by Daniel Smith
But this is precisely why the question of desire is linked with the theme of an immanent ethics, and becomes a political question. For one of most difficult problems posed by an immanent ethics is the following: if transcendence represents my impotence (at the limit, my power reduced to zero), then under what conditions can I have actually been led to desire transcendence? What are the conditions that could have led, in Nietzsche's words, to “the inversion of the value-positing eye”—that is, to the whole history of nihilism that Nietzsche analyzes (and nihilism, for Nietzsche, is nothing other than the triumph of transcendence, the point where life itself is given a value of nil, nihil)? This is the fundamental political problem posed by an immanent ethics: How can people reach a point where they actually desire their servitude and slavery as if it were their salvation—for those in power have an obvious interest in separating us from our capacity to act? How can we desire to be separated from power, from out capacity to act?6 As Deleuze writes, “the astonishing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike” (AO 29). In other words, whereas other moral theories see transcendence as a necessary principle—the transcendence of the moral law in Kant, for instance, or the transcendence of the Other in Levinas—for Deleuze transcendence is the fundamental problem of ethics, what prevents ethics from taking place, so to speak.
This brief analysis has served to isolate two aspects of an immanent ethics: it focuses on the differences between modes of existence, in terms of their immanent capabilities or power (active versus reactive, in Nietzsche; active versus passive, in Spinoza), and it poses, as one of its fundamental problems, the urge toward transcendence that effectively “perverts” desire, to the point where we can actually desire our own “repression,” a separation from our own capacities and powers.
NIETZSCHE AND LEIBNIZ: THE THEORY OF THE DRIVES
With these two aspects in mind, let me turn to the second part of my paper, which deals with the question of how Deleuze in fact characterizes modes of existence, with their powers and capacities. Put succinctly, one could say that Deleuze approaches modes of existence, ethically speaking, not in terms of their will, or their conscious decision-making power (as in Kant), nor in terms of their interests (as in Marx, for example), but rather in terms of their drives.7 For Deleuze, conscious will (Kant) and preconscious interest (Marx) are both subsequent to our unconscious drives (desire), and it is at the level of the drives that we have to aim our ethical analysis. To explore this point, I would like to examine two sets of texts on the drives taken, not from Nietzsche and Spinoza, but rather from Nietzsche and Leibniz, since Leibniz was one of the first philosophers in the history of philosophy to have developed a theory of the unconscious.
The first set of texts comes from Nietzsche's early book entitled Daybreak, published in July 1881. Nietzsche first approaches the question of the drives by giving us an everyday scenario:
Suppose we were in the market place one day [he writes], and we noticed someone laughing at us as we went by: this event will signify this or that to us according to whether this or that drive happens at that moment to be at its height in us—and it will be a quite different event according to the kind of person we are. One person will absorb it like a drop of rain, another will shake it from him like an insect, another will try to pick a quarrel, another will examine his clothing to see if there is anything about it that might give rise to laughter, another will be led to reflect on the nature of laughter as such, another will be glad to have involuntarily augmented the amount of cheerfulness and sunshine in the world—and in each case, a drive has gratified itself, whether it be the drive to annoyance, or to combativeness or to reflection or to benevolence. This drive seized the event as its prey. Why precisely this one? Because, thirsty and hungry, it was lying in wait.8
This is the source of Nietzsche's doctrine of perspectivism (“there are no facts, only interpretations”), but what is often overlooked is that, for Nietzsche, it is our drives that interpret the world, that are perspectival—and not our consciousness or perceptions. It is not so much that I have a different perspective on the world than you; it is rather that each of us has multiple perspectives on the world because of the multiplicity of our drives—drives that are often contradictory among themselves. “Within ourselves,” Nietzsche writes, “we can be egoistic or altruistic, hard-hearted, magnanimous, just, lenient, insincere, can cause pain or give pleasure.”9 We all contain such a vast confusion of contradictory drives that we are, as Nietzsche liked to say, multiplicities, and not unities. Moreover, these drives are in a constant struggle or combat with each other; my drive to smoke and get my nicotine rush is in combat with (but also coexistent with) my drive to quit. This is where Nietzsche first developed his concept of the will to power—at the level of the drives. “Every drive is a kind of lust to rule,” he writes, “each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.”10
To be sure, we can combat the drives, fight against them—indeed, this is one of the most common themes in philosophy, the fight against the passions. In another passage from Daybreak, Nietzsche says that he can see only six fundamental methods we have at our disposal for combating the drives. For instance, if we want to fight our drive to smoke, we can avoid opportunities for its gratification (no longer hiding packs of cigarettes at home for when we run out), or we can implant regularity into the drive (having one cigarette every four hours so as at least to avoid smoking in between), or we can engender disgust with the drive, giving ourselves over to its wild and unrestrained gratification (say, smoking non-stop for a month) to the point where we become disgusted with it. And so on. But then Nietzsche asks: Who exactly is combating the drives in these various ways? His answer (given in a second aphorism taken from Daybreak) is this: The fact
that one desires to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand within our own power; nor does the choice of any particular method; nor does the success or failure of this method. What is clearly the case is that in this entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive which is a rival of the drive whose vehemence is tormenting us … While “we” believe we are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is complaining about the other; that is to say: for us to become aware that we are suffering from the vehemence [or violence] of a drive presupposes the existence of another equally vehement or even more vehement drive, and that a struggle is in prospect in which our intellect is going to have to take sides.11
