1. The Functions of Recoil

Recoiling movements in Nietzsche’s thought constitute a way of thinking that does not authoritatively reestablish itself or look to a completion of itself in the ways it moves and develops. There are four senses of recoil that may be taken to elaborate the notion of self-overcoming: rebound, falling back under the impact of a force, quail or wince, and coiling again.

Recoil in the sense of rebound. Rebounding is a movement of springing back in response to a release of pressure. This movement is evident, for example, in the rebounding effect of subordinated or suppressed values that are released from traditional and opposing pressures in such contexts as Judeo-Christian morality, nationalism, and Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics. When suppressed valences rebound in the absence of traditional opposition, they form multiple foci of organizing powers for thought and action. The power of the ascetic ideal is dispersed in its genealogical account, for example, by the powers of what Nietzsche calls “affirmative” uncovering and making public and by the powers of sensuality, self-interest, appearance, and mortality. This kind of rebounding recoil, in dispersing the powers of traditional philosophical ways of thinking, has a destructive effect on the central organizing force of such ideas as linear time, the choosing subject, and essential unity. It has a similar effect on the affiliation of ‘unity’ with ‘reality’, on the positive value of the idea of wholeness, and on the explanatory value of the Kantian conception of subjectivity. The positive effect of rebounding recoil is found in the release wherein multiple forces of making, freeing, and affirming take priority over the traditional ways of establishing truth by the exclusion and suppression exacted by the idea of unity. By attending to this recoiling movement we put in question the tendency to think of Nietzsche as either a metaphysician or an antimetaphysician; that is, the content of his claims and critiques is found to be secondary to the self-overcoming movement of his thought. Rebounding recoil is a significant aspect of the self-overcoming movement of Nietzsche’s discourse and is a movement to which all aspects of his thought are subject.

Recoil as falling back under the impact of a force. Many of the ideas and values that have positive functions in Nietzsche’s thought fall back under the impact of his genealogical approach to those very ideas and values. In On the Genealogy of Morals, for example, his own attempt to remember by his genealogical work and his conscience regarding weakness and fear are clearly a part of the ensemble of values on which this genealogical study has a negative impact. Both his memory and his conscience invoke the traumatic suffering that he accounts as part of their formation. Nietzsche’s intention of finding the energy common to all forms of life recoils under the impact of his idea that all descriptive claims are interpretations within a specific descent as well as under the impact of his claim that the force of all formations—including the formation of the idea of common force—is beyond meaning and sense. The authority of Nietzsche’s constructive ideas falls back, recoils under the impact of the descent and the discursive contingency of those ideas. In this recoiling movement they lose their claims to authority except within their own discursive organization. This retreating recoil is a nonauthorizing movement—in this context, a movement without an author—that pervades Nietzsche’s writing. His discursive organization as a whole, as a limited organic unity, is characterized by the movement of self-overcoming. There is the falling back from the authority of Nietzsche’s organizing ideas and values, and there is the self-overcoming of the discourse as a whole under the impact of the force of dispersion which undermines the authority of the given discursive unity. His genealogies are thus forces under whose impact his own leading ideas fall back from the authoritative position that Nietzsche at times gives them.

Recoil in the sense of quail and wince. Nietzsche’s writing recoils before the foolishness of many of the values that have an extremely serious impact in his tradition of thought. Redemption, self-giving love idolized under the name of agape, seriousness of mind, honest truth, scholarly objectivity, passionate commitment to God, philanthropic concerns: Nietzsche’s discourse repeatedly winces before such values as their internal motivational structure and historical formations come to light. Knowing himself to be under their effects, Nietzsche is driven like Zarathustra by the force of his wincing recoil to parody and ironize them and himself, not in the hope of eliminating them entirely—he, too, is human, all too human—but with the intention of putting into effect a disgust, a quailing, before their refusal of their own secret interests and before their pious blindness. Zarathustra’s nausea and self-sickening are not incidental parts of Nietzsche’s writing; they are, in part, physical appropriations of wincing recoil. This movement has moment particularly for us who might read Nietzsche without parodying and ironizing him and ourselves, too, in the reading process. To take him with a heavy spirit of seriousness is a violation of the discourse’s wincing recoil. If we are unable to mock our own mocking of him, we are unable to follow one of the recoiling strands of his writing and thought.

Recoil as coiling again. We can think of this movement in relation to the ideas of eternal return and will to power. On the one hand, the idea of eternal return involves a series of claims about the meaninglessness of time and the trajectory of will to power. On the other hand, eternal return, which Nietzsche calls “the great cultivating idea,” involves in its conception a coiling again of traditional ideas, a recollecting and gathering of inherited forces, a type of torsion among them that can release a torrent of nontraditional effects, such as new directions of action, collections of newly formed or reformed presuppositions, different organizations of values and thoughts, and, possibly, beings that are different from traditional humanity and from us who are constrained to think in terms of the complicated metaphors and grammar that collect around ‘being’, ‘thought’, and ‘time’. On the simplest level the claim of eternal return is that all things repeat themselves in an endless circular movement. But we must ask ourselves how this claim functions in Nietzsche’s writing. We find a double recoiling action. There is the avowed eternal recoiling again of each event, springing forward again, expending itself, burning out, and slowly coiling again in an unthinkable return of life force to the event’s constellation; then there is the coiling again in the constitution of the claim itself of the ideas of eternity and return, of the early Greek image of time, a coiling against the conflict of meaning and meaninglessness, of the peculiar Western anxiety over death and loss, of the twin anxieties over keeping and releasing, and of all the other bits of thought and sense that compose the idea of eternal return. These composing elements are coiled again in Nietzsche’s metaphor, but this recoiling movement changes the patterns of force in which all the elements have been combined in their inherited associations, and the idea of eternal return releases these elements to meanings and senses they do not have in their other metaphysical formations. In the second sense of coiling again, the ideas that have led to and made possible the idea of eternal return are themselves released from the ideologies and passions that have held them and now lead to thoughts and passions that depart from and contradict the earlier authoritative structures. In this movement, eternal return also puts in question its own authority as a definitive concept or meaning and sets in motion a self-overcoming movement within Nietzsche’s thought. This recoiling movement veers from a static maintenance of the thoughts that compose it.

The movement of coiling again in the idea of eternal return, if it is itself a movement of recoils, is not a familiar one in our philosophical heritage. These recoiling movements, as we find them in Nietzsche’s writing, are not governed by the ideas of same, identity, or self, and the again does not suggest in this context the repetition of some fundamental sameness, such as being, spirit, subjectivity, or energy with a self-realizing telos. This recoil, rather, promises a ‘beyond’ that verges on the horizon of our thought, on an über. This horizon does not verge on our dominant traditions but on the movements by which those traditions decompose. This recoiling suggested by eternal return is part of the self-overcoming in Nietzsche’s discourse. Thus in On the Genealogy of Morals, we find a coiling again of the ascetic ideal. On the one hand, it is the object of severe genealogical critique. On the other hand, it plays a major role in the genealogical critique, and the essay coils again in the power of the ascetic ideal, now that the ascetic ideal in Nietzsche’s discourse knows its lineage and amoral power. In this movement there is both coiling again and a springing rebound that pushes the discourse to the edge of its ability to speak and propels it beyond itself in a self-overcoming movement that cannot know its future or its effects. I find this the most forceful recoil in On the Genealogy of Morals: it propels itself beyond itself in its genealogical knowledge of its own ascetic ideal.

2. Nietzsche’s Self-Overcoming Is the Middle Voice
of Metaphysics

I shall emphasize the middle voice because the movement of self-overcoming and its recoils, which take place in Nietzsche’s thought, cannot be thought well in the active and passive voices. In the active voice self-overcoming appears to be a kind of force that is to be understood by its effects, by what it does. It seems to be vaguely nihilistic in this voice, which is the primary voice of our philosophical tradition, because it does not have a telos or a self-realizing nature; it is something like a chaotic subject. In the passive voice, self-overcoming is an object of thought that can be grasped by a movement other than its own. It is something to be defined, broken apart, put back together again, and understood. Each voice has its own rights and powers, but without the middle voice we will not be able to speak and think in the movement of self-overcoming, which is the movement of Nietzsche’s thought.

The dominance of the active and passive voices makes inevitable the priority of the spectator-subject for philosophical thought, whereas the middle voice yields a different way of thinking that is marked by undergoing a movement rather than by either active assertion or passive reception.

A. THE MIDDLE VOICE

The middle voice has lost a significant part of its meaning, its semantic significance, in Western languages. It survives in a limited way primarily in the reflexive function. In early Sanskrit, where its still earlier use in Indo-European and Indo-Iranian is traced, the middle voice speaks in the sphere of the subject. On the one hand, it may be reflexive, and on the other, it may speak nonreflexively of an action in the action. For example, in a ritual the active voice for ‘cleanse’ or ‘purify’ may be used: “Whatever of you the impure have polluted, that do I cleanse for you.”¹ In the middle voice its sense might be rendered: “Whatsoever the impure has polluted, as to that for you through this let them become pure.” In the middle voice, the impure’s becoming pure is expressed entirely in the verb form. Or, in the passive voice, we say, “Let us be purified.” In the middle voice, we say, “Let us become pure.” In the latter instance we are of the action that reverts to itself. It is a purifying action that makes pure. In the active voice the verb is for another. In the passive voice the verb acts on the subject. The middle voice is used when the subject is in some way specifically implicated in the result of the action but is neither the active subject nor the passive object of the action. Pacati in the active voice of Sanskrit means ‘(the cook) cooks (something) for another’. Pacate in the middle voice means ‘(the cook) cooks for himself’. In the case of the intransitive verb, the active of drmhati, for example, means ‘to make (something) firm’. The intransitive middle drmhate means ‘(something) becomes firm’ or, we might say, ‘firming comes of its own action’.² The middle voice of the verb ‘to die’—mriyate—we translate as ‘dying occurs (of itself)’. We translate ayate ‘to be born’ as ‘birthing occurs (of itself)’.³ This middle-voiced intransitivity is also found in the Greek middle perfect form, phainesthai, meaning ‘to appear appearing or appearing appears’, and gegonesthai, ‘to become becoming’ or ‘to come becoming’. In both instances the activity of the middle-voiced perfect expresses its temporal movement out of itself.

I note particularly the intransitive uses of the middle voice, because that is one form of the middle voice that is difficult to retrieve in our languages now, but one that plays a significant role in contemporary efforts to think outside of the domain of subjectivity.⁴ The reflexive form by which we now retain the middle-voice function is not entirely appropriate in the instances I have cited. We need to bracket the implication ‘of itself’ when we say that becoming becomes, for example, because there is no distance of self-relation or self-objectification. There is neither an active subject nor a passive object, and the peculiarity of that structure for our grammar is lost by the reflexive form. We are inclined by our structures of expression to speak of an action’s doing something in relation to itself and thereby to indicate an incipient subject-relation in the verb’s action. We are inclined to say appearing shows itself or becoming itself becomes. In that way we intuitively put into the whole occurrence a positing formation, whereas the middle voice in these instances can indicate a whole occurrence’s occurring as a whole without self-positing or reflexive movement throughout the event. The reflexive form indicates the whole event, but shapes that event in an expression by means of a self-relational structure that is often missing in the middle voice. In such cases a nonreflexivity is both carried and covered over by the reflexive suggestion of self-relation. The reflexivity has to be overcome to give voice to this middle form.

