Abstract
In his treatise On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche elaborates some cardinal aspects of a theory of linguistic performativity, which links language to physiological dimensions. These dimensions are effects of linguistic acts, but also outcomes of a deeper biologic-cultural inheritance of humanity. Linguistic mnemonic techniques and the promise put themselves mutually into effect and reveal their physiological background humanising and dehumanising the human being. The major focus of this paper is directed at the relationship between the performativity of language and its physiological, but also “divine” (pre)conditions.
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Notes
- 1.
As Werner Hamacher puts it, “In the promise, the promise promises itself, the fact that it is a promise” (1998: 66). Nietzsche stands here on Kantian grounds. The promise already appears as a paradigmatic case or act of morality and is related to the will, already in Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten. At the same time, these passages from On the Genealogy of Morality engage in an implicit dialogue with Kant’s reflections on morality. Cf.: 1998: 65–66.
- 2.
As is well known, Kant put this in the form of the categorical imperative. (“Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a Universal Law of Nature”). See also: Gadamer 1987: 181. The categorical imperative excludes exception: 179.
- 3.
Hamacher 1998: 100. As is well known, Heidegger interpreted Nietzsche’s thought and its place in the history of philosophy as a metaphysics of the will to will. (Nietzsches Wort ‘Gott ist tot’. Heidegger 2003: 234). This, of course, can also be challenged (cf. Henning Ottmann 1987: 358; Hamacher 1998: 108.) on the basis of the present context too.
- 4.
See also: the First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality: “And just as the common people separates lightning from its flash and takes the latter to be a deed, something performed by a subject, which is called lightning, popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of strength, as though there were an indifferent substratum behind the strong person which had the freedom to manifest strength or not. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; ‘the doer’ is invented as an afterthought,—the doing is everything. Basically, the common people double a deed; when they see lightning, they make a doing-a-deed out of it: they posit the same event, first as cause and then as its effect.” (26).
- 5.
“…den Menschen des eignen unabhängigen langen Willens, der [this “der” may bear to “Mensch” as well as to the “Wille”] versprechen darf…” Nietzsche 1887: 293.
- 6.
Cf. Derrida 1997: 98.
- 7.
An essay by Volker Gerhardt brings these into harmony, arguing that “‘Active forgetfulness’ disciplines man into an active and reliable creature” (Gerhardt 2011: 252). I would say that, on the contrary, it is not so much forgetfulness, but rather the mnemonic technique of forgetfulness that disciplines man. Gerhardt emphasizes all through the importance of the individual, and the reliability of man realized in the promise. The irony of Nietzsche’s text (especially in the pseudo-hymnic passages on the sovereign individual) goes unnoticed in Gerhardt’s smoothing, levelling, stabilizing interpretation. Ottmann misreads this passage in the same way, not paying attention to the irony, or at least, the ambiguity of the text (1987: 212). Cf., on the other hand, the literary scholar, Hamacher’s rigorous interpretation (1998: 85–86). Kai Behrens mentions the “figurality” of the semantics of the “moralized mnemonic technique” in the text (2005: 110). For certain rhetorical effects of the text, see: 164–168.
- 8.
- 9.
Cf. also Borsche 1992: 307.
- 10.
“There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing;’ the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’” (2007: 13).
- 11.
See Deleuze 2006.
- 12.
Nietzsche probably borrows the term “plastic power” from Jacob Burckhardt, who uses it to describe the culture of the Italian Renaissance: “Finally, these intellectual giants, these representatives of the Renaissance, show, in respect to religion, a quality that is common in youthful natures: they distinguish keenly between good and evil, yet they are conscious of no sin. They believe that every disturbance to their inward harmony will be resolved by virtue of their own plastic resources, and therefore they feel no repentance. Thus the need for salvation became weaker, while the ambitions and the intellectual activity of the present either shut out altogether every thought of a world to come, or caused it to assume a poetic instead or a dogmatic form.” (1960: 252). See: Kittsteiner 1996: 56. The essay, despite its title, does not deal with forgetfulness. Cf. also: Figal 1999: 52–53, 265. On the Nietzsche-Burckhardt relation, see also: Ottmann 1987: 18–21, 48–51. On Nietzsche’s notion of the “Renaissance” see ibid. 281–292).
