Notes on: Deleuze, G.  (2006) [1962].  Nietzsche and Philosophy.  Trans.  Hugh Tomlinson.  London: Bloomsbury publishing PLC

Dave Harris

[I was prompted to go back and reread some Nietzsche before considering this book by Deleuze and I made some notes.  I was already aware that Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche was quite different from the one with which I had grown up, and I wanted to see how Deleuze had managed to transform Nietzsche into such a positive figure.  I am no scholar of Nietzsche, but it was possible to see this book as a kind of redemptive essay, sympathetically reading Nietzsche in order to rescue him from the usual charges of elitism, patriarchy, and incipient Nazism, largely by ignoring those bits as irrelevant.  I have only been able to spot one or two examples of this redemptive reading.  One occurs with a discussion of one of Deleuze's favourite concepts, the eternal return.  I was already aware after reading Difference and Repetition that Deleuze sees the eternal return as a kind of dynamic return of a system for generating possibilities, or, in one of the metaphors he uses a lot as a return of the whole game of dice, not a repetition of one result of the cast of the dice.  The argument is made in two essays {notes here and here}.  Imagine my surprise when on reading one of the sources of this discussion in Nietzsche, his very peculiar book Zarathustra, there seems to be a clear statement that the eternal return does produce an identical reality, not even a similar one.  Compare this with what Deleuze says about Zarathustra in the first chapter below  -- the opposite.  Not even the combined resources of the Facebook discussion group on Deleuze and Guattari could resolve this apparent contradiction: one or two thought it was an example of what used to be known in the trade as a 'symptomatic reading', where some deeper meaning is identified despite the specific forms of the words.  In this way, Deleuze seems to be arguing that Nietzsche really meant to say the opposite of what he actually said, which gives you quite a licence for interpretation! 

The actual argument, in Chapter 2,seems to be first that the clockwork science of its day could not deal with qualitative differences, but focused on models featuring quantitative ones, and qualitative changes in the eternal return could not be dealt with by scientific models of the day which installed mechanical reproduction, equilibrium, or entropy. One obvious conclusion would be, therefore, that the eternal return is a lot of non-scientific bullshit of little value. Of course, Nietzsche and Deleuze much prefer the other option -- that science is limited in its ability to grasp philosophical concepts and thus we should disqualify it from the debate, the 'wise' resort of all sorts of homeopaths, spiritualists, astrologers, faith healers and snake-oil salesmen. What superior argument can philosophy offer for its conception instead? A combination of philosophical and political implications and commitments and preferences as below. Sometimes these are even pseduo-scientific as in 'since there has been infinite time, and the universe is not in a state of stability yet,  there can be no long-term trend to equilibrium, because if there were, we would have reached it by now'. You don't have to be too critical to spot the terms and conditions smuggled in there -- 'infinite time', 'no equilibrium', the mutual support of 'infinite time' and 'not yet' -- and so on.

One or two little tropes like this are apparent as we shall see as we go along.  As usual, they are deployed in the service of the peculiar arguments of philosophers which often take the form of arguing that A must really be seen as B because if we accept the consequences of literally reading A as A, this will cause some embarrassment elsewhere in the text, either in the stirring conclusions we wish to draw, or in having to accept that an earlier discussion omitted a possibility.  I suppose it is a form of abduction. One similar classic example is that if the eternal return produced exactly the same world, there would be no becoming, which takes for granted that there is becoming, which must be qualitative: so the argument is that if there are no qualitative changes, we would not be able to argue that there are qualitative changes, and that this would be sad; since we do not wish to be sad, it follows that the eternal return cannot produce the same world.]

Preface to the English translation

Deleuze begins by confronting head on with the argument that Nietzsche was a protofascist, and suggests instead we can see his thought as a kind of 'over violent poetry, made up of capricious aphorisms and pathological fragments'(viii).  He says that English readers understand Nietzsche least because they are not aware of the underlying struggles with French rationalism and German dialectics.  As a results, in England, Nietzsche was only admired as a stylist [really?].  He is a great philosopher and has had considerable influence.  There are two main arguments.  First we have to see the importance of forces and the way in which they produce events that must be read as signs or symptoms of forces, as a 'general semeiology' (ix).  There are active and reactive forces in different combinations.  Language represents a propositional form of symptoms, indicating an underlying mode of existence [yet neither Nietzsche and nor Deleuze see any mileage in sociological investigation of these links.  In the case of Nietzsche, it seems to be approached through some kind of wacky 'physiology'].  The reactive forces are ressentiment and bad conscience, both of which enslave human beings, and their masters.  We also find the first defence of Nietzsche's antisemitism -- it is really a critique of 'the original priestly type'.  The second argument turns on power and its connections with ethics and ontology.  Nietzsche's will to power is not just a matter of political agents seeking power, but is a product of the state of forces at work and represents the dynamic qualities of activities.  Rather than individual wills wanting power, it is more a matter of 'the one that wants in the will' (x) [really a kind of weak naturalism for me].  It is really a search for forms of power, especially  Dionysian forms.

The eternal return has also been misunderstood.  It is not the return of the identical or the same.  In Zarathustra, there are two intervening processes, first willing or thought which constitute ethical interventions [by the ruling order that realises its responsibilities to kill the weak?], so that we can will only those things that we would be willing to live all over again; second, being itself is understood as becoming, and only that that is capable of becoming is 'fit to return'.  It has to be something active and affirmative, not anything  negative or reactive, which both prevent becoming.  The eternal return is therefore 'a transmutation', something active and affirmative [but the context always suggests activity to press on with human adventure and heroism, and being affirmative about your strong and aggressive nature?].  This book is all about Nietzsche on becoming.

However, it is difficult to read the kind of emotional dispositions in the work, which Nietzsche has always maintained are connected to concepts.  We have to place ourselves in Nietzsche's 'atmosphere' to avoid misunderstandings like the ones above, this time including seeing the Overman in terms of a master race.  Nietzsche was aware that he would often be misunderstood, as in his discussion of the ape or buffoon in Zarathustra.  Nietzsche is a nihilist in one sense, in making us aware of the dangers of reactive forces and the negative, and transmutation or becoming was deliberately established to overcome nihilism.  The Overman was not a superhuman being, but the focal point to oppose the reactive forces, pointing to the future.  Nihilist forces could be overcome.

We can see the difficulty of the context in the use of the aphorism, 'which only makes sense in relation to the state of forces that it expresses, and which changes sense...  according to the new forces which it is 'capable'... of attracting' (xii).  We must change our image of thought.  It is not concerned with truth and falsity, but interpretation and evaluation, focused on forces and power.  It is deeply connected to movement, with different speeds and slowness, and this connects thoughts to the arts in particular.  Zarathustra is really an opera, designed to 'directly express thought as experience and movement'.  His admiration for fascist figures should really be seen as an example of a theatre director showing how the Overman should be played.  Thinking and creating is what emerges overall, thinking as casting the dice.

Chapter one.  The Tragic

Genealogy.  This is N reintroducing sense and value back into philosophy, in the form of a critique.  Kant neglected values, and as a result, conventional values have been reasserted, even in phenomenology.  However we need thorough critique focused on the notion of value and evaluation.  Values underpin all appraisals.  The core of evaluation is uncovering differences in corresponding values, seen as differences in 'ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate' (2) [before sociology, of course].  The key differences, between 'high and low, noble and base' [Bourdieu would have a field day here] represent different elements in ways of being.

Being critical means referring everything back to values and to the origin of values.  Too much philosophy has either ignored values, as in the '"high" idea of  foundation', simply listed existing values, or adopted conventional values.  Some have derived values from simple facts, like utilitarianism or scholasticism, assuming some notion of 'the valuable for all'.  Instead we must do genealogy, focusing on different elements rather than universal ones.  There are no absolute values or universal ones.  Values are divided in their very origin.  Focusing on this difference is something active not reactive, nothing to do with ressentiment or revenge.  The latter is for 'apes'.  Critique is more active and affirmative, down to the 'natural aggression of a way of being' (3).  It is something noble of course, designed to bring about the values of the future.

Sense.  The sense of something is provided once we know the forces at work in it, once we treat phenomena as signs or symptoms.  Philosophy becomes symptomatology or semeiology [sic -- about things as well as words].  The distinction between phenomena and sense replaces the old idea of appearance and essence, or the scientific notion of cause and effect .  Force involves the domination 'of the quantity of reality' and even perception is the expression of such forces.  A succession of forces can take possession of a thing, and can coexist, which changes the sense of the phenomenon or object, and this is the proper topic of history, especially the development of '"mutually independent processes of subduing"'.  Interpretation and subjugation are the same thing.

Nietzsche is a pluralist and in this sense an empiricist [we cannot assume things simply express single essences but must investigate them] .  We see this in the rejection of the notion of a single dominant god.  Even the death of god is plural, having multiple sense, just like every other 'phenomenon, word or thought' (4).  Hegel saw pluralism as naive, but for N it is a great achievement, requiring mature concepts, estimation of forces and interrelations.  Essences remain, but as something more variable, and related to the thing and those characteristics which persist despite the forces attempting to subdue it: an affinity between force and things produces essence.

Forces appropriate objects indirectly first, imitating matter initially, in order to survive.  This explains the initial similarity between the philosopher and earlier variants such as ascetics and religious people [this is the site of another objection to Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche for me.  Nearly all Nietzsche's examples relate to the human sphere, but Deleuze seems to want to generalize to the non human as well, a kind of reverse anthropocentrism].  It explains why the religious forces were able to take hold at particular times.  At the same time, it is absurd to remain with this image, and philosophy must eventually come out from behind its mask and acquire a new sense.  This indirect interpretation is actually frequently necessary, because we do not perceive original differences very easily - we need a friend, some third person who can guide us but then be overcome [reminds me of the role of the philosopher's apprentice in Future of Educational Organisations].  Only when philosophy has thrown off its mask can we grasp its genealogy, which can be generalized [almost like the owl of Minerva flying only at dusk].  Reservations the common people often have about philosophers are well grounded if they go on to suggest dangerous ideas [male heroicism].

The philosophy of the Will.  Objects themselves are forces, or express forces [same thing for Deleuze?], and all objects are signs.  The forces are plural, and are related to each other but at different distances.  It would be wrong to see matter alone as plural and interrelated, and this is why Nietzsche opposes the idea of 'atomism' [assuming fundamental primitive objects?].  Simple atoms would have no concept of relation, because the concept would not contain the necessary differences.  The will and the will to power is an element of force fully embracing difference, and is often exercised on another will: the big split is between wills that command and wills that obey.  Only will can dominate or obey.  Schopenhauer saw the will as something essentially unitary, based on some common links between those who command and those who obey.  He also saw the need to constrain the will and suppress it in order to develop morality, to become ascetic.  Nietzsche  has to reject this unity as a mystification [so there is no general will then {sic}, only the wills of groups like the elite and the mass? This would be too sociological for Deleuze?].

The critique of atomism turns on psychic objects such as soul or ego.  These make more sense in terms of discussing command and obedience, and egoism can help us to throw off disinterestedness.  However, the will is not just egoism and again we have to look at origins.  The origin lies in hierarchy again, an internal difference between dominant and dominated.  This difference is central to the genealogy. [So hierarchy is just an example of the universal process of difference for Deleuze? Instead of a narrow and racist elitism, Nietzsche is really offering us general philosophy but behind his own back?]

Against the Dialect [and the chance to take on some unspecified critics and rehearse Deleuze's own critiques in Difference and Repetition].  For Nietzsche, all sorts of plural relations are possible between forces, not just dialectical ones.  The Overman replaces the dialectical concept of man, and transvaluation replaces dialectical appropriation and alienation.  The whole approach is profoundly opposed to Hegel.  When forces are related, for example difference is affirmed and even enjoyed.  Difference emerges from activity not essence, often from 'the aggression of an affirmation'(8).  This aggression is inherent in activity itself [again an apologetic generalization,combining philosophical activity with actual attempts to grind the faces of the poor and kill those who object].  Hegelian negatives by contrast look feeble and artificial [yes --but what about Marx's ones?] 

There is an empirical kind of enquiry involved, when Nietzsche asks what does the will actually want: the answer is 'to affirm its difference'.  [Again there are human examples], the pleasure of thinking that we are different.  This is to be seen as affirmative and 'constitutive of existence' (9).  It is positive because it 'denies all that it is not'.  This positivity is the basis of noble morality, while slave morality attempts to deny any difference or any alternative.  Slave denials are the root of the negative elements of the dialectic [ridiculous speculative determinism], and lead to the desire for revenge and ressentiment as impoverished versions of affirmation.  There is no dialectic between master and slave: this is a form of slave thinking.  There may be opposed notions of representation of power or superiority, struggles over recognition, the desire to represent power, but this is not the same as the will to power, but only how it looks to slaves and those with ressentiment [I suppose the best example these days would be the ludicrous symbolic struggles over 'respect'?].  Slaves cannot conceive of power except in this symbolic way, as the stake in the competition, and this actually reinforces established values.  The slave wins in Hegel because the power of the master is misunderstood, and already implies the struggle of slaves to become successful and recognized.

The Problem of Tragedy.  Nietzsche on the tragic has been misunderstood by using dialectic, but the domestication of the tragic is actually accomplished by Socratic rationalism and dialectic, and, more recently, by turning it into a display of spectacular emotions [I think this is really interesting discussion, and I have notes here].  We should not see the tragic as linked dialectically to life [as is common, apparently].  Nietzsche's first attempts, still influenced by Schopenhauer, might still have borrowed from Hegel with its emphasis on contradiction and resolution in tragedy, but there are other contradictions.  These include the contradiction between primitive unity and individuation, between life and suffering, with suffering needing to be redeemed: here, Nietzsche is still influenced by Christian notions of redemption and reconciliation.  However, the contradiction is then rendered in terms of the struggle between Dionysus and Apollo, with Apollo representing the value of beautiful appearances,  glimpses of eternity, and the dream as redemptive, something individuated [rendered at the individual level, available to individuals], while Dionysus offers a different resolution by pointing to the underlying reality.  Tragedy does unite these two antitheses, and reconciles them, although it is dominated by Dionysus, who is the only proper tragic subject.  Apollo helps represent the tragic in drama, but the dionysian chorus always offers something deeper and more primal beneath apollonian forms.

N's Evolution.  Tragedy is some original contradiction which finds solution and expression, and this theme runs through modern tragic culture as well.  In the end, wisdom prevails over anything more empirical or scientific, something more comprehensive.  Despite the dialectical elements, however, Dionysus appears as something affirmative who does not just resolve pain, but affirms it as necessary, even pleasurable.  Dionysus also transforms himself or grows, rather than simply appearing as the individuation of the primal.  There is even an anticipation of the eternal return in the myth, when Dionysus is reborn, although the argument is directed against individuation.  Nietzsche is still influenced by Schopenhauer and Wagner and still sees the goal as the resolution of suffering, but at the price of transcending normal individuation. 

Nietzsche himself revised his approach later and stressed the novel elements—the affirmative nature of Dionysus, the affirmation of life itself rather than any higher resolution, and the discovery of the real opposition between Dionysus and Socrates with his instinctive criticism and his stress on rational consciousness as creative, his judgement of life against rational ideas.  The real opposition is no longer between Dionysus and Apollo, and even Socrates is still too close to Greek thought to become a proper 'theoretical man'.  The Dionysus figure is used not in contrast to Apollo but as a complement to Ariadne, since 'a woman, or  fiancée, is necessary where affirming is concerned' (13), and the real opposition to Dionysus is now seen as the crucified god, Christianity, something negative and ascetic.

Dionysus and Christ.  There are many similarities in terms of martyrdom and passion, but the difference is whether life is to be affirmed or suffering, with the latter therefore requiring redemption.  The Christian view has led to the bad conscience, the internal torments of guilt and pain, and a nihilist stance towards life.  Christians appear to praise love, but it is a cruel love.  The relation with judaic thought is not a simple dialectical one, because there are continuities, and continuites between love and hate—both examples show the limits of the dialectic and the way in which it selects elements to be related 'in an entirely fictitious manner'.  Thus Jewish hatred triumphs in Christian love.  All this is quite different from Dionysus, where pain is resolved by a joyful recognition of the unity of life, requiring no external justification.  The two approaches can then be contrasted point for point, the ascetic versus the affirmative, the life force versus the need for a saviour.  This is what is Zarathustra is aiming at, something more than just redemption, transvaluation, the reemergence of Dionysus.  A fundamental opposition to dialectic is clearly implied.

The Essence of the Tragic. Dionysian tragedy offers us 'multiple and pluralist affirmation', (16) but how can we affirm everything, even that which produces disgust?  We need of course to interpret and transform such things first, so we can affirm it in a special way.  It's not a matter of regaining lost unity, but rather heading for multiplicity, 'affirmation as such'.  The tragic is a particular aesthetic form of joy, arousing only fear and pity in the moralist or scholastic, and requiring a new kind of 'artistic listener' [detached and financially secure members of an elite].  Multiple affirmation is the key, and with it, even the tragic hero can be joyful.  Nietzsche was to go on to reject this early argument as still excessively Christian, just as Wagner was to be rebuked for declining into emotionalism.  Tragedy is to be undergone by heroes who remain 'joyful, graceful, dancing and gambling' (17).  This is seen better in the later celebration of Ariadne who appears as 'the bursting constellation of a famous dice throw' (17).  Dialectic offers an over theoretical account of the tragic vision, still informed by Christianity in the case of Hegel.

Christian theology asks the right question about the meaning of existence, but Nietzsche insists that this requires much more interpretation and evaluation, to aim at the notion of the just existence, not something which can be seen as a fault requiring divine rectification.  This is the bad conscience, the unhappy consciousness, that affected even Schopenhauer despite his atheism [apparently, Schopenhauer could see no point in existence having rejected god, so he compromised] .The 'truly tragic way' [assuming this is 'good'] is to see all existence as justified and affirmative including suffering.

