Violence, Economy and Temporality 163

PETER SEDGWICK

VIOLENCE, ECONOMY AND TEMPORALITY.PLOTTING THE POLITICAL TERRAIN OF

ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALITY

“all great ages must be paid for –”1

Recent years have seen what Herman Siemens has called “a surge of inter-est […] especially in the Anglo-American world” in the political relevance ofNietzsche’s thought.2 This increased interest has been accompanied by anxiety.Daniel Conway, for example, has written insightfully of a Nietzsche who posespolitical questions that leave us facing the stark, possibly despotic consequencesof his “immoralism”.3 Equally, interpretations that seek to figure Nietzschewithin a democratic agenda – for instance, the work of Mark Warren, LaurenceHatab and Alan D. Schrift – have provoked troubled responses. On the one hand,there are those who respond by refusing to acknowledge any political dimensionto Nietzsche’s philosophy. Such a view is propounded by commentators such asThomas H. Brobjer and Brian Leiter. According to Leiter, Nietzsche “has nopolitical philosophy, in the conventional sense of a theory of the state and itslegitimacy […]. He is more accurately read […] as a kind of esoteric immoralist, i. e.,[as] someone who has views about human flourishing, views he wants to com-municate to the select few”.4 For Leiter, Nietzsche’s emphasis upon a trans-formation of the individual renders questionable the legitimacy of associatingany project of political change with him.5 Such an approach epitomises the

1 Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. NewYork 1968, section 864.

2 Siemens, Herman: Nietzsche’s Political Philosophy: A Review of Recent Literature. In: Nietz-sche-Studien 30 (2001), pp. 509–526, here p. 509.

3 Conway, Daniel W.: Nietzsche and the Political. London 1997. Nietzsche, Conway argues, “daresto raise a calamitous, and previously unapproachable, question of political legislation: what oughthumanity to become?” (p. 3). Asking what we ought to become raises “the founding question ofpolitics”. Such a question, when combined with the fact that “nothing Nietzsche says definitivelyrules out the illiberal political regimes with which his name has been linked” (p. 4) should makeus anxious, for the path we might thereby be tempted to follow may lead to tyranny.

4 Leiter, Brian: Nietzsche on Morality. London 2002, p. 296.5 Ibid., p. 302. Of course, there are immediate objections to this kind of approach. It seems

strange, for example, to think that a project of individual transformation is devoid of political

164 Peter Sedgwick

“hardly defensible” strand of Nietzsche studies that Don Dombowsky hassingled out for criticism (specifically in relation to Thomas Brobjer).6 But Dom-bowsky is also wary of overtly political approaches to Nietzsche that tend to readhim as being “compatible with a radical democracy or radical democratic ethos.”7

Such readings “never proceed without notable exclusions, and thus, their argu-ments are seriously compromised.”8 Pro-democratic readings of Nietzsche causeDombowsky unease because they conceal aspects of Nietzsche’s work that oughtto worry anyone with democratic sympathies. For example, his lack of sympathywith egalitarianism, or his affirmation of the necessity of domination and exploi-tation. The question Dombowsky poses is simply: how is it possible to reconciledemocratic ideals with a thinker whose praise of agonistics is “basically compat-ible with the commitment to perpetual war or permanent confrontation charac-teristic of fascist ideology”?9 Although critical of aspects of Dombowsky’s inter-pretation of Nietzsche10 for Christa Davis Acampora, too, Nietzsche’s radicalquestioning of authority poses a serious problem to any democratic rendering ofhim, for it is a questioning which she doubts “any political order (in so far as it re-mains an ordering) could sustain.”11

From these briefly cited examples it should be clear that worries aboutNietzsche and politics take on a specific form. The political ramifications ofNietzsche’s thought cast a questioning shadow over the terrain of political the-ory and above all its central concern with the legitimacy of political authority. In

implications. Equally, it is unconvincing to hold of someone, as Leiter in effect does of Nietz-sche, that if they do not have an explicitly articulated theory of politics this necessarily means theydo not have a politics. One might add to this the fact that the assertion that Nietzsche lacks anytheory of the state is contradicted by the fact that the Genealogy offers an explicit account of theorigins of state and civil society (GM II, 17 – see also the discussion below).

6 Dombowsky, Don: A Response to Alan D. Schrift’s “Nietzsche for Democracy?”. In: Nietzsche-Studien 31 (2002), pp. 278–290. For a critical account of Brobjer’s approach see Dombowsky,Don: A Response to Thomas H. Brobjer’s “The Absence of Political Ideals in Nietzsche’s Writ-ings”. In: Nietzsche-Studien 30 (2001), pp. 387–393.

7 Ibid. The people Dombowsky has in mind here include not only Alan Schrift, but also WilliamConnolly, Laurence Hatab and Mark Warren. See Connolly, William: Political Theory andModernity. Oxford 1989; Hatab, Lawrence J.: A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy. AnExperiment in Postmodern Politics. Chicago, Il. 1995; Warren, Mark: Nietzsche and PoliticalThought. Cambridge, Mass. 1988.

8 Ibid., pp. 278–9.9 Ibid., p. 287.

10 Acampora, Christa Davis: Demos Agonistes Redux. Reflections of the Streit of Political Antag-onism. In: Nietzsche-Studien 32 (2003), pp. 374–390. According to Acampora, Dombowskyis guilty of the same selective attitude to textual exegesis that he criticises the likes of Schrift for,namely “stitching [texts] together in a rather haphazard manner” (p. 377).

11 Ibid., p. 375. Acampora nevertheless remains open to being persuaded, in so far as it might,following Hatab, be possible to situate this agonism “at the margins of a democratic polity”.Such a view, of course, presupposes an agonism that somehow respects the notion of boundariesand stays where it is supposed to …

Violence, Economy and Temporality 165

this regard, the views expressed by Conway, Dombowsky and Acampora findresonance in Jürgen Habermas’s contention that Nietzsche is to be countedas one of “[t]he ‘black’ writers of the bourgeoisie”.12 This is the Nietzsche whounmasks the rationality of bourgeois liberalism in such a way as to question thevery basis of democratic societies. A Nietzsche who looks likes this is boundto cause anxiety in a readership who understandably find much of value in hisbooks and yet whose liberal-democratic outlook is more or less presupposed.

The urge to recuperate Nietzsche for democracy may have more in commonwith the desire to deny him any political significance at all than at first appears.We should be sensitive to the possibility that both tendencies may be expressionsof the same anxiety. In both instances, what is significant concerns not Nietz-sche’s thought (not the content of his books) so much as the fact that he is ren-dered acceptable as an object for intellectual consumption within a contempor-ary, democratic environment. A Nietzsche who can be enlisted in favour ofdemocracy stands out from that environment almost as little as a Nietzsche whohas nothing to say about politics. In either case, one has a Nietzsche who is, inthe narrowest of senses, “environmentally friendly” in so far as he cannot in aserious manner pose dangerous, even unthinkable questions about the value ofthe kind of politics “we” effectively endorse. Perhaps we need to discover andface a Nietzsche who occupies a rather different plane: a Nietzsche who disturbsus; a figure whose thinking we ought not feel the need to erase or sanitise, thethinker akin to that hinted at by Conway, Dombowsky and Acampora. Thiswould be a Nietzsche who has an, at best, unsettling effect upon our politicalpresuppositions.

