Upload
gamelendeza
View
231
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 1/26
69 NIETZSCHE’S AGON WITH RESSENTIMENT
Continental Philosophy Review 34: 69–93, 2001. © 2001 K luwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Nietzsche’s agon with ressentiment: towards a therapeutic
reading of critical transvaluation
HERMAN W. SIEMENS Department of Philosophy, Nijmegen University, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands(E-mail: [email protected])
“That humankind be redeemed from revenge: that is the bridge to the highest
hope for me and a rainbow after lengthy bad weather” (Z Tarantulas).
“Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a cure [ Heilmittel ] and an aid
in the service of growing and struggling [kämpfenden] life” (GS 370).1
Abstract. This paper examines the therapeutic implications of Nietzsche’s critique of
ressentiment and revenge as our signature malady. §1 examines the obstacles to a therapeutic
reading of Nietzsche’s thought, including his anti-teleological tendencies and the value he
places on sickness. Then there is the energetic problem of finding resources to tackle
ressentiment, given the volitional exhaustion of modern nihilism. Finally, the self-referential
implications of Nietzsche’s critique of slave values threaten to trap his thought in a futile
ressentiment against ressentiment. If the impulse to “cure” or “redeem” us from revenge
through critical destruction repeats the logic of revenge, then the challenge for a therapeutic
reading is to think through the transformation of revenge on the basis of repetition.An agonal reading of Nietzsche’s philosophical practice is proposed to tackle these prob-
lems in §2. In Homer’s Contest (1872), Nietzsche describes the transference (Übertragung )of Hesiod’s “evil Eris” – goddess of war and destruction – into the “good Eris” of the contest
or agon: destructive impulses are affirmed as stimulants, but also transformed into
culture-building forces through an agonal regime of limited aggression. By superimposing
this regime, as a model for Nietzsche’s textual confrontations, on their “unconscious text” of
embodied ressentiment, a therapeutic perspective emerges, based on three principles: affir-
mation; mutual empowerment; and externalisation. The agon performs an affirmative trans- formation of revenge on the basis of a “fertile” repetition: destructive affects (as in
ressentiment) are transferred into constructive deeds of mutual antagonism. Through
Nietzsche’s agonal discourse, a reactive regime of internalised aggression is externalised in
active deeds of limited philosophical aggression – a therapeutic transformation of
(self-)destructive into constructive, philosophical impulses.
1. Introduction: The problematic of sickness, health and redemption
Nietzsche’s life-project of critical transvaluation (Umwertung ) is dedicated
to a contestation of values. Against the prevailing values of European (Chris-
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 2/26
70 HERMAN W. SIEMENS
tian-Platonic) culture – whether religious, metaphysical or moral – Nietzscheattempts time and again to raise life as the highest value: to overcome all
values for the sake of life, its affirmation and elevation. But it is the problem-
atic of revenge and ressentiment, uncovered by Nietzsche’s genealogical cri-
tique of European modernity, that situates his call for a transvaluation of all
values, giving it direction and urgency. Against this background, I propose to
examine the practical implications of Nietzschean transvaluation under the
aspects of therapy and redemption. What practical consequences does
Nietzsche draw from his diagnosis of ressentiment as our malady and the
source of our malaise? Does he have a cure to offer, a way to heal the wound
of ressentiment? Does he offer us a way out, a redemption from ressentiment?
These questions raise in an acute form two of the fundamental problems af-
flicting Nietzsche’s critical thought. The first is an energetic problem: if, as
Nietzsche argues, 2,000 years of ressentiment have progressively depleted
our volitional resources, how can we do anything about it? Where are we to
find sources of energy for tackling ressentiment? The second problem con-
cerns the critic’s auto-implication in his total critique. As we shall see, thera-
peutic or redemptive impulses on Nietzsche’s part risk implicating his own
project in the very ressentiment they would overcome.
There are good reasons for supposing redemptive and therapeutic impulses
to issue from the project of transvaluation. In different ways, they seem to
articulate one and the same desire to overcome the legacy of ressentiment.
Typically, Nietzsche’s texts combine a critical philosophical discourse on
values with a psychological/physiological discourse purporting to uncover and evaluate the instinctual economy that sustains them. The critique of mod-
ern “slave” values in opposition to “noble” values has led many to read trans-
valuation as a programme to redeem modernity by annihilating slave values
and reversing them into a noble morality.2 At the same time, the bad con-
science and ressentiment sustaining prevailing values are diagnosed as “sick-
ness” or “decadence,” leading to vociferous appeals of concern for the “health”
and “future” of humankind.3 It is hard not to read therapeutic interests into
such contexts and to begin asking: what would Nietzschean psychotherapy
look like?
There are, however, also good reasons for resisting such readings. It is
under the sign of the “healing instinct of a degenerating life” that the asceticideal appears in the Genealogy (GM III 13), and much of the third essay
(sections 13–21) is devoted to criticising the various forms of priestly medi-
cation for aggravating the problem of ressentiment.4 Accordingly, Zarathustra
is cast as the opposite of a “holy man” and a “world-redeemer”. He tells his
disciples to lose and deny him that he may return to them and declines to heal
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 3/26
71 NIETZSCHE’S AGON WITH RESSENTIMENT
the blind, the cripples and the hunchback so that the people may come to believe in his teaching.5 If Zarathustra refuses the mantle of the analyst with
that of the priest, Nietzsche’s counter-therapeutic impulse has its deepest and
most interesting reasons in the questions “of whether we could dispense with
our illness in the development of our virtue”, and “whether the will to health
alone is not a prejudice, a cowardice” (GS 120). The ambiguities of these
questions unfold in the self-referential dimension of Nietzschean critique and
his profession of interest in bad conscience as a sickness that is “pregnant”
with a future (GM I 6; GM II 16, 19). If Nietzsche affirms the will to health,
he also appears to value sickness or a will to sickness; if he asks “why weak-
ness is not contested [bekämpft ], but only justified” by morality (KSA 13:
14[66]), he also writes:
Decline, decay, refuse is not something to be condemned in itself: it is anecessary consequence of life, of growth in life. The appearance of décadence is as necessary as any upward and forward movement of life:one does not have it in hand to put an end to it. Reason requires quite thereverse [umgekehrt ]: that it [décadence – HS ] receives its right . . . (KSA13: 14[75]).
The reversal of rights, or transvaluation of sickness in these lines goes hand-
in-hand with a redetermination of the concept health. In questioning whether
we can dispense with our illness (GS 120), Nietzsche also complicates the
notion of “health in itself ”, a normative or “normal health”, proposing in-
stead that we multiply health into polymorphous, “countless healths of the body.”
How, then, are we to reconcile Nietzsche’s counter-therapeutic remarks
with the therapeutic implications of his critical labour? How exactly are sick-
ness and health, the will to health and the will to sickness, related in his
thought? Can the conflicting impulses running through his texts be thought
together – as a counter-therapeutic therapy that would contest sickness, while
giving it its right?
Dreams of annihilation: the problem of repetition
An important clue to these questions can be found in the well-known line
from aphorism 370 of The Gay Science, that “every art, every philosophy
may be viewed as a cure and an aid in the service of growing and struggling
[kämpfende] life.” The connection between healing and struggle [ Kampf ] as
“agon” is central to the therapeutic reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy to be
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 4/26
72 HERMAN W. SIEMENS
advanced in §2 of this paper. But as it stands, this line makes a global state-ment (“every . . .”) and says nothing specific about Nietzsche’s philosophy.
The point of the aphorism, as a full reading shows, is to distinguish two kinds
of philosophy or art – Romantic, and Classical or Dionysian – and to align
Nietzsche’s thought with the latter against the former. This distinction com-
plicates the question of therapy, since it implies a distinction between ‘good’
and ‘bad’ therapy and the forms they can take at the level of philosophical
discourse. As a consequence, the identification of therapeutic and redemp-
tive impulses will have to be revised, for as an instance of ‘bad’ therapy,
redemptive impulses come into conflict with Nietzsche’s therapeutic inter-
ests.
