying “I am not a racist”. It’s a
self refuting remark. One you wouldn’t feel compelled to make unless… “I’m not gay…” “I’m not
a racist…” …wouldn’t that relax you if you were and African-American; to hear that? “Oh, don’t
worry about me” [crowd laughter]. Not very relaxing.

All of this is to set up genealogy and the process and project of suspicion. Well in “The
Genealogy of Morals”, and now we are into the argument, and I don’t think that I can finish it in
one lecture, but we will start Nietzsche’s argument in “The Genealogy of Morals”. Sorry about
that. Nietzsche wants to trace the origin of our values; in other words, “What are the values of
these Western values?”. I mean, this isn’t an ethical theory; he wants to know the value of our
values. Now the question here, and I will have to address it much later, is “Well, what do you
mean by value?” And I have said rather vague things like “Value for life”, and I’ll have to fill that
in later with an account of Nietzsche’s own myths and other things, and I will try to do that later.
But for now I am after purely negative gain. In other words, now I just want to shoot my targets.
Later I will build some clay pigeons of my own; right now I am just shootin’ targets, okay? This is
the negative part of the argument.

Nietzsche wants to trace “What is the origin of our values?”; the value of our values. Evaluation,
interpretation, will… are everywhere. You know, we value things all over the place; and
differentially. And there are classic theories about ethical evaluations that surround – no matter
how complex some of these get – based around issues of good and evil. And that’s one of the
ways that Nietzsche draws the opposition within the west; the opposition between good and evil.
I hope not too esoteric, since if you don’t have that one down by the time you are about six,
Horror movies don’t make sense. You’ve got to have that step, sort of a rough cultural idea; you
know… he wants to know what lies behind these evaluations.

The procedure that he follows in this text is to make use of certain kinds – certain modes, forms
and kinds – of psychological reasoning, certain modes, forms and kinds of historical
investigation, and importantly, he wants to look at the texts, the crucial ones that have helped to
structure our understanding of whole bodies of discursive practices and the ways in which these
evaluations have come to be made. The schema, as it were, of the book is as follows.

We are going to look at the general question of the value of our values by looking at our
morality. Our morality, we are going to look at in its true and original home in religion. You know,
we are not going to take for granted that morality grew out of the enlightenment in a set of
procedural legal rules, but that morality grew out of the fertile embodied substantial rich soil of
religions. By religions, I mean important things people believed about their purposes; whether
they lived, died, and so on, and where they would go afterwards.

You know, the kind of ticked off questions that Job asked God. “Why did you mess with me?”
and “What’s going to happen if I die?” you know, the devil had really mucked with me and I want
to know why. As you know, God’s answer to Job is kind of rough; it’s “Shut up. I am big, I am
mean, get offa here. I can do worse.” [crowd laughter]. If you have seen the movie Hellraiser,
you know it’s true too, right? These are horrible movies; don’t go see all these movies. Hellraiser
is a terrible movie.

Specifically Nietzsche wants to go to a religion which he takes to be crucially important in the

moral development of the West and I think that so does William Buckley, he and Nietzsche
agree; Christianity. So Christianity will be one of our focuses. I want to say about Nietzsche’s
suspicion of Christianity that I don’t buy the entire suspicion. I have a distinction that I want to
make, and it’s a little bit critical of Nietzsche. For me, I like to make political distinctions; I prefer
them to theoretical ones. For me, I want to distinguish two kinds of Christianity, and I am not
talking about Catholic and Protestant. Although James Joyce thought those were interesting to
distinguish.

Does anyone remember what Joyce said when he ceased being a Catholic and some British
reporter asked him “Well, have you lost your faith, sir? What’s the problem here? Now that you
have stopped being a Catholic, are you going to become a Protestant?”, to which Joyce
responded “I have lost my faith, not my reason” [crowd laughter] Which for you Catholics out
there, I think that’s a great remark “I have lost my faith, not my reason”.

In any case, I like to distinguish in Christianity between two kinds of religion. One represented
by Billy Graham, and the other by Marting Luther King ah, a name… I suppose I can use the
proper name, you know, properly; it’s not slanderous to either one. But I like to distinguish
between people who lead their people out of bondage and then people who are busy playing
golf with the Pharaoh. It’s a rough distinction between religious people; that some forms of
religion have more of an interest in golf games with the Pharaoh, others seem to have more
interest in leading their people out of bondage. That’s a distinction Nietzsche doesn’t pay much
attention to; I would like to.

But for now, let’s just get polemical, broad and look at Christianity in Nietzsche’s way; as a form
of life, and look at it in relation to first… for Nietzsche there is Greek life, and it represents a
certain thing to him. Nietzsche was trained as a classicist, and in spite of his acute intellect, I
have to argue that he always remained a little too in love with the Greeks. A little bit. Nietzsche
was trained that way, always a little bit too enamoured of them, although he was one of the
people that helped to demystify many aspects of their life.

He wants to look at the schema of values of the Greeks and how they became Christian values,
which Nietzsche argues later become decadent and life threatening and lead to a third kind of
evaluation, which is really, as it were, the dead end that he sees civilisation headed towards.
And this is that threat I mentioned earlier of “Nihilism”. That threat I mentioned earlier; the threat
of Nihilism. Not as a personal belief, but as something that could be the fate of a culture.

Now I ought to tell you that there are some contemporary theorists that believe this is all already
over…that our culture – and this is why I have given the title of the course “Nietzsche and the
Post-Modern Condition” – some postmodern theorists have written in collections called “What to
do after the end of the world” They write essays on what do we do now that the world is over.
Now that there aren’t any humans left, what do we do with our word processors now? [crowd
laughter] Sort of a new question; theoretical. Well to find out why people write weird things like
that it’s good to go to Nietzsche and trace the development of these values and of moralities
from the Greeks through the Christian religion and on to this situation of Nihilism that Nietzsche
will discuss.

Well, ah, one of the ways that I like to do this is to try to warn you right away that if you read The
Genealogy of Morals – and I hope you do, all of you; it’s a good book, you should read it, it’s
fun. You don’t have to read it. There are lots of good books, but if you do read it – watch out for
a sort of invidious binary in the text; masters and slaves, master morality and slave morality. The
reason you should watch out for this invidious binary is that for Nietzsche these are metaphors
that tell you something about the origins of these value systems and ultimately you will find out
that for Nietzsche, neither is satisfying. In other words they are not positions he would adopt
now; they are part of how out cultures move.

He will identify the Greek ideals with master moralities and the Christian ideals with slave
moralities. Hardly surprising now, is it? Because even if you see a Chuck Heston movie about
early Christianity, you notice what you could hardly help but notice, that the origins of
Christianity are among the classes of the despised, the oppressed and the slaves. Hard to miss!
Jesus isn’t hanging out at The Qantas Club! He hangs around with hookers and cheats and
frauds, charlatans, all of the time. Only time he ever bumps into religious people it just pisses
him off. Kicks over their tables, makes fun of them in their Synagogue. I mean that’s a fair
reading of the New Testament, it’s not outrageous; just read the damn book.

Again, through long canonical use, you can lose the ability to read. Nietzsche said one bad thing
about Christianity is that it can make you forget how to read. It would be great to read the New
Testament and pretend you never heard anything about Jesus. It would be a lot of fun. Because
you might find a totally unrecognisable character. You know, he had one close woman friend
and she was a hooker. That’s not interesting to you? It is to me. It wasn’t the wife of the current
vice president, it was a prostitute. And I am not up here to stone him because I did agree with
perhaps one of his profound remarks – Jesus’ – In the New Testament, and that’s “If you are
without sin you can cast the first stone” and that generally would stop a lot of stoning. [crowd
laughter]. I think. It’s not a sermon, but just a piece of advice.

Well, Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals contrasts the master morality of Greece with the
slave morality of Christianity and then follows it through to its next phase. One of the reasons he
could do this so brilliantly – I think – is because of his background as a philologist. Nietzsche’s
background was a philologist, okay. Since we are pressed for time.

Nietzsche’s background as a philologist warned him that certain words that were important in
evaluation underwent very interesting semantic shifts between the Greek period and the
Christian period. So for example, the Greek word for “Excellence”, or “arete“, which as close as
we can come to saying it in West Texas… the Greek word for “Excellence” comes to be
translated in the Christian Medieval period as something different, and then by the time we get
to the King James bible… and this is important. I want to just skip to the King James version,
because now we get for Excellence something like… trying to think of the exact… the exact
word here… the movement is from excellence to… virtue… yeah, piety; sometimes as narrow
as piety. Virtue; piety.

Well let me try to give you a sense for the difference… that Nietzsche wants to drive here. An
Excellent Greek, on the model of the master set of values that the Greeks held, was someone
like Odysseus, a great example from Ceto, a nice example of an excellent Greek. He was
excellent because he was – in a sense that today we wouldn’t understand at all because of the
division of labour – he was well rounded.

Odysseus could tell a lie well; which is a virtue. To know when to lie and to whom and about
what was a virtue for the Greeks. It’s a powerfully smart one. For example if a God questions
you about if you have messed around with something, it’s very nice to fool him. Odysseus could
build a boat, drive a furrow straight, sing a song, you know, fight in a battle, throw a discus, and
many other things. There was a lot to it. Very well rounded, interesting. Noble values.

In short these noble values were what Nietzsche called “active” powers that, as it were, would
see what they wanted to act upon and then act upon it. And those were for him noble values. He
calls them master morality; however they are naive. He points that out later and I’ll get around to
that when I try to explain…

Now I want to make the quick move from that ideal; that Greek ideal of excellence, which is well
roundedness in many areas. Well if you think of that, then you think of something like “virtue”;
don’t you see that the semantic terrain is almost reversed? Because certainly in the Victorian
period, to mean to be “virtuous” meant to deny – one after another – all those aspects of your
active powers, which were celebrated in this earlier use of the word. Namely “I won’t do that, it’s
a sin. I am virtuous”… “I won’t do that, it’s a sin. I am virtuous”… “I won’t do that, it’s a sin. I am
virtuous”, “I won’t’ overeat”, “Sex… phew… out of the question”; “No”, “Just say no”… “Just say
no”… [crowd laughter].

So, Nietzsche’s point was that this transformation; from a master to a slave morality was life
denying, not life affirming; life denying. And it was life denying in this first, quite ordinary sense.
Namely that the active powers that human beings wanted to realise become “inwardised”;
turned against themselves and become a series of “Just say no’s” to various aspects of the
things that make us human. Things that are ignored by theorists, academics, philosophers,
literary critics and others. Topics we ought to discuss. Like how good is our food? How warm is
our house? How much fun do we have having sex? We don’t talk about that much and yet that’s
the fabric that makes a life that flourishes. Not whether Shakespeare is in the canon or not or
whether Mel Gibson plays him or not, but whether we are healthy and well and feel good and
like Odysseus can do many things and enjoy a whole bunch of them.

That was… at least this is the movement that Nietzsche wants to trace. Now these life denying
values of Christianity; he’s not simple minded on this. His criticism of Christianity is not simple
minded. So I want to end this lecture on the genealogy and then pick the genealogy up in the
next lecture again with the following remark. Nietzsche didn’t think that the movement to what
he sees as the slave morality of Christianity and its life denying aspects is entirely negative
because it made the human race more subtle, more devious, more mendacious.

Oddly enough, until Christianity came along, human beings, according to Nietzsche, weren’t
nearly tricky enough, weren’t nearly clever enough, mendacious enough, creative enough. No,
the Greeks who just, you know “Well I lied to a god, I did this… I did that…” No, Christianity
goes “I love you” in this very strange way we are going to examine later. But not until it comes
into the world – as Nietzsche sees it – that human beings actually become these sort of subtle
mendacious tricky people with deep subjective problems, strange consciences and guilt with all
its many wonders is born into the world. And we’ll discuss that next time when we return to The
Genealogy of Morals.

4) On The Death Of God

In this lecture I want to pick up on my discussion of “On the Genealogy of Morals” by Nietzsche
and return our argument concerning the value of our values, the origins of our ethical
judgements and so on, and look at the question of – as I stated in the opening lecture – the
paradoxical situation that our morality may, oddly enough, have an immoral origin. And so this is
the argument to which we will return. One of the points I didn’t make about the genealogical
method in the last lecture, I want to make now and it’s very important. When we look
genealogically at “The Greeks” as a type, or Christianity; Nietzsche uses a kind of typology
where we don’t look for who speaks in a document, but for as it were, what motivates the
speaker behind the document.

