A semblance of identity

The post-foundational subject

In contemporary theory, the traditional subject may indeed be dead, its unity dissolved in a sea of relations that have exposed the contingent and ephemeral nature of its boundaries. The Cartesian cogito, independent and transparent to itself, has proven as unsustainable as the Hegelian subject, whose unity rests on the reciprocal recognition established by its negative relations to others. Nevertheless, the subject remains an important element in moral and political debates about agency and responsibility at both the individual and the collective level. And, indeed, many have sought to reground agency and responsibility on a new model of subjectivity, one that, in their view, escapes reliance on the metaphysical crutches that supported the old one.

For a certain kind of post-foundational political thought, the task has been one of displacing – but not dissolving – identity by exposing the constitutive exclusions that are simultaneously its conditions of possibility and impossibility. In this kind of theory, an identity is fixed, on the one hand, through exclusions that differentiate it from other identities, and, on the other hand, through the more fundamental exclusion of an unrepresentable ontological difference often signified by the Lacanian terminology of ‘lack’. But as these excluded differences also form a ‘constitutive outside’ – and, indeed, they do not pre-exist the exclusions themselves, even if they are presupposed by them – they are never simply exterior, and so they compromise every identity’s solidity even as they consolidate it. It is on this paradox that the subject is reconstituted: instead of the self-certainty that follows from a process that secures unity – for example, the dialectical movement that secures the self-identity of the ego (‘I am I’) by mediating it with its other, by which Hegel defines self-consciousness as ‘Desire in general’ (Hegel, 1977: § 167) – subjectivity involves a process of fixation through constitutive exclusions and repressions that also undermine these determinations. ⁴

On the one hand, the term ‘subject’ can be taken to name a conscious agency capable of making choices and taking responsibility that emerges from a temporary stabilization brought about by always incomplete acts of identification: in Ernesto Laclau’s words, the subject ‘can be formed only through acts of identification. If I need to identify with something, it is because I do not have a full identity in the first place’ (1996b: 92). This identification, in turn, arises through exclusions, so that, as Judith Butler states, ‘the subject, the speaking “I”’ is formed through an ‘exclusionary matrix’ that ‘requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects,” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject’ (1993: 3). On the other hand, the subject is often conceived not as the product of these processes of identification and exclusion, but as the self-defeating processes themselves. Slavoj Žižek thus maintains that rather than being ‘always caught in, traversed by the pre-subjective process (of “writing”, of “desire” and so on)’ (1989: 174), the subject is ‘an empty place’ (ibid.: 175) that persists when all pre- or non-subjective elements are abstracted away: ‘what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or trans-subjective process … but a lack in the structure, a lack which is the subject’ (ibid.). But this subject of lack is also a subject of self-subversion: ‘it is not enough to say that the subject’s identity is always, constitutively, truncated, dispersed because of the intrusion of an irreducible outside. The point is rather that the “subject” is nothing but the name for this “mutilation,” for this impossibility of the “substance” to realize itself fully, to achieve its full identity-with-itself’ (1991: 95, n. 35). Considered in these terms, the subject is the unconscious agency that, the conscious subject not knowing what it does, constitutes its agency through an act that both determines it and subverts it. ⁵ Whether the term ‘subject’ names the conscious being constituted by exclusions, the unity of unconscious constitutive processes, ⁶ or what resides in the gap between an undecidable terrain on which identities are consolidated and the decision/identification that secures individual or collective identity through exclusion, constituting itself by the decision by which it crosses from one side to the other, ⁷ it certainly differs from the Cartesian cogito that is conscious and transparent to itself. Nevertheless, it still remains connected to its cousin, if only by the way it establishes the self-subverting ground of that cogito. ⁸

