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Foreword by Michael Hardt and index copyright © Columbia University Press Preface and this translation © The Athlone Press, Originally published in France in as as Nietzsche Nietzsche et la philosophie by Presses Universitaires de France The publishers acknowledge the financial assistance of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication in the translation of this work. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deleuze, Gilles. [Nietzsche et la philosophie. English] Nietzsche and philosophy / Gilles Deleuze ; translated by Hugh Tomlinson ; foreword by Michael Hardt. p.
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Foreword This book is, in my view, the best introduction to Deleuze’s thought. Many readers who pick up his later books or his collaborations with Félix Guattari find Deleuze’s vocabulary difficult and obscure. This is due, at least in part, to the fact that Deleuze takes for granted the concepts he has worked out for himself in his earlier books and does not repeat the process. In this interpretation of Nietzsche, then, written relatively early in his career, readers can discover together with Deleuze many of the concepts and philosophical positions that became central to all of his later work. The three most important concepts in this book are multiplicity, becoming, and affirmation—and indeed the three are intimately related. In Nietzsche’s concept of multiplicity Deleuze finds a notion of difference that does not refer back to (and thus depend on) a primary identity, a difference that can never be corralled into an ultimate unity. Multiplicity is precisely this expanding, proliferating set of differences that stand on their own, autonomous. At the most basic level, one can recognize Nietzsche’s profound betrayal of the primacy of identity and unity in his famous pronouncement that God is dead: there is no identity from which all the differences of the world emanate, nor any unity to which they fall back. Instead of any divine ordering principles Nietzsche proposes the will to power as a perpetual motor that produces differences. What the will wills is difference. The will to power is a machine of multiplicities. The concept of becoming is in many respects simply an extension of the notion of multiplicity, highlighting the temporal process, the production of multiplicities. Deleuze and Nietzsche both, of course, are here engaging one of the central problems of the history of philosophy: the relation between being and becoming. They place the emphasis on becoming to highlight the fact that being itself is an act of creation, and that creation can only be understood as the production of differences, of multiplicities. Deleuze explores this proposition in the
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greatest detail through his interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return. It is a mistake to understand the eternal return as simply a repetition of the past, a return of the same. Nietzsche’s notion, Deleuze explains, points in the opposite direction: “It is not being that returns, but rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity” (48). What Deleuze is working to develop, once again, is an autonomous conception of difference and its constant proliferation in a creative process of becoming. Finally, Deleuze finds an ethics and even a politics of multiplicity and becoming in Nietzsche’s notion of affirmation. He begins with Nietzsche’s typology of active and reactive forces. Active forces, like becoming itself, are deemed superior because they are creative: they produce differences, whereas reactive forces produce nothing. Reactive forces only lead to ressentiment and bad conscience. Nietzsche poses this as an ethical guide and a principle of selection: always seek out the active forces in life and avoid the reactive ones. The typology of active and reactive is then extended in Nietzsche’s distinction between affirmation and negation. Deleuze explains this distinction, for example, in the contrast between master and slave mentalities. Both, of course, involve affirmation and negation. The contrast dramatized in these two Nietzschean categories, however, lies in the priority and order given to affirmation and negation in each. The slave mentality says, “You are evil, therefore I am good,” whereas the master mentality says, “I am good, therefore you are evil.” The slave mentality, Deleuze explains, is purely reactive. It needs to pass through two negations to arrive at an affirmation: since you are evil and I am not you, therefore I am good. The master mentality, in contrast, is purely active. Its affirmation of itself is autonomous and the negation of the other merely secondary. This affirmation, I should emphasize, has nothing to do with acceptance of or acquiescence to how things are, what is, but rather purely an act of creation. This is indeed how Deleuze reads the eternal return as an ethical principle of selection oriented toward the future: “whatever you will, will it in such a way that you also will its eternal return” (68). To complete the ethical proposition, then, Deleuze links affirmative practices and their acts of creation to a life of joy, which stands opposed to all the reactive forces and sad passions.