The Problem of Existence.  This has been long discussed, usually in terms of the injustice of existence and of divine justification for it.  For the Greeks, the Titans helped provide a first sense [Prometheus necessarily committed crime and incurred divine judgement and punishment].  [Anaximander's specific account is discussed on page 19].  Deleuze notes that the myth is hostile to any sort of becoming, which is seen only as some original fall from grace.  At least this is not a Christian interpretation, though,so it does not lead to bad conscience and guilt.  Nietzsche sees the notion of Christian original sin as '"preeminently feminine"', but this is 'not Nietzschean misogyny', because the powers attributed to Ariadne are seen as inseparable to Dionysus [hmmm!  Looks like the familiar dualism of the idealized asexual good and the suspected, sexualised and feared bad woman here].  Nietzsche thinks that we should not be appealing to women, who make us feel guilty in the guise of mothers and sisters [there is a particular diatribe in Will to Power, apparently], who peddle ressentiment.  It is this notion of revenge that haunts modern philosophy and moralism, one of the 'fundamental categories of Semitic and Christian thought'(20).  Nietzsche wants to free us from this abiding sense of responsibility, make ourselves independent of praise and blame: 'Irresponsibility—Nietzsche's most noble and beautiful secret' [and obviously self-justifying]

Christian nihilism is more developed than Greek versions, since they saw the gods themselves as responsible for the faults in existence, a result of divine folly, not the sins of men.  However, this is developed, following the introduction of a sexual connotation, where Eve is responsible, and where human beings crucify their god.  Even so, the issue is whether existence is blameworthy in itself, whatever caused these faults.  Dionysus offers a radical innocence, 'the innocence of plurality, the innocence of becoming and all that is'(21)

Existence and Innocence.  It is 'deplorable' to seek people responsible for [natural] injustice.  There is no one outside the whole, indeed, '"there is no whole"' (21), no unified universe but multiplicity, things affected by different combinations of forces, and the focus instead on what forces are able to do affirmatively.  Those who do not pursue these investigations will only be controlled by another will or force.  Most of us prefer to interpret the world in a way which corresponds to the forces we possess, and to deny anything else.  We congratulate ourselves for the former, and blame herself for the latter, so the will is split, and some neutral subject is assumed to possess free will to act or refrain.  This is a poor understanding of the forces at work, the will which we can develop.  We develop negative interpretations, and one interpretation tends to serve—the one that says existence has no meaning.  We are simply 'bad players' at this game.

Heraclitus was the first to realize the importance of play as something affirmative, to do with becoming.  There is only becoming, no being as such.  Thought must affirm becoming and also see the becoming in being.  There is no other being, 'nothing beyond multiplicity' (22).  Multiplicity and becoming support each other.  Any single individual [people, but also objects] is a form of unified multiplicity: 'unity is actually affirmed in multiplicity'.  There can be no negativity in becoming.  The notion of return is also involved, seen initially as 'the being of that which becomes...  The being which is affirmed in becoming' (23).  This means the eternal return is also something to be affirmed, 'as law of becoming as justice and as being'[as usual, we have definitions that support each other here rather than logical implications].  There can be no blame attached to existence.

The links between the many and the one, being and becoming 'forms a game'.  We need first to affirm becoming and being as becoming, and then we can introduce the third term 'the player, the artist or the child'[seeing the gods as childlike was a feature of Greek thought, apparently, and even Dionysus has his divine toys].  As players, we can temporarily abandon ourselves to the game of life.  The artist creates within the rules of the game, sometimes addressing those rules explicitly.  The being of becoming also plays the game itself, in aeon [this rather mysterious form of intensive time operating beneath objective time, also discussed in Difference and Repetition].  The eternal return is a moment of the game [again defined as the being of becoming], and a return of the action of the game back from that moment.  Apparently, Heraclitus used the notion of the game to mock human hubris, to explain justice as the law of the world in the form of play or innocence.

The Dicethrow.  There are two moments: the dice are thrown and then they fall back.  For Nietzsche, there are two tables for the throw, the earth and the sky, where the dice fall back to the sky, as in Zarathustra.  But the earth and sky are part of a single world, midnight and midday in Zarathustra [actual and virtual?].  Human players and artists can also divert attention from birth to sky, temporarily at least.  The dicethrow 'affirms becoming and it affirms the being of becoming' (24) [it maintains the importance of the game itself and the actual results of each turn].  We're not talking here about a series of throws which will eventually produce the same result as initially.  A single dicethrow reproduces itself, representing all the possibilities [a very abstract and philosophical way to put it -- you can't play dice if you do not accept the rules or the random results]. One throw affirms chance, but the result should be seen as the affirmation of necessity, just as being is necessary to becoming and and unity to multiplicity [this notion of necessity is quite useful then - presumably not so much divine necessity as necessary reason, but based on chance?].  Of course, chance will not always produce a particular winning combination, double six, which allows us to start all over again, but [by way of compensation], the player can at least affirm chance itself, as a counter to what might be seen as iron necessity [never mind if you're in poverty—better luck next time with your kids].

We can see the metaphor of the dicethrow as chaos, and again there is an implicit affirmation and innocence [only because Nietzsche admires the old noble spirit that laughs at fate? I am sure it pleased some of them to think of their fortunes as being accumulated only because of lucky chance].  It gives a higher purpose to the actual, a chance to dance, to experience chance [could be Giddens on the dubious universality of 'choice' in modernity] .  Nietzsche wants to call this necessity or destiny, affirmed of chance, a way of celebrating the particular throw of the dice, a particular 'fatal number which reunites all the fragments of chance'(25).  Such affirmation of chance implies another dicethrow [seems very similar to hope for a better life following reincarnation --or posthumous fame?  I could have been a contender?  Better luck next time?  Best of three? Not my fault if I lose all my money?].

Most people are afraid to play, however, and find it impossible to laugh at any adverse results like real players.  We selectively interpret the results, approving the ones that we like and using notions of causality and probabilities to explain them.  Causality and finality domesticate chance.  Probabilistic estimates of the results of the throw prevent affirmation.  This sort of reason actually originates in ressentiment and revenge.  Probability will not deliver, because there is no purpose in the universe, and we can only play as well as we can.  If we do not affirm chance, we are not celebrating the dicethrow nor encouraging it to return.  We need to break away from notions of probability and finality, and think of events in terms of a coupling of chance and destiny rather than a probability distributed over several throws, opt for a fatal combination, 'fatal and loved, amor fati' (26). [Deleuze sees THIS as some wonderful refutation of scientism?]

Consequences for the Eternal Return.  We have to distinguish between single throws of the dice and those which 'fall back' and reintroduce the notion of destiny.  The eternal return brings both moments back.  Another absurd quote from Zarathustra implies that if we welcome chance and see it as an expression of will, we can make it our friend.  It would be wrong to take the particular 'fragments of chance' (26) as dominant, as masters [especially if they disadvantage us], and all the fragments have to be reunited and affirmed.  Nietzsche apparently [in Will to Power] sees chaos as some underlying necessity for purposeful activity, '"an irrational necessity"', an attempt to unite the notion of chaos and cycle, becoming and eternal return.  Chaos is not entirely constrained by becoming, and chaos guarantees that becoming cannot be judged against any other external criterion [so all this follows from having to make things consistent].  Becoming has a law in itself, and as long as we affirm chance, there is a compensation [because chance is at least better than chaos?].  Chance does not finally conquer chaos, however, but the two are linked in a circular movement.  This is Nietzsche's departure from earlier conceptions of eternal return: there is no subjugation of becoming [as in the notion that the identical is what returns?].

Nietzsche's Symbolism.  The dice throw is multiple affirmation which challenges the existing forms.  It is sometimes rendered as fire, transforming force.  Human activity can be seen as something less than combustion, more like cooking [could be Levi-Strauss here on cooking in the culinary triangle, mediating the raw/natural], putting chance into the fire, which is always there to reheat it.  There is always multiplicity in unity.  There are metaphors of dancing and dancing stars to represent the game and chaos.  Zarathustra himself is a suitable figure for Nietzsche because he introduces morality into metaphysics, and denounces the mystification of other forms, but he also sees the chaos and affirmation of chance in fire and stars.  The images of chaos, fire and constellations are also found in the myth of Dionysus, once interpreted, of course, in the figure of Dionysus as game player. Nietzsche also attempted to deal with the physical science of his time, and 'dreamt of a fire machine completely different from the steam engine' (28) [prat], but preferred poetry and philosophy and dreams to actual science.

Despite the interest in poems and aphorisms, however, serious philosophy was the point.  An aphorism can be seen as a fragment, 'the form of pluralist thought' (29) aimed at articulating a sense of being, or action.  It is not the same as the maxim which tends to relate only to human phenomena.  Nietzsche was not anthropomorphic [handy for Deleuze -- but that all turns on the preference for the aphorism?].  The point is to evaluate and interpret, and both the aphorism and the poem do this, but both need to be themselves evaluated and interpreted.  Nietzsche in particular urged us to practice exegesis on the aphorism from a pluralist standpoint, going back to the differential elements which produces sense and value [the social hierarchy?] This element is always implicit, waiting to be developed in philosophy [that is interpreted in terms of Nietzsche's own wacky ideas about strong men and wild beasts].  Again some notion of eternal return is involved as a second dimension of interpretation.  'All aphorisms must therefore be read twice' [once literally and once in terms of symbolism?], once as a specific throw of the dice, and once as the game itself.

Nietzsche and Mallarmé.  [Similarities and differences are discussed pp 30--32.  Mallarme composed a famous 'concrete' poem about the throw of the dice, of course].  Both saw the dice throw as two dimensional, and suggested that human beings want to domesticate chance in the name of the rational and the human.  Both saw tragedy as important.  Both saw works of art as constellations.  Both affirmed multiplicity and unity.  However, M saw necessity as abolishing chance, the dice throw as stopping its operation, as in the poem, with direct implications for humanity, with chance needing justification in another world.  For N, the two aspects are joined together, and ressentiment lurks in the idea of redemptive art.

Tragic Thought.  Is affirmation simply the result of an optimistic mood or tone?  Nietzsche are denies that ressentiment is just a psychological state, but vis and biological states should be understood as examples of a typology, some underlying principle that explains psychology.  Even Christianity cannot be blamed specifically for producing ressentiment, which is 'the element of history as such, the motor of universal history' (32) [absurd naturalism].  Similarly, all metaphysics of whatever kind implied judgment of the world.  Ressentiment is a force which produces all the psychological and cultural notions, including identity, causality and reason.  It began with human thought itself.  It drives our nihilist [denying nature] thought as some kind of 'transcendental principle'.  Struggling against it will imply serious criticism of metaphysics, history, psychology and science.  It's difficult at the moment to think what life would be without ressentiment.  Perhaps we would all have to become Overmen.  Ressentiment marks a fundamental difference among us, producing both genealogy and hierarchy.

Nietzsche's philosophy aims to overthrow ressentiment and transmute it, to oppose asceticism, realize the positive and affirmative aspects of will, unlike all those philosophers who were afraid of it and wanted to constrain it.  The past and future are both innocent, and the eternal return is to be welcomed.  The price is to accept tragic thought, however, which is not a struggle against ressentiment but something joyful and creative, 'pure and multiple positivity', an acceptance of chance.  'All the rest is nihilism' (34).

The Touchstone.  We can now charge all earlier tragic philosophers as failing to break sufficiently with ressentiment, even those who are able to criticize Christian morality.  They were still ascetics, for example, upholding abstract reason, some notion of interiority, often developing anguish or guilt.  Nietzsche offers instead 'full virile maturity', dancing and playing [playing is not betting, so we can accuse Pascal of not accepting the full implications of chance, but representing some kind of timid attempt to turn chance into probability].  Nietzsche welcomes the end of god, the acknowledgement of monstrosity in chaos, and in this he has gone much further than the others to fundamentally oppose asceticism, bad conscience, and ressentiment.

Chapter two. Active and Reactive

Spinoza said that we should redirect our attention to the body instead of just thinking about consciousness and spirit all the time, and that so far we did not even know where the body could do.  Nietzsche continues this with his view that consciousness is nothing but a symptom, and is the passive partner when it comes to establishing values.  This explains the frequent characteristics of it as a slave consciousness, usually appearing only when some superior possibility arises, defined as a superior body.  The body is not just a field of forces, [a distinct object] since there is no external reality apart from force already.  Quantities of force in relations of tension is all there is, and forces are hierarchically arranged – they either obey or command.  A body is this relation between contending forces, including chemical biological and social bodies.  This also explains why bodies are 'always the fruit of chance' (37), something astonishing [I think the astonishing thing is that the relation of forces has an outcome].  Inevitably, the body must be a multiple phenomenon, unified by domination.  It possesses superior or active forces and inferior or reactive ones.  A hierarchy is this difference between forces, and quantity and quality are combined.

Obeying and commanding relates to power, but power never dominates completely, with no trace of struggle.  It is more that inferior or reactive forces use their power to adapt [almost a notion of hegemony?].  Reaction involves accommodation and regulation.  However, it is not enough just to chart these, fascinating as they might be, and we often see them as means or even ends in their own rights, without referring to what it is that these dominating them.  This neglects all the spontaneous form-giving active forces, but these do not appear to consciousness, since that consciousness is reactive [keep up!].  This is why we do not know what a body can do.  It is also why we have only a limited understanding of memory, and nutrition and reproduction as well.  It is not just a matter of mechanism vs. vitalism, since vitalism can also be misled in its emphasis on reactive forces.  There are unconscious active forces as well, which explains the importance of the body [and, presumably, gives a foundation to all that crap about physiology?].  The body is what makes the self into a potentially very powerful being.  Science must study the active forces, not the activities of consciousness, and this also has a moral implication [helping us develop a critical stance towards the world and to the old slave moralities?].  The active reaches out for power, imposing forms and creating them.  Darwin is mistaken for seeing evolution entirely in a reactive way, and N preferred Lamarck [who fitted his preconceptions better, even if it was highly dubious – so much for science].  Transformative energy is the same as nobility.  It is Dionysian power.  However, reactive forces always accompany such power [and vice versa].

It is the qualities of forces, active and reactive, that we must think about first.  However, there is a quantitative dimension, and Nietzsche was well aware that science was able to quantify: indeed, he thought this approach would even one day generate 'the scientific order of values' (40), although this would be abstract and ambiguous.  Quality was important if we were to move beyond description.  Quality cannot be reduced to quantity, but rather the reverse, quantities are signs of quality.  Deleuze argues that this means in general that quantity is important because it generates differences which describe the essence of force, and it is only useful in this context, say for describing how unities form when quantitative differences are equalized [maybe].  These differences in quantity should not be neglected, however [as when we take averages instead of ranges of values?  And of course, Deleuze has to preserve the importance of difference].  It is never possible, therefore, to reduce differences by describing numerical equalities, since quality persists, and it can be seen as something that cannot be represented in numerical equality [what a long winded way to say this].  Since differences always persist, so qualities must also be involved [does this argument work backwards?  All depends on Nietzsche deciding that qualities are the same as differences in quantity—only the same?].  In a strange bit, Deleuze says Nietzsche goes on to talk about subjectivity, which seems to be involved in what could be an anthropomorphic argument {because we are really thinking of human qualities underpinning our quantitative measures?} , but says that Nietzsche is only interested in cosmic subjectivity [Somehow, this lets him off the hook! He denies human subjectivity by invoking some mystical one?].  Chance is important and can bring together and relate all forces.  Chance is affirmed in the motion of the eternal return.  However, the chance relation of forces takes place at the concrete level [Deleuze likes to argue that Nietzsche says that chance has a heavenly level as well].  This is the affirmative dimension of chance, which creates [?] the potential for power, by bringing quality to the relation.  Nietzsche says 'in an obscure passage' (41) [in Will to Power, apparently] that although the universe itself generates arbitrary qualities, this somehow generates an order of quantities as well.  The arbitrary origin of quantities apparently means that we can't calculate forces quantitatively alone, but need to include the equalities and 'the nuance of this quality'[obfuscation in my view, and circular again -- if qualities have nuances, obviously you can't quantify, since 'nuance' here means something unquantifiable?].

Apparently, the discussion about science depends on the theory of the eternal return, suggesting that Nietzsche was interested in science only if it favored the eternal return [!], and in areas where it did not, he neglected it.  Deleuze has a different take.  Nietzsche was no scientist, but he did have a suitable way of thinking.  He did assume that science always ends in equilibrium and equality [assuming natural equilibrium?  If so, that explains a lot in the paragraph above].  Quality and difference must be preserved instead.  It might be possible to develop some sort of quantitative scale nonetheless, but not a ratio one.  Science was obsessed [in his day] with utilitarianism and egalitarianism.  His critique sets out to challenge these views, especially taking on the current 'three forms of the undifferentiated'[logical identity, mathematical equality, physical equilibrium].  [The old elitist opposed egaliatarinaims on political and cultural grounds -- no need for the eternal return to intervene]. By insisting on reduction to the quantifiable, science becomes nihilist, denying life with all its vital differences, and predicting eventual equilibrium [as in heat death of the universe ].  The basic categories of matter, weight and heat, for example depend on this underlying notion of equalizing quantities.  Science thus belongs to asceticism.  Science is nihilist because it focuses excessively on the reactive forces, and therefore describes only the petty side of things.  Reactive physics is also riddled with ressentiment, and so is biology, although this is not initially clear.

Science either affirms or denies the eternal return.  The critique of science makes it clear that this return cannot be mechanistic, more can arguments from thermodynamics be decisive in rejecting it [so this was one of the objections in Nietzsche's day?  That the eternal return did not incorporate entropy?].  We can see in the insistence that energy must be conserved, for example, a view that says the cancellation of differences is inevitable.  This is how a nihilistic principle creeps in, from an undue focus on 'finitude'[as in the objective illusion?].  Obviously a mechanistic version also assumes some long-term balance or equilibrium, despite short term changes in the intermediate term.  Thermodynamics assumes that differences in quantity cancel each other out in the long-term, as with the properties of heat.  The first and final states are undifferentiated in each case, and if this were true, becoming would end either in the same state of being or in nothing [classic philosophical argument, not willing to be compelled in any way by science in this case,but wriggling round inconvenient arguments by saying they cannot be true if some valued principle is not to be sacrificed --exactly how Deleuze proceeds in this discussion of the eternal return].  The eternal return therefore cannot be [!] the return of the identical, but a different sort of synthesis, which science cannot deal with.  Somehow, diversity and difference itself has to be reproduced.  It is not identity that drives the eternal return, but its opposite, not the same but the diverse.  [So Deleuze is arguing for this congenial version of the eternal return not from what Nietzsche actually says about it, but by following an implication from what he says about quality, quantity, and science].

If equilibrium was the goal, it would've been achieved already [see above].  An examination of the present shows that there is no equilibrium [!] Given the elapse of infinite time, becoming would have already started, and the notion of becoming excludes the possibility of ending in becoming something.  Therefore, since becoming has not attained its final state this means that becoming is not a process with a beginning and an end.  If it is finite, what started it?  Can there be any single moment of being that is not affected by it?  Apparently, all the earlier thinkers confirm this view of becoming, although this was usually accompanied by theological ulterior motives, an unwitting sense of tragedy.  Only Heraclitus thought of this sort of pure becoming. 

The idea that this present moment is a passing moment forces us to think of becoming [Deleuze uses the same sort of argument in his discussion of Bergson].  If we take seriously the notion of becoming, it follows that being, as a moment of becoming, must include becoming.  As a result the eternal return shows is a world of becoming to a world of being [an actual quote from Nietzsche's French version of Will to Power supports this, 44].  It all looks like the problem in Bergson about how the present somehow contains the past, how the past comes to be: the moment must be somehow continuously present and past, and yet to come.  The eternal return is a process of this kind.  It is not being that returns, but 'rather the returning itself that constitutes being' (45).  Returning is the process, and that affirms 'diversity or multiplicity'.  The eternal return synthesizes different moments of time,  diversity and its reproduction, being and becoming: being is 'affirmed in becoming'.  This fulfills 'a truly sufficient reason' [this process of  C19th sufficient reason, systematically working from principles to conclusions is the heart of philosophy for Deleuze, and is discussed best in the book on Leibniz].

