THE HUMAN ANIMAL NACH NIETZSCHE re-reading zarathustra's interspecies community

Abstract

This article examines the double account of the human in Friedrich Nietzsche's writings. Genealogically, Nietzsche insists that humanity is a tamed herd that attacks its own animality. Philologically, this human – through anthropomorphism – sunders itself from those aspects of language that are not representational. Read in relation to this double critique, the article argues that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an attempt to imagine an entirely different relation between politics and language, one that enables a thinking of a future without dominion and responds to the crisis of human rights and the humanities today.

Keywords:

•  Nietzsche
• the human
• animality
• language
• politics

Notes

I would like to thank John Mowitt, Julietta Singh, and the Angelaki reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Their advice greatly improved the essay.

1 The German preposition “nach” means, among other things, both “according to” and “after.” This essay is concerned with Nietzsche's account of the human animal and with the continuing relevance of this account for the present moment, especially as it has been extended, revised, and engaged by a range of thinkers “after Nietzsche.”

2 That is, the critiques of Arendt and Agamben force a questioning of the power of human rights that does not necessarily require concerning oneself with any beings other than humans.

3 Bruno Latour's Politics of Nature shares in this project as well, although the solution that Latour proposes – legislative “houses” made up of human and non-human agents – strikes me as entirely anthropomorphic.

4 My use of “chez” follows Samuel Weber's remarks in “Reading and Writing Chez Derrida”: translating chez as “in the work of” is

imprecise inasmuch as the attribution or localization signified by the word chez is not to be equated with a relation of simple interiority or inherence [ … ] Such a translation would be especially misleading in regard to a thinker, one of whose major motifs has always been the reassessment of the values of interiority, immanence, and inherence, as well as of the underlying opposition, “inside/outside,” on which these values repose. (87)

I make no claims in this essay about “Nietzsche's thought,” as if such a thing could be positively identified or known. I refer only to some of his texts.

5 On this point, Nietzsche is in agreement with writers such as Kant. In On Education, Kant writes that discipline is “that influence which is always restraining our animal nature from getting the better of our manhood, either in the individual as such, or in man as a member of society. Discipline, then, is merely restraining unruliness” (18). Where they differ is in the valuation of this production. For Kant, becoming human is the highest possible form of culture. For Nietzsche, it is a degeneration into sickness. While Kant takes pains to say that there is something in the human that restrains and is higher than its animality, for example in the final section of the Anthropology, “The Character of the Species” (232), he also has a rather complex account of the human's indirect duty toward animals. See The Metaphysics of Morals, “The Doctrine of Virtue” §16 (192), and §82 of the Anthropology (168–70). For commentary on the role of the animal in Kant's morality, see Timmerman (94–95, 162–63), and Llewelyn.

6 This phrase owes much to Bataille's and Blanchot's readings of Nietzsche. In The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot writes of Bataille's thinking about language: “far from claiming to keep it solely for himself, his constant concern was that it should not be affirmed in solitude but communicated, although it is also an affirmation of solitude. He once called it friendship, the most tender of names” (211). See also the title essay in L'Amitié by Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida's The Politics of Friendship. The phrase is also suggested by a letter (dated 30 July 1881, and postmarked Sils Maria – the site where Nietzsche found “eternal recurrence”) to Franz Overbeck, in which Nietzsche refers to himself and Spinoza as “at least a solitude of two” (Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche 177). Nietzsche's references to Spinoza are, as is well known, extremely inconsistent. Sometimes an adversary, sometimes a friend or precursor, this reference to their shared “solitude” evokes precisely the complexity I wish to sound in “communities of solitaries.”

7 One of the most crucial studies of this “Selbst-Tierquäleri” is Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. They write: “What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts” (2).

8 See, for example, the section of Twilight of the Idols called “My Idea [Begriffe] of Freedom” (64–65). Duncan Large translates “Begriffe” – the word almost always translated into English as “concept” – as “idea,” which renders invisible to the English-language reader the entire problem we are working through. Nevertheless, this translation acknowledges that when Nietzsche produces concepts they are certainly not concepts in the Kantian sense (cf. Critique of Pure Reason, First Division, Book I: “Analytic of Conceptions” 53–67).