I should say at the outset that I endorse the view that there is an inexorablypolitical aspect to Nietzsche’s writings. Whatever Brobjer or Leiter may say,Nietzsche, for one, seems to have been in little doubt concerning his own politi-cal destiny: “Only after me will there be grand politics on earth.”13 The problem ishow to approach the question of this political significance. In this regard, DerekHillard has offered valuable insights on Nietzsche’s conceptions of exchange,power and history. According to Hillard, “exchange is at the heart of Nietzsche’sconcept of historical transition.”14 He shows how Nietzsche employs a conceptof economy that operates by way of the interaction between a “formal ‘exchange

12 Habermas, Jürgen: The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theo-dor Adorno. In: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cam-bridge, Mass. 1987, p. 106. Nietzsche is contrasted here with those “dark” bourgeois thinkers(Machiavelli, Hobbes and Mandeville) who, unlike Nietzsche, were constructive rather than de-structive critics of bourgeois thought.

13 Nietzsche, Friedrich: Ecce Homo. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth 1986, “Why I am aDestiny”, 1.

14 Hillard, Derek: History as Dual Process. Nietzsche on Exchange and Power. In Nietzsche-Stu-dien 31 (2002), pp. 40–56, here p. 40.

166 Peter Sedgwick

principle’ that provides […] an interpretative framework for meaningful con-tent” and an “indeterminate element of ‘domination’ through which a currentinterpretation replaces one previously in existence.” The central point to graspabout Nietzsche’s notion of economy, Hillard argues, is that it is taken by himto be the “more or less immutable”15 structural precondition of all forms of dis-course. Human society and history in all its diversity emerge from this condition.In what follows I shall concentrate on just one of Nietzsche’s books, On the

Genealogy of Morality.16 I develop Hillard’s position, but seek also to supplementand thereby go beyond it. Thus, where Hillard’s interest lies principally in historyand exchange, I focus on the importance Nietzsche’s notion of economy has forhis articulation of temporality in general (past, present and future possibility)rather than history alone. This general temporal framework is developed out ofthe notion of economy. The pattern this development takes is exemplified byNietzsche’s account of prehistory. Nietzsche’s conception of prehistory is one inwhich a primordial economy of violence sows the seeds of humanity’s futurepotential. Consequently, violence is a key feature of Nietzsche’s conception ofeconomy and cannot be ignored. The linked themes of temporality, economyand violence form the basis of Nietzsche’s account of human nature. They areto be found at the root of his analyses of self-consciousness, value, reason,and freedom. Taken together, temporality, economy and violence mark out thepolitical terrain of Nietzsche’s thought. Their conjunction gives rise to his con-ception of history, the domain of all human aspiration and hence of “grand

politics”. An awareness of the manner in which these elements are linked isnecessary for any critical discourse on the politics of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Inelucidating it I turn first to the question of history and temporality.

1. History and Temporality.

Nietzsche proposes we engage in thinking “a real history of morality” (GM pref-ace, 7). This historical exposure of values is no mere tourist trip; one does notpass by this newly revealed landscape like an Odysseus, immune from the effectsof the Sirens’ call. A history of this kind changes us – or ought to. It presents uswith the “new demand ” to “evaluate the value of these values”. The significance of the“real history” Nietzsche extols thereby extends in two directions simultaneously:backward into the past and forward into the future. From this it should be clear thatnot merely the historical past but temporality in general is among the Genealogy’s

15 Ibid., p. 44.16 Nietzsche, Friedrich: On the Genealogy of Morality (GM). Ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson. Trans.

Carol Diethe. Cambridge 1994.

Violence, Economy and Temporality 167

significant preoccupations. Past, present and future taken together are central toNietzsche’s treatment of morality, with the primary significance of history resid-ing in its role as a prelude to thinking about the future. As Nietzsche notes, whatis at stake is not so much uncovering the “origin” of morality but the larger ques-tion of “the value of the ‘unegoistic’, the instincts of pity, self-denial, self-sacri-fice” (GM preface, 5).17 The dominance of these instincts, for Nietzsche, char-acterises the Christian ideal of the “good man”. Nietzsche’s rebellion againstthese instincts is well known and there is no need to rehearse it here. However,the manner in which the Genealogy formulates this rebellion is worth consideringfor it has important implications for understanding his treatment of temporality.

According to Nietzsche, the “good man” has been held to be the surestmeans of ensuring the future of humanity. Selflessness and pity are thought of asvirtues: they are generally taken to define what is civilised and thereby ensure thefuture progress of civilisation. As Nietzsche presents it, therefore, a mode oftemporality (i. e. the future) stands as the guarantor of Christian moral discourse.Nietzsche can now invert the image he has proffered: what if the purportedly“good” person were in actuality a “regressive symptom”, “a danger, an entice-ment, a poison, a narcotic, so that the present lived at the expense of the future? […]So that precisely [Christian] morality itself were to blame if man, as species,never reached his highest potential power and splendour” (GM preface, 6). A questionmark is thereby placed over Christian morality by invoking the wider frameworkof temporality in general (the historical past, the living present, and the possiblefuture). The future, not the past, invites us to formulate a judgement concerningthe value of Christian morality. What has been the case is important in so far as itrelates to what will be the case. Questions of morality concern questions of timeand possibility rather than timeless conceptions of right and wrong.

2. Time and Economy: Progression and Regression

In so far as the questioning of Christian morality that Nietzsche proposesinvokes time it is also invokes economy, for the framework he articulates here isat the same time one that concerns questions of profit and loss. What is at stakein morality, Nietzsche is asserting, needs to be grasped in terms of the limits thatmust be placed upon a certain kind of expenditure in order to ensure the futureof humanity. This amounts to claiming that if we wish to attain a genuine under-

17 Nietzsche’s “real history” is written as a polemical exposure of the “blindness” that characterisesour faith in morality. See, Stegmaier, Werner: Nietzsches “Genealogie der Moral”. Darmstadt1994, p. 66. As such, it seeks to demythologise ethics. For further reflection on the question ofmythology see section 8, below.

168 Peter Sedgwick

standing of the nature and significance of ethics we must use a standpoint thatconjoins temporal and economic concerns. Past, present and future need to bethought of as economic articulations, of the saving up and profiting from humanpotential or squandering and losing it.

Nietzsche’s use of the phrase “symptom of regression” (Rückgangssymptom)to describe the “good man” demonstrates this connection in stark terms. Mostobviously, the “good man” is presented as symptomatic. He expresses the realisedpower of the unegoistic instincts that become manifest as the “morality of pity”.For Nietzsche, the key characteristic of the morality of pity is illusion. What pres-ents itself as objective, naturalised morality is in actuality a concealed desire forpower. Privileging the kind of self-understanding epitomised by the “good man”testifies to this desire. The interests the “good man” indicates by way of his pres-ence in the world are what really matter to Nietzsche. It is because the “goodman” is indelibly associated with these interests that Nietzsche takes him to sig-nify “regression”. It scarcely needs to be said that to call something regressive isto imply that it is in some sense a throwback to an earlier state. Nietzsche’s useof the phrase “symptom of regression” thus also invokes the temporal structurealready discussed. Now, however, this structure is one within which the envision-ing of the regression or advancement of humanity becomes the central issue. What isat stake in morality is nothing less than the future of humanity. From the stand-point of the future, what is regressive is living at its expense. To live according tothe morality of pity, Nietzsche claims, is to do just this: one lives “in a smaller-minded, meaner manner” and, in so far as one lives on credit, one squanders whathas been saved up in the past rather than saving up for the future. A structureof credit and debit is thereby articulated from the outset of the Genealogy whereinhuman futurity springs from a temporality that is organised according to thelogic of profit and loss. In this way, Nietzsche seeks to subsume moral discoursewithin a larger, amoral temporal structure that is itself unfolded out of economy.In this sense, economy has the peculiar power of bestowing upon humanity itstemporal possibilities. How this bestowal occurs is a matter of prehistory and thesubject of the second essay of the Genealogy, to which I now turn.