Without ‘the subject, who can only exist as a will transcending the structure’ (Laclau, 1996b: 92), action, and hence politics, would seem not to be possible. Thus Laclau, Žižek and others often criticize thinkers who supposedly reduce the subject to a mere ‘subject position’ or linguistic effect, or who would disperse the subject completely in processes of subjectivization, leaving some structureless abyss in its place. ⁹ The impossibility of the subject’s ever fully assuming a stable identity, alongside its necessary attempt to do so, is taken to be ‘a condition of democratic contestation itself’ (Butler, Laclau and Žižek, 2000: 2), and the basis for a pluralist moral theory. ¹⁰ But the assumption that this agency must take the form of a (temporarily) unified subject with a stable identity is far from unproblematic. It is asserted alongside a stark alternative of affirming a ‘unique scene of the Self’ or reducing the self to a chaotic ‘pandemonium of competing forces’ (Žižek, 2008: xxiii). Referring to the constitutive exclusions that stabilize a discourse and allow the subject to position itself and assume its identity, for example, Laclau maintains that ‘a discourse in which meaning cannot possibly be fixed is nothing else but the discourse of the psychotic’ (1990: 90), a point that underpins the view that ‘the impossibility of an ultimate fixity of meaning implies that there have to be partial fixations – otherwise, the very flow of differences would be impossible. … Any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 112). The rejection of the consolidation of identity through constitutive exclusion is taken either to lead to the incoherence of a ‘pure particularism’ of free-floating and disconnected differences ¹¹ or to amount to an imperialistic move to absorb all identities into some greater unity. ¹² And the insistence that agency take the form of unified subjectivity is frequently used to embed notions of responsibility and guilt that on certain registers remain close to more traditional conceptions, at least in so far as they contrast this idea of responsibility-for-self against that of a disordered self unable to assume any responsibility. ¹³ Perhaps unsurprisingly, the theorists who insist on the necessity of the subject constituted through negative exclusions often read Nietzsche in a limited and reductive way, particularly where he would seem to pose alternatives to these ideas. ¹⁴ Of course, Nietzsche, perhaps more than any other major philosophical figure, attacks the notion of the unified subject not only for reflecting a slavish and guilt-laden perspective on life, but for carrying metaphysical remnants into an age that purports to be post-metaphysical.

For these reasons, I maintain that the post-foundational theories that hold meaningful agency to require the category of the subject, arguing that an agent must at least temporarily be a fixed being with a solid identity or its actions can only be chaotic and indeed psychotic, ultimately retain a shadow of the classical view of the subject. Their insistence on the need for the subject misunderstands and simplifies agency in a way comparable to what the early Sartre finds with the traditional ego. Against such a view, this article holds that genuinely concrete agency is not a product of constitutive exclusions and fleeting unities, but rather that such exclusions and unifications are at best secondary and derivative. This is not to say that identity, unity and the uncertain separation of the agent from what it is not, are unimportant or non-existent; it is simply to say that they are not foundational. They are effects of the multiplicity that characterizes concrete agency rather than a reduction of multiplicity that might seem necessary for agency to function concretely and coherently. Furthermore, this multiplicity is not a chaotic scattering of disparate and disconnected differences, but a complex of differences related and thus brought together in a synthesis, but a synthesis that at best only appears to bring differences into unity. In this way, identity, unity and the negative relation of the subject to what it is not, are also semblances, appearing to be more substantial and fundamental than they really are. They accompany certain kinds of agency, and, as the early Sartre argues, they help sustain those forms of agency, but it is a mistake to consider them to be agency’s conditions of possibility.

I will advance these claims through an examination of Nietzsche’s account of the agency of the drives and their relation to the ego. Nietzsche’s doctrine of perspectivism (that is, that there are no facts, only interpretations) and the connections he draws between perspective, valuations and the will to power (the will to power of the weak demands a moral order of good and evil; the strong go beyond good and evil) are well known. However, as Daniel W. Smith points out:

Agency, along with the meaningful valuations off of which it functions, exists at the level of our multiple, conflicting, relational drives, while the conscious and reflective self, which gives us our sense of being a unified ‘I’ or ego, is largely simply along for the ride, associating itself or taking sides with a particular drive (2007: 70). This conscious subject, for Nietzsche, is merely an effect of unconscious and impersonal drives, which engender a synthetic complex that is irreducible to unity; the ego, which seems to be a governing centre, is a semblance or an illusion. Consciousness and the ego seem regularly to accompany our actions and, to a degree, give these actions sense and definition, yet they are also inadequate to the multiplicity from which they emerge. For Nietzsche, the ego is neither a necessary presumption for understanding the coherence of our agency nor an indispensable foundation for morality or ethics. Indeed, it is precisely the ability to overcome the illusion of the ego that Nietzsche ties to a morality and ethics that goes beyond good and evil.