The middle voice is also carried and covered over in verbs that have a middle-voice form but an active-voice meaning. The Greek boulomai, for example, means ‘to wish’ or ‘to be willing’. It can also mean choice or preference in the sense that one desires to be pleased, in contrast to ethelo, which implies consent. What remains of the middle voice can be noted as a state of desiring, a state of preference that issues in active choosing. The ‘I will’, in the sense of I wish, comes from a dispositional state rather than from active deliberation and judgment. In the case of gignomai ‘to become’, the verb is used of the birth of people and animals, the production of things, and the taking place of events. The middle voice is carried in the sense that the activity of becoming is a state that yields of itself. As we have seen, in its perfect aspect gegonesthai indicates a temporal process that yields of itself in its process. When gignomai is used with the genitive form of a noun, it means ‘to come under the control of’ or ‘to belong to’; that is, it indicates a state that is under the control or in the possession of something else. It is in a larger situation in which the voice of the controlled thing is lost to itself. In such instances, the sense of being in a middle-voice situation is covered over by a passive-voice meaning. Oiomai ‘to think’ is also a middle form and suggests an activity that speaks in its own sphere and reverts to itself of itself prior to a subject’s taking charge of it. Thinking in this case would be an activity that enacts itself out of its own processes. This formation is not at all foreign to Western thought, but whether it can be elaborated adequately by the additional thoughts of subjectivity and presence is a question that will recur for us and one that is important for the larger question of the end of metaphysics.

These middle-voice verbs that retain their middle form but have come to have active and passive meaning often suggest that an event yields the subject that is able to act or to receive an action. In boulomai, which means ‘I wish out of a state of inclination’, for example, something is produced—the I that wants something—from a state in which the produced I is not active. Something takes place that is other than a subject’s activity directed toward something else. To think of a state that of itself is to be pleased is both an awkward thought for us and a mark of the middle voice.

When a word has several, even countervailing, meanings, the middle voice can give expression to the word’s multiple values without indicating a common, harmonizing meaning. The importance of exact signification is not in question here. The active employment of words and literal functions allows for useful naming and predicating. But when a word has in its power several emphases and counterplays of meanings, such that none of its meanings can adequately express the other meanings, the word is then able to bring to expression a variety of registers, tones, experiences, and significatory chains as its play finds full voice. The verb ‘to end’, for example, means both to limit and to terminate. It suggests arrival at a telos (the end of this project is at hand) or incompleteness (the project came to an untimely end) or the continuing presence of a telos (the end of the project guided its process) or delimitation (the project’s possibility ends here). If we think of ‘to end’ in the middle voice, both the conclusiveness of termination and the nonconclusiveness of delimitation become apparent, both the overtone of death and the overtone of self-realization, the presence of both limited identity and possibility at the limit. The middle voice of ‘to end’, given the variety of senses in the word, does not allow a conclusion to the question of the end of metaphysics, and this question and nonconclusiveness appear to emerge out of the ending that is in question. Ending does not suddenly happen as a new event, as a final point on a line. It can appear, rather, as a multidimensional voice in the very process of metaphysics. Ending and thinking metaphysically are mutually implied. We shall return to this implication by combining the middle voice of ‘to think’ and ‘to end’, a combination that inscribes a process of delimiting that can be adequately elaborated by the reflex of reflection only if the re is thought in the middle voice, and only if the flexion is a kind of coiling.

We may also refer to events in their middle voice, to situations that occur with many meanings and deeds and that voice themselves in excess of the actions and meanings that constitute them. These events cannot be understood adequately if the objective meanings that constitute the event are used to objectify the event as a whole. We may take Jean-Pierre Vernant’s account of the performance of Oedipus the King as an example of an event that is filled with conflict, ambiguity, and transition and that shows the value of the middle voice in giving expression to the occurrence of events in their excess of activity and passivity.

[T]he situation at the beginning [of the play] . . . is that of catastrophe. We call it the plague, but it’s not the plague; it’s a loimos, a calamity, a defilement which has caused life to come to a halt, so that the world of human beings no longer communicates with the divine world. The smoke from sacrifices does not rise to heaven, women either do not give birth or give birth to monsters, the herds do not multiply, the earth is no longer fruitful. The human world is isolated in its foulness.

And the play opens with a paean, a joyous song of thanksgiving for some happy event, a joyous song, rapid in tempo. One wonders what a paean is doing here. But we have several clues that there is another sort of paean, sung at the change of seasons, at the passage from winter into summer, or at the entry of spring. For example in the festivals of the type of the Athenian Thargelia, at the moment when the impurities of the past season are expelled at the entrance into a new season, there is, at Athens, the expulsion of one who is called the pharmakos. This paean, we are told, is characterized by its ambiguity. It is a joyous song, like a song of thanksgiving, and, at the same time, a song of terrible anguish with cries and lamentations. It is no accident that the tragic poet has placed this paean at the beginning of his tragedy. This paean gives us one of the fundamental oppositions in the structure of the work which enables us to understand it. If we compare this paean with what the chorus says at the moment when the tragedy, having reached its acme, takes an abrupt turn, the moment when Oedipus understands that he is damned, understands what he is, we find that the chorus intones a song which is equally astonishing, for it celebrates Oedipus from two points of view. It celebrates him as a savior of the City, as a king almost divine, while saying at the same time that “he is the most unfortunate and the foulest of men.” Thus we see that the tragedy is based on the idea that the same man is the divine king (and there we have a reminder of Greek history) on whom the prosperity of the earth, of the herds, and of the women depends, the king who bears the whole burden of the human group depending on him. And, seen from the perspective now shared by the audience and the poet, he is at the same time considered to be something dreadfully dangerous, a sort of incarnation of hubris, which must be expelled. Into this opposition, of the divine king who is also an impurity, the one who knows all but is blind, we [find] . . . the idea that this divine king, who belongs to the Greek past, is at the same time superseded; and that, in a way, according to the scheme of the familiar ritual, he must be expelled as a pharmakos.⁵

Further, the performance of Oedipus the King was a public event which communicated in the crosscurrents of the fourth-century citizenry, in the ambiguities and uncertainties that marked the social lives of the people. The crossroads of decision lying before the hero are shrouded with such profound ambiguity that when the hero chooses the best possible course of action, the very good that he intends and follows becomes the means by which he commits criminal, even heinous, acts. This fateful ambiguity makes of him a pharmakos, a poisoning healer whose presence embodies both great social danger and the very ambiguity that his expulsion is intended to eliminate. His attempt to be just has occasioned enormous injustice; his mission as the savior of Athens has brought about a threat of destruction that is worse than the precipitating calamity.

The city that watched and heard the play was itself experimenting with the relatively new system of elected officials who administer justice. They also watched a play that had been judged as to its excellence by the new system of voting by tribunals. The decision concerning the best drama reflects the new and uncertain system of dispensing justice, a secular system that moved away from ancient rituals and practices in which the gods, not humans, appeared to establish the justice whereby a play or an action was chosen. And in the play at hand, the city watched and heard a tragedy in which the uncertainty of being just and good had fateful, cosmic dimensions. A pharmakos was also the person whose secular duty was to provide justice for the city. The city’s own profound uncertainty in the transitional situation concerning justice was played before it in a tragedy that arose from the very structural ambiguity that was inherent in the world of gods and people. There is a dark Hades quality to justice that appears in its ritual memory in which the light of law is limited and in which a darkness emerges that extinguishes humans’ sense of proper place. “Greek law which had just been formulated, unlike Roman law, is not systematized, not founded on axiomatic principles, but is made up tentatively of different levels.”⁶

The movement of the drama plays out the historical, changing circumstances and the enormous ambiguity of its place and time. In addition to what it says thematically and the effect that it has on its hearers, the play in its setting enacts of itself—and not in reflexive regard to itself—a texture of ancient and modern practices that are embodied in its culture. In its being played, it and its audience are involved in an event that exceeds the reflexivity of the play’s portraying to the Athenians their own perplexity and quandary. In its complex ambiguity it occurs as the question of justice which binds, as a question, both the play and the people with the play in a voice other than action and passion. A complex history and a complex society are voiced in a whole event that is marked by transformation and multiple dimensions of conflicting currents of meaning. It is like a voice that speaks fatefully beyond the totality of meanings and transformations that constitute the play’s activity and suffering and that gives that totality a shaking, quivering quality. Oedipus the King comes to pass in the diathesis of the play of forces that structure it. Like a middle-voiced verb, the play, as an event in its middle-voiced function, states its own event in its occurrence. It voices itself without the intervention of regard for itself. In this instance the middle voice is one of question, transformation, anxiety, and a play of countervailing forces rather than the voice of the present identity or group of identities. The play’s voice puts its totality in question.

We may now summarize our discussion: The nonreflexive value of the middle voice is not expressible in a present indicative mood. It does not suggest predication or subjective intervention in the formation of its movement. Even in the phrase “he cooks for himself,” the middle voice suggests that an action occurs which is immediate in its enactment and is not reflexive. The prepositional, object-forming “for himself,” a grammatically formed space that suggests activity and reception of activity, is eliminated in the single middle-voice verb. The middle voice suggests something that goes beyond subject-object formations. It is able to articulate nonreflexive enactments that are not for themselves or for something else. As a formation it does not need to suggest intention outside of its movement or a movement toward an other. It does not suggest action by which the subject becomes other to itself. It does not oppose active and passive formations, but it is other than they are. It is the voice of something’s taking place through its own enactment. It remains hearable by us in some reflexive functions; we have seen that those functions often lack particularly the middle-voice value of intransitive processes of enactment. We have seen that in the middle voice a certain immediacy of presence can be expressed, but we have also seen that the presence of a complex, ambiguous verb or event, by virtue of its ambiguity and countervalences, may in its middle voice express not the immediacy of simple presence, but transition, ambiguity, and dissolution of presence. In such cases there is an excess vis-à-vis the meanings that constitute the event or word. That excess suggests that the presence of meaning is not a sufficient basis for thinking in relation to the event, that the excess necessitates something other than the language of meaning and presence for its articulation.

To come to understand the middle voice better, we might analyze the verbs that retained a middle-voice structure but took on active and passive meanings. Then we could formulate the various ways in which active and passive meanings have an almost hidden value that is in excess of those meanings. Or we might show how the middle voice expresses temporal aspects in its various tenses. The coming and passing of things in this voice is articulated as the things’ own occurrence. Or we might trace the middle voice through Latin deponents and find its excess there. In such work we would need to be alert to the ways in which the loss of the middle voice functions in our account of it, and we would need to find strategies to show how the loss of the middle voice functions in the process of carrying out our account of it. Perhaps our writing could then give expression to its own loss of the middle voice and thereby delimit the inevitability of its loss.