So the hermeneutic question of “Who is the speaker and is he honest?” isn’t really what
Nietzsche wants, but to see what kind of type would say something like that. See, the standard
philosophical approach to a text would be to look at the propositions and then to determine if the
argument is valid, sound if the speaker is sincere and so on. Nietzsche, rather than looking at
that, looks at the question: “What kind of person would make an argument like that?” – “What
type of person would evaluate like that?” – rather than to look at the evaluation. That’s another
way to look at genealogy.

You know, rather than to look directly at an evaluation, you look at the kind, characteristic or
type that would make it. So when I make a remark about “master morality”; it’s about a certain
type that speaks in these various evaluatory words. Or about Christian morality; it’s about the
type, or “What human types speaks in these texts?”, okay. And again, that’s part of the
suspicion of the method; of what it causes us to suspect.

Well we get onto some rather strong claims; the account of – as I say – of “Greek ideals”, is that
they are active, noble; you notice these various valorising terms, but they are also somewhat
childlike and naive. These are terms that imply that there should be more of a mendacious spirit
in human beings; more malice wouldn’t be bad here. In fact, throughout the text of Nietzsche,
there is something like – and I don’t want to trivialise it – but there is something like what Mick
Jagger calls “Sympathy for the Devil“; that all really dialectical and intelligent human beings will
have to have a sense for evil and some sympathy for the devil, or they will be a little… stifled
and boring. And I think that’s not wrong; just a little sympathy for the devil won’t hurt.

In any case, let me look at a famous argument… In the first type that we have looked at – the
Greek type – we will give it a name and call it the “active type”, or the “master morality”, and
here we have what I have called active force which prevails over reactive forces. And reactive
forces here would be things that stand in the way of the will realising what it wants. Well that’s
not much of a problem from that position in Greek society where myths… and by the way we are
in the realm of myth here. These types are after all not really sociological accounts, but in a
certain sense mythic accounts… if you put enough weight on “myth”, and I want to put a heavy
weight on that term.
Anyway, this is the active type. One of the faculties that the active type is noted for is the ability
to forget. And this is again part of Nietzsche’s ongoing polemic with what might be called “mere
historicism” – people who just wander idly through the relics of the past in search of a cultural
treasure or whatever. In other words, for Nietzsche, the active person is willing to forget, and he
contrasts that with memory, which you need in Christianity in order for the redemption story, for
example, to make sense. You need to remember the sufferings of the martyrs… remember…
memory plays an entirely different role for the master morality; the way Nietzsche puts it they
are “strong enough to forget”.

So if insulted and you hit the master in the face, he hits you back and that way he honours you
and then he forgets it, see. Because first of all, if he turns the other cheek he shames you by
saying well you are not, you know, good enough to even fight with me. Rather, you hit him, he
hits you back and then you both forget it. It’s the West Texas version of master morality [crowd
laughter]. He hits you, you hit him, and then you have treated each other with dignity, and then
you forget it. But you don’t turn the other cheek and then remember it; mendaciously remember
it “Oh yes, you have hit me now, but later…” There is the secret that will come in with
Christianity; the “but later”.

Now, I want to start this with a typology and then to read a brief portion of the genealogy where
Nietzsche thinks he has uncovered, as it were, a text that’s at the very heart of Christian
morality – for Nietzsche – in this typological sense. The Christian type, Nietzsche says, is
reactive; calls it a “slave morality”, and in this type of morality, reactive forces prevail over the
active ones. And here you want things, but there is, as it were, principles and rules that stand
between your will and fulfilling the will or the desire. And the extremes that we know throughout
history that this has achieved are unbelievable, but their achievement has always had some
perverse opposite character. And I will try to use just one example here, and that’s the monk
who is going to think about the pleasures of the flesh no more.

So the monk sleeps naked under a cloth that’s rough and as he denies that part of being human
of being a biological animal – as he denies it – does his body become less or more eroticised I
wonder? After years of sleeping under this rough blanket naked and denying the flesh; oddly
enough, what comes in precisely is a new sublime and elevated form of the erotic. Everything is
eroticised about the blanket and the body of the monk. No longer this straightforward sort of
Greek physical act, but now an entire eroticised body.

I mean, try to explain that the Victorian era produces novels like “Wuthering Heights“, I mean,
the point is this: you know, the denial of that power, in reactive power, doesn’t mean that people
really just say “no” and things become de-eroticised. No! Christianity perversely eroticises the
world in a brand new way. And you know, in Wuthering Heights, the moment that you sinned
was the moment that Nietzsche thought was interesting about Christianity; was that to break
through and to sin gave a whole new dimension – for him – to human interest.
It made the human being an interesting species; sin did. Before that, we looked a lot like
primates… you know, and afterwards it becomes this act filled with meaning across a whole
terrain; subtle glances… of course all this may be gone now, right? It’s just you meet in the mall,
the same old thing as the Greeks maybe, who the hell knows… more or less. But you know, in
the Victorian era, you can imagine that a glance, a touch, a glove… you know. You read
Kierkegaard on the diary of a seducer, and even though its… all of the book is about him just
thinking about it, and not even mentioning anything the least bit pornographic, its just “My God,
you can’t get that involved over one look, can you?” and yes… you can.

But perversely, it was this morality that, as it were, pushed those active release of those normal
human powers into this reactive mode, so that they were devious in roundabout ways; they did
not de-eroticise humans, but eroticised us in a new way. And then of course made us have at it,
and then to take the lies inward in a form of guilt; where oddly enough the weak revenged
themselves upon the strong – again, in terminology – this way… you want something, but you
are really not up to getting it, so… in the Greek scheme, you just don’t get it because and for the
simple reason that you weren’t up for it; you couldn’t handle it, you couldn’t do it.

Now the Christian will take that same inability and turn it against the active type and use it as a
reproach. The things they can’t do – their limitations – become virtues; now they are virtuous
because their limitations, their faults, their inabilities to get the things they want, now are valued
highly. Whereas the active type, who previously was valued highly, who goes ahead and acts
out is considered immoral, and even worse, turns the punishment inward in the form of guilt,
because the morality is general. So he goes “I did what I wanted… oh I feel awful about it!”, and
Nietzsche finds that mendacious and perverse. “I did what I wanted to do, god I feel terrible!”, “I
did what I was inclined to do, oh I feel awful!”

See, for the Greeks, the way Nietzsche presents it, that’s unthinkable. You can’t imagine
Odysseus later going “Oh god, I blinded a god, I feel terrible!” No! “I blinded his eye! Knocked it
out! Wow! Let me tell you a story about it!” But no, that would be too straightforward for what
happens after Christianity, where reactive powers make the world a more subtle place; more
erotic, and in fact open up whole new fields of interpretation.

In fact, it’s interesting to note that the first thing that the Devil does in the Bible is to teach Eve to
interpret. God has given a rather straightforward command. Milton makes a lot out of this: God
says “Don’t eat anything…” This is a myth, you all know this is a myth, so chill out: “Don’t eat
anything off that tree” Well, what does the serpent say? He says “Well, maybe God’s testing
you. Maybe God really wants you to eat it to prove that you are a worthy creature…” So Eve
starts thinking “Well [maybe] that’s it after all then… let me think and interpret this…” And so it is
with the Devil that interpretation is born within the inside of the text itself; the Devil says
“interpret… think… interpret… don’t just listen to that… of course that could mean more than
one thing!” Well of course, so could everything else. Anyway…
Now, the Christian morality then. When Nietzsche says it turns itself against life; there’s one
level in which I want you to understand where I think it’s pretty obvious; sort of “flat footed”
critique. At least the kind of Christianity I was brought up around – the Baptist church – and I
don’t think it’s not consonate with most varieties. Things like thinking critically, having a whole
hell of a lot of fun, enjoying sex a whole bunch, taking certain substances, getting real drunk,
letting yourself be a free spirit, being free of malice and the envy of other people and stuff aren’t
cultivated very much by Christianity; all the things that Nietzsche associated with the other
morality. Now admittedly the Greek way of doing this is too straightforward, too childlike;
certainly not nearly as interesting as things will be later, in his view or in mine either.

Now, Nietzsche makes here… and I am going to read, I think, a famous passage. And a justly
famous passage. Perhaps in this passage we see his most negative moment of the critique of
Christianity and so we’ll look at that, and its in – and then I’ll read it briefly – and its in the first
essay in The Genealogy of Morals, in case you decide to read the book, in Section 15… and I’ll
read… I haven’t read to you much… but this passage is so beautiful in Nietzsche I can’t pass it
up… and well I have talked about his style so much, and this is a great example of it. So I’ll read
you this, then toward the end of the talk today I’ll do one other little piece. Okay.

Nietzsche here is discussing Christian values of… faith, love and hope, and I’ll start with his
rhetorical question. “What, do I hear a riot? They call things ‘the last judgement’? They call
things ‘their kingdom’? ‘The kingdom of God’?” – Meanwhile, however, you know – “Until then
they live in faith, in hope, in love. In faith in what? In love of what? In hope of what?” – You see
how this genealogy of suspicion is going to start to work now? He is going to examine that – “In
love of what? These weak people; someday or other they too intend to be strong. There is no
doubt in that, because some day their kingdom too shall come. They term it the kingdom of God
of course, because after all one is so very humble in all things. To experience that one needs to
live a long time, beyond death. Indeed one needs eternal life, so as to be eternally justified in
the kingdom of God for this earthly life in faith, in love, in hope. But how justified?”

“Dante, I think, committed a crude blunder” – very few people but Nietzsche would say Dante
committed a crude blunder, let me just tell you that right now – “Dante, I think, committed a
crude blunder when with a terror inspiring ingenuity he placed above the gateway of his hell the
inscription ‘I too was created by eternal love‘. At any rate, there would be more justification for
placing above the gateway to the Christian paradise the inscription ‘I too was created by eternal
hate‘; provided a truth may be place above the gateway to a lie. So what is it that constitutes the
bliss of the Christian paradise? We might even guess…” – a genealogist isn’t going to guess,
they are going to look for a text. We might guess, but Nietzsche says they have an authority to
tell them about it. And Nietzsche doesn’t pick out, ah, Jimmy Swaggart or some second rate
figure in Christianity, he picks a text in Thomas Aquinas.

And you know, arguably, I think Thomas Aquinas knew something about Christianity; that’s my
view. I don’t think Nietzsche picked someone out of the mainstream of the tradition, I think he
picked a very important figure. According to Thomas Aquinas the chief blessing in heaven will
be like this. Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint, says “The blessed in the kingdom of
heaven will see the punishments of the damned in order that their bliss be more delightful to
them” [crowd laughter]

[long pause] [sigh] In the place of the Greek athletes we have martyrs. Surely you understand
that this is drenched in more blood than the simple Greeks could ever dream of. I mean, the
trick of genealogy is not to see that as an argument, but to make it raise a whole host of
suspicions in your mind about people who want to be nice, be good, be kind, love, cherish you;
you’ve got to suspect that area of discourse. And this kind of genealogical argument – and I just
gave you what I take to be a powerful sample of it – is supposed to make you ask this question:
“Isn’t that kind of love a mask for a kind of hate? Isn’t that kind of faith a mask for a kind of
power?”

Now don’t think that because we have called this “slave morality”, it has no power. As Nietzsche
once said: “Christianity — a mistake? A two thousand year mistake?” No, it does have power. I
mean it does have power. Don’t think that this is shallow critique of Christianity. This is not
denying its power, for god’s sakes. In its appeal to love as a kind of hatred, in its appeal to
compassion as a mask for power, and in its deferred way of insisting upon having its own way.

In fact, now I will return to a simpler example that Nietzsche wouldn’t have appreciated. But its
that after this you should at least suspect when a television preacher – I don’t want to be sued
for libel here – when a TV preacher goes “I love homosexuals…” – I am trying to do the voice
too – “…but I hate their sin”. After you have read Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals you may
suspect that statement. You may just go “I suspect that’s not the case”. I mean after all, for a lot
of people being gay is what constitutes people in a certain way. Its part of their identity. You
don’t just go well “I love them, but I hate that”. It’s kind of “I love Michael Jordan, but I don’t like
basketball” Well, there might be reasons for that but… hard to know what they would be… I
don’t know him myself. In any case, this hermeneutic of suspicion that Nietzsche is drawing out
is that Christianity; while presenting itself as a religion of love and compassion and tenderness;
is a mask of hate and fear; and another form of power.