What we call thinking, willing, and feeling are all “merely a relation of these drives to each other.”12
Thus, what do I mean when I say “I am trying to stop smoking”—even though that same I is constantly going ahead and continuing to smoke? It simply means that my conscious intellect is taking sides and associating itself with a particular drive. It would make just as much sense to say, “Occasionally I feel this strange urge to stop smoking, but happily I have managed to combat that drive and pick up a cigarette whenever I want.” Almost automatically, Nietzsche says, we take our predominant drive and for the moment turn it into the whole ego, placing all our weaker drives perspectivally farther away, as if those other drives were not me but rather an it (hence Freud's idea of the “id,” the “it”—a concept he clearly derived from Nietzsche). When we talk about the “I,” we are simply indicating which drive, at the moment, is sovereign and strongest; “the feeling of the I is always strongest where the preponderance [Übergewicht] is,” flickering from drive to drive.13 When we “will” something (to stop working and go to a tavern), there is a drive that commands, and a host of drives that obey (accompanied by “feelings of compulsion, force, pressure, resistance and motion”), but we identify our “I” with the drive that commands, and not the drives that obey (since the former is accompan
ied by a feeling of power and superiority).14 But the drives themselves remain largely unknown to what we sometimes call the conscious intellect. As Nietzsche concludes,
However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. He can scarcely name the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and counterplay among one another—and above all the laws of their nutriment—remain unknown to him.15
In other words, there is no struggle of reason against the drives; what we call “reason” is itself nothing more than a certain “system of relations between various passions,” a certain ordering of the drives.16
Indeed, this is how Nietzsche explains the familiar sense we have that, as we grow up, we become more mature: that is, more reasonable. “Something that you formerly loved as a truth,” he writes, “now strikes you as an error”; so you cast it off “and fancy that it represents a victory for your reason.” But in fact, this is less a victory for your reason than a shift in the relations among your drives.
Perhaps this error was as necessary for you then [Nietzsche continues], when you were a different person—and you are always a different person—as are all you present “truths” … What killed that opinion for you was your new life [that is, a different drive] and not your reason: you no longer need it, and now it collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm. When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal event; it is, at least very often, evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm—something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet.17
As Deleuze will put it, there is no “pure” Reason or rationality par excellence, but only a plurality of heterogeneous processes of rationalization, just as there is no universal or transcendental Subject that could function as a basis for a universal ethics, but only variable and extraordinarily diverse processes of subjectivation (PV 14–17).
This, however, is where the question of morality comes in for Nietzsche, for one of the primary functions of morality is to establish an “order of rank” among the drives or impulses: “Wherever we encounter a morality,” Nietzsche writes, “we also encounter valuations and an order of rank of human impulses … Now one and now another human impulse and state held first place and was ennobled because it was esteemed so highly.”18 Consider any list of impulses—in our present morality, industriousness is ranked higher than sloth; obedience higher than defiance; chastity higher than promiscuity, and so on. One can easily imagine—and indeed find—other moralities that make a different selection of the drives, giving prominence, for instance, to impulses such as aggressiveness and ferocity (a warrior culture). When Nietzsche inquires into the genealogy of morality, he is inquiring into the conditions of any particular moral ranking of the impulses: why certain impulses are selected for and certain impulses are selected against. Behind this claim is the fundamental insight that there is no distinction between nature and artifice at the level of the drives. It is not as if we could simply remove the mechanisms of morality and allow the drives to exist in a “free” and “unbound” state; there is no such thing, except perhaps as an Idea. Kant liked to say that we can never get beyond our representations of the world; Nietzsche surmises that what we can never get beyond is the reality of the drives.19 In fact and in principle, the drives and impulses are always assembled or arranged, from the start, in different ways, in different individuals, in different cultures, in different eras—which is why Nietzsche always insisted that there are a plurality of moralities (and what he found lacking in his time was an adequate comparative study of moralities).
In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche attempts to show that what we now call “morality” arises when one particular drive comes to the fore and dominates the selection and organization of all the others. He uses a French word to describe this drive—ressentiment—because the French verb ressentir means, not primarily “to resent,” but rather “to feel the effects of, to suffer from.” In a sense, morality is not unlike aesthetics: much aesthetic theory is written, not from the viewpoint of the artist who creates, but rather from the viewpoint of a spectator who is making judgments about works of art they did not create, and perhaps could not create. Similarly, morality has tended to be developed, not from the viewpoint of those who act, but rather from the viewpoint of those who feel the effects of the actions of others. Both are driven by a mania to judge; this is why philosophers are obsessed with analyzing “aesthetic judgments” and “moral judgments.” The person whose fundamental drive is ressentiment is what Nietzsche calls a “reactive” type; they do not act, but rather re-act to the actions of others, and moreover, their reaction primarily takes the form of a feeling or sentiment (ressentiment as resentment) rather than an action.