3. Economy, Futurity and Prehistoric Violence

For Nietzsche, we have seen, the proper analysis of morality requires that itbe articulated within a temporal framework of past and current costs and futurebenefits. As such, the value of any conception of the good concerns its effecton human futurity. The future, however, is not something that is simply given tohumankind. Futurity does not flow inexorably from an objective temporal orderwithin which humans just happen to be situated. Futurity does not precede hu-

Violence, Economy and Temporality 169

manity. Rather, the future was something that first had to be attained by it. Thisattainment is linked in important ways to the development of human nature“before history”, to the realm of prehistory that precedes the ancient conflictbetween noble and slave outlined in the first essay of the Genealogy. That is whythe “real problem of humankind” (GM II, 1) is, for Nietzsche, a prehistoric prob-lem. It is the problem as to how humans ended up being able to make promises –an ability that distinguishes us from all other animals. For Nietzsche, the key tothis riddle lies in the insight that prehistory, as a mode of temporality, is tied intoeconomy. Nietzsche’s commitment to this view is shown by the fact that when itcomes to constructing a story explaining how we came to be the promising ani-mal he once again deploys a language of costs and benefits.

Our ability to make promises is an endowment, i. e. the consequence of aconsiderable, long-term prehistoric investment. A specific kind of memory ispresupposed by promising: a way of thinking that can draw distinctions betweenpast undertakings, present situations and future states. There must be a subjectthat remembers in such a way that he or she feels obligated by the act of prom-ising. A memory of this kind is not given by simply having a nature that is“human” drop out of the sky fully formed. Rather, such a memory is made; it isan achievement. The feeling of obligation presupposes a subject who has an “activedesire not to let go” of the moral imperatives taught them. The phrase “prehis-toric era” therefore denotes the period of “the actual labour [Arbeit ] of manupon himself during the longest epoch of the human race, his whole labour be-fore history” (GM II, 2). One should note the economic references at work here.Even prior to history man is already a labourer. To be human is always already to bea creature whose identity is inextricably bound up with a world of work. Workstands at the point of emergence of the human race and its original work consistsin the (unconscious) manufacturing of its own identity. What this labour in-volved is equally significant. Unrelenting pain and suffering were the tools usedto create in the individuated communal being (now a debtor) the memoryrequired to suppress actions detrimental to the survival of the communal body(the creditor) (GM II, 3). This prehistoric economy is an economy of violence en-acted in a primeval workplace. Members of the prehistoric social body learned toobserve imperatives on the basis of costs and benefits. The benefit of communallife is security, its cost the unrestrained violence turned on the individual whothreatens that security. Such horror, Nietzsche holds, is “explained and justifiedon a grand scale”, for out of autochthonous violence comes human futurity. Thisis because the ability to promise means nothing less than having “control overthe future” since one who promises is “answerable for his own future !” (GM II,1). A prehistoric economy of violence thereby bestows futurity upon humanity.Only because of this violent economy does man become a temporal being andonly through the invention of temporality is he made responsible for himself.

170 Peter Sedgwick

The logic of exchange this bestowal implies is not hard to extrapolate: futur-ity is a form of credit that is gained on our behalf at the cost of past agonies. Al-though there was no altruistic motive at work within our prehistoric forbears,their necessary economy of violence became the unconscious force which was toforge the human soul, coining its dual nature, debased and yet gleaming with po-tential for future splendour:

[M]an must first have learnt to distinguish between what happens by accident andwhat by design, to think causally, to view the future as the present and anticipate it,to grasp with certainty what is end and what is means, in all, to be able to calculateand compute – and before he can do this, man himself will really have to becomereliable, regular, automatic [nothwendig: necessary], even in his own self-image, so that he,as someone making a promise, is answerable for his own future! (GM II, 2)

According to this account, right from the start human development exhibitsfuturity: any individual is an individual only in so far as their behaviour will con-form to certain persistent characteristics (i. e. be reliable, regular and automatic).Human nature consists in the ability to calculate a world of future possibilitiespurchased at the cost of primeval violence.

4. Violent Economy and the Prehistoric Origins of the Self: Creditor and Debtor

Out of prehistoric economy concepts are crystallised, selves are manufac-tured. No surprise, therefore, that “the contractual relationship between creditor

and debtor” (GM II, 4) is the “most primitive personal relationship there is”(GM II, 8). Selves initially encounter one another on the basis of calculation:“here person met person for the first time, and measured himself person againstperson” (GM II, 8). A person discovers whom he or she is by finding how he orshe stands with regard to someone else. Identities are based on assessments oflike and unlike cases, on judgements that spring from the notion of “equivalence”(GM II, 4). The “primeval” belief that a damage suffered has its equivalent in theform of a penalty is central to the concept of personhood. We cannot think ofwhat it means to be human (an “I”) without thinking according to the terms en-gendered by this notion. The “I” exists only in so far as it must always stand inrelation to its Other, a “you”.18 The relation between self and Other is, in turn,only possible in so far as both arise from a social world that is thinkable in terms

18 See Nietzsche, Friedrich: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London 2003. I, “OfLove of One’s Neighbour”: “The ‘You’ is older than the ‘I’; the ‘You’ has been consecrated, butnot yet the ‘I’: so man crowds towards his neighbour”. The “You”, in other words, is alreadya piece of social currency – to speak in mercantile language – whereas the “I” still awaits trans-formation into legal tender. The culture of the masses thus remains the dominant social force inmodern times.

Violence, Economy and Temporality 171

of possessions secured through the economic practices of defining, measuring,and the like. “I”, in short, am my possessions rather than my private thoughts;“I” is a concept produced within a web of economic practices.

Nietzsche elaborates these economic practices by way of mercantile imageryagain permeated with a sense of violence. Buying and selling in the prehistoricmarket place, it is contended, formed the basis for the later development of ab-stract notions of individual accountability (GM II, 5). The debtor had to guaran-tee the promise. Failure to repay the debt brought a forfeit. The “I”, understoodas its possessions (including its body) was subject to the demands of the creditoror, alternatively, staked its claim over the Other as a creditor. From such a stand-point, “I” exist to the extent that I have power over the Other, or to the degreethat the Other has power over me – a power traditionally expressed in the credi-tor’s right to make the debtor suffer. A dominant mode of interpretation is re-vealed in this way: one believes that one suffers because one has done somethingwrong, because one is responsible to an individuated Other. This sense of respon-sibility is the basis of all relationships. Violent economy, in other words, is thebasic condition of civilisation,19 a condition that extends into the prehistoric ori-gins of civil and political society and the modes of subjectivity associated withthem.

5. Self-Consciousness, Bad Conscience and Futurity

Nietzsche’s account of the origins of civil society is straightforward enough.Constituted initially through communal violence, the subject is subsequently re-constituted as a specifically political being by the further violence of colonisation.At some juncture in the shrouded world of prehistory primitive human popu-lations living according to the dictates of the creditor-debtor relationship wereinvaded by “some pack of blond beasts, a conqueror and master race”, and sub-ordinated by them (GM II, 17). Out of the desire of these “artists of violence andorganizers” to extend their power the rudimentary form of the state was born.20

In this way, the “oldest ‘state’” that emerged was a colonial tyranny that workedon the raw material of a communal humanity that was half-animal until it ren-dered it “not just kneaded and compliant, but shaped ”. The creditor-debtor rela-tionship, a relationship “older even than the beginnings of any social form of or-ganization or association” (GM II, 8), was in this way reinterpreted through theimposition of formalised (i. e. legal) social order.

