Trappen in a Family Portrait: Gender and Family in Nietzsche's REfiguring of Authority.

Ethics, Dialogue and Gender IdentityChapter

Jude Browne

Trapped in a Family Portrait? Gender and Family in Nietzsche’s Refiguring of Authority1

Verity SmithHarvard University

Tracy B Strong - 7123 wordsUniversity of California, San Diego

In the end … the old deep, heartfelt plea: become who you are. At first one must emancipate oneself from one's chains, and in the end, one must also emancipate oneself from one's emancipation.

Nietzsche to Lou Salomé, End of August, 1882

For it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian state, that the basic factof the Hellenic instinct finds expression - its "will to life." What was it that the Hellene guaranteed himself by means of these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal return of life; the future promised and hallowed in the past; the triumphant Yes to life beyond all death and change; true life as the over-all continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality. For the Greeks the sexual symbol was therefore the venerable symbol par excellence, the real profundity in the whole of ancient piety. Every single element in the act of procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth aroused the highest and

1 This paper is part of a larger project of the authors on the generalquestion of the significance of gender, sexuality and related mattersfor and in the thought of Nietzsche – indeed each section and sometimes each paragraph could, should and will be expanded into an essay the length of the present one-. Most of the discussion of the relevant secondary literature is relegated to the footnotes.


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most solemn feelings. In the doctrine of the mysteries, pain is pronounced holy: the pangs of the woman giving birth hallow all pain; all becoming and growing - all that guarantees a future- involves pain. That there may be the eternal joyof creating, that the will to life may eternally affirm itself, the agony of the woman giving birth must also be there eternally.

All this is meant by the word Dionysus.Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Miranda: Oh brave new world that has such folk in it!Prospero : T’is new to thee.

Shakespeare, The Tempest

There has been much talk in recent years of the multiple self,

or the socially constructed self, or of identity as

performance. Much of this discussion has come in the context

of the exploration of an understanding of the self (or the

person, or identity) that might be more appropriate to a

vision of democratic politics centered on something other than

liberalism. There has, however, been very little examination

of precisely in what multiplicity consists, of what its

implications might be, of what social construction is, or

indeed of what must count as performance. What makes for a

self that is actually multiple and not just, as Marx mocked

the German Ideologists, a hunter in the morning, a fisher in

the afternoon and a critic after dinner? Taking our cue from

the fact that many theorists of this multiple self have found

resources in Nietzsche, we turn in this paper to what

Nietzsche actually says about the self, or more properly about


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his self. It turns out that multiplicity requires a radically

different understanding of parents, of the child, of gender,

and (thus) of pregnancy. We then seek to extend this

understanding to the problem of how democratic authority and

politics might be reconstituted on this model.

There has also in recent years been much talk about genealogy.

Again, this discussion is largely inspired by Nietzsche or by

the adaptation of Nietzschean genealogy in Hannah Arendt,

Michel Foucault, and others. But genealogy is not only an

approach to history, or an interpretive technique. Genealogy

is also about families, and families, as presently

constituted, are about gender and sex. Any discussion of

genealogy that ignores gender and eros seems to us to have

left out essential parts.2 It is our contention that

Nietzsche’s rethinking of the relationship of present to past

is inextricably bound up with a contestation of conventional

gender roles, and even the structure of kinship itself. 3 The 2 For exceptions, see Babette Babich, "Nietzsche and the Erotic

Valence of Art: The Affirmative Problem of the Artist as Actor, Jew or Woman," Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 15 (1988) pp.15-33 now reprinted with alterations in her Words in Blood Like Flowers (SUNY PRESS, 2006); andLynne Huffer, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

3 It is important to distinguish between kinship and families so as not to naturalize the nuclear family form, but, rather, to recognize the ways in which particular kinship rules/norms work to establish particular kinds of families, sexual practices, and gender distinctions as normative. But Nietzsche’s attempt to rewrite his genealogy will also work the problem from the other direction: that is, we will explore how the refusal to occupy one side or the other of a set of binary sexual and gendered categories can strike at the foundational rules of kinship, and perhaps open a space for reconceiving kinship categories and norms. For descriptions of existing gay/lesbian non-marital kinship relations that are not


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complexities of gender and familial reference in Nietzsche’s

thought have hardly gone unnoticed. But seldom have the two

senses of genealogy above been theorized together. The essay

that follows is an attempt to remedy this lack.

I. Genealogy as an Agonistic Problem

Gender is an act of multiple differentiations, bound up with

the structure of kinship relations. In this context one may

ask what it means -- for political theory -- for a person --

to have or not to have a mother and a father, or, more

precisely, what it might mean to think of oneself as without

having had a mother and a father, or, even more precisely, to

ascribe to oneself the qualities necessary for one's own

birth? We know that the myths surrounding the births of

heroes typically ascribe to them some form of chthonic birth.

We know that Macbeth will only be defeated by a "man not of

woman born." We know that Christ told a crowd in Nazareth

that one must abandon one's parents in order to follow Him.4

exhausted by the nuclear family form, see Kath Weston’s landmark ethnography Families We Choose. See also Martha Fineman, The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies (New York. Routledge, 1995) for a critique of the “sexual family” model (to which she opposes the “caretaker/dependent” dyad). And see Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (13.1), 2002, for a useful rethinking of kinshipas not (only) biological and juridical, but “a set of practices that institutes relationships of various kinds which negotiate the reproduction of life and the demands of death” so that “kinship practices will be those that emerge to address fundamental forms of human dependency, which may include birth, child-rearing, relations of emotional dependency and support, generational ties, illness, dying, and death (to name a few)” (pp. 14-15).

4 Matthew XII 46-50; Mark III 31-35


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And it is not only individuals that are autochthonic: in

Redburn, Melville names America a country with neither mother

nor father.5 Let us look then at how Nietzsche became what he

is.

At the beginning of his autobiography, in which he presents

himself to the world with the words that Pilate used for

Christ, Nietzsche writes:

The good fortune of my existence (Daseins),

perhaps its uniqueness, lies in its frailty: to

express it in the form of a riddle, as my

father I have already died, as my mother, I

still live and become old.6

A number of issues must be noted:

1. This is the conventional way to begin an autobiography

-- with a discussion of one's genealogy. The concept of

genealogy, however, is one of Nietzsche's central concerns and

critical tools. Genealogy, as Nietzsche develops it, is not

only the elaboration of one's lines of descent from the past,

it is also, and more generally, the understanding of the

manner in which the present can affect the past. We know that 5 Herman Melville, Redburn, pp. 162-163 (New York. Anchor Books, 1965).6 Ecce Homo (Why I am so Wise 1) in Werke Kritische Gesammtausgabe (Berlin.