The Greek form of power was a form of power too. It presented itself as an ideal of excellence,
but it was… don’t you see now that the metaphor more straightforward really applied. In other
words Odysseus would go… it’s like reading Aristotle, right? It’s not a big secret to anyone that
Aristotle’s views represent the views of the gentlemanly upper classes of Greece. That
shouldn’t… it’s no surprise because Aristotle says in The Ethics that well – “I don’t teach ethics
to people who aren’t well brought up young Greek men, I mean why the hell bother…” – well
then you know who he is talking to, and that has a charming honesty one can find naively
throughout Aristotle’s encyclopaedic intelligence. I mean it’s really charming. This on the other
hand is a form of power that is subtle, important, very interesting.

Now the possibility however looms in this scheme; that the triumph of these reactive forces will,
as it were, overdo the job. You follow me? Its one thing to say “No” to certain instincts and – “life
affirming” or not – but it’s quite another to push that process to the edge at which life is
threatened in a profound and fundamental way. To deny them beyond a certain point begins to
be a danger for the species. Now people keep going “Well, you sound like some damn
sociobiologist“.

No, the way Nietzsche is using these terms: “life affirming”, “life negating”, have to do with our
fate of the species in being able to recreate ourselves, and in the writing of these myths he is of
course trying to recreate himself at some level; obviously. And retelling them is an effort at
creating something, god knows what it will be by the time we are through, but it’s an attempt to
do that.

Well the two things that he says – and again keep that passage in mind – that characterise
Christianity are “resentment” and the term there means this double move of love/hate; the
resentment of the weak of the strong, but the resentment plays itself out with the strong as well
in the form of guilt. So Nietzsche has an extended analysis of resentment and guilt as being
fundamental to this, as it were, substructure of Christian discourse.

Now Nietzsche takes this whole argument to be very destructive of all ethical theories in the
Western tradition for this obvious reason. Whether you are talking about Mill, or about Kant,
clearly these theories are rooted in that tradition. Especially Kant’s, I mean for God’s sakes, it’s
just a very high German theoretic account of The Golden Rule in a certain way. I mean it’s very
complicated, but its essence is that his parents were good Pietists, and he by God is smart
enough to justify being that, theoretically; and he is, by the way.

In any case, these are the two factors Nietzsche sees working here in the reactive type:
resentment and guilt, and the ideal for human living that they posit he says is not aesthetic but
ascetic ideal; namely, the ideal of someone who just says “No”. You know, the ascetic ideal; not
too much of anything “Oh no, no more desert for me”, “No, I’d rather not tonight”, “No, I can’t do
that now”, what these are mechanisms or ways of making our bad conscience; our guilt,
bearable.

This ascetic ideal, you know, it’s an ideal so we can make these things bearable to live with.
You know I started earlier on making the remark that we could only deal with so much reality.
Well on this topic here, we can only deal with so much of this critique until somebody wants to
say “Shut up”; “You know, I go to church, I don’t want to hear any more of that, shut your damn
mouth, its ruining it for me”, well, I will in a minute, but not yet.

What the ascetic ideal does is it makes this bearable, but it also expresses finally a will to
nothingness; to just simply not have to will anymore. This is where the spectre of Nihilism arises.
And it doesn’t arise so much… well it arises with the origin of Christianity. It does not become,
as it were – for Nietzsche – a problem on the agenda of the world and of our culture until what
Nietzsche sees as “the decadent period of Christianity”. I mean, a period that I think we could
understand might be… we might characterise this as a sort of decadent period, and Christianity
is still lagging itself out.

In this decadent period what will happen is – Nietzsche thinks – is that we will see an
expression of the “Will to nothingness”; simply the refusal to will anymore. This is where
Nietzsche’s worry; his fear, which I have named “Nihilism”; which he names “Nihilism”, has
become a real cultural possibility. And again, I am going to refer to a film… I am using films
rather than referring to other texts because, as you know, in our culture films are texts, right?
And very important ones. A lot more people, a lot bigger impact on the objective culture, let’s
face it.

Take a movie like Heathers; beautiful expression of the will to nothingness played out almost
like an active will. In the movie Heathers, the young rebel wants the whole high school to
commit suicide together and sign a mutual note about it and it will be “The Woodstock of the
80’s”. I like that, that’s cute. That’s… in the spirit of Joy Division’s famous line in one of their
albums – referring to Nietzsche – “There is no turning back the last man“. In other words, the
last humans are already here, and there is no turning back the next step.

So today for example, and now I will, in sympathy with some of my friends I know who teach in
Theology I should say that their problem today formulated at a very head high level would be
not the disbeliever, which was the older problem you discussed in theology departments, not the
non-believer; their problem today is the non-person. In other words, to find someone for whom
belief or disbelief might mean any damn thing either way. Its not that you can’t find people that
won’t go “Oh I believe, I believe”, because you will. But to find someone that believes, you
know, believes like Kierkegaard believed, or Saint Paul believed; you know, really believes. So
the problem isn’t finding some silly tricky little argument, but finding some human being
somewhere to make it to.

This is the Nihilism that makes Nietzsche relevant to the current situation. What Nietzsche
actually sees at the end of this is what centred around God, and yet modern conditions – which I
have characterised as the advent of Capitalism, mass communication, what Max Weber said
were called “the disenchantment of the world”… you know… disenchantment. I don’t want to
make that sound too strong because the enchanted world of the Middle Ages; you know if you
got a toothache in that enchanted world it was unpleasant. So there are good things about
modernity that I appreciate; like penicillin and other things. So don’t get too carried away with
this enchanted/disenchanted distinction of Max Weber’s.

Nevertheless though, Max Weber called this modern world “disenchanted”, and Nietzsche’s
trope for that – and the name of this lesson is called; what a thing to call a lesson – The Death
of God”, I mean, you know, this is one of Nietzsche’s most notorious – as you know – parables
and I am going to use it and hope that I get a chance to interpret it, to bring to an end this, sort
of, this Nietzsche as a moralist point. In any case… before I do that I want to make two quick
points about what I have just said.
Both the Greek Ideal – and don’t think these are very limited ideals… they structure all the
things we still value… to the extent that we are still human and still value things – the Greek
ideal and then the Christian ideal from which our other theories grew stay crucially important for
all other theories. By that I mean for all other ethical theories. One of the ways Nietzsche sees
these – and then I will get onto this passage – is this way.

Nietzsche talks about a reversal of values; that’s from the master to the slave; or from the active
to the reactive human. That’s the reversal, and the reversal – as I say – has a double edge to it.
It makes humans more mendacious, more interesting, sexier, more sinful, interesting. One more
example might help there. I want to make this point clear.

Augustine’s Confessions – I don’t know how many of you have read this, but – Augustine’s
Confessions were magnificent and I think it’s a wonderful book. Augustine feels more guilt, and
has more excitement over stealing a pear than any of us would feel if we stole seven million
dollars! [crowd laughter] I mean, Augustine in the Confessions evokes sin in the most
marvellously embodied way. Because he stole a stinking pear. We are a long way from that
historically, folks. That is far distant.

And my scary thing I’d like to say is I am about to read this parable about the death of God, and
its supposed to be shocking, and yet I feel like I am at a time and a place in culture when we are
far distant from our ability to be shocked by that at all either. What Nietzsche took to be most
shocking, I think today it’s just grist for a certain commodity, system, certain way of advertising.
Today “World spirit” may very well be just advertising.

Nevertheless, let me give you the famous parable; Nietzsche’s Death of God parable, and I’ll
use it to bring this kind of suspicion to an end because with “The Death of God” we have – in
Nietzsche – and it’s going to take a long time to explain, and I’ll do that in the next lecture, we’ll
talk more about this parable. We could have spent eight hours interpreting just the parable. First
of all, a parable called “The Death of God” can’t be atheism, right? Because to the bourgeois
atheist it makes no sense to say God died because there wasn’t one, so he couldn’t have died.
So that doesn’t make sense.

“The Death of God” is about the drying up of a horizon of meaning, and of a whole form of
human life. And about Nietzsche’s both fear and exhilaration at what might come next. We still
to a large extent live in the interregnum between worlds, if you will, or between paradigms. Not
many people in the history of the world have faced that; lived in periods like that. So Nietzsche
in that sense is also a prophetic thinker, so I’ll share with you – just so you can scandalise your
friends, hell if nothing else – Nietzsche’s famous parable, and it’s from “The Gay Science”. The
one I want to share with you is the parable from “The Gay Science” called “The Madman”,
naturally, and as a madman myself, sometimes a professional madman, I enjoy this passage a
lot. In “The Gay Science”, this is 125; aphorism 125. Of course these are some of Nietzsche’s
fragments he is best known for because they are filled with hyperbole and wonderful invective
and so… well, I enjoy this one. The Madman.

“Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours and ran to the
market place…” – please follow Nietzsche’s every line because none of this is accidental, the
madman lit a lantern and ran to the marketplace, okay – “…and cried incessantly: ‘I seek God! I
seek God!'” – Well you can imagine that in a mall, right? [crowd laughter] The cops are going to
come and pull you out, because nothing in a mall is that serious. It’s not designed to be, folks.
Anyway…

“As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just…” – see, Nietzsche
was not just a simple atheist; follow this – “As many of those who did not believe in God were
standing around just then he provoked much laughter” – Mall again, right? – “God, get this
skypilot out of here” – “Did he get lost? One said. Did he lose his way like a child? Said another.
Or is he hiding?” – now they are talking about him – “Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he
gone on a voyage? Has he emigrated? They yelled and laughed.

“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glance. ‘Whither is God?’ he
cried; ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have
we done this thing? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe
away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its centre; from its
sun? Whither is it moving now? [Whither are we moving?] Away from all suns? Or are we not
plunging continually? Backward, forward, sliding in all directions?…'”

“‘Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?” Even so
close to them – I am adding to the text now – even as close to some of those gravediggers as
we all sit today? “Don’t we hear their digging at all? Is not night and more night coming on all the
time? Do we not smell anything as yet of God’s decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is
dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him'”

Now there is a change. The mall people are a little quiet now because this is more interesting
than they thought it would be, okay. That’s why they were quiet. And then he goes on.

And here’s the point where I want to introduce my next series of talks with: “‘How shall we, the
murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves now? What was holiest and that the world has yet
known has bled to death under our knives, and who can wipe this blood off of us? What water is
there that can clean us now? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to
invent?'” – What new myths? What new ways to live shall we have to invent? – “‘Is not the
greatness of our deed still far too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to
be worthy of it?…'”

“Here the madman fell silent and looked again at the listeners; and they were silent and
astonished. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. ‘I have come
too early; my time has not yet come’, said the madman. ‘This tremendous event is still on its
way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time;
the light of the stars requires even more time; deeds too require time, even after they are done,
before they can be seen and heard'” – by many – “‘This deed is still more distant from some of
them than most the distant star—and yet they have done it themselves'”

“It has been related further” – Nietzsche again – “that on that same day the madman entered
various churches, and there he sang his ‘Requiem to a Dead God’. Led out and called to
account, he is said to have replied each time: “What after all are these churches now if not the
sepulchres and the tombs of God?” What are these churches now? If not the sepulchres and
the tombs of God?

Well, there’s the famous “Death of God” parable, for what its worth, or not worth. It takes a lot of
interpreting, but it’s a very, very – for me – excitingly interesting, challenging, powerful and
serious moment. Philosophers are very seldom ever really serious. You can tell that from
Socrates, and sometimes the best part about them is that they are not too serious. But that’s a
very serious moment for Nietzsche. And it’s also a moment that I think that I’d like to bring down
to earth just a bit, because this is still a deed quite distant from us, and it may take quite a bit of
work to pull it closer. But it’s really hard not to catch a sense for that.