- 13.
See on the notion of the “afformative” as a pre-performative Hamacher 1994: 340–374.
- 14.
Nietzsche often evokes this idea of the secondariness of consciousness in various forms. For example, according to a pseudo-genealogical passage of The Gay Science—which also clarifies the causes of the present self-annihilation of the West—consciousness comes into being as an organ for reading “signs,” as dependent upon, or as an index of communication: “consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication […] Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this-the most superficial and worst part-for only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness.” Nietzsche 1974: 298–299. He varies this thought on a vital-physiological level as the origin of morality in a notebook entry: “All intensification (Erhöhung) of life increases (steigert) the communicative power of man and his understanding power too. Our empathy with other souls does not originally mean anything moral, but only the physiological stimulatability involved in mesmerism: ‘sympathy’ or what is called ‘altruism’ are only the products of a psychomotor connection generally understood as belonging to the spirit (Ch. Féré calls this induction psycho-motrice). We never communicate thoughts, but rather movements, mimic signs that we read retrospectively (zurückgelesen), having considered the thoughts.” (Nietzsche 1887–89: 297).
- 15.
Cf. Tomasello 2014.
- 16.
Ibid. 46, 87–88. Tomasello does not deal with the promise.
- 17.
As Derrida also makes it clear: “There is no ethics without the presence of the other but also, and consequently, without absence, dissimulation, detour, différance, writing. The arche-writing is the origin of morality as of immorality. The nonethical opening of ethics. A violent opening. As in the case of the vulgar concept of writing, the ethical instance of violence must be rigorously suspended in order to repeat the genealogy of morals.” (Derrida 1997: 139–140).
- 18.
Cf. Ottmann 1987: 266. This has been already anticipated in On the Uses and Abuses of History, “For since we are now the products of earlier generations, we are also the products of their aberrations, passions, mistakes, and even crimes. It is impossible to loose oneself from this chain entirely. When we condemn that confusion and consider ourselves released from it, then we have not overcome the fact that we are derived from it. In the best case, we bring the matter to a conflict between our inherited customary nature and our knowledge, in fact, even to a war between a new strict discipline and how we have been brought up and what we have inherited from time immemorial. We cultivate a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that the first nature atrophies”. Nietzsche 1998: 270.
- 19.
The last sentence of the book applies this to the rhetorics of scientific discourse too: “These are all coordinative phenomena through and through, and it is almost inconceivable that they arose evolutionarily from some nonsocial source. Something like the shared intentionality hypothesis just must be true.” A hypothesis that must be “true,” is certainly not a hypothesis, but “the truth” (declared by the same “authoritative voice,” analyzed some pages earlier).
- 20.
Nietzsche replaces “selection” by “interpretation:” “The will to power interprets: there is interpretation in the constitution of an organ. This will determines and separates the levels, the differences in power. The differences of power, however, would not be able to see themselves as such: there must be a being willing to develop, which interprets each other being willing to develop considering its value. […] In fact, interpretation is itself a method to surrender something else. (Organic processes require constant interpretation).” (1885–87: 139–140).
- 21.
Cf. Ottmann 1987: 229; Figal 199: 247–251.
- 22.
- 23.
The text enumerates the metaphors of violent inscription and dismemberment at length.
- 24.
These are Hamacher’s terms (1998: 83).
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
The Birth of Tragedy equally makes a distinction between music and its manifestation, the will.
- 27.
As is well established, Plessner described the ontological mode of being as “excentric positionality” among others, where “excentric” still remains an adjective next to the noun, “positionality.” Heidegger speaks about an “ex-istent,” “ec-static” mode of being, which, just like the often discussed “Da” and “Dasein,” cannot be reduced to the concept of positionality.
- 28.
Heidegger 2010: 322–324.
- 29.
Cf. Simmel 1907: 248–250. (The last chapter of the book is titled “Die Moral der Vornehmheit,” “The Moral of Nobility.”).
- 30.
Nietzsche 1887: 325. In these sentences resonates Burckhardt’s doctrine about the moral in the Renaissance: “The awakening of the conscience was by no means necessarily followed by the sense of sin and the need for salvation (…) but this contempt for repentance must automatically extend to the sphere of morals, because its origin, namely the consciousness of individual force, is universal.” 1960: 279.
- 31.
- 32.
And Nietzsche goes on to say, as if anticipating Freud, “This secret self-violation, this artist’s cruelty, this desire to give form to oneself as a piece of difficult, resisting, suffering matter, to brand it with a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a ‘no,’ this uncanny, terrible but joyous labor of a soul voluntarily split within itself, which makes itself suffer out of the pleasure of making suffer, this whole active ‘bad conscience’” (2007: 59).
- 33.
- 34.
On hypnosis, as included in structures of normal perception, on the relationship between hypnoses and automatisms, on the problematisation of rationalist and voluntarist concepts of subjecthood, and on the cultural techniques of hypnotic trance in the second half of the 19th century, see: Crary 1999: 65–72.
- 35.
At one point in the third essay of The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche contrasts Plato with Homer: “Plato versus Homer: that is complete, genuine antagonism—on the one hand, the sincerest ‘advocate of the beyond,’ the great slanderer of life, on the other hand, its involuntary idolater, the golden nature” (2007: 117). We should pay attention to the literal antagonism between “greatest benevolence” and “involuntary.” (Cf. Simon 2016: 14–29).
- 36.
Cf. Derrida 2011.
- 37.
Nietzsche’s other aphoristic remark can point to a more basic meaning: “We have already gone beyond whatever we have words for.” (“Wofür wir Worte haben, darüber sind wir auch schon hinaus.”) (1889: 128).
- 38.
Speech act theory only reaches this established, determined, authorized level of the promise “I confine my discussion to full blown explicit promises and ignore promises made by elliptical turns of phrase, hints, metaphors, etc. I also ignore promises made in the course of uttering sentences which contain elements irrelevant to the making of the promise. I am also dealing only with categorical promises and ignoring hypothetical promises, for if we get an account of categorical promises it can easily be extended to deal with hypothetical ones. In short, I am going to deal only with a simple and idealized case.” Searle 1969: 55–56. Derrida was right to claim that “I am convinced that speech act theory is fundamentally and in its most fecund, most rigorous, and most interesting aspects […] a theory of right or law, of convention, of political ethics or of politics as ethics” Derrida 1988: 97. For the concept of “making explicit,” and its role in speech act theory, see Campe 2005: 17–39. For Searle’s theory of the promise cf. Wolf 2005: 41–56. In this sense, Searle’ concept of commitment presupposes and inscribes a kind of institutionally supplemented perlocution into the mode of being of the promise, dependent upon the other’s counter-signature.
- 39.
Schneider 2005: 12. While Hobbes equated this force making the promise with the will, Nietzsche does not make such an equation, according to Schneider.
- 40.
Or, as Derrida puts it before Agamben: “An oath is a bond in human language that the human tongue, as such, insofar as it is human, cannot loosen. In human language is a bond stronger than human language. More than man in man. In human language, the element of translation is an inflexible law that at once prohibits the translation of the transaction but commands respect for the original literalness or the given word. It is a law that presides over translation while commanding absolute respect, without any transaction, for the word given in its original letter. The oath, the sworn faith, the act of swearing is transcendence itself, the experience of passing beyond man, the origin of the divine or, if one prefers, the divine origin of the oath. […] When I swear, I swear in a language that no human language has the power to make me abjure, to disrupt, that is to say, to make me perjure myself. The oath passes through language, but it passes beyond human language.” (2001: 185). For the Ancient Greek use and conceptual history of the oath, see: Marót 1924. With regard to Austin, see also: Kulcsár-Szabó 2017: 95–122.
- 41.
Paul de Man famously rewrote Heidegger’s main “thesis” with a Freudian accent: “Die Sprache verspricht (sich).” see “Promises” in Allegories of Reading.
- 42.
Nietzsche was also the philosopher of affirmation (Ja-sagen).
- 43.
Here, language comes into play as the correlative or metaphor of action, or else, as the metonymy (spectre) of action.
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Lőrincz, C. (2020). Noble Promises: Performativity and Physiology in Nietzsche. In: Kulcsár-Szabó, Z., Lénárt, T., Simon, A., Végső, R. (eds) Life After Literature. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33738-4_7
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