There are times of great joy or anger or grief when one is overwhelmed and seems almost to become a spectator to an outpouring of emotion. A person might sob uncontrollably, while at the same time, and with a strange sense of calm detachment, feel almost like a bewildered outsider witnessing someone else having an outburst. The usual interpretation of these events is that one has ‘lost control of oneself’. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that, at least temporarily, it has become impossible to conceal an always already existing disconnect between our usual interpretation of ourselves as unified beings and the reality of our concrete multiplicity. These moments, I want to say, have ethical significance, in so far as they make us appreciate that we are not the kind of agents that our politics and our morality usually insist that we be. They challenge us, as Nietzsche would say, to see whether we could not perhaps think differently as a first step towards eventually being able to feel differently. ¹⁵

The drives and the ego

Freud’s conceptualization of the primary instincts is an instructive counterpoint to Nietzsche’s theory of drives. ¹⁶ Freud defines instinct as ‘an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation … lying on the frontier between the mental and the physical’ (Freud, 1953: 168). He contrasts it to ‘a “stimulus,” which is set up by single excitations coming from without’ (ibid.) and to which the instincts respond. Instincts are thus internal and immanent motor forces, part psychical and part physical, which amount to ‘a kind of elasticity of living things’ (Freud, 1959: 57) and which relate living beings to the external world. The multiplicity of instincts, along with their loose and ambivalent relations to objects, creates a cacophony within the initially decentered infant, which unifies itself only through a largely unconscious and always precarious resolution of these conflicts by way of instinctual repression. The result is the individuation of the infant, its recognition of its separation from the external world, and consequently the formation of ‘the inclusive unity of the ego’ (ibid.: 11), which, filtering out incompatible instincts or components of instincts, governs the discharge of psychic energies. Despite the instincts having causal efficacy, their unification results primarily from external impositions, as various frustrations and dangers from the outside, ranging from the withdrawal of the mother to the realistic (if not necessarily real) threat of castration by the father, compel the formation of the ego and superego and the establishment of the reality principle and the sense of guilt. ¹⁷

Freud acknowledges that there is no necessary conceptual limit to the number of instincts – ‘in no region of psychology were we groping more in the dark. Everyone assumed the existence of as many instincts or “basic instincts” as he chose’ (Freud, 1957: 51) – yet he consistently restricts the number of component instincts to two. Maintaining, against Jung’s monism, that ‘our views have from the first been dualistic’ (ibid.: 53), he insists that a fundamental and irreconcilable opposition of component instincts is necessary both to sustain the tension that propels psychic life and to carve out the various regions of the psyche as it develops over time. When the phenomenon of narcissism undercuts the opposition between id- and ego-instincts, showing the instinct for self-preservation to be a modification of an original self-love and thereby collapsing the analytic distinction between the ego and the id, it indicates that ‘the distinction between the two kinds of instinct, which was originally regarded as in some sort of way qualitative, must now be characterized differently – namely, as being topographical’ (ibid.: 52). This conclusion pushes Freud to search for an instinctual conflict operating ‘beyond’ the pleasure principle. Observations about the compulsion to repeat provide evidence of the fundamentally conservative nature of all instincts (ibid.: 36) and lead to the speculation that there exists in living beings an instinct to return to an earlier, inorganic state. Freud briefly considers whether this death instinct alone could be foundational, the instincts that serve life perhaps functioning only so that the organism can die in its own way (ibid.: 37–9). However, holding firmly to his commitment to dualism, he instead posits an opposition between two types of conservative instinct, one aiming to return life to the inorganic and the other propelling it to forge larger unities. This dualism between Thanatos and Eros cannot be subsumed under the previous dualism of ego- and id-instincts, allowing Freud to proclaim the new model of the psyche to be an advance on the old one. It also enables a new separation of psychic structures, whereby the ego and id become modifications of Eros and the superego emerges from Thanatos being thrust outwards and then turned back. Yet Freud still laments: ‘we still feel our line of thought appreciably hampered by the fact that we cannot ascribe to the sexual instinct the characteristic of a compulsion to repeat’ (ibid.: 56); and, indeed, the death instinct, just like the ego-instincts of the earlier model, remains an indemonstrable supposition used to explain observable phenomena. ¹⁸ Moreover, the new arrangement collapses in a similar way to the old one, as Freud admits that ‘if the pleasure principle had not already been operative in [the primary psychic processes] it could never have been established for the later ones’ and that ‘the pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts’ (ibid.: 63). As pleasure corresponds to a decrease in internal tension or excitation (ibid.: 8), the conflict between Eros and Thanatos becomes a struggle over ways to achieve this aim; yet a common aim is precisely what made the earlier opposition between id- and ego-instincts untenable.