Not only that, mechanism does not actually imply eternal return [in this sense], but focuses only on the 'the false consequence of a final state', reproducing the same set of differences in a cyclical way.  For Nietzsche, this would not explain the impulse that leaves the initial state, and reenergizes the final state to repeat itself.  Not only that, it would ignore the diversity in each cycle [one of those philosophical arguments again].  'We can only' [!] see the eternal return as an expression of 'difference and its repetition'.  [Note that this does not seem to be much of a difference [!] between the processes of difference and repetition and multiplicity, despite some attempts to see an important shift marking some kind of breach from formal philosophy to politics].  This principle is the will to power, and, here, power is used as a supplementary force to mechanism [expressed in one of those classically backward philosophical arguments - since we cannot think the will to power in mechanistic terms, the mechanistic order is a mistake].

The will to power is spelt out in various ways [references to the French edition of will to power].  It is a completion of the important concept of force in physics, one which adds the notion of inner will.  It is added to force.  It involves a separate will [so force cannot act on its own].  We have already seen that forces are always related and that quantitative differences are signs of qualitative ones.  The qualitative ones are those derived from the will to power.  In this way, the will to power can be seen as synthesizing or relating forces [dizzy logic, leaping over all sorts of steps in between].  The synthesis of forces also helps us understand time.  A particular kind of synthesis produces the eternal return, so [wait for it] the eternal return 'has as its principle the will to power' (46) [here as elsewhere,' principle' is understood as the opening statement in a chain of sufficient reason?].  However, Nietzsche thinks the principles are too general 'in relation to what they condition', which is why he thought Schopenhauer on the will to live was too general [and not hierarchical enough politically] , compared to the will to power.  A good principle 'reconciles empiricism with principles', and does this by being 'no wider than what it conditions, that changes itself with the conditions, and determines itself in each case along with what it determines' [highly suspicious in my view, allowing all sorts of adjustments to move from principle to empirical cases, and making it so flexible than it can never be falsified].  In this way, the will to power is never separable from actual forces and is 'always plastic and changing' (47).

To separate too drastically the will from its manifestations risks metaphysical abstraction, but to equate the two supports mechanism [nasty dilemma].  There is a difference between forces that can and power that wills [anthropomorphism again?].  Relations of forces always reproduces relations of domination, but domination always involves an internal will in order to achieve it, otherwise there would be indeterminacy.  We have already seen that forces need to be produced both by differences between themselves, but also something that generates these [qualitative] differences – this is the will to power, the genetic element.  This is  'in no way anthropomorphic', but [or because?] it can be rendered in mathematical terms [very weak defense] by referring to it in terms of (x+dx) [where dx is presumably changes in x.  I don't know if this is one of the examples in Sokal's polemic], and we can then go on to describe the relation between the forces as dy/dx.  We have thus seen the will to power as 'the genealogical element of force and of forces'[this seems to be relating back to Leibniz and the discovery of an abstract relation which underpins actual relations of x and y, and which is detectable even when the arithmetic values of x and y are reduced to zero.  This adds some mathematical credibility to Nietzsche, although whether it is implicit in what he sees is of course highly debatable].

However, we have still not elucidated or analyzed the will to power, nor seen how this combination of abstract and concrete relationships produces the eternal return 'in conformity with its principle'.  We need to examine Nietzsche's relation to Kantian notions of synthesis, and the subsequent critiques [that it was not clear how it worked or related to the objects that were being synthesized?].  A true notion of genesis or production would also require some constant ['eternal', but I am thinking this could be a typo for 'external']process of synthesis, to replace the strange role of 'miraculous harmonies between terms that [still somehow] remain external to one another' (48).  Nietzsche has been influenced by these critics, and turns synthesis into a matter of relations of forces [which makes it appear much more material and external?], and added the eternal return as a constant generation of diversity, which requires synthesis to operate [so here we have a motion of the eternal return as pretty well constant in its operation?].  This gives Nietzsche an implicit Kantian heritage and a rivalry with his [Hegelian?] critics.  He thought he had rescued Kant by going beyond him internally, so to speak, with the motion of the eternal rreturn and will to power. [So the whole argument is also addressing other philosophers and their controversies, as usual].

We have to tidy up the terminology, and then we can make his philosophy rigorous.  First the notion of genealogy involves both differential and genetic components, and this is how the will to power produces differences in quantity and something that produces the quality.  It also implies chance if it is to be plastic [!], and only the will to power can affirm all chance.  Second, forces are dominant if they possess a certain quantity, but they are active or reactive depending on quality.  Even the reactive forces express a will to power.  The differences in quality actually explain quantitative consequences.  The task is to interpret these qualitative differences and see how they affect particular events or phenomena, and thus to work out the relation of forces: this will not be easy, and we need a method as finely discriminating as that of chemistry.  Third, the will to power is the principle of the qualities of force, and that also means the act of interpreting.  It follows that the will to power must have qualities itself, quite fluent and subtle ones [because it has to do this clever interpretation first].  These qualities appear only momentarily.  They are separate from the qualities of force itself: force can be active or reactive, but the will to power is affirmative or negative.  There is even a will to nothingness.  However, there is a 'deep affinity, a complicity'(50) between action and affirmation, reaction and negation.  Action and reaction appear as a means to exercise the will to power, and they both have to be affirmed [which I think means given philosophical significance].  Affirmation is a kind of license to become active.  Affirmation and negation are immanent [and transcendental, he says] to action and reaction.  Fourth, the will to power both interprets and evaluates [since we like affirmation, it is Dionysian], and, more technically, it is the will to power which adds value, as something qualitative.  Values are always connected to evaluation of this kind, so it is the will to power that produces specific sets of values: they represent a particular quality of force which is active or reactive [there's also the term nuance, unexplained so far].  Thus values are valuable [!] if they express an affirmative will to power.  All these operations are considered to be inherently connected, which gives some problems with Nietzsche's terminology, so that he uses terms like noble or master to refer both to active force, and affirmative will, and the converse.  These notions of nobility or whatever provide a clue to the value of a belief system, and hint at its genealogy, but it requires genealogy to further uncover how nobility gets connected [a very fancy way of saying that philology shows that the terms good and valuable originally also referred to the nobles, advanced in Genealogy of Morals -- pretty thin stuff I thought].  In this way, genealogists are the best able to critique systems of values.  There is no other way, since values are not self sufficient, and it is not enough to praise all values alike, since some of them are clearly based on slavery: unfortunately, Nietzsche's system turned into the most appalling conformism, driven by ressentiment [no one is specifically mentioned].

Action and reaction coexist.  The negative is already solely reactive.  Only active force asserts itself and affirms its difference, but it can be limited by reactive and negative forces.  There appears 'an inverted self image' (52) of an element in its origin.  In social terms, noble active forces are confronted by plebeian images, and this connection appears usually as an evolution, sometimes in dialectical terms as the development of contradiction, sometimes in utilitarian terms as a kind of their derivation or development, say of the economy.  Beneath these reactive images lies genealogy.  Reactive forces deny that they are anything other than an evolution, because they have to oppose any fundamental difference.  This produces mediocre analysis, and a preference for reactive forces [at the conscious level].  However the original inversion in genealogy is what is responsible, and it is this that produces consciousness of reaction.  Certain factors can assist the development of reactive forces, including a negative will to power or will to nothingness.  Is it just that reactive forces develop so that they can overpower active ones and become, in a way, aggressively active themselves?  Nietzsche's answer [avoids this problem] by saying that what the reactive forces do is to decompose active forces from their content, stripping active power, and making those active forces join them instead.  So we have an idea of subtraction or division as the secret of reactive forces, and this is what ressentiment, bad conscience, and the ascetic ideal reveal.  The separation in turn depends on some mystification or falsification [we are nearly at the concept of ideology!], something imaginary [with a mystifying reference to a 'negative utilization of number' -- subtraction? (53)].  Separating active force from action is only the first stage, the second is to tie it to some mystifying justification [maybe], and Nietzsche has in mind the [eg Christian] revaluation of slavery or the ignoble, and the way in which it persists as an active force, even in those who are politically dominant.

This means it is not enough to analyze actual combinations of forces, since active forces can incorporate [inverted] inferior forces.  This is why we have to actively support the strong, as in Will to Power.  Success in the struggle does not always indicate the triumph of the affirmative and active: that still remains to be demonstrated after analysis and interpretation.  We cannot use simple physics or mathematics, and must be prepared to go beyond what happens to be the factual case in any social system.  Deleuze tells us this echoes an old debate with Socrates [54, which seems to tie in with Deleuze's view about desire].  Nietzsche also encounters the modern equivalent of Socrates, 'the free thinkers' (55), positivists who suggests that we must just accept accomplished facts, dismissing any notion of independent values.  This is 'fatalism'[of a bad kind], often uncritically accepting what has happened entirely in positive terms [as social functions, for example].  Positivist can still be atheists, but still have this positive functional view of religion.  Anything human seems to be praiseworthy, without asking of its origins.  Because there is no analysis of the struggle between active and reactive, the reactive tends to be seen as natural and dominant, providing a series of facts that can be asserted against the really strong, the free spirits as opposed to the free thinkers.  It is clear that a number of ideologies can be criticized here, including humanism and the dialectic [which is itself obsessed with operating with already humanized contents]. 

The term hierarchy refers to the difference between active and reactive forces, with the former always superior, and this is what makes it innate.  But [social] hierarchies show the triumph of reactive forces, where the weak have triumphed after all, with this system propped up by morality or religion.  This is a bad hierarchy, and we miss that it is back to front.  [The old argument that it is the weak who have really prevailed].  The weak happen to be cunning and witty enough to perpetuate this illusion [as in the crafty and charming serpent].  To get to the bottom of this inversion, we have to analyze forces properly.  [The term nuance appears again, this time referring to a quality of a reactive force, how it appears at a particular stage of development.  Still not very clear!  There is another quality of active force which says that it must always go 'to the limit of what it can do', whereas, presumably, reactive forces have no such impetus of their own?].

The will to power is the genealogical element that produces the relation of the forces and their quality.  It must manifest itself in force.  These manifestations have to be carefully analyzed.  One appears as a capacity for being affected [by forces], which introduces an apparently contradictory notion that the will to power both produces forces and is determined by them, 'always determined at the same time as it determines' (57).  Apparently, this is Spinozist, where a capacity to be affected corresponds to every quantity of force, as in his notion of the body, where the more ways we have to be affected, the more power we have.  This is not just an abstract possibility, apparently, because we can detect it in the actual bodies in relation.  For Nietzsche, the capacity to be affected is a sensibility or affectivity, some feeling of power, which becomes an aspect of the manifestation of the will to power.  This is why the will to power affects all the other feelings, often acting as a pathos.  This is why the will to power affects everything, and can even act at a distance if things feel they are attracted.  When the will to power is manifested, it perceives some things and feels the approach of something assimilable [getting really into fairyland here].  Feeling the strength of assimilation can therefore be a manifestation of the will to power, even if this leads to obedience or submission.  Sometimes, an interior force can decompose a superior  one, just as atoms can disintegrate.  So [nothing lies outside of the will to power].  [Also think there's some equilibrium detectable in here, where the capacity to affect somehow aligns up nicely with the capacity to be affected: it seems to require some 'process of sensible becoming' (59)].  Again it is the underlying forces and the interactions that produce sensibility.  Forces can change into the opposite, struggle with each other or  'become'.  So we're not just talking about a struggle between opposites, since the will to power has qualities which affect the becoming of forces, it's sensibility [capacity to affect or be affected].  Pathos --in the sense of suffering-- is the most elementary or common form in which a becoming appears [not just anthropomorphism-- egocentrism].

We seem to have an argument that active forces have a tendency to become reactive, with becoming in the stronger sense.  There might be other forms of becoming, but we only know becoming - reactive.  Reactive forces seem to triumph everywhere: they benefit from the will to nothingness, and from the appeal of negation.  This explains the growth of nihilism and its characteristic forms like ressentiment, bad conscience and asceticism.  We would need a different sort of sensibility to detect other kinds of becoming, which implies that human beings are essentially reactive, and that ressentiment and the rest are the very principles of human being: this explains Nietzsche's disgust at human beings.  This argument has implications for the eternal return, which seems doomed to take a reactive or disgusting form, and indeed Zarathustra says  finds it nauseating, in the first version.  However, this would introduce contradiction into the notion of the eternal return, which now features becoming nihilist.  It requires the development of the Overman to avoid the nausea.

Becoming active would be quite different from the becoming that we know of now.  If we are to argue that Nietzschian concepts are consistent [!] we will have to work out what it might be.  There are some problems to deal with.  First we have seen that active forces become reactive: once they have done so, why don't reactive forces also go to the limit of what they can do?  Is it this that produces the delusions of grandeur that Nietzsche complains about [in connection with Napoleon, as I recall], and has this not showed that reactive forces have become active in their own way?  We can see reactive forces from different points of view, as illness, for example which narrows possibilities, but which also reveals new capacities and new forms of the will.  Actually, Nietzsche is fascinated by the ability of reactive forces to open perspectives and reawaken will to power.  Even religion has certain admirable aspects.  However, we could argue that it is not the same illness which has these apparent ambivalent effects.  This is where we have to consider nuance, which affects the connection with the will to nothingness.  So reactive forces can lead to resistance, contamination of active force, they can grow out of active forces—there are different types, with different affects.  Nietzsche seems to use the term nuance to refer to the subtle differences that only long experience can alert him to, for example his long experience with decadence.  Subtle forms of interpretation are required for both active and reactive forces [highly suspicious in my view, meaning he can make them into whatever he wants].  Thus some reactive forces become grandiose, some active forces do not know how to turn into affirmation [that typical fate of the cultured]: all depends on the geneaologist's art.  Nietzsche's interest in physiology leads him to see this in terms of sickness and health.  Differences remain when the forces go to the ultimate limits.  Becoming active leads to a link between action and affirmation, while reactive becomings are connected to negation and a will to nothingness [repetitive assertion, circular suggestions for analysis].

Becoming active must involve selection of the activity and of an affirmative will.  It is the eternal return that acts as the selective principle.  It provides the will to power with a rule: 'whatever you will, will it in such a way that you also will its eternal return' (63).  [This is the bit that appears in Will to Power as urging us to live as well as we can, because everything will be repeated].  The alternative is to be utilitarian and parsimonious with our pleasures, enjoy things only once, and as some sort of reward.  It is the thought of the eternal return that selects, and it also informs our willing, making it more creative.  Even so, this is not enough, because reactive forces can still resist this selection if they are combined with the active ones.  A second selection is required, and this is both obscure and esoteric, so Deleuze has to construct its for us.  First the eternal return makes the will complete, and this must also mean that it makes the nihilistic will complete [or no nihilism can be complete without it] .  Second, we saw before that the will to nothingness is allied to reactive forces, and appears in this universal form of becoming, but is never complete, capable of conserving only a reactive life, negation.  Third, the eternal return can make the will to nothingness complete only by achieving some absolute negation, the negation of reactive forces themselves, the self destruction of the weak, indicated in Zarathustra by people who will their own downfall [the Prologue, apparently].  Fourthly we are not just talking about turning against one's self, turning active forces into reactive ones, but proper self destruction, where even the reactive forces are denied.  This possibility of denying reactive forces becomes a matter of active negation or active destruction and is seen in the ways in which the strong spirits destroy their own reactive tendencies, by thinking of the eternal return, and accepting the eternal return even if it leads to self destruction.  They are not just admitting to judgment, but agreeing to self destruction [I think the secular version of this is being willing to sacrifice themselves in order to become affirmative and strong].  This negation of the reactive forces can become affirmative, and lead to eternal joy, the joy of destroying the negative as an act of affirmation [with a link back to the Dionysian celebratory acceptance of tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy].  Fifthly, since the eternal return destroys reactive forces, they cannot return themselves, and nor will those representatives of reaction like the small man.  Negation has been affirmed [seen as part of life as in Dionysus].  This is different from the simple idea that we should will everything that returns, since here the eternal return makes something come into being, but only by changing its nature: 'the eternal return is being and being is selection (Selection = hierarchy)'(66) [all this is still definitional really?].

We have to elucidate these points.  We have to remember that transmutation of values means affirmation instead of negation as in 'the supreme Dionysian metamorphosis'.  Eternal return is the being of becoming, and becoming itself has two aspects—becoming active and becoming reactive-- and the transformations of both into their opposites is possible.  'But only becoming active has being'(66), since becoming reactive is dependent on active being, or is itself nihilistic [maybe].  There can be no becoming based on the return of reactive forces, so an eternal return says the [nihilistic] reactive forces must be overcome.  Affirmation thus has a particular support, in being the only force to affirm being [on the other side of the eternal return]. The eternal return helps us see that becoming active is the only kind of becoming which can possibly have a universal application to being [both here and on the other side of the eternal return] .  Affirmation therefore gains profundity from its connections with the eternal return, as it 'changes nuance' (67).  The eternal return also has a selective ontology by preferring affirmation as universal becoming.  This is all spelled out in terms of the discussions that Zarathustra has with his animals, who cannot understand his disgust at the prospect of an eternal return that does not select.  What he is trying to say is that affirmation covers the whole, universal being, because affirmative force has been selected as a single becoming [maybe]. [ The terms and their properties depend on each other again -- the eternal return validates affirmation, because affirmation is the only force to survive ,because reactive forces are nihilistic, meaning they perish before the eternal return -- etc].

Chapter three Critique

Overall, sciences dominated by the passive and reactive concepts, we can see this in human sciences as well, which are dominated in terms of utility, adaptation, regulation, and forgetting [all Nietzsche's terms in Genealogy...].  They lack genealogy.  In each case, the facts dominate, but they are never interpreted as a result of a will, to truth and to power. As science progresses, so it becomes more submissive to the established order [I'm not sure this is at all true of the latest theoretical physics].  Sciences are also dominated by a heartless scholasticism.  Nietzsche's attack on utilitarianism was important in its decline [in France?].  It is inevitable that questions of utility must involve someone making a judgement about what is useful, and how best to judge action anyway, despite what the actors themselves think.  Utilitarian thoughts claim some special privilege, but they are really based on ressentiment.  If this sort of generalization is a necessary part of science, it is also found in philosophy, so Hegel can also be criticized on the same grounds as utilitarianism.  Real activities are replaced by generalizations based on the third party's perspective: which itself produces some profit for the third party. We can apply this critique to linguistics, which is usually judged from the point of view of the recipient.  An active philology would be different, reflecting how language obeys force rather than reacts to it.  Again, the meaning of the word depends on the will of the speaker, suggesting that the noble business of naming things itself as the origin of language.  It then becomes important to ask who it is that is doing the speaking and naming and what they might will by it.  Once uttered, words can be possessed by another force and another will.  We see the best analysis of this in the discussion of the word 'good' in Genealogy...  [I wasn't terribly impressed I must say].  It follows we should be developing an active science based on active forces not just reactive ones.  This leads to a symptomatology, where phenomena are treated as symptoms of some forces; a typology, since we can see different forces at work in terms of activity; a genealogy tracing the origin of the forces in terms of their nobility and will.  All sciences should work like this and so should philosophy.  We see this in Nietzsche's speculation about the philosophy of the future [which apparently appears in Will...  and elsewhere].