Gruyter, 1966ff) volume VI-3 p. 262. Henceforth WKG. Nietzsche is cited from this edition by work (if named), internal divisions, WKG, Volume number, sub-volume number, and page number. Translations are ours although we have consulted the extant Kaufmann, Hollingdale and Cambridge University Press editions. For a full discussion of this autobiography see Sarah Kofman, Explosions I (Paris. Galilée, 1992) andmy “Oedipus as Hero: Nietzsche on the Family and the Family in Nietzsche" in boundary 2: A Journal of Post-Modern Literature, May 1982.


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from early in his career, Nietzsche was concerned with the

possibility of transforming the present by changing its past.

Thus he can write in Use and Misuse of History for Life:

For since we are the outcome of earlier

generations, we are also the outcome of their

aberrations, passions and errors, and indeed

of their crimes; it is not possible to free

oneself wholly from this chain. If we condemn

these aberrations, and regard ourselves free

of them, this does not alter the fact that we

originate in them. The best we can do is to

confront our inherited and hereditary nature

with our knowledge of it, and through a new,

stern discipline combat our inborn heritage

and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new

instinct, a second nature, so that our first

nature withers away. It is an attempt to give

oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in

which one would like to originate in

opposition to that in which one did originate:

-- always a dangerous attempt because it is so

hard to know the limit to denial of the past

and because second natures are usually weaker

than first. What happens all too often is

that we know the good but do not do it,

because we also know the better but cannot do

it. But here and there a victory is

nonetheless achieved, and for the combatants,


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for those who employ critical history for the

sake of life, there is even a noteworthy

consolation: that of knowing that this first

nature was once a second nature and that every

victorious second nature will become a first.7

This passage requires that one bring into being a new nature

that is not of the old. Although he does not here tell us what

the “second nature” is to be, his entire life project, both

individual and collective, is, we think, set out in this

paragraph.

What though are the conditions for achieving such a

transformation? We are here to some degree in the realm of

what J. L. Austin called the "performative,"8 that is the realm

of describing or naming something in such a manner that it

becomes something other than what it had been. (To say "I

promise" is to become an obligated person when one previously

was not one). We recognize this most easily as a political

question when such a contest over such namings arises.9 Take

7 Use and Misuse of History for Life, 3 [henceforth HL] WKG III-1, p. 216. [Untimely Meditations (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1997), p 76 ]

8 J.L. Austin, How To do Things With Words (Harvard UP) and an immense literature including especially Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Ithaca. Cornel UP, 1983) and Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (New York. Routledge, 1997). The following three paragraphs were written originally for this paper buthave appeared in altered form in Joseph Lima and Tracy B. Strong, “Telling the Dancer from the Dance: On the Relevance of the Ordinary for Political Thought,” in Andrew Norris, ed. The Claim to Community (Stanford. Stanford UP, 2005).

9 Monique Wittig is pointing to the realm of performativity when she asserts that gender introduces the “division of Being” into language,


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the following case.10 In 1789 Louis XVI of France found

himself urged by his minister Neckar to call the Estates

General into session. The Estates General were composed of

the nobility, the clergy and the Third Estate, which stood for

the non-privileged classes. The Estates had not been summoned

since 1614 when the meeting dissolved without agreement after

the Third Estate refused to consent to the abolition of the

sale of offices unless the nobility gave up some of their

privileges. The convocation of the Estates was thus

essentially a medieval practice, hardly an institution, but it

was nonetheless a practice the availability of which led to

their being called in 1789. On June 17, 1789, the Third

Estate declared itself to be the National Assembly of France.

The question immediately raised is to the authority by which,

in terms of which, this claim has legitimacy and more

importantly to what it means to declare oneself something that

had not previously existed as itself. The assembled delegates

(they are not even really delegates in that they are not for

the most part elected) cannot be calling upon an existing

such that “Gender must then be destroyed.” She holds that contests over naming become contests over Being: “The possibility of [gender’s] destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say “I,” I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact hold true for every locutor”. Monique Wittig, “The Mark ofGender,” in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985)p. 81. See also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1989; Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), Excitable Speech (New York: Routledge, 1997) as well as a number of other theorists re: thepolitics of gender performativity.

10 We are indebted for the comparison to Josiah Ober, The Athenian Revolution (Princeton. Princeton UP, 1996) pp 46ff. He draws upon Sandy Petrey, Realism and Revolution (Ithaca. Cornell U, 1988)


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authority -- they are trying to call one into existence -- to

create a past -- so as to give themselves a reality in the

present. The King, it should be noted, had the Assembly

building surrounded by troops and ordered them to disperse,

stating that their naming of themselves the National Assembly

meant nothing and was therefore null and void.

The political question here is then which performative is to

be efficacious, what one might call the ethnological, social

conventional (that of the King), or the biological, that is

the claim to life advanced by the would-be Assembly. The

deeper question has to do with the status of authority. What

is it that serves as the entitlement to speak? The Third

Estate is claiming the right to think of itself as a National

Assembly -- how may this right and, more importantly, this

would-be actuality be established? This is the question of

foundation, of constituting oneself as a person, a body, a

people -- perhaps the fundamental modern political question.

It is, as we shall see, the question of sovereignty.

What has to be the case for a performative to be accepted as

performing, for something new to come into existence – in the

above case for the National Assembly to in fact exist, where

existence comes both in the acknowledgement from others and

that it is what it says that it is? Most of the discussion of

performatives explicitly assumes a particular form of life

(one might call it an institutional structure) such that when

one says “I do” in a particular set of circumstances and in


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response to a question posed at a particular time and place,

then one is in actuality a married person and in no ways an

unmarried one.11 In the above case, however, we are one step

below or beyond that, in a realm of what we might call a hyper

(or vertical)-performative, when the saying of particular

sentences calls up the possibility of conditions that make a

new authority actual.12 Such a change is in fact a

transformation or a transfiguration of the world. If we have

been naught, how shall we be all?

The case above gives us a spatial debate between the King and

the (would-be) Assembly; Nietzsche combines a spatial debate

as to the boundaries of personal or national identity with a

temporal debate, that is one between the present and the past.

Achieving such a transformation is the kind of thing at which

Nietzsche is pointing in the passage cited above from Use and

11 How and what counts as an authoritative institutional context, and how much it matters, is controversial, of course, but we cannot here rehearse the differences between Austin, Benveniste, Derrida, and Searle on the relative weight of “constitutive rules,” “institutionalfacts” (Searle), pre-existing sources of authority (Benveniste), context/conventionality of circumstance (Austin), and the conventionality of language itself aside from context of use (Derrida).