Nietzsche’s argument turns on an irresolvable conflict of interests between
two forms of life:
Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a cure and an aid in theservice of growing and struggling life: they always presuppose sufferingand suffering beings. But there are two sorts of suffering beings: first,those suffering from the excess [Ueberfülle] of life, who want a Dionysianart and with it a tragic view of life, a tragic insight, – and then those suffer-ing from the impoverishment [Verarmung ] of life, who seek peace, still-ness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge,or intoxication, spasms, numbing, madness (GS 370).6
The difference between impoverishment or lack and excess serves Nietzsche
to distinguish the Romantic from the Classical. Those suffering from lack seek redemption or respite from their suffering. These interests are served by
Romanticism in various ways. Typically, it offers “closure in optimistic hori-
zons,” sabbatical visions governed by goodness, gods or logic (“for logic
soothes”), visions that would resolve what is most frightening and senseless
in existence; alternatively, it employs the physiological means of affective
discharge – the intoxicating rush or spasms of passion. But the semiotics of
suffering are complex, and Nietzsche warns that Romantic therapy can take
unexpected, even opposed forms: not just the projection of personal suffer-
ing into a binding universal law (Schopenhauer’s “revenge” on all things),
but also destructive misarchism, the anarchists’ hatred of the law. What they
all share is a non-acceptance of personal pain and the impulse to soothe or
numb it, usually through visions that resolve or destroy its perceived sourcesin negativity. These sources include struggle and conflict [ Kampf ], and for
Nietzsche this is crucial: to reject them is to reject the very “growing, strug-
gling [kämpfende] life” in which even impoverished, Romantic types take
part. This, for Nietzsche, is bad therapy; not because it does not relieve pain,
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 5/26
73 NIETZSCHE’S AGON WITH RESSENTIMENT
but because it negates and falsifies life in its character of conflict. Good therapy, by contrast, is centered on the productive aspects of conflict. Optimistic clo-
sure is eschewed in favour of an openness towards pain and suffering, per-
ceived as necessary for growth and production. It is this interpretation of
pain – the “tragic insight” – that serves the interests of life as excess, whether
in destructive Dionysian visions expressing “the overfull force, pregnant with
the future,” or in Classical visions that express a “gratitude and love” of life
without falsifying its tragic reality. Good therapy is able to affirm life as it is.
It is plain from Nietzsche’s language – e.g., the identification of the “Clas-
sical” with the “Dionysian” – where he would have us situate his thought
along the axis of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ therapy. Yet serious obstacles to a ‘good’
therapeutic reading arise from the opposition, or conflict of interests, be-
tween ascending forms of life (excess) and declining forms of life (lack). The
first concerns the redemptive impulses in Nietzsche’s thought. These can no
longer be assumed to converge with a sound therapeutic interest in overcom-
ing ressentiment, for the above text is quite clear: redemptive impulses serve
the interests of declining forms of life against the interests of ascending life
in growth, struggle and fertility. From this perspective, any desire on Ni-
etzsche’s part to redeem modernity from ressentiment not only undermines
his therapeutic interests; it threatens to co-opt them into the service of declin-
ing life. A second, related difficulty comes from Nietzsche’s treatment of
closure. If “closure in optimistic horizons” also serves the interests declining
life, then any attempt to enclose the horizon of the future becomes suspect.
Clearly this goes for redemptive visions of health free from ressentiment.More seriously, it threatens any directive or teleological orientation towards
health, any attempt to determine the passage from present sickness to future
health with reference to a governing telos or goal. It is not enough for Ni-
etzsche’s will-to-health to remain open to sickness, conflict and suffering
(the tragic insight); in the interests of ascending life, it must take a form that
is resolutely anti-teleological or open-ended.
At the root of these ‘impossible’ demands is the fundamental problem
posed by aphorism 370: that sound therapy presupposes an excess of life.
Nietzsche is quite clear that it is “the one richest in the fullness of life, the
Dionysian god or human” who can afford exposure to negativity and tragic
insight. He is also quite clear that he was wrong in The Birth of Tragedy toascribe excess to contemporary philosophy and music (Schopenhauer,
Wagner). Indeed, the closing lines of the aphorism seem to rule out tragic
pessimism from Nietzsche’s present altogether, in a gesture that defers by
renaming it a “pessimism of the future.” And is this gesture not correct? Trag-
edy and pre-Socratic philosophy may have been predicated on excess, and
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 6/26
74 HERMAN W. SIEMENS
Nietzsche can lay claim to this insight as his very own “intimation and vi-sion.” But Nietzsche’s philosophy cannot lay claim to excess: his own diag-
nosis of the pervasive debilitation of life in modernity implicates him, no less
than “us”, the potential beneficiaries of a Nietzschean therapy, robbing his
thought of any therapeutic force in the present. On Nietzsche’s own terms,
then, the depleted volitional resources of modernity confront his therapeutic
interests with an energetic deficit . Certainly, the semiotics of lack and impov-
erishment are not hard to discern in Zarathustra’s hope: “That humankind be
redeemed from revenge: that is the bridge to the highest hope for me and a
rainbow after lengthy bad weather” (Z Tarantulas). The ambiguity of
Nietzsche’s project announces itself in these lines, where the vengeful im-
pulses condemned by him reappear as the redemptive hope and sabbatical
desire inspiring Zarathustra – or do they? To what extent are Nietzsche’s
practical interests “infected” by the very disease he sought to combat? A
straightforward redemptive reading of the problem of revenge, as suggested by
Zarathustra’s words, raises an acute problem for Nietzsche, whose entire project
is vitiated if it merely repeats those impulses subjected to critique. For a ‘good’
therapeutic reading, on the other hand, resources must be found that would turn
the energetic deficit of modernity into the surplus of ascending life.
The suspicions we have raised can be taken further if we turn to the Gene-alogy of Morals. Here the redemptive impulses discerned in Romanticism
are given a closer analysis in the context of what is called the “slave-revolt of
morality” (GM I 7f.). At the same time, Nietzsche brings a new, external
dimension to his analysis, situating the redemptive urges of slave morality ina socio-political fabric of power-relations. The analogy with Nietzsche’s own
philosophical situation is so strong as to suggest that redemptive impulses
are rooted deep in the conditions governing the project of transvaluation,
locking his thought into a hopeless repetition of the logic of revenge. The
Genealogy identifies two kinds of impulse behind redemptive hopes and sab-
batical desires. First, there is narcosis:
“happiness” on the level of the impotent, the oppressed, those festeringwith poisonous and inimical feelings, . . . appears essentially as narcosis,numbing [ Betäubung ], rest, peace, “sabbath”, emotional relaxation andlimb-stretching (GM I 10; cf. GS 370 above).
Then there is revenge:
These weak ones – sometime they too want to be the strong ones for once,there is no doubt, sometime their kingdom too will come – “The Kingdomof God” it is called amongst them . . . (GM I 15).
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 7/26
75 NIETZSCHE’S AGON WITH RESSENTIMENT
Later on, in the third Essay, the intimate connection of revenge to narcosis isexplained in the context of ressentiment:
It is here alone, I would suggest, that the physiological causality of ressentiment, revenge and related [impulses] is actually to be found: in ademand for the numbing [ Betäubung ] of pain through affects (GM III 15).
The presupposition of this analysis is pain. The pain of weakness, impover-
ishment or lack, familiar from Romanticism, is given a more concrete turn in
these passages. The slave suffers not for existential or metaphysical reasons;
he suffers from ‘weakness’ vis-à-vis a class of masters; from a ‘lack’ of power
in relation to overpowering forces; from the secret, slow-burning pain of
actual ‘impotence’ that cannot reverse its suffering and dare not even revealit. In the Genealogy, redemptive hopes arise in the face of oppression, under
conditions of antagonism, as a destructive reaction to being-overpowered. In
the context of this power differential, the Romantic strategies of narcosis
(Wagner) and revenge (Schopenhauer) form a single dynamic. For the slave’s
redemptive hopes relieve the feeling of impotence by means both physiological
and spiritual: a narcotic ‘rush’ tied to the promise of release, of peace – an
end to the pain of antagonism. But the narcotic effect of this promise depends
on desires and impulses that are far from peaceful. A central claim of the
Genealogy is that vengeful wishes and destructive phantasies nest and fester
in our most ‘harmless’ sabbatical longings: to eliminate the source of the
pain, the antagonist, would bring instantaneous and lasting relief; since ac-
tual impotence rules this out, destructive impulses feed instead on dreams of
annihilation.