We also have to rethink what a question is.  It seems obvious to ask 'what is', but there is an implicit metaphysics, beginning with the Greeks and Plato deciding to focus on ideal rather than specific cases, the distinction between beautiful things and Beauty, something rooted in being and essence.  This form of questioning was not always very successful, however, as a way of getting to the essence, and the sophists preferred another question – 'which one?'.  This, they thought would lead to the issue of what continues as essential qualities among concrete objects.  The procedure also offered an empirical form of enquiry, and was pluralist rather than dialectic.  Nietzsche follows this argument and says that 'which one' means inquiring into the forces and will that possess a given thing – which force or will is manifested in it.  Essence express the value or sense of a thing, and thus in turn is determined by the forces with affinities for that thing, and well with affinity for the forces.  Still asking what is it assumes that there is some external sense, whereas really, essence is perspectival [depending on the person asking in this case, but there's also some non subjective standpoint?].  It follows that there is a plurality of essence, and that essence is always related to sense and value.  The whole thing can be symbolized by Dionysus, the gold of transformations, 'the unity of multiplicity' (72), so it is always him that we find when we ask which one is it [t is Nietzsche's poem Ariadne's Complaint, where all this is to be found apparently, in Dionysian Dithyrambs].

The method then involves symptomatology first, to ask first which the one is that says something thinks or feels and wills.  This is useful for asking, for example, what someone wills when he appeals to some ideology, or pursues some action.  Even those apparently without a will, like ascetics are willing something.  There must be a will to power, otherwise nothing could be thought or experienced.  This is also the tragic method, or the method of dramatization, although we must strip that term of 'Christian and dialectical pathos' [Deleuze has a more secular version of his method of dramatization. I think in Two Regimes of Madness].  What the will wants is not simply an objective or object, since these are still symptoms.  What it wants is to affirm its difference, which might include denying other forms of difference.  Qualities are willed, whether something is heavy or light [remembering that something light means something noble and affirmative].  In other words, when we ask which one, we require an answer that refers to a type, one reflecting the quality of the will to power and its nuance.  [I am confused].  It is a 'type of the one that speaks of the one that thinks, that acts, that does not act, that reacts etc' (73).  We ask what wills typically want in actions of this kind [so it is an ideal type?].  Again this looks anthropomorphic, but we're only talking about types of man [feeble], and we can use this to question some of our earlier generalizations, such as that man is always reactive.  Animals, things and gods can also dramatize, since all are transformations of Dionysus, [who in this case seems to refer to some universal will].  Thus we can ask interesting philosophical questions like what would the will of the Earth look like, and Nietzsche is able to answer by assuming that it must be Dionysian lightness [circular arguments again, one that first asserts that Dionysus is some universal will, and then we discover that any particular objects that might have a will must therefore represent the characteristics of Dionysus!].

A will to power does not mean that the will wants power: the two are inherently connected, thus there can be no separate will like the will to live [in Schopenhauer].  The Nietzschian will to power is therefore entirely new, and even though others have used the term, they used it in a different sense, as if power were the ultimate aim of will and its motive, and Nietzsche criticized this view.  It is based on three misunderstandings. 


First, it involves a particular representation of power, activated by the will.  This is the conception in Hegel [and Hobbes and others].  It also involves recognition, some 'comparison of consciousness'(75), which involves some other dimension of will which takes the form of a motive to compare, and which we might find in vanity or pride, or even inferiority.  This again involves the fundamental question of who is conceiving of the will to power like this, who wants to be represented as superior, or gratifyingly inferior?  Nietzsche suggests it will be the weak or slaves.  So this notion of power is actually a slave notion, when he imagines himself in his master's place.  It is a representation of nobility, which clearly signifies the lack of real nobility.  This has been classically misrecognized in the master slave dialectic.  The passion to have things represented, even to have representatives is found in slaves, as 'the only relation between themselves they can conceive of' (76), and this conception has limited to grasp of philosophy when it considers power.

Second if we make power an object of representation, we make it dependent upon the processes of representation and recognition, and this delivers us straight away to accepted values, which alone can grant recognition.  It is really an argument that current values should be attributed to ourselves.  There is no alternative for the common man who is not in a position to go beyond values that have been assigned to him.  Hobbes' philosophy just takes this picture of the common man, and so does Hegel's: neither sees the will to power as a mastery of creating new values. 

Thirdly, established values are attributed through combat and struggle, driven by an attempt to profit from current values [a crypto theory of social class, except that the universal class is 'the strong'].  It is typical for any social struggle to be judged by established values.  However, struggle, war, rivalry and comparison, 'are foreign to Nietzsche and his conception of the will to power'(76).  [I am not all convinced by this, since war and militarism, not to mention knightly combat, are occasionally admired, not least in The Gay Science].  He does not see struggle as creating values except those of the triumphant slave, so struggle helps slaves reverse hierarchy, but never expresses active force nor an affirmative will to power.  Struggle rewards the weak against the strong [because we are defining struggle here as popular upheaval, not as the constant grinding of the face of the poor].  We see this in the opposition to Darwin, who could not see that selection really favoured the weak [I read this differently, as Darwin not emphasizing the creative aspects of the evolution, which might be the same thing].  Nietzsche himself says that he 'is much too well bred to struggle'(77) [no doubt, but he admired men of action nevertheless].

We have to be careful not to introduce 'emotional tonality' into the discussion of the will to power, as when we discover its essence only in grief or dejection, and yearn to escape from power, as if it were possible.  This follows from seeing the will to power as a desire to dominate, which can then be rendered as something contradicting a universal will to power [a will to live].  It is common to note the contradiction between the good and the bad sides, between particular representations or appearances of power.  It follows that the bad sides of power needs to be limited, say by social contract.  Schopenhauer draws out the implications by making the will to power the essence of life, producing appearance in general, power as representation again.  This is a mystification, uniting representation with the world in principle, seeing the world itself as some kind of appearance or illusion.  For Schopenhauer, this produces people who limit their options, not only by contract but by a form of 'mystical suppression'(78).  [this is beyond my competence, but I have commented on it in my discussions of what Nietzsche says about Schopenhauer here and there].

The old metaphysics is to be superseded by focusing on the will.  The will is both affirmative and creating, and joyful.  It liberates [all the references are to the joyful bits in Zarathustra].  The strong should create their own values.  We see the point if we consider earlier conceptions of the will as above, which have enshrined slave ideas, together with an association of suffering.  However, to avoid anthropomorphism, we have to see that power itself wills, and, for that matter, power cannot be [conventionally] represented or evaluated, since everything depends on what power lies behind these representations [heading towards Weber again here on power as the underlying category for social stratification? Same problems of overgeneralizing and losing specificity?].  Power wills the regulation of forces [and is now actually, determined by forces at the same time!], and either affirms or denies.  Again we can think of a typology of combinations which will produce different phenomena.  This is to be seen as something creative, not that phenomena simply reflect types of power and force.  Power energizes these combinations, does not desire or seek them.  It 'bestows sense and value' on behalf of the will.  What results is a variety of cases, not just the unitary  or the multiple, since 'unity...is affirmed of multiplicity': 'the monism of the will to power is inseparable from a pluralist typology'.  If we think of power as active or reactive, we do not just get a typology but rather 'a hierarchical whole', in which active forces prevail over reactive ones [who form some sort of subordinate whole, presumably because they have to in order to perform this mysterious stripping away of active force from actuals].  Nietzsche uses the terms high and noble to depict superior active forces which affirm, and sees these as light, and the opposite terms for the reactive.  It has been said earlier, that human phenomena are manifested by the reactive, but here, the human [some humans?] is rendered as being animated by a base, heavy soul.  Of course, even Deleuze notes, the whole thing is based on some assumed superiority of the noble and light, the affirmative, but this again links to 'the test of the eternal return', which will select what is absolutely better, while canceling out the reactive and the negative.

We can now see critique as anticipating this transformation of the negative, as joyful and aggressive because it is creative.  Critics cannot be distinguished from antisocial persons, like criminals [suits Deleuzian misosophy].

The Genealogy should be seen as a key for interpreting aphorisms and evaluating poems.  It provides a detailed analysis of the reactive type.  The first form to discuss is ressentiment, the second bad conscience, and the third asceticism, the three characteristic feeders of reactive forces and nihilism.  The first part is needed because the reactive forces themselves prevent interpretation.  The two aspects together form a critique.

The reactive forces depend on a mystification, to strip active forces from what they can do.  Ressentiment is an imaginary revenge, implying a particular paralogism [in this case, a fallacious argument that looks as if it's logical], to justify the separation of force from what it can do.  Bad conscience is similarly inseparable from spiritual or imaginary events, resulting in the inverted world, a force turned against itself, antimony [the opposition of two theses in the same argument: Deleuze says this goes beyond Kant, however, claiming to be more fundamental].  The ascetic ideal offers a particularly inclusive ideal to inform or contain morality and knowledge, by misusing syllogism.  There is a will here, but it wants nothingness.  These essays appear in this order, because Nietzsche wants to go beyond Kant's critique of pure reason, to show the limits of Kant's critique.  It also attacks the Kantian heritage through to Hegel and Feuerbach: Nietzsche sees this as ending in the critic himself adapting to things and ideas, or uncovering determinations of which he had been deprived, 'in short, the dialectic' (82).  [I much prefer Bourdieu's version of how this works, in Distinction] The main question about who should undertake critique is neglected in favor of generalizations about reason and man, without spelling out which men or whose reason.  By leaving spirit general and abstract, it inevitably means incorporation with existing forms of power.  If it is underdogs who do this sort of critique, it looks progressive, but it's often still the case that we're talking about reactive forces, which change positions, but not the power of the ideology itself [as with religion].  Kant similarly compromised, and stopped with this compromise.  It even validated further reactive forces like religion, reason and morality.  Here, the relation is like Marx's to Hegel, standing critique back on its feet.  But there is no connection with Marx because Nietzsche wants not just to put the dialectic back on its feet, but to challenge the need to do any kind of dialectics, which was inverted in its very conception.

Critique must be both total and positive, applying to everything and affirming.  Nietzsche can be criticized for overemphasizing elements in Kant which led to confusing the power of critique with some support for the rights of the criticized.  However, this is an unintended outcome, and Kant can be forgiven for merely extending an existing conception of critique, which applied to everything except knowledge and truth itself, to claims of morality, but not to morality itself.  This had long been established, and it leaves Kant with a belief in 'true knowledge, true morality and true religion'(84), what was seen as facts.  This fundamental belief is what ends in justification.  So far, we still do not have the politics, however, since Nietzsche's critique is aimed at categories themselves, and how they go over into actual practices.  It is not just a matter of opposing false morality or false religions, since we then become institutionalized critics.  At the level of knowledge, Kant's critique suggested that there was false knowledge of what was really unknowable, but he should have focused on the true knowledge, on what can be known.  Inevitably, Nietzsche is forced to adopt perspectivism, denying any absolutes and stressing the crucial role of interpretation of morality or knowledge.  Indeed, there is no knowledge as such, and anything that claims to be [absolute] knowledge is an illusion, an error, or falsification.

Kant did develop the notion of immanent critique, instead of looking for errors introduced from outside, say from the senses or passions.  There is clearly a risk of contradiction [or infinte regress] here, if reason is to be used to critique reason.  Kant chose instead to look to the transcendental but only for something that conditions reason rather than generating it.  We need a genesis of reason and of understanding, the will on which it is based, the will to power as its genesis.  Principles [logical premises] are never transcendental, but come from the manifestation of the will to power, its transmutations.  In the future, it will be possible actually to create values, to turn philosophers into lawgivers [!].  At least this is better than the dream of dominating the whole of being [maybe—as in positivism].  Metaphysics began when the old philosophers failed in this project, saw the limits of sufficient reason.  It is not that philosophers are somehow more sagacious than other lawgivers, rather that the destruction of the old values must result in legislation, creation.  In this happy state, the will to truth is a will to power.  It looks like this is the same sort of process by which secular philosophy displaced theology, when philosophy comes into its own.

Nietzsche versus Kant: Nietzsche has genetic and plastic principles that produce beliefs, interpretations and evaluations, not transcendental principles which condition mundane facts.  He wants to develop thought against reason rather than one which is immanent to reason, and we find this in what is normally called irrationalism, where the thinker himself is opposed to the reasonable being: 'this was the sense of the dicethrow'.  Genealogy is preferred to Kantian legislation which would distribute domains and allocate values.  Genealogy predicts wars of the future, instead of rational harmony and thoughts of creating values, instead of judging justice and hierarchy.  There is no support for the reasonable being as either the priest or legislator, and the reactive man acting according to his self interest is even preferred, nor does God find a place: the will to power provides the critical perspective in the form of a critical type of man [not exactly the Overman who is to emerge from critique, but a kind of ancestor of the Overman].  It is the ends of the Overman that are served by critique: the point is not to justify anything, but rather usher in a different way of feeling altogether.

The will to truth was seen as the most important source of judgement, with God as the highest court of appeal, but this needs to be critiqued itself.  Kant is the last of the classical philosophers still believing in the value of truth as something external, not wanting to ask who seeks truth, what do they want and what mode of power are they deploying.  Most human beings do not seek truth, against a philosophical view of itself, but this only ignores the issue of forces and the qualities of the will to power.  Nietzsche thinks that the issue is to ask what truth means in actual circumstances, and how it became some ideal.  It needs to be dramatized [brought to the forefront and interrogated, perhaps by asking why we want truth, what might be wrong with untruths or ignorance].  Concepts like truth presuppose a truthful world, just as science posits a world of phenomena different from actual phenomena.  The truth-seeker is supposed to be at the centre of the truthful world.  Allegedly, he wants not to be deceived, because that is harmful, but this opposes that the world is truthful ultimately, and in a false world it would be better to go along with the deception.  This want is often disguised under wanting not to deceive [Gay Science?].  However, wanting the truth implies that the world itself is not truthful, and this implicates differences of power.  It also opposes knowledge to life, and preserves the world of truth for some beyond.  This world becomes just appearance.  Ultimately, this is a moral issue, however, to do with wanting a better world, one that reflects the virtues of the one willing the truth.  It is a form of judgement, denouncing appearance and accusing life itself.  Beneath this still lies another want, wanting life to become virtuous to correct appearances, to turn against itself, and this is the 'religious or ascetic contradiction'(90).  This contradiction is itself a symptom, and the question comes why would anyone will a diminishment of life, nihilism?  This is a classic issue produced by reactive forces, which, ironically, pretend to offer a value superior to life itself.  Those superior values are deeply connected to a desire to annihilate life, to favor the reactive forces until they lead to nothingness.  The whole argument shows how knowledge, morality and religion are linked together as layers, and why asceticism is so widespread and difficult to critique, because it wields these different layers differently: even science with its will to truth is compromised.

However, morality has replaced religion, and science is increasingly replacing morality.  Christianity has declined through its own paradoxical development [I like this bit, in Genealogy and in Gay Science], and is now clearly a form of thinking belonging to the past.  Current Christian spokespersons just seem immoral themselves.  Morality continues religion, but in a more creative way.  It's also true that knowledge is the continuation of morality and religion.  Asceticism dominates but it rings the changes on these elements.  This is one reason why settling accounts between the elements looks like critique but is not.  Will the paradoxes of the will to truth ruin morality as well?  Could we suggest some other moral ideal?  Again it is hard to avoid asceticism and its ideals, and that tends to offer regression back to religion.  One conclusion follows: truth itself can be criticized, and critique must be a critique of truth.  If the will to truth prospers in this new way, morality will perish, and this is predicted to be happening in Europe over the next two centuries.  Deleuze likes the rigor of this argument, its connected steps [I'm much more skeptical, I just think one implication follows from the definitions at the earlier stage].  If the argument is successful, the ascetic ideal itself can no longer hide behind some will to truth, some claim to be the only way to truth.  By breaking with the will to truth, Nietzsche thinks he has prevented the ascetic ideal from mutating into yet other forms, and claims this is another form of seeking the truth or knowledge.  Again the point is to destroy first so as to leave a place for a completely different will.

Deleuze works through some apparent contradictions between difference texts to argue that Nietzsche is really saying that existing knowledge should not be set up as an independent set of judgements opposed to life.  In another text he says that knowledge is too close to life.  Deleuze explains that we have two notions of life here, one referring to life as a whole and the other referring to the main forms of life as produced by reactive forces.  There's also a difference between knowledge and thought: knowledge domesticates thought as soon as it becomes a powerful institution, and confines it again to the reactive.  This applies especially to rational knowledge.  Critique, on the other hand, brings into play new forces and therefore a new kind of thought, one that can affirm life without limits, in harmless with affirmative life itself.  Thinking therefore involves discovering new possibilities of life, even though this produces serious difficulties for the thinker.  Nietzsche wants to argue that such thinking is equivalent to the great explorations of the day, but it faces two constraints, urging it to be useful knowledge for reactive life, and that includes the need for thought to establish itself.  Thinking aims at this 'noble affinity of thought and life.

Nietzsche thinks of art as similarly split.  Proper art expresses 'desire instinct or will'(95), and stimulates the will to power.  But there's also reactive art, arts with a therapeutic intent, supporting the reactive forces.  Kant attempted to destroyed this union, but was forced to see the spectator as someone who was disinterested, so that Nietzsche can ask the usual question about who looks at beauty in this disinterested way.  A proper aesthetics of creation which would support affirmation, in which the artist would lead an affirmative and active life.  However, art is also complicit in falsehood and deception, indeed celebrates it.  The point, however, is to take this power of falsehood deliberately to combat asceticism [I'm not at all sure I understand this], stripping out the negative associations of appearance, but somehow adding to a deeper sense of reality, and also showing that power can be brought into effect in the interests of truth.

The dogmatic  has to be opposed.  It argues that thinkers want and love truth; that proper concepts contain truth; that thinking is a natural faculty, so that if we think properly we would end with truth.  This implies that sincerity is the route to truth and that there is a 'universally shared good sense' (96).  It also argues that are diverted from the truth by outside forces such as passions, which affect our sincere thinking and produce errors.  Finally, it is a method that will deliver truth as long as we adhere to it, and this method is universally valid.  This image of thought sees truth as an abstract universal and we never understand the real forces that affect thought [these would be social forces for most of us].  Nor is any sense of the truth emerging in some way separate from its presuppositions [no empirical truth].  For Nietzsche, there are these forces at work affecting what we can sense, and thought will not find the truth just by itself.  It is these forces that produce obvious truths.  Reactive forces clearly are at work in producing conformist truth as an easy and pleasant discovery that will not trouble anybody.  The established forces are concealed, but are 'ideally expressed in truth in itself' (97).  Philosophers personally tend to be a 'a thoroughly civil and pious character', happily fitting in two existing culture and morality.  Even science fails to really offer critique, since after judging the powers of the world, it tends to sanction them as truth.