9 Patton's essay “Nietzsche and Metaphor” appears in Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, and is a reading of Kofman's Nietzsche and Metaphor. Patton's thesis is that Kofman's drive to read Nietzsche psychoanalytically leads to some confusion in her thinking of the relation between metaphor and concept. In order to bring Kofman's reading into relief, Patton refers to the Derridean and Deleuzian readings of Nietzsche. He writes:

Both Derrida's defense of generalized metaphoricity and Deleuze's dismissal of the concept of metaphor may be traced back to this Nietzschean problematic. In his work alone and with Guattari, Deleuze repeatedly denies the existence of metaphor in philosophy and affirms only the creation of new concepts. Although Derrida draws attention to the play of metaphor in the texts of philosophy, he argues in “White Mythology” both that the concept of metaphor is a philosophical concept and that it is thoroughly imbued with metaphor. Like Deleuze, he denies the existence of any principled distinction between concept and metaphor, preferring the term catachresis to refer, by analogy, to the philosophical invention of new concepts. (98)

10 In addition to the well-known fact that Nietzsche's texts are full of poems, aphorisms, and (parodic) narratives, Gary Shapiro's Nietzschean Narratives is important here:

Suppose [ … ] that we read Nietzsche's notebooks as we do those of a novelist. Then we could read Nietzsche's narratives for the stories they tell without either reconstructing a secret unwritten philosophy [ … ] or committing ourselves to a process of deconstructing whatever there was in his writings that seemed to constitute a meaningful expression. (34)

I take “deconstruction” to mean something other than what Shapiro means here, something that, in fact, takes a reading like Shapiro's as its Ansatzpunkt.

11 On “tracing” and “différance” see “Différance” (in Margins of Philosophy), Speech and Phenomena (a deconstruction of the notion of “presence” in Husserlian phenomenology), and Of Grammatology. The “solitaries” in communities of being-in-common are not self-same. They are neither alone with themselves nor “themselves” when they are with others. They are not “liberal individuals” with (self-)presence. Speech and Phenomena:

This movement of différance does not happen to a transcendental subject. It produces it. Auto-affection is not a modality of experience that characterizes a being who will already be itself (autos). It produces the same as a relation to (it)self in the difference with itself, the same as the non-identical. (92; my translation)

12 This “communism” is not exactly that imagined by Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Mau or any other proper name linked to the word in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. It is better thought in relation to the names Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, and Giorgio Agamben. The word “end,” in quotation marks, refers both to the collapse of “really existing” socialism at the end of the twentieth century (which is still ongoing in China, Cuba, etc.) and to the closure of this project: “end” as closure, telos, and collapse. After this “end,” one can only re-treat. To re-treat is to deconstruct.

13 Gary Shapiro, in Nietzschean Narratives, writes:

The animals, however, seem unable to grasp the problem of language; in Zarathustra's world an animal may be able to talk but it cannot reflect on its own talk in metalanguage [ … ] Zarathustra is still affectionate with his animals, but makes it clear that there is something missing from their account. (81)

What is missing is a properly “human” relation to language, a use of language that is aware of itself. This awareness is usually captured by the philosopheme “as such”; animals may speak, but they don't relate to things as such in their speech. Through a long and complex series of moves, Heidegger, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, arrives at the conclusion that the animal exists in its environment in a state of captivation, a captivation that is remarkable in the fact that in it the animal has world but does not have the world “as such.” Heidegger writes: “We must say that world does not mean the accessibility of beings but rather implies amongst other things the accessibility of the beings as such” (269). This “as such” is, first of all, given by Heidegger to the human because the human, unlike “the animal,” has language and the “as such” is in the first instance a type of linguistic relation – it must always be marked with the “as such” in whatever language one speaks/writes. For commentary, see Derrida's Of Spirit and The Animal That Therefore I Am, Agamben's The Open, and Calarco's Zoographies.

14 As the notion of retreat – “le retrait” in French – has been worked out by Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, it means both to treat again (to re-read carefully and patiently) and to make withdraw or to withdraw from the initial treatment. Beginning from Derrida's essay “The Ends of Man” [Les Fins de l'homme], they have proposed that such a re-treat can only happen at the “end” (as completion or telos and as collapse). As the title of Derrida's essay suggests, it is not just the humanities that have reached an end but “the human” itself. In order to respond to the crises of human rights and the humanities, we must re-treat the human by tracing it again and by withdrawing from it. We have to learn to let go of being human.

15 This “my” is not easy to read. Those readers who take “Zarathustra's animals” as metaphors or figures tend to read this “my” as implying ownership. For these readers, the “my” indicates that the eagle (pride) and snake (discernment) are aspects or images of Zarathustra. Heidegger, for example, writes: “However, Zarathustra's animals are not chosen arbitrarily: their essence is an image of Zarathustra's proper essence, that is to say, an image of his task – which is to be the teacher of eternal return” (Nietzsche II: 45). In the reading I am proposing, the “my” is an indication not of ownership but of friendship, of the being-in-common shared by solitaries. The animals do not belong to Zarathustra, nor are they merely part of him; rather, they are with him. To put this differently, Heidegger reads like a vivisectionist, extracting the animal as a figure.