It is such dreams that threaten Nietzsche’s own thought, not for personal
reasons, but because his project is subject to the same conditions under which
they flourish. Impotence, the feeling of being-overpowered, are built into the
scene of transvaluation as its initial conditions. It is important to see that an
interest in growth and conflict does not place the critic in a position of strength.
On the contrary, it is weak and impoverished forms of life, under the
hegemonial values spawned in their interest, that constitute the force majeureof Western civilisation. The historical meaning of the “slave-revolt of moral-
ity” is to have reversed political weakness into power, bondage into victory,
as a result of reversing “good” into “evil.” Thus, the project of transvaluationis predicated on the reversal of weakness and bondage into power, casting the
one who would resist them into a position of weakness.7 From this position,
nothing could be more tempting than the slavish desire to destroy the legacy
of our Christian-Platonic past once and for all, and redeem us from
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 8/26
76 HERMAN W. SIEMENS
ressentiment. Yet, to succumb to this temptation would be to play into thehands of the opponent, for it is declining forms of life that crave annihilation
[Vernichtung ] of antagonistic forces8 – for the sake of peace. Once again, it is
Zarathustra who intimates Nietzsche’s implication in his own critique, this
time with the voice of impotent rage:
The Now and the Then on earth – Oh my friends – that is for me the mostunendurable: and I would not know how to live, if I were not still a seer of what must come. A seer, a willer, a creator, a future itself and a bridge tothe future – and oh, still a cripple on this bridge, as it were: all thisZarathustra is (Z Redemption).
It is hard, on Zarathustra’s own admission, to disentangle these lines from
the crippling revenge against time and time’s “it was.” The impulse to de-
stroy the legacy of our Christian-Platonic past and redeem us from ressentiment
does seem to make of Nietzsche the “evil spectator” condemned by
Zarathustra: “Impotent against that which has been done – he is an evil spec-
tator of all that is past” (Z Redemption).
But are we really to suppose that Nietzsche was blind to these self-referential
consequences? And if not, that he knowingly acquiesced in a hopeless repeti-
tion of the attitudes he criticised? Nietzsche’s insight and resilience should
make us think twice about redemptive readings because of their consequences.
We should perhaps pause to ask whether there is another way to take the self-
referential dimension of Nietzsche’s critique seriously. Is there a way for him
to contest prevailing values that does not simply replicate the foundationalgestures of slave-revolt (revenge) and the promise of redemption? A way to
react against them that does not remain locked in a reactive mode of evalua-
tion? There is a good deal of textual evidence that Nietzsche repeats the logic
of revenge in reacting against Christian-Platonic values. My argument does
not deny this; rather, it denies that in repeating these motions, Nietzsche re-
mains locked in a reactive mode of evaluation. Transformation through rep-
etition: this is the paradox I shall try to think through. The argument turns on
the concept of “agonal transvaluation.”
2. Agonal transvaluation as therapy
In this section, I shall propose an agonal model for Nietzsche’s transvaluative
discourse; this model will then serve as the basis for an agonal concept of
therapy.
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 9/26
77 NIETZSCHE’S AGON WITH RESSENTIMENT
Agonal culture
My claim is that Nietzsche’s textual confrontations, both early and late, ex-
hibit a recurrent strategy of “agonal transvaluation”: they draw us into a criti-
cal contestation of dominant values, whose dynamic form is modeled on the
pre-Socratic “agonal” community presented in the early essay Homer’s Con-test (1872).9 Here Nietzsche describes a specific organisation of power , adynamic tension that holds between a plurality of more-or-less equal, active
forces contesting one another. As the signature institution of ancient Greek
political culture, it pervades all areas of life, from art and education to politi-
cal debate; it is the “life-ground” of the polis. Agonal contestation engages
the antagonists in a complex interplay of mutual affirmation and mutual ne-
gation, a “play of forces” [Wettspiel der Kräfte] that stimulates or provokes
each to deeds that would outbid the other, while containing both within the
limits of measure. The productive relation of mutual empowerment-
disempowerment creates a dynamic of limited aggression that precludes ab-
solute destruction (death or total negation) on one side, and absolute,
conclusive victory (total affirmation) for any single contestant on the other.
Agonal victory is thus relative and provisional, and the agon itself inconclu-
sive. Like all forms of play, the agon is intrinsically repeatable; the dynamics
of provocation and limitation gives the agonal “play of forces” a form that is
radically open-ended.
As a productive conflict of active forces, agonal culture embodies Ni-
etzsche’s therapeutic interest in “growing and struggling life” as fertility fromGS 370. In Homer’s Contest , the agon serves to explain the extraordinary
productivity “in deeds and works” of pre-Socratic culture: through mutual
provocation and empowerment, it propitiates the elevation [Steigerung ] or
growth of life and the cultivation of greatness [Grösse]. It should not, how-
ever, be thought that horror, despair and sickness are simply absent from this
picture. Health is not a given; it is an achievement of agonal culture, which is
unthinkable in the absence of terrifying and destructive affective forces.10
Like tragedy, the agon effects a practical transformation of “inhuman” into
human, culture-building forces in conjunction with an affirmative interpreta-tion of life, radically opposed to Christian morality as “Anti-Nature” (TI). In
Nietzsche’s account, aggressive, thanatos drives dominate: as a regime of
limited aggression the agon transforms and assimilates them into a produc-
tive and affirmative practice of life.
From this brief sketch it can be seen that the agon combines in an astonish-
ing way various elements which Nietzsche associates, at one time or other,
with health.11 Equilibrium [Gleichgewicht ] and measure [ Maass] (e.g. GS
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 10/26
78 HERMAN W. SIEMENS
113. See Pasley 148) are of paramount importance in the agon. Then, there isinnocence [Unschuld ] in the sense of an extra-moral attitude, a non-judge-
mental openness to instincts and passions (KSA 8: 5[146]). For our purposes,
the next two features are crucial: the dynamic, energetic conception of health
(as in GS 370), of abundant strength and vitality, able to thrive on obstacles
as challenges in a dynamic of productive self-surpassing (Pasley 124f.); and
then the more radical picture of a ‘health in the teeth of sickness’ (Pasley
154), or what Nietzsche calls “great health”, that thrives on sickness ‘as its
eternally stimulating and eternally re-forming antagonist’ (Pasley 149), turn-
ing damaging forces into stimulants, to its advantage.
It is upon the affirmative transformation of pathological, destructive im-
pulses through agonal contestation that the therapeutic claim will be based.
The argument begins with the proposition that agonal culture regulates Ni-
etzsche’s transvaluative discourse as its productive and organising principle,
as a model that organises his critical confrontations. Detailed arguments in
favour of agonal hermeneutics cannot be presented in this context,12 where
the discussion will be confined to a number of points that bear directly on the
question of therapy.
Agonal hermeneutics
Nietzschean transvaluation is devoted to contesting and overcoming prevail-
ing values in the name of life, its affirmation and elevation. As an agonalcontest of values, transvaluative discourse challenges a given value or ideal
by staging a confrontation with a representative persona or type, whose vari-
ous attitudes and postures are then interrogated and evaluated from a stand-
point in life as the highest value. The agon has important consequences for
the way we understand Nietzsche’s textual confrontations, which can be used
to introduce a viable therapeutic reading.
In the first place, the agon involves a symmetrical organisation or economy
of power, presupposing a plurality of more-or-less equal antagonistic forces.13
Agonal discourse is therefore contingent on the participation of a plurality of
forces in a symmetrical contestation of values: transvaluation only occurs
where “we” are drawn into critical contests, as an “agonal community” of
readers who consent to the rules of play. Under these conditions, deference to
Nietzsche or any single force is ruled out. Nietzsche’s judgements do of course
claim authority, but not the incontrovertible authority of truth-claims deliv-
ered by a great master, healer or priest. They serve rather to “open play,” to
provoke dispute and draw us into controversy; like Zarathustra, Nietzsche
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 11/26
79 NIETZSCHE’S AGON WITH RESSENTIMENT
would sooner have hated friends than command belief (EH pref. 4). Agonalauthorship throws its own authority in the balance, to be won by purely hu-
man means of consensus: judgements and counter-values, together with the
very standards of evaluation or judgement, are opened to contestation by a
collective readership which would respond to the challenge it issues. In this
light, agonal hermeneutics can accommodate at least one of Nietzsche’s coun-
ter-therapeutic impulses: the rejection of asymmetrical (saviour/priest-sin-
ner; master-disciple) relationships voiced by Zarathustra.