Coming from the university I come from, where we have one of the world’s great cathedrals:
Duke Chapel, and we have a beautiful stained glass painting of various saints, martyrs,
apostles, Christ, but most important, and I want to return to Nietzsche’s first line about the
market place. Our madman went to the marketplace to tell the news, because it’s in the
marketplace where the news – in the new era of the world – in the New World Order; it’s the
marketplace where the news needed to be spread, okay? In any case in Duke Chapel; it’s a
beautiful chapel, I mean it’s the best imitation you can get this side of Europe [crowd laughter].

Built in the thirties I think – right? 20’s, 30’s, something like that – in this chapel you wander
through, and for a moment your sense of reverence is almost there, you almost can remember
some of those feelings when you were very young and you thought just maybe that was right, or
whatever. But you wander off the edge of the chapel, and usually it’s very cool in there and they
are playing Bach and it’s just a nice place to go, I mean I have to admit it.

But as you wander off, then there are the barons of tobacco; all of the barons of tobacco; the
Washington Duke family, all buried in stay – not cardinals, not saints, not martyrs, no Thomas
Aquinas, no Saint Thomas More; but George Washington Duke and his family, the buyers and
sellers of America’s first international commodity: tobacco. The fortune upon which that church
is erected, and to which it is dedicated. What is that magnificent church now but the tomb and
the sepulchre of God? This always seemed to me a striking example, from a local perspective. I
mean you’d need to visit the chapel if you come to Duke, and you are welcome to do so.
I will bring up a few things from the Genealogy again, but by the time we have reached this
moment of The Death of God, we already have a strange change in the discourse of
Nietzsche’s text. Because now the challenge will be for me to present what I have only so far
indicated. And it’s indicated in the parable. What new games, new festivals, can human beings
– insofar there is any life that remains – what can be invented, now? To make up for what has
already been destroyed.

And that’s the challenge we’ll have in the next classes; is to see first what does Nietzsche offer
us by way of any new myths like that, and more importantly, what myths could we construct
ourselves; what games, what holy festivals, what interesting books, fascinating arguments, and
new ways to live? Other than the pathetic tragic, stupid, banal array of ordinary, everyday,
bourgeois stinking life. Surely we can do better than that. Surely.

So that’s the project that we will head out on, you know. Because we don’t want to end with the
thought that always seems to me ghastly – and especially after reading Nietzsche – it’s that to
imagine someone looking at your tombstone years from now, and it says: “Bill O’Reilly”, gives
the dates – its always comforting, I visit graveyards, I like it – “Sold tyres” [crowd laughter]. Now
I don’t know if you sell tyres, and I know people driven to that and worse, but still, that would be
“Great salesman. Wonderful friend. Nice chum”.

5) Nietzsche And The Eternal Recurrence

This lecture is on a very troubling thesis of Nietzsche’s: The Eternal Recurrence. Before I
discuss Nietzsche’s idea of The Eternal Recurrence I want to do a little bit of what I promised
that I would do last time when I recounted the parable of The Death of God, and that’s to
interpret it a little bit more. One of the nice things about parables – and I am going to compare
that parable to some other parables. One of the nice things about parables is that in a certain
sense if one is to read them at all – engage in reading them at all – parables demand, require
interpretation. They quite literally can’t mean what they say, quite literally. And if you notice in
many traditions, the attempt to communicate through a parable is the attempt to communicate a
truth that, as it were, could not possibly be communicated in another, sort of, more linear form
without, as it were, the aid of a story.

You may for example notice that Christ in the New Testament uses parables far more often than
he uses demonstrative arguments, far more often than he presents position papers, far more
often than he testifies before congress, far more often than he gives news conferences. And
perhaps it’s because the tradition of the parable is one in which the listener is forced to tap into
their own autonomy and their own self creation in order to engage the parable at all. So
something similar is true, and I think of the parables that – and parable as you recall… I have
droned on and on about Nietzsche’s many styles – but the parable again is a style that
Nietzsche uses to convey a kind of truth; a kind of new way of looking at things without, as it
were, the direct communication which I think that he rightly believes views like his cannot
receive.

And it’s not as though – and this is why I have been so reluctant throughout to present
Nietzsche as a philosopher. I have been equally reluctant – I hope you have noticed – to
present him as a literary figure, which seems to me – if I said being presented as a “mere
philosopher” was degrading – to be presented as a “mere literary figure”, especially in a culture
like ours today, you know, considering the people who go on book tours, it would be even more
degrading. So I don’t want to view Nietzsche’s text as merely philosophical, or merely literary,
but to try to view Nietzsche’s text as in some way exemplary and special.

And the way that I indicated that early on and I will mention it again now, as I said, in a certain
way – and I did use this example from philosophy – Nietzsche wanted to impossibly play Plato
to his own Socrates. To invent himself as such a character that would stand out above the other
texts within which his were produced, and this act of self creation also occurs in literary figures,
or the attempt is made, and I can think of two examples; Proust and James Joyce, where the
attempt is made, certainly, to take the stuff of one’s own life and to recreate it in a mythical
space that is much larger, as it were, than what someone might call the pathetic embodied ruins
of any singular life. Because at one level, all our lives end in a dirty little tragedy in some corner
anyway. In some sense. So this – in a way – is an attempt to write in such a way as to live
beyond oneself in an act of self creation, and I think Joyce and Proust are fair comparisons in
some regards to Nietzsche in this way.

Okay I ended… as I said, I was going to say a little more about the Death of God parable, so let
me say something first; very flat-footed and ordinary about it. There is a sociological dimension
to the Death of God parable. And by that I mean that the Death of God – for Nietzsche – is a
trope, or a metaphor that signals some perhaps still on its way – you noticed? If you listened to
the parable carefully – perhaps still on its way event. One that has still… it’s already happened,
but it’s still on its way in the sense that it is yet to become understood in all its dimensions; in its
fullness. In the same way one might say that a very bright child is a project on the way to
something but it’s still not fully developed and all the ramifications of what that child will
eventually be have not become apparent.

So in something like that way, you could begin with the sociological observation that something
profound has shifted. Somewhere in the 18th… in transformations from say the 14th to the 18th
and 19th centuries and Nietzsche being – as I say – paradigmatically the philosopher of the
20th century, even though he died in 1900, so this event will be… the sociological remark is this;
Nietzsche certainly isn’t the only one to register a profound shift. I have already mentioned Max
Weber’s account of the disenchantment of the world, and of how the world is becoming
secularised, and I think that we don’t want to overplay this because we all know that the
embodied and impassioned pull of religion is still very important throughout the world. Obviously
it becomes important in many places in the world.
Weber’s point was that religion, when it became one compartment of life. And the best way to
understand that in modern society is there are five days when you work, and there is a day
where you play, there’s a day where you have to do jury duty, a day when you have to vote, and
then a day to go to church; and our lives become, as it were, fragmented and
compartmentalised into these spheres. As that happened – which Weber saw as a process of
secularisation – as religion became, as it were, shrunken to this one day a week observance,
okay. This is sort of regardless of individuals. You could feel like you are doing it every day but
it’s awfully hard, as I think a rather minor rock’n’roll star said “It’s awfully hard to be a saint in the
city”; it’s very difficult to be a Christian under those cultural and social conditions.

Better than Bruce Springsteen’s “Saint in the City” is Martin Scorsese’s brilliant film “Mean
Streets“, where one of the characters has for a hero Saint Francis of Assisi, but what does he
do? Well, he runs a little numbers, hangs out with a few minor hoods and tries to get by in the
city. And Scorsese wants to highlight for us this process by which this otherwise exemplary
character cannot realise himself under those conditions.

So sociologically something has changed that has… you know, there is something in society,
and about society has changed in such fundamental ways that the conditions required for God
to live and thrive… you know, whatever… as I say, if you are just a flat out atheist, this is not
going to be helpful because it won’t make any sense, but then I find people who are just flat out
atheists to be boring. I mean, it’s a boring view about anything, I am sorry. It just bores me.

So the sociological remark is something really profound has changed in the world; Weber called
it the “disenchantment of the world”, and even though its old fashioned to mention his name now
– in the New World Order – Marx also noticed a profound change from the feudal to the
capitalist mode of production. And he talked about the way that all fast frozen relations in
feudalism, all these fixed systems of thought and enquiry – and there were systems of thought
and enquiry – and world views in the medieval period were being rapidly torn asunder by the
new forces of production, and the new developments and technologies under capitalism, which
Marx praises in the Manifesto as being – in that regard – progressive. He says all those ancient
feudal ties of blood and all these ancient feudal relations, they had to be mercilessly ripped
apart, and then Marx points out correctly; they were mercilessly ripped apart. So in fact the
whole tradition of sociology is born from the attempt to understand the transition that was widely
felt, not just by intellectuals, but people in their ordinary lives that had occurred between one
massive way of producing and organising life and another.

One final example of the transition… and I am going to take this one from science; is the
production of – I saw this in a history of astronomy class once – the production of a new star
map in which for the first time… it had retained those round circles, and things we associate
with medieval maps; you know, Earth; the Earth was still in the middle and then there were
these things that surround it in perfect circles. It had retained all that, and the stars were dotted
out in the heavens, but it had no border. In other words now, you know, you look up in the sky
and it wasn’t just pinholes of light, it had – as it were – gone beyond that. More stars than that.
In fact undecidable in the sense that [too many] to count now, so I am leaving the border off my
damn map. This is… I am not going to be burned by the church because here is the map, it’s
just like they want it, but I am not going to put a frame around it; it can’t be enframed.

And so this change, and I have just tried to invoke it there, but in sociology it’s clear that
whatever political position you might take regarding this change… to what I will call “modernity”,
or “modern life” is marked in Nietzsche’s text – at least in part – by the parable of The Death of
God. By the death of a world in which people could draw meaning from that myth and sets of
myths surrounding the holy; surrounding God.

Well I tried to leave us last time, you know, in a sense upset, you know, about that and in a
position where the search to try to find meaning could have some meaning. And it’s now
incumbent upon me to try to present something that Nietzsche is very reluctant to present, and
that’s some positive answer to “What should you do for the search for meaning?” Well, one of
the reasons that he is reluctant to give a didactic positive answer to that question… “Well, okay,
I agree with you Nietzsche, things have changed, God is dead, and we don’t know where we
are headed, the sky looks like its getting darker…” but I want to know the answer to this classic
question, raised by Saint Paul, Tolstoy and Lenin, namely; “What is to be done?”. And believe
me, I don’t consider that a trivial question, and those three people I just named were not trivial
human beings; it’s a very important question. What is to be done?

Well Nietzsche, as I say, being the sort of indirect fellow he was, what he calls a “decadent”,
someone born, as it were, between two worlds… between two worlds in the same way perhaps
as Socrates, Christ, and others were decadents, in that sense, born between two different
worlds. As a decadent he’s not going to develop any kind of didactic answer to the question
“What is to be done?”, so it’s in that context that I would like to address his “myth”, if you will, or
his “thesis” of The Eternal Recurrence, which is how he presents himself frequently. For
example in a text we will discuss later; Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he is
presented once in that text as the teacher of “The Eternal Recurrence”, or “The Eternal Return”.

There has always been a kind of scholarly question that philosophers ask and other people who
are interested in the reconstruction of his texts and so on, about whether this is a thesis he
holds to the way we hold to a cosmological thesis. You know, about “will this really happen?”
kind of question. Well the Eternal Recurrence is – for me – nothing like that for Nietzsche; it’s
not a theory about the cosmos. I mean, it’s not an astronomical theory; it’s not a theory about
karma, or about the great wheel of becoming returning back again. I view this myth – I am about
to, sort of, gloss and explain the challenge of – I view it as a challenge to self creation. It is, as it
were, a question that Nietzsche poses to you in order to spur on your varying, and I hope
various projects of self creation.

The basic idea of The Eternal Recurrence is this. Nietzsche… wants you to ask yourself this
about your own life. What if it were the case that everything that occurred would necessarily
occur after a certain span of time again. Let’s say in about – just to give the myth a little, sort of,
pop feel, a little USA Today feeling, let’s say at about the year 3000, they round it off, you know,
6000 BC, 3000 AD… people who think this talk of Christianity isn’t important today; you might
look at a calendar sometime. Anyway, that 9000 year period, let’s say that then the show starts
again, and it replays itself not as some of us would wish, with all these new and interesting
variants, but everything happens again just as it happened before.