I have discussed the middle voice with two emphases in mind: first, to take note of a power of expression and writing that is traceable in its loss and that by its loss suggests that there are limits to thinking when it is predominantly constituted by the active-passive structures, and second, to prepare a way of interpreting the recoils in Nietzsche’s thought that refers recoiling to its own movement without involving the language of causation. We are working on the limits of the active-passive structures as we trace the middle voice in relation to active and passive functions, and, as we saw in the case of Oedipus the King, the middle voice can bring to thought a dimension of events, an excess of present meaning, and a situation of conflict, that is otherwise clouded over if not totally obscured. Both the middle voice and its obscurity, in a way yet to be determined, produce or yield thought processes by which the subject-object structure is overcome. We shall look specifically at one instance in which the function of the middle voice in the context of unreconciled conflicts plays a positive role in the formation of thought. In this instance, the excess of meaning that takes place in conflicts issues in a discursive process that overcomes itself. In this self-overcoming the priority of the active and passive voices is also overcome. Finally, we shall think about the limits of thought by means of the middle voice and mark one sense of the ‘end of metaphysics’ in Nietzsche’s thought. We will be considering a way of thinking in which the end of metaphysics, construed now as delimited traditional thought, opens to thinking both in and through that limit. This part of our discussion is preparatory to considering the movement of the question of ethics in Nietzsche’s account of the ascetic ideal.

B. THE MIDDLE-VOICED PROCESS OF SELF-OVERCOMING IN
NIETZSCHE’S THOUGHT

The idea of self-overcoming brings to expression a movement that both defines and delimits philosophical thought, and in Nietzsche’s work the idea of self-overcoming recoils in a self-overcoming manner.⁷ He typically works within a given structure of value or thought in such a way that the values or ideas become increasingly questionable because of the countervailing powers that they carry as well as suppress in their own movement. The history of the formation of morality, the fears and resentment, the profound oppression and suffering that are built into the attitudes and hierarchies of morality: these powers have the effect of turning on themselves when those inherent, countervailing powers are released to take their own directions in Nietzsche’s genealogy. The turning of repressive powers on themselves, their functioning against themselves, which is also the movement of resentment against itself, is a middle-voiced movement of self-overcoming. Nietzsche releases this turning by providing a genealogy of what is both behind the good-evil polarity and nonetheless effective in the practical and theoretical life of the polarity. As he shows how the ascetic ideal establishes its life by repressing its life, the effect of this account is to turn the ascetic ideal against itself through both its own repressive action and its affirmation of life which maintains the repression. On the one hand, Nietzsche looks for the truth of the moral order. He looks for its origins and purposes, for the nature of its energy, for the intentions internal to self-giving love, for the meaning of moral affirmation, and for values that will provide a different order, a different morality. When this aspect of his work is held in isolation from its own self-overcoming, Nietzsche looks like a critical moralist, another modern ethical thinker. On the other hand, he places in question moral thinking as such by maintaining in his language the countervalence of values within morality. Moral values, by their countervalence, undercut and move to overcome their own power to organize his discourse around any of their groups or poles. In this second aspect, the very structure of moral thought develops transvaluationally out of its own movements and interplays and in the absence of domination by any part of its once definitive structure. In On the Genealogy of Morals, the process of self-overcoming thus constitutes a middle voice of Western morality.

Just as Zarathustra must fall under the power of resentment and profound self-hatred in his pilgrimage toward possibilities for living without resentment and self-hatred, so Nietzsche’s own genealogical thought works within the structures that come to closure and are delimited in his discourse.

We shall take as an example of this self-overcoming the functions of ‘will to power’ and ‘eternal return’ in Nietzsche’s account of them. My purpose is to show the effect of the middle-voice function of the valences of will to power and eternal return in Nietzsche’s discourse about them. In their own middle-voice movement and in the context of their own multiple countervalences, the ideas of will to power and eternal return recoil upon themselves in Nietzsche’s writing. This movement breaks the privilege of the active-passive voices and, instead, privileges the movement by which the overcoming of metaphysics overcomes itself. When will to power is read primarily in the active voice, for example, it appears to be a quasi-subject that does something in and to specific situations of choice and affirmation. In the middle voice, however, will to power occurs as a self-overcoming movement of a specific, complex organization of countervailing values. In this example, we have an instance of the ending of metaphysics and a way of thinking that issues from this ending. The two components that hold our attention are internal countervalence and the middle-voice function.

Is it not the function of these two ideas in Nietzsche’s discourse, will to power and eternal return, to provide resolution and synthesis? They appear to give synthesizing order in the “junglelike growth” of the genealogist’s descriptions and the ideas that tumble through Nietzsche’s thinking. Do they not offer a basis of sameness and a holistic image for all things? In preparation for answering this question we shall look first at will to power with two questions in mind: How does Nietzsche describe will to power? How does his account of will to power function in his thinking?

Nietzsche wanted to show that will to power better explains the appearance of things, that is, it explains things better than other competing ideas, such as that of a creator-subject. He adopts the scientific approach, which he understands to be governed by number and measurement. He measures phenomena by a quantitative scale. Further, “force is to be found in quantity. Mechanistic theory can therefore only describe processes, not explain them” (WP 660). The quantitative scale is a scale of force. He intends to describe degrees of force, not entities that have degrees of force attached to them, and by this process of description he will have interpreted all things by reference to degrees or amounts of force and the interplay of these forces.

The relations and plays among forces are different from the forces themselves, of course: “We cannot help feeling that mere quantitative differences are something fundamentally distinct from quantity, namely that they are qualities which can no longer be reduced to one another” (WP 565). Quality, then, refers to the differences-in-play of quantities of force. Nietzsche’s discipline is not to single out forces, see them in a totality, and describe the totality as a sum total of its constituents. The qualities of force relations are not reducible to the constituent parts, and Nietzsche proposes descriptions of qualities, of the interplays of forces, as the subject of his discipline.

Will to power has reference to interplays of forces, not to some preexisting essence. On Nietzsche’s terms there are no quanta outside of specific organizations: quanta are relationally conceived. So his science of number and measurement is a description of qualities of force produced in the interplay of various factors of force. By not reducing quality of force to quantity of force he in effect claims that quantities of force are “real,” that is, they are effective only as nameable elements in some organization. They are contributing elements, and presumably they are independent of this organization only to the extent that they occur in other organizations. And the quality of this organization could be a contributing factor, that is, a quantity of force, in another organization that has a different quality.

Instead of quanta having a transorganizational nature, they are distinguishable only in virtue of their different effects in organizations. Differences of force in a complex play of forces, not a common nature, constitute their “identity” (WP 1062).

How, then, are we to read “force,” if not as a transcending essence that is present in all organizations? The idea of force is the organizing principle of the disciplined discourse that is emerging from traditional patterns of thought. Will to power names the quality of the organization that is expressed in the transforming, transvaluing discourse that Nietzsche joins in its early stages of development. His “measuring” account of force articulates the quality of will to power that empowers, arranges, and distributes this discourse. Modern science, which, according to Nietzsche, is in the genealogy of resentment, the ascetic ideal, and bad conscience, is articulated in a transformation toward a discourse whose estimates and hierarchies multiply unities and disassemble categorical totalities. His own developing discourse produces a Wesen of difference that is called “nobility” in Beyond Good and Evil, and, finally, this transformation of science foresees a Wesen that is beyond (over) the conscious organization of man.

When Nietzsche says in Will to Power that “this world is the will to power and nothing else! and you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides,” he is holding the world in his “mirror”:

And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy without beginning, without end . . . enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary . . . a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back . . . blessing itself as that which must recur eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this is my Dionysian world of eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying . . . my “Beyond Good and Evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal. (WP 1067)

The differentiating element in this “world,” its quality, is will to power combined with eternal return. Both a group of metaphysical claims and a countervalence to such claims occur in the paragraph. It contains claims making up a nihilism from a metaphysical point of view. But when the paragraph is read as recoiling on its own claims, those claims are known to be supported by nothing other than the energy of this mirror image, this organization. Its energy is not to be taken as a part of something beyond it and universal. It is a self-reflection, not of Nietzsche particularly, but of a powerful grouping of discursive forces that in desiring to be itself has no desire for foundations outside of itself. In willing to be itself, the discourse wills the will to power. In willing the will to power, it wills an image of a discourse supported solely by its own interplays, the genealogies of those interplays, and the other interplays that they put in motion.

The energy of this discourse, as a qualitative interplay of forces, has its validity in its effective organizing power. “The will is a creator” (Z, “Of Redemption”). The will to power originates in a full interplay of forces—not, for example, from a lack of energy or a need for relation. Its characteristics are ebullience, fullness, overflow. It frees its participating forces from that repression of will that has characterized its predecessors: “Willing liberates: that is the true doctrine of will and freedom” (Z, “On the Blissful Isles”). It expends forces for creation and self-enjoyment. It has been fed by the forces that gained strength through opposition and repression, as we have seen—not the affections of enslavement, but the hardness and sense of life bred by struggle with the preceding controlling powers. In its youthful energy it burgeons, rephrases, appropriates, expands, bypasses. Its profligacy is in its affirmation of its energy to be whatever and however it occurs. Hence the satisfaction of this discourse happens in self-affirmation, not in the fulfillment of unfinished goals. Intensity, not teleology, is its hallmark.

But Nietzsche also claimed that the destruction of past traditions occurred because of their violations and fears regarding their will to power. On the Genealogy of Morals refers to the will to power in the entire sweep of human history. Nietzsche does not think that it is limited to his own emerging discourse. Will to power is used as an explanatory concept for the movement of all history, and particularly as an explanation for the decline and degeneration of its closest “relative,” the ascetic ideal. Like any other discourse of absolutes, Nietzsche’s discourse makes its central idea, its dominant force, the force that dominates other forces in its discursive appropriation of them. It gives focus, unifying power, and it sets in motion undercutting movements. This relation of metaphysical claims and antimetaphysical effects sets the direction of thought for a significant current of reflection running through the twentieth century. We are familiar with the undercutting effect: it transvalues metaphysical ideas by putting them in play with equally forceful ideas about movement without ultimate meaning.

One way that this undercutting functions is through the observation that will to power has an oscillating rhythm. As the quality of a limited, forceful interplay (that is, as the quality of a discourse), will to power is not an essence that unfolds inherent meanings or an inherent identity as it develops in an historically extensive process. In its discourse it not only interprets itself as a nonsubject without essential identity; it oscillates in the interplay of forces; by this oscillation it creates zones of identity in which one or another group of forces makes hierarchies that exclude other identities and that themselves have a limited number of possibilities for identity. These groupings play themselves out, and particularly in the regrouping and transitional phases the loss of the dominant identities accompanies the manifest power of transformation. There is no center, no anchoring ballast. Centers of willpower are identities. Will to power shows itself particularly as the centers fade out, lose their magnetism. Will to power is manifest in its movement without center. The concept of the will to power functions in this rhythm of identity formation and identity decline as an ability to give identity and focus in Nietzsche’s discourse. On its own terms, this idea also is expected to lose its centering ability and to be overwhelmed. It is a recoiling part of an oscillation, like the movement of a circle that in its movement changes the smaller organizations of movement within its circumference into larger organizations that, in their interplay, slowly change the whole. In this instance the idea of will to power may be expected on its own terms to recoil back on itself and to rebound with organizing concepts that replace its own impact and power.

Nietzsche often speaks of a sense of rightness or honesty that accompanies the individual who undergoes ego sacrifice or identity sacrifice in a process of affirming will to power. A satisfaction peculiar to the Western ego traces the movement from energy with center to the power of energy without center. In language that transvalues Christian sacrifice in the images of crucifixion and resurrection, Nietzsche finds that ego loss without retention of desire for ego gain finds pleasure in returning to a source that is without identity or subject interest. His own happy movement in the course of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to the image of the last man who is still all-too-human, and beyond, toward a state that is not a man-state, is also a movement in the power of the idea of will to power toward an anticipated organization that is beyond the will-to-power discourse. There is no expectation that the overman will think of will to power unless he or she looks into a distant and past discourse in his or her lineage.