Like Freud, Nietzsche posits a primordial struggle among conflicting drives, holding the self to be a ‘multitude and disgregation of impulses’ (Nietzsche, 1968: § 46) or ‘an inextricable multiplicity of ascending and descending life-processes’ (ibid.: § 339). However, refusing to categorize drives according to fundamental aims or purposes, but instead ascribing to them simply a need to discharge their strength, ¹⁹ he establishes neither a monistic conception of drives nor a dualism among conflicting or opposed drives. Instead, he maintains:

Against opposition, Nietzsche insists on a more complex and subtle ‘order of rank’ among agonistic drives, where they are organized in terms of differing degrees of power. ²⁰ The self constituted by this arrangement of drives either lacks systematic order (corresponding to having ‘weak will’) or achieves coherence through the coordination of a dominant impulse (corresponding to ‘strong will’) (Nietzsche, 1968: § 46); its strength is assessed by its capacity to endure and overcome antagonism (ibid.: § 382). But if the self achieves coherence and strength, it is not due to the organization of its drives into unity, but rather to the way its multiplicity of drives establishes a seemingly durable but never fully centred complex. The order of rank that emerges in an organism is thus not a fixed hierarchy but ‘a pattern of domination that signifies a unity but is not a unity’ (ibid.: § 561).

Nietzsche maintains that a world without stable essences lying beneath appearances, a world without things-in-themselves, is ‘essentially a world of relationships’ in which the sum of forces and resistances emanating from each point ‘is in every case quite incongruent’ (Nietzsche, 1968: § 568). It is a world of clashing forces, in which ‘the adiaphorous [neutral] state is missing, though it is thinkable’ (ibid.: § 634). This view underpins Nietzsche’s thesis of agonistic drives within the organism, the drives themselves being nothing other than relational forces. However, Nietzsche also contends that a ‘will to power’ both emerges from and determines the order of rank of the drives. The will to power prevents the interaction among forces from falling into a form of mechanistic determinism, but it also corrects, Nietzsche says, the shortcomings of mechanistic theory – ‘it expresses the characteristic that cannot be thought out of the mechanistic order without thinking away this order itself’ (ibid.). The mechanistic interpretation of the world, which ‘seems today to stand victorious’ (ibid.: § 618), abandons any assertion of purpose or goal in favour of a purely quantitative analysis. However, the result is only abstraction and description, never explanation and understanding, ²¹ mechanistic theory resting on an essentialist hypothesis of the atom as the seat of motion and positing, without demonstration or justification, mysterious powers of attraction and repulsion among independently existing things (ibid.: §§ 620–1, 624–5, 660). The mechanistic conception of force, therefore, ‘still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as “will to power,” i.e., as an insatiable desire to manifest power; or as the employment and exercise of power, as a creative drive, etc.’ (ibid.: § 619). This will to power is not a will in the ordinary sense: ‘the will of psychology hitherto is an unjustified generalization … this will does not exist at all’ (ibid.: § 692). It ascribes the required intentionality to force – ‘we cannot think of an attraction divorced from an intention’ (ibid.: § 627); also, ‘there is no such thing as “willing,” but only a willing something: one must not remove the aim from the total condition’ (ibid.: § 668) – but not as a teleological principle for force and not in the form of a transcendent cause that conditions its effects. Indeed, to the extent that it can be aligned with causality – keeping in mind Nietzsche’s critique of the concepts of cause and effect – the will to power must be treated as a purely immanent cause. Hence his declaration: ‘there is absolutely no other kind of causality than that of will [to power] upon will [to power]. Not explained mechanistically’ (ibid.: § 658).