19 Even our ability to think, the basis of all culture, is inextricably linked to the creditor-debtorrelationship (GM II, 8). As Hillard puts it, “exchange is culture” (Hillard: History, op. cit., p. 44).

20 Civil society and state hence began with an act of violent oppression. Contra Leiter, it is plainthat Nietzsche does here offer a theory of the origins of civil society and legality.

172 Peter Sedgwick

From its communal beginnings to its formalisation in the civil realm,Nietzsche’s self-avowedly “speculative” (GM II, 6) prehistoric narrative envis-ages society as being constituted through economies of pain. At every step inthis narrative we see a subjectivity emerging that is shaped by violent economicprocedures. This violent articulation of subjectivity creates the terrible conse-quence that self-understanding is essentially linked to suffering. A subjectivitycreated in this way is not simply susceptible to enduring the imposition of socialregulation as if beset by something that is relentlessly external to it. Social regu-lation penetrates deeply into the subject, so much so that such regulation is inpart constitutive of subjectivity, since the demands of social life pattern the self ’srelationship to its own bodily desires and inclinations. This would not be a prob-lem if all these desires were themselves social, but they are not. Although sub-sequently restricted by communal mores, like any other animal the primitivehuman was once used to acting on instinct. Under the yoke of subjugation, ournow socialised and formalised primitive forbears were obliged to curtail these in-stincts to a degree hitherto unknown, with the consequence that consciousnessreplaced instinct as the basis of action and judgement (GM II, 16).

The new domination of consciousness forced the instincts to find new pathsto discharge themselves. These paths lead to the violent redistribution of drivesnow channelled by political forces.21 Under such circumstances the economyof violence is turned against the very subject who is enacted through it: obligedto exist within a straightjacket of formalised conventions and customs, “manimpatiently ripped himself apart, persecuted himself, gnawed at himself […]”.Socialised, formalised and legalised man is, in other words, spontaneouslymasochistic.22 Such violence is nevertheless productive. An inner world is therebycreated: man suffering from himself creates the “bad conscience” as a conse-quence of “a forcible breach with his animal past, a simultaneous leap andfall into new situations and conditions of existence, a declaration of war againstall the old instincts”. This event is “momentous”, for with it humanity ceases tobe as one with the rest of the animal kingdom.23 Political subjugation, it follows,

21 This is what Nietzsche refers to as the “internalization of man” (GM II, 16).22 Such masochistic violence is not merely a matter of thought; it is a matter of action: ‘Moral self-

knowledge […] is not simply contemplation. Man does not merely turn toward himself, he turnsagainst himself. Nietzsche’s genealogy of the conscience tries to make this clear’. Müller-Lauter,Wolfgang: Nietzsche. His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philos-ophy. Trans. David J. Parent. Urbana, Chicago, Il. 1999, p. 37.

23 It is worth pointing out here that my reading differs from that offered by David Owen. See,Owen, David: Is There a Doctrine of the Will to Power? In: International Studies in Philosophy,32/3 (2000), p. 100. According to Owen, the “blond beasts” that initiate “state-formation […]are already themselves subject to bad conscience”. This is because the pack of invaders whoNietzsche holds responsible for bad conscience must, in order to subjugate a community,already be able to make promises. Owen cites Aaron Ridley to make his point: “[T]he basic formof imposing a custom, after all, must be ‘Do this, or else …’ (a threat, a promise). And this means

Violence, Economy and Temporality 173

was the key to prompting the development of a new and decisive importancefor consciousness. Political subjugation, in other words, is what gave rise to“subjectivity” in the sense that we now understand it: as a consciousness capableof dwelling on its own inner world, of reflecting, criticising, imagining, and cre-ating.

With the invention of bad conscience humankind now suffered from itself(GM II, 18). But the meaning of such suffering is, for Nietzsche, “active”24 and

that the imposer of customs must himself have a memory of the will and have become calculable,which in turn means that he must have been subjected to custom and punishment” (Ridley,Aaron: Nietzsche’s Conscience. In: Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 11 (Spring 1996), p. 3). How-ever, one should note that for Nietzsche punishment and bad conscience are not intrinsicallylinked. As he says in GM II, 14, one thing punishing does not do, as is often supposed, is to makethe wrongdoer feel guilty. On the contrary, “the evolution of a feeling of guilt was most stronglyimpeded through punishment”. Hence, “‘Bad conscience’, the most uncanny and interesting plantof our earthly vegetation, did not grow in this soil […]”. On the interpretation offered here, oneshould add, the problem to which Owen, via Ridley, alludes does not arise. As GM II, 14 implies,a subjectivity constituted through communal customs and punishments does not of itself en-gender bad conscience. Custom and punishment give rise to a subject capable of promising. Butpromising in this sense does not presuppose the kind of self-reflexive guilt that characterises badconscience. Rather, bad conscience originates in the subsequent refashioning of subjectivity thatoccurs through the formalisation of social relationships: it presupposes an imposition of powersubsequently codified in the form of the state and legality that one community of promisersbrings to bear on another. In this regard, one could draw a distinction between the effects of“internal” and “external” modes of subjugation. As a member of a community one is a promiserto the extent that the practices constitutive of personhood are intrinsic to one’s community. Thecustoms one observes and the punishments one may be obliged to accept for wrongdoing donot originate in something extrinsic to the communal field of social relations. The wrongdoer, inthis sense, is a victim of “how things are” in so far as how things are is “how we do things here”.To be subordinated by those from another community, however, implies the emergence of a differ-ent relation between personhood and social order. In this case, social order takes on the appear-ance of something relentlessly “external”. The Self-Other relationship of creditor and debtor isnow restructured by the superior power of a third party, an other that does not do things the way“we” do them, but impels us to do things the way “they” oblige “us” to – for example, to petitionin “their” language rather than the one spoken in the community.

24 I use the occurrence of the word “active” here to raise a point concerning Gilles Deleuze’s in-terpretation of Nietzsche. Deleuze makes much of the dichotomy between “active” and “reac-tive” primordial qualities of force. This dichotomy, he argues, is important for understanding thenature of consciousness, abstract thought and habit: “Consciousness [for Nietzsche] merely ex-presses the relation of certain reactive forces to the active forces which dominate them. Con-sciousness is essentially reactive […]. And what is said of consciousness must also be said ofmemory and habit […]. What happens is that science follows the paths of consciousness, relyingentirely on other reactive forces; the organism is always seen from the petty side, from the side ofits reactions” (Deleuze, Gilles: Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London1983, p. 41). If the reading I am offering here is convincing, then this observation is problematicin at least two ways. First, Nietzsche, we have seen, argues that consciousness arises from a longprehistory that begins with a “moral memory” first springing from a violent economy of habits(i. e. practices: the morality of custom). In the primitive community, it is the reactive social de-mand for survival that gives rise to practices that in turn constitute the subject as a promiser.This fashioning of the subject in its own turn implants the potential for the higher self-con-sciousness that is realised in the aftermath of (“active”) colonial intervention (GM II, 17). Speak-