Conclusive victory for any antagonist spells the death of the agon: since
the agon precludes both conclusive defeat (destruction) and conclusive vic-
tory, it is repeatable and inconclusive in its very mode of being. As a conse-
quence, the agon gives an open-ended , inconclusive orientation to
transvaluative discourse. Despite its popular image, Nietzschean critique does
not aim to destroy its opponents (life-negating values or attitudes – like
ressentiment) and assert a single-handed victory (conclusive counter-values)
over them. Instead, it serves to open and re-open the question of victory.14
What would constitute the overcoming of life-negating values? What would
be an affirmative practice beyond ressentiment? In this light, agonal
hermeneutics addresses the most serious threat to a therapeutic reading: the
redemptive desire to destroy Christian-Platonic values. If it is declining forms
of life that dream of annihilating [Vernichtung ] antagonistic forces for the
sake of peace, then the interests of ascending life, by contrast, require the
empowermentof the antagonist, for the sake of continued conflict and growth.
Nietzsche’s philosophy must therefore resist the lure of finality and the expe-dient of destroying its opponents. This does not exclude conflict altogether.
The interests of “growing, struggling life” require that Nietzsche’s philoso-
phy practise conflict or struggle in a form that (a) empowers its opponents,15
and (b) remains open-ended or inconclusive; that is, it must practice agonal conflict.
If understood correctly, the open-ended, dynamic qualities of the agon
also address the problem of closure at its most intractable: the demand that
therapeutic discourse be non-directional or anti-teleological, in the interests
of ascending life. Repeatability in the agon cannot be properly understood if
we restrict ourselves to a historical perspective, or the perspective of the
antagonists. At issue is not whether the agon is in fact repeated, and the kindsof institutional and financial infrastructure this requires. These historical/em-
pirical questions presuppose that the agon is to be repeated, and this is a
feature intrinsic to the agon as a dynamic ordering of forces, a matter of its
temporal character as a festival and a form of play. As Gadamer has argued,
play cannot be adequately understood from the players’ perspectives, be-
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 12/26
80 HERMAN W. SIEMENS
cause it has its being independently of their consciousness, attitudes and in-tentions: “the mode of being of play is not such that there must be a subject
who takes up a playing attitude so that the game can be played. Rather, the
most original sense of play is the medial sense.”16 In this sense, play acquires
a structure of repetition that is radically impersonal and anti-teleological.
Whatever the player’s intentions, their outcome is determined in the space of
play or confrontation, so that the real subject of play is not the player, but
play itself which holds the player in thrall (p. 106). From this perspective, the
dynamics of play are freed from the players’ intentions, goals and efforts,
which are themselves played out within a to-and-fro movement detached from
any telos: “the movement which is play, has no goal which brings it to an
end; rather it renews itself in constant repetition” (p. 103). This thought is
fleshed out by Gadamer with reference to the puzzling temporality of (peri-
odic) festivals.17 The festival cannot be properly grasped from the usual per-
spective in successive time, as a historical event that was originally so and
then came to be repeated with small variations at periodic intervals. Rather,
repetition or return is intrinsic to festivals – including agonal festivals – in
their character as celebration. Since it belongs to the establishment of a fes-
tival, at its very origins, that it should be regularly celebrated, the festival is
something that “only is insofar as it is always different [. . .] It has its being
only in becoming and recurring” (p. 120).
In this light, the open-ended repeatability of agonal discourse is not con-
tingent on the self-restraint of antagonists able to hold back from destruction
or absolute victory. Contestants cannot be relied on to avoid excess in theagon which, by its very nature, allows the temptation of hubris to compete
with the warning of self-restraint – with uncertain results. This goes for
Nietzsche as well, who is notoriously unrestrained at times. According to
Gadamer, however, the antagonists must be clearly distinguished from the
agon itself, as the ‘subject’ of play in the medial sense. Whatever their atti-
tudes or intentions, they are, as agonal players, subject to the to-and-fro dy-
namics of empowerment-disempowerment, an inconclusive, repeatable
movement detached from any telos. If, as I suggest, the agon gives the tem-
poral character of play and celebration to Nietzsche’s textual confrontations,
then we can say: agonal discourse is a radically impersonal, non-directional
and repeatable medium of thought; something that only is insofar as it is becoming. Individual teleologies are embedded in the anti-teleological me-
dium of agonal exchange to which they give themselves; any bids for power,
any attempts at closure are checked or undone by the vicissitudes of empow-
erment-disempowerment to which they are subject. Agonal hermeneutics thus
ensures that Nietzsche’s therapeutic interests remain non-directional and open-
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 13/26
81 NIETZSCHE’S AGON WITH RESSENTIMENT
ended, in line with the interests of ascending life, despite the temptations toclosure that haunt his project.
But there is, it seems, a difficulty here. For it is hard to see how agonal
discourse, if non-directional, can promote the interests of ascending life. How
can a non-directional medium be in any sense orientated towards health? The
answer I propose involves the feint of writing, that is, the emphatically fictive
style of Nietzsche’s agonal confrontations. It was noted earlier how well the
agon exemplifies the notion of ascending life advocated in GS 370. Building
on this observation, I propose that agonal discourse enacts the highest form
of life for Nietzsche (growth, fertility, conflict, excess). The agonal dynamic
regulating his discourse serves to supplement the discursive critique of patho-
logical, life-negating regimes with a performative challenge that anticipates
or pre-figures the therapeutic telos of health – a productive and affirmative
form of life.18
The notion of fiction is important for two reasons. First, because it in-
volves a particular vision, a possible form of life or health amongst others,
not a normative concept of health enjoined upon all as a binding universal
law or telos. The distance between teleology and fiction is measured by the
difference between enclosing the horizon of the future, and playing with an
open horizon. The agonal feint thus orients transvaluation towards health
without subsuming it under goals or directives that would in fact promote the
interests of declining life: the anti-teleology of fiction joins the anti-teleology
of play. Fiction is also important in its performative aspect as the agonal dy-
namic of mutual empowerment-disempowerment enacted in Nietzsche’s texts.This agonal dynamic throws valuable light on certain features of Nietzsche’s
thinking that resist discursive understanding; it also opens up an energetic di-mension to Nietzsche’s texts essential to their therapeutic potential.
A recurrent and highly problematic feature of Nietzsche’s critical and in-
terpretative style is a characteristic movement of “saying and unsaying”
(Blondel). This can take different forms: as an alternation of appropriation
and alienation,19 of dominating and freeing the other in turn, or Nietzsche’s
tendency to limit his negations of the other through subsequent affirmation –
to name a few. Common to all is a double-movement of “Absolutsetzung”
and “Nicht-Absolutsetzung”20 whereby Nietzsche contests a position and then
retracts his contention, or opposes a claim only to undo his counter-claim.From a discursive point of view, all this is hard to make sense of, or simply
incoherent. From a dynamic perspective in agonal contention, however, it
begins to make sense. The agon, as we have seen, precludes destruction of
the opponent in favor of a practice of limited aggression (mutual
disempowerment) predicated on mutual empowerment. If, as I am suggest-
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 14/26
82 HERMAN W. SIEMENS
ing, Nietzsche’s textual confrontations are regulated by an agonal regime,then they are bound to unfold through a dynamic of mutual empowerment-
disempowerment. Within this dynamic, “saying and unsaying” constitutes a
coherent practice of limited aggression. At stake here is how we read Nietzsche:
instead of isolating his judgements or interpretations from one another and
identifying them with “contradictory” positions, we need to place them within
an agonal “play of forces” that implicates us as readers, not just his chosen
adversary, in a collective contestation of values.