A new image of thought would not pursue this sort of truth, but would focus on sense and value, trying to identify the noble and the base, and the forces that they express.  This goes beyond the notion of truth and falsehood, because there are different source of truths, and even higher thoughts might contain falsehood, indeed use it, as with art, to become affirmative, something that 'becomes true in the work of art'.  We also have to abandon simple notions of error as well, which clearly depend on some absolute notion of truth, and which somehow express the worst aspect of thought.  Nietzsche says that philosophers often use extremely simple examples to try to illustrate this notion of error, as something arising from simple stupidity.  However, stupidity is a full aspect of thought, 'it expresses the nonsense in thought by right' [which means, I think, the assumption that correct, dogmatic thought achieves truth by right --if so, there should be no errors].  Stupidity has its own truth, the truth 'of a leaden soul'.  Thought based on reactive forces displays its own kind of stupidity, which appears this time as a symptom of an ignoble way of thinking.  Nietzsche uses this analysis to oppose dominant thoughts of his time.

We have to accept pluralism and a typology of truth, locating truth and error to particular types of knowing, and asking who it was who formulated such knowing.  We have to suspect the base in the notion of truth, and the high in the notion of falsehood.  This is the purpose of philosophy.  It is supposed to 'sadden' people, exposing any kind of baseness in thought, criticizing all mystification, demonstrating the complicity between victims and perpetrators, and becoming active and affirmative, even if aggressive.  The point is to create free men who are not domesticated by culture, state or religion.  We have to identify and combat ressentiment and bad conscience and its role in thought.  Philosophy does not always succeed, but it has stopped things getting worse.

Philosophy itself has become mystified. We see this in the caricature of critique associated with the dogmatic image of thought, but it starts the first time that philosophy attempts to relate to the established powers.  The classical philosophers avoided this, and became 'comets'.  The philosopher is constantly domesticated as a sage, an uncritical friend of existing wisdom and truth.  But truth must be dismembered as was Dionysus, partitioned according to sense and value.  This kind of philosophy must be constantly revived in each epoch.  We must see that terms like stupidity or baseness are always related to a particular time, our contemporaries, and the same goes with error, even though that poses as atemporal.  This is why philosophy is always marked by time, always against the current times, as critique, with concepts that are untimely, not of the present.  This opposition is crucial.  The kind of truth presented by the untimely is 'truths of times to come' (100).  The succession of philosophers is not some 'eternal sequence of sages' or historical development, but a series of comets, marked by a 'discontinuity and repetition', between the eternity of the sky and the historicity of the earth.  Thinking is never just an actual exercise of some faculty, nor does it precede somehow on its own: rather it depends on forces which affect thought, sometimes, with reactive forces, to constrain it.  Once thinking becomes thought, it can be occupied by reactive forces, and the 'fictions' crucial to reactive thought become elements of it, preventing proper thought.  Nietzsche thinks we should be awaiting the forces and power capable of affirmative thought.  Thinking itself is not a natural exercise but 'an event in thought itself, for thought itself' (101) [in less fancy terms, actual thinking is conditioned by the existing structure of thought]. Thinking could become particularly light and affirmative, but it must be forced to do so, by a perception of violence having been done to it, forcing it to be active.  These activities, forcing thought to be active, are found in culture, which Nietzsche sees as a matter of training and selection.

We can see the dynamic aspects of culture by comparing it to method.  Whereas method 'always presupposes the goodwill of the thinker, "a premeditated decision"', culture shows the violence undergone by thought, something selective, a training which awakens the unconscious.  The Greeks had this sense of thoughts being activated not by goodwill but by force being exercised on them.  This explains some of the strange passages in Nietzsche about punishment and force as necessary components in developing thinkers, and that tyrannical laws are more effective than schooling.  Deleuze says these texts are  ironical, designed to tease the Germans for thinking of themselves as a rational nation of thinkers, but this is an irony turning on the claims about cultural developments, how the Greeks turned into the Germans.  Violent elements produce people who do not confine thought to the existing state, whereas the good works of churches and states produce martyrs, always with the needs of the state in mind.  The church and state harness the violence of cultural change and turn it into reactive force, [possibly] under the illusion that they are simply managing violence [if so, we are close to the themes of  Anti Oedipus here, with people designing their own repression and so on].  As a result, culture is turned into something reactive itself, something limiting thought, making people even more stupid, cultural degeneration, and Nietzsche sees this as a historical theme [I still think Adorno and Horkheimer are much better].

At least we can see that images of thoughts imply a complex relation of forces, which in turn depends on the typology of forces.  As before, typology depends on topology [the division between noble and base].  Present circumstances produce particular kinds of thinking so 'we have the truths that we deserve' (102).  There are no non-cultural origins of truth.  We only think outside of cultural constraints when we are forced to do so, when we are forced to become active and affirmative: this requires not a method but a particular cultural conjuncture [a paideia, which I have seen defined as a broad character-forming kind of education leading to maturity, something which transcends the instrumental elements in culture].  Method involves avoidance and escape from confronting the real issues [the metaphor here is the thread in the labyrinth – I would've thought this is a pretty useful form of escape, which makes it a rather unfortunate metaphor].  Thinking has to be suited to the place, the time and the particular elements [of force?].  Great thinkers use aphorism and anecdote, usually to refer to extreme places or extreme times, not to temperate moderate zones nor to the 'moral, methodical or moderate man' (103).

Chapter four.  From Ressentiment to the Bad Conscience

Normally, reactive forces hinder action, by delaying it or dividing it, but they can also produce a burst of creativity in order to adjust, a riposte, and again this relation is normal.  This means that ressentiment is not just simple reaction, rather that it leads to no compensating action: the former response is the rare one [Deleuze for some absurd reason sees 'normal' as involving '"normative" and "rare"' (105)].  We can turn to Freud to understand this, with his notion of the "topical hypothesis", where one system receives some stimulation, but another system retains a trace of it, assuming that recording a transformation limits receptivity to fresh stimulation.  These two systems can correspond to the conscious and the unconscious, implying that the unconscious retains memories, while the conscious is the one that acts at the boundary between the outside and inside, like a kind of skin, developing its capacities to respond.  Although Freud had subsequent doubts, this is what is going on in Nietzsche, also using terms conscious and unconscious.  The reactive unconscious is the one that stores lasting imprints in a form of digestion or rumination.  Reactive forces attach themselves to these imprints, but this can never be the only mechanism because adaptation is also required, which provides a reaction to present stimulations, and this one features reactive forces in the conscious.  Nietzsche sees the conscious as only a limited area of human thought, and sees it as wholly reactive, but it is slightly better than unconscious reaction, because at least it's more transparent [maybe, or at least the only one linked to action?].

However, the two systems have to be kept separate, and traces must not interfere with consciousness: the fluidity and mobility of consciousness must be retained.  This happens through the 'faculty of forgetting' (106).  Unlike Freudian psychology, forgetting here is not seen as a negative operation, but something active and positive, not just inertia, but more a matter of absorption, even repression.  There is thus an immediate conscious reaction to stimulation, and an imperceptible trace of it in the unconscious.  And forgetting also has the positive function of helping us see happiness or hope in the present.  Forgetting is a kind of guard keeping the two systems apart, with a purely functional activity, and energized by reactive forces [there's even a suggestion that this unconscious energy is transferred to the conscious, 106 -- all very Freudian I think].  If humans have the capacity to forget damaged in some way, they can never '"have done" with anything'[citing Genealogy], and consciousness is absorbed by the traces of the unconscious and overrun.  Indeed, as soon as we become conscious of these traces, we can no longer act out reactive forces [that is, the ones presented to our consciousness?].  This helps [old] reactive forces prevail, and action [in the present] is limited [sounds like a basis for current notions of mindfulness, being in the present].  The result is a triumph for reactive forces over active: is not just a matter of greater force, more that forgetting is no longer able to draw energy from reactive forces, and the only reaction is between old and present reactive forces.  A kind of modulation takes place, where some forces are supplemented, and others destroyed, in the form of a 'strange subterranean struggle' (107), going on entirely between reactive forces but with the implications for activity.  We can now define ressentiment as a reaction which becomes perceptible but which is drained of energy and can no longer lead to action, the concept of sickness in general: thus ressentiment is a form of [wasting] sickness [a pretty good description of depression based on endless reworkings of past stressful events].

So again we have a topological model based on reactive forces and how they interact in the relation of dominance.  The man of ressentiment is dominated by memory traces saturating these consciousness.  There is, luckily, a more active memory too [below?].  A typology of ressentiment follows, one type is when reactive forces prevail over active ones, with one symptom being 'a prodigious memory' (108).  This type is 'a reality which is simultaneously biological, psychical, historical, social and political' (108).  It looks as if this happens almost by accident, as a result of strong experiences which are overwhelming, and which lead to a general notion of revenge.  However, we must not see this exclusively in quantitative terms, and there are particularly strong relations between some forces and some subjects, as in Nietzsche's types.  There's no need to have experienced something overwhelming, nor any need to generalize.  There is no such energetic reaction, rather a more endless feeling that substitutes for action, one which blames its object.  Strong excitation can be beautiful and good, even for the resentful: the issue is whether it becomes a matter for 'personal offence and affront'.  The object is blamed because it can produce no other reaction but the effect of a trace in the memory, 'a qualitative or typical [constituting a type] powerlessness'.  The more effect it has, the more it tends to produce offence, and in this sense beauty and goodness can be as equally outrageous as pain.  Nothing can penetrate the system.  Consciousness itself becomes hardened.  The memory stores more and more traces of hatred in itself.  Only the object can be blamed.  This is why revenge becomes imaginary or symbolic.  Freud and Nietzsche share an interest in the relation between the anal/digestive and sadism, as in Nietzsche's 'intestinal and venomous memory'(109), or the poisonous spider.  What these thoughts also reveal is an attempt to rework psychology, to turn it into a typology of subjects [Deleuze uses an expression referring to putting psychology 'on the plane of the subject' and says, in a note, that Jung was on to this in his denunciation of Freudian objectivism, 198].  The only possible cure is to transform the type.

The resentful develop a clear spirit of revenge, and 'spirit' here refers to the means for revenge.  It is not just a strong desire for revenge, but because the reactive forces are incapable of action, the only form of revolt is spiritual.  This is the only way the weak can triumph, and introduce a new type of their own: they triumph by harboring a prodigious memory.  Other characteristics follow.  The resentful cannot admire, respect or love because hatred dominates everything.  Self reproach is really a form of reproaching the person who's supposed to be cherished.  This is why self abasement and modesty is 'frightening', because it conceals hatred.  The same goes for 'buffoonery or base interpretations', for ever seeing traps to be avoided in things, [including refusing a battle of wits, which could describe Deleuze himself], permanent malevolence and disparagement, even addressed to friends or enemies.  This reduces things, even misfortune, to matters of blame—everything is someone's fault.  This is not at all like a healthier aristocratic indifference to fate.

Ressentiment is also a narcotic leading to passivity, which in Nietzsche means something which is not acted rather than not active.  Passivity shows the triumph of reaction, the moment at which reactive forces become internalized.  The resentful are impotent, frigid, insomniac, touchy, wanting compensation, and hence 'the man of profits and gain' (110): the system of profit and gain which dominates society shows the imposition of ressentiment.  The only crime becomes one of failing to recognize profit [it is even a crime against the spirit for theology].  Slaves adopt this morality of utility, which includes judging things on the basis of good and evil.  Even the 'incredible notion of disinterestedness' (111) conceals an interest, and in fact is a form of praise for a third party who enables an actor to benefit.  Utilitarianism itself has such a standpoint, some passive third party who regulates interactions, really representing 'the triumphant standpoint of the slave who intervenes between masters'.  This perpetual accusation replaces aggression.  It becomes a goal in itself, so that everything disappoints.  There is a particularly 'dreadful feminine power' here, which blames partners for failure and misfortune.  The resentful want everyone else to be evil so that they can appear good, a display of the essential characteristics of the type.  It leads to the denunciation of the strong as necessarily evil, an inversion of values for Nietzsche responding to the need for slaves to have someone who is eternally evil to blame.

So the system that argues that someone else is evil therefore we are good can be spelled out using 'the method of dramatization', asking who it is who might be making these statements.  The implication is that there is no single notion of good, because what is good for one is evil for the other, so no agreed semeiology or axiology is available.  Dramatization involves pluralism and immanence.  Anyone claiming just to be good would be acting affirmatively and joyfully, revealing some quality of the soul, the certainty that only noble souls possess.  Nietzsche uses the term 'distinction' to refer to this affirmative character, which is just automatically acted upon or enjoyed: it even implies, etymologically, someone who is  real, actual and true [is this 'good', or 'distinction'?], implying that only people who act have a real existence, and possess reality.  In this way, people claiming to be good are also claiming to be able to create values.  Such people feel power and happiness, a kind of wealth that can be distributed.  They are to be contrasted with all that is 'low minded common and plebeian'[citing Nietzsche Genealogy].  Nietzsche sees this as [disconnected from social or political interests], offering just a typology or an ethic of living, something that naturally follows from the claims to be good, something which affirms aristocracy in the full sense: what is evil is actually of little importance, existing just to amplify the affirmative nature of the good. 

Claiming that someone else is evil therefore we are good is quite different, beginning with a negative premise, and allowing the positive only to appear often negation.  This is the 'strange syllogism of the slave'(113), invoking two negations—just like the dialectic!  This makes the dialectic 'the ideology of ressentiment'[a highly suspicious deduction]. The slave's values are created from this negativity.  They also involve negating action of the masterly kind.  This requires subordinating every action to the standpoint of the one who does not act, the one who faces the consequences, or to one of those mysterious third parties who are the ultimate judges of intentions.  This is how the conventional notions of good and evil arise, and how they lead to moral judgment.  What looks good according to the masters' ethics of life becomes the evil of morality.  This is why conventional notions of good and evil are inverted and based on passivity and denial, although they appear as divine and transcendent.  They conceal hatred for life.  Religion follows this negative syllogism too, which makes its positivity misleading.  The religious have invented 'the good weakling: there is no better revenge against the strong and happy' (114).  This is the judaic legacy of ressentiment which goes over into Christianity, and Christian love is actually based on it.  [This looks like it's heading towards a depressive entirely negative eternally remembered ressentiment of Christianity itself].

The whole argument also conceals parologism [in the sense of mimicking logic?].  The problem lies in the middle premise, where an opposition with the master is taken to be a guarantee of possessing of the opposite value, of being good.  If we assume that what the master does is the result of the abstract nature of events, and not personal evil, the whole thing falls.  Because masters are seen as responsible for their actions, so the weak feel entitled to react.  The whole argument displays one of the classic fictions of an abstract force independent of what it can do.  It is not enough to abstain from actions like those of the master, but necessary to counter the abstract force detected in it, and thus claim some superiority.  In this way reactive forces appear as abstract and neutral notions of force, something that can be countered, something that can be divided into blameworthy or deserving vectors.  There's also a curious assumption that more abstract force is required to abstain from action, and this also provides reactive forces with 'a contagious power'(115).  First, force is split into two, and the manifestation of it is seen as an effect of the force which is seen as a separate cause: this is a convenient illusion in science, but it ignores 'a real relation of significance'.  Second substantive force is projected onto a subject who decides whether to manifest it or not, becoming the act of the subject: for Nietzsche, this sort of subject is a ' fiction or grammatical function' (116).  Thirdly, a force is seen as something moral, because it is capable of not operating, and this requires this projection on to the subject: the weak in particular see their very weakness as something meritorious [for Nietzsche it is 'natural'?].

Getting onto bad conscience, it can take two forms, a 'raw' animal like form, and of form which takes advantage of such content and gives it a shape, just as topology shapes typology.  Ressentiment possesses these two aspects, constituted in the unconscious first, then finding form in typical characteristics of the kind we have discussed, like revenge and perpetual accusation, turning unconscious forces into things that can oppose active ones and separate them from [suitable, rational] objects [Nietzsche doesn't seem to discuss active political revolt against the strong as a rational outcome, of course.  Blimey, my prodigious memory has also dredged up Merton's typology of possible responses to social strain—revolt, retreat, anomie, conformism, ritualism.  While we are here, inversion also looks like one of those prophetic ways in which juvenile delinquents establish their 'own' values in subcultures]. Once more, it is not just a matter of quantity.  Instead we have a displacement of reactive forces [from conscious to unconscious] which in turn separates forces from what they can do.  The displacement is covered by a mystification ['reversal by projection'(117)]. 

What seems to happen is that reactive forces produce an inverted image of themselves, so that a difference between reactive forces becomes a definite opposition between reactive and active.  As this image is developed, so the values corresponding to forces are inverted.  In this way reactive forces are projected and become a fiction, developing a fictional relation between God and [natural] life, for example, or between the immediate and the 'super sensible' [heavenly?] worlds.  We have a difference here from the active power of dreams or the positive images of affirmative gods: the fiction in question does not reflect reality but falsifies and denies it [already covered under 'inversion'].  We can now see how the evolution of ressentiment develops, from the separation of active forces from action [which Deleuze calls falsification], from attributing blame, and inverting the values of these forces.  Reactive forces come to appear superior, capable of undermining all the movements of life and beauty, and inventing instead a world in which these movements seem evil.

The full development of ressentiment requires yet another stage, arising from having 'an artist in fiction'[a type again?], and again we have to establish who is responsible.  The first answer is 'the priest', especially the Jewish priest, or at least one who has the 'judaic form'(118), who uses dialectics to perform this inversion.  Divine love, taken up by Christianity, emerges as the greatest accomplishment of this inversion, 'the venomous flower of an unbelievable hatred', something that persuades the wretched that they are the only good people, blessed by god.  Without such a person, slaves would remain in raw ressentiment.  The priest does not share the goals of the slave exactly, but expresses his own will to power, in the form of nihilism.  Nihilism is interdependent with reactive forces.  Deleuze insists that this is not anti Semitism.  Although the Nazis filtered his work through their own interests, Nietzsche himself had no truck with the then current Bismarckian regime or with German anti Semitism, which he saw as'" this shameless racial hoax" [citing a letter to Fritsch, in which, apparently, he explicitly attacks German anti Semitism].  He explicitly distanced Zarathustra from anti Semitism [I have noted these occasional comments, and given my own interpretation of them in my notes on some of these books—my own view, for what it is worth, is that Nietzsche does get occasionally close to anti Semitism, even if it is not the precise German kind].  Deleuze explains that 'the Jewish question' had become a topic for a great deal of discussion among Hegelians, but that Nietzsche had his own particular take on how judaic priests had been affected by German history.  There are racial elements, says Deleuze, but only as an element of 'crossbreeding' [indeed -- a racist concept this time] the development of a particular historical social and political complex, a type.  So we're talking about the type of the priest [rather similar to defenders of Marx who suggest that his comments about Jews are also of comments about a type of capitalist].  Actual Jews have a positive role, [developed best of all in Beyond Good and Evil, says Deleuze].