174 Peter Sedgwick

positive: it creates an inner realm of meaning, imagination and beauty as a meansof compensating for the inability of the drives to express themselves externally.Likewise, selflessness, self-denial and self-sacrifice all belong to this realm andemerge from this condition. In other words, the “instincts”, as Nietzsche callsthem in the preface to the Genealogy, associated most closely with Christianmorality are on his own account produced by social forces. Bad conscience is anexpression of humanity suffering from itself as a result of being compelled to in-habit a formalised and regulated world. Bad conscience is expressed in nausea,the feeling of disgust at one’s own embodied humanity. As such, it is a “sickness[…] but a sickness rather like pregnancy” (GM II, 19). As the metaphor of preg-nancy implies this suffering is a prelude to the future. It, too, exemplifies econ-omy since it represents a kind of investment: prehistoric suffering accrues creditin the form of future potential. Out of the sickness of bad conscience the con-science that characterises the self-understanding of sovereign individuality isborn.25 At the same time, however, bad conscience is replete with another andvery different potentiality that is capable of blocking the workings of economyand hence undermining futurity.

ing like Deleuze, we are thereby presented with a “reactive series” (survival-habit-promising-consciousness) that operates without any reference to an “active” element. With regard to thislast point, one should note that even the “active” colonising forces that later gave rise to the “in-ternalisation of man” must themselves have been produced by the same reactive series in orderto first be rendered a community of promisers. Deleuze might, of course, counter that the activeelement is always already there in the shape of the body: “The body’s active forces make it a selfand define the self as superior and astonishing” (ibid, p. 42). However, this presupposes that it ispossible to summarise what a body is by speaking purely in terms of its “active” components.Necessarily, bodies are also reactive. The second problem concerns the significance of conscious-ness for Nietzsche. What Deleuze refers to as the “petty” and “reactive” element of conscious-ness is something of great import for Nietzsche. The “sovereign individual”, after all, is charac-terised not so much by unconscious activity as by the confident consciousness engendered byself-possession. For the “sovereign individual” promising is a second instinct, but it is the aware-ness that this engenders (the kind of consciousness) that Nietzsche values. The story the Geneal-ogy tells, in other words, is one wherein consciousness is envisaged as passing through stages: tostart with it looks constituted (“reactive”), but subsequently, and especially with regard to the“sovereign individual”, it is constitutive of identity (“active”). The text of the Genealogy thus chartsa transformation of forces: the passage from “reactive” to “active”. This transformation, one mightadd, is sketched out on the template of economy.

25 To be a “sovereign individual” is to have a self-image that is rooted in a sense of responsibility to-ward oneself, to be one’s own master. As such, the uniqueness of the sovereign individual amplyjustifies the conditions that gave rise to it by escaping from them (GM II, 2). In this way, the pre-historic imposition of uniformity is interpreted as the necessary precondition of the individualitythat signals its negation, and does so with a seemingly organic inevitability, as is witnessed byNietzsche’s choice of metaphor when he discusses this: the “tree” of violent imposition bearsthe “fruit” of emancipation from external compulsion. As Stegmaier notes (Stegmaier: Nietz-sches “Genealogie”, op. cit., p. 149) the “sovereign individual” needs the social straightjacket inorder to become what he or she is.

Violence, Economy and Temporality 175

6. Economy Blocked: Christian Self-Consciousness as Self-Loathing

Bad conscience may be a kind of pregnancy, but pregnancies can go wrong.The sickness of bad conscience is prone to become interminable. This, forNietzsche, occurred when the creditor-debtor relationship “was for a secondtime transformed through interpretation”. This new interpretation concernsthe perceived relationship between present and past generations in a tribe. Here,“the living generation always acknowledged a legal obligation towards the earliergeneration”, especially to the founders of the tribe. This is expressed in the beliefthat the tribe “exists only because of the sacrifices and deeds of the forefathers”,who “continue to exist as mighty spirits”. These sacrifices must be compensatedfor by further sacrifice. Belief in the gods, it follows, originates in fear of in-debtedness to the ancestor. One is successful because the gods are favourableand one is thereby indebted to them; this is the basis of the feeling of guilt. The“maximal god yet achieved”, Nietzsche tells us, is the Christian God (GM II, 20).Unsurprisingly, therefore, the God of Christianity brought with it “the greatestfeeling of guilt on earth”. Guilt conjoined with religious presuppositions is adeadly mixture. Feelings of duty and indebtedness are moralised, bad consciencebecomes permeated with religious feeling and the possibility of paying offdebts, a central feature of the development of bad conscience, is circumvented(GM II, 21). The rendering of concepts of guilt and duty in moral terms repre-sents a retroactive step in which the economy of meaning, of compensationthrough equivalence, that flows from the creditor-debtor relationship is turnedback on itself.

With the conjoining of the concepts of bad conscience and God the possi-bility of paying off the debt is permanently forestalled. The individual is renderedeternally in debt, eternally guilty, born into a state of sin that cannot be overcomeand condemned to eternal suffering. In the end, the “‘creditor’”, too, becomesenmeshed within this aporia. The progenitor of humanity, the ancestor, is nowthe source of a curse: Adam commits the act of “‘original sin’”. Alternatively,the natural world or “existence in general” comes to be regarded as inherentlyworthless or even evil. That it finds a means of relieving the suffering created bythe diabolization of creditor-ancestor or nature is “Christianity’s stroke of gen-ius”: God sacrifices himself for guilty humanity. A will to self-torture is revealed(GM II, 22). Unable to allow the natural drives their fullest expression the per-son of bad conscience turns to religious presuppositions in order to tormenthimself: “Guilt towards God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture”.In this way, the animal instincts become interpreted as evidence of sin, as theembodiment of “rebellion” against the order of things. In this manifestation ofreligious belief Nietzsche thinks that he has unearthed a “sort of madness”wherein humanity wants to feel “guilty and condemned without hope of re-

176 Peter Sedgwick

prieve”. We are faced with a humanity that exists in a state of eternal guilt wherethe punishment itself is never equal to the crime, where the debt can never be an-nulled. The Christian concept of God becomes in this way susceptible to beinginterpreted as symptomatic of the dominance of a desire to feel worthless. Thisdesire engenders inactivity and the values that emanate from it reflect this byplacing the highest value on passivity and self-abnegation. Christian morality isin this way rendered an expression of the human capacity to suffer from itselftransformed into its guiding purpose.

A humanity suffering in the manner just outlined suffers from the “sickness”Nietzsche rails against at the outset of the Genealogy. Morality is the “danger ofdangers” because the desire that motivates it is no longer the desire for futuritybut for nothingness, for loss of self. Practices come to dominate that fashion aself incapable of escaping from its animal nature yet simultaneously incapable ofbeing reconciled with it. Nietzsche’s account of prehistory thus ends up by iden-tifying in Christian morality a moment wherein the economy of credit and debitis retained but shorn of the essential notion of equivalence. Self-loathing nowbecomes the prime virtue. Nothingness, in the shape of a purportedly “better”afterlife, becomes the prime goal. In effect, this signals an interruption of theprehistoric economy that endowed humanity with its futurity. For, the desire toescape from our bodily nature is ultimately no more than the socially created de-sire to escape from what we are. Christian values and the practices that charac-terise it sanctify this desire. Their significance resides in their being an ex-pression of this desire’s will to mastery in a naturalised and illusory form. The“good man” is the goal of this form of desire. He represents the outcome of asustained attempt to interpret personhood in negative terms and, through inter-preting it, to fashion it according to these terms.