12 Derrida makes a similar point in stressing the need to move beyond the performative to the realm of what he calls the impossible, since the possible, or the performative, is already too bound up with pre-existing structures of sovereign authority to affect real transformation. See Paul Patton, “Future Politics,” in Paul Patton and John Protexi, eds., Between Deleuze and Derrida (London. Allen and Unwin, 2005) for a very helpful account of how Derrida’s project of “affirmative deconstruction” moves between the conditioned and the unconditioned (or a concept as it appears in institutional/historicalcontext – the possible - and an absolute, albeit aporetic, form of the concept – the impossible).


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Misuse, although he does not tell us how the substitution of a

second nature for a first is to be achieved.

He does, however, give us an example (and, perhaps, a

counterexample). In the essay “Homer on Competition,”

Nietzsche argues that man’s secondary characteristics, those

that are “human” (here meaning the outgrowth of civilization)

are not separable from primary or “natural” ones. They “have

grown together inextricably” so that “Man, in his highest,

finest powers, is all nature and carries nature’s uncanny dual

character in himself.”13 It is in fact the capacities we think

“terrible” and view as “inhuman” which may be “the fertile

soil from which alone all humanity, in feelings, deeds and

works can grow forth.” But there is a critical distinction

between a nihilistic (and Hegelian) “struggle to the death”

and the controlled and controlling competition of the agon

(190). Nietzsche praises the Greeks for neither positing an

ideal of harmony over conflict nor falling into Orphic life-

denial. Rather, the Greeks sublimate violence into cultural

contests in which there are “always several geniuses” to both

incite each other to action and to “keep each other within

certain limits.” For Nietzsche, the “kernel of the Hellenic

idea of competition” is that it “loathes a monopoly of

predominance and fears the dangers of this, it desires, as

13 “Homer on Competition” in Genealogy of Morality , trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: UK, 1994) p. 187. This is a translation of “Homers Wettkampf” – one of the “Five Prefaces to Unwritten Books” that Nietzsche presented to Cosima Wagner on Christmas Day, 1870 (see Kritische Studentausgabe (Gruyter. Berlin, 1995) volume 1, pp. 783-92.


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protective measure against genius – a second genius” (192).

Nietzsche attributes the deterioration of the Hellenic state

to the absence of competitive ambition and agonistic

relationships. When one “great figure” stands above and

apart from the rest, the agonistic spirit withers, while this

figure commits an act of hubris and “collapses under it”

(194).

Importantly, he considers Alexander the Great a “grotesquely

enlarged reflection of the Hellene” and his brutal actions in

war a “nauseating caricature of Achilles” (190). Nonetheless,

when the Hellenic state gives up competition, it becomes

“vengeful and godless . . . in short it becomes pre-homeric – it

then takes only a panicky fright to make it fall and smash

it.” And then Alexander does not only reflect, caricature, or

even replace the Hellene: “Alexander, the rough copy and

abbreviation of Greek history, now invents the standard-issue

Hellene and so-called ‘Hellenism’.-” (194).

What Nietzsche is saying is that foundation requires that one

authoritatively change the past such that one issues from a

past one has made rather than that from which one now issues.

Doing so in a productive way involves plurality and agonism. In

this way a temporal contest also has what we might call a

spatial dimension. And insofar as Nietzsche claims lineage

from Alexander, we might ask which family and thus which past

he seeks to change. When Nietzsche says “father” the referent


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is irreducibly multiple. Genealogy is about families -- both

on the individual and on the social/political level.

2. In the Ecce Homo passage, Nietzsche is concerned with

his parents. The “facts” of his life at the writing are that

his father had died when he was almost five and that his

mother was still alive (and, indeed, would outlive him).

However, it is not that his father has died and that his

mother lives on that he is telling us. Rather he has died as

his own father and as his own mother he lives on. Thus the

subject of this autobio- and autothanato-graphy14 (the subject

who may or may not be its author) is both alive and dead. Even

more, it means that the one self of this auto-biography is in

fact not one but two. He continues: "I know both, I am both."

Furthermore this double origin is said to be his "good

fortune." The self that knows itself, that can write itself,

is never single.

3. As both his mother and father he is thus of two

genders, both male and female.15.It should be noted that this 14 As Sarah Kofman, Explosions I (Paris. Galilée, 1992) reminds us.15 We use the term gender here and throughout, though we could have

used sex (and do in several places), insofar as Nietzsche's claim to be both parents is at times presented as a claim to the biological potential to play one role instead of another in reproduction. However, given Nietzsche's questioning of a distinction between the biological or corporeal and the ideal or social, the term sex-gender would perhaps be most appropriate, though it is an awkward locution. Further, we take Nietzsche's claim to be of both sexes to be performative: a performance that can become efficacious only when he attributes certain gendered functions, attributes, or styles to himself. At the same time, his self re-gendering (or re-sexing) is bound up with his challenge to conventional kinship patterns and


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does not exclude him having the attitudes that each gender

might have towards the others. He could be fearful of

castration and have penis envy, if one were to give credit

temporarily to Freudian categories. Indeed, Nietzsche's

writing could easily be said to exhibit both of the

compensatory reactions to castration anxiety: radical

devaluation (abjection), and overvaluation (fetishization) of

Woman. Moreover, the Freudian remedy for woman's "lack" (or

penis envy) is, of course, that of having a child. The point

here is that most readings of Nietzsche on these matters

attribute to him one of these states and the desire to have

the other.16 The resultant frustration – that of a man who

can’t be a woman or a woman who can’t be a man – leads him – sexual practices, insofar as gender is also parasitic on a kinship structure that makes the symbolic positions “male” and “female” available. See Butler (1993) for a discussion of the ways in which gender and sex can be understood to produce one another simultaneously. See also Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always AlreadyHeterosexual?” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (13.1), 2002, esp. pp14-15 and Butler, Antigone’s Claim (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000)for discussion of the role that kinship rules have in rendering some forms of sexual relationship culturally legible, and others illegible, as well as in establishing systems of gender normativity. Butler illuminates the way in which a violation of kinship prohibitions via “unintelligible” sexual practices can de-stabilize normative gender categories.

16 Caroline Picart (Resentiment and the “Feminine” in Nietzsche’s Politico-Aesthetics (University Park, PA. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999) argues that Nietzsche desires to appropriate female reproductive powers and, unable to do so, suffers a crippling and destructive resentiment. The feminine is thus a sign of the “devolution of his thought.” (p. 16). We rather see Nietzsche’s self-understanding as one of alterity. . Luce Irigaray, on whom Picart draws extensively, sees Nietzsche’s will to self-birth as a desire to half genealogy rather than, as we do, a desire to alter it. (See her Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (New York. Columbia UP, 1991, esp. p. 81(. The claim that Nietzsche was homosexual (and a woman wanting a man) is made in Joachim Köhler, Nietzsche’s Secret: the interior life of Friedrich Nietzsche (Ronald Taylor, trans.) New Haven. Yale University Press, 2002.


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it is said -- to various mistakes and excesses out of a kind

of ressentiment against himself. These readings, it seems to

us, foreclose unthinkingly the possibility that Nietzsche

might actually be bi-gendered (indeed that we might all be,

even if we choose to deny it – a lesson that might have been

learned from Freud or Joan Riviere).17 We might likewise read

Nietzsche’s flaunting of a compensatory masculinity (sometimes

displayed in misogynist terms) as a cover for his desire to

appropriate feminine power, and his (and our) plurally sexual

natures.18 17 Joan Riviere “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” Psychoanalysis and Female

Sexuality, ed. Hedrik M. Ruitenbeek (New Haven: College and UP, 1966).Interestingly, two recent films have also taken up the question of double gender (or bi-sexuality), that of performative identity, and that of motherhood. In Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonz, 1999), a film that is very much about the performance of identity, the character Lottie declares herself a "transsexual" after having used John Malkovich's body (which she inhabited via a portal leading to his brain) to make love to and then impregnate another woman, Maxine, whorefers to her as "the father . . . the other mother". Lottie is figured as male (though still possessing a female body) after this performance of her masculinity, insofar as she and others (including her husband) refer several times to her penis (in Lacanian terms, shenow possesses the phallus). Also interestingly, Maxine only likes sex with Lottie as Malkovich, needing both the masculine and the feminine present at once. And All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar, 1999), a film populated by pregnant women, trans-gendered characters,transvestites, and performers, closes with the following dedication: "To Betty Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider . . . To all actresseswho have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother."

18 In this regard, Freud’s own masquerade in his notorious essay “Femininity” is important (in New Introductory Lectures. Norton. New York,1965). He begins that essay by using four lines of a Heine poem (The North Sea) to pose “the riddle of the nature of femininity.” But,as Mary Anne Doane points out, Freud has removed the lines from theircontext, a stanza in which Heinrich Heine is actually posing not the question “What is Woman?” but, rather “ . . .what signifies Man?” Doane thus notes that Freud’s castration of the stanza conceals the question of “man’s own ontological doubts” (a humanistic question)


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4. He is not only his mother and father, he is his own

child. Again and again, Nietzsche will valorize youth and

natality. In the essay on the use and misuse of history for

life, Nietzsche remarks early on that the child’s play is

disturbed by the pressure of “it was.”19 Nietzsche is

introducing into philosophical thought the centrality of the

fact of children, of newness. The image of the child

dominates not only Zarathustra, but many of his texts, from

early work like The Use and Misuse of History for Life and Philosophy in the

Tragic Age of the Greeks to later material in Beyond Good and Evil

(where maturity is said to be the recovery of the seriousness

that one had in play as a child20) and to his last notes.

5. This child, however, is a child of incest, a product

of the union of the mother and himself as father and of the

father and the mother as himself. Incest is in fact a

valorized theme from as early as the Birth of Tragedy.21 Carole

beneath the question of Woman, thus performing his own masquerade in the very pre-text of the essay. See Mary Anne Doane, “Film and theMasquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990), pp.41-57.

19 HL 1 (WKG III-1 244)20 Beyond Good and Evil par. 94 (WKG VI-2 p. 90).21 “There is,” he writes, “a tremendously old popular belief,

especially in Persia, that a wise magus can only be born from incest.With the riddle-solving and mother-marrying Oedipus in mind, we must immediately interpret this to mean that where the spell of present and future, the rigid law of individuation and especially the original (eigentlich) magic of nature is broken by prophetic and magicalpowers, there some enormous unnaturalness – such there as incest – must have preceded it as cause; for how else could one compel nature to betray her secrets, if not by victoriously resisting her, that is


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Pateman has pointed out that the social contract requires an

other, sexual, contract that in effect re-inscribes patriarchy

back into the fraternity of the contract. The sons overthrow

the father only to institute a fraternity of men who form a

social-sexual pact prohibiting incest so that they will have

orderly access to the women they subordinate. We might extend

that thought here and note that insofar as liberal democracy

depends on the possibility of an initial or "original"

contract, that contract is only made possible by the

prohibition of incest. The banning of incest is a reassertion

of patriarchal authority in its fraternal form. It is thus

not a surprise to find Nietzsche here raising the necessity of

incest22 in order to break with the hold that the past has overby means of the unnatural.” Birth of Tragedy par. 9 (WKG III-1 60). And though he does not stress this in the text of Zarathustra, he must haveknown that incestuous brother-sister pairings were for a time customary among the followers of Zarathustra, or Zoroaster (the reference above may be to this practice).

22 It is noteworthy how few films there are that treat parent-child incest sympathetically. Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie and Louis Malle'sLe Souffle au Coeur are the only two that come immediately to mind, though there are several that treat brother-sister incest relatively sympathetically (Close My Eyes, and especially John Sayles's Lone Star). In political theory, there are almost no examples of felicitous incest with the only one coming to mind Montesquieu’s Persian Letters where the only happy persons are the incestuous brother and sister, Aphéridon and Astarté (letter 67). They are also the only ones who produce a child. In this case, the incestuous union is one that follows the dictates of their custom and religion, while opposing the(new) law of the land. Thus, the incestuous union functions as a reinstantiation of traditional authority in the face of ill-fitting and externally imposed law. But it also seems to be a parable of democratic revolution, in which revolution involves some kind of return. What the future holds for – and through - their child is lessclear, as the Aphéridon sells himself and their daughter into slaveryto free Astarté from bondage. The pair subsequently contract with the merchant who buys him that he will free them both if they both work for him for a year. They are then freed, though they remain importantly in the merchant’s debt. But the child is never mentioned


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the present, and, we want to suggest, with the idea of society

based on the liberal understanding of the contract predicated

on relations of exchange, of credit and debt, as he sets it

out in the Genealogy of Morals.23

6. Nietzsche is concerned with temporality and rebirth.

He tells us slightly later in Ecce Homo that not only has he

died as his father and lived on as his mother, but that he is

“merely his father once more . . . his continued life after an

all-too-early-death” so that he is in some sense claiming to

be his father reincarnate.

We also know from The Antichrist that Nietzsche considers himself

one of those who are “born posthumously,” to whom “only the

day after tomorrow belongs”. This birth, or rebirth, is set

in the context of his being read by his “predestined readers,”

those who will understand his Zarathustra24 Here it is through

future readers, who have keen enough ears to understand him, that

he is reborn.25 These are, it seems, the same readers to whom he

again. Interestingly, the siblings in Montesquieu’s tale are Guèbres,followers of Zoroaster, or Zarathustra. Voltaire subsequently also wrote a play called Les Guèbres about the persecution of Zoroastrians by their Moslem conquerers.