This is the point Nietzsche makes in his famous parable about the lambs and birds of prey:
That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange; only it gives no ground for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves “these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, lamb—would he not be good?” there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps to say that birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: “we don't dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.”20
In this parable, the lambs are reactive types; not being able to act, or re-act, in the strict sense, their reaction can only take the form of a feeling or affect, which, in the moral realm, Nietzsche describes as an affect of resentment against those who act—I suffer, you who act are the cause of my suffering, it is your fault that I am suffering, and I therefore condemn your activity. Nietzsche's fundamental puzzle in the Genealogy is this: How did a morality derived from this fundamental drive of ressentiment come to dominate all others? How did reactive drives triumph over active drives?
Nietzsche attempts to give an answer in the first essay of the Genealogy: reactive forces triumph by positing the fiction that we are subjects endowed with free will. This is what Deleuze calls “the fiction of a force separated from what it can do,” which is in part derived from the subject–predicate grammar of language. When we say “lightning flashes,” for instance, we separate in language the lighting from the flash, as if the flash were an action or operation undertaken by a subject called lightning, as if the lightning were separate from the flash, and could perhaps have decided not to flash had it so chosen. But this is obviously a fiction: there is no lightning behind the flash, and the lightning and the flash are one and the same thing. Yet it is precisely this fiction that lies at the basis of morality: when we say “a subject acts,” we are presuming that, behind every deed, there is a doer; behind every action or activity, there is an actor, and it is on the basis of this fiction that the moral judgments of good and evil enter into the world. When the lambs say, “birds of prey are evil,” they are presuming that “the bird of prey is able to not manifest its force, that it can hold back from its effects and separate itself from what it can do” (NP 123), like the lightning that decides not to flash, and they can therefore condemn their action as evil, and hold the birds of prey “responsible” for it. At the same time, what is deemed to be “good” is the non-active position of the lambs. The lambs conclude: “Birds of prey are evil, because they ‘choose’ to perform the activity that is their own (carrying off little lambs), they do not hold back; whereas we lambs could carry off birds of prey if we wanted to, yet we choose not to, and therefore we are good.” It is assumed here that one and the same force is effectively held back in the virtuous lamb and given free rein in the evil bird of prey. But one can easily see the sleight of hand at work here: the birds of prey are judged to be evil because they perform the activity that is their own, where
as the lambs judge themselves to be good because they do not perform the activity that they … do not have—as if their “reactive” position “were a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritorious act.”21
In the remainder of the Genealogy, Nietzsche famously shows that, even though the positing of the subject is a fiction, it none the less has a real effect, like a contagion; activity is made ashamed of itself, and turns back against itself. “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward,” Nietzsche writes, which is “the origin of the bad conscience,” and the concepts of guilt and sin.22 The term “fault” no longer refers to others (“It's your fault”) but to myself (“It's my fault”). What Nietzsche calls the “ascetic ideal,” in its negative sense, marks the triumph of reactive forces; life is “judged” by transcendent values superior to life.
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze takes up this Nietzschean schema, mutatis mutandis. What he calls “desire” is nothing other than the state of the impulses and drives. “Drives,” he writes, “are simply the desiring-machines themselves” (AO 35). Moreover, like Nietzsche, Deleuze insists that the drives never exist in an unbound state; nor are they ever merely individual. They are always assembled by social formations, and one of the aims of Anti-Oedipus is to construct a typology of such formations—“primitive” societies, States, capitalism, and, later, in A Thousand Plateaus, nomadic war machines—each of which organizes and assembles the drives and impulses in different ways. Behind this claim, there lies an attempt to resolve an old debate that concerned the relationship between Marx and Freud. Like Nietzsche, both Marx and Freud insisted, each in their own way, that our conscious thought is determined by forces and drives that go beyond consciousness, forces that are, as we say “unconscious” (though we have become far too accustomed to this word; it might be better to formulate a new one). Put crudely, in Marx, our thought is determined by our class (“class consciousness”); in Freud, it is determined by unconscious desires (stemming, usually, from familial conflicts). The nature of the relationship between these two unconsciousnesses—the “political economy” of Marx and the “libidinal economy” of Freud—was a problem that numerous thinkers tried to deal with in the twentieth century (Marcuse, Brown, Reich, and others). For a long time, the relation between the two was usually formulated in terms of the mechanisms of “introjection” and “projection”. As an individual, I introject the interests of my class, my culture, my social milieu, which eventually come to determine my (false) consciousness; at the same time, the political economy was seen as a projection of the individual desires of the population that produced it. Deleuze and Guattari famously reject these mechanisms in Anti-Oedipus; they argue that political economy (Marx), on the one hand, and libidinal economy (Freud), on the other, are one and the same economy. “The only means of bypassing the sterile parallelism where we flounder between Freud and Marx,” they write, is “by discovering … how the affects or drives form part of the infrastructure itself” (AO 63). This is an extraordinary claim: your very drives and impulses, even the unconscious ones, which seems to be what is most individual about you, are themselves economic—that is, they are already part of what Marx called the “infrastructure.”