7. The Political Terrain of Violent Economy

Leiter has commented that what Nietzsche values above all else “is preciselywhat the ‘marketplace’ of politics violates [since] great things (and great people)are to be found far from the realms of politics and economics”.26 This is, at best,a half-truth – at worst misleading. It is certainly the case that Nietzsche is con-sistently critical of the politics of his time. This is the politics of a by now bur-geoning liberalism that understands democracy in terms of the satisfactions themarketplace can provide for a mass culture where “individualism” means con-forming to a norm far removed from the “I” of sovereign individuality. In sucha world, what is consecrated as the “I” is the “You” presented in illusory form –

26 Leiter: Nietzsche, op. cit., p. 296.

Violence, Economy and Temporality 177

a being akin to Heidegger’s concept of the “they-self ”.27 This is where the half-truth mentioned lies. At the same time, Nietzsche in no way turns his back on therealms of politics, economics, or the market. As we have seen, in the Genealogy theconditions out of which individual sovereignty emerges are themselves possibleonly in virtue of the violent economic practices that characterise the prehistoricmarketplace. Indeed, such practices taken together are, for Nietzsche, the essen-tial precondition of temporality and hence of humanity having any future pos-sible greatness whatsoever. Given the essential violence of economy, to writeas Leiter does of politics “violating” the purity of a noble Nietzschean vision ofgreatness pertains to an unintentional irony. To call politics a violation ofNietzsche’s highest hope is to condemn the very means whereby this hope itselfis made possible. To put it another way, the concept of “violation” is a centralone in Nietzsche’s methodological arsenal. The colonial violation that, forNietzsche, initiates politics (the realm of state and law) is the unconscious actthat leads to bad conscience. Without bad conscience there is no inner realm ofthe self, and without that there is no possible future greatness for humankind.Politics and economics, therefore, are essential features of Nietzsche’s accountof the development of the human race. There is, in other words, a contrast to bedrawn between the politics Nietzsche condemns and the political vocabularyhe employs and values. Evidence of Nietzsche’s objecting to the politics of theliberal-democratic market does not license the further misleading inference thathe condemns politics as such, or is “a-political”. Two responses to Nietzsche’sachievement in the Genealogy are outlined below as a means of constructivelygrasping the political potential of his thought. Both seek to think in terms of thenotion I have already employed of the “political terrain” of Nietzsche’s thought.The first response is critical, the second more positive.

8. First Response

Nietzsche’s view of human potential, we have seen, is linked inexorably tofuturity. Futurity has its origins in an economy of equivalence and exchange.Through violence, economy articulates a humanity capable of individual auton-omy. In turn, the “good man” of Christian virtue is judged as wanting not by ahistory patterned by conflict between competing interests, but by prehistory,which is where these interests find their temporal precondition. This is becausethe “good man” represents an undermining of the futurity that defines our na-ture. He is the betrayal of our endowment from prehistory, the regressive turning

27 See Heidegger, Martin: Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford1980, pp. 68, 163ff.

178 Peter Sedgwick

away from the freedom of the sovereign individual. However, the notion of pre-history that the Genealogy deploys in order to criticise Christian morality shouldgive us pause. If morality stands judged by prehistory then it is called to accounton the basis of a narrative of human development that is, as we have alreadynoted, on Nietzsche’s own admission a matter of conjecture.28 The developmentof an economy of violence is a thought experiment. It also has a persuasivepower because the prehistory it aims to account for is developed into a narrative.Stories, however fictitious, always pertain to the possibility of such power.

Philosophers, of course, have always found themselves obliged to tell storiesof one kind or another. In Nietzsche’s there is an inextricable link betweenhow humans became what they are, coercive economic practices and the abstractconceptions of equivalence, exchange, credit and debit, that flow from thesepractices. In effect, this means that the concept of economy operates in theGenealogy as an interpretative tool allowing an array of notions relating tohumanity (“instinct”, “community”, “self ”, “society”, “law”, and “state”) to beconjoined through the invocation of a pattern that is claimed to be common tothem all. In this way, the logic of equivalence and exchange is envisaged asfashioning a personhood that is grasped in terms of obligations entailed bymaterial possessions. Subjectivity thereby emerges in the wake of economy asthe embodiment of a primitive and violent distribution of property. The notionof economy thus serves to naturalise an inherent violence engendered by pos-session. Possession constitutes the terms in which human relations are formu-lated in the primitive community. It also underlies the development of society,legality, state, and the further transformations and refinements of the individualthrough colonisation. Such developments are, at the same time, situated byNietzsche within a narrative that is guided by the notion of the possibility ofhuman perfectibility understood as individual autonomy. The highest expressionof subjectivity, in other words, is self-possession. Violent economy, in this sense,teeters on the verge of becoming a godless theodicy. It justifies the violent andpossessive prehistory of humanity through invoking the as yet unfulfilled poten-tial of its futurity.

In Nietzsche’s account of prehistory the initial and violent distribution ofproperty which gives rise to humanity is the condition in virtue of which allmeaning is rendered possible. Economic practices are envisaged as the persistentfeature of all forms of human life: no level of civilisation, Nietzsche tells us, hasever been discovered that does not exhibit the economic relationship (GM II, 8).The becoming of community, self, society, ethics, politics, and state is governedby the rule of economy. It is the transcendental precondition of historical and

28 What Nietzsche has spoken of must, he says, be a matter of thoughtful guesswork since it con-cerns what is concealed and “such subterranean things are difficult to fathom out” (GM II, 6).

Violence, Economy and Temporality 179

cultural diversity. However, in resorting to the notion of an economy whoseanimal violence frames and thereby escapes the domain of history Nietzschenaturalises historical conflict in all its possible forms. The violence engenderedby prehistory now stands as the timeless, but hitherto forgotten, condition ofhuman endeavour. It is a violence that frames “those centuries before the historyof mankind” (GM II, 14) as “the genuine and decisive historical period whichdetermined man’s character” (GM II, 9). At the same time, however, it “exists atall times or could possibly re-occur” (GM II, 9). Violence, in other words, is uni-versal. Violence delivers humankind into temporality, but in doing so it createsits own specific debit structure: the original violence that characterises humanbecoming leaves us eternally susceptible to being returned to it. Violence abidesnot only as the condition of the human past but of the future, too. Violent econ-omy is therefore the prerequisite of a properly human existence. Becoming, ani-mal nature and economy stand outside history, while the moralistic philosophiesof being that are formulated within that history now stand open to the charge offorgetting and eliding the animal nature from which they emerged.

The economy of violence Nietzsche narrates falls prey to the threat of be-coming pure mythology. “Mythology”, one should remember, means both theexposition of myth and the construction of a fictional discourse in the form of aparable or allegory. The Genealogy deals in mythology in both these senses. Onthe one hand, it seeks to dispel what is asserted to be the specifically Christianmythology. It seeks to achieve the disenchantment of Christian values by reveal-ing them as a body of practices symptomatic of a specific and narrow conceptionof interest intent on denying our violent animal origins. On the other hand, how-ever, the very exposure of this mythology brings with it a demand that mustbe satisfied. If the disenchantment of myth is to be successful one must offerin its place something else to authorise it. It is here that the Genealogy threatensto cease to be a text of disenchantment and become, instead, one of enchant-ment. In invoking the notion of future individual autonomy as the fulfilment ofour prehistoric beginnings, Nietzsche seeks to persuade us that a court of judge-ment fit to assess Christian morality is possible.29 The logic of costs and benefitsthat gave rise to the human soul becomes the means of standing in judgementover the products of that soul. The reader is, in effect, expected to suspendjudgement concerning the legitimacy of the economic notions themselves. Dis-enchantment with Christianity is achieved at the expense of enchantment withviolent economy.