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This linked sequence of concepts—multiplicity, becoming, affirmation, joy—not only characterizes his reading of Nietzsche but also runs throughout the various turns of Deleuze’s work as a guiding thread. That is why this book is an excellent introduction to Deleuze’s thought. Following this thread, a reader can successfully navigate through the various labyrinthine passages. This book is also, in my view, a brilliant analysis of and introduction to Nietzsche’s thought, but in a rather different way. Before considering the fidelity or accuracy of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, however, one should first note the French context of this book. Many French philosophers of Deleuze’s generation—including Michel Foucault, Pierre Klossowski, and Jacques Derrida—turned to Nietzsche in roughly the same period. They looked to him in part as a kind of provocation, a lever to help pry them away from the French philosophical establishment. What Nietzsche most importantly provided, according to Deleuze, was a means of escape from Hegel’s dialectical thinking, which was in some respects dominant in France at the time. (Deleuze once remarked that his generation was characterized by a generalized anti-Hegelianism.) Nietzsche provided a cure for the dialectic. “There is no possible compromise,” Deleuze writes, “between Hegel and Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s philosophy . . . forms an absolute anti-dialectics” (195). Indeed, this book is pervaded from beginning to end by the confrontation with Hegel. Deleuze’s primary charge against dialectical thinking is that, despite its claims, dialectics mystifies and destroys difference and is thus incapable of recognizing multiplicities. The dialectic pushes all differences to the extreme of contradiction so that it then can subsume them back into a unity. Real differences, according to Deleuze, are more subtle and nuanced than dialectical oppositions, and they do not rely on any negative foundation. On the basis of this proposition Deleuze can then contrast the double negations of dialectical thinking with Nietzsche’s notion of affirmation. Through this polemic against the dialectic Deleuze was attempting to reverse the commonplace accepted by the French philosophical establishment at the time whereby Hegel’s thought was inextricably linked to progressive politics. Instead Deleuze celebrates the political possibilities of Nietzsche, an unlikely source. Multiplicity, becoming, and affirmation open the path toward a politics of difference. In this book, however, the content of that politics is only alluded
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to. Deleuze’s politics of difference is really only elaborated in his later work, especially his collaborations with Guattari. How can we square, then, Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche with the numerous other readings that emphasize Nietzsche’s aristocratic nature, his anti-Semitism, his misogyny, and his reactionary politics? Should we assume that Deleuze just uses Nietzsche strategically as a weapon to attack the French philosophical establishment and that this book is finally more about Deleuze himself that it is about Nietzsche? I do not think this is the case, but to understand why, one has to consider Deleuze’s innovative approach to reading the history of philosophy. Many of Deleuze’s books are monographs on specific figures in the history of modern European philosophy, from Spinoza and Leibniz to Hume, Kant, and Bergson. And a central goal of his entire philosophical project is to reorient the canon to highlight different traditions. When Deleuze approaches the work of a specific philosopher, however, he does not claim to be comprehensive. He may make no mention, for instance, of Bergson’s Christianity or Spinoza’s misogyny. He concentrates on what interests him most, what is active and living in each philosopher. One might say, in this respect, that Deleuze approaches each philosopher and the entire philosophical tradition selectively, taking what he wants and ignoring the rest. He does not attempt, according to this view, to be “true” to the history of philosophy—presenting the real Hume or the real Leibniz—but rather chooses from that history and puts it to use. That gets us somewhat closer, but does not yet arrive at what really characterizes Deleuze’s method of interpretation, because in their own way his readings are in fact quite faithful and precise. Although Deleuze makes no pretense of being comprehensive, he does continually claim to have isolated the core of a philosopher’s work. He will declare confidently and without qualification what is the essence of Spinoza’s thought or what is Bergson’s fundamental idea. Deleuze’s selections, then, must go to the heart of a philosopher’s thought and ignore or discard what is not essential to it. This procedure, in fact, is not unlike the principle of ethical selection contained in the doctrine of the eternal return. Deleuze affirms the core of a philosopher’s thought beyond the limitations of the particular thinker. That is the sense in which I consider this book an excellent introduction to Nietzsche. Deleuze disregards all of Nietzsche’s comments on democracy and the masses and women that are full of ressenti-
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ment , all of the reactive forces that reappear in the pages of Nietzsche’s texts, and focuses only on the active, affirmative, and joyful passages. He isolates the heart of Nietzsche’s work and carries it forward. In this sense Deleuze is indeed true to Nietzsche’s thought, perhaps even more so than Nietzsche himself was. He selects —he wills to return, one might say—those elements of Nietzsche’s work that are most true to Nietzsche’s thought. This is really the model that Deleuze proposes for reading the history of philosophy. —