When this movement through dominant identities is denied by the forces of those identities, the reconstituting trajectory of the movement is diverted. The ascetic ideal, for example, with its repressive force directed against its own destruction, is a return, certainly, but yet a return to the quality of energy without center; it returns to an overwhelming identity, to a particular magnetic center. This kind of return, observes Nietzsche, particularly in the course of On the Genealogy of Morals, weakens or sickens the self-identifying complex, viz. the ascetic ideal. The recoiling movement continues its effect even as the identity struggles to maintain itself and represses its own energy in an effort to control or stop the power toward transvaluation and redesign. A turning now occurs, as the internal weakening—the “sickness”—undercuts the power of repression and strengthens, through pressure and forceful concentration, what is repressed. The repressed, with its increased energy, turns out from the identity center, perhaps at first extravagant in its emerging liberation, and turns toward its own constitution and recentering.

If the center of the emerging quality of identity affirms its own generative process and does not identify itself and its valence by reference to endurance and universal validity, and if it centrally affirms a decentering momentum, then the recoil of its power will not mean blind repression, self-sickening, and return of energy through regression. It will move “gaily” in its own self-transformations and, by that kind of movement, create the conditions for its successors as it moves recoiling away from its own quality and comes under the effect of other qualities.

If Nietzsche’s recoiling thought is successful, it gives the conditions for thinking the processes by which it effects its own overcoming and undercutting. That effectiveness is in the function of its ideas—how they encourage their own transvaluation. If one follows those ideas for a time, the process of self-overcoming develops through the organizing power of those ideas. If one thinks these ideas metaphysically without appropriating the antimetaphysical forces and the consequent recoils that constitute self-overcoming, one is in a discourse that is different from Nietzsche’s. The transformations that might go on are more likely to be repetitions of those that led to Nietzsche’s discourse. At least they are different in the images and visions that they spawn by virtue of the absence of the torsion of self-overcoming recoil. They will not develop in the strain of forces or in the affirmation of the will to power that center and decenter Nietzsche’s inheritance. The discipline of Nietzsche’s discourse and its transvaluation involve the maintenance of its recoiling tensions until its metaphysical predecessors and its own “all-too-human” struggle transform into a different creature that knows all parties in the current struggle only as an aging or dead paternity. And if one participates knowingly in the transformative process, one will be in it with senses of difference and perhaps of pleasure that are not characteristic of most other modern discourses.

In “The Intoxicated Song” Zarathustra says that “joy wants itself, wants eternity, wants recurrence, wants everything eternally the same.” This “deep eternity” is recurrence. Nietzsche often describes eternal return as the return of each pain, sorrow, injustice, and so on, and in those statements he emphasizes that the effect of the idea of eternal return is to transvalue the ideas of final telos and ultimate meaning by the force of another idea (eternal return) and image (time as an enclosed, revolving wheel). He is thinking through the idea of existence without meaning or aim. There is not even a finale of nothingness. Recoiling eternity. No completion, but continuous recoiling. And in this thought he finds existence and the world affirmed (he sometimes uses redeemed) in their own recoils amid the vacuum that ceaselessly interrupts the texture of judgments that would override their own disturbed vibrations.

The effect of affirming these occurrences of return, oscillation, and eternal return is to reach out discursively for power (WP 675). Reaching out for power is in contrast to reaction and reversion. The move out interrupts the sickening process that prevails in its own ancestry. Thought metaphysically, the claim is that the foundation of all existence is now affirmed in a group of values that have a dimension of noncontingent validity because they are appropriate to the transhistorical nature of the will to power. But when the idea is thought in terms of its discursive effect in its middle voice, it releases the discourse from alignments of self-protection and self-affirmation. Returning returns. It is a recoil that ceaselessly unsettles the thought of both eternity and sameness. No identity controls the process. Identity control is itself transvalued in the recoiling return. And the discourse is free for its multiple, struggling orders. No meaning rules over them in the recoil of eternity as return. There are surging powers in a quality of energy that affirms them all in their countervailing lives. Out of this affirmation—out of this quality, the will to power—the multivalued orders are affirmed strongly so that they move in their recoiling countervalence beyond themselves not in the power of centering self-maintenance but in the power of affirmation of the multiply contradictory occurrence. If the discourse works, the power of negation peculiar to traditional Western metaphysical thought is transvalued into a different quality of forces. Then the idea of will to power is itself transvalued into something different, which Nietzsche’s discourse could not, true to itself, imagine. In Nietzsche’s work, the middle voice of self-overcoming and transvaluation functions in the text’s self-overcoming and transvaluing movements. It is an unaccustomed voice, but one that Nietzsche identifies as a silent movement in and through Western thinking: the movement of this thinking—I choose movement instead of force or will—is unthinkable, aporetic, within the organization of its controlling meanings and values. Yet it is a movement that Nietzsche thinks by means of maintaining the tradition’s conflicts without the organizing power of the ideas of consistency and reconciliation, that is, without the organizing power of a pervasive and controlling presence. Without the power of presence, transcendence in Nietzsche’s thought occurs as the image of trans, of the beyond, of space without presence. We have noted this transcendence in the self-overcoming functions of will to power and eternal return. Both of these thoughts in their multiple recoils dissolve their own discursive authority.

In the discussion of the play of will to power and eternal return in Nietzsche’s writing—a play of metaphysical assertion, antimetaphysical assertion, and nonmetaphysical recoil in the process—we discern not only the conflictual directions that are methodically maintained, but also a middle-voiced recoiling function. In the first place, Nietzsche has developed a significant part of his thought in the conflictual play of forces that moves through Western metaphysical thought and that has not been affirmed in that thought. This conflictual play has a middle-voiced function in the sense that it is of the thought’s movement, is neither active nor passive, and provides multiple recoils back on the presumptive authority of its organizing ideas. It is not the subject of action nor the recipient of action. Second, the traditional repression of the conflictual play is not only the result of the active force of a metaphysician’s thought. Repression of the play of conflictual forces is also of the semantics, the structures of meaning, that constitute metaphysics. On the Nietzschean account, this repression occurs in the semantic movement of metaphysics and also has a middle-voiced function of sickening while it saves meaning. Third, the play of the conflicting forces and the repression of that play constitute the recoiling movement of Nietzsche’s thought, a movement in which their repression becomes one among the playing forces and is a part of the movement’s transvaluation. Transvaluation of the repression of the constitutive conflicts within metaphysics is a process in which the dominant meanings of metaphysics are composed by opposing powers and in that condition function blindly in a self-overcoming manner. Self-overcoming in metaphysics takes place as the middle voice of Nietzsche’s discourse. In his discourse, however, it is affirmed, and self-overcoming self-overcomes without inherent resistance. It is a voice that in its recoils exceeds reflexivity, closes metaphysical thought, and prepares for the overcoming of Nietzsche’s own thought. It is the voice of differing, moving of itself, without the thought of transcendence.

The strategy we have followed in showing how in Nietzsche’s discourse self-overcoming takes place as the recoiling middle voice of metaphysical discourse is to trace the discursive function of countervalences in his thought of will to power in eternal return. These are countermovements in the traditional values and thoughts that Nietzsche followed genealogically and that also play significant roles in his own thinking. His discourse changes as the processes of self-overcoming and transvaluation take place. In his thought, the conflicts and groundless chaos characteristic of metaphysical formations become apparent as countervalues are given full rein in their recoiling movement, multiple organizations, and trajectories. We have seen that only by undergoing self-overcoming do we think Nietzsche’s thought. This means that only as we undergo Nietzsche’s self-overcoming and that of our own reading do we think in the movement of Nietzsche’s thought.

In the section that follows we shall turn to his discussion of the ascetic ideal in Part Three of On the Genealogy of Morals, noting that when the trans of transcendence is thought without subjectivity or self-reflexivity, when transcendence is thought in the middle voice of self-overcoming, the ascetic ideal stands out with unusual definition in its multiple functions and patterns. We can say initially that without self-presenting transcendence, without a concept of transcendence or that of the thinker’s own universal presence, the ground for the Western ascetic ideal falls away. The ascetic ideal increasingly functions as a remainder that, while demanding a ground of validity, has no such ground outside of its own heritage. Various images will function as a ground in this remainder.

The images for ground that have exercised the most power on me as I have worked on this discussion have been those of Nietzsche’s texts. I have been tempted to hear his words as something like grounds for my words, which would make a complete whole of his self-overcoming work, and thus I have been tempted to eliminate the constant pollution of self-overcoming as it turns to waste the very elements that functioned definitively in his text. I have been tempted to make Nietzsche’s passion and suffering definitive of more than their own momentary discourse and to see his passage through metaphysical thought as transcending his passage and opening up a better world beyond metaphysics. By purifying Nietzsche’s text in such ways, I have in effect overlooked and humbled their constant and trivial loss of significance, their mundane and qualified—Nietzsche called it their “faded”—truths, the truncation of their spirited leaps and lofty spirituality. I suppose that it is an axiom that when a text becomes the grounds of its own interpretation, when we wash out biography, personal motivation, historical limitations, and the multiple impacts of other nontextual forces—the messy texts that mix writing with the fragmented, semi-conscious disconnections of psychology, language, and cultural life—when we purify texts in such ways and then make texts the basis of our interpretation, we are within the power of the ascetic ideal, now a remnant of other discourses in which the ideal took its power from the images of perfect being and fallen being. We shall be alert to this remnant ideal and its considerable power as we attempt to think in and with Nietzsche’s genealogy of it. I hope to remain alert to the recoils in Nietzsche’s genealogy that transgress and pollute the circulations of meanings that might otherwise promise a purity of textual self-realization, but which, in their recoiling circulation, turn away from themselves by virtue of multiple, constituting, contesting powers. These powers recombine with each other in the discourse in a context of the concept of will to power that moves in a self-overcoming manner in his thought.

We have seen that the will to power, in its movement of self-overcoming, will not function as a self-maintaining discursive force. If we separate the will to power from its movement of self-overcoming, make it quasitranscendental, such that it provides a position outside self-overcoming, we will have yet another essence in terms of which to understand human life outside human life. But when we follow the will to power in its self-overcoming, it and whatever we find it investing in the text will be subject to self-overcoming. In the case of the ascetic priest, for example, the will to power, which provides the priest with a strange power of life-affirmation, means that the priest and its ascetic ideal are in the movement of self-overcoming, the very movement that this ideal denies. The middle voice of will to power is the voice that is refused by the active, meaning-giving assertions of the ascetic ideal.

And yet . . . And yet haven’t I been in the position of the spectator thinker as I have shown the discursive role of the spectator thinker, its recoils, its self-overcoming? Haven’t I maintained a subject’s power of representation? Haven’t I cleared out a space and given it meaning by my interpretation? Have I, too, been an ascetic priest, removed from the interests of fasting, bathing, and supplication, but resistant all the same to self-overcoming? I may know that the semantics of this book are delimited by the vacuum of their horizon and by the position I take regarding them. But I am a knower and a philosopher, and the spectator position of knowing and thinking is what I find in question. This finding may well reestablish a posture that resists self-overcoming. And in knowing this I am turned again, not by the force of my sincerity or of a will to truth, but by the clash of the knowing posture and a movement that will not know or be known by a spectator. Do I undergo a transvaluation? Am I decanted in my philosophical incantations by a discourse that has Nietzsche’s genealogy in its lineage?

What happens when I turn again to the ascetic ideal? Am I removed in this turn? Perhaps in the next section I shall be an Übermensch, or at least a guiding free spirit, and will bless us all in our release from the polluting herd who seek the assurances of the ascetic priest. Then I would know why I am so wise and why our work here is so significant. The danger, of course, is not only in such self-deception, but in the self-indulgence of speaking this way, in its cleansing power of confession. So I will look again at the ascetic ideal, wincing before its power within my stance, repelled by its traps, caught by its recoils, attracted by the possibility that I shall be purified by a recoiling ferment, and wondering whether the ascetic ideal masters its recoil and whether it masters me who seems to want to master the distance that separates me from Nietzsche’s discourse.

The question is whether this knowledge, which includes a recoiling movement with Nietzsche’s genealogy, is part of a springing movement away from the components of the genealogy that has occasioned and attracted it. This is a question of whether the spectator’s stance on Nietzsche’s genealogy in the lineage of Nietzsche’s genealogy is—in its vocabulary, values, and the very space of its thought—more distanced from the ascetic ideal than I at first thought it to be. I have been prepared to write that the spectator’s stance is a space of asceticism, that it cleansed the body of its density in a profound, middle-voiced self-deception. By moving to the text I wanted to be in a movement that recoiled from the ascetic ideal of the spectator’s stance. But now I find that this stance is in Nietzsche’s lineage and that the desire to leave the stance as much as possible is at once a desire to purify it by treating the text as though it were self-contained. If I hold this stance, do I stand in the rebound of On the Genealogy of Morals? Is this a self-maintaining posture without self-overcoming? Or is this reading of Nietzsche a space of fragmentation which, to use Blanchot’s phrase, relates without relation, which is rapport without rapport? An interrupted stance of a fragmented spectator? A broken space in the verge of Nietzsche’s recoil? A pollution of Nietzsche’s texts without a bad conscience? A stance that recoils in self-overcoming as it views self-overcoming in Nietzsche’s writing? A countervalence with Nietzsche’s text in the play of Nietzsche’s own counter valences, one that gives full rein to countervalences? Does self-overcoming self-overcome in this reading?

3. Genealogy and the Ascetic Ideal

Ascetic means self-denial by means of severe abstinence. Its antithesis, in our tradition, is sensuality and the body’s life. Yet, antithesis is hardly appropriate for body: already an asceticism is at work in my use of antithesis, as though body were a thesis that could be ‘anti’. Already too much meaning is bestowed on body, already the body’s density is denied in its affirmation as the antithesis of ascetic. From what does the meaning of the ascetic ideal derive? In part, Nietzsche says, it derives from the unstable equilibrium between the animal and the angel in humans and from the human desire to survive, that is, from the human will to will (GM III 1-2). A stability is imposed on this instability that pervades human mentation and animality, but this stability has fear and the will to will as its progenitors, and fear combined with the will to will is not the hallmark of stability. The ascetic ideal is generated by lack of stability, and it provides stability in instability: it promotes the very instability that it means to overcome. We may say that it recoils in its own instability. When we hold in mind that, according to Nietzsche, the ascetic priest generated the space for philosophical thought, we are prepared to see that this unstable stabilization is definitive of our traditional work, that to think genuinely and seriously as a philosopher is to be marked by the ascetic ideal. We find our thinking in question by virtue of the heritage of our endeavor.

The signature of the ascetic ideal is guilt: the felt and affirmed indebtedness of being an animal in association with the “angelic”; the guilt associated with an individual’s being an unjustifiable, meaningless breach, an individual’s lacking one central essence, an individual’s being under the authority of an image of centered unity in one nature that gives and takes life. To be this breach is to be a self in need of fundamental correction within a hierarchy of greater or lesser reality. To be this breach is to be guilty.

The discipline of the ascetic ideal is self-denial in the form of continuous correction and submission of the animal, the chaotic, the meaningless. It is a discipline that subtly humiliates the meaninglessness of life by imposing a meaning for life under the transcending authority of pure life/pure being. This is a discipline that calls for the spectator’s distance from the animal, the dense, the confused, the superficial, the vacuous.

The pervasiveness of this ideal in our tradition cannot be overstated on Nietzsche’s terms. Aside from its obvious relation to religious morality and practices, it structures both philosophical and artistic endeavor. It is found in the multiple goals of realizing a higher nature or spirituality by means of superior systems of morality, thought, and enjoyment, by the insights of privileged souls. We are naturally inclined by our discourses to find the highest forms of worship, the best forms of criticism, the most subtle wines, the loftiest music, the purest foods, the most salubrious methods of health care, the best causes for social action, the most sterling morality, the formulae for realizing our true and best nature, the best and truest thoughts. We are driven by our discourses to find the truth of ourselves by disciplines of self-realization and self-denial, like the athlete who trains for movement and endurance by austere denial of most satisfactions and by elevating a few severe activities over all others. When such endeavors are attached to the idea of virtue, we have at work the ascetic ideal and the shade of the ascetic priest.

The pervasiveness of the ascetic ideal suggests to Nietzsche the appropriateness of suspicion of our most passionate life-affirmations. He finds, for example, even in Wagner’s enthusiastic affirmation of sensuality an unconscious desire for redemption, conversion, and salvation. Wagner’s very seriousness betrays his chaste desire for truth in his revolt against the morality of his age: Wagner’s pious, driven seriousness is the carrier of the will to truth and the ascetic ideal of that will. We find the same kind of seriousness in the philosophical drive for exact and accurate thought, transcendental grounding for empirical or phenomenological description, and loftiness of spirit beyond the fallen world of everyday desire and occupation. “Every spirit has its own sound and loves its own sound,” Nietzsche says, and that sound in willing itself attempts to drive out other voices and to elevate itself in the form of hierarchies of value (GM III 8). Whenever we find exclusively self-authorizing systems of values—even if those values make sensuality primary—we find the ascetic ideal at work. Such structures of value will be poor in things of nonspiritual living; they will be pure and chaste in their discipline of forming hierarchies and humble before the authority of their truth, whatever their truth might be. Our values of careful objectivity, rational explanation, suspended belief in disciplined investigation, and serenity in the face of confusion and uncertainty: these we find, in Nietzsche’s genealogy, to be formed by and to express the ascetic ideal.

We are already familiar with Nietzsche’s descriptive claim that the disciplines of knowledge and morality are themselves unconscious expressions of will to power, and we note now that these disciplines are expressions of will to power in their ascetic ideal. The ascetic ideal is both an articulation of the unbridgeable breach in human existence, a breach that is bordered by what our tradition names spirit and animal, as well as by an expression of will to power. As unconscious will to power, the ascetic ideal is a forceful affirmation of human meaning that enables the human organism to affirm itself in the face of no meaning at all. As unconscious expression of the void of existence, it is an affirmation that radically denies its own occurrence and that sickens itself by willing its own denial in the very illusion of its self-affirmation. Nietzsche’s way of stating this paradox is that all willing that takes its direction from the ascetic ideal longs to get away from appearance, change, becoming, and death, and in denying the very elements of human life it denies its own happening and wills nothingness in the illusion of spirituality: the idea wills the void—death—in spite of itself (GM III 28). But it remains will. In spite of its debilitating itself in its self-denying will to truth and meaning, it wills, and the issue for us is how we are to think in this will that weakens its own organism by the non-self-conscious strategy of the ascetic ideal.

Such self-consciousness is at once a process whereby the ideal continually perishes. We note first that in Nietzsche’s genealogy we are not involved in an antithesis of the ideal, but in the ideal’s own development. The genealogy is characterized by recoil before the only self-contradictions that constitute the ideal, by the ideal’s lack of ideality in its ideal self-assertions, its dumbness, its impurity, hubris, and accumulation of power and authority. The genealogy’s wincing recoil expresses the ascetic ideal and is structured by it. The genealogy seeks—wills—the truth of the ascetic ideal and in this endeavor finds itself submitted to the law of self-overcoming that is found in traditional morality and thought.

But this recoil is compounded by another recoil. The genealogical knowledge coils again in the energy of ascetic self-awareness, now affirmed without repression, and in this compounding torsion it interprets itself by its own paradox and meaninglessness. The genealogy finds that its own meanings are breached by no meaning at all, that its order is always in the horizon of mere lack of order, and that it does not represent an antithetical position to the objects of its critique.

What is this nontheoretical, nonantitheoretical movement? In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche names it the “law of the necessity of self-overcoming” (III 27). In the context of guilt, self-overcoming releases and reinscribes its participants in guilt, “letting those incapable of discharging their debt go free” (II 10). Justice is overcome by a mercy closely associated with the Judeo-Christian experience of forgiveness. But that rendering names a quasi mercy that traditionally is itself spiritualized in the cruel and stringent terms of the ascetic ideal. It is a movement of self-overcoming in the history of resentment, but a movement that reinscribes traditional resentment and asceticism in a more stringent, yet more self-deceived, spirituality of justice and mercy.

The law of the necessity of self-overcoming means in part that no spirituality—religious or philosophical or aesthetic—has authority outside of its own configuration, and it means that its own unappropriated chaos will catch up with its own substantial self-deception and explode it like the recoil of a supernova. The will to power never rests in its expressions, and it never stabilizes the authorities by which it comes to stand in a given environment. It, too, is subject to self-overcoming.

For our purposes, an issue arises that has to do with the recoil of this law as it rebounds from itself in its authoritative status in Nietzsche’s discourse. Metaphysical readers of Nietzsche take this law, as well as his ideas of will to power and eternal return, to be claims about what is really real, and many interpret his position as nihilistic because metaphysically read he appears to mean that what is really real lacks ultimate meaning or sense: Nietzsche’s position then has the kind of negative purity that radicalizes the tradition of metaphysical skepticism. But such readings neither recognize the function of self-overcoming in the texts of this law and these ideals nor do they themselves engage in self-overcoming thought.

This law, the discourse of its authority, is part of the process of self-overcoming in the tradition of the ascetic ideal and the will to truth. Or we may say that it has authority on its own terms only in the organism of its own discourse. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche has shown that self-overcoming functions within Western morality as a law of life. This law presupposes that mere void is suppressed by the meanings of the ascetic ideal as well as assumes the paradoxical, decomposing void of its own meanings. Without the suppression characteristic of Western morality and its accompanying sickening and decomposition, the law does not occur. It is a law within the movement of the meanings of the ascetic ideal by virtue of those meanings’ combined refusal and unconscious expression of what Nietzsche variously calls void, nothingness, and breach. The function of Nietzsche’s interpretation of the law of necessity of self-overcoming is thus to undercut its own authority outside of its heritage by showing its genealogy and by maintaining the awareness generated by the genealogy.

We can see now that self-overcoming defines the movement of the ascetic ideal as well as of Nietzsche’s genealogical account of that ideal. Self-overcoming is not primarily a theory, but a discursive movement that he identifies in Western thought and practice as well as in his own writing. When self-overcoming is treated primarily as a theory or as a paradoxical kind of intentional activity, void and breach appear to be lost in the activity and passivity of the interpretive structures: it becomes another meaning that might perplex us but that we could not be said to think as we undergo it. We are not, however, the subjects or the objects of self-overcoming. As humans, as instances of Judeo-Christian humanitas, we are of it and it is a submerged movement as we live out its denial. It is a movement that by reverting to itself decomposes its own theoretical standing and rebounds beyond its possible meanings into nothing that is self-overcoming itself.

4. The Ascetic Ideal and the Ascetic Priest: “There Is
Nothing of Virtue in This”

According to Nietzsche’s genealogy of the Western philosopher, the ascetic ideal took one of its points of departure from the contemplative men who in early history were viewed by the rest of their society with hostility and mistrust. Their brooding inactivity contrasted negatively with the most valued activities of their cultures, and they needed to instill fear and hence be left untroubled if they were to survive and flourish. They also seemed internally divided and strange to themselves; in order to empower and authorize their misplaced inclination to lives of contemplation, they turned, without conscious strategy, on themselves that cruelty and castigation that normally was reserved for punishment. In becoming objects of their own tortured denials, they appeared to be related to sorcerers, soothsayers, and priests. Contemplation was thus wrapped in a protective mantle of wonder and divine power. By the fear that these proto-philosophers generated, at war with themselves in a struggle of energies that they could neither understand nor even contemplate, these priestly contemplatives provided themselves with both the social and psychological space and energy to “overcome the gods and tradition in themselves, so as to be able to believe in their own innovations” (GM III 10). Nietzsche suggests that the ascetic ideal had its impact in the early life of philosophy—primarily in India in the case of this account—as a power of deception and of overcoming the anticontemplative values that formed major parts of the contemplator’s identity: the self-overcoming of both the man of action and the ascetic priest in the contemplative man is part of the heritage and meaning of the ascetic ideal in the philosophical tradition.⁸

We note four points: The contemplative element was at first a peculiar kind of power that was an object of hostile contempt; it survived by becoming mysterious and fearful both to others and to the one suffering from it; the ascetic ideal functioned to overcome the previously anti-contemplative and dominant values and ideals; the combination of contemplative power and the ascetic ideal involved masking contemplation by means of the ascetic ideal, however, and setting in play the incompatibility of the ideal’s power and contemplation’s power in the values that arose from the combination. We thus expect in the combination of philosophy and the ascetic ideal a process that empowers contemplation and that also attempts to overcome contemplation. Since the ascetic ideal has become definitive for Western philosophy, this overcoming is self-overcoming. As both ascetic and contemplative, Western philosophy is at odds with itself. Self-overcoming, deception, the ascetic ideal, the ascetic priest, brooding wonder, an inclination toward neither activity nor the establishment of meaning, and the mutual incompatibilities of those elements are all constitutive of Western philosophy. Further, Nietzsche says that the power of contemplation has no intrinsic meaning, no roots in anything that has higher value. It is a physiological process that means neither separation from the world nor attachment to things in a predetermined way. It is a kind of power that is other than the belligerent extroversion that dominated the early social and psychological scene as well as other than the cunning, fearful extroversion of the ascetic priest.

The ascetic priest is the central figure in the meaning of the ascetic ideal both for Western philosophy generally and for Nietzsche’s own genealogy. In this figure we find both the structure of valuation that is in question and the process of self-overcoming by which the authority and meaning of the entire formation of the ascetic ideal loses its authority and meaning. The ascetic priest is the image by which Nietzsche’s own values come most clearly into question and by which self-overcoming is interpreted in this section of On the Genealogy of Morals. It—the ascetic priest—is like a pharmakos in this writing: it is the condition of its own outcasting, it purges a pollution, and it heals the wound that it signifies. It has one further function that we shall explore: its outcasting carries away with it the ideals of purity, healing, and health that give meaning to the pharmakos and its outcasting. This last, self-overcoming element is the one most specific in Nietzsche’s discourse.

We thus face the ascetic priest when we inquire about the meaning of the ascetic ideal for philosophy. We now come to grips “seriously” with the meaning of the ascetic ideal when we are “face to face with the actual representative of seriousness” (GM III 11). A triple recoil: as we return to the ascetic priest in this genealogy that constitutes a rebound from the ascetic priest, we find that our endeavor is wrapped in the kind of seriousness of which the ascetic priest is a representative. “Our” seriousness, however, is already mitigated—not absent, certainly, but diluted already by our manner of return to the ascetic heritage. The ascetic priest, said Nietzsche, is too interested a party to provide its best defense. It will confront us directly with full power, “confuting” [Widerlegen] us rather than helping us to trace its meaning. Our ability to ask about the meaning of the ascetic ideal and the ascetic priest shows a weakening of the ideal’s power—a daunting power in its full strength that buries questions under an avalanche of forceful meanings. This weakening of meaning and the consequent open space by which we return to the question of meaning in the ascetic ideal shows a power other than that of the ascetic ideal, a discursive power that appears to take place in the gaping of meaning and the alleviation in the demand for meaning rather than in either its perfection or its presence. The energy released in the loss of meaning will help us later to think of contemplation, contemplative thought, and self-overcoming without the hegemony of the ascetic ideal or the ascetic priest. For now, Nietzsche says, our relative distance in relation to the ascetic ideal will help us to “defend” the ascetic priest against ourselves. This is a “defense” that will trace the meaning of the ascetic ideal genealogically without the passionate, assertive Widerlegen of the ascetic priest in its desperate and unconscious articulation of will to power. Power confronts power in this genealogy, but the power of the confrontation is no longer controlled by the ascetic shepherd’s bestowal of meaning on all reality for the sake of his fearful, depressed flock. The power of this genealogical confrontation expresses a delimitation of the ascetic ideal, the lack of meaning that pervades its bequest of meaning.

“The ideal at issue [Gekampft] here is the valuation the ascetic priest places on our life” (GM III 11). The ascetic priest finds values in our life only if it turns against itself and by this turning becomes a bridge to another, quite different, invaluable life. This turn against mortal human life by mortal human life is itself a recoil “back to the point where it begins,” to the time of some type of straining violation and mistake. By recovering the original mistake or its image, we are able to evaluate correctly our lives whose worth is found only in their recoil to their origins and is found in a consequent self-denial in favor of obligations that originate outside of ourselves. And the profound disgust regarding ourselves, disgust that neutralizes the power of momentary satisfactions in sensuality, possession, and pride—what does this disgust mean? It means that someone is trying to live in spite of the enormous forces exerted against living. The recoil against ordinary living and its satisfactions is a mode of valuation by which the continuation of living is promoted. The very elements that depress and threaten continuation—affective deformation, decay, pain, ill fortune, ugliness, lack of esteem, the imminence of death, hopelessness, cosmic indifference—these elements in their discord are embodied in self-mortification and self-sacrifice. One finds meaning through them by coiling them again in ascetic ideals, making them the very elements by which human life is turned against itself and is enjoyed by grace of a higher meaning that is placed figuratively in relief by affirming the lack of meaning in human life: “triumph in the ultimate agony.”

The values of the ascetic priest constitute a process of self-overcoming in which the profoundly discouraging elements of life are turned on themselves in self-mortification; such recoil makes human life, in its self-denial, a “bridge to that other mode of existence” that is posited as an eternal, life-giving presence beyond our stained and forlorn way of being. The meaning of this self-overcoming recoil, in the senses of quailing, coiling again, and rebounding, is “an insatiable instinct and power-will that wants to become master not over something in life but over life itself, over its most profound, powerful, and basic conditions” (GM III 11). But the bridge to higher life is not physiological well-being, nor is that its goal. The bridge is self-denial in multiple forms of social and psychological life in which the agonies of living that show no meaning at all are re-enacted in the names of absent meaning and truth that are other than earthly life. Yet the driving force of asceticism is not meaning, the promise of meaning, or something like a lost homeland. The driving force is instinctual power, a mere urge to exist that means nothing. It is also the energy that enables us to enjoy the meanings of the ascetic life, as well as the energy of the seductive power of asceticism that enables us to go on in spite of meaninglessness, suffering, and death.

Seriousness about meaning suggests to Nietzsche, then, a return to the error, to the ontological erroneousness of human life and to the alleviation of error by a will to meaning that has as its meaning an escape from the meaninglessness of its world and willpower. Seriousness about meaning, in the context of the ascetic ideal, is “an incarnate will to contradiction” (GM III 12). It is a wonderful phenomenon that violently wipes out the gods of nature, cruelty, and expropriation—the divine forces of creation and destruction with no hint of ultimate care—in processes of continuous self-denial that produce continuous, if resentful, self-affirmation in the name of a life without contradiction or malice. The ascetic ideal functions by a movement of reversal, like that found in such traditional philosophical claims as “there is a realm of truth and being, but reason is excluded from it,” or “things are so constituted that the intellect comprehends just enough of them to know that for the intellect they are—utterly incomprehensible” (GM III 12). The reversal is found in claims that things with which we have contact can be known only by an agency that is distant from them and that occupies a purer, less contaminated realm of reason and consciousness. In all such claims, the ascetic reversal is found in affirmation of life or truth or meaning by way of separation from the things to be known or affirmed in traditional ways. Usually the reversal develops in the concepts and beliefs regarding transcendence, whereby human existence is truncated in its difference from what is higher, better, more true, and without perspectival stance. In the heritage of the ascetic ideal the will to live is preserved by the cultivated desire to be in touch with a form of life that is different from our own fragmented lives and by realizing the difference of the desired form by squandering (sacrificing, which is to say, investing) the life one has at one’s disposal.

As the mediator of the differences between higher and lower forms of life, the figure of the ascetic priest wields the enormous power of providing hope for us in our misfortune and hopeless pain. By wounding itself through hunger, celibacy, disciplines that counter the body—the disciplines that bring to experience a world different from ours and a life beyond our reach—the ascetic priest provides the miracle of reversing life-denial and profound depression into life-affirmation and the will to live. This kind of resurrection has moved Western metaphysics as few other powers have. Nietzsche’s claim is that this figure constitutes the pattern by which contemplative power has polluted itself in both its fear of itself and its fear for its survival. The unconscious tactic becomes part of an unconscious identity, but one that is fissured by contradictions that issue in continuous recoil and self-overcoming. Ascetic self-overcoming is self-destructively obsessive because it regularly loses itself by repeating its own pattern: it repeats itself in a future of repetitions that reinstitute the absent transcendence that both cuts it and delimits it. It is an obsession with and, in the unaccepted, unacceptable absence of its ideal.

Yet, ascetic self-overcoming in the form of self-denial, truncated as it is in its own denial, is self-overcoming nonetheless, and the figures of the ascetic priest and the ascetic ideal are definitive of Nietzsche’s genealogy of them. In seeing how this is so, we shall see how the definitive structure of valuation in Nietzsche’s discourse is self-overcoming and how the possibility of valuative thinking comes into question. It is Nietzsche’s own self-overcoming that raises the question of ethics, and this self-overcoming is simultaneously the self-overcoming of the ascetic priest. Thus, a major aspect in the formation of traditional philosophical thought and evaluation no longer assumes the figure of self-denial but that of self-affirmation. The distance that enables this genealogy to “defend” the ascetic priest and the ascetic ideal is the distance necessary to affirm the ascetic priest in its meaning by affirming self-overcoming—but in this case, self-overcoming without self-denial. It is a distance that allows for a middle voice of self-overcoming that takes momentary priority over the stances of activity and passivity. Self-overcoming without self-denial both permeates Nietzsche’s discourse and has its basis in the ascetic ideal’s violent, anxious, and blindly combative heritage. In this affirmation the obsession with self-denial in the ascetic ideal’s heritage is broken. Self-overcoming comes self-overcoming like a vortex that is finally released to flow no longer in the repetition of self-denying formations, but in a dispersion of possibilities previously withheld from this heritage. Nietzsche’s distance from the ascetic priest is a distance of self-recognition in which the seriousness of meaning for life is weakened enough to allow an affirmation of its own self-overcoming movement. In Nietzsche’s experience one can think in this movement and not die. One can think it and become more alive.