In a way, Nietzsche’s texts present a conundrum similar to Freud’s. In
Freud and Philosophy21 Ricoeur argues that a hermeneutic reading of psy-
choanalytic discourse falls short; for at crucial junctures, hermeneutics, as an
interrogation of meaning in the medium of language, must be supplemented
by an economics that addresses the dynamic, energetic dimension of Freud’s
thought. In Nietzsche’s case too, hermeneutics is insufficient; even a broad
hermeneutics embracing not just discursive sequences, but the other strands
– narrative, metaphorical etc. – woven into them, must be supplemented by
an energetic point of view that makes sense of the dynamic, performative
dimension of Nietzsche’s texts. There is, in other words, more to Nietzsche’s
texts than a critical discourse on values; next to the thematic dimension of his
writing, we need to attend to “what inside Nietzsche’s text remains outside
discourse”:22 a performative dimension that continuously erupts on the sur-
face of the text, moving, forming and deforming Nietzsche’s discourse in
ways that exceed discursive readings. In this regard, Blondel speaks of the
“enigma” of Nietzische’s texts,23 i.e., their tendency to combine discursivesequences amenable to synthesis and analysis with heterogeneous elements –
the buffoonery, musicality, the ecstasy, the breaks, leaps and contradictions,
Nietzsche’s extravagant punctuation. All this surface play tends to be ig-
nored and relegated outside philosophy to the domains of rhetoric, style, art
or literary history. In ‘rescuing’ Nietzsche for philosophy, however, we ef-
face the uniqueness of his text and with it, the prospect of a therapeutic read-
ing. It is the ‘surplus’ of Nietzsche’s text, the forces that disrupt and distort
discursive order, which for the most part carry its affective charge or pathos.
Any insight into the pathology of transvaluation, let alone its therapeutic
transformation, is therefore barred until we find ways of linking what Nietzsche
says to what he does not say, but enacts.The agonal model is way to do this, for it brings a “vertical” or energetic
dimension to our readings. The dynamics of empowerment-disempowerment
regulating Nietzsche’s philosophical discourse at the surface of the text is but
part of a larger organisation or economy of energy, grounded in embodied,
affective engagement. From this perspective, Nietzsche’s discourse means
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 15/26
83 NIETZSCHE’S AGON WITH RESSENTIMENT
what it says, but it also works as a code [Zeichensprache] for a body in ac-tion. In fact, it becomes a metaphor of the body in extreme, violent agitation,
the transference of an affective engagement bound by an agonal economy of
energy. Agonal discourse, I shall argue, is both a commentary on the
ressentiment animating it and the site for its therapeutic transformation into
the productive aggression of critical transvaluation. To see why this is so, we
need to probe the vertical axis of agonal culture.
Agonal transference [Übertragung] as therapy
Governing Homer’s Contest is an anti-Christian, anti-Humanist polemic that
would reapportion and transvaluate the conscious and unconscious, purposiveand affective determinants of human culture: against the opposition of desire
and spirit, Nietzsche claims that the “natural” and the so-called “human”
qualities of human existence are “inseparably entwined”; against moral judge-
ments that would exclude the former from human culture, he proposes that
our “terrifying capacities and those considered inhuman are even perhaps the
fertile ground from which alone all humanity in impulses, deeds and works
can grow forth” (HC. Cf. BGE 229). Accordingly, Nietzsche’s account is
pitched at the level of “nature”. The presupposition is a pessimistic view of
life (nature and history) inspired by figures of thought, modern and ancient24
life as an inexorable war of annihilation [Vernichtungskampf ] driven by terri-
fying affective forces such as hatred, cruelty, lust. Against this background,the agonal regime is regulated by specific drives or affects, such as envy and
ambition. They effect a transference or displacement of Hesiod’s “evil Eris”
– the goddess of war and hatred – into the “good Eris”, goddess of the con-
test.25 For Nietzsche, this means a transference or displacement – his term is
Übertragung – of aggressive, destructive drives into constructive forces of
culture. The key concept of Übertragung is given a broad range of
determinations. Depending on the context, it can mean: metaphor, untruth,
deception or veiling; imitation or play; spiritualisation, idealisation, or subli-
mation; the exploitation, harnessing or mastery of destructive energies; and
their regulation, codification or measured discharge.26 In this context, I shall
consider the metaphorical and transformative aspects of the concept.
In the first place, agonal Übertragung falls within Nietzsche’s broad con-
cept of culture as metaphor or “vita femina” (GS 339) – the transference or
repressive displacement of embodied, instinctual forces towards the conscious
surface of thought and language (expression). Meta-phorical culture results
from the primal, i.e. constitutive act of bad conscience: the scission of human
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 16/26
84 HERMAN W. SIEMENS
life into conscious and unconscious, very close to Freud’s conception of “pri-mal repression,” as Blondel has argued.27 As a result of the primal split, “the
sequence of phenomena that are really connected takes place on a subcon- scious level; the apparent series and successions of feelings, thoughts etc. are
symptoms of the real sequences” (KSA 12: 1[61]). Thus, cultural phenomena
become “symptomatic and displaced metaphorical manifestations” (Blondel,
p. 167) of desire; even thought is “but another sign language which expresses
a compromise between the powers [ Machtausgleich] of different affects” (KSA
12: 1[28]), what Nietzische elsewhere calls “a more or less fantastic com-
mentary upon an unknown [or: unconscious], perhaps unknowable, but felt
text” (M 119). As cultural artefacts, Nietzsche’s agonal texts are subject to
the same vicissitude: his critical discourse means what it says, but it also
means more than it says; it too performs a metaphorical commentary upon an
unconscious text. But which unconscious text? What kind of “compromise
[is held] between the powers of different affects” in agonal culture? And
what is the agonal rule of transference or displacement?
Agonal culture is not distinguished by the kinds of affect that animate it; it
is rather to their organisation, the peculiar “compromise” between powers,
that we should look. Hate, cruelty, lust, deceitfulness, vindictiveness, all those
affects symbolised by Hesiod’s “evil Eris,” are the “fertile ground” of agonal
deeds. These form the “latent meaning” of the Homeric dream world, accord-
ing to Nietzsche;28 but they also form the latent meaning of Aquinas and the
Apocalypse of St. John, the disciple of love (see GM I 15–16). The agon
draws on affective powers no different from those which, although repressed,fill the subterranean workshops of Christian-Platonic values. The difference
lies in the direction (goal, object) given these affective powers and their con-
figuration with other powers. They are not repressed or internalised in the
agon, but externalised or discharged in deeds of mutual antagonism, gov-
erned by codes of disempowerment that limit the pathos of aggression. They
are not condemned, but openly acknowledged as stimulants, provoking and
empowering each antagonist to contest the other. The secret of the Greeks,
Nietzsche writes, “was to worship even illness as a god, if only it had power .”29
The agonal dynamic of mutual empowerment-disempowerment controls and
limits powerful, destructive affects for the purposes of exploitation; it is about
“using” these “great sources of power, the wildwater of the soul, often sodangerous, overwhelming, explosive, and economising them” (KSA 13:
14[163]).
In Nietzsche’s texts, we also find, as their “fertile ground” or “source of
power,” those vengeful and deceitful desires animating agonal contestation;
these, then, form of the “unconscious text” upon which the discourse of lim-
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 17/26
85 NIETZSCHE’S AGON WITH RESSENTIMENT
ited aggression performs a metaphorical commentary. Of course they alsofeed the sickness which the “conscious text” of critical transvaluation dis-
covers behind Christian-Platonic values. But the agonal dynamic of Ni-
etzsche’s discourse is no mere commentary on the hatred animating it; much
less, does it justify hatred or moralise it in the guise of Johannine love (KSA
13: 14[65]); rather, it draws on hatred as a “source of power,” within an
economy that serves to transform it.
Within an agonal economy of energy, Übertragung means both the meta-
phorical transference of destructive affects and their affirmative transforma-
tion into constructive, culture-building impulses. Accordingly, Nietzsche’s
textual confrontations economise destructive, vengeful affects for the pur-
poses of value-contestation and -creation. With this transformative impulse,
a therapeutic perspective on Nietzschean transvaluation is opened. One could
say: Nietzschean transvaluation performs an unconscious therapy on the un-conscious text of its own explosive sickness. Insofar as we participate in the
contestation of values inaugurated by Nietzsche’s text, we too perform an
unconscious therapy on our own sickness. The therapeutic perspective is made
up of four claims:
1. The agonal contestation of values is suited to transforming our condition
as moderns because it draws on just those affects which, although repressed,
are constitutive of our modern sickness: the unconfessed spirit of revenge
and hatred animating our modern ideals.