In other words, its almost the opposite of that Steven Spielberg nostalgia in Back to the Future
when we can go to, you know, the future or the past and change and alter our lives and so on,
and do the things we should have done; Peggy Sue got married, there are tonnes of objects in
our culture that promise us that we can go back and do things differently, that we can go
forward and fix things that are going to happen and so on.

Nietzsche asks a horrifying question. Are you leading the kind of life that once its complete,
once you are dead, that you would be willing to lead over again and over again and over again
and over again, infinitely? Are you leading the life that you could stand to lead again and again
and again and again and again? And Nietzsche considers this a horrifying question and an
absolutely striking challenge. This is not an ethical theory, you know, it’s not a thought
experiment in a certain way like some ethical theories present where you go “Well let me see,
would I do that again, that certain act?” No.

Are you leading the kind of life, are you the type of person, are you creating, as it were, the
persona, the character that you want to play in a drama that will occur over and over and over
and over again without any change. And that is – for Nietzsche – a challenging question to our –
you know – ideas of our own self creation. Because the spectre I wanted to leave you with last
time is a spectre familiar in bourgeois society, and it accounts for a lot of job switching, and it
accounts for a lot of these misdirections, you know, where you go “Well I drive a cab, but I am a
writer”, like I said last time, you know. The person who dies at 80 “Well, I sold tyres well”, and so
on. The question Nietzsche asks is “Do you want to sell them well infinitely“, and it doesn’t
matter whether you were a worker like that or Donald Trump. Do you want to live that glitzy
dumb life again and again and again and again and again?

So the myth, as it were, The Eternal Recurrence is a challenge to your self creation; to live a life
so interestingly, so beautifully, so perfectly lived that you would be willing to say “Yes” – as
Nietzsche says – to fate. To say “I love fate”, “I love the place where it’s put me, I love even my
vices”, you know, this isn’t about going back and fixing that up, no “I love even my vices enough
to want to repeat the performance that I did this time again and again and again. And of course
you can’t avoid the, sort of, theatrical nature of this challenge, because it’s like the challenge to
write about yourself, or to make of yourself a character; like Hamlet.

By the way, let me clear up something in an earlier lecture. I loved Mel Gibson’s Hamlet, and as
a film – okay, to clear this point up – as a filmed version of Hamlet, it is head and shoulders
above the other filmed versions. Because instead of filming a stage play where everyone acts
like this… you know, how you do in theatre, where you have to emote. In cinema you have
action and people have to talk normally and sometimes quietly. Well as a filmed version, Mel
Gibson’s Hamlet actually is better, in my opinion. But the point about Hamlet is this: Hamlet is
an exemplary character because people feel compelled to do what? To act the character again
and again and again and again and again. And they are going to be acting it again and again
when we have Laserdiscs, and God knows who will play it next.

I mean, you know, the next… Kyle MacLachlan may play a Hamlet for a version directed by
David Lynch [crowd laughter] Where Ophelia is just a tiny little person who comes from a land
where the birds sing a pretty song [crowd laughter]. See, we don’t know who will play it next, but
we know this; that that exemplary character has been played again and again and again, and
Nietzsche asks us to ask about our own lives; are we living them in such a way that… and by
the way, you know, Hamlet does have a few faults. I mean if you have noticed in the play, he
has more than one, I think. But he is very interesting.

In any case, Nietzsche’s question is “Is your life of that kind that you would be willing to repeat it
over and over again”. This question Nietzsche finds horrifying in part because the world has
changed in such a way, and among its changes are the every day – and I should… I have got to
mention this tension between Nietzsche and – what I call last time – the everyday… boring,
crappy world of the bourgeoisie; we are bought and sold on the marketplace every day. I mean
that’s where the madman goes, is to the marketplace, to give his news. You had better go to the
marketplace to give your news or you won’t get heard, right?

In any case, in that sort of boring workaday world; at its best boring – Dickens tells us what it is
at its worst – but at its best boring. Under those conditions can you find a way conceivably to
live that you would be willing to do again and again and again? And as I said, I think Nietzsche
has more in mind here than changing jobs.

You don’t go “Well Nietzsche’s right, my God, I have just been in insurance too long” [crowd
laughter]. It’s like that Monty Python sketch, the guy wants to become a lion tamer; he’s an
accountant. Of course Monty Python; they consider accounting to be an illness, right? [crowd
laughter] I mean you go to therapists and doctors to be cured of being an accountant. And so in
one skit, this guy says “Well I think I’ll be a lion tamer”; problem is he doesn’t know what a lion
is, and so John Cleese shows him a picture of a lion and he says “Oh God no!”, and he says
“Well maybe you should take it a step at a time and go into banking next” [crowd laughter]

Nietzsche’s challenge is more than just changing jobs from accounting to banking, to even
being the captain of a little skiff for a year… say, on your savings or whatever. It’s to live a life
that is in some sense – and… I hate to use the word “art”, because that trivialises it. But in a
way to live a life that’s like a work of art; like Hamlet in a sense, that you’d be willing to play that
part again. “Yeah I did well enough I want to play it again”. And that includes all the things that
Nietzsche knows about the pain of life, which I hope I have tried to make clear through some of
the examples I have used. Including those moments. Would you be willing to play the part again
and again.
So the way I have always seen The Eternal Recurrence is not as an ethical theory so much as a
challenge to fashion; a life for you that’s worth living. Now to understand this you need to see
that Nietzsche is using a myth here – of The Eternal Recurrence – precisely because he’s done
what I have earlier argued that he does. He has rejected the dogmatic tradition of philosophy
where you attempt to answer the question I attempted to answer in my first series of lectures –
and failed – namely, “What is the best kind of life for human beings?” Nietzsche thinks there is
no general answer to that question, but he thinks it’s a supremely important question. By
“general answer”, that means there is not one answer that I can find and then I give you the
argument and all of you go “That’s right, that’s the best one, we’ll all do it”. No.

This challenge takes place… in a different narrative and with a different kind of challenge, and in
a way it puts the burden upon the reader – the interpreter, as it were – to ask the question “Well,
could I love fate that much?” Wherever it’s put me and whatever it’s put before me, I’d be willing
to play this drama of self creation that I have already either attempted or escaped from over and
over and over again. Now I think that it is a powerful challenge. The more we think about it, the
– sort of – more horrifying it becomes.

I mean, in a way this is why modernists – and by “modernists”, now I am referring to both texts
written by so-called “modern writers” and “modernist cinema”, people such as Woody Allen are
so freaked out by death, I mean, it’s both a perplexing and frightening thing to die. But it’s also a
kind of nice thing because now the hypochondria is finally over and it’s been proven you were
right. I mean, Woody both is… afraid of death, but then in a way it will justify him because he
has been a hypochondriac, you know, all his life and he takes Aspirin and he talks about death
– in his books – about death, and he sees all these Ingmar Bergman movies about death and
death death death… But part of that is the very fascination with it because when it finally comes
then – you won’t be around to see it – “Well you thought I was a hypochondriac, I died, and I
said I would” Well, hardly surprising, but at least you stand justified before that belief.

So there’s a fascination with that, and then bourgeois culture in general. Sartre once said that if
you were going to tell a dying person one thing that would make them happy… and I think this is
why we build… not why… there are many reasons why and a lot of them have got to do with
valorising capital… but one reason why nuclear weapons and the spectre of an apocalypse was
so attractive, utopian and fascinating… and I mean all that seriously… this is a joke because,
look, Hollywood made thousands of movies about apocalypses and people… “Oh, The Missiles
of October… I want to see that documentary again… they almost blew the world up…”

And the giddiness of apocalypse and all these movies is sort of based on a point by Sartre. If
you could tell a dying person one thing that would make them happy, it’s that everybody else is
dying too right now as you die. When you die, you are all going to die together; you are going to
have at least that one communal experience under capitalism of all going out at once. And you’d
go “Well, geez, I gotta die, but old Bob down at the office, haha… he’s not ready…” [crowd
laughter] “He’s going too, you know” [crowd laughter].
So ah, Nietzsche though – Nietzsche’s challenge is in a way scarier because death won’t even
stop this; this process of self creation, for Nietzsche. See because you’ll just… if you do
something really badly and die and people forget about it, that won’t help because you’ll have to
do it again and again and again and again and again. Now again, Nietzsche doesn’t hold this as
a view about the cosmology of the world or that things actually will occur again and again, but if
one views… you might ask yourself this question: “If I viewed my life as a part – as a persona –
and I was trying to create myself in a more conscious way than I am…”

Because in a certain sense we are all trying to create and recreate ourselves all the time. I think
that’s why… lots of people now stay in graduate school until well past their mid life [crowd
laughter] So that you can continue and be creating yourself and. you know: “Oh well, I am taking
anthropology this month… and this month I am going to do astronomy”. Well this is to give you a
patina; a pathetic patina of self creation. It’s beneath contempt, but anyway… that’s another
story. Ergh, I am really in a good mood, I don’t know why this is all sounding so nasty here; it’s
supposed to be challenging and life affirming and fun.

In any case I don’t think that there is… I think that the question Nietzsche wants you to ask is
this. Engaged in my own self creation, could I do this? And then my point was going to be that
we are in fact engaged in acts of self creation with varying degrees of consciousness that that’s
what we are doing. Nietzsche had the misfortune of being supremely, acutely, perhaps
pathologically aware… and I mean certainly pathologically aware, in my opinion.

I think all the great theorists, philosophers and literary people – or practically all of them – were
delusional in one or another important sense of that word. It’s okay. God, what a boring species
we would be without people who are delusional; nuts, if you will. It would be really boring.

But ah, Nietzsche was acutely aware of his own self creation, and of course that’s what comes
out in these very hyperbolic styles, in the aphorisms, and when Nietzsche calls himself, you
know… In one book he gives the title “The Whole of the Man” and the book has titles like – I
mean has chapter titles like – “Why am I so clever?” “Why do I never make mistakes?” You
know… he responds to himself by saying “I have never bothered with questions… there are
none… it’s beyond question that I never make mistakes and am very clever”. So Nietzsche is
acutely, almost insanely aware of his own self creation. A process as I say that we all undergo
but under conditions where we are not nearly so aware as Nietzsche was.

Ernest Jones, the biographer of Freud – and I am not sure this is a compliment about Nietzsche,
but – Ernest Jones, Freud’s biographer once said of Nietzsche… says, well… Jones did…
Jones said that Freud said – so we don’t know if its true or not – Jones said that Freud said
about Nietzsche that he knew more about himself than any man who ever lived or was ever
likely to live… as someone addicted to self reflection… about their own self creation. So it was
Freud’s judgement that he knew more about himself than anyone who ever lived or was ever
likely to live.
So what sets the eternal challenge… I mean – The Eternal Return as a challenge – is not just to
do the same things you have done, but to be consciously aware the way a creator is of their
creation: about yourself, see? With no God to be the creator of you as fallible, finite, and you
know, you can always… and what an excuse… you know, I mean, you actually hear it in the
death house sometimes as the last, you know, remark trying to sway the judge: “Don’t execute
me… God made me this way, what the heck…” It’s a nice excuse because if you are familiar
enough with the Odysseys there is some truth to it of course.

If God knew everything; he knew about Charlie Manson long before Charlie Manson did, yet he
went ahead and let Charlie do some awful things. If you don’t know about that serial killer – I
know about a lot of them – I can’t get into certain serial killers in giving lectures in Washington
D.C. because to name some of them is libellous… no, anyway, that’s… Let’s leave that where it
is. In any case, ah, sorry, you can hold for a moment while I get myself together… no, I am
kidding [laughs]

In any case, this challenge to create oneself is a magnificent one and it bears – as I say – a
striking resemblance to artistic creation, however the level of self consciousness involved is
perhaps even greater, because when you create a fictional character like Hamlet the artist can,
as it were, distance themself from that creation to a certain extent and always has the alibi of
saying – like actresses and actors do – “Well, I just created that part”. Jodie Foster talking about
playing a prostitute when she was twelve “Well I just created that part”. Well, I bet she did – she
probably knew how – but in any case, an artist can always distance themselves from their work,
but if you are Nietzsche’s very special kind of artist and your work is yourself – your own
subjectivity – then the split and the distance is much more intimate and narrow, and the creation
is your own self creation, then the challenge is extremely risky because if you write a character
in a novel or in a play and you don’t like the character you can edit it. But if you write a character
for yourself in an ongoing way you can’t just simply edit it out because it is you – your
subjectivity – that is at issue. So for these and a host of other reasons I think that Nietzsche’s
challenge concerning The Eternal Recurrence is a fascinating one.