The movement of self-overcoming in the ascetic ideal in Nietzsche’s account thus involves the following aspects:

1. Part of the ascetic ideal’s meaning is found in five elements of unconscious will:

(a) Sensual attraction, that is, its seductive charm—“a touch of morbidezza [found] in fair flesh” in women; “the angelic look of a plump pretty animal.” The ascetic ideal intensifies the sensual by dissembling it.

(b) Its justificatory power for weak and incapable people: we can see ourselves as too good for this world, “a saintly form of debauch” that provides a sense of significance amid pain, boredom, and flawed activity.

(c) The means of attracting power and justifying it among religious leaders—the Gandhi or St. Francis syndrome whereby an ascetic individual, or, in many cases, the seemingly ascetic individual or group, is given enormous leverage because they deny their bodies and in a broken way become the image of both the ascetic ideal and the self-overcoming will to will.

(d) The means of expressing lust for everlasting association with life by self-denial. Nietzsche calls it the cupidity of saints.

(e) Always, in all its forms, the meaning of the ascetic ideal is found in human horror in the face of mere emptiness, the “human horror of a vacuum.”

2. The meaning of the ascetic ideal gives expression to the vacuum that it intends to overcome. This “higher spirituality” is a type of willing that fills mere lack of meaning with images, goals, projects, and ideas that mean nothing beyond their own endeavor. They express the vacuum that they propose to overcome.

3. The continuing factor in all types of the ascetic ideal is the will to will. Humans would “rather will nothingness [i.e., the ideals of life-denial] than not will at all.”

4. The ascetic ideal developed out of previous, opposite valuations and fear of life as structured by those valuations. The opposite values that Nietzsche finds prior to what we call civilized life or history include cruelty, dissembling, revenge, slander of reason, the good of danger, etc. (III 9). The ascetic ideal developed as an internalizing of these values in forms of denial that inverted love of life into suspicion and malice toward life. Cruelty, for example, turned into love of the weak and sick coupled with a dissembling self-denial and its consequent suffering in the form of weakening and sickening human lives.

5. The meanings and strategies of the ascetic ideal give both form and content to philosophy. They are found in the withdrawn contemplative spirit of wisdom, “nonjudgmental” objectivity, suspicion of the senses and of sensuality, lofty rejection of everyday life, and the priority of representation and belief over creation and assertion.

6. The ascetic ideal in philosophy undergoes transformation by its genealogical account into a different kind of freedom and thinking. We are able to represent to ourselves the seriousness of this ideal in a history of its striving for the rights of representation (III 10). We can describe the ideal’s drive to “compel its acceptance,” how it promotes its own growth and prosperity in the life-inimical species that it breeds, how it seeks to master life by its life-denial. This drive for mastery that turns against its own life has led to suspicion of its own life-mastery, to questioning and doubt regarding its own truth. Its self-denial turns against itself in genealogical thought. Its commanding self-absorbed perspective has recoiled upon itself and produced new genealogical knowledge of itself. Its blind refusal of meaninglessness has been transformed into a reassertion of its own meaninglessness, into a denial of its own meaning. This means that the recoil of the ascetic ideal on itself, with its disgust over life, has transformed its own nay-saying into yea-saying by the transvaluation of founded meaning into meanings that are created and affirmed in the midst of no meaning at all.

7. The self-overcoming of the ascetic ideal is a movement in Nietzsche’s genealogy. In this case we can say that self-overcoming, not a perspective, a law, or a form of life that rejects the ascetic ideal, is Nietzsche’s thought in his account of the ascetic ideal.

5. “Probably It Infects Even Us”

The ascetic priest’s own self-overcoming movement is found in part in the interplay of denial and affirmation that structures the ascetic ideal: “The no he says to life brings to light, as if by magic, an abundance of tender yeses; even when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, of self-destruction—the very wound itself afterward compels him to live” (III 13). The life of his self-denial compels him to live with intensity and passion and in this sense his life is self-seeking and self-affirming. But the future of this life is severely delimited by the fear of life that moves the ascetic ideal. Fear of life is expressed as continuous repetition of values that embody the ideal. In the ascetic ideal’s power a person is repelled by the (self-overcoming) life that moves in the denial. Not-this-life is willed intensely: that is the sickness, the nihilism, of Western contemplation as it developed into the mainstream of our philosophical heritage. Denial of the self-overcoming movement that characterizes the life of the ascetic ideal is definitive of this sickness. The move out of depressed fatigue with life in its ambiguity, meaninglessness, and suffering is blocked by the factors of fear and denial, and the yes made possible by the ascetic priest turning denial against itself is lost in the obsessive quailing before things as they are. Until this fear and denial recoil against themselves, wince before their recognized and, in that sense, affirmed self-contradiction, the release of self-overcoming that silently infests the ascetic ideal is lost.

The suppressed movement of life-affirmation in the dominant structure of life-denial makes possible the self-overcoming of self-denial. This is the first of three aspects that we shall note concerning the self-overcoming of the ascetic ideal. The affirmation of life-affirmation, however, which under the circumstances is also an affirmation of self-overcoming, is the missing element of the ascetic ideal. When the ascetic ideal recoils in this affirmation in the movement of Nietzsche’s genealogy, the life-affirmation that is suppressed by life-denial rebounds to form a different and productive focus of thought and living. We find this focus at work in Nietzsche’s genealogy of the ascetic ideal as he overcomes the ideal through his affirmation of its force within his own discourse. We shall turn to that force after we consider a second self-overcoming element in the ascetic ideal.

The life-affirmation at work through the ascetic priest is found in the exploitation “of the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of self-discipline, self-surveillance, and self-overcoming” (III 16). By the consolation that the ascetic priest and the ascetic ideal provide, those besotted with “guilt, sin, sinfulness, depravity, damnation,” those people who are thoroughly defeated in their lives, turn the defeat on themselves by means of practices and disciplines that institutionalize their lostness. One effect of such consolation is to create communities of the consoled, which separate them from those who are able to live without sin or consolation. There are two self-overcoming factors in this part of Nietzsche’s description: that of a falling back under the force of life, and that of rebounding in restrained self-surveillance and self-negation. In this instance the self-destructive, depressed self is overcome by its own consoling denial and becomes the life-affirming, life-denying contradiction that we examined in the previous two paragraphs.⁹

We note with emphasis “the chief trick” of the ascetic priest (GM III 20). Nietzsche’s clear insight that our traditional experiences of “ecstasy” [Entrücken] are affiliated with the maintenance of guilt, both as fallenness from transcendence and as moral failure, will help us to see the structural play of the affections of transcendence within the ascetic ideal. In Part Two (Sections 2-6) of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche shows that cruelty and suffering are components in the formation and functions of memory, that memory is affiliated with a person’s promising a future action and affiliated as well with contractual relations in which the debtor is guilty in the senses of being inadequate to some demand or need and borrowing in response to the demand or need. The capacity to make promises, a capacity that is bred in suffering and cruelty—suffering and cruelty are parts of the ‘life’ of promising—this capacity includes an individual’s indebtedness to the future in a present inadequacy and by expected completeness vis-à-vis future events. Promising includes the individual’s ability to affirm itself in its painful inadequacy. The individual can promise itself in its inadequacy to the future. Part of the self-overcoming of guilt is found in ecstatic—that is, future-oriented—confirmation of guilt, which is now a genealogical condition of the body and mind that could otherwise exist without guilt. This ecstasy is one of standing out into the future and removing oneself from the limits of the present. For Nietzsche, ecstasy is a matter of temporal transcendence based on a capacity to make promises. The ascetic priest’s chief trick of providing life-affirmation by means of life-denial is thus unconsciously in the lineage of the cruelty of memory’s formation. Paradoxically it embodies the continuing fissure of indebtedness to the future in its own self-overcoming movement as it attempts to overcome guilt. While Nietzsche’s account of guilt emphasizes relations of time, however, the ascetic priest’s formulation is organized by the idea of the perfect, judging, transcendent being. The ascetic priest takes ecstasy as transcending time by a relation to a nontemporal being. The priest’s “trick” is to appear to transcend the temporality that constitutes the ecstasy: to affirm life by negating its dispersing temporality. On the contrary, Nietzsche finds ecstasis in the structure of time: an individual stands out of the present by promising a future yet to be and by remembering a past that is no longer. His is a temporal ecstasis, whereas the ascetic priest’s is an ecstasy of standing out of time into a timeless reality. The latter transcendental ecstasy denies the temporality of its own occurrence—denies its life—in its ideal of transcendence.

The strategy at issue here is the principal means of relieving life-threatening anxiety that is unbearable for many individuals. Emotional intensity is cultivated by pulling people away from the senseless suffering of life by “raptures” [Entzückungen] of feeling; that is, they are carried away from life [entrückt] by the delight [entzückt] of affections that embody the idea that everything, and most particularly suffering, has meaning. The enraptured person stands out [ek-stasis] from temporal, physical, sensuous, mortal existence in an “orgy” of meaning-affect (GM III 20). Instead of low-energy melancholy, he or she thus experiences intensity of anger (righteous indignation), fear (those who look upon the face of God shall die), voluptuousness (Jesus the groom), meaning-saturated despair (Where art Thou, O Lord, in my hour of need?), etc. The feelings or morbidity are overcome in the ecstasies of guilt in which one knows oneself to be in the forgiving judgment of a righteous God.

Traversing these feelings are reasons for suffering and injustice: we are guilty before God, shortfallen and inadequate, bound to err, in desperate need of a redemption in which the failures of human life are made good by the healing God. We come to know ourselves in this transaction, this rapture, as beings who find in their guilt reason to live in the light of a transcendent divine meaning for life. The cruelty of this ecstasy is found in its wrenching a person from the conditions of self-enhancing life and projecting them into a structure of fallen, always guilty life, bowed before a higher life. Suffering means just punishment from which one is released by grace. The self-overcoming element of this ecstasy is found as guilt is turned on itself, clarifies itself, and comes to know itself in the processes of its own escape. The “sickness” of perpetuated guilt is the genealogical condition for a return to that “health” in which the meaninglessness of suffering-guilt is affirmed and the ‘meaning’ of the ascetic ideal is thereby overturned.

We could view this overturning as itself a kind of rapture in which a new affection of life-affirmation takes place. But in that case we must separate it from the ascetic ideal’s meaning of ecstasis. For Nietzsche, life-affirmation stands inside, not outside, the meaningless suffering of life; the move to the Übermensch, a being beyond guilt and redemption, is not a transcendent ecstasis, but one of living through and going beyond the heritage of conscience. (In chapter 5 we shall consider whether Heidegger’s account of the ecstases of temporality avoids the ascetic ideal and its escape from time.)