Ressentiment aims to separate active force from its 'material conditions'[allegedly natural associations with the aristocracy?].  It is a fictitious separation, but it has real consequences, of turning active force back against itself, being interiorized.  This is what produces bad conscience, which continues the same role as ressentiment.  Ressentiment is some sort of infection, concealing hatred under love, spreading to other people disguised as joining with them [or pitying them].  If successful, the fortunate will also develop bad conscience about their good fortune.  This is the final triumph of ressentiment, getting the accused to admit their guilt and to blame themselves, to introject active forces, to produce another type of bad conscience, residing in masters as well as slaves.  Active force in this case produces pain and suffering, and even magnifies them in a 'squalid workshop' (120).

Pain is given an extra dimension which multiplies, some inward dimension that follows from seeing pain as the result of sin, and also as a way of redeeming sin.  Here we have the full development of bad conscience as guilt, a typological innovation.  This involves understanding that pain is connected with the issue of existence, the possibility of acting, appearing as an external constraint on action.  The strong have always understood that the only meaning of pain is in gaining pleasure at the expense of someone else.  This is recognized in Greek culture as the edifying pleasure the gods get in seeing [human?] evil, such as the trojan wars which acted as a festival for the gods.  Seeing pain as something that constrains existence results from reactive thinking, sometimes an excessive identification with the one who suffers, or the passive one, and this is an identification with ressentiment.  Pain should be seen instead as a stimulant to life, inflicting suffering as an 'active manifestation of life'(121).  Nietzsche notes that cruelty was a major feature of the leisure activities and festivals of former times.  It must be the internal dimension of pain that causes us to suffer, and we can only resolve it by manufacturing more pain, internalize and you more, turning it from one of life's [Dionysian] tragedies into something personal [and therefore base and trivial?]. Again a priest is needed to perform this evolution, especially a Christian priest in this case: they urge us to internalize pain, and connect it to sin, making it more than just some raw animal experience.  This is achieved by altering the direction of ressentiment, finding something outside to focus upon as a cause, something or someone other.  However, the explosive nature of ressentiment also needs to be channeled, and this is accomplished by coming to blame oneself, through a bad conscience and guilt: this is achieved through the invention of sin.

Christianity completes the project of Judaism here.  St. Paul is particularly influential as a 'spiteful character', and the new testament clearly shows its base origins.  Even the death of Christ is worked back into the scheme, and the connection between Christian love and hate is disguised by  JC's death and sacrifice: 'the truth that Pontius Pilate discovered [ecce homo?] remains hidden'(123).  However, Christianity has one element which it adds to Judaism, in that it changes the direction of ressentiment to produce the bad conscience.  This does not diminish the force of ressentiment, but adds something to it.  In particular, ressentiment can now be appeased by being spread to others and to entire lives: it only works if everyone feels guilty, including the strong, in a 'dreary refrain'.  This is how the priest becomes a master.  In terms of philosophical implications, this can be read as an attack on the dialectic, replacing antitheses and oppositions by differences and correlations: Hegel's unhappy consciousness is a mere symptom of bad conscience.  We have a story of a two stage development both of ressentiment and of bad conscience, both involving the priest and the particular fictions that he specializes in.  However, culture is also implicated.

Culture means both training and selection, and its morality is contained in its customs, and its violence.  However, it turns into domination by one group, 'people, race or class' (124) [how is the question] , and thus it always has an arbitrary or limited element, it is always reactive.  However, there's always something that appears to go beyond arbitrary rule, a certain active force, something that expresses generic humanity.  These two aspects must be distinguished genealogically, even if they are confused concretely.  Nietzsche thinks that primitive societies featured the domination of custom, something generic, which preceded history as such.  That appears as the need to obey laws [Deleuze links to Bergson on the natural tendency to develop habit].  However, the whole point of socializing ['training'] people is to get them to act out reactive forces, through the imposition of habits and models.  However, certain aspects of the unconscious, including the dubious physiological stuff about digestion, are attacked by culture, since the main role of culture is to train the consciousness, including the ability to forget and be consistent [through being internalized, but not in a nasty way].  This is a future oriented commitment, a matter of 'promising commitment to the future'(125) [presumably, some memory of freedom which is projected into the future as well, or seen as inherent in humanity, waiting to be realized].  In this way culture also produces free powerful and active men, those who promise a better future [a charismatic?].  Culture has always been connected to violence, both to train  reactive forces, and to constrain them, as well as making memory particularly vivid [!].  The early notion of justice involved clear punishment to compensate for any injury caused, and this restored human relations [if it was redemptive, that is, and did not develop into murder or blood feuds].  We also see the early emergence of the notion of debt and credit [as in 'payback'].  All these eventually help produce active people [and nasty utilitarian ascetics, as we saw].

So far, we've not really explained the emergence of bad conscience or ressentiment.  Certainly, they did not originate with conceptions of justice, as their exponents claim.  For the moralizer, justice is secondary, the result of the reaction to offence.  This is unsatisfactory, however, since it is not clear how some just retribution will satisfy pain, the desire for revenge.  The whole equation between pain and injury only works if we include the pleasure in inflicting pain, or contemplating it, some external meaning of pain.  But that is a legacy of an active standpoint, where reactive forces train people to pursue pleasure.  Reactive forces do not lead to action or the search for pleasure.  They represent the last area which can be conquered by the spirit of justice.  The same goes with bad conscience.  Punishment can never make culprits feel guilty, and often has the opposite effect.  In early societies, punishment indeed hindered the effect of guilt.  Something else must develop before human beings can feel themselves to blame for active forces.  The same goes for those gloriously free 'sovereign individuals' [sic]  who are produced by the triumphs of culture: they consider themselves liberated from morality and custom, not in debt in some way.  The responsible and moral man is not to be confused with these free people.  Free individuals will assume power over themselves, as well as over the law: they will be irresponsible, they will not have to answer, they will be liberated from feelings of debt and from the claims of masters to manage them.  Nietzsche argues that this means the individual emerges at the expense of the species.

This evolution of culture displays the eventual superiority of active forces over reactive ones, but, in the middle, the reactive forces triumph, as we can see from looking at actual history [rather than pursuing this idealized notion of what culture must deliver].  Culture is perverted by history.  History shows us the process is of the degeneration of culture, where various groups, including churches and states, somehow stand for the species.  They are reactive forces, falsified as species forces.  Another collectivity formed by this activity is the herd.  This society does not wish to self destruct and usher in a future.  [nearly sociology!].  The whole comes to stand for particular contents, reactive ones.  The domesticated man is the goal, not the sovereign individual, the sick, mediocre and gregarious man.  The violence of culture gets associated with the property of people and organizations.  Violence continues, but in order to domesticate human beings: the strong are domesticated as much as the weak.  Selection now becomes an activity to reproduce the reactive life.

This is no accident, but an inherent tendency in history, its 'principle and meaning' (130).  We see this in the disappointment about how the Greeks become Germans, and also through a symbol in Zarathustra: the fire dog, which comes to stand for species activity, the relation of human beings to the earth.  But this refers to domesticated men and deformed species activity serving reactive forces.  Zarathustra rebukes the dog for defending these institutions masquerading as self important representatives of the species.  Another fire dog is required, symbolizing species activity in pre history: this explains why Nietzsche is so keen on the Greek notions of culture  [very clear in his work on the need for classical education – strangely, this work is not cited specifically anywhere in Deleuze.  Maybe it is included in one of the other editions?].  All this stuff about the two aspects of culture might only be one of Zarathustra's visions?  Can we separate culture from history?  Is species activity a suitable clear idea?  [we could never know it even if it was, of course because we cannot undo the effects of our own history]. Have we not already argued that human beings are essentially reactive, which makes it difficult to see how an active person could appear – Deleuze promises answers below.  Well—narrative tension!].  There is a clue [in Untimely Meditations, apparently] that becoming suitable for service to society is always ambiguous, particularly in the ways in which reactive forces themselves can produce a kind of activity, in the development of ressentiment and bad conscience.  In this way, reactive forces can come to pose as species activity [no different really from the formation of the other fictions and illusions discussed above.  A good discussion of ideology covers most of it, say Marcuse on the various devices like the 'technological veil', or the reduction of needs to one dimension; or Habermas on distorted communication].  The normal social processes like cultural training are then used to develop reactive conceptions.

So again reactive forces split activity from active forces, this time by projecting concepts of debts on to them, and engineer some relationship with other reactive forces in a 'a complex association' (131) [we could even call this a mode of production].  The projected section even comes to set itself up as a judge.  Debt itself widens to involve debts to divinity or society, it becomes inexhaustible and 'unpayable'(132).  In the example of Christian redemption, it is not discharged but deepened, and becomes lifelong [nicely discussed in Genealogy].  People internalize suffering and feel guilty about debt: no human being could ever repay the debt incurred through God's sacrifice.  What might be seen as normal forms of debt and responsibility originate from activity in culture, and it can disappear or be discharged, with pain playing a role.  But when those forms grow from ressentiment and become part of culture, they change direction, becoming internalized. 

In particular, first reactive forces bring into creation associations which are diversions from creative activity, such as herds.  Second, bad conscience emerges in this context, so that debt is no longer an aspect of species activity, but becomes connected to 'reactive association' (133).  It also becomes unpayable, and associated with internal guilt: this is one way in which the original tendency to blame others becomes a tendency to blame ourselves as unworthy in the face of the church or God.  Thirdly, priests actively organize associations like the herd, and invent ways in which we can internalize and endure guilt and pain.  They invent a new kind of community and invite us to join.  This can help reduce ressentiment, but only by discharging it towards others: the whole system becomes contagious, and the men of bad conscience find satisfaction in recruiting others by making them feel guilty.

Nietzsche might be working with two or even several types of religion, and not all of them are essentially linked with ressentiment.  The cult of Dionysus, for example is associated with the opposite sense, of lightness, with affirmation.  Everything depends on the forces which take possession of religion.  The religion of the strong is selective and educative.  If only we could separate Christ as a personal type from Christianity, we could see him as affirmative.  Different types of religion are also associated with different quantities and qualities of force, and these develop an affinity with particular forms of religion.  Religions  can even ally themselves to different forces as they develop.  This is the normal state of religion, to be determined by external forces, including the actions of philosophers.  The life of Christ is such an example, rapidly dominated by a force that minimizes the actual feeling of divinity.  As religions gain powers of their own, they always have to pay the price of borrowing 'a mask to survive'(134).  St. Paul is more important in the development of Christianity than Christ.  This provides the essential link between religion and bad conscience and ressentiment: the latter are reactive forces which manage to colonize religion as a way of escaping from the domination of active forces. They develop in an increasingly religious form as religion itself becomes socially important.  The very development of religion shows that it is not just driven by reactive forces, that it must incorporate some kind of will, discussed in the form of the ascetic ideal.  Asceticism was always present, feeding on ressentiment and bad conscience, but as it develops, it mixes the two, and also shows how reactive forces can become livable [just like Weber on the Protestant Ethic], in what turns out to be 'the fundamental complicity' between reactive forces and a particular form of the will to power.  Even so,[ ideological] fictions are required to strengthen this complicity, such as 'the fiction of the world beyond' (135), and this one happens to be good at combining a number of other fictions.  Similarly, the will to nothingness needs some sort of force behind it, the reactive forces, something which helps it react to the good life.  Both the will and these forces are required, and both might survive had they not become allied, but in a very different way.  Asceticism is the key.

This typology draws upon psychological metaphors of depths or caves, developing a theory of the unconscious 'which ought to be compared to the whole of Freudianism'.  However, Nietzsche does not just deal with psychology, since the type is biological and sociological etc, and he also wants to include 'metaphysics and the theory of knowledge' (138) to develop a fully fledged philosophy to reject the old metaphysics and transcendentalism, and found itself on genealogy instead.  Psychological readings misunderstand this: wills to power do not have motives; nor is genealogy just a philosophical genesis.

[And there is this lovely table below, pages 136, 137].  [Deleuze has certainly done his best to systematize Nietzsche's ramblings]
Nietzsche types


Chapter five.  The Overman: Against the Dialectic

Nihilism means not nothing, but having a value of nil. This can only be achieved by a fiction, one that separates one aspect of life and sees it as opposed to life itself, something unreal, an appearance, valueless.  In particular, there's a connection with the ideal of another superior world, superior to life: inevitably this means 'the depreciation of life, the negation of the [this] world'(139).  It is not that these higher values leave behind human will, rather that they offer a will to deny: this is the nothingness of the will, originally a concept in Schopenhauer.  It remains a will.  Nihilism negates the [affirmative] will to power, reducing its value to nil.  Nihilism in a more colloquial sense means a reaction to something, even to the superior world and its values, to higher values themselves: here, having values is seen as valueless!  This occurs when we see behind apparently higher values, denying God, or any other form of the supersensible.  All will is negated, life becomes tedious and pointless.  This second sense actually belongs to the first one as well, because the first one began to devalue life, and this depreciated life now continues in a world without any values or purpose.  Essence was once opposed to appearance and life became an appearance, but now essence is denied, leaving nothing but appearances [sounds like Baudrillard].  Nietzsche calls this the "'pessimism of weakness"'(140), ending in a completely reactive life.  If the first kind of nihilism can be seen as 'a negative nihilism', the second kind is 'a reactive nihilism'.

The will to nothingness allows the full triumph of the reactive forces, and life itself becomes reactive and unreal.  But reactive forces still need life providing the energy to continually deny and contradict [a strange bit says that life becomes a witness or even a leader].  However, life is increasingly threatened in case it sparks some alternative to reactive forces, and this, in effect, makes the reactive forces separate even from the negative will, and attempt to replace it.  It is better to have total stagnation, strength without will, and for life to fade away passively.  'Passive nihilism' [a third type] triumphs in the end, ushered in by reactive nihilism. We see this in the remarks about God.  He is dead, but he died of pity, almost of weariness, or sometimes is killed by vengeful human beings who resented such an omnipresent witness. 

Pity involves tolerance for a 'state of life close to zero' (141), for the life of the weak and the sick.  It validates the final victory of the poor.  Humans feel pity only if they need a reactive life themselves, like those who turn it into a religion.  Pity always combines the will to nothingness and reactive forces, so it is '"practical nihilism"' (142) [especially in The Antichrist, apparently].  It disguises itself, of course, by appearing to obey higher values.  If humans adopt pity as their major value, they can put themselves in God's place, and ressentiment becomes atheistic [although still a rather Christian form of it].  In Zarathustra, the ugliest man is the one who kills god, the most reactive. However, there's at least a liberating consequence of killing god, in taking responsibility for one's own destiny, being better as a human fool than a religious one.  It might be better to have no values rather than a nothingness of will, better to fade away.  This passivity will follow the death of God, said the 'prophet of weariness' [in Zarathustra].  The 'last man' shows the option of having no will, living in a single herd, no rulers, no herdsman.

This does not happen all at once, and there are some intermediate stages.  The reactive life hangs on for a long time trying to perpetuate its own values, which include social and community values, which, so exponents think, will lead to happiness.  This seems to vindicate those who think that some kind of god will always be needed [Heidegger is mentioned explicitly, but this might apply to Durkheim too].  The reactive life of religious periods is prolonged, and it requires some supersensible authority.  Eventually, the second stage arises, turning against any superior values.  Then the exhausted life, not willing at all, content to fade passively, completely reduced to a reactive form.  In all the stages, the nihilistic perspective is prominent: indeed, for Nietzsche, nihilism is 'the motor of the history of man as universal history' (143).  We find it following the same stages in Judaism leading to Christianity, leading to democratic and socialist ideology, and ending with the last man.

We now need to discuss the famous section about god being dead.  In the first place, saying that he is dead puts god into 'time, becoming, history and man' (144), as synthesis, arguing that once god must have existed but now he's dead -- 'and he will rise from the dead'.  If god is to be synthesized like this, his death is an obvious component.  Indeed, life and death themselves are traced to the synthesis 'with or in the idea of god'.  It also raises important questions like who has killed god, and how did he die.  Several options are possible:

First, we can look at the problem from the point of view of 'negative nihilism: the moment of the Judaic and Christian consciousness'.  Here, god expresses the will to nothingness and the depreciation of life, since he exists entirely in the beyond.  This glorifies the reactive life, and leads to the Judaic notion of ressentiment, after the 'golden age of the Kings of Israel'.  Anything universal appears as a hatred of life, prompting the opposite view that what is particular is pro life, but sick and reactive.  These inner connections are hidden.  The first stage is to see the Jewish god killing his own son to make him independent of himself, and also of Jewish doctrine—a first notion of the death of god.  This helps god be reconstrued as a god of love, preferring to 'suffer from hate'.  The independence involved in the crucifixion makes god universal and cosmopolitan [sounds like borrowed Hegel here].  On the cross, god ceases to be a jew.  The old god dies and a new one is born.  The crucified god insists his father is a god of love.  This means that we can love Jesus rather than hating god, as long as we believe in him.  This disguises the 'hateful premises' of the reactive life.  [Very convoluted stuff].  St. Paul develops these ideas and makes them central to Christianity as such, via the gospels, 'a grandiose falsification' (145), and insists that Christ died for us, as a redemption of our sins and the unpayable debt we owed to god.  We are therefore necessarily guilty, and constant self rebuke and guilt prolongs the debt.  As a result, 'the whole of life becomes reactive', it is resurrected as reactive.  St. Paul again connects these notions to the notion of an afterlife, where love and the reactive life will be reconciled.  It is for our sake that all this happens.  For this reason, St. Paul needed Jesus to die on the cross, and be resurrected.  Ressentiment is hidden, and diverted into bad conscience.  Universal love is the principle, and undying hatred the consequence, to be directed at anyone who resists.

Second, we can examine the implications from the point of view of reactive nihilism: 'the moment of European consciousness'(146).  The will to nothingness and the reactive life are synthesized in a different way.  One unintended consequence is that if we are to be blamed for putting god to death, there must be some possibility for atheism, and for the ascent of 'the reactive Man instead of God'.  This is the European man, who killed god again, in the guise of the ugly man.  The reactive life itself cannot tolerate even god and his pity, and assumes him to be really defunct.  There is no resurrection, no connection with divine will, but a displacement of god altogether, and the triumph of reactive man.  'God is suffocated by the ungrateful one whom he loves too much'.

Third, from the point of view of passive nihilism: 'the moment of Buddhist consciousness'.  Christ assumes a different form from the one depicted in St. Paul, a 'personal type'.  We can get to this through the massive contradiction of the gospel for Nietzsche.  The true Christ brings glad tidings, abolishing the idea of sin, ressentiment and revenge and a refusal of war, the kingdom of god on earth, and the acceptance of death.  Christ comes to resemble Buddha.  His intention was to let the reactive life fade away, into passivity.  The old reactive life at least had a certain nobility, with men considering whether they could replace god [the last man].  Jesus offered a gentle decadence into passivity, but this was so far ahead of its time, that the whole death of Christ had to be falsified, moved backwards into reactive nihilism, mixed with paganism [says Nietzsche].  Proper Buddhism is appropriate to a fatigued civilization, but there was no civilization in the west, and it had to be established first, by violence, before it could progress to its final end.  Christianity could indeed become a kind of European Buddhism, but there are still periods of violence to come, progress through all the stages of nihilism, 'the result of a long and terrible politics of revenge'.

There are actually substantial differences with Hegel.  Nietzsche sees no world significance in the death of god, and thinks the potential is yet to be realized, and will depend on various combinations of forces: it is not a matter of waiting for the immanent meaning in an event to unfold.  In particular, there will be no reconciliation of man and god, even after a number of intermediate forms.  The relevant forces will have to be given time to form up, and bring meaning from the outside, and these are not just mere appearances of inner dialectical forces.  The intermediate forms and the claims made for them are only symptoms: we need to ask which particular subject, which notion of infinite are being invoked, and what the will is that is driving it.  Hegelian dialectic does not penetrate to this interpretive level, and explains changes and developments at the superficial level instead, or as some 'abstract permutation where the subject becomes predicate and the predicate, subject' (148).  This provides little interpretation, in favor of some eternality [combinatory, we might call it] [I must say I think Marxist dialectic is harder to criticize on these grounds, although Althusser's version of it has been].  The abstract logic of opposition and contradiction substitutes for awareness of 'the real element' which produces forces.  [We then leap to Deleuze's old conclusion in Difference and Repetition ] difference produces events, with opposition 'as mere appearance' (149).  With Nietzsche we have typological and topological differences.

We see the difference in comparing Nietzsche's bad conscience with Hegel's unhappy consciousness.  [I found a bit of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mindrff on the Web which defines it thus:

In Stoicism, self-consciousness is the bare and simple freedom of itself. In Skepticism, it realizes itself, negates the other side of determinate existence, but, in so doing, really doubles itself, and is itself now a duality. In this way the duplication, which previously was divided between two individuals, the lord and the bondsman, is concentrated into one. Thus we have here that dualizing of self-consciousness within itself, which lies essentially in the notion of mind; but the unity of the two elements is not yet present. Hence the Unhappy Consciousness. The Alienated Soul which is the consciousness of self as a divided nature, a doubled and merely contradictory being. This unhappy consciousness, divided and at variance within itself, must, because this contradiction of its essential nature is felt to be a single consciousness, always have in the one consciousness the other also; and thus must be straightaway driven out of each in turn, when it thinks it has therein attained to the victory and rest of unity. Its true return into itself, or reconciliation with itself, will, however, display the notion of mind endowed with a life and existence of its own, because it implicitly involves the fact that, while being an undivided consciousness, it is a double consciousness. It is itself the gazing of one self-consciousness into another, and itself is both, and the unity of both is also its own essence; but objectively and consciously it is not yet this essence itself--is not yet the unity of both.]
[So both types are split, but one by guilt and the other by inadequate knowledge?]

The latter finds its meaning in the apparently opposing forces, say between Christianity and Judaism, but this opposition cannot be seen as formative.  It is only a symptom to be interpreted.  [I'm not sure that Hegel quote above would support this, but there is no definitive reading, of course]. Emphasizing contradiction nieces important differences, including genealogical ones.  The 'labour of the negative' is only an appearance of the struggles between wills to power, and these differences have been abstracted and then made into some genetic law.  The whole thing has been made into fiction, and inevitably it offers a fictional solution.  Everything dialectic includes fictions of various kinds, rendered as moments of spirit.  It is no good standing this dialectic back on its head [ reference to Marx as well as Feuerbach?], because the character of the dialectic remains [needs much more discussion in my view].  In particular, accounts of social change and transformation are always seen as 'permutations of abstract and unreal terms'(149) [this is now looking a bit like Rancière on Marxism, although he wants to substitute concrete hybrid struggles for class struggle.  Nietzsche wants to substitute hybrid forces?  If so, these are rapidly organized into affirmative and negative types.  A typology is equally abstract for Rancière?].  The dialectic fails to ask the basic question '" which one?"'.  Everything is assumed to run according to preexisting principles heading towards reconciliation. 

After Feuerbach, man becomes god, and anthropology replaces theology, but that still leaves a lot of concrete [sociological work for me] work to do to fill in these categories: indeed, the particular needs to be separated from the universal.  The man for Feuerbach is still reactive man, the slave, still seeing themselves as a form of god, still needing god.  God has not really changed either, but remains divine, something still 'manufacturing the slave' (150).  It is just that the intermediate terms have been left out, or rather redistributed.  The essential categories of the reactive forces and will to nothingness persist.  Instead of proper reconciliation, we have complicity between man and god.  This shows that the entire dialectic is still contained within reactive forces, and that it can only develop the kinds of nihilism discussed above.  Restoring man over god is exactly like reactive nihilism.  The essential fictional dynamics of nihilism are preserved.  The only one who wills such developments is the man of the unhappy consciousness.  'The dialectic is the natural ideology of ressentiment and bad conscience'.  Nihilism informs its thoughts.  It is still ' a fundamentally Christian way of thinking'[Hindess and Hirst say the same of any 'two level' argument].  The death of god still happens within reactive forces and nihilism.

We can now consider the work of Stirner (151f),  who apparently did pursue the issue of 'which one', and argued that if we are asking who is man, we already have an answer to hand, since we mean a specific man, not the essence of man, which haunts the old dialectic [his critique seems to be similar to the one we've just seen about how hegelian dialectic leaves god intact].  In Nietzsche's terms, even the ugly man who kills god then becomes an object of pity by Men. 

At the speculative level, dialectic proceeds through contradiction and resolution, and at the practical level, through notions of alienation and the suppression of alienation, or its reappropriation.  This reveals the petty conservative nature of the dialectic, for Deleuze, a matter of endless  'quibbling', disputing properties and changing proprietors, exactly as in ressentiment.  Stirner has noticed these qualities as well, suggesting that hegelian freedom is always abstract, and this leaves room for existing social relations [as in freedom within the existing notions of property, I think].  What is it that drives reappropriation, however?  For Hegel, it is yet another alienated form, Objective Spirit, and the same goes for Feuerbach and the notion of 'species being'.  For Stirner, these notions are as alienating as the ones in traditional theology.  They still refer to the alleged properties of Man, and offer the only resolution in terms of switching positions to become a proprietor oneself.  Reappropriation becomes more and more limited, until it can be fully reconciled with religion and the state.  We know that hegelian transformations always preserve [even if they transcend].  For Feuerbach, reappropriation 'is less reconciliation than recuperation'(152), the human ownership of formally transcendent properties, but the human remains as an absolute being.  Apparently, Stirner goes so far as to deny even human essence, and says there is no need to reconcile humanity with anything, because it affects everything with its own power and for its own enjoyment: overcoming alienation means just annihilating things which get in the way. The ego is finite in Stirner, and every notion of higher essence above humanity challenges this notion of unique selfhood [which would stop human beings realizing their power?]. Hegelian history ends in nihilism [not Reason].  The dialectic cannot control history, because it is seen to have a history of its own which is out of its control.  Stirner comes these conclusions by pursuing his own questions about the role of particular individuals, even though he has to still use the classic terms of the dialectic.  At least he sees that nihilism is the end, where everything is overcome, although by an ego rather than Spirit.

This helps us discuss Marx and the German Ideology.  Marx wants to stop the final stages of sliding into nihilism.  He supports ['Saint Max'] Stirner on the dialectic as rooted in the ego, not even the human species, but sees Stirner's ego itself as 'the projection of bourgeois egoism' (153), and goes on to talk about the limits to the ego, the species, and the particular social order that shapes species being and egoism.  Deleuze wonders if this is enough, however, unless we definine which bits belong to species and which bits to the individual [surely accomplished in the actual analyses eg of the commodity or labour] .  Again the issue is which one.  Until we answer this question, Marxism is merely the 'avatar before the nihilist conclusion', the last proletarian stage.  The dialectic and history are still running down a common slope.  [An interesting critique, very condensed, and worth another read].

Nietzsche evidently knew his Hegel and Stirner: we can tell not by frequent quotations or the usual [scholastic flourishes] but by 'apologetic or polemical directions of his work itself' (153).  We must see the whole work as directed against dialectical themes, especially hegelian ones.  Nietzsche is always attacking German philosophy for preserving theological and Christian elements, and thus succumbing to nihilism, and how this will only end with reactive conceptions of ego or man.  The whole thing is mystified, and needs to be subject to a thorough analysis of its underlying values [in the Nietzsche sense, all that stuff about whether it belongs to the strong or the weak].  Stirner helped Nietzsche in this critique, but did not do enough to abandon the abstract categories of property or alienation.  The power of the dialectic is dissolved by his acute questions, but it ends only in 'the nothingness of the ego'(154), the question of humanity but one framed by nihilism.  He needed a typological method [to flesh out abstract concepts like  'man', and use instead farkin awful different types of man, like those tedious ones that follow below].

In particular, we need to consider the higher man, as in Zarathustra.  We precede past 'the prophet, the two Kings, the man with the leeches, the sorcerer, the last group, the ugliest man, the voluntary beggar and the shadow' (155), and see in each the reactive being of men and also of human species activity.  The higher man is the deified version of man, but also one that represents the triumph of culture and species activity.  The prophet represents passive nihilism, too tired even to die.  The sorcerer is the bad conscience, who fakes suffering in order to receive pity, and thus widen the contagion via false tragedy.  The ugliest of men represents reactive nihilism, where ressentiment has been turned against god, but still flourishes in humanity.  The two Kings refer to customs, species activity grasped as custom, but also species activity in the 'post historic' [the modern] where there are no enduring customs: their problem is that the [popular, populist]customs become triumphant themselves rather than the species activity.  The man with leeches is the scientist, pursuing certainty and acting conscientiously, and knowing that it is a highly limited knowledge that results, one that cannot subordinate knowledge to any broader values.  The last pope obviously represents culture as it produces religion.  His lost eye represents his inability to see anything active or affirmative, but instead to see nothingness and eventually the replacement of god by man.  The voluntary beggar has experienced the range of human culture from rich to poor, and was seeking happiness, both in heaven, and in cultural activity, but wondered what sort of happiness he seems actually likely to encounter and whether it represented 'science, morality or religion' (156): he already knows that a self sufficient culture, one that is only  'ruminative', belongs to cows not humans.  The shadow is the wanderer, 'species activity itself, culture and its movement', seeking some higher purpose and principle.  All these types are combined in two kinds of higher man, one which shows the triumph of reactive forces, and the other representing species activity and its products.  This is why Zarathustra relates to higher men differently, seeing them sometimes as the enemy and sometimes as a host or companion.

This ambivalence shows that man may not be essentially reactive at all.  So far, we've examined lots of arguments for this proposition, that nihilism is the concept of universal history and so on, and that it is impossible to conquer, at least without destroying 'even the best men'(157), since they are in essence reactive, the disease of the earth.  On the other hand this seems to be some potential after all in culture and inhumanity, and it might just have been misdirected.  There have been active periods in history.  Zarathustra sometimes claims to be on the side of this sort of man.  What is at stake here is ' modes of becoming of forces or qualities of the will to power'.  Human beings have a deep essence as well, relating to the 'becoming - reactive' (158) of all forces [hints of Deleuze's virtual?].  Becoming is only possible in the presence of the opposite quality, health presupposing sickness, the active man bearing signs of illness.  These qualities of becoming are always attached to human 'destiny', and Nietzsche notes, sadly, that even the Greek world was overthrown, even the Renaissance; but that presupposes active forces having been overcome.  What is 'deeply...  truly generic' is the 'becoming reactive of all forces', which presupposes activity as we just saw  [philosophical rambling around definitions as usual].  When Zarathustra tells his visitors they have failed, what he means is that the goal of a higher humanity is always missed, because of its nature.  Human activity inevitably produces flawed products [maybe], since all culture is inhabited by reactive forces [it is all based on an attempt to domesticate active forces in order to permit social order?  We have objectification instead of reification].  The dialectic is limited for the same reasons, unable to escape becoming reactive. All the higher men are unhappy because they know this—the Kings know they have unleashed a mob, the shadow knows that he will never regain unity, species and cultural activity is a false fire dog, just a stage in an eventual becoming reactive.  This explains the two aspects of the higher man discussed above.  [In my notes, I've explained it in terms of Nietzsche's manic depression!  I don't think even Deleuze can really represent it as a consistent argument.  It just vacillates from optimism to pessimism, rather like Deleuze and Guattari on politics].

We finally come to the Overman. This is not a successful triumph over the higher men, nor is it the realization of the true human essence [which apparently is what Heidegger thought].  Human essence is and always will be human, all too human, becoming reactive as universal becoming, driven by nihilism.  But, why does species activity always fail?  We can see that it would if its goals have been hijacked by reactive forces, but this project itself simply cannot be viable without the power of affirmation.  Reactive forces after all required an ally in order to triumph.  Active forces need to make contact with an affirmative power, however, and here is the problem in that they lack a will outside themselves and thus are vulnerable to the will to nothingness.  It's necessary to express a power of affirmation, a project to become active.  Zarathustra clearly is pursuing this project, although Zarathustra himself is not to be taken seriously [!], and he evokes pity.  Zarathustra knows he's being pitied.  Higher men remain too abstract to connect with affirmation, wanting only to invert values rather than changing them.  This will only end in becoming reactive, as we saw.  Reactive forces are organized.  We need something quite different to become affirmative: 'Dionysian affirmation rather than man's species activity'(160).  In more detail: first we need to know how to play and dance, to  laugh, even at suffering, to affirm chance and becoming.  Second we should do away with false gods [the higher men worship the ass who only gives a simulation of affirmation].  Third we need to investigate the symbolism of the shadow, and in particular and noting that it needs light.  Fourth, we need to distinguish the two fire dogs, the caricature and the real thing, the one that lives on the surface and thus only warms up becoming - reactive and gets cynical, and the one that is genuinely affirmative and speaks from the earth.  [All this the poetic stuff is no doubt very interesting, but where exactly does it lead?  What sort of politics does it produce? Do we just opt for Dionysus or is there anything material or even essential that would prompt us?]

So nihilism both appears in the form of superior values, and it also draws on reactive values.  It ends in no will at all as its final stage, but in the meantime, it depreciates all life.  Activity is powerless under the domination of the reactive and can only turn against itself, even support and energize reactive forces.  Faced with this domination, Nietzsche argues that we should change the whole basis of values, and this is what transvaluation is.  It is no good just changing values, no good killing god, since the whole system is still preserved 'even if the place is left empty' (162).  It is a matter of reversing our values, in order to regain activity, to connect it with affirmation as will to power.

This might be possible if we accept that nihilism is always unfinished and incomplete, and thus can become self defeating [classic philosophical stuff].  In this sense, transvaluation is 'a completed nihilism', focusing on the entire set of values.  However, in order to defeat nihilism, it must be a focus on existing values, all those that are known up until the present that are transmuted.  We can actually uncover existing values that are present, manifested, in ressentiment, bad conscience, and asceticism.  We realize the power of the human spirit by examining the strength and complexity of the spirit of revenge.  We use our sickness to complete our knowledge of the body.  We come to see the potential of the will to power itself, 'in general' (163), and how it underpins all values.  We come to recognize that it actually appears in the form of the negative, but this is only one of its qualities.  We have to think of other aspects, and again the thought of the eternal return helps as [if we accept that is role is to select only affirmative qualities]. [The eternal return {?} is the ground for knowing that the affirmative exists, its ratio cognoscendi]  This tracks back to earlier philosophers as well [including the Kantian argument that the full face of god must be unknown? Now we accept Kant if he helps us here].  The will to power is not only suffering but 'unknown joy'.  We see this argued in the poem about Ariadne and her complaint, where Ariadne detects some unknown god even behind pain.  [This looks suspiciously like the dialectical method, where we postulate the existence of something that opposes or contradicts what it is that we see.]  That there is a will to power means that affirmation must exist [ its ratio essendi, the grounds by which something comes to exist], and vice versa [of course, guaranteed by tautological definitions].  [It is as if knowledge of the power of the negative helps us uncover the entire will to power, while knowledge of the eternal return addresses the affirmative?]. New values appear from affirmation, which were not realized before, not uncovered by mere scholarly philosophy, but produced by a deliberate attempt to creation.  This is the equivalent of 'a Dionysian transmutation of pain into joy '[by some lofty understanding that both are attached to each other in life?].  Ariadne has to be known as negative first before she can become affirmative.

However, all this depends on nihilism proceeding to its conclusion [and having Nietzsche remain exempt, as the only one capable of interpreting it in a positive way, while all the rest of us are impatient to die].  Nietzsche offers a particularly 'subtle' (164) argument here.  Once the will to nothingness has triumphed, the reactive forces are free to establish another target, assert their own values.  Even the arrival of the last man is not sufficient to halt the 'enterprise' of the will to nothingness.  What results is wanting to not just fade away, but to destroy himself actively, self destruction rather than passive extinction, this is the "man who wants to perish".  This type is produced following another selection continuing on from the last men, and, says Zarathustra, the active self destroyer is 'on the path of the overman' [inspired by a maniac and optimistic phase: there's no other reason for it; it just appears like a rabbit out of a hat, unless we're going to define the will of nothingness as necessarily turning to activity in the end.  It cold be a classic two-stage argument, where nastiness a the surface really depends on a balance {multiplicity} of nastiness and niceness at the virtual level. There also seems to be some self pitying sacrifice ethic here, where the man who wants to perish does so deliberately in order to bring about the overman, and thus appears at last as a hero].  When that the reactive forces split from the will to nothingness, there is a moment for activity, and, happily, a potential for affirmation [echoes here of a man who kills himself rather than waiting for death, as a last act of will, just like Deleuze did?].  We end with the '" eternal joy of becoming"', just like the end of Greek tragedy.  All this is found in Dionysus and his philosophy [which we have already decided is marvelous].  The negative turns into its opposite [! not just a difference here then], not as a substitution, but as a conversion.  The last man is not really the last man, because he is succeeded by the man who wants to perish, to break negation, even at the expense of perishing.  We can all follow this path, Zarathustra urges us, helping to create the over';,.man [you can see why the Nazis had a field day with this].  Negation is completed, and it negates even the reactive forces.

In more detail, transvaluation or transmutation involves: first changing quality in the will to power, turning from negative to affirmative, affirming life against the one we have at the moment, and making affirmative life central, leaving no place for any other [the Dionysian incorporates the tragic as well as the joyful as in Greek tragedy ].  Second, moving from a mere basis of knowledge [ratio cognoscendi] to a more positive argument for existence [ratio essendi], [from scholarly to existential reason, examining real consequences not just persuasive logical reasons?], seeing the will to power as it is, after establishing its qualities and the reasons for some of them being unknown.  Third, the negative itself becomes affirmative, subordinated to affirmation, devoted to a full life, turning against reactive forms, heralding the Overman.  Fourth, affirmation becomes fully independent, producing and absorbing back the negative, completing the sequence from the man who wants to perish.  This is the final conversion of heavy into light, of nothingness into play and laughter, 'what Zarathustra calls "the Communion"'(166).  Fifth, all the values known up to the present are critiqued, negated, but in the interests of greater affirmation and transmutation.  Sixth, affirmation turns into a 'becoming active as the universal becoming of forces'.

We can understand Nietzsche as offering a holistic approach, where negation and affirmation exist as opposed qualities, but also parts of the whole [a multiplicity?].  Negation  has certainly been dominant up to the present day and has produced the modern man and his world, including the tendency to nothingness.  Affirmation appears as something outside or above man, the Overman, and this is a holistic form of affirmation that includes the negative but reduces its power.  The Overman represents not just the human species, but everything, it offers an eternal affirmation of all things.  It is true that affirmation in its normal appearance is limited, and has negative consequences, producing destruction [the rampages of the strong?].  First negation ascends to such a point that all known values are destroyed, which explains the bits about how the destroyers and criminals are also creators [in Zarathustra].  Second, substantial negations are required before affirmation can even appear [lions become children etc], but destruction can also become active, committing overcoming [which is one way in which the negative allies itself with the active, or it would have no force at all].

The ass, always saying yea, is Dionysian in appearance, but 'wholly Christian', offering an affirmation admired by the higher man.  It accepts everything.  [Then an odd bit about the affirmative qualities of having small ears, like Ariadne, and apparently, Nietzsche himself, taken as a symbol of not being at all like the ass. This pompous and pseudo literary stuff got on my nerves when I was reading Nietzsche.  I understand, of course, that it is a parody of Christian parables.  Nietzsche in his self aggrandizing way claims that his small ears make him a monster, the anti Christ, apparently in Ecce Homo – I probably skipped that bit].  Deleuze continues the style by arguing that it is 'more circular ears favoring the eternal return' (168).  Constant affirmation means an incapacity to actually articulate affirmation.  Nietzsche here is denouncing this false total affirmation, that contains no negation.  That is different from saying that we should unleash affirmation that does contain it, which makes affirmation real and compete, once the negative has been expelled.  It is a master of needing to affirm affirmation [!], against the false totality of reactive forces.  After the great transmutation, the negative will become affirmative itself in this sense, as a 'mode of being of affirmation' (169).  This nice positive affirmation might even involve aggression, but of a positive kind, unlike that unleashed by ressentiment. Zarathustra is constantly offered compromises and temptations from buffoons, dwarfs, and demons, the latter standing for nihilism, but they are driven by ressentiment, and Zarathustra rejects them in favor of a more positive power of affirmation '(love)' (169).  Only this sort of affirmation can manage the negative, and let it destroy itself through completion as above.

Nietzsche opposes every negative form of thought which he sees as destructive, based on ressentiment.  Negation has to be transformed, but by effectively attacking the dual forces that underpin ressentiment, or the ascetic ideal [see above].  Affirmation itself must take on a dual form, and an aggressive one, for example in dealing with Christianity and its underlying ressentiment.  [This helps us play little games: 'to the famous positivity of the negative, Nietzsche opposes his own discovery: the negativity of the positive'(170)].  The two negations are not like the two in the dialectic [contradiction and transcendence?].  If we look at the critique of the ass, we can see two elements, a lack of affirmation, and also a misunderstanding of affirmation.  [So 'the ass is also a camel'] —both are docile, patient, accepting their burdens as inevitable and real, not responsive to any other notions of the real: for them, affirmation means taking things upon yourself, 'acquiescing in the real'(171).  Nietzsche can see all the reactive forces here, producing all the strengths of the ass.  By being limited to what is real in this way, it is impossible to investigate the production of the real, and this is the fate of most of us who are taught to accept our lives and our realities.  The ass is even Christ.  Freed from this divine model by the ascent of man, the ass accepts everything placed upon him, and his identity itself depends on his ability to accept the real.  Human beings also  are too inclined to stick to the present instead of looking to the future, the false positivity with its false affirmation [all this is referenced to the usual poetic rhubarb in Zarathustra].  A sense of reality and affirmativeness is attached to everything that is heavy.  This works best in the desert [camel, geddit?] of nihilism, and heavy reality tends to dominate everything else anyway.  Asses do not know how to say no to this burdensome reality, because they cannot identify nihilism as its context [and might will prefer to cling to burdensome reality instead of nihilism?]. 

This is not a stoical acceptance [of Fate in all its manifestations?], says Deleuze, more to do with linking affirmation to things that can be seen, things that exist at the moment, however we conceive of existence.  Philosophy itself has been apologetic, as in its strange mixtures of, say, 'metaphysics and humanism' (172).  [It certainly lacks a sociological method which would help it critique reality].  If existing being is seen as affirmative, then affirmation must also be found in human being [we get our sense of ourselves by distinguishing ourselves from brute reality, and being able to do things with it in a positivist sense?].  Humans must relate to being in a positive or a dialectical sense, and Nietzsche singles out the latter, for offering a more sophisticated, but still wrong, discussion of the negative.  Hegelian idealism, for example, leaves being untouched, or something that is transformed into nothingness.  Feuerbach restored a notion of the sensuous, real being, but fell into the trap of affirming being as it is: this real being is still produced by the reactive.  Nietzsche offers a different account.  First, conventional notions of being truth and reality depend on nihilism and the reactive, something constructed by the negative, not self sufficient, but a symptom of a will.  Second, affirmation is not acceptance, and we must be prepared to say no to affirm, be a lion instead of an ass or camel.  Third, this sort of positivist affirmation still preserves conventional notions of humanity, which is really the reactive man: he survives, but only by living in the desert [geddit?], living for a long time only because he has lost 'the taste for dying' (173). 

Existing notions of reality celebrates dead things, but the world is really living, subject to wills to power, but also to a 'will to falsehood' (174) [and what or who drives this systematically?].  Making things false involves an evaluation, and everything is an evaluation, so there is no reality in brute appearance or in trusting the senses.  There is even a will to appearance and illusion or deception.  The will to develop positivist truth is just an example of this will to illusion.  This shows that the negative has dominated the attempts to grasp reality ['actualizing the will'] so far, and this has produced apparent opposites like being or reality as opposed to life.  Beneath these assertions we will find evaluations or 'lies'.  There is the whole will to power, however, attempting to grasp the whole of life, and to affirm its particularity [defined, oddly as 'a higher power of the false', meaning something which art does?].  This still involves an evaluation, but this time an evaluation based on enjoying difference rather than setting out oppositions.  It doesn't try to rationalize on the basis of what is, but to 'set free what lives', not to accept the burdens, but to create light values, new forms of life.  However, this is beyond human effort and strength at the moment, but the task is to shake off these false burdens.  This is indeed an aspect of art as the highest power of the false, a Dionysian affirmation, something superhuman.  [There is a summary on page 175].  This higher form of affirmation only follows an initial negativity towards positivist forms of reality and the base forms of experience that this produces.

There is a new conception of being proposed here, linking it to affirmation itself.  'Affirmation itself is being, being is solely affirmation in all its power' (175).  The normal conceptions of being and nothingness, the actualized ones, are just abstract expressions of affirmation and negation as they appear in the will to power.  How can affirmation be seen as being? [Only by seeing it as two-level, actual and virtual]. It has no actual objects in mind, but rather becoming, which involves being affirmative about becoming, a double affirmation, both at the primary and secondary levels.  Again Deleuze finds reference to this in Nietzsche's symbolic texts [oh no].

Thus the eagle and the serpent can be seen as aspects of the eternal return, the great cycle of the cosmic level, and individual destiny respectively.  This suggests a two-level nature of affirmation.  Dionysus and Ariadne do as well.  Ariadne is a complex character who first loved Theseus, who himself stands for the higher man, courageously taking on challenges, but not rooted in the earth, too ready to assume burdens.  Ariadne is offered only the feminine image of the higher man, whose power turns on revenge and ressentiment.  Once Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus, she transmutes and liberates her feminine power to become something more affirmative, something more suitable to go beyond the higher man to the Overman.  When she meets Dionysus, she is affirmed again, and she energizes him.  The eternal return [French version of Will to Power] shows the "closest approximation of being and becoming"' (177), but itself needs to be affirmed, in a Dionysian universe of cycles and rings.  Dionysus needs a fiancée [wedding ring, geddit?] to be accepted and affirmed in his wholeness [so here we have the final argument for Deleuze's reading of the eternal return—it's consistent with the poem about Ariadne and Dionysus!].  The labyrinth is also an image in Nietzsche, and representing the unconscious or the self, and we need a guiding thread [!] to explore it.  The labyrinth is also the eternal return, something circular, leading back to the same instant.  However, the labyrinth is also becoming, or even its affirmation, something which leads to being.  Again the two levels are connected, since the thread affirms becoming as well, but first leading Theseus to a higher values, still based on the negative.  Dionysus tells Ariadne he is the labyrinth and the thread is an affirmation of him.  She affirms this [!], having heard him with her little ears [the ears are another labyrinth].  So the labyrinth is being that results from becoming, but it requires a double affirmation of being and becoming [Jesus!].

We now see that affirmation and negation are both qualities of the will to power, but they are asymmetric.  Affirmation doesn't just oppose negation [except at the actual level].  Affirmation enjoys difference, but negation is entirely negative.  At last, we can see that affirmation is 'multiplicity, becoming and chance' (178), and all are dualist in this case, linked with their opposites [becoming with being, chance with necessity] hence requiring double affirmations [which at the higher level, affirms the multiplicity].  In this way, [higher] affirmation can be seen as 'in the nature of' returning in a cycle of becoming and being.  [Assertion masquerading as some logical deduction].  Apparently, all these 'are the aspects of Dionysian willing', and 'principles for the eternal return' (179).  There is no return of the negative, because being is itself selection, and only something that is affirmed can return, something that must preserve the relation with becoming, something that is active.  Multiplicities contain difference but not negation.  This is the thrust of Nietzsche's entire critique of the mystifications of philosophy, including the apparent power of the negative, or the lingering effects of bad conscience.  Nietzsche says that difference is happiness, and object of joy, and 'that only joy returns' [in his manic moments] .  We find 'philosophical joy' [aha!] in these notions of multiplicity, becoming and chance, and the satisfying unity which links them, in their ability to explain things ['necessity'].  This has a universal benefit, however [philosophers always speak on our behalf].  It is untimely, but it promises liberation from things like the unhappy consciousness or the negative generally.  Even the death of god will turn into a joyful event eventually, once we realize that it is a step on the way to exclude the negative and the reactive.

Instead of negativity and opposition, we have 'the warlike play of difference, affirmation and the joy of destruction' (180).  We can see this in Zarathustra, passing through the negative until he reaches the point of transmutation, the story of the struggle with the nihilist demon and his various relationships with man [a burden, jumping over men etc], preserving his negative power and will in these different forms.  Zarathustra combats negation and stands for affirmation, active existence, the sign of the lion, as a symbol of affirmative destruction.  The will to power no longer produces only the negative, but has an unknown face as well, making the negative only one actualization.  Z can be seen as the father of the Overman, representing the final precondition for his emergence.  In this sense, he is also an agent of the eternal return, so 'Zarathustra is subject to Dionysus'.  Zarathustra, Ariadne, and Dionysus represent the 'Trinity of the antiChrist', but Ariadne only energizes Dionysus.  Zarathustra therefore cannot bring about the eternal return on his own, but can only father it.  The eternal return and the Overman emerge from two genealogies, 'two unequal genetic lines'. 

Thus Zarathustra is given the task of explaining [actual?] causes and moments, while Dionysus explains the necessary, absolute, even 'apodictic'(182) nature of these connections, how actual moments are synthesized in becoming.  Thus the eternal return becomes an active moment, itself determined, but also determining, at the second level of affirmation.  So Zarathustra sees the connection between affirmation and the will to power, but arguing that this is necessary [my emphasis] belongs to Dionysus.  It is the difference between conditioned and unconditioned affirmation [where conditioned here refers to empirical or at least actual events?].  Unconditioned affirmation is required in order to break the sequence of types of men.  It appears in a disguised way, as conditions Dionysus sets which appear autonomous.  This is the creative moment, since these conditions contain an excess, 'a deeper genealogy'.

So each concept in Nietzsche expresses these two unequal genetic lines.  Laughter, play and dance bring about concrete transmutations in Zarathustra, but are deeper affirmative powers of reflection and development in Dionysus, affirming becoming and multiplicity: 'play affirms chance and [my emphasis] the necessity of chance'.

Conclusion.

Modern philosophy is full of hybrids and amalgams, and this shows its vigor, but there are also dangers [incidentally, phenomenology is seen as 'modern scholasticism' (184)].  Everything is mixed together, and allegedly metaphysics has been surpassed, even philosophy.  Nietzsche wanted to go beyond metaphysics, but so did Jarry! [There is a short piece on Jarry in Deleuze's Essays...] Nietzsche would've been tempted to withdraw from this game, this incorporation of scraps of the whole philosophical legacy into modern thought.

Nietzsche and Hegel are irreconcilable.  Nietzsche pursues a number of polemical projects, including an attack on dialectic and its mystifications.  Schopenhauer began the task but remained in Kant and pessimism, but Nietzsche offers a 'new image of thought'.  If the dialectic is defined by: the power of the negative manifested in opposition and contradiction; the idea that suffering and sadness have value, because they are manifested in split and loss; that positivity is produced by negation, then Nietzsche centrally attacks these three ideas [I still think he has to revert to the first one to explain the emergence of the Overman].  His argument is that contradiction offers 'a false image of difference', and inverts the whole process, seeing difference as the thing to be negated, the self as being affirmed only after the negation of the other, and the negation of the negation in order to make progress, whereas it should've really argued for the affirmation of affirmation.  The whole thing is animated by underlying interests [not class differences, of course, but some abstract ontological or philosophical interest], expressing every aspect of reactive forces and nihilism.  Ressentiment requires a double negation in order to produce a 'a phantom of affirmation' (185), and asceticism requires both ressentiment and bad conscience.  The whole thing turns on sad passions and unhappy consciousness.  It is a philosophy suitable for the theoretical man reacting against life, trying to judge it [which is what Nietzsche says about the Socratic dialectic].  It is also the philosophy of the priest, subduing life with negatives in order to establish their power [actually, 'his power', nearly an actual agent].  The dialectic appears at its most authentic in Christian ideology, where it appeals to the thought of the slave, reactive life in itself.  Even the atheism produced is still 'a clerical atheism', the image of the master is still a slavish one.  Positivity is falsified and highly limited.  Dialectical positivity, 'the real in the dialectic' is 'the yes of the ass', accepting reality in its entirety, including the products of the negative.  People embrace the dialectic thinking they are being positive and affirmative, and see it as powerful because it apparently explains everything [not these days matey. Positivism has conquered all].

Nietzsche separated ressentiment from bad conscience, and this was itself of great importance [why?].  His polemic 'is only the aggression which derives from a deeper, active and affirmative instance'(186) [see below] .  Dialectic and kantian critique, which are linked, both preserved this notion of false critique.  A true critique takes an independent developmental route, and sees the negative as only one mode of being.  Dialectical philosophy just describes symptoms rather than underlying forces or will.  They only asked the question 'what is?', 'the contradictory question par excellence' [because everything that exists must be contradictory, heterogeneous?].  Nietzsche's method was 'dramatic, typological and differential', and philosophy became an art, something involving interpretation and evaluation.  His focus was on the 'which one?' involving the will to power as a flexible and genealogical principle, an element which determines the relation of forces in quantitative and qualitative terms.  This fundamental difference is manifested in multiple affirmation [it can explain any of the types?] and has the potential to be creative because it bestows, even 'bestowing virtue'.

Thus pure affirmation involves multiplicity, becoming and chance.  Multiplicity is affirmed in a speculative proposition, corresponding to asserting the joy of diversity as a practical one [so all that stuff about joy supports the philosophy of multiplicity and gives it a 'practical' dimension].  We only lose if we only affirm at the first stage, so to speak, affirming particular outcomes, seeing chance as negative, and becoming and multiplicity as opposition.  True affirmation of chance 'necessarily produces the winning number'so that the dice throw can be reproduced [still a bit mysterious.  Does it mean that if you affirm chance, you must be able to convince yourself that you will win eventually?  Or that no dice throw ever produces a loss because the game is the thing?  Or that the eternal return will only bring about positive outcomes so all we have to do is wait for it?].  We have to affirm 'the necessity of chance' [that is, see no real alternative to it,so might as well celebrate it?].  We have to see being as multiplicity and becoming.  If we affirm all this, we are affirming affirmation itself at its highest level.  [We stay cheerful and whistle under all circumstances, accepting what Fate gives us].  Difference also repeats or reproduces itself, and we see this in the eternal return, which is its highest power, 'the synthesis of affirmation which finds its principle in the will'[the eternal return as combining affirmation and being, justifying the affirmative will to power?].  This is the affirmation of affirmation, opposing the weight of the negative.

The will to power does clearly manifest negation, and reaction is a particular quality of force.  But these are only options, and there are other aspects of the will to power.  We are prevented from finding what those are because conventional knowledge itself expresses reactive forces.  Human understanding is deeply affected by negation pessimism ['Man inhabits only the dark side of the earth'].  That's why human history so far has been all about nihilism negation and reaction, but long term, negation will turn back on reactive forces themselves, and bring about transvaluation: negation loses the power to negate and becomes active, appearing as only one form of affirmation.  It changes quality.  It becomes valued now only as 'the preliminary offensive or a subsequent aggression' (187).  This is the 'negativity of the positive', again a new development from dialectic [I'm still not convinced, especially if dialectical change involves a certain struggle against the old constraints, which itself could be seen as a positive one in the long run, something justified in order to bring about a positive end.  Without some sort of qualification as well, anything can be justified as positive aggression, including the extermination of Jews in order to bring about the new order].  It follows that transmutation is a condition of the eternal return [condition here meaning one of the factors that brings it about?], or that it depends on the eternal return, involving 'the standpoint of a deeper principle'.  This is because [!] The will to power only returns what is affirmed, having transformed the negative [first?  How long must we wait?].  The one 'is for the other…  in the other' [sounds very Christian].  The eternal return is being, but we have already seen that being is selection [ but NOT that being always selects the affirmative, quite the opposite].  The will to power has affirmation as it's 'sole quality' [I think we've changed the meaning of affirmation now, because this refers to affirmation at the first level, the affirmation that is necessary to pursue any action, including actions under the sway of reactive forces].  Action becomes the sole quality of force [all this must be after the eternal return: before it, reaction can also be a quality of force].  'Becoming - active as the creative identity of power and willing'[we'll get pie in the sky when we die, and can become fully active affirmative characters].

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