FAIRE UN ENFANT DANS LE DOS

What seems to happen before their eyes happens, in reality, behind their backs.

ALTHUSSER, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists

I'm almost tempted to conclude my counter-transmission with that old line from Leonard Cohen: “You can say that I've grown bitter, but of one thing you can be sure, the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor.”^[100] For so it is that we—all of us—always risk falling short of philosophy, falling on our collective face. And Nietzsche could be held responsible. But one final caveat about the problem of holding trickster Nietzsche responsible. Slapstick indeed!

The recently suicided Gilles Deleuze once turned a remarkable, untranslatable phrase to express how difficult it is to translate philosophy in general, and that of Nietzsche in specific. Deleuze remarked that, for him,

the history of philosophy is a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had actually to say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed.^[101]

Now Deleuze turned to face the problem of Nietzsche. “It was Nietzsche, who … extricated me from all this. Because you can't deal with him in the same sort of way. He gets up to all sorts of things behind your back [Des enfants

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dans k dos, c'est lui qui vous en fait].”^[102] In French to do something behind your back isfaire un enfant dans le dos. In Deleuze's language, his own epitaph might then read: Des enfants nietzscheens dans le dos, c'est lui qui vous en fait. In impossible translation: Nietzsche sneaks up on you from behind and gives you monstrous children. He does this—he makes us fall short of philosophy and his most fundamental premises, his centrum—by means of the omnidirectional “oral” emissions of Radio Nietzsche, as Radio Nietzsche. As such, like God, Nietzsche remains both dead and eternal—unconscious. If to date his effect has indeed been mainly prophylactic—not to create the higher man but only to incorporate possible opponents into his own corps—then this was quite sufficient and necessary for the time being. From beginning to end, Nietzsche never intended to broadcast to any present time exclusively, but always into the future. Just like God and capitalism themselves.