But is the will to power anything more than a fanciful assertion presented to avoid the conclusion that ‘in a purely quantitative world everything would be dead, stiff, motionless’ (Nietzsche, 1968: § 564)? It is no more far-fetched, Nietzsche contends, than the mechanistic assumption of the atom as the seat of causality, which merely projects the fictitious psychological ego onto the world (see Nietzsche, 1990: 59–61); but it is also a necessary conclusion, he feels, if the critique of mechanism, and specifically of its abstract understandings of quantity and quality, is followed through. ²² Mechanistic theory holds all qualities perceived by the senses to be reducible to quantitative formulas: the colour red, for example, is nothing more than light waves radiating within a certain frequency band, and so forth. Yet on the one hand, ‘everything for which the word “knowledge” makes any sense refers to the domain of reckoning, weighing, measuring, to the domain of quantity; while … all our sensations of value (i.e. simply our sensations) adhere precisely to qualities’ (Nietzsche, 1968: § 565); on the other hand, ‘we need “unities” in order to be able to reckon: that does not mean we must suppose that such unities exist’ (ibid.: § 635). While correctly locating knowledge in the realm of quantity, mechanism uncritically adopts the abstraction of unity (the atom), along with the concept of motion in empty space, ²³ which allows it to reduce quality to quantity and to maintain an absolute divide between knowledge (what can be put in ‘objective’, quantitative terms) and value (the ‘subjective’ interpretation or assessment of this ‘objective’ reality). Units enable counting and quantification, but they also abstract away constitutive relations. Thus on a more concrete level – the level at which there are no unities or things pre-existing their relations, but only incongruent relations of force – quantity cannot be a number but only a relation: there is no ‘quantity in itself’, but rather ‘difference in quantity’, an ordinal relation of more or less – hence a relation of order of rank – but one that cannot be placed on a fixed numerical scale. In being more or less, Nietzsche holds, differences in quantity are also differences in power: they involve strength and weakness, ‘but it should be kept in mind that “strong” and “weak” are relative concepts’ (Nietzsche, 1974: § 118). What are therefore given to us through our senses, and only later organized by us into countable unities, are the affects of this ‘difference in quantity’.

Now Nietzsche maintains that difference in quantity, as a difference of more or less, is never experienced as such, but is instead felt in terms of quality: ‘Our “knowing” limits itself to establishing quantities; but we cannot help feeling these differences in quantity as qualities … we sense bigness and smallness in relation to the conditions of our existence … with regard to making possible our existence we sense even relations between magnitudes as qualities’ (Nietzsche, 1968: § 563). These qualities are entirely a matter of perspective – ‘It is obvious that every creature different from us senses different qualities and consequently lives in a different world from that in which we live’ (ibid.: § 565) – but they are not merely subjective interpretations of an independent quantitative world. When quality is linked to concrete difference in quantity, mechanism’s partitioning of knowledge and value becomes untenable. Values may not be reducible to fixed quantities, but they are nevertheless immanent to the domain of quantity, since values always refer to power relations and are constructed so as to be ‘our perspective “truths” which belong to us alone and can by no means be “known”’ (ibid.). As a result: ‘The reduction of all qualities to quantities is nonsense: what appears is that the one accompanies the other, an analogy’ (ibid.: § 564). ²⁴

Once mechanism’s abstractions of unity and numerical quantity are eliminated, ‘no things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their “effect” upon the same’ (Nietzsche, 1968: § 635). But if the connection between difference in quantity and the feeling of quality is accepted, then the will to power must be acknowledged, Nietzsche maintains, simply because ‘mere variations of power could not feel themselves to be such: there must be present something that wants to grow and interprets the value of whatever else wants to grow’ (ibid.: § 643). The will to power is therefore ‘not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos – the most elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first emerge’ (ibid.: § 635). And the varied meanings of the Greek pathos – ‘occasion, event, passion, suffering, destiny’ (Kaufmann, 1974: 264) – are significant. The will to power arises with the event of clashing forces, and, indeed, an event is nothing other than such a clash: ‘The degree of resistance and the degree of superior power – this is the question in every event’ (Nietzsche, 1968: § 634). It is an affect or a feeling of power that is inseparable from this clash and it defines a perspective. As such, it reacts back upon the conditions from which it emerges by evaluating, judging and interpreting: ‘Every center of force adopts a perspective toward the entire remainder, i.e., its own particular valuation, mode of action, and mode of resistance’ (ibid.: § 567). No drive, no force, could be or become without this feeling of power and a non-subjective compulsion to discharge its strength; as such, each force, which is what it is because of its relations of more and less with every other force, interprets its conditions so that this feeling of power can be satisfied. ²⁵