2. Agonal transvaluation allows for a transformative will to health, while ac-knowledging and affirming the value of illness. In line with the age-old
war of annihilation against the passions (“il faut tuer les passions”: TI Mo-
rality as Anti-nature 1), Christian and post-Christian bourgeois morality
outwardly condemn the aggressive impulses that covertly animate them in
attitudes of ressentiment. At the same time, they would rather justify (by
falsifying) hatred as love than transform it. In agonal culture, by contrast,
the transformation of destructive affects goes hand-in-hand with an affirma-
tive attitude of acknowledgement, gratitude, reverence. As an agonal
economy of power, transvaluation can therefore accommodate the most
serious of Nietzsche’s counter-therapeutic impulses; not just his rejection
of asymmetrical relationships, but his affirmative remarks concerning sick-
ness, its indispensability and its “right” (KSA 13: 14[75]). Agonal trans-
valuation precludes the total negation of illness, a war of annihilation
[Vernichtungskampf ] that would extirpate pathological forces for the sake
of “normal health”; instead, it inaugurates an open-ended contest [Wettkampf ] with illness, an affirmative transformation that repeats and
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 18/26
86 HERMAN W. SIEMENS
affirms pathological, destructive forces, while transforming them into con-structive philosophical impulses.
3. To replace the negation of hatred with acknowledgement, the repression of
aggression with its expression in agonal deeds of envy and ambition, is
also to release new sources of power or energy. The affirmative moment of
agonal culture has an economic consequence of vital importance, given the
energetic deficit obstructing a viable therapeutic reading. From an eco-
nomic point of view, agonal transvaluation dissolves inherited systems of
solitary debilitation through a collective regime of mutual empowerment .
It is what Nietzsche calls a “systeme fortifiant,” in opposition to the debili-
tation or weakening promoted by moral systems:
Debilitation as task : debilitation of desires, of feelings of pleasure andunpleasure, of will to power, to pride, to having and wanting-to-have-more;debilitation as humility; debilitation as faith; debilitation as aversion andshame in all that is natural, as the negation of life, as sickness and habitualweakness . . .
Debilitationas renunciation of revenge, of resistance, of enmity and wrath.the blunder in treatment: one does not want to contest sickness through a
systeme fortifiant , but through a kind of justification and moralisation:
that is, through an interpretation . . . (KSA 13: 14[65]).
Agonal transvaluation, by contrast, would contest our inherited sickness
through a systeme fortifiant . Through the non-repressive transference of
revenge and wrath, energy is released for a therapeutic contestation of sick-ness in the interests of ascending life. We are familiar with ressentiment as
sickness and as the fast-burning agent of debilitation and self-contempt
(EH Wise 6). The agonal perspective reminds us that it is also explosive, a
tremendous reserve of affective resources, housing a potential excess of
expendable energy – if only it can be harnessed correctly in productive
deeds.30 The agonal dynamic of empowerment-disempowerment is a prime
instance of that “propitious gathering and intensification of forces and tasks”
needed for us to “grasp with one look all that could still be cultivated out of
the human being” (BGE 230). It reminds us “how the human being is still
not exhausted for the greatest possibilities”, despite the ravages of our ‘natu-
ral history of morality’ documented in Part 5 of Beyond Good and Evil .
4. The question of therapeutic transformation turns on the re-organisation of
the active forces of human existence. As Nietzsche insists in the Genealogy
of Morals, reactive affects and postures of internalised aggression are ani-
mated by forces that are active, i.e. actively engaged in affirming and em-
powering themselves in their given configuration or life-form.31 This means
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 19/26
87 NIETZSCHE’S AGON WITH RESSENTIMENT
that active forces bent into reactive attitudes can be released towards novelforms of self-affirmation by changing their direction (externalisation) and
their configuration with other forces. In agonal transvaluation, reactive pos-
tures of internalised aggression are externalised into active deeds of mu-
tual critical antagonism; the unconfessed spirit of revenge animating our
modern ideals is openly acknowledged in deeds of envy and ambition that
express and limit these affects at once; meanwhile, their source in a feeling
of impotence is gradually eroded by a regime of symmetrical power-relations
geared towards mutual limitation on the basis of mutual empowerment
(provocation, stimulation, arousal, but also recognition, gratitude).
Finally, it is important to recall and re-affirm the fictive or figurative
character of agonal transvaluation. The therapeutic mechanisms of affir-
mation (2), empowerment (3) and externalisation (4) can only operate un-
der the sign of fiction. This does not, however, undermine their therapeutic
value. As a fictive anticipation of health regulating Nietzsche’s discourse,
the agon enacts a possible form of health, orienting transvaluation to-
wards health without subsuming it under a telos of health imposed upon
all alike. In this way it avoids both forms of Romantic sickness:
Schopenhauer’s binding universal law and the anarchist hatred of the
law. For Nietzsche’s agonal feint of health enacts a possible formation of the law of health: the law or rule of agonal engagement that binds collec-
tively across particular communities. Rather than prescribe a “normal”
or normative health from the present, Nietzsche plays at health in the
company of imaginary agonal communities. It is a strategy he calls accel-eration when, for instance, he writes of his imagined “free spirits”: “and
perhaps I shall do something to accelerate their coming if I describe in
advance under what vicissitudes I see them arising, upon what paths I seethem coming?- -” (HaH Pref. 2). Pitched between prescription (law) and
laisser faire (anarchism), between prophetic vision and fatalistic waiting,
agonal discourse serves to stimulate and guide actual readers in the collec-
tive construction of new forms of health.
3. Conclusion: Nietzsche and Freud – agonal and analytic transference
Reading Nietzsche through the optics of the agon affords a way to think
through some of the major difficulties confronting a therapeutic interpreta-
tion of his thought. Against the prohibitive deficit of energy in modernity, the
agonal regime uncovers and harnesses the enormous affective resources tied
up with ressentiment. At the same time, there is the playful/pre-figurative
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 20/26
88 HERMAN W. SIEMENS
orientation of thought towards health without recourse to directives, goalsthat would promote the interests of declining life. Then there is the paradox
of transformation and repetition: the agon opens a transformative perspec-
tive on the project of transvaluation without denying the self-referential im-
plications of Nietzschean critique or the overwhelming textual evidence that
it repeats vengeful attitudes. Finally, the conflicting impulses towards health
and sickness in Nietzsche’s thought are accommodated and conjugated by
the agon, which allows for the therapeutic transformation of forbidden, patho-logical desires through their affirmative, repetitive re-enactment .
With this formula we have not only the key to a viable therapeutic per-
spective on Nietzsche’s philosophical practice; we also have the alpha and
omega of Freud’s psychoanalytic practice: repetition compulsion in its mani-
festation as transference. In conclusion, I want to suggest that agonal trans-
valuation opens a rich seam for the comparison of Nietzschean philosophy
and Freudian analysis centered in the concept of transference [Übertragung ].In analysis, Freud argues, repressed episodes from the analysand’s past are
repeated, enacted or transferred onto the analytic relationship unawares. As
such, transference allows for the compulsive repetition of the repressed in
the distorted form of neurotic symptoms. In maintaining these symptoms and
the gratification they afford, it constitutes one of the greatest obstacles to
therapy. This, however, is but one side of transference, which is also the key
to therapy for Freud. Precisely because of the freedom it gives to repetition
compulsion, transference is a privileged site for the manifestation of repressed
or “forgotten” pathogenic impulses and their transformation through the work of remembering.