29 Recall here that Nietzsche’s question is: in so far as we are “moral” do we live with a view tothe future or do we live at its expense? In other words, do we live according to the dictates thatestablished our nature or have we failed to do so?

180 Peter Sedgwick

Such enchantment necessitates suspending a political question concerningeconomy itself. The question is simply: is the notion of economy that Nietzschedeploys susceptible to, and has it even perhaps been a symptom of, activities ofreinterpretation beyond his control. Nietzsche must suppress this question if theGenealogy’s economic narrative is to be allowed to do its work. In order to gener-ate concepts like temporality, human nature, the subject, and in turn history, themeaning of economy must exist independently of these spheres. Nietzsche needsto ignore the possibility that, rather than being a purely prehistoric preconditionof human development, the economy of violence deployed in the Genealogy

might be tainted by forces associated with a narrower historical and politicalfield. When, in the Genealogy’s third essay, Nietzsche characterises of “our wholemodern existence” (GM III, 9) as manifesting a contradiction between avowedChristian piety and actual hubris he points, however vaguely, in direction of thisfield. In whatever way we moderns might like to think of ourselves, Nietzschenotes, life today is in reality “nothing but hubris and godlessness, in so far as itis strength and awareness of strength”. Significantly, such strength is evidentin our attitude toward nature, which is assaulted “with the help of machines andthe completely unscrupulous inventiveness of engineers and technicians”. Themodern attitude to nature is, in short, one of economic exploitation. The violentuse of nature alluded to at this point in the text is not a matter of prehistoric im-port. The violence in question is a social phenomenon, something possible onlyin virtue of the existence of a complex, technologically proficient society orga-nised along economic lines. The logic of equivalence and exchange at work in thebackground here need not be interpreted as a “prehistoric” phenomenon scar-ring the present. It is no less open to being read in political terms: as the con-temporary manifestation of a specific form of social organisation. Here econ-omy may point not so much toward the prehistoric past as to a current societyand culture that functions according to the dominance of economic practicesproduced historically.

In simplest terms, the problem here is to be found in the absolute impos-sibility of extricating a primeval meaning from the concept of economy, i. e. ameaning immune from recuperation according to the dictates of current socialdemands. Any idea, including Nietzsche’s conception of economy, is socially andhence politically mediated. In using the notion of economy as a means of elab-orating the distant past of humanity and, in doing so, taking it to signify the con-ditions wherein humanity is bestowed with futurity, Nietzsche falls prey to assig-ning to an array of practices that dominate the present the status of timelessness.The economy of violence presented in the form of a tale that concerns both theorigins of the human and its possibilities thereby projects modern practices intopast and future alike. As a projection of the present, any speculative narrativeof prehistory is prey to becoming a figural realm. The story of modern social

Violence, Economy and Temporality 181

conflict is retold as allegory. In Nietzsche’s case, the past’s noble and slave, credi-tor and debtor, are figural representations of today’s possessors and possessed,exploiters and exploited. To treat this allegory as if it concerns a primeval past isto fall prey to thinking in mythical terms. It is to take a speculative narrative for-mulated in and out of the present as signifying something timeless and natural, tofind in the past the mirror image of the present and thereby legitimate it.

Someone intent on providing a defence of Nietzsche could reply to theabove criticisms by pointing out that the sovereign autonomy of the individualhe advocates in II, 10 of the Genealogy actually necessitates breaking from theconditions that have endowed humanity with its future. The power of the sov-ereign individual is expressed though the “self-sublimation of justice”, i. e.mercy. To show mercy is to be just in the most affirmative of senses in thatno compensation is demanded from the wrongdoer. Through sublimation the“most powerful man”, like the society of great power, transforms the terms ofthe economic relationship that served to make him or it possible by eschewingrevenge. A humanity of this kind is to be numbered amongst the highestachievements. Paid for in advance, in prehistory, at the cost of sufferingbeyond measure, mercy expresses Nietzsche’s conception of human perfecti-bility as the actual overcoming of the logic of equivalence, compensation andrevenge.

This vision of the overcoming of the logic of economy, however, points atthe same time to the limitations of that logic as an explanatory model. Economyis overcome by the power of sublimation: justice “ends like every good thing onearth, by sublimating itself ” (GM II, 10). Sublimation, however, is not inherent ineconomy and cannot be derived from it alone. The latter concerns only the prac-tices of weighing and measuring that delimit the realms of society and subjectiv-ity as spheres of possession. What sublimation represents is that within us whichresists economy, something that engenders the transformation of humanrelations in new and unpredictable ways. If the credit-debit structure of “justice”is sublimated this nevertheless occurs because of something other than itself.Nietzsche understands this “other” in terms of power. To embody the greatestpossible power would be to transcend the bad feelings engendered by damage, toshow mercy through forgiveness because one is sufficiently strong to be forgiv-ing. At that moment an essential characteristic and limitation of the economic re-lationship is thrown into relief by the Genealogy itself. The text argues that the su-premely powerful society and individual alike overcome the logic of equivalenceand exchange through a refusal to understand value to be a matter of weighingand measuring. Value, it turns out, is not simply a question of things as the econ-omic relationship presupposes. In the economic relationship the polarity of Selfand Other, creditor-debtor, is secured in terms of “things”. The Other’s relationto the I is that of a thing, of a body and its possessions whose thing-like nature

182 Peter Sedgwick

signifies an instrumental value in so far as they are primarily grasped as a meansof satisfying the I’s desire for domination. Mercy, however, is marked by the abil-ity not to take the Other to signify a mere thing. Mercy shows us that we need notbe constrained by the economic relation. In so far as it does this, mercy also re-veals that the economic relationship need not be the only one, that there aremodes of recognition and action that surpass it.

The question is does this other mode of relationship pertain to a status anyless primeval than that of the violent economy of prehistory that Nietzscheprivileges? Does the economic relationship itself perhaps presuppose anotherform of relationship that, even if not prior to it, is coterminous with it? Thisis not the place to go into this issue in any detail, but it is worth recalling that thework of Emmanuel Levinas points in the direction of an economy of meaningthat finds in the Self-Other relation a mode of indebtedness that flows fromdiscourse rather than thing-hood.30 Transferring this to Nietzsche’s account,we could say that the relationship between creditor and debtor presupposeslinguistic practices that do not merely involve weighing and measuring but,amongst other things, moments of silence, pauses that establish all speechas dialogue. Dialogue presupposes someone who speaks, who is “like me”: a“someone”, not a “something” on the basis of which exchange is rendered pos-sible. Such an approach does not eliminate questions of power and domination,of conflicts of purpose, but it does tell us how practices inextricably linkedto domination might subvert themselves, how the mercy Nietzsche so values ispossible.