The second self-overcoming factor is found in the “creation of a chasm between healthy and sick” (GM III 16). In this instance, the countervalence is not internal to the conscience of the ascetic ideal but is the divide between the communities of consolation and individuals who do not need the ascetic ideal’s strategies of survival in the face of the meaninglessness of life. The chasm between these differences is itself a gap without meaning, a mere difference that makes possible a coiling again of the energy of those who are not suffocated by resentment so that they are released for creative work beyond the limits of the saved and the damned. This chasm makes possible the development of bodies that are not (de-)formed by the “physiological depression” of life-defeat.

A third movement of self-overcoming is found in the apparent opposition of the ascetic ideal and the disciplines of modern knowledge. These disciplines have embodied opposition to the blind beliefs of the moral and religious traditions, have been nurtured by the values of enlightenment, and generally have “survived well enough without God, the beyond, and the virtues of denial” (GM III 23). But philosophical knowledge in particular is also characterized by faith in the value of truth. “This unconditional will to truth is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if as an unconscious imperative” (GM III 24). This faith is the moving force of modern knowledge and thought, and is an internalization of the ascetic ideal by which contemplative people protect and explain themselves. Because of it, people search for knowledge and think that they discover meaning and truth everywhere they turn. In this faith, truth appears to have a transcendent status. It stands beyond mortal life, is pure in relation to the tarnish of coming to be and passing away, and makes poor our humble attempts to approach it. This faith requires a sharp division between the sensuous body and its passing achievements on the one hand and the agency whose promise it is to know truth and perhaps become true on the other. In this faith, knowledge and thought are disembodied, spiritualized, and given disciplines of abstraction and separation from the world. The ascetic ideal creates this value. Philosophy and the other disciplines of knowledge are formed by it. In philosophical knowledge and thought, the “affects grow cool, the tempo of life slows down, dialectics in place of instinct, seriousness imprinted on faces and gestures (seriousness, the most unmistakable sign of a labored metabolism, of struggling, laborious life)” (GM III 25).

This unconscious collaboration of the ascetic ideal and modern disciplines of thought and knowledge defines the structure of self-overcoming in Nietzsche’s genealogy. The issue is one of meaning—the meaning that generates and maintains abstraction and separation from the living, temporal, and changeable movements of that meaning. Nietzsche emphasizes the negative roles of sensuality, fundamental change, physical processes, and mortality on the one hand, and robust, self-accepting self-assertion on the other. The negative recoils in the processes of abstraction and separation include quailing before the mortal, mutational life of ‘truth’, quailing usually in the form of fear, disgust, and anxiety; falling back under the impact of meaninglessness; rebounding in types of life-denial; and coiling again in disciplines, ritual repetitions of imposed meanings, petty pleasures, uncritical and unsuspicious obedience, and emotional outpourings that enhance guilt, that is, a sense of fallen and unworthy distance between one’s ordinary physical and psychological life and some transcendent perfection such as truth. Nietzsche’s discourse takes part in these recoils. His is a genealogy in which the will to truth attains self-consciousness and finds in that process that truth evaporates in a will to will.

“All great things,” Nietzsche says, “bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming: thus the law of life will have it, the law of the necessity of ‘self-overcoming’ in the nature of life. . . . In this way Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality; in the same way Christianity as morality must now perish too: we stand on the threshold of this event. After Christianity truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the question ‘what is the meaning of all will to truth?’” (GM III 27). This is the question that controls Part Three of On the Genealogy of Morals. It is the question that moves the discourse, and it means that Nietzsche recognizes in his thought the moribund life of Christian morality and the ascetic ideal. He continues, “What meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?” [emphasis added]. The problem of the genealogy of the ascetic ideal is the meaning that constitutes it, Nietzsche, and “us.” “As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness—there can be no doubt of that—morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, questionable, and perhaps the most helpful of all spectacles” (GM III 27). The meaning and truth—the ethos—of Nietzsche’s own genealogy is thus in question.

“Our” account of Nietzsche’s genealogy of the ascetic ideal has as one of its own genealogical aspects something that Nietzsche’s did not have: Nietzsche’s genealogy. We have verged on thinking beyond Nietzsche as we have organized his writing in a voice that was not his to control—the middle voice of self-overcoming—and as we have followed the effects of that movement. We have not undergone his pain over the loss of infinite meaning, for example. We have not felt Zarathustra’s nausea. We could say this is because we have not felt deeply enough or spiritually enough. But we know that Nietzsche has put in question the meanings of both ‘depth’ and ‘spirituality’, and we pause before capitulating to their attraction. The ambivalence that Nietzsche experienced between laughter and terror over the loss of founded, teleological time need not be so poignant for us as it was for him when we have undergone the movement of his discourse. Whereas he struggled to find courage to endure the self-overcoming of both religious and moral beliefs, the passage of the monopolizing power of those beliefs has yielded to a much less troubled discursive organization. No matter how frequently we participate in religious and moral faiths, we may know that their meanings are optional and may feel, perhaps with keen alertness, the vacuum of human meaning; we may know this and yet feel no inclination to worship, to search for truth, or to look for transcendent justification of our values or continuity of meaning among our transactions. We know that both religion and morality may well carry not only their own means of destruction, but may well be destructive for us when we live by them. These emotions and this knowledge indicate part of the effect of Nietzsche’s self-overcoming. We can be no more than tempted by aspects of our tradition whose passing threatened catastrophe for Nietzsche.

On the other hand, we do not need to look beyond ourselves to register the continuing effects of the ascetic ideal. I have said that one of this ideal’s phenomena is found in our own reading of Nietzsche. But we can also trace the effects of self-overcoming in the weakening of those emotions that collect around the loss of foundations, the nineteenth-century ideas of subjectivity, God, and the power of the idea of unity. The traces of Nietzsche’s self-overcoming are found as well in the growing attraction of the ideas of breach, division, fragment, scission, void, torsion, recoil, verge, and horizon. There is probably a strong temptation for us to feel satisfaction in intellectual types of humility, poverty, and chastity regarding texts, and one way beyond the ideal is concentration on self-overcoming which recoils and repeatedly occurs without reestablishing a center of focus that escapes the voice of its own overcoming. In this case, self-overcoming does not suggest dominance and exclusion in the name of the traditional notion of right. Alternatives to the traditional ethics of suppression and outcasting, to the insistence on founded meanings, might emerge from this movement. Even that hope, however, may legitimately raise our suspicions. The nonethics of self-overcoming doubtlessly threatens the loss of those satisfactions we feel when we struggle for right and justice understood according to their inherited meanings. But in the recoil of self-overcoming that overthrows morality from within its own genealogy, and in the rebound to options that we cannot foresee, we might expect less of that asceticism that is able to affirm life only by distorting it in the names of meaning and goodness, that remembers only by outcasting its mere vacuum, and that fears its margins even more than it fears its closure to its own voice of self-overcoming.

Has a springing out from Nietzsche’s genealogy occurred during the writing and reading of this chapter? Has there been a recoil in our reading of Nietzsche, a recoil that moves in, to, and beyond the horizon of Nietzsche’s thought? In On the Genealogy of Morals, the ascetic ideal comes to a horizonal awareness in which the genealogical discourse on the ascetic ideal recoils in the discovery that it has given its own lineage and found itself in the ascetic ideal, not beyond it, but aware in it, and this awareness appears to give a different horizon from that of the ascetic ideal, one aspect of which is the question of ethics. This genealogy discovers itself as a spectator of the ascetic ideal and as a recoiling part of the ascetic ideal. In willing its own truth, the genealogy wills the self-overcoming recoils that move without awareness in the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche’s genealogical discourse moves beyond the ascetic ideal only in the sense that it affirms the recoils that pollute the ascetic ideal and that infect it with self-overcoming and with the vacuum to which self-overcoming bears witness.

I have emphasized this discursive movement, not the experience of a genealogist, not the self-consciousness of an individual, but the discourse that puts the genealogist beyond the reach of any instance of consciousness or experience. Is this reading in the springing movement of Nietzsche’s genealogy a different product from what he would or could have done? In recoiling back to Nietzsche’s genealogy, are we one step removed from the ascetic ideal that his genealogy found within its own discourse? Or are we still within the penumbra of the ascetic priest, entranced by the play of shadows, less aware of the priest’s shadow than Nietzsche was? My dilemma is found in the posture of a thinking and rethinking that distances, disciplines, and purifies Nietzsche’s texts. My question is whether there is a recoil in this distance that is springing from the part played in our lineage by Nietzsche’s genealogy, whether in coiling again my own discourse is under the force of Nietzsche’s spring which pushed his own language to a place in which the individual’s experience could be undone by discourses that move in recoils that are of the language’s own making. My clue has been that the vacuum no longer seems so terrible, that Nietzsche’s pathos is less intense in a lineage that has sprung from his work, that the space of spectating might be able to will more freely its own pollution of meaninglessness and differences without identity.

I am ending with the question of thought and a question of ethics, with questions that do not demand answers but demand, rather, their own continuation as questions by recoiling on themselves, with the thought that the priority of question recoils in Nietzsche’s affirmation of self-overcoming, an affirmation that moved thought through the nihilism of self-overcoming to self-overcoming as a spring for thought without the necessity of asceticism’s denial of its own self-overcoming movement.

The distance of our stance is thus in question. Nietzsche might call it the pathos of distance. If this distance moves in a springing recoil of Nietzsche’s genealogy, if it is a distance of recoiling “in vain” (GM II 28), then it is not a purified space for meaning but a movement of question without answer, a movement that in recoiling on itself produces neither solution nor moralities, but produces a quality that approaches us as a shade without a will to certainty, a Dionysian quality that is the voice of self-overcoming. The discipline of the distance of our stance regarding Nietzsche is found in maintaining the priority of question. Does this discipline recoil on the ascetic ideal of the Wissenschaften? By maintaining the priority of question, are we engaged in a self-overcoming of the ascetic ideal in our work as philosophers? Do you find it disconcerting, as I do, that we, by this discipline of distance regarding Nietzsche’s texts, have less of the ascetic ideal to live by? Less intensity? Less meaning? Do we find more to will—more will—in this loss of meaning? Can we be philosophers who do not mortar and fill in the cracks among the fragments of values and meanings? Can we as philosophers suffer and parody the ‘why’? Know without wanting to be wise? Read with laughter the great thoughts, and live without heroes? Can we maintain the distance of the questioning discourse in Nietzsche’s recoils? Or must we once again return to the comforts of the ascetic priest, will meaning among all things, and answer the question—why human existence at all?—in order to have the energy to think and to be?

The question of ethics is found in the self-overcoming of Nietzsche’s discourse. It is not a question that is structured by a group of values that oppose another group, but is rather embodied in a way of thinking and knowing that comes to its consciousness as it “affirms” the limits of meaning in the surpassing transgression of no meaning at all. Nietzsche’s genealogy does not attempt to find the thought and language that will make its limits of expression or the limits of expressiveness—the difference of no meaning at all—into a nonevaluating ‘power’ in a discursive organization. That is one of the issues that Nietzsche’s self-overcoming left for thought and contemplation. He made the question of ethics unavoidable in his thought and brought faith in meaning and in the will to truth to their own limits in such a way that the question of ethics becomes conspicuous in his self-overcoming genealogy.