In a thought-provoking book called Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis, Daniel
Chapelle has argued that transference therapy shares with Nietzsche’s thought
of Eternal Recurrence the goal of redeeming the past (Becoming), and the
formula of compulsive repetition for achieving this goal. In a sequel to this
paper,33 I have tried to extend this thesis from the Eternal Recurrence to Ni-
etzsche’s actual philosophical practice, with the claim that agonal transvalu-ation enacts a compulsive repetitive contestation of the sickness animating it (ressentiment). This claim precludes any simple acceptance or justification
of ressentiment, at one extreme; and the redemptive impulse to eliminate
sickness once and for all, at the other. Instead, the agonal transference of vengeful impulses releases energy for an open-ended contestation of sick-
ness that would empower us to master it; a goal akin to the analytic task of
“binding” or “taming” [ Bändigung ] pathological drives.34
A central affinity between Nietzschean and Freudian transference involves
the performative axis of discourse. As a forgetful re-enactment of hidden
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 21/26
89 NIETZSCHE’S AGON WITH RESSENTIMENT
thought contents, analytic transference connects two distinct axes of the ana-lysand’s discourse: the conscious and the unconscious, the thematic and the
performative. Transference thus serves as an oblique, metaphorical re-enact-
ment of unconscious experience patterns, and the analyst can learn to decypher
the analysand’s conscious discourse as a displaced, metaphorical commen-
tary on an unconscious text of pathogenic instincts. Nietzsche’s texts, I have
argued, also work along two such axes, connected by the transference of
repetitive affective patterns. His conscious, transvaluative discourse at the
surface of the text establishes a philosophical value-critique in relation to
another; at the same time, the dynamics of Nietzschean critique perform or
enact a shadow play of forgotten, hidden impulses, a displaced, metaphorical
commentary on the embodied ressentiment against ressentiment animating
it. If, as I have argued, agonal transference affords both a code or cypher for
making the unconscious text of critical transvaluation manifest and a regime
for re-organising and transforming these affective forces, then a detailed com-
parison of the mechanics and goals of Nietzchean and Freudian therapies
becomes possible. Significant differences, both theoretical and practical,
emerge from such a study. But important affinities can also be demonstrated
in the areas of sublimation, play and the Enlightened telos of a binding mas-
tery over the pathological forces which, for both thinkers, are absolutely per-
vasive: the rule of human life, not the exception, under modern conditions.
Notes
1. References to Nietzsche’s published texts follow standard English abbreviations with
section/aphorism numbers and/or names, as appropriate; occasionally volume and page
numbers are given from the standard German edition, the Kritische Studienausgabe[KSA], ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Munich and Berlin: dtv and de Gruyter, 1980).
References to the Nachlass are also from the KSA and follow the notation therein.
Emphases are original, unless indicated. Translations are mine, although I have leaned
on Hollingdale, Kaufmann and others. Square brackets are mainly used in quotes for
alternative translations, interpolations or comments of mine.
2. The closing sections of GM I on “Rome versus Judea” could be read in this vein. See
also GM I 12, where Nietzsche appeals for a “redeeming case of human existence”
[erlösenden Glücksfall des Menschen].
3. E.g. EH Pref. 2 identifies “ideals” with the worship of the “reverse values from those with
which the flourishing, the future, the high right to the future would be guaranteed”. In AC
3, Nietzsche defines his problem as follows: “what type of human one ought to breed ,ought to will, as more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of the future.”
4. E.g. through the moralisation of guilt as sin. For Nietzsche this is typical of priestly
therapy, as “a mere affect-medication, not at all a real healing for the sick in the physi-
ological sense” (GM III 16).
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 22/26
90 HERMAN W. SIEMENS
5. See EH Pref. 4; Z Redemption. Or again: I am a railing by the torrent: let those who can,grasp me! Your crutch, however, I am not” (Z Pale Criminal).
6. Cf. Nietzsche Contra Wagner: We Antipodes, where this passage occurs with slight
modifications and the further connection with revenge: “The revenge against life itself
– the most voluptuous kind of intoxication [ Rausch] for those so impoverished.” (KSA
6. 425). The connection between weakness, revenge and narcosis is discussed below.
7. On this point see: W. Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche: Seine Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätze seiner Philosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971), 55, 78, 121.
8. Cf. H. Ottmann, Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1987), 223:
“A radical will to annihilate [Vernichtungswille] attests to weakness, not strength”. This
view, central to Nietzsche’s philosophy of power from the late 1870’s on, is traced by
Ottmann back to his early reception of Thucydides, whose “dialectical turn against total
power” leads Nietzsche to advocate a certain equilibrium and reciprocity of power. An
analogous turn towards agonal relations of power will be traced in §2 of this paper.
9. Homer’s Wettkampf (KSA 1. 783ff.). The best available translation is by C. Acampora,
in Nietzscheana (North American Nietzsche Society), 5, 1996. Together with the note-
book PII8b (=16[], KSA 7), Homer’s Contest is the most important source for Nietzsche’s
thought on the agon. As one of “Five Prefaces for Unwritten Books” given to Cosima
Wagner for Christmas 1872, it was “finished on the 29 December 1872” (KSA 1. 792).
But the drafts in 16[] show that Nietzsche was working on it in period: summer ‘71–
early ‘72, i.e. during latter stages of The Birth of Tragedy. The folder MpXII 3 (=20[],
KSA 7), containing first draft, is dated summer ‘72.
10. “How Greek nature knows how to make use of all terrifying qualities:the tiger-like rage for destruction (of the tribes etc.) in the agon
the unnatural drives (in the education of the youth by the man)
the Asiatic orgiastic ways (in the Dionysian)
the hostile isolation of the individual (Erga) in the Apollinian.
The application of the harmful towards useful [ends] is idealised in the world-viewof Heraclitus .
7. Finale: Dithyramb to art and the artist: because they first create [herausschaffen]
the human and transpose [übertragen] all its drives into culture.” (KSA 7. 16[18])
“The poet overcomes the struggle for existence by idealising it into a free agon [con-
test]. Here is the existence, for which there is still a struggle, existence in praise, in
undying fame.
The poet educates: he knows how to transpose [übertragen] the Greeks’ tiger-like
drives to ravaging devastation into the good Eris.” (KSA 7. 16[15])
11. For an overview of different conceptions of health in Nietzsche’s thought, see: M. Pasley,
“Nietzsche’s Use of Medical Terms,” in Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought (London:
Methuen, 1978), 123–158. The chronological emphasis in Pasley’s account is useful,
but rather too stark. Conceptions that he separates into different phases often play into
one and the same text.
12. See: Socrates’ Hesitation: Agonal Critique and Creativity in Nietzsche’s Early Thought (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Essex, 1993). Ch’s III & IV argue for an ago-
nal reading of Nietzsche’s engagement with Socrates in BT and related texts; Ch’s V–
VII present an agonal reading of Nietzsche’s relation to the pre-Socratic philosophers
as a way into the problem of tragedy in his thought. Also: “Agonal Writing: Towards an
Agonal Model for Critical Transvaluation” (article based on workshop paper given at
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 23/26
91 NIETZSCHE’S AGON WITH RESSENTIMENT
the 1994 Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society in Cardiff, Wales. Soon to ap- pear in forthcoming Conference Proceedings), where the case for agonal hermeneutics
is made with reference to TI Morality as Anti-Nature. Finally: “Nietzsche’s Hammer:
Philosophy, Destruction, or The Art of Limited Warfare”, Tijdschrifit voor Filosofie, 60,
2 (June 1998) discusses Nietzsche’s own account of his war-praxis in EH (EH Wise 7)
from an agonal perspective.
13. In Homer’s Contest , Nietzsche writes of the institution of banishment or ostracism:
“one removes the outstanding individual so that the play of forces [Wettspiel der Kräfte]
may reawaken: a thought that is inimical to the “exclusivity” of genius in the modern
sense, but presupposes that in a natural order of things there are always several gen-
iuses who rouse one another to action, as they also hold one another within the bounds
of measure. That is the crux of the Hellenic notion of contest: it abhors absolute he-
gemony [ Alleinherrschaft ] and fears its dangers; it desires, as a protection against gen-
ius – a second genius.” (HC; KSA 1. 789). The exclusive or “outstanding individual”,
the one who holds “absolute hegemony” [ Alleinherrschaft ], is the absolute victor , i.e.
that contestant to whom none are equal. If the outstanding individual is ostracised for
the sake of the agon, then the agon can only thrive where a plurality of more-or-lessequal , antagonistic forces [ Kräfte] or “geniuses” are engaged in contestation. Accord-
ing to Vernant, it is Hesiod who first observed that “all rivalry, all eris presupposes a
relationship of equality” [J.-P. Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1982), 47], a principle that Nietzsche incorporates into his
own form of philosophical warfare: “The task is to become master, not over any
resistances, but over those against which one has bring one’s entire strength, suppleness
and mastery of weapons to bear, – over equal opponents . . . Equality in the face of the
enemy – first presupposition of an honest duel [. . .]” (EH Wise 7).