Is a “politics of mercy” perhaps the basis for a contemporary articulation ofNietzsche’s political legacy? It is certainly the case that through mercy the limitsof economy are revealed in their starkest form. This of itself indicates the inevi-table dimension of political economy that the Genealogy must inhabit, ruminateupon and deploy in order to construct a critique of its own times. The politicalterrain of Nietzsche’s thought, in other words, is the very domain he some-times expresses the deepest wish to escape from, the domain of the everyday,the apparently petty, small and mean things which he so often also reminds uslie at the bottom of our highest ideals. A properly critical reading of the Geneal-

ogy is driven to reflect upon what the text shows as much as what it says. Thearguments already raised in this section are intended to demonstrate this lastpoint: the terrain of the politics of Nietzsche’s genealogical investigation isnecessarily staked out in terms of economically determined patterns derivedfrom the very social order he wishes to criticise. Although this indicates thepotential danger of prehistory recoiling into mythology in Nietzsche’s text, this

30 See Levinas, Emmanuel: Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh 1998.

Violence, Economy and Temporality 183

possibility does not of itself exhaust the question of the politics of Nietzsche’sthought. It does, however, indicate that in Nietzsche’s philosophy politicalcategories, such as civil society, state and subjectivity, are tied to the notion ofviolent economy. Thinking about Nietzsche and politics, in other words,involves at some point thinking about economy and its limits. Bearing this inmind, in what follows, I consider briefly a further argument concerning thepolitical value of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

9. Second Response

For the purposes of this paper I have, up to this point, confined myself to theGenealogy alone. The reason for this was to bring the issues of economy, violenceand temporality to the fore, and to show how, taken together, they constitutea politically charged space without which Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianmorality and his account of human development would not be possible. Anawareness of the central role these notions play in Nietzsche’s critical discourseis necessary for any consideration of the politics of his thought, especiallybearing in mind the, for some irresistible, temptation to derive a politics fromthe concept of “genealogy”. The presence of these notions also indicates thatany thorough account of Nietzsche’s philosophy will at some point be obliged toengage with its political register.

That said, when it comes to human futurity, at least, the Genealogy also pointsbeyond itself. Take, for example, Nietzsche’s discussion of the “man of the future”.Such a being redeems humanity from the dominance of old ideals and the nihil-ism that arises from them. As opposed to the “good man”, the “man of thefuture […] gives the earth purpose and man his hope again […] he must come one

day …” (GM II, 24). Rhetorically, the text transforms a hope into a necessity: thedesire for purpose slips into a demand concerning what must be the case. If thereference to “earth” were not enough to remind us, the next section of the Gen-

ealogy confirms where the satisfaction of such a demand might lie. Nietzschepoints us to another work of his own: the future “belongs to another, youngerman, one ‘with more future’, one stronger than me – something to which Zara-

thustra alone is entitled […]” (GM II, 25). Reflecting the language of economythat dominates the Genealogy, futurity itself is here rendered a possession, some-thing that can be held like a piece of property. There is also the matter of entitle-ment to consider, of legitimacy, when it comes to who is the future’s rightful pos-sessor. But does Nietzsche therefore believe that giving purpose to the earth is amatter resolvable purely in terms of mastery? Does “entitlement” here denotenothing more than possession? Laurence Lampert has made the following inter-esting claim that is enlightening in this connection:

184 Peter Sedgwick

Nietzsche’s politics lays claim to the past. It is the local politics of a “good European”who affirms his European home as heir to Christianity and Greece, to hardness andintellect. But that politics broadens out as this particular past makes possible therecovery of the whole of the human and natural past; a local loyalty that expands intoloyalty to the earth. Nietzsche’s politics lays claim to the future. It is a global politicsthat arose in Europe […] it spreads out as a future global politics of loyalty to theearth, [an] ecological or “green” politics that has only begun to formulate its agendabut that finds in Nietzsche’s thought a comprehensive means of affirming the earth.31

We come here to the question of “grand politics”. For Lampert, a Nietzscheangrand politics would be a global one that begins with an affirmation of theenvironment, a politics that makes its progress through outlining an agendaof value based upon love of the earth itself. The justification for this resides inthe fact that without such love futurity is impossible. In support of this, one cannote that if violent economy remains a constant within the narrative of the Gen-

ealogy so, too, do the notions of earth and embodiment. Economy would benothing without an environment in which development, conflict and violencewere enacted upon bodies. Affirmation of futurity, likewise, would be impossiblewithout the persistence of an environment that is worth affirming. That theGenealogy itself invokes Zarathustra at the very least gives us leave to do the sameand recall, as Lampert does, that text’s demand that we remain “loyal to theearth”.32 Loyalty is not the same as possession. The “earth”, in the sense that wemight understand it here, cannot be possessed since it is the earth itself that ispresented as demanding our loyalty. This is not the place to pursue the task ofinvestigating the possibility of whether an alternative, and possibly complement-ary, economy might be at work in Thus Spoke Zarathustra;33 or whether a “naturaleconomy” can be found here capable of being synthesised with the Genealogy’sviolent economy in such a way as to deflect the criticisms I have raised in the pre-vious section.34 It is, however, possible to follow Lampert and assert that in so

31 Lampert, Laurence: Nietzsche and Modern Times. A Study of Bacon, Descartes and Nietzsche.New Haven, London 1993, p. 432.

32 “Stay loyal to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue! May your bestowing love andyour knowledge serve towards the meaning of the earth! […] Lead […] the flown away virtueback to earth – yes, back to body and life: that it may give the earth its meaning, a human mean-ing! […] Truly, the earth shall yet become a house of healing!” (Z I, “Of the Bestowing Vir-tue”, 3).

33 The notion of self-possession that I have noted here is certainly detectable in Zarathustra.As Volker Gerhardt has noted, ‘Zarathustra wants new Law-Tables with new values that springfrom the self-legislation of free and self-possessing individuals’. See Gerhardt, Volker: Self-grounding: Nietzsche’s Morality of Individuality. Trans. Peter Poellner. In: The Future of theNew Nietzsche. Eds. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Howard Caygill. Aldershot 1993, p. 298.

34 Likewise, there is a question to address concerning the relationship between the economic ter-rain of the Genealogy and its relation to Nietzsche’s philosophical output as a whole. Stegmaier(Nietzsches “Genealogie”, op. cit., chapter 2) has argued that the Genealogy illuminates aspects ofboth Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. Thus, for example, we can envisage the Gen-

Violence, Economy and Temporality 185

far as it is currently enacting possibly catastrophic damage on the environment,global-capitalist economy increasingly takes on the form of a gross squanderingof human futurity. It certainly seems plausible to envisage a Nietzsche whostands as a critic of this squandering. This would be a Nietzsche whose workinspires us to question the hubris of modern economy by raising the question offuturity. Although this approach may, like that of violent economy, have a rolein plotting the terrain of a Nietzschean politics, it does not follow that such apolitics would lead us back down the avenue of liberalism, or even to the affirm-ation of democracy. In the theory of violent economy Nietzsche formulates indetail the kind of agonistic approach that, as we have seen Dombowski note,does not sit comfortably with democratic practices and values. What Conwayhas called the “question of political legislation”35 in Nietzsche cannot be ad-dressed without reference to this economy.

ealogy as seeking to chart in persuasive terms the historical emergence of dominant moralityoutlined only sketchily in parts of Beyond Good and Evil. The question as to how the concept ofeconomy operates in this latter text can thus further illuminate its role in the Genealogy. Likewise,an understanding of the development of Nietzsche’s thought as a whole, exploring the notion ofeconomy as it is manifest at different levels, is probably essential for a more satisfying articu-lation of the concept in the Genealogy. Given that Nietzsche’s thought begins with Schopenhauerand pessimism, subsequently embraces a positivistic engagement with the sciences, moves on toemphasising concepts of practice, action, value, and “will to power”, and reaches its finale in theunrestrained “symptomatic” period cut short by his mental collapse, it is likely that a highly com-plex articulation of economy would be unearthed in the pursuit of such a survey.

35 See footnote 3, above.