Another motto that grows out of this notion of The Eternal Recurrence is Nietzsche’s motto that
he was in love with fate… loved fate… the love of fate. Because for Nietzsche there is
something all so fateful about where you find yourself – you know, I mean, Nietzsche believed
that you find yourself, as a matter of fact, growing up in certain communities with certain
linguistic possibilities, historical possibilities, social possibilities and so on; about which you have
no choice. You know, Heidegger‘s sort of sort of ergh, yucky way of saying this is that you are
“thrown into the world”.

Another way to put the same point is, if you have ever seen this game “Class Struggle“; a
Marxist dice game, you begin by rolling the genetic dice, okay. The high roll – If you roll high –
you get… first of all the order in which you get to rolls helps to tell you something. You begin
rolling with the whitest male rolling first, then on down to the darker males, then you go down
and the last person to roll will be the darkest female in the room and as you roll the genetic dice;
they tell you which class you are born into. And so the throw of the dice… and you may go “Oh
that’s just silly” No!

I mean it’s… the throwing of the genetic dice does put you in certain positions and conditions of
life to begin with that you did not choose. And for Nietzsche that’s a threat and an opportunity –
both – the flipside of that crisis is an opportunity and that’s that whatever you condition, this kind
of act of self creation can be undertaken and in fact sometimes spectacularly so when you are
thrown into the worst conditions, and I can’t help but bring up now my favourite politician in the
United States today, and so I can do it this time in a flattering example, and I am sure many of
you don’t like this politician, a local politician, and that’s Jesse Jackson.

I think that in many ways Jesse Jackson is an exemplary human being, and in this strong sense,
that coming from where he came, to engage in that act of self creation – which the media now
goes “Oh well, you know, he puts on a mask, he plays a part”. Well, how long have they been
around here? You know? Ho long have they been around the United States? Is that supposed
to surprise anybody? No. It’s that it’s the quality of the performance – its how intimately it’s
knitted in with self and against which obstacles that’s given it its drama.

And of course, the current sort of derision about the self creation of Jackson… that ongoing
process – the derision about it now doesn’t surprise me historically because I was around when
Martin Luther King was derided, made fun of. Of course the moment that he was dead then the
myth could be closed off, he was safely blanched out into the general culture where now he
becomes a figure for McDonalds advertising, and the picture of Martin Luther King, you know, at
one time a sort of communist, dangerous, bizarre, scary civil rights leader… it’s hard to even go
back there in history after all this work of social amnesia that’s been performed upon us.

But now that he’s blanched out, safe, secure, in short dead, then the general culture can tell
new myths about him, but I can guarantee you this. If – and this would be, for me, tragic – If
anything ever happened to Jesse Jackson, it would be a few years, but then… the next thing
you know we would have pictures of him… he would be whiter than when he was alive… this is
for me a humorous note. I noted as the years went on how Martin Luther King got whiter and
whiter. After his death, I mean. The pictures of him – and this is actually noticeable – became
whiter and whiter. I saw him speak once when I was young and he was an African American –
you know, very dark; black, you know. And as the photographs of him over the years – you
know, the ones used by McDonalds – there is just a hit of skin tone… well, anyway, this long
digression is only to give you one of my heroes of self creation today, someone I really admire
who is engaged in a phenomenal, not only self creation, but recreation. And through a whole
bunch of mistakes, as you know, and accidents and misfortunes and stupidities in order to
recreate himself again at another level.

And for better or worse, you know, my own feeling, looking at it from the outside, because I
don’t have his subjectivity, but looking at it from the outside… hell, who knows, it might and up
being a life worth living twice. The Eternal Return threatens – challenges – us with the notion to
live a life worth living over and over again, not twice. I mean that’s the best example I could find
today, and that’s a life that might be worth living twice. Thinking about the great majority that toil
anonymously day in and day out, it’s hard to imagine a life worth living even the first time, not to
mention twice.

So the Eternal Return in Nietzsche; The Eternal Recurrence of everything is supposed to be

frightening. Also it is supposed to be a positive moment in Nietzsche. It is a positive challenge to
engage consciously and self reflectively in something you do anyway, which is in the constant
act of rebuilding your persona; your self. This is not… and Nietzsche is far too complex to
believe that this is the advice to stop wearing masks and be who you really are. Well, you know,
if you check the philology, the philological history of the word “persona”, you’ll see that that’s not
interesting. And I’ll make a comparison here with David Hume the British philosopher, the
empiricist.

When Hume Goes in search of “the self” empirically, and he knows as an empiricist that he has
to find the “I”, “the self”, “the subject” empirically, he has us do an experiment. We are to look for
it, and find ourself in this inner space of our mind; where is the “I”, the self. And Hume performs
this experiment in “A Treatise of Human Nature, and there isn’t one. You don’t know what colour
your self is, what weight it is, and so on – not your bodily self, but your self – that thing that
continues through all the changes in your body and hair colour and weight, height, and so on.
And Hume, with the rigour that belongs to his thinking goes “It’s a fiction” There is no self, no “I”,
no substantial individual beneath all the surfaces. We’ve looked for it, it’s not there, it’s a
custom, a fiction, a habit. It’s just habitually, you know, the way we behaved with one another.
We have driver’s licenses and lawyers to take care of continuity [crowd laughter].

There isn’t such a thing; it’s a convention, a habit, and so on. Well so that people wear masks is
not only interesting, its interesting because beneath the masks there isn’t something called “the
self”, so that makes one become concerned in Nietzsche’s way that the various masks, shapes
and forms that one does wear and choose in order to become what one is – to use Nietzsche’s
phrase – “In order to become what one is” – is not to become an authentic self, but to become
the best and most interesting self that you can create. And in that sense it does not belong to
the dogmatic tradition of philosophy, because God knows what variety of selves would be
created if people had the opportunity and the vision and the will and imagination to create
themselves in this radically self conscious way that Nietzsche challenges us to do in his myth of
“The Eternal Return” [applause].

6) The Will To Power

I’d like to wrap up my remarks about self creation, self invention, and the challenge of The
Eternal Recurrence by saying that we need to remember that this has to do… that this has to do
with what I mentioned later in the lecture: the love of fate. Loving the place you have found
yourself in history. And sometimes that’s a difficult thing to do, and for me that’s a quite personal
remark that has to do with my own self invention. To try to love the place I have found myself in
history, like many other people now is… I find that difficult. Nietzsche on the other hand thought
it might be difficult, but it was a challenge that we should attempt to meet.

In this next set of remarks I’d like to address The Will to Power, and of course that gives me a
chance to address something that I probably should have talked about in the opening lecture
because in a set of lectures on Nietzsche in which we want to reach an audience – a very wide
audience – we need to dispel some of the myths about Nietzsche’s text and concerning
Nietzsche, and one of the most prevalent – and certainly it’s a widespread myth, you can find it
in many places – is the myth of… well I want to first say it’s a myth and then to argue the danger
and risk in Nietzsche’s text that – because I use myth in a strong sense – that allows it to be
possible.

I wanted to discuss – just for a moment – the relation of Nietzsche’s work to Fascism, and the
reason I want to do that is because the first, sort of, Americanised reception of Nietzsche
involved the use of Nietzsche’s text for propaganda purposes by various National Socialist Party
hacks. Unfortunately it belongs to the nature of propaganda; even by the good guys, who
counter propaganda… as if we knew who the good guys were, after all the events that have
occurred. I mean, this isn’t going to turn out to be a defence of the Fascists or anything, it’s not.
I hope it doesn’t turn out to be a defence of any parties. I wish them all equal luck.

In the words of Nietzsche, “Whatever is shaky should be pushed over”. If something is shaky…
on a shaky foundation, his advice is to push it over. If it’s not on a shaky foundation then when
you push, it will stay there and it will be okay. If it’s on a shaky foundation, push it over. In any
case, ah, the counter-propaganda also involved Nietzsche and the British in their efforts to
combat Nazi propaganda also participated in – just like the Nazi’s were – valorising certain
remarks of Nietzsche’s. Then the British were at the same time demonizing those remarks and
that couldn’t help but effect the reception of his work in England. And since in the United States
– I may have earlier remarked – we are so in love with British intellectuals, we know they
couldn’t be wrong about anything; just because of their damn accent. You use that accent and
American academics begin to swoon and, you know, they go into almost orgasmic reactions to
what is being said.

We knew that this British reception of Nietzsche must mean that he’s… you know, like, the
philosopher of Fascism. Well, there are elements in Nietzsche’s text that open up onto the risk
of a hideous new project in which against the technological world we try to reinvigorate it
through blood, steel and a new human being – the famous overman which I will discuss when I
will discuss the text of Zarathustra – that such a, sort of, clever interpretation could then be used
for propaganda purposes is clear; it was. Clearly it could be used that way.
I don’t think that – to be fair to the text of Nietzsche – that this use is one that can in any sense
be authorised under older, fairer standards of interpretation – however I should say that those
are the very standards that Nietzsche himself had attacked: older, fairer standards of
interpretation. But by those hermeneutic standards of interpretation – the older, fairer ones – it
would be fair to point out that Nietzsche always viewed himself as a good European, rather than
a good German.

He just laid tonnes upon tonnes of abuse upon those narrow nationalists who were good
Germans and always talked about the Teutonic forests. Once Nietzsche said “Well, back to the
forests with them then”, you know… “They are just boring the hell out of me, I hope they go live
in a forest” Sort of the way I feel about a lot of the rhetoric in the United States on the right
today, sort of, “Oh, it’s so good…” go from coast to shining coast and Bangor to shining Maine,
or whatever the hell you want to do.

But ah, no, Nietzsche just scorned this German nationalism. It’s hard to imagine that someone
so sensitive that the event that finally, as it were, tripped Nietzsche off into madness – another
topic we will talk about in the lectures that remain – the event that finally tripped him into
madness was someone beating a horse with a whip. Someone that sensitive; with that sensitive
a nature, in a certain way, it’s hard to imagine would have done well had he lived long enough
as a great propagandist for that gang of petty bourgeois thugs that took over Germany and
became the Nazi Party, so… I think that that was a dangerous misunderstanding of the text of
Nietzsche.

However – and this is the admission that I think is necessary to show the risk of the text –
however, once you have introduced processes of radical self creation and redirection… left the
wide open… and then argued for the strongest possible misinterpretations, you know, the ones
that are the most creative and interesting and new, clearly you’ve opened yourself up to
possibilities of violence, death, madness, and many other things as well. Well that’s the
admission on the one hand, not that it needs to be admitted.

We live in the 20th century, one of the most – perhaps the most – barbaric century in the history
of the world. I mean, if there was a central fact to our century it would be murder: the killing of a
people by their people. So to take before the bar this one rather literate, cosmopolitan, quiet
little man who wrote these rather exciting texts as some causative factor in that much larger
process, I think is overkill of a very high order.

In any case, his text does open onto the danger of fascism, but as I said, that for me is not an
objection because dangerous and insane risks are taken in his text in other directions as well.
And that many texts have risks, many interesting texts, many interesting bodies of work have
risks and many uses. The standard though americanised pop line that Nietzsche was – for the
Germans – “superman” and “blond beast” is just simple minded. So that’s not a criticism, it
doesn’t mean there aren’t lines in his work that are like that, but its simple minded, and that
should be enough to move slightly past that. It’s a simple minded way to look at Nietzsche. Far
too simple minded.

And that’s not – as I say – to get out of the trap that Nietzsche’s text is full of risks. However, an
odd thing has happened, and in the return of Nietzsche in our own time is that well at one time
he was used for ideological purposes in the National Socialists and the movement of Fascism,
according to Bloom and other paleo-conservatives in the current period, the return of Nietzsche
in the sixties, and then what I might call his re-return in the 80’s and 90’s has been scandalously
anarchistic left wing Nietzsche, so obviously this is a text that can produce many differential
political effects because the Nietzsche denounced by Bloom is the person who argues for
strong multiple interpretations for recreating, you know, canons and destroying older canons of
knowledge. The Nietzsche that said if things are shaky, push them over… that Nietzsche.