The conflict among drives seeking to discharge their force is thus one of quantitative differences in power that engender qualitative valuations, the discharge itself being the impulse to enforce these valuations: ‘Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm’ (Nietzsche, 1968: § 481). As a struggle of order of rank, the dominance of particular drives and their valuations is contingent and fluctuating, and the will to power emerging from them ‘expresses itself in the interpretation, in the manner in which force is used up. … The same quantum of energy means different things at different stages of evolution’ (ibid.: § 639). These variations are found within the individual as much as between individuals.

The meaning and value of each drive is determined only in relation to the others and in relation to broader evaluations that result from certain drives establishing dominance: ‘In itself it [a drive] has … neither this moral character nor any moral character at all, nor even a definite attendant sensation of pleasure or displeasure: it acquires all this, as its second nature, only when it enters into relations with drives already baptised good or evil or is noted as a quality of beings the people has already evaluated and determined in a moral sense’ (Nietzsche, 1982: § 38). The values a drive expresses or is aligned with are ‘the conditions of preservation and enhancement for complex forms of relative life-duration within the flux of becoming’ and represent ‘the standpoint for the increase or decrease of these dominating centers (“multiplicities” in any case; but “units” are nowhere present in the nature of becoming)’ (Nietzsche, 1968: § 715). The inequality that characterizes the quantitative differences among drives dictates that some drive must dominate against myriad resistances. However, it is not a drive but a complex that rules. Or, rather, a drive, being a relation and not a substance, achieves dominance by effecting a synthesis of diverse and ever-changing impulses, engendering a complex of agonistic forces that is ‘apparently durable in comparison with other complexes – e.g., through the difference in tempo of the event’ (ibid.: § 552). The relative stability of this synthesis does not follow from any law or equilibrium point, but rather from ‘the fact that … a certain force cannot be anything other than this certain force; that it can react to a quantum of resisting force only according to the measure of its strength’ (ibid.: § 639). Thus, ‘a new arrangement of forces is achieved according to the measure of power of each of them’ (ibid.: § 633). However, since values, interpretations and expressions are merely results, their apparent endurance need not refer back to any underlying stability in the synthesis of drives that brings them about. And indeed, as drives are in continuous struggle and hence continuous flux, the syntheses that underpin the appearance of stability must themselves fluctuate. They are not fixed forms but ‘schemas of correspondence’ between interacting and continually changing life-processes. ²⁶ For this reason, language fails

Words might designate, for example, the traits that compose the individual’s character, but if this character remains consistent over time, it cannot be for the same reasons or due to the same syntheses because the individual does not even remain the same person. The stability is found in the overall result, not in the underlying processes, which exceed the representative capacities of language. Language does not capture fixed unities, but only apparent stabilities that emerge from the struggle of constitutive drives.

A series of falsifications, however, occurs in the becoming-dominant of a complex of drives. First, the multiple senses of the dominant drive are reduced to a single, unambiguous meaning: ‘Every sovereign instinct has the others for its tools, retainers, flatterers: it never lets itself be called by its ugly name: and it countenances no praise in which it is not also praised indirectly. All praise and blame in general crystallizes around every sovereign instinct to form a rigorous order and etiquette’ (Nietzsche, 1968: § 377). Drives also tend to conceal themselves beneath their expression, as ‘the fleshly desires or the desires for power [hide] under the dominion of Christian values’ (ibid.). Words, whose meanings are products of victorious drives, but which capture only the drives’ most superficial effects, establish similarity and identity across differences by circulating a ‘weak emotion’ that ‘is the common element, the basis of the concept’ (ibid.: § 506). Judgement and evaluation, carried out by the will to power, operate through assimilation and equalization (ibid.: § 532). In all these ways, dominant drives tend to establish a simplified schema of fixed hierarchies and stable identities and markers. These are the categories of conscious life, which is mistakenly treated ‘as the standard and the condition of life that is of supreