3.3—
The "Subject" of Perspectivism

3.3.1—
Two Recent Accounts

It has become common, in Nietzsche scholarship, to view Nietzsche's epistemological position as a modified version of Kant's.^[15] According to one such account (what, for reasons that will become clear, I call the skeptical neo-Kantian account), Nietzsche accepts Kant's phenomenalism or idealism but gives it an evolutionary rather than a transcendental deduction. That is, what Kant takes to be logically and conceptually

[15] This view was proposed early on by Vaihinger, "Nietzsche and His Doctrine of Conscious Illusion," 84, and has gained currency in recent years. It has been suggested, asserted, or argued for by Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, AntiChrist, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 205ff.; Rüdiger Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977), 53 and passim; George J. Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-in-Themselves," Dialogos 36 (1980): 48, "Nietzsche and the Correspondence Theory of Truth," Dialogos 38 (1981 ): 108, "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology," Dialogos 59 (1992): 75–101; Bernd Magnus, "Nietzsche and the Project of Bringing Philosophy to an End," in Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker, ed. Yovel, 52; Schacht, Nietzsche, 62, 83, 139, "Nietzsche's Gay Science, Or, How to Naturalize Cheerfully," in Reading Nietzsche, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen Higgins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 79; Eric Blondel, Nietzsche. The Body and Culture, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 98ff.; Steven G. Crowell, "Nietzsche's View of Truth." International Studies in Philosophy 19 (1987): 17 n. 2; Nicholas Davey, "Nietzsche and Hume on Self and Identity," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 18 (1987): 20–21; Daniel W. Conway, "Beyond Realism: Nietzsche's New Infinite." International Studies in Philosophy 22 (1990): 99ff.; Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 121 and passim; Brian Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 351; Stephen Houlgate, "Kant, Nietzsche, and the 'Thing in itself,'" Nietzsche-Studien 22 (1993): 132, 148, and passim; and Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 2–3, 77–78, 85, 90, 95. This view is also implicit, I think, in the distinction between perspectival appearance and the unknowable world "in itself" assumed by Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 96, and Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 26ff.

a priori, Nietzsche, following the neo-Kantian F. A. Lange, sees as having only an evolutionary priority. What Kant argues is necessary and universal for rational thought and experience, Nietzsche views as the contingent product of a particular "physico-psychological organization," itself a result of the natural selection of traits that have proven their practical value for the survival of the species.^[16] Due to their different "physico-psychological" constitutions and organizations, different species can be supposed to have different "perspectives."^[17] On this view, then, the proper subjects of perspectives are biological species.

It is certainly the case that Nietzsche's "perspective" language most frequently appears in contexts that discuss the conditions necessary for particular species (often, human beings) to preserve themselves and to enhance their power (see, e.g., BGE P, 11, 34, 188; WP 259, 293, 616, 678, 789, 904). Yet the interpretation of perspectivism generated by this account commits Nietzsche to a position that, I believe, he does not accept: the skeptical position that every species is in principle unable to apprehend the world as it is in itself and the world as it is apprehended by other species.^[18] Nietzsche does not seem to believe, for example, that there is anything like a specifically human perspective, a unified and coherent totality rigorously differentiable from the "perspectives" of other species. First of all, Nietzsche's naturalism commits him to regard all living beings as, in fundamental respects, similar. He claims, for instance, that the human process of cognition is only a more complex and specialized form of the process of ingestion (or "incorporation" or "assimilation") found in the protoplasm (see WP 500, 501, 510, 511, 654, 666; also see §5.3, below). Indeed, a central theme of Nietzsche's later work is that knowledge is only a form of will to power, the drive to incorporate and subdue found in all organisms and species (see BGE 13, 36; GM II:12; WP 466–617). Second, Nietzsche argues that the human species itself does not have a unified worldview but rather is

[16] See Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-in-Themselves," 33–35. This reading draws on passages such as GS 110, 354, and 374.

[17] See Stack, "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche: Critique of Knowledge," Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Routledge, 1991), 44–45, and GS 374.

[18] The more general Kantian metaphysical realism implicit in this account is rejected by Nietzsche's harsh critique of dualism and the notion of the thing in itself. See, e.g., GS 54, 354; TI "Socrates" 2, "Reason" 6, "World" 6; WP 552, 567. This argument against metaphysical realism is presented more fully in chapter 4, below. For a powerful argument against the species interpretation of perspectivism, see Alexander Nehamas, "Immanent and Transcendent Perspectivism in Nietzsche," Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983): 473–94.

divided into a host of antagonistic "perspectives" or "interpretations": e.g., master and slave, Dionysian and Christian, Homeric and Platonic, Roman and Judaic, Goethean and Kantian, and various hybrids of these.^[19] Such differences of perspective, for Nietzsche, are not simply minor differences of opinion; on the contrary, they designate significantly different modes of perception, desire, cognition, evaluation, and action that compose different forms of life.

Thus, rather than demarcating insurmountable divisions between species, perspectives mark both extra- and intraspecies differences and similarities. According to Nietzsche, the biological field is crossed by a continuum of perspectives, none of which is in principle disjoint from another but each of which can be shown to differ from others in important respects and to significant degrees.^[20] The subject of perspectivism, then, must be something other than biological species.

This conclusion is shared by another recent interpretation (what I call the realist neo-Kantian account of perspectivism) that is explicitly "neo-Kantian" while rejecting the skepticism inherent in the species view.^[21] Instead, it construes perspectivism as a doctrine limited to the description of human knowledge. Claiming that the doctrine simply draws an analogy between a commonsense conception of human vision and a commonsense conception of human knowing, this account maintains that the subject of perspectivism is simply the ordinary, individual, human viewer/knower.

Brian Leiter, for example, begins from the obvious premises that "necessarily, we see an object from a particular perspective: e.g., from a certain angle, from a certain distance, under certain conditions," and "the more perspectives we enjoy—the more angles we see the ob-

[19] On master vs. slave, see BGE 260 and GM I. On Dionysian vs. Christian, see EH "Destiny" 9 and WP 1051 and 1052. On Homeric vs. Platonic, see GM III: 25. On Roman vs. Judaic, see GM I: 16. On Goethean and Kantian, see TI "Skirmishes" 49. On the various hybrids of these, see GM I: 16 and BGE 260, and 200. In the oft-cited GM III: 12, Nietzsche argues that we should learn to inhabit "a variety of perspectives and affectire interpretations in the service of knowledge"—which certainly seems to argue against the view that we inhabit only some unified "human" perspective. See WP 339: "This mankind is not a whole: it is an inextricable multiplicity of ascending and descending lifeprocesses [ . . . ] the strata are twisted and entwined together." Cf. Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 261: "Nietzsche holds not only that there are countless varieties of perspectives for countless forms of living process, but also that we human beings inhabit, not one, but a veritable nest of perspectives."

[20] For a more detailed argument to this effect, see Nehamas, "Immanent and Transcendent Perspectivism in Nietzsche," 476–77.

[21] Prominent proponents of this view are Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, and Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals ."

ject from—the better our conception of what the object is actually like will be."^[22] He goes on to argue by analogy that "necessarily, we know an object from a particular perspective: i.e. from the standpoint of particular interests and needs," and that "the more perspectives we enjoy—the more interests we employ in knowing the object—the better our conception of what the object is like will be."^[23] His argument concludes that, contrary to an overzealous skepticism, "we do indeed have knowledge of the world, though it is never disinterested, never complete, and can always benefit from additional non-distorting [cognitive] perspectives."^[24]

According to this account, then, just as there is no visual perspective that in principle is unavailable to us, so too is there no knowledge that in principle escapes our grasp. Unlike the skeptical account, this realist account has the merit of acknowledging Nietzsche's claim that we can and do have access to other perspectives. It suggests that, just as we can gain a new visual perspective on an object of vision by changing our position relative to it, so too can we gain different cognitive perspectives on an object of knowledge by bringing different sets of cognitive interests to bear upon it. Moreover, insofar as it grants the interestladenness of all inquiry, it suggests that we might come to appreciate and acknowledge the legitimacy of perspectival interests other than our own, even if we ourselves do not share them.^[25]

Yet this construal of the subject of perspectivism also runs into difficulties. Foremost among these, I think, is its assumption of a pre-given subject who has perspectives or interpretations. According to the commonsense account of vision called upon by this realist interpretation, when I move around an object, there is a change of perspective but no change of subject; it is the same I that takes up different perspectives . Perspectives are cumulative and thus, too, is knowledge. While I cannot simultaneously inhabit different perspectives, I nonetheless can take up

[22] Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 344. Leiter draws on Clark, whose presentation of this view is more fully elaborated. I draw on Leiter's presentation, because it is more concise and schematic yet, in important respects, the same as that of Clark.

[23] Ibid., 345.

[24] Ibid., 346. Cf. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 134–35.

[25] Leiter ("Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 345–46) says that "there are an infinity of interpretive interests that could be brought to bear" on the object of knowledge. Similarly, Clark (Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 135) writes: "We are, after all, finite creatures with a limited amount of time to discover truths, whereas there are surely an infinite number of truths to discover. We should therefore expect people with different interests to discover different truths."

consecutively a number of different perspectives on the same object and thus gain a richer visual sense of it. The situation is analogous in the cognitive case, according to the realist account. It holds that, although our knowledge is always "interested," we can bring a variety of "cognitive interests" to bear upon an object and thus come to know it better. Once again, across these different sets of "cognitive interests," there is a central, stable subject who consecutively occupies these different sets of interests and thus accumulates a more complete knowledge of the object on which these interests are brought to bear.

This view does, of course, receive some support from the passage privileged by its advocates. After all, in that passage, Nietzsche claims that "There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'; and the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe the thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity,' be" (GM III:12).^[26] This certainly lends some credence to the notion of perspective accumulation proposed by the realist account. Yet this account too narrowly focuses on this passage and, more specifically, on the optical analogy presented in it, to the neglect of more important features of the passage and Nietzsche's other central concerns. As I have indicated, it neglects to discuss the explicit connection between perspective and interpretation developed in this passage, a connection that we have seen to be fundamental to an understanding of perspectivism.^[27] Furthermore—and more important for the present discussion—it fails to account for another central feature of Nietzsche's later work: his critique of the notion of a pregiven subject—what he calls "ego-substance" (TI "Reason" 5).

3.3.2—
Nietzsche's Critique of "Ego-Substance"

A critique of the notion of mental- or subject-substance is found throughout Nietzsche's later work. Though, like many of Nietzsche's

[26] For Leiter ("Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 343), this is "[t]he primary text in [Nietzsche's] mature work in which he does offer a sustained discussion of [perspectives and perspectivism] in an epistemological context," while, for Clark (Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 128), this passage is "the only statement of Nietzsche's perspectivism in [the mature works]."

[27] Leiter ("Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 343) notes that "Nietzsche uses the language of 'interpretation' freely throughout the material published during his lifetime [while] discussions of 'perspectivism' and 'perspectives' are far less frequent." Yet Leiter proceeds to discuss perspectivism without reference to the notion of interpretation.

major ideas, it is never developed at length, this critique appears in much the same form in Beyond Good and Evil, the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and the later Nachlaß (see, e.g., BGE 12, 16, 17, 19, 34, 54; GM I:13; TI "Reason" 5, "Errors" 3; WP 229, 370, 477, 481–92, 531, 545–53, 631–32). Not surprisingly, the critique of ego-substance is a result of Nietzsche naturalism, which is both antimetaphysical (against the posit of any otherworldly entity or explanatory principle) and holistic (against every absolute foundation or origin). Thus, Nietzsche considers theological the belief that there is some "being" or subject-substratum "behind doing, effecting, becoming" (GM I:13). To assume such a being is to posit an otherworldly entity that initiates or produces the happenings, effects, and appearances that constitute the natural world while remaining outside that world, unchanged by its contingencies and exigencies (see TI "Reason" 5, "Errors" 3; WP 487). The notion of ego-substance is also a form of the "myth of the given," what Nietzsche calls the myth of "immediate certainties," those simple, atomic unities that are supposed to serve as the absolute foundation of all being and knowing.^[28] Nietzsche's naturalism rejects the idea that there is any entity that is not essentially dependent upon other entities for its genesis and continued existence and the idea that there is any fundamental, obvious "fact" that need not justify itself by relation to other "facts." For, according to Nietzsche, there are "facts" only against the background of a particular interpretation, and the only entities that exist are natural, that is, essentially relational and contingent, entities (see WP 481; BGE 34; and GM I:13). Thus, in rejecting the foundational presuppositions of "materialistic atomism," Nietzsche also rejects what he calls "soul atomism [ . . . ], the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon " (BGE 12). Such an idea, he claims, is not only super-natural but also fails to account satisfactorily for important features of human psychology, which reveals the human subject to be an amalgamation of competing impulses and drives rather than an atomic unity.^[29]

As Nietzsche himself acknowledges, this critique of mental substance

[28] See BGE 16, 17, 19, 34. Other "immediate certainties" repudiated by Nietzsche are God, the thing in itself, substance, and cause.

[29] True to his naturalism, Nietzsche regards psychology as "the queen of the sciences," "the path to the fundamental problems" (BGE 23), against the Kantian view that claims this role for epistemology and metaphysics.

stems from the critique of that notion by Hume and Kant.^[30] Following Hume, Kant argues that, because the subject or self is not discoverable among the contents of experience, some other justification must be sought for its postulation. Nietzsche takes up this line of thought in Beyond Good and Evil §54. For Nietzsche, as for Hume and Kant, we only ever experience discrete impressions, actions, and effects but never the "subject" that is supposed to have those impressions or initiate those actions and effects.^[31] Yet whereas Kant came to regard the notion of the self as a formal requirement of reason and to posit the antinaturalistic notions of noumenal self and noumenal causality, Nietzsche comes to regard the self as merely a grammatical habit that supports a moral fiction. For the radically empiricist Nietzsche—who maintains neither Kant's distinctions between intuition, understanding, and reason nor Kant's conviction that practical reason must be taken for granted and its postulates deduced—we have justification only for belief in actions, effects, doings, becomings, and appearances; and it is only a "seduction of language" that leads us to posit a "'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything" (GM I:13).^[32] Furthermore, this linguistic habit serves the Christian, moral purpose of making some isolable thing (i.e., a specific subject) responsible and accountable for these actions and deeds. The separation of doer from deed, the subsequent removal of this doer from the conditioned and contingent world of effects and happenings, and, finally, the ascription of a "free will" to this subject serve to isolate some being as responsible for every eventuality and to claim that this being was free to do otherwise.^[33]

Of course Nietzsche also criticizes determinism, the notion of an "unfree will" (BGE 21). But this is not the place to delve into what

[30] On Kant, see BGE 54. Hume is certainly the precursor to Nietzsche's critique of metaphysical conceptions of causality and the self, a fact that Nietzsche seems briefly to acknowledge in WP 550. For more comparison between Hume's and Nietzsche's critiques of the self, see Davey, "Nietzsche and Hume on Self and Identity." For a comparison between Nietzsche's and Kant's critiques of the self, see Schacht, Nietzscbe, 138–40.

[31] For Kant on the phenomenality of "inner sense," see Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929), 87–88, 165–69; for Nietzsche on the "phenomenality of the inner world," see WP 477, 479.

[32] For more on our metaphysical seduction by the subject-predicate form, see BGE 16, 17, 19, 34, 54; TI "Reason" 5; WP 482, 484.

[33] See BGE 21, 219; GM I:13; TI "Reason" 5, "Morality" 6, "Errors" 3, 7–8. According to Nietzsche, human decisions and actions should not be viewed as the result of a detached "free will" possessed by every human being. Rather, they are to be seen as the results of a struggle among competing instincts, drives and desires. On this, see A 14.

would need to be a lengthy discussion of Nietzsche's philosophy of mind and moral theory. I simply want to indicate that a critique of the notion of a pre-given subject-substratum is basic to Nietzsche's naturalism. The point is that to assume the existence of a "free will" behind every action is to assert that the source of the contingent and the conditional is something given and unconditioned, in short, something unworldly. According to Nietzsche, this scenario "deprives becoming of its innocence"—and it is the primary goal of Nietzsche's naturalism to restore the "innocence of becoming."^[34]

3.3.3—
Nietzsche's Conception of Subjectivity:
"The Subject as Multiplicity"

This does not mean, however, that we should alter the subject-predicate structure of our grammar or that we should completely do away with the notion of "subject" (or "soul" or "ego" or "will").^[35] "Between ourselves," Nietzsche writes:

it is not at all necessary to get rid of "the soul" [ . . . ] and thus to renounce one of the most ancient and venerable hypotheses—as happens frequently to many clumsy naturalists who can hardly touch on "the soul" without immediately losing it. But the way is open for new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as "mortal soul," "soul as subjective multiplicity," and "soul as social structure of the drives and affects," want henceforth to have citizens' rights in science. (BGE 12; cf. AOM 17; D 501; WP 490)

Thus, Nietzsche's rejection of the notion of subject as unmoved mover, causa sui, causa prima, or soul atom leads him to construct an alterna-

[34] See 2:3 "Before Sunrise"; TI "Errors" 7–8; WP 552, 787. Nietzsche's relatively few, and always enigmatic, comments concerning free will and determinism might be further elaborated by comparing them with Heidegger's much more substantial discussion of being-in-the-world as a rejection of the Cartesian "worldless subject." See Heidegger's Being and Time and the discussion of these issues by Charles Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 85, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

[35] The terms "subject," "soul," "ego," and "will" are used more or less interchangeably by Nietzsche. He alternately speaks of the soul-atom (BGE 12), the subject-atom (GM I:13; WP 488, 636), and the ego-atom (BGE 17; WP 635), "the soul as subjective multiplicity" (BGE 12), and "the subject as multiplicity" (WP 490; cf. WP 492). In various passages, he identifies "soul" and "subject" (WP 485), the "I" and "the will" (BGE 19), "doer," "will," and "ego" (TI "Reason" 5), "subject," "ego," and "doer" (WP 488). It should be noted that what is often translated as "the ego" is, in German, simply das Ich, "the I."

tive theory of subjectivity. Following a recurrent strategy, he begins by reversing our common linguistic and philosophical habits, arguing that what is primary are actions, deeds, accidents, and becomings rather than subjects, doers, substances, or beings.^[36] A naturalistic theory, Nietzsche contends, must start from these former and construct the latter out of them rather than vice versa. Hence, just as Nietzsche comes to conceive of "a thing" as "the sum of its effects" (WP 551), so, too, does he come to conceive of the subject as the sum of its actions and passions.

Nietzsche's initial premise is that the natural world in which we are situated and that we observe is, first and foremost, a world of becoming, that is, a world of myriad actions, happenings, effects, and appearances. Yet we can and do individuate this becoming into particular sets or assemblages. The subject, Nietzsche argues, is just such an assemblage. Subjectivity in general is characterized by a specific set of activities and appearances; and each particular subject is individuated by a peculiar subset of those activities, by a disposition to act in a particular manner and direction: "'the subject'" he writes, "is [ . . . ] a created entity [ . . . ] a capacity [ . . . ]—fundamentally, action collectively considered with respect to all anticipated actions (action and the probability of similar actions)" (WP 556; cf. WP 485).

Yet, for Nietzsche, the subject is only a relative unity. The unity of the subject is that of a disposition, merely a probability that groups together a range of more or less similar and more or less connected activities for the purpose of simplification and calculation.^[37] Subjects, Nietzsche tells us, are irreducible multiplicities.^[38] The disposition that

[36] This conception is developed more fully by the twentieth-century French Nietzschean Gilles Deleuze, for whom the empirical individual is a "concentration, accumulation, coincidence of a certain number of converging preindividual singularities" (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], 63), also called "pure events" or "pure becomings" (The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale [New York: Columbia University Press, 1990]).

[37] See WP 561: "All unity is unity only as organization and co-operation: no differently than a human community is a unity—as opposed to an atomistic anarchy; it is a pattern of domination that signifies a unity but is not a unity." Cf. WP 490.

[38] See BGE 12, 19; WP 488–92, 636, 660. This Nietzschean conception of subjectivity has been advocated more recently by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. See Foucault and Deleuze, "Intellectuals and Power," Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 206, and Foucault, "The Confession of the Flesh," trans. Colin Gordon, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 208.

composes them is itself made up of microdispositions—what Nietzsche variously calls "drives" (Triebe ), "desires" (Begierden ), "instincts" (Instinkte ), "powers" (Mächte ), "forces" (Kräfte ), "impulses" (Reize, Impulse ), "passions" (Leidenschaften ), "feelings" (Gefühlen ), "affects" (Affekte ), pathos (Pathos ), and so on. Starting from the premise that there are, first and foremost, actions, becomings, and appearances, Nietzsche posits "affects"^[39] as the interior states that help to explain and predict these actions, becomings, and appearances.^[40]

These affects are as close as one comes to a "bottom floor" in Nietzsche's multileveled theory of subjectivity. With this hypothesis, he would seem to be arguing that the subject is not an atomic, pre-given unity simply because it itself can be broken down further into component parts. That is, he would seem to be replacing one sort of "subject atomism" with another, taking considerable force away from his critique of "ego-substance."^[41] Indeed, in the Nachlaß, Nietzsche seems to say that the "subjects" of interpretations and perspectives are affects:

[M]oral evaluation is an interpretation, a way of interpreting. The interpretation itself is a symptom of certain physiological conditions, likewise of a certain spiritual level of ruling judgments: Who interprets? —Our affects. (WP 254; cf. D 119; BGE 187, 556)

It is our needs that interpret the world: our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm. (WP 481; cf. BGE 6; GM III:8; Z: 1 "On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions"; WP 567)

Here, Nietzsche seems to argue that every affect is or has a particular "For and Against" (cf. BGE 284) that makes it a kind of instinctive interpretation, a particular manner of construing and responding to its

[39] I use "affect" as a general term to encompass the host of other associated terms, because "affect" seems to combine the active senses of "drive" and "desire" with the more passive senses of "passion" and "feeling." (Heidegger attempts to distinguish these terms from one another, though he grants that Nietzsche himself often equates them and gives no real clues to help us sort out their different senses. See his Nietzsche, vol. 1, The Will to Power as Art, trans. David F. Krell [San Francisco: Harper, 1979], 44–53.) Moreover, the term in its various forms (affectus/affectio, der Affekt, l'affect/l'affection ) has a long and rich history in philosophy (from the Scholastics to Spinoza, Kant to Deleuze), rhetoric, and the aesthetics of music.

[40] See BGE 36; WP 619, 635. Note that, in WP 619, the translation should read "an inner world [not 'will'] must be ascribed to it."

[41] This charge is made by Davey, "Nietzsche and Hume on Self and Identity," 23, 26. Deleuze (Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], chap. 2), too, seems to read Nietzsche this way, as positing two basic and irreducible forces: active and reactive.

environing conditions. On the basis of these texts, one could argue that there is a simple answer to the question "who or what is the subject of interpretations and perspectives?" and that this answer is simply: "our affects."^[42]

Yet while affects are in some sense primitive, for Nietzsche, he refuses to conceive of them as entities, much less the atomic, singular, and unified entities that could be the proper bearers of perspectives and interpretations. First of all, on a micro-level, Nietzsche thinks of affects as an organic form of the basic "force-points" posited by Boscovich to replace the materialist atom.^[43] Boscovich maintains that these basic items are "not [ . . . ] particles of matter in which powers somehow inhere"^[44] but dynamic, differential "centers" or nodes within a force-field.^[45] They are, as it were, temporary dams or accumulations of force rather than subsisting entities. Second, on a more macro-level, affects are tendencies and processes ("becomings") rather than definite entities ("beings").^[46] "Fear," "love," "exuberance," "ressentiment," and "envy," for example, are not adequately described as "things"; rather, they are what Nietzsche calls "dynamic quanta of force or drive" that have their specific expression and direction. Third, affects are, by definition, relational: they relate one state of affairs to another. As the terms "drive" and "impulse" suggest, affects are a pulling or pushing of the organism in one direction or another. They are, as it were, the state between two states—what Nietzsche describes as "the state 'towards which ' [der Zustand, von dem weg]" or "the state 'away from which ' [der Zustand, zu dem hin]" (BGE 19). Finally, Nietzsche argues that it makes no sense to speak of an affect in isolation from other affects. We

[42] Sarah Kofman (Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], 93ff., 135ff.) takes this to be Nietzsche's position.

[43] See BGE 12, 36. On Boscovich and Nietzsche's relationship to Boscovich, see chap. 2, n. 30.

[44] Charles C. Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 455, quoted in Kaufmann's note to BGE 12. Gillispie paraphrases the account provided by Michael Faraday (Experimental Researches in Electricity, vol. 2 [New York: Dover, 1965], 290), who brought Boscovich's notion into the mainstream of modern scientific theory.

[45] Cf. Deleuze (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 6): "Every force is thus essentially related to another force. The being of force is plural, it would be absolutely absurd to think of force in the singular." This notion of being as an irreducible plurality is at the heart of Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche.

[46] See WP 556: "One may not ask: 'who then interprets?' for the interpretation itself, as a form of will to power, has existence (but not as a 'being,' but rather as a process, a becoming ) as an affect."

have seen that he considers affects to be, in a rudimentary sense, interpretive. Like the interpretations described in GM III: 12, each affect is or has a "For and Against" [Für und Wider ] "that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm" (WP 481). Yet just as interpretations are always essentially engaged in a struggle with other interpretations, just as each interpretation always begins from and tends toward other interpretations that it reinterprets or by which it is reinterpreted, so, too, each affect is always engaged in a struggle with other affects, each of which "would like to compel the other[s] to accept [it] as a norm." Affects, Nietzsche tells us, are "dynamic quanta in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their 'effect' upon the same" (WP 635, my emphasis).^[47] Indeed, the world is a "becoming," for Nietzsche, precisely because it is composed entirely of these volatile relations. "My idea," Nietzsche writes (speaking here of "bodies," though the same holds for affects and interpretations),

is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (—its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they conspire together for power . And the process goes on—. (WP 636; see chapter 5, below)^[48]

Instead of individual affects, each with its own interpretation or perspective, then, what we encounter are always "unions" of affects. This description comes closer to capturing Nietzsche's idea of "perspective" or "interpretation." While each affect is or has an interpretation in a rudimentary sense, Nietzsche tends to think of interpretations and perspectives as hierarchical aggregates of affects in which some dominate and others are subordinate.^[49] Instead of being the proper subjects of in-

[47] Once again, the language of "dynamic quanta" is the language of "affect" extended to encompass "all efficient force" (BGE 36). What holds for the more general language of "dynamic quanta," therefore, also holds for the subcategory of "affect."

[48] Cf. GS 333, where Nietzsche describes knowledge and understanding as a contract that temporarily settles accounts between struggling drives and relates them to one another in a nonantagonistic way. Cf. also WP 567.

[49] This view of interpretation has recently been suggested by Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, chap. 6, and Fowler, "Nietzschean Perspectivism" and "Having a Perspective as Having a 'Will.'" Fowler ("Having a Perspective as Having a 'Will,'" 115–16) writes: "As I see it, a Nietzschean perspective can be correctly characterized as being a certain configuration of affects—or perhaps better, a certain 'common-wealth of affects.' [ . . . ] which are related in such a way that some of these affects are dominant and so responsible for imposing order on what would otherwise be a chaos of motives and emotions. [ . . . ] A perspective is just a structure of affects governed by a basic dominant affect (or small cluster of them)."

terpretations and perspectives, then, affects turn out to be "subjects" only in a political sense: namely, members of the hierarchical structure of an interpretation.^[50]

This description recalls our earlier characterization of interpretations as systems of evaluation directed by particular needs. But what is it that unifies a particular system and what makes a particular set of needs dominant? Nietzsche tells us that every interpretation and perspective is oriented toward the preservation and enhancement of a specific level of organization in life, from the individual to the group, the species, and life as a whole.^[51] Are the "subjects" of perspectivism, then, perhaps just these particular levels of life? In a sense, the answer is yes; for a particular perspective does represent the "point of view" of a particular type, group, culture, people, and so forth. Yet, once again, these perspectives are never encountered in isolation. That is, we never come across these perspectives independent of the individual human beings to whom they are attributed. And each individual cuts across all the various levels of life: human beings are individuals as well as members of communities, cultures, subcultures, races, classes, genders, nationalities, religions, political parties, and other groups. Thus, on the one hand, we always encounter perspectives within individual subjects, while, on the other hand, individual subjects are aggregates of these perspectives and their forms of life.^[52]

For Nietzsche, the individual subject is an aggregate on at least two levels—what are usually called "the physical" and "the spiritual," "body" and "soul." According to Nietzsche, however, these do not form the two sides of an opposition between different kinds of entity but only mark differences of degree along a continuum from the more

[50] For a similar interpretation, in terms of the will to power, see Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, "Nietzsche's Teaching of Will to Power," trans. Drew Griffin, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 4–5 (1992–93): §3.

[51] "Insight: all estimation of value involves a certain perspective: that of the maintenance of the individual, a community, a race, a state, a church, a faith, a culture" (WP 259). Elsewhere, Nietzsche puts the stress on "enhancement" and "flourishing" rather than "maintenance" and "preservation." See the discussion in §§5.2.3–5.2.4, below.

[52] "[T]he concept 'individual' is an error because every being constitutes the entire process in its entire course (not merely as 'inherited,' but the process itself . . . )" (WP 785).

or less immutable to the more or less mutable.^[53] First, a subject has a quantitative identity insofar as it is born with a basic physical unity: an integral body. Yet even this basic unity and identity are only relative, because, according to Nietzsche, the body itself is "a political structure," "an aristocracy" (WP 660, 490; BGE 259) or "oligarchy" (GM II:1): that is, a hierarchy of organs, tissues, and cells, each of which has a particular role and function. In a healthy body, these various parts fulfill their functions in service of the whole; while in a sick or dying body, this relation of parts to whole (and thus the integrity of the body) is threatened or dissolving.^[54] Furthermore, the relatively pre-given unity of the body is not an eternal verity but the product or result of "interpretation" (in Nietzsche's extended sense of the word), that is, of millennia of evolutionary struggle.

Second, and more important for the present discussion, a subject has a qualitative identity insofar as it is or has a more or less stable "character" or "self." But this unity, too, is an aggregate, and, moreover, one that is intimately related to the physical, bodily aggregate.^[55] Indeed, Nietzsche argues that the organizational unity of the body provides the proper model for theorizing about the "soul," "self," or "subject":

The body and physiology as the starting point: why?—We gain the correct idea of the nature of our subject-unity, namely as regents at the head of a communality (not as "souls" or "life forces"), also of the dependence of these regents upon the ruled and of an order of rank and division of labor as the conditions that make possible the whole and its parts. In the same way, how living unities continually arise and die and how the "subject" is not eternal; in the same way, that the struggle expresses itself in obeying and commanding, and that a fluctuating assessment of the limits of power is part of life. The relative ignorance in which the regent is kept concerning individual activities and even disturbances within the communality is among the

[53] I note that my discussion here owes much to Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, chap. 6, to Davey, "Nietzsche and Hume on Self and Identity" and "Nietzsche, the Self and Hermeneutic Theory," and to Deleuze's work in general. On the notion of the body in Nietzsche and Deleuze, see Paul Patton, "Nietzsche and the Body of the Philosopher," in Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces, ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991), 43–54.

[54] On this process of growth and decay, see WP 647, 678. Also see GM II:12 and WP 643, on "physiological organs" as interpretive constructions.

[55] See Z: 1 "On the Despisers of the Body": "'Body am I, and soul'—thus speaks the child. [ . . . ] But the awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body"; and Z: 2 "On Poets": "Since I have come to know the body better [ . . . ] the spirit is to me only quasi-spirit; and all that is permanent is also a mere parable." See also GS P:2 and WP 659.

conditions under which rule can be exercised. [ . . . ] The most important thing, however, is: that we understand that the ruler and his subjects are of the same kind, all feeling, willing, and thinking. (WP 492)

This last remark is important; for it suggests not only that the body presents the appropriate framework for a conception of the self but also that the latter is actually rooted in the former—in the affects, which are at once "physical" and "spiritual," that is, interpretive.^[56] The affects, then, are the point of contact between "body" and "soul." In mirroring formulas, Nietzsche tells us that "the soul" is a "social structure of the drives and affects" (BGE 12), while the "body is but a social structure composed of many souls" (BGE 19). We could summarize this by saying that the self (the physical-spiritual "subject-unity") is a composition of many "souls," each of which has its own perspective, its own arrangement of drives and affects, Fors and Againsts. The self is thus an aggregate of many different perspectives and interpretations, each of which is affective, rooted in the various drives, impulses, desires, capacities, and passions of the body (see GS P:2). The unity of the self is the result of the ordering, organizing, and subordinating power of the dominant affective interpretation(s).

This idea runs throughout Nietzsche's discussions of subjectivity, selfhood, and character. For example, in two related notes from 1884, he writes:

[A]ll sorts of contradictory estimations and therefore contradictory drives swarm within one man. This is the expression of the diseased condition in mankind, in contrast to the animals, in which all existing instincts satisfy very specific tasks—this contradictory creature has however in its nature a great method of knowledge: he feels many Fors and Againsts—he raises himself to justice —to a comprehension beyond the estimation of good and evil . The wisest man would be the richest in contradictions, who has feelers for all kinds of men: and, in the midst, his great moments of grandiose harmony —a rare occurrence even in us!—a sort of planetary movement—. (WP 259)^[57]

In contrast to the animals, man has cultivated an abundance of contrary drives and impulses within himself: thanks to this synthesis he is master of the earth.—Moralities are the expression of locally limited orders of rank in this multifarious world of drives: so that man should not perish through their contradictions . Thus a drive as master, its opposite weakened, refined,

[56] See BGE 19: "we are at the same time the commanding and the obeying parties."

[57] Cf. GS 297 and KSA 11:26[149]: "Justice, as the function of a broad panoramic power that looks beyond the narrow perspectives of good and evil and thus has a broader horizon of advantage —the intention to preserve something that is more than this or that person" (cited in Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:147 [Krell's translation modified]).

as the impulse that provides the stimulus for the activity of the chief drive. The highest man would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant "man" shows itself strongest, one finds driving instincts that powerfully conflict with one another [ . . . ], but are controlled. (WP 966; cf. Z: Prologue 3; BGE 284; TI "Skirmishes" 49; WP 881, 933)

Here, as elsewhere, Nietzsche argues that the human subject is a multiplicity. In contrast with animals, who are composed of only a few, very specific, instinctive "perspectives," human beings are far more complex—collections of a vast array of competing instincts, desires, drives, beliefs, and capacities and thus of a vast array of perspectives and interpretations.^[58] Hence, human beings are at once the most "richly endowed" and "the most imperiled" creatures (GM III:13).^[59]

Nietzsche contends that, for the most part, human beings have been unable to master or control the conflict of interpretations and perspectives that rages within them. Pushed and pulled in multiple directions, the majority of human beings have shown themselves to be incontinent, unable not to respond to the myriad stimuli to which they are continually subjected (see BT SC: 1; BGE 212, 258; TI "Socrates" 4, "Morality" 2, "Germans" 5; A 30; WP 778). As a defense against this wanton and painful condition, human beings have resorted to a drastic means of achieving order, control, and power: they have declared the entire range of affects evil and resolved to extirpate them (see GM III:13–14; TI "Morality"; WP 228, 383–88). Though it would appear to be a rather rare and extreme manifestation, Nietzsche argues that it is "one of the most widespread and enduring of all phenomena" (GM III:11; cf. A 8–9). He discerns this kind of evaluation not only in the practices of the religious ascetic but also in those of the rationalist philosopher (who draws an opposition between mind and body and subordinates the latter to the former) and the scholar-scientist

[58] On the struggle for supremacy of the affects, see D 109, 119; Z: 1 "On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions."

[59] Cf. A 14 and WP 684: "The richest and most complex forms—for the expression 'higher type' means no more than this—perish more easily: only the lowest preserve an apparent indestructibility. [ . . . ] Among men, too, the higher types, the lucky strokes of evolution, perish most easily as fortunes change. They are exposed to every kind of decadence: they are extreme, and that almost means decadents. [ . . . ] This is not due to any special fatality or malevolence of nature, but simply to the concept 'higher type': the higher type represents an incomparably greater complexity—a greater sum of co-ordinated elements: so its disintegration is also incomparably more likely. The 'genius' is the sublimest machine there is—consequently the most fragile." Also see GS 301–2; Z: 1 "On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions"; GM I:16.

(who strives for objectivity conceived as "contemplation without interest") (see GM III:12, 23–28). Indeed, "[a]part from the ascetic ideal," Nietzsche maintains, "man, the human animal, had no meaning so far" (GM III:28).^[60]

The ascetic solution is not only extreme but self-defeating. For, in the guise of extirpating the affects and denying the multiplicity of perspectives, it simply endorses one affective perspective and sets it against all the others. It, too, manifests a will to power and thus a privileged interpretation and dominant set of affects. Disgusted with sensuous existence, it plots revenge through the separation of mind and body and the elevation of the "spiritual" and "antinatural" over the bodily and natural. This condition is certainly paradoxical—for it pits a particular will of life against life itself (see GM III:10–13; TI "Morality"), an affect against all affects (see BGE 117), "nature against something that is also nature" (WP 228)—but it is nonetheless prevalent.

This strange phenomenon, Nietzsche argues, is "the expression of the diseased condition in man, " a sign of nihilism, decadence, and the degeneration of life.^[61] In this condition, human beings are primarily reactive and negative. They declare their contradictory nature evil and surmise that there must be a better condition—a good, noncontradictory, extranatural condition and world (see WP 579). Thus, they come to exemplify that unnuanced, binary morality of ressentiment, which declares an other (in this case, the natural and physical) "evil" and consequently infers that it (in this case the spiritual) must itself represent "the good" (see BGE 260 and GM I:10).

However, the contradictory swarm of drives in human beings also presents another possibility. Nietzsche contends that there are rare human beings in whom the many contrary drives, affects, perspectives, and interpretations are managed and organized into a rich and powerful unity (see GM III:14). In such beings, all the affective perspectives and interpretations are allowed to express themselves, but in the service of the whole (see BGE 200; TI "Skirmishes" 49). Such human beings "give style" to their characters. Nietzsche explains:

To "give style" to one's character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then

[60] Cf. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Nietzsche contends that this asceticism is such a pervasive feature that it can be said to characterize humanity as a whole; hence, Zarathustra's condemnation of "man" and call for the "overman."

[61] This theme runs throughout GM III, TI, and the notes on "nihilism" in the later Nachlaß (see WP Book One)

fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large part of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime [Erhabene umgedeutet ]. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. [ . . . ] It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own. [ . . . ] Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style. (GS 290)^[62]

Against the sensualist and relativist who submits indiscriminately to all drives and perspectives, and against the ascetic who attempts to annihilate the passions altogether, Nietzsche opposes the "highest human," who affirms that life is essentially affective and that it essentially involves the will to power (the forming, shaping, organizing, expansive drive of all life). This "highest human" is one capable of incorporating the multiplicity of affective perspectives and employing them in the service of the whole. Thus, Nietzsche says, such a person raises him or herself to "knowledge," " justice," and "an estimation beyond good and evil."

Yet this necessitates a redescription of "knowledge" and "justice." "Knowledge" can no longer mean "objectivity [ . . . ] understood as 'contemplation without interest,'" for this is "a nonsensical absurdity" (GM III: 12) that denies the affective character of life and the affective perspectives and interpretations that are the very conditions for any knowledge whatsoever. Similarly, "justice" can no longer mean the equalization of power, the prevention of struggle, and the insurance of

[62] One finds this same idea throughout Nietzsche's notes of the late 1880s. See, e.g., WP 46, 384, 778, 881, 928, 933, 962ff., 1014. Yet this notion also appears in a much earlier text, where Nietzsche writes: "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 wholly to free oneself from this chain. If we condemn these aberrations and regard ourselves as free of them, this does not alter the fact that we originate in them. The best we can do is confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge of it, and through new, stern, discipline combat our inborn heritage and inplant 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. [ . . . ] But here and there a victory is nonetheless achieved, and for the combatants [ . . . ] 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" (HL 3, pp. 76–77).

peace, for this represents "a principle hostile to life " (GM II:11), because it denies "the relations of supremacy under which the phenomenon of 'life' comes to be" (BGE 19).^[63] Rather, for these "higher types," "knowledge" and "justice" signify the affirmation of affective life and of the organizing force that controls it in the service of the subject as a whole.

There is no better formulation of these aims than the passage on perspectivity cited at the outset. For the "higher types," "knowledge" and "justice" are precisely "the ability to have one's For and Against under control and to engage and disengage them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge" (cf. BGE 212, 284). Such a nuanced, multifaceted estimation is indeed something other than the binary, slavish morality of "good and evil." It points toward a different ethics: a model of practice firmly rooted in the ethos, which affirms difference and variety and extols self-control and fine discrimination in the estimation of the particular passions and actions appropriate for any given situation. Indeed, in this sense, perspectivism might be seen as encapsulating Nietzsche's conception of practical wisdom: it advocates the cultivation of a variety of affective centers within an overall organization (the subject) that is finely attuned to its capacities and environment, aware of the affective perspectives that are appropriate to a given circumstance, and able skillfully to deploy these perspectives as required.^[64]

[63] Jean Granier ("Perspectivism and Interpretation," trans. David B. Allison, in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977], 199) construes "knowledge" and "justice" in just this way, that is, as attempts to see things as they are, to "be true" to a putative ontological ground: "the text of Being."

[64] See TI "Skirmishes" 49, where Nietzsche praises Goethe for conceiving "a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom." This passage and the conception of ethics presented above invite comparison with Aristotle's ethics of areté, phronesis, and megalopsychia . Robert C. Solomon ("A More Severe Morality: Nietzsche's Affirmative Ethics," in From Hegel to Existentialism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987]) draws just such a comparison, arguing that Nietzsche's "affirmative ethics" is much closer to Aristotle's than to any other ethicist in the Western philosophical tradition. A similar comparison is made, with reservations, by Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 193. Walter Kaufmann discusses Nietzsche's debt to Aristotle's ethics in general and, particularly, to his conception of megalopsychia (Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ, 4th ed. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974], 382–84 and his note to BGE 212), while Bernd Magnus finds little of Aristotle's notion in Nietzsche ("Aristotle and Nietzsche: Megalopsychia and Übermensch, " in The Greeks and the Good Life, ed. David J. Depew [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980]). Jean-François Lyotard draws on both Nietzsche's perspectivism and Aristotle's phronesis to develop more fully this "postmodern" conception ofethics and justice. See Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), and Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

3.3.4—
The Subject As Interpretation

We can now make explicit the result of this discussion for the issue at hand, the issue of the "subject" of perspectivism. We have seen that the subjects of perspectivism are not simply biological species; for, according to Nietzsche, there is no such thing as, for example, "the human perspective," because the human subject is itself composed of a multiplicity of perspectives formed at the micro-level of affects. We have also seen that the subject of perspectivism cannot be the individual human knower presupposed as atomic and given; for Nietzsche maintains that the human subject is a multiplicity that is constantly being achieved, accomplished, produced, constructed . Moreover, the subject does not have these various perspectives and interpretations; rather, they are what the subject is . According to Nietzsche, the subject is nothing over and above the various physical/spiritual affective perspectives and interpretations—the complexes of belief, desire, action, perception, and thought—that compose it and the relationships between these perspectives and interpretations.

This is not mysterious provided that we take seriously Nietzsche's conception of the subject as a political organization. Every such organization is a more or less temporary union of various individuals and groups that often have different experiences, views, and desires but agree (or are made to agree) about some central ideas, practices, and goals that supervene and serve to unify the membership. The force of the organization resides in the collective power of its members, in their ability to struggle in a particular direction and yet be flexible and responsive to changing circumstances by drawing upon the capacities of individual members or subgroups. There is no organization without these members and no membership without the existence of the organization as a whole.

Nietzsche argues that the subject is just like this.^[65] It is nothing over

[65] Along the lines of Quine's "web of belief," Rorty ("Inquiry as Recontextualization," 93) has described the subject in a similar fashion: as a self-reweaving web of beliefs and desires separate from which there is no subject or "self." Though a Nietzschean orientation is only implicit in their work, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have developed in detail this political model of subjectivity in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

and above the sum and arrangement of the affective perspectives and interpretations that compose it. These are not, and need not be, homogeneous. Indeed, Nietzsche argues that the more heterogeneous they are—provided that they maintain some coherence—the richer and more flexible the whole will be. (This is a basic theme of Nietzsche's later work. See GS 295–97, 344, 373, 375; BGE 212; GM III:12; TI "Morality" 3, 6; WP 259, 410, 600, 655, 881, 933, 1051.) This union, however, is "mortal"; it is a changeable entity. Different circumstances often force the acquisition of new perspectives and/or the loss of old ones, thus altering the overall structure. And if these changes are significant enough, or if particular factions cease to remain subordinate to the whole, that whole is threatened or falls apart. Nietzsche writes:

No subject "atoms." The sphere of the subject constantly growing or decreasing, the center of the system constantly shifting; in cases where it cannot organize the appropriate mass, it breaks into two parts. On the other hand, it can transform a weaker subject into its functionary without destroying it, and to a certain degree form a new unity with it. No "substance," rather something that in itself strives after greater strength, and that wants to "preserve" itself only indirectly (it wants to surpass itself—). (WP 488; cf. GS 290 and WP 715)

We thus discover not only that the human subject is a fabricated entity but that its fabrication takes the same form as that of an interpretation. Recall that, in his highly generalized account of interpretation (GM II:11), Nietzsche writes:

whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it;^[66] all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adjustment through which any previous "meaning" and "purpose" are necessarily obscured or obliterated.

If "all events in the organic world" are submitted to this process, it is not surprising that this description also applies to the formation of subjectivity. Indeed, we find that Nietzsche not only views the subject as a

[66] I take it that "some power superior to it" does not refer to a subject outside the field of interpretation that controls that field from without. Rather, it refers to an affect, perspective, or interpretation—within the general field of interpretative struggle—that is able to dominate and subordinate the previous interpretation by assimilating the old terms into its new system (see, e.g., WP 492). For more on this conception of interpretation, see §5.3.1, below.

multiplicity of micro-interpretations and -perspectives; he also views the subject itself as a macro-interpretation. The point is simply that, for Nietzsche, interpretation goes all the way down and all the way up. Rather than positing the subject as something outside the realm of interpretation, something that stands behind and fabricates interpretations, Nietzsche maintains that the subject itself is fabricated by and as an interpretation. Thus, the famous passage that claims that there are no facts but only interpretations, concludes:

"Everything is subjective," you say; but even this is interpretation [Auslegung ]. The "subject" is nothing given [nichts Gegebenes ], but something added, fabricated, and stuck behind [etwas Hinzu-Erdichtetes, Dahinter-Gestecktes ].—Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter [Interpreten ] behind the interpretation [Interpretationen ]? Even this is fiction, hypothesis. (WP 481)^[67]