14. This point is grounded in a feature of the agon that distinguishes it from a normal game.
Usually victory and defeat in a particular bout are firmly defined, prescribed by a rule
or set of rules that give a standard or measure of victory, outside and independently of the course taken by a particular bout. In the agon, by contrast, the measure or standard
of victory is immanent to the dynamic of each contest: it is the actual issue of contesta-
tion, the bone of contention. The agon therefore involves a contest of judgements of
victory, or a contestation of justice (the standard for judging victory). Justice needs to
be re-determined, defined anew in response to the dynamic course of taken by each
agon, which begins by throwing our judgement into question. In each contest it is the
very definition of victory that is at issue, so that each bout puts the question: “What
constitutes victory?” into play. On this important point see HaH 170 on “artistic ambi-
tion”: the Greek tragedians “strive for victory over rivals in their own estimation, be-
fore their own seat of judgement, they really want to be more excellent; they then
demand consensus on this their own estimation from others outside, confirmation of
their judgement.[. . .]” (HaH 170 HS). Also HC, where an antagonist of Pericles, when
asked which of them is the best wrestler in the city, answers: “ ‘even if I throw him
down he denies that he has fallen, attains his objective and persuades those who saw
him fall’ ” (HC; KSA 1. 788). The account of Heraclitus in PTG also contains important
remarks on the immanence of justice to agonal antagonism (PTG 5–6; KSA 1. 825f).
15. On this important point see my discussion of Nietzsche’s “war-praxis” (EH Wise 7), in:
“Nietzsche’s Hammer. . .”, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 60, 2 (June 1998), pp. 334–338,
346f.
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 24/26
92 HERMAN W. SIEMENS
16. H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1996), 103–104. The translation has been modified
where I felt it to be necessary.
17. p. 119ff. Gadamer refers to the work of Walter Otto and Karl Kerenyi (“Vom Wesen des
Festes,”) Paideuma, 1938).
18. The attempt to refer Nietzsche’s style of thought to his substantive concept of life has
already been made by other commentators. In the absence of an agonal model,
Müller-Lauter appeals directly to the Will to Power as the ‘ontological’ ground of
Nietzschean discourse that determines its standard of truth. See: W. Müller-Lauter,
Nietzsche: Seine Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätze seiner Philosophie, Ch.
5. In a similar move, van Tongeren argues that Nietzsche’s moral ideal is determined by
the Will to Power in its character as struggle. See: P. van Tongeren, Die Moral von Nietzsches Moralkritik (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988), Chs. 5 and 6. Blondel, by contrast, focuses on the
problem of language: the dynamics of “saying and unsaying” enable Nietzsche to “say
life” under the constraints imposed by his critique of metaphysics in language. See: E.
Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture. Philosophy as Philological Genealogy, trans.
Sean Hand (London, Althlone, 1991), Ch. 2. My claim differs from these in its therapeutic
accent; but more importantly, it shifts the explanandum from the actual dynamics of Ni-
etzsche’s thought, to the agonal model which I argue regulates them.
19. See BGE 208 and 209, where an account of Nietzsche’s own style of critical interpreta-
tion is cast as: “Yes! and No!”, “a pessimism bonae voluntatis”, and a “scepticism of
bold manliness” which “despises and yet seizes for itself. . . undermines and appropri-
ates . . . believes not, but does not thereby lose itself.”
20. W. Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche: Seine Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätze seiner Philosophie, p. 113. Ch. 5 establishes this motif with regard to the will to truth.
Chs. 6 and 7 then trace it to the figure of the Übermensch and the thought of Eternal
Recurrence. See also the illuminating discussion focused on the problem of struggle in:
P. van Tongeren, Die Moral von Nietzsches Moralkritik , Ch. 5, §3.1 and Ch. 6. Theagonal account of this double-movement sketched below offers a preliminary response
to these two authors, both of whom see it as deeply problematic.
21. P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970), esp. Book II Part I: pp. 65ff. and
390ff. on Psychoanalysis and Phenomenology.
22. E. Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, 7.
23. E. Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, Introduction.
24. Schopenhauer’s “self-lacerating Will”; Darwin’s “struggle for existence”; Heraclitus’
“father of all things”; and, in the context of HC, the “evil Eris” and the “Children of the
Night” described in Hesiod’s Works and Days.
For Darwin: “The poet overcomes the struggle for existence by idealising it into a
free agon [contest]. Here is the existence, for which there is still a struggle, existence in
praise, in undying fame. The poet educates [erzieht ] : he knows how to transpose
[übertragen] the Greeks’ tiger-like drives to ravaging devastation into the good Eris.”
(KSA 7: 16[15]; HS). For Heraclitus’ “father of all”, see fragment 53: “War is the father
of all (beings) and the king of all.” (In H. Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker , ed.
W. Kranz, Berlin: 1960: 9th ed.). For a useful list of references to this principle in
Ni et zs ch e, se e LP. Hers ch be ll & S. A. Ni mi s, “N ie tz sc he and He ra cl it us ”,
Nietzsche-Studien 8, 22–26. One important reference not mentioned by them is in BT 4
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 25/26
93 NIETZSCHE’S AGON WITH RESSENTIMENT
(KSA 1. 39), where Nietzsche writes of “eternal contradiction” as the “father of things”.The insight into war [Vernichtungstreiben] as the fundamental character of life is attrib-
uted to all Greeks in BT 7 (KSA 1. 56).
25. For envy [ Neid ] and ambition [ Ehrgeiz], the agonal affects par excellence, see HC KSA 1.
785–787, 787–790 respectively. Agonal affects are distinguished from destructive af-
fects – hate, cruelty, lust, deceit etc. – according to Hesiod’s distinction between the
good and the evil Eris goddesses. The evil Eris “drives men towards the inimical
struggle for annihilation [Vernichtungskampf ]”; whereas that Eris is good “who, as
jealousy, wrath, envy, rouses [stimulates] men to deeds, not of mutual destruction
[Vernichtungskampf ], but rather the deed of contest [Wettkampf ]. The Greek is enviousand feels this quality not as a flaw, but rather as the effect of a beneficent deity . . .”
(HC; KSA 1. 787). If the Greeks celebrated agonal affects, like envy, ambition etc. in
the deity of the “good Eris”, they also held a reverence of terror for other, destructive
affects, in the sister deity: “the evil Eris”.
26. Although the concept of Übertragung governs the account of agonal culture in HC, the
term itself is strangely absent. Important formulations are to be found the Nachlass
surrounding the essay, especially: 16[18], [15], [26] (KSA 7). Other important passages
are: HaH 214 and 5[91] (KSA 7).
27. E. Blondel, “Nietzsche: Life as Metaphor”, in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 153.
28. See HC (KSA 1. 783–785) on the latent violence and the horror of the night – the realm
of the evil Eris – “behind” the warm, mild sunlight of Apollinian art – sculpture and
Homeric epic, in particular.
29. HaH 214. Cf. KSA 8: 5[146] on the institutional underpinnings of the Greek acknowl-
edgement of ‘base’ drives. In note 7[75] (KSA 9) the affirmative praise of drives in-
cludes reference to such agonal affects as envy and hatred; significantly, Nietzsche’s
thoughts are directed towards the future (“A hint for the future?? NB”).
30. A compelling exposition of this insight has recently come to my attention in: D.W.Conway, Nietzsche and the Political (London: Routledge, 1997), 94ff.
31. See e.g. GM III 13 where the ascetic ideal is derived from the “protective and curative
instinct of a degenerating form of life”, as a “means” ( Mittel ) to preserve that form of
life; or more precisely, as a means whereby active forces, “the instincts of life that are
deepest and have remained intact”, combat a “partial physiological inhibition and ex-
haustion”. Despite its apparent complicity with other-worldly wishes of sick and ex-
hausted forms of life, the ascetic ideal is exposed as a “ruse for the preservation of life”
in the hands of the ascetic priest, the “incarnate wish for a being-other, a being-elsewhere”:
“but the very power of his wishing is the fetter that binds him here, and through it he
becomes the instrument which must work at creating more favourable conditions for
being-here and being-human . . . this apparent enemy of life, this negator , – precisely
he belongs to the greatest of the conserving and Yes-creating forces of life.
32. D. Chapelle, Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 5.
33. “Towards a Therapeutic Reading of Critical Transvaluation (II): Transference in Nietzsche
and Freud”, to be published in New Nietzsche Studies, Special Issue on Nietzsche and
Psychoanalysis, forthcoming 2001.
34. See Freud’s “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”, in the Standard Edition of theComplete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth
Press, 1953), vol. 23, 224–225.
8/13/2019 Siemens Agon and Ressentiment
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siemens-agon-and-ressentiment 26/26
94 HERMAN W. SIEMENS