So, you know, it’s hard if one wants to place simple moral blame upon a body of text to go “Well
Nietzsche was responsible for Fascism, and damnit now he’s responsible for its opposite
number, Anarchism. Why wasn’t he just a damn good Liberal like John Stuart Mill?” Well, he
thought Mill was a blockhead. [crowd laughter] You know, “Why wasn’t he just a middle of the
roader?”… you know, the current politics that seems to dominate today: a middle of the roader,
mainstream.

Well to quote my friend Hightower from Texas there’s nothing in the middle of the road where I
come from except yellow lines and squashed armadillos. [crowd laughter]. And so I am glad that
Nietzsche’s text isn’t in the middle of the road and it does allow for multiple political uses, and
some of those I want to talk about now in terms of The Will to Power. And I am going to have to
return – in order to do that – to my discussions of genealogies.

Before I do I want to leave one more note on Jesse Jackson in the lecture – I am not his
campaign manager – it’s just an interesting example, but I have been asked, you know, if he
has this real courage of self creation, why doesn’t he run for a real job like mayor. That would
show real courage. Well my view of that – and I don’t know if it was Nietzsche’s, and I don’t care
– my view of that is it doesn’t take real courage to be a mayor, a governor, a senator, a
president, real courage to be the head of a bureaucracy, real courage to be the president of
IBM, but it does take real courage – as you know if you live in the Washington D.C. area – to
sleep under the bridges at night. It takes a lot more courage. So I am not sure that running for
mayor is something that we should particularly valorise as an act of courage. I mean, in a
certain way it takes far more courage to be a pimp than a politician, even though in many other
respects the jobs are similar. [crowd laughter] Enough of that for now… we’ll return to that later.

The Will to Power. Well first let me say that The Will to Power is the name of a text by – of
Nietzsche’s – I shouldn’t say by, because The Will to Power was pieced together – in a way that
makes us suspect the text itself – by his sister. And I have already, you know, denounced his
sister somewhat for dressing him up, for marrying one of these “good” Germans, and for the
uses she made of her brother’s persona after he lost his mind. Well, she was one of the editors
that helped compile these fragments; “The Will to Power”.

Since then however, Kauffman and others have worked upon this compilation, but by now its
almost useless to go back and pretend there is no such text because, as in the case of a much
shorter text, namely the fragment I discussed which was “I have forgotten my umbrella”, which
has now become a text of Nietzsche’s through this radical process of interpretation. So now too
is “The Will to Power”, a much larger and more complex text become a text of Nietzsche’s, even
though he never compiled it in that way or put it together in that way. The Will to Power is – in
fact I am not sorry that it did because The Will to Power contains a host of suggestive,
fascinating and interesting views, among which is Nietzsche’s famous view of power that I will
be discussing.

It’s impossible to discuss it however without connecting it in some way to the process of
genealogy that we discussed when we talked about “The Genealogy of Morals“. Because one of
the things that genealogy was supposed to do is to show us that, as it were, what shapes
discursive practices and actual human practises are certain relations of power which create the
conditions for the possibility of certain sentences being written and certain practices being
carried out… then calls for an account of what those relations of power are like. And in The Will
to Power, Nietzsche gives us an account of “force”, as it were, or “power” that is… very
interesting.

For Nietzsche, power won’t be the simple power of domination of one self over another, and the
reason it can’t be that linear self over another self kind of power is because – as you may have
guessed already – for Nietzsche, as for Hume in a certain way, there is no essential self. There
are only, as it were, a kind of multitude of personas that when a life is well lived will have the
coherence of a character. In fact isn’t that what we say about someone we know who is rather
advanced in years and we want to valorise them… we say “Oh God, Old Bob or Aunt Sue was
really a character”. When you say that you have said something Nietzschean about them. They
have put together those various selves in a way that makes them really a character, and that’s
not a bad thing to say.

Well anyway, the reason that these – that for Nietzsche – that power cannot be simply power of
one person over another; can’t be that simple is because selves aren’t that simple. And also
because power is not just, as it were, horizontally applied in models that we might think of like
the Marxist theory of exploitation or other theories of power… how power isn’t just applied as it
were across the horizon of the social body – by that I mean… by that rather wild phrase I mean
– it’s not as though power is applied merely to the external manifestations that break the rules of
the current existing order.

Power, as it were, is also applied vertically across the intensity and within the subjectivities of
people. One way of putting this is that in some sense we internalise relations of power within
ourselves that allow many of the external relations to function. Now to give a West Texas
example of that is that each one of us has to have a little cop inside us – little tiny policeman
inside – that keeps us from stealing, because there aren’t enough cops on the outside to keep
us from doing it. And yet there are many things we want that we don’t have the money for, and
under conditions where we carry out our will and valorise ourselves, we might otherwise take
them.

And given the rate at which people who steal things are caught, which means much less
frequently than you will be caught at work trying to take a long break, you know, kind of makes it
rational to want to steal certain things… easier to do than getting by with laying off work for a
while. Under those conditions it becomes clear that power also is in a sense an intensity within.
Something that you bring against your own self project in a way that has been characterised by
certain French theorists as “micrological power” – or sets and effects of power – rather than
“macrological power”.

So if I talk to you about the police, or the state, or the even… in Marx’s sense of the power of
the marketplace, these are macrological views of power and Nietzsche provides us with a
micrological view and that micrological view has to do with tiny interstices of overlapping effects;
very difficult to characterise, very subtle effects of power. Almost unnoticeable, in fact, they
sometimes pass not for power at all – this is what a genealogical analysis is supposed to show
– sometimes they don’t pass for relations of power at all, but rather for things like a good
conscience, or a clear mind, or fair rules, or even fairness itself.

Those discourses, as self evident as they seem to us today, are also structured by power. And I
think that to make Nietzsche’s analysis of power come alive for us now, rather than a, sort of,
long account of it, I’ll give a little bit more of the, sort of, theoretical complexity of it, then I’ll give
a real example to give the argument real bite, okay? So let me give a little more of the
theoretical version of it.

For Nietzsche, power is always in some sense relational. It’s not as though power is a thing we
can find in the world, but it is always a complex relational set of intervening and interacting
effects. It’s not always the best question to ask “What are the causes?” In some cases it might
even be – although it sounds oxymoronic – it might be best to say quasi-metaphorically, or
maybe metaphorically, that power sometimes gives off effects where we have what amounts to
an absent cause. In other words, what the analysis really should look at are the effects and
bracket out what might otherwise – in a normal analysis – might be called “the cause”.

Instead these multiple effects, these relational effects, and to use some more terminology which
isn’t French; it’s modern American Lit. Crit. [Literary Criticism] terminology. These overlapping
economies of power; of influence, of persuasion, of control… these micrological ones are not
subject, as I say, to simple linear analysis in any one of the various modes that we might be
used to. You know, analyses of – in particular – ordinary analyses of political power.
Let me see if I can cash this in with what I think is a very interesting example – and at least I
hope it’s a good example. And it should lead to the next thing I want to discuss, which is
Nietzsche’s view of history. I am going now to refer to Michel Foucault’s brilliant work “Discipline
and Punish – and if you haven’t read it, please read it because it is a strange artefact and it
would not be possible without the influence of Nietzsche – and to discuss Foucault’s “Discipline
and Punish” will have us enter the terrain of the politics of reading Nietzsche, which I want to get
onto now, which as I said might be a banal topic but it’s one I enjoy, so what hell, I am going to
talk about it some. But Michel Foucault is someone who has made great and systematic use of
parts of Nietzsche: the genealogical method, and Nietzsche’s sensitivity to these micrological
relations of power.

Now for me the best work by Foucault, as I said, is “Discipline and Punish”, and in that book
what Foucault is interested in is to do a genealogy of the forms of punishment and how they
changed – if they did change – and in what ways they changed between this period I have
characterised as “feudal” to this period I have characterised as “modern”. So Foucault starts his
book with older forms of discipline and punishment. In fact the first section is on The Spectacle
of the Scaffold and it begins with as gory a description as one could wish of an execution in
France.

Huge audience… bring out this guy… I am just going to gloss it; don’t want to read all that stuff;
it’ll turn this damn thing into a horror movie! Anyway, you had this huge audience for this
execution, you bring out the guy, he’s drawn, quartered, molten lead poured into here, horses
pull on him, the crowd is in an uproar, screams… tortured… pull, pull, pull, finally they drag him
up and a Prelate of the church comes up… the man still can speak, you know, and he
confesses that he has done wrong and courageously states that now he has paid his price; his
honour to God. And then they burn him, you know, after using sulphur and so on.

Well, you read this section in Foucault and you recoil in horror from those old feudal relations
and how barbaric they were. And Foucault does his best to make it come alive for you: the
conditions of possibility for those practices; the arbitrary rule of kings, you know, the necessity to
give the crowd its spectacles, its festivals of atonement. It’s important that the criminal declare;
atone – in a spectacular public way – his crime.

Well toward the end of this long and rather barbaric chapter in feudalism – in this, sort of, feudal
setting – Foucault begins to mention how the spectacle of the scaffold begins to die away, under
a rather strange condition of reversal. I hope this will make Nietzsche’s genealogical example
clearer too, as I use the Foucault example. The Spectacle of the Scaffold begins to die away,
and one of the reasons Foucault suggests for this is that… who turns out to be the hero of the
spectacle? The legislator or prince who condemned the man? The Prelate who forgave him? Or
the suffering, wounded, courageous body of the victim?

Imagine the crowds and, you know, who they will eventually begin to pull for, as it were. Well,
the insinuation by Foucault is that this form of exercising power across the social body begins to
undermine itself through a strange reversal where the victim being slaughtered becomes, as it
were, the centre, the important focal point of the ceremony and begins to win the sympathy of
the crowd. And of course that’s not the idea of disciplining and punishing in that period or this
one. Hardly the idea, right, for the punished party to be the star of the show.

Now you may say “Well, we have gone back to that in a way because… there’s one sure way to
get a miniseries; and that’s to be a serial killer” That’s true under conditions that I will describe
before the end of this lecture as post-modern, but right now we are going from feudal to modern.
Under post-modern conditions things have grown so bizarre that I am not sure how I will use
Nietzsche to help analyse them.

But in any case I want to go from this feudal Spectacle of the Scaffold to the modern methods of
discipline and punish. The horror, sort of, evoked in us by what Foucault does there is the horror
simply at a past form of life and the way they punished people. Now of course what happens
after that are these great prison reforms in the 18th and 19th century.

Utilitarians for example, like Bentham, were very involved in prison reform and in ending this
scaffold business and these public spectacles. No they wanted clean… I mean, they had
programs like Bush‘s clean new prisons, that were sort of humane, but enough of them. So
Bentham and Foucault makes brilliant use of this.

Bentham – the great Utilitarian – interestingly enough also came up with a great architectural
design called a Panopticon, and it was a building where from the, sort of, the top of the building
– I wish I had a drawing of it here for you – but from the top of the building you can kinda see
everything that goes on down through it. And each one of the cells facing in on them – where
the prisoners are – have the peculiar characteristic that you are isolated so that you cannot, you
know, see the other people, but as the guards walk through in surveillance they can see you
quite easily and this was very important for the device itself. This is the surveillance aspect of
modern power, and this is quite micrological.

To give you an ordinary example of how modern power works in that way: you may be a
perfectly honest citizen and a straightforward person, but when you walk into a department store
frequently you are being filmed and watched. And it’s so ordinary, so micrological, so beneath
the surface of your consciousness and everyday affects that you don’t think about it – but – you
are being filmed and watched and surveilled, as you walk through the mall, as you walk through
a department store… or as you drive through the city. You know, the sort of omnipresent
helicopter, you know… [laughs] It’s not a paranoid delusion, you see them all the time, it’s just
that you forget because of their ubiquity. Power is like that, you see. Ubiquitously running here
and there, it becomes easier to forget what structures our own power. Because it’s easy to
remember about the past – how barbaric it was – and sort of distance ourself from it.