23 Here again the work of Judith Butler is of importance.24 The Antichrist, Preface (WKG VI-3 p. 165); see also Ecce Homo Preface 3

(WKG VI-3, p. 257)25 The ear is importantly considered an uncanny organ by Derrida,

because of what he calls its “double structure.” Cf “Roundtable on Autobiography” in Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, Schocken Books, 1985), pp 57-59. A keen ear is one that perceives differences. Nietzsche was quite proud of his small, keen ears, which he claimed were of great interest to women.


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poses the riddle of his existence in Ecce Homo, as evidenced by

the multiple repetitions of a single question at the start of

each of the last three parts of Ecce Homo’s final section, ‘Why

I am a Destiny’: “Have I been understood?”26 The riddle of

his existence, as queried here, seems to be that he is both

alive and dead, and that this liminal condition of life-in-

death (or death-in-life) is bound up with his relationship to

tradition or inheritance on the one hand, and futurity and (his)

legacy on the other. We will pick up this theme again when we

mention Whitman.

7. The language of "shadow" is important here. Shadows not

only invoke ghosts (and vice versa), but, importantly, the

"uncanny" figure of the double, or Doppelgänger. Importantly

for our purposes, Freud explicitly ties the uncanny to the

figure of the Doppelgänger, who stands for that which has been

repressed in oneself but has surfaced, only to be exteriorized

through displacement onto the figure of an "other".

Tellingly, Freud himself ties the phenomenon of "the double"

to Nietzsche's teaching of eternal return: “[T]here is a

doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. And finally

there is the constant recurrence of the same thing -- the

repetition of the same features or character traits or

vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names

through several consecutive generations."27 (234). (A passage

26 EH, Why I am a Destiny, 7; 8; 9.27 Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny", Standard Edition, volume 17, p. 234,


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in Beyond the Pleasure Principle28 contains a similar phrase - 'the

perpetual recurrence of the same thing' - which Freud puts

into inverted commas). Eternal return, it would seem, requires

that the self be understood as multiple and as self-

engendering.

8. It is also important that the dominant form of

understanding in this text is that of fingers and hands, of

touch and not of sight.29 He has "fingers for nuances”; he has

"it in his hand, he has the hand for it."30 In Twilight (What the

Germans Lack 8) the Germans are said to lack such fingers and

tactile skills. What they lack, in other words is feeling.

In Twilight, Nietzsche distinguished two kinds of intoxication.

One is Apollonian and is the excitement of the eye, of vision.

Dionysian intoxication, however, is in excitement and

intensification of the “whole system of feelings (Affekt-System)”

28 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, chapter 3 (Standard Edition volume 18, p. 22)

29 This is especially interesting in light of Irigaray’s claim that woman has a problematic relation to structures of seeing and to the visible. She is closer to the sense of touch. Feminist film theorists following Laura Mulvey’s classic “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” suggest that the extreme proximity of the female spectator to the image (she is the image) means that she oscillates between the masculine position and the feminine. This oscillation issometimes figured as transvesticism. Considering Nietzsche’s trouble with his eyes and reliance on touch in light of such a description puts pressure on the category “female spectator” in interesting ways. (And of course there has been a host of queer and critical race film theory since Mulvey that does this as well). And it only complicates matters thoroughly to remember that Machiavelli attributes the mistakes most people make to the fact that they rely on sight rather than on touch. (Prince, chapter 18)

30 The reference is lost in the Kaufmann translation as "know-how".


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and it leads to a process of constant self-transformation.31

As one of our epigraphs points out, Nietzsche directly links

pregnancy and the Dionysian.

All of this comes together in a question: why does Nietzsche

think his doubleness -- even to the point of designating

himself as having two genders -- to be a riddle centrally

important to what he is and to what his work is? The point,

presumably, is to replay the Oedipal story and come to another

resolution than that which has shaped Western notions of the

self since the Greeks. Nietzsche is not so much “anti-Oedipus”

as Oedipus triumphant. Are we saying “pace” to Deleuze and

Guattari, from whom we have learned much? They are at least

right to claim that the Oedipus dynamics are centrally

inscribed in Western understandings of the self.

II. The Pregnancy of Riddles and the Riddle of Pregnancy

Oedipus answers riddles and is indeed the answer to a riddle.

What is a riddle?

In Zarathustra, the problem of the limit of will is posed as “a

riddle - a dreadful accident” which takes the form “the will

is a creator.” The only solution for this riddle is to achieve

a “reconciliation with time”, by “learn[ing] to will

backwards.” In other words, answering a riddle affects the

weight that the past has on us. How so?

31 Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes 10 (WKG VI-3 p.111)


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In exploring this, let us look at what Nietzsche says about some

riddles. Two might detain us. First, in the preface to the

second edition of Gay Science (paragraph 4) Nietzsche gives some

"Advice to philosophers! One would better honor the modesty with

which nature hides itself behind riddles and multicolored32

uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman whose foundation33 is

not to let her foundation be seen? Perhaps her name, to speak

Greek, is Baùbo…"34 Riddles are thus a form of veiling that

allows truth to be. Secondly, in Zarathustra, there is a chapter

entitled "The Vision and the Riddle." There the riddle is said

to be that of eternal return.35 (We should thus suspect that

eternal return has something to do with changing the relation of

the past to the present and with coming to being).

Why riddles? We note that a riddle has the particular quality of

making the question go away when answered. Once you know what

goes up a chimney down but won’t go down a chimney up you can 32 bunte means “multicolored” but also “confused.” The town to which

Zarathustra first goes is Die bunte Kuh (cow).33 Gründe = ground, foundation, bottom, reason34 Gay Science 1886 Preface to the 2nd edition. Par. 4 (WKG V-2 p. 19).

See Sarah Kofman's definitive discussion of this passage in her essay“Baùbo” in Michael Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong, eds., Nietzsche's New Seas (Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1988). Baùbo, Kofman reminds us, is the equivalent of koilia, which refers to the female sex organ, and is celebrated as the symbol of fertility and the regeneration and eternal return of all things. Baùbo is personifiedin the mysteries of Eleusis consecrated to Demeter. In her grief over her loss of Persephone, Demeter, goddess of fecundity, had been acting as if sterile. Baùbo made Demeter laugh by pulling up her skirts and displaying a figure of Dionysus drawn on her belly, thus recalling the eternal return of life and suggesting to Demeter that "she recall fecundity to herself".

35 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (henceforth TSZ), Section 3, "The Vision and the Riddle".


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never be asked the question again as a riddle. So the riddle

offers the possibility of eliminating that which gives rise to

it. Riddles are ways of transfiguring the past; so also is

eternal return. In Zarathustra, the problem of the limit of will

was posed as “a riddle - a dreadful accident” which takes the

form “the will is a creator.” The only solution for this riddle

is to achieve a “reconciliation with time”, by “learn[ing] to

will backwards.” 36

The ultimate in willing backwards, and establishing one’s own

lineage, is to give birth to oneself. Insofar as Nietzsche

has claimed to parent, or give birth to, himself, he implies

he has been pregnant with himself. Significantly, Nietzsche has

Zarathustra call woman a riddle,, for which the solution (or

answer) is pregnancy. In speaking to the little old woman,

Zarathustra first declines to speak about “woman” to women,

but, when pressed, he finally declares, “Everything about

woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one

solution: that is pregnancy.”37 While this formulation has 36 TSZ, Section 2, “On Redemption”. See the discussion in Tracy B.

Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, (Champaign, IL. University of Illinois Press, 2001), chapter 8

37 TSZ, Book I, On Little Old and Young Women. This chapter ends with the (notorious) dictum of the “little truth” of the “little old woman”: “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!” Before jumping to the usual conclusion one should read the convincing interpretation in David Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Rowman and Littlefield. Lanham, MD, 2001) pp 155-158. Allison reads this as referring to the notorious photograph of Paul Rée, Nietzsche and Lou holding a whip (as all interpreters do) but, as the scene replays an incident in which a lecherous Aristotle was embarrassed, reads both as relevant to Nietzsche’s desire to express his distress with Rée’s apparently greater success in getting Lou’s affections. Thus the passage and the photograph are in fact at the bottom about Rée and


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often been denounced as misogynist, it may not be (only) that,

insofar as Zarathustra himself appears as pregnant after this

encounter. Similarly, Nietzsche's assertion as to the necessity

of the eternal agony of the woman giving birth may be both

taken on its face as insensitive and as his model for the

"eternal joy of creating". It is important to recall that,

for Nietzsche, creativity always involves pain.

Nietzsche's use of the language of pregnancy and birth in

connection with creative or contemplative work recalls his

discussion in The Gay Science of "spiritual pregnancy" producing

the "character of the contemplative type" which he finds

"closely related to the feminine character" and terms "male

mother."38 One should thus not conclude here that when Nietzsche

talks about pregnancy that he is simply talking about the new-

born child. Pregnancy is intimately tied with pro-creation and

that is for Nietzsche always sexual. To be one’s own parent is

to penetrate and impregnate oneself.

not about ‘woman.” See also Kofman’s comments on the question of “woman” (as opposed to “women”) in the essay mentioned in footnote 25.

38 Gay Science 72 (WKG V-2 p. 106) henceforth GS. And relatedly: "Constantly, we [philosophers] have to give birth to our thoughts outof our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have in us of blood, heart, desire, passion, agony, conscience, fate, catastrophe (GS preface 3 (WKG V-2 p. 17)).


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III. The Phenomenology of Pregnancy and Democratic Theory

A. Genealogy, Corporeality and Pregnant Embodiment

Intriguingly, the phenomenology that emerges from Nietzsche's

use of maternal and reproductive language is strikingly like

that which Iris Marion Young terms that of "pregnant

embodiment" in her essay of the same name.39 Though her

immediate end is quite different from Nietzsche’s, her

critique of the conception of a woman's body as a mere fetal

container, of the assumption of a unified subject, and of a

mind/body split are quite consistent with Nietzsche's project.

The point of the preceding discussions was to establish that

for Nietzsche the actuality and ontology (we could call these

with Weber, the “vocation” of “calling”) of the multiplicity

of the “self” revolved around questions of gender, of

parenthood, of childhood, and thus of pregnancy. We propose

now to extend this discussion and to examine what relevance it

might have for an understanding of politics that would be

democratic. More directly: what does it mean to be pregnant with oneself and

what are the implications of this possibility for democratic politics?

It is noteworthy that theorists of multiplicity have used

precisely the same metaphors as has Nietzsche and that they

39 Iris Marion Young. 1990. "Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation" in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).


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generally do so in the context of founding or grounding a

nation or a person – of bringing something into being. Whitman

thinks of himself as giving birth to the entire American

nation. In "Long, too long America," we find that his task is

to:

… conceive and show to the world what your children

en-masse really are,

(For Whom except myself has yet conceived what your

children

en-masse really are?)

And, perhaps most famously, in "Song of Myself", "For me the

male and the female . . . For me children and the begetters of

children". The language of conception comes naturally here, but

the conception is not a unitary or an atomistic self but a self

that contains multitudes.40 This is a claim that there is

nothing any human being has become or done that one could not

have become or done. Contingency goes all the way down.

Whitman, and George Kateb following him, does not here exclude

gender. Kateb: “All the personalities that I encounter, I

already am: that is to say, I could become or could have been

something like what others are…. I am potentially all

personalities and we equally are infinite potentialities.”41

40 Indeed, it is partly this different understanding of the self, or the "individual" that distinguishes the claim to be a bi-gendered (ordouble) parent from the common usage of the language of (political) "birth" by the classic social contract theorists.

41 George Kateb, The Inner Ocean (Cornell UP, 1992) p. 247. Morton Schoolman has also systematically linked Nietzsche and Whitman, but his emphasis is on their shared aesthetic relation to democratic forms of life -- a not unrelated matter, but one we do not have space


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B. The Presence of the Other: Reconstituting (Democratic) Authority

A self so constituted cannot be single: he/she/it must contain

all that engendered it (parents) and all that it can engender

(child). It will only be able to give birth to itself if

called out (Emerson will call this provocation) by an exemplar

-- but this exemplar must be its own exemplar and will only be

if allowed to be such. In Human all-too-Human I (1886 Preface,

par. 7) Nietzsche will write that “The secret force and

necessity of this task [coming into the world as oneself] will

rule among and in the individual facets of his destiny like

and unconscious pregnancy – long before he has caught sight of

this task itself or knows its name.”42 And this means that

everything about that self must be contingent, in the sense

that it is in fact not only its own parent but its own child.

(Such is the fate of Oedipus, after all). We think of this as

what is now called “perfectionism.”

The perfectionist model is one of potentiality (or becoming in

another sense), and draws on the phenomenology of pregnancy and

conception. We are in the realm of perfectionism when we

experience the world (a person, an idea, a goal) as something to

which we feel called but which we know that we are not yet. In

Dawn of Day pregnancy is said to be the “most holy” condition of

the human being. “’What is growing here is something greater

than we are’ is our most secret hope: … It is in this state of

to explore at length here. See Schoolman’s Reason and Horror: Critical Theory, Democracy, and Aesthetic Individuality (Routledge: New York, 2001).

42 See also Human all too human, Assorted Maxims, pars 63 and 216 (WKG IV-3 pp. 41, 106)


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consecration that one should live! It is a state one can live

in!”43 The realization of the “exemplar” (as Nietzsche called it)

to which we are drawn in what Nietzsche and Emerson explicitly

name “love” would constitute a new being who has transfigured

his or her (or his and her) pasts in the achievement of

exemplarity. While we would argue that Nietzsche's thought

retains this quality throughout, it is most easily initially

identified in the essay "Schopenhauer as Educator." The essay

has a number of qualities relevant here. First, the essay has

an almost breathless erotic quality -- that of the eromenos to

the erastes. Nietzsche starts out by a description of himself as

what can only be seen as philosophical cruising: “In those

days, I roved as I pleased through wishes of all kinds ... I

tried this one and that.” His first stance is like that of the

young Hippocrates in the Protagoras, in “need, distress and

desire” for philosophy, but unable to rest with it.44 His

encounter with Schopenhauer is described in self-consciously

explicit “physiological terms.”45 The question he poses himself

is that of giving life to a bodily form.46

43 Dawn of Day par. 552 (WKG V-1, p. 326)44 Schopenhauer as Education par. 2 [henceforth SE] ( WKG III p. 342)45 SE 2 (WKG III p 345). 46 On this general question see Strong's Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of

the Ordinary (SAGE, 1994), pp. 46-50 and Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford, 1984) part IV. See also Richard Wagner in Bayreuth par. 5,where he says that “the soul of music now wants to create for itself a body,” that mousike “reaches out ... to gymnastics”. See also Strong, “The Tragic Ethic and the Spirit of Music,” International Studies in Philosophy (April, 2004).


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But what are the implications of this for relations between

selves so conceived? We think that the implications are

democratic – although not democratic in the sense that someone

like Rawls might see it. Such selves are transparent themselves

and to each other -- and in being transparent cannot claim a

position of natural superiority to anything or anyone else.

This means two things. First, society cannot in the end be

thought of simply as a contract between separated selves for the

selves are already not separated even before (as it were) there

is society.47 Secondly, the greatest danger to such selves will

be to want to fix the relationship between itself and others in

a final manner.

A full development of these ideas would require a

reconceptualization of the idea of contract as a foundation of

political society so as to include in it the constant presence

of contingency. The danger here – only partially explored by

Nietzsche -- is that one will be tempted to fix the voice of

others as the voice of the other, that is, as the voice against

which one defines oneself – here the other is the other sex.

Such will be the burden of his explorations of slave morality

in the Genealogy of Morals. In closing, we want briefly to

explore this question. It is of direct political

47 And, as Carole Pateman demonstrates, individuals so conceived are always masculine. Moreover, truly democratic contract of this sort is not possible insofar as contract on this model always instantiatesa relation of subordination, while purporting to be predicated on oneof equality. See Pateman's analysis of contract as subordination in The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).


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significance in any society where the other is readily

available.

Jean-Luc Nancy, in an essay called “La Comparution/

Compearance,” concludes as follows:

[C]ommunity… always excludes and on

principle…. At the bottom, that which the

community wants to exclude is that which does

not let itself be identified in it. We call it

the “other.” Community excludes its own

foundation…. But to exclude, exclusion must

designate: it names, identifies, gives form.

“The other” is for us a figure imposed on the

unpresentable (infigurable). Thus we have for us

– to go to a heart of the matter – the “Jew”

or the "Arab," figures whose closeness, that

is their in-common with “us,” is no accident.”

“Us” here reflects that Nancy speaks as a Frenchman and a

member of the French “community.” The problem of “the other”,

as he goes on to clearly recognize, will be specifically

different for other communities, but not structurally so. The

double question is always: “how to exclude without fixing

(figurer)? And how to fix without excluding?”

The answer to Nancy’s question is difficult. When we exclude

the other, here the other sex in me, what is it that we are

missing about him or her, or what is it that we want to miss?


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Take a parallel case from Cavell: “What [a man who sees

certain others as slaves] is missing is not something about

slaves exactly and not exactly about human beings. He is

missing something about himself, or rather something about his

connection with these people, his internal relation with them,

so to speak.” Cavell goes on to point out that my actions show

that I cannot mean in fact that the other is not human, or is

less than human:

When he wants to be served at table by a black

hand, he would not be satisfied to be served

by a black paw. When he rapes a slave, or

takes her as a concubine, he does not feel

that he has by that fact itself, embraced

sodomy. When he tips a black taxi driver … it

does not occur to him that he might more

appropriately have patted the creature fondly

on the side of the neck.

No matter what the slave owner, or the Frenchman in Nancy’s

essay, can claim (and assert that they truly believe), their

actions show that they hold something quite different. They

can allow that the others have qualities (their cuisine or

their music, say) but what they cannot allow is for them to

see themselves as he sees them. For then, they would see

themselves as they see him. Their power consists in requiring

that the others have no existence for them except as they

allow it. Montesquieu saw this and in The Persian Letters named it

the central quality of tyranny.


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What is missing is an acknowledgement of the other. It is

not simply a matter of knowing (all there might be to know)

something about the other, but acknowledgement. Cavell again:

[A]cknowledgment goes beyond knowledge not in

the order, or as a feat, of cognition, but in

the call upon me to express the knowledge at

its core, to recognize what I know, to do

something in the light of it, apart from which

this knowledge remains without expression,

hence perhaps without possession….

[A]knowledgment of the other calls for

recognition of the other’s specific relation

to oneself, and that this entails the

revelation of oneself as having denied or

distorted that relationship.

To allow the other a voice is to recognize something about

one’s relation to the other – that there is the relation of

being human – and to recognize one's constant temptation to

deny that relation. My existence as human depends on theirs

and this in turn on the acknowledgement that no one’s soul is

his or her own.48 Cavell speaks of masters and slaves and we

extend that here to sex. We verge here on territory that is48 Indeed’ this may be what Montesquieu was trying to capture in his

telling of the undoing of the Troglodyte community. Letter 11 of The Persian Letters concludes with the words of a doctor from a neighboring country who had been wronged by the Troglodytes:

'Away with you!' he said, 'for you are unjust. In your souls is a poison deadlier than that for which you want a cure. You do not deserve to have a place on earth, because you have no humanity, and the rules ofequity are unknown to you. It seems to me that I should be offendingagainst the gods, who are punishing you, if I were to oppose their rightful anger.'


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unexplored. Acknowledgement in the case of the reconstitution

of the self along the lines that Nietzsche analyses involves a

gendered self-engendering, an acknowledgment of the double

sexuality of one’s self or rather selves. We might think of

this other sex as one's own (never then as the other sex), as

it were one’s shadow that exists by virtue of one’s present

apparent sex.

The question that this raises for democratic authority has to do

with the status and possibility of contract as a foundation for

politics and justice. Can a multiple self contract? How does a

shadow contract? This cannot be a matter of desexualizing the

contractor49 but of retaining the acknowledgment of simultaneous

bi-sexuality – itself dependent on multiple identities (being

one’s parents, one’s child and the progenitor of each that is,

acknowledging the contingency of any claim to self-certainty as

the necessary pre-condition for democratic politics. Only in

this will one be able avoid repeating being either one’s father or

mother, that is of claiming moral authority for a particular

self. As noted above, Nietzsche knows both as he is both.

Nietzsche calls on us here to express something about ourselves

that he knows we will resist. He begins to lay the ground for

the necessity of dealing with the non-acknowledged sexualized

past that has a hold on the present.

49 Like in the work of Susan Okin, with her advocacy of “genderless marriage,” or in almost all liberal political thought.


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To what understandings of democratic theory does this point? If

Nietzsche was no democrat, at least in most (but not all, we

think!) of the senses in which we use that term in the West

today, he nonetheless provides a foundation for a democratic

thinking that privileges individuality but not individualism.

We have sketched both agonist and perfectionist claims to

politics and the phenomenologies of these politics. Both kinds

of politics, both phenomenologies, involve both temporal and spatial

contests. And, too, each form of democratic politics invokes

the logic of the riddle in that each involves guessing, and

experimentation, rather than calculation and determinate

knowledge. Both involve the “leap without guidelines” of birth

and of all artistic creation. A politics that moves between

the two might finally be linked, we suggest, through the

necessity of agonistic respect50 and an acknowledgment of the other that

entails giving the other a voice. In each case, there is a

respect for – even a celebration of – the fact of difference and

plurality. But there is also the acknowledgment that the

fundamental contingency of identity means that “I” could have been

otherwise, could have been the other, and may yet (or already)

be so.

In particular, we see the following. First, in liberal

democratic thought, the idea of a core fixed “identity” is

essential, essential because the public-private distinction

depends on it. Liberal thought must see politics as that human

activity that functions at least in part to protect some portion50 The term is originally William Connolly’s.


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of the self from infringement.51 There is a strand in

democratic thought, however, that views the notion of fixed

identity with suspicion: above we allude to Walt Whitman,

Jacques Derrida, George Kateb, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Hannah

Arendt, to which we added inter alia the voices of Judith

Butler, Wendy Brown, William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, and Mort

Schoolman. For these (and other authors) “identity” must remain

fluid and motile. We seek to extend this line of thought by

explicating the grounds on which one might elaborate a conception of

identity that is not fixed either temporally or spatially. Above we

would argue, following our analysis of Nietzsche, that the

sources of a motile identity must be found in the contingency

consequent to multiplicity.

Secondly, any person so multiply conceived must nonetheless

beware the temptation to fix the other as the other, or to claim

superiority or privilege for itself, a privilege that it would

otherwise claim as a condition for its self. Nietzsche

articulates forms of self-understanding and practices that

foster agonistic respect and the acknowledgment of our

relational constitution. Nietzsche is above all concerned not

with rejecting morality, but with making impossible that one

claim for one’s own morality a moral privilege, what one might

call the “moralization of morality.”52

51 Such thought is central to Rawls, who may stand in for most others here. See Tracy B. Strong, "Setting One's Heart on Honesty: the Tensions of Liberalism and Religion,” Social Research (January 2000)

52 The term is originally Stanley Cavell’s in The Claim of Reason. Wendy Brown makes an argument against the moralization of morality in “Symptoms: Moralism as Anti-Politics,” (ch. 2 in Politics Out of History


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Lastly, such an understanding of the motile self will not have

at its center a vision of the irreducible separateness of

selves, one from the other. It is important to note here that

this vision is not that generally associated with “communitarian”

critics of liberal thought such as Charles Taylor or Michael

Sandel. These writers adduce a vision of a “thick” self, which

they counterpoise to the “thin” one in Rawls and others.

Thickness here is gained by virtue of the self’s embeddedness in

the mesh of historical and social realities within which we all,

perforce, live. Here one might think, rather, of Hannah

Arendt’s understanding of plurality as both an ontological fact –

though one which must nonetheless be achieved and maintained -

and a normative good. Our inner plurality both mirrors and is a

condition of the maintenance of outer plurality.53 In our

understanding the non-separateness is analytic to our selves,

not consequent to contingent historical matters. Whatever

separation we have consequent to our historical rootedness is

made possible, in our view, by and only by the preexisting

ontological contingency of identity.

(Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), pp. 18-44.53 Arendt repeatedly notes her indebtedness to Nietzsche for her

understanding of the inner plurality of the self. She also contends that “Nietzsche saw with unequaled clarity the connection between human sovereignty and the faculty of making promises . . .” (Human Condition, p. 245). One way in which our reading of Nietzsche diverges from Arendt’s is that she thinks he failed to apply these insights to his solipsistic understanding of will, and thus could notextend this understanding to relations with others. We think she hasmissed the importance of the corporeal dimensions of his thought, and the ways in which he associates will with breeding and birth.


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This, in turn, raises one final question, upon the asking of

which we finish this essay. If what we have said above is true,

then a central question is why it is that liberal democratic

thought insists (and not without a positive response from our

own intuitions) that at the core of each individual is something

that is singly and irreducibly that one person? What is being

protected? To what is acknowledgment refused? The answer,

somewhat gnomically, might look like this fable that

Wittgenstein recounts in 1931.

It seems to me that the story of Peter Schlemihl

should read like this: He makes his soul over to the

devil for money. Then he repents it and the Devil

demands his shadow for ransom. But Peter Schlemihl

still has a choice between giving the Devil his soul,

or sacrificing, along with his shadow, life in

community with other humans.54

What might we lose? Our shadow, our self. It is our shadow

that reminds us that we are embodied and that this means we

live with others and as others. "Who is it that can tell me

what I am?" cries King Lear. The answer comes from the Fool:

"Lear's shadow." It is not that I have become a shadow of my

former self, but that my shadow -- my ghost – can tell me.

Acknowledgement in the case of the reconstitution of the self

along the lines that Nietzsche analyses involves a gendered

54 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 14


Jude Browne

self-engendering, an acknowledgment of the double sexuality of

one’s self or rather selves. We might think of this other sex

as one's own (never then as the other sex), as it were as one’s

shadow that exists by virtue of and is cast by one’s present

apparent sex as long as one lives in the light.

Trappen in a Family Portrait: Gender and Family in Nietzsche's REfiguring of Authority.

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