16 See The Animal That Therefore I Am. The most crucial distinction here is between reacting (which any animal may do) and responding (which is supposedly possible only for humans), a distinction that Descartes insists upon in Discourse on Method:

And I paused here particularly to show that, if there were such machines having the organs and the shape of a monkey or of some other nonrational animal, we should have no way of telling whether or not they were of the same nature as these animals [ … ] we would always have two very certain means of telling that they were, for all that, not true men. The first means is that they would never use words or other signs, putting them together as we do in order to tell our thoughts to others. For one can well conceive of a machine being so made as to pour forth words, and even words appropriate to corporeal actions that cause a change in its organs – as, when one touches it in a certain place, it asks what one wants to say to it, or it cries out that it has been injured, and the like – but it could never arrange its words differently so as to answer [répondre: respond] to the sense of all that is said in its presence, which is something even the most backward men can do. The second means is that, although they perform many tasks very well or perhaps they can do them better than any of us, they inevitably fail to do other tasks; by this means one would discover that they do not act through knowledge, but only through the disposition of their organs. (32)

17 Beyond Good and Evil:

So far as the superstitiousness of logicians is concerned, I do not tire of emphasizing again and again one little briefly stated fact which these superstitious ones do not like to admit. It is simply this: A thought comes when “it” will and not when “I” will. It is thus a falsification of the evidence to say that the subject “I” conditions the predicate “think.” It is thought, to be sure, but that this “it” should be that old famous “I” is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion. Above all it is not an “immediate certainty.” In the end even “it is thought” says too much. Even this “it” contains an interpretation of the process and does not belong to the process itself. Our conclusion here is formulated out of grammatical custom: “Thinking is an activity; every activity presumes something which is active, hence [ … ]” (18–19)

18 See Deleuze's book on Leibniz titled The Fold. See also Foucault's The Order of Things:

Strangely enough, man – the study of whom is supposed by the naïve to be the oldest investigation since Socrates – is probably no more than a kind of rift (déchirure) in the order of things, or, in any case, a configuration whose outlines are determined by the new position he has so recently taken up in the field of knowledge. Whence all the chimeras of the new humanisms, all the facile solutions of an “anthropology” understood as a universal reflection on man, half-empirical, half-philosophical. It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle [pli: fold] in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered [trouvé: found] a new form. (xxiii)

19 Kathleen Higgins writes: “The overman is a kind of place-holder for the aim of human aspiration toward greatness” (143).

20 In Jacques Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am this takes the form of re-writing “animals” as “animots,” a world that can only be read (not heard, since it sounds “the same” as the French plural animaux). Our access to “animals,” for Derrida, is only through “mots,” words. That is, the concept of “the animal” prevents us from thinking animal singularity.

21 This is what is most commonly known as “dehumanization.”

22 The site at which the thought of “eternal recurrence” comes to Nietzsche on 14 August 1881; see Klossowski, especially chapter 3.

23 On birds in Nietzsche's texts, see Shapiro's Alcyone and his essay “The Halcyon Tone as Birdsong.”

24 “Song,” like other music, is to be understood as issuing from elsewhere than “the animal.” Although this is only a first, provisional step, it could be associated simply with “birds.” What matters here is not a concept of “the bird” but the actual, material songs produced by singular birds.

25 This could also be the “Nightwanderer.” “Wandeln,” intransitively, means to walk or stroll; transitively it can mean “to change.”

26 Hollingdale, no doubt because of the adjective “trunken,” translates this as “The Intoxicated Song.”

27 The difference is, quite simply, the difference between a thinking (which the animals produce) that insists that everything returns, and a thinking that takes eternal recurrence as something “selective.” What is not selected is, precisely, the self, the self-same. Eternal Recurrence is a thought of becoming. See Klossowski, and Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy.

28 In Nietzschean Narratives, Shapiro writes that “Zarathustra's insight into eternal recurrence cannot be communicated in the prosaic manner that the animals first attempted” (93); it must be sung.

29 The poem is “Fadensonnen” and it is quoted here, with slightly modified translation, from Ian Fairley's “Introduction” to his translation of Fadensonnen & Eingedunkelt as Fathomsuns and Benighted.