Well, anyway, Bentham’s Panopticon was – as Foucault argues – a principle and not merely a
building; the general principle of surveillance, and it’s been crucially important for the shift to our
new forms of discipline and new forms of punishment. Bentham brilliantly shows that its no mere
building by arguing: oh by the way, this same design for this Panopticon building would be
absolutely appropriate for schools, workhouses, and many other socially utilisable – you know –
socially utilitarian benefits. By that I mean schools could be built this way, right? So all the
students were working and you could see them and they can’t see you easily and so the
principal could be at the top and looking down upon the thing. Bentham thought “What a
wonderful device!” This Panopticon, this sort of one way visual presentation of all the surveilled
people.

And again to return to my example, you never get to see the face – do you – of the person
behind the one way glass in Macy’s who is doing the filming of you as you walk up and down
the aisle? Hell, who even notices anymore, right? You don’t even notice, you know hell. I mean,
shouldn’t it be outrageous, you know to, sort of, this earlier generation of Americans: “What the
hell are you doing filming me, I don’t steal, I am an honest, you know, God fearing, taxpaying
American, I don’t want to be on your damn films; surveilled, watched, filed, numbered. I don’t
want that. But the ubiquity of this kind of surveillance is just obvious.

Also, you know, we have now found out that the telephone… quite a strange instrument to pick
up, because God knows who is listening and recording what you are saying. And now the
possibility for multiple interpretations reinstitutes itself at a much higher level because you may
in fact say on the phone “I have forgotten my umbrella”… it might click off some strange
computer by some strange government agency saying “Ah this person is one of those weird
interpreters of Nietzsche” And you may only be telling your Aunt Susan that you forgot your
umbrella… and you are already in a huge bank of information, preinterpeted in some basement
in the city where they are going over it, providing analyses to companies and agencies that
provide the analyses and so on…

Power – micrological like this – very well may be beneath the level of every day life. By that I
mean in every day life we may just walk past it. I mean I know I do for sure, you know, in a
department store, you know sometimes I stop and wave at the little guy. And sometimes when I
hear a click on the phone I stop and go “Oh I am sorry you have this job of listening to all these
boring…” You know, have you ever commiserated with the surveiller? You just go “I am so
sorry, you don’t have anything to do but to listen and open my mail and listen to all these phone
calls. If you ever get lonely, please call and lets talk” [crowd laughter] This is a nice strategy to
adopt, but anyway.

So the power of Foucault’s argument is that – is supposed to be – to show that what has
happened is not that we have gone from one thing that appears to us – to our sensitive liberal
utilitarian instincts – as barbaric to something less barbaric, but to a new mode of discipline and
punishment and surveillance which is itself an incredible effect of the expansion of power – not
of its contraction – across many areas of life… across many areas of life.
The, sort of, Spectacle of the Scaffold is over, but we still execute people. We just do it behind
wall after wall of secrecy, you know… wall after wall of secrecy. They are still executed, but it
just happens in a space where we – in principle – can’t look. Now I know that people have run
for, say, the Governor of Texas and argued that we should put these things on TV, you know:
“Hell, if we can execute ’em, show it on TV”, and ah, you know, it didn’t work out as an idea and
he lost the election. I think if he had sold it to the networks first and then tried it as a political
idea… [crowd laughter] …he would have had something, but he didn’t try that.

Well the serious point being made here by Foucault is not that that old barbaric power of the
past has been broken and liberal democracy has won everywhere – No… it’s that power has
shifted, it has expanded in its intensity and precisely by becoming even more hidden,
micrological, everyday in a certain way – seeping in every day – it has become, as it were, sort
of, totalising; “territorialising” – if you like – more and more of our lives, in subtle but profound
ways.

So I guess that I wanted to use that example in particular because now we begin to wonder
about even Foucault’s analysis; if it isn’t a bit old fashioned and we are not in yet another space.
Because Foucault is still – to my mind at least – somewhere on the borderline between a
modern account of power and one that I would characterise as “post-modern”; or after the
modern. And it’s going to be difficult for me to characterise that in spite of the title of these
lectures – which is “Nietzsche and the Post-Modern Condition”. Because no-one yet knows
what the post-modern condition is because it is not a condition we are in yet, it is a trajectory. As
Nietzsche said of The Death of God “It is perhaps an event on its way”.

I wanted to use Foucault’s example… ah, the example of Foucault however to try to show you
what genealogies do; how they reverse our perception. So in the case of the feudal period they
show us the reversal that occurs on the scaffold, when all of a sudden the person you are
tearing apart becomes the hero. And that’s if not surprising, sort of, you know, when you see
through their courage and stamina they become the hero of the spectacle, the spectacle begins
to disappear, we don’t… that guy can’t be the hero… you know.

Well similarly, the stories we tell ourselves about our institutions – now, our, sort of, institutions
under modern liberal democratic societies… democratic societies… – the stories we tell
ourselves; that they are based on legitimacy, consensus, and so on. And Foucault warns us that
that may be the discourse within which we discuss, but what makes that discourse possible are
the micrological powers of discipline, punishment and surveillance that undergird that liberal
discourse.

And again, as in the case where Nietzsche quotes Saint Thomas, one could hardly quote a
better source than Bentham – who was a social engineer and reformer in the tradition of, you
know, many others we have encountered since – and you know, this panopticon device to show
that the reversed look at this discourse of democracy and so on shows that beneath it are these
micrological effects of power. And I would like to say about them that they are differential and
highly complex. I mean, I don’t know if the Foucault example is enough, one might have to do
more still to make this come alive. Let me see if I can find another way to do this.

Well let’s take for example a situation where it seems as though the only force that’s being+
recognised is the force of the better argument. Namely, a university setting. That’s one I am
familiar with, so we’ll take that as an example. Argument within that setting seems to proceed
free of power. Knowledge seems to be used in a way that is interest free. That’s the ideal of
research, in a way; interest free knowledge. Knowledge free of the effects of power.

If Nietzsche is right about power; wherever there is knowledge, it will be an effect of power. That
will not mean it’s not knowledge, folks! In other words, understanding that knowledge is an
effect of certain power won’t mean that it isn’t what? Really knowledge – yes it will be – but it will
be to see, as it were, the other side. It will be a reversal; it will be to see that that knowledge
effect is itself an effect of certain relations of power.

Now, in our case of the university, the institutional powers are quite subtle. In other words, it’s
very rare that… especially at a university, and this is more common in high school where you
can simply take unruly students and throw them out into the streets. In university you don’t get
that opportunity quite so often; that’s really just an opportunity to take a student you don’t like
and say “Get the hell out of here, don’t come back” But there are other ways, and they may
seem childish, but sometimes power is childish.

Another way to discipline; one of my favourite, is grading [crowd laughter], and it starts very
early in our lives. Our first system is highly complex and structured. If you want an account of
structuralism, this is an interesting one. In kindergarten, the way we, sort of, discipline our kids…
they do their rose and it’s really red and they stay in the lines they get a happy face, you know.
If he gets a little out of the lines, they just, sort of… straight face. If they really just draw all over
the thing and chaotic Nietzschean wildness: they get a sad face. They don’t turn in the work at
all; they don’t get a face: no face.

And I noticed as you go throughout school that this same topography of discipline continues. In
elite universities we still go “A”, and the fact that we substituted a happy face for that letter
doesn’t mean the message is different. In other words, they have been… socialisation; power
has already instructed that that “A” is a happy face. And you get an A, and you see a happy
face: “A”; happy face. “B”, and guess what you get? “C”… and if you – for God’s sakes, in an
elite university – if you flunk somebody, you won’t see their face. You may get a letter from their
attorney, but you won’t see their face [crowd laughter], okay.

My point here is that the structural disciplinary way that that’s done – believe me if you are
grading in the humanities, the difference between a brilliant paper on Plato and one that’s
completely insane is not an easy distinction. If you think it is, you don’t teach that. I mean I admit
that in maths courses, you know, there we can let a, sort of, traditional view to hold sway for a
moment, but when you are grading a paper on Plato for God’s sakes or Shakespeare or Proust,
it’s hard to know the difference between brilliant insight and a piece of garbled lunacy [crowd
laughter]

And this is exactly – to return to my political moment – this is exactly the problem we have when
we listen to many of our current official leaders speak. We don’t know whether this is really a
piece of powerful political rhetoric or a garbled line from a David Lynch film. [crowd laughter].
You know, sometimes I expect to see one of the currently elected high executive officials just to
walk around going… in the land they come from, the birds sing a pretty song, and stuff like
that… weird David Lynch… hell, we don’t know, it might even be an act of political genius for at
least one person I have in mind here to do something like that. You know, “to free him of his
image” or whatever.

In any case, what I am after here is a topography, a very subtle form of power, because it looks
as though my power to give that grade is my power. But what happens if I decide I am not going
to play that game any more, and I am just going to give all my students “A”s that complete the
work, and otherwise “F”. I am not going to do this gradation, this topography any more. I can’t. I
tested that one empirically; they won’t let me do it. No, you have to have a spread. Now here is
the interesting part about power today: they don’t tell you what the spread is exactly. Because
micrologically, they are disappointed that you haven’t been, as it were, already conditioned to
know that. So they are sort of disappointed in you that you didn’t realise all along that you
needed that spread.

Just like if you opened a Macy’s that you happened to be the manager of and didn’t get that
camera installed. Your supervisor would go “Well I thought you knew we always use cameras…
You know, you are a pretty nice fella, but we always use them… We don’t want to interfere with
our customers, no… But we always use these cameras, it’s for the good of the rest of the
customers, because if there is a lot of shoplifting, the prices will go up” Of course, that would be
an act of God, no human will actually raise them. That’s economics; no humans do it. They are
sort of the only acts left of a dying God; economic acts.

But anyway, these forms of power that Nietzsche sets our sights on in the book “The Will to
Power” shows power in quite a different light than normal political theory because these are
situations within which power and knowledge and principle are intermingled. For example, when
I earlier said there was you know, paradoxically – Nietzsche argues there is an immoral origin to
morality – paradoxically there is… rational knowledge itself has its origins in relations of power
which themselves – in my view – cannot be rationally defended. That is, their origin does not
mean that what they produce – again, to make this point again so you don’t take a simple
minded mistake out of here – that doesn’t mean it isn’t real knowledge. The universities and
many other things; research institutes and all produce real knowledge; what we today call
knowledge anyway. I call it information – I’ll return to that later – I don’t want to call it knowledge,
I want to call it information. But the conditions under which they are produced are these subtle
conditions of power. Grading is one example.
Grading is just one example; it’s one of my favourites though because its one of the times in life
when you see what an incredible effect you can have by making a happy face. You could make
someone happy by just… I mean someone is bound to say “Of course you do, because those
grades depend upon what they do later in life in their jobs” Well that just feeds back into my
earlier argument: of course, because the rest of your whole stinking life you are going to be
looking for a happy face from someone, you know. Eight years in the law firm and you are
looking at all the old lawyers that forgot all the law they knew twenty years ago, and you are
waiting for one of those S.O.B’s or whatever to give you another happy face.

Well the challenge of Nietzsche – the sort of left Nietzsche that I want to evoke – is to at least
be aware of these intersties of power. To at least be aware of them, and be willing to challenge
their boundaries, because it is not a pretty life to always be in search of a happy face, and it is
not for your own good.

For God’s sakes, remember when your father… my father used to spank me and the first thing
he would tell me is the same thing they would tell me at school “I am going to do this for your
own good” And I always wanted to say “Well damnit, why don’t you spank yourself then,
because you could spare me the favour. If its for good, do it to you, I love you dad, and if its for
good, do it to yourself because we want you to have the good” [crowd laughter] “Don’t do it for
my own good, don’t do me any favours here”, “Oh well we don’t think you’ll work out with our
firm; it’s for your own good”… “Oh well thanks anyway, but I’ll sacrifice for you” [crowd laughter]
you know…

Modern power presents itself as what I would like to call – and I mean this especially where its
least obvious – we know what modern power has looked like in the East Bloc and in the Soviet
Union and it was no surprise to anyone they were totalitarian. What I would like for us to
recognise is that we are totalitarians as well. It’s a horrible… but until we see it we won’t have a
chance to be really radically democratic, ever. I mean, okay, a little biblical scholarship here
“Easy to find the mote in your brother’s eye, difficult to see to one in your own”… very difficult.
So this account of power reminds us that the totalitarian is not “the other”, sometimes we meet
the enemy and it’s us.