Abstract
Throughout this book, we have been developing, with Freudian resources, an account of qualified freedom. Human interpretation crucially enters into inheriting our personal and cultural histories, negotiating the demands of society, and expressing the basic drives possessed by embodied beings, but that activity also emerges out of these different conditions and is constrained by them. Nineteenth-century German philosophy tries to make sense of a divided self whose relation to the world and its own psyche are deeply troubled — limited epistemically and afflicted by forces that problematize its capacity for rational self-determination. We have discussed various attempts to come to terms what it means to be a situated subject: Fichte’s appeal to the Anstoss, the hermeneutic circle, and Marx’s challenge to the distinction between thinking and matter, among others. However, no philosopher challenges the model of the sovereign, self-possessed subject more than Nietzsche, whose work decisively rejects the faith in reason and progressive history that reaches its culmination in the work of Hegel.
We are all suffering from a consuming fever of history and ought at least to recognize that we are suffering from it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”
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Notes
Comparisons between Freud and Nietzsche include Daniel Chapelle, Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993);
Ronald Lehrer, Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought: On the Origins of a Psychology of Dynamic Unconscious Mental Functioning (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995);
Reinhard Gasser, Nietzsche und Freud (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997);
and Paul-Laurent Assoun, Freud and Nietzsche, trans. Richard L. Collier, Jr. (London: Athlone Press, 2000).
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), I:2.
Ibid., I:12. Many scholars have compared the will to power to Freud’s conception of the drives. See the sources listed in Note 1 above as well as Ofelia Schutte, “Willing Backwards: Nietzsche on Time, Pain, Joy, and Memory,” in Nietzsche and Depth Psychology, ed. Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ronald Lehrer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 111–26;
and Robert Grimwade, “Freud’s Philosophical Inheritance: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Psychoanalytic Review 99, no. 3 (June 2012): 359–95.
Nietzsche’s claims about the will to power have an ambiguous status, because he suspects that what counts as natural is humanly constructed and then treated as if it were objective. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses the Stoics of constructing a view of nature and then justifying their moral account with reference to that supposedly unchanging nature, discovered through reason (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage, 1966], §9). Given this understanding of how the concept of nature is used, it is not clear whether the description of the will to power is a literal metaphysical account of human nature (along the lines of Schopenhauer’s position) or an interpretation of nature from our historical perspective.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), “The Four Great Errors,” §7.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), §3.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), §344.
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 144.
See Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 32–50.
Richard Schacht, “Nietzschean Normativity,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future, ed. Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 152.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), “Why I Am A Destiny,” §1.
Maria Talero, “Temporality and the Therapeutic Subject: The Phenomenology of Transference, Remembering, and Working-Through,” in Rereading Freud: Psychoanalysis through Philosophy, ed. Jon Mills (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 176.
On the issue of trauma as a breach in the mind’s experience of time, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 10–24, 57–72. Caruth emphasizes the unmediated nature of trauma (how an event is imprinted on the psyche without being interpreted in any way), which contrasts with our reading in this chapter. Ruth Leys critiques Caruth’s view, on the basis that it ignores the role of the retrospective investment of meaning (Trauma: A Genealogy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 266–97). Nonetheless, in both interpretations, trauma distorts the relationship between present and past, and hampers the subject’s ability to construct a coherent narrative about her own life.
Jean Laplanche, “Notes on Afterwardsness,” in Essays on Otherness, ed. John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999), 260–65.
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 99.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), II:20 (“On Redemption”).
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© 2013 Matthew C. Altman and Cynthia D. Coe
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Altman, M.C., Coe, C.D. (2013). Nietzsche: The Therapeutic Function of Genealogy. In: The Fractured Self in Freud and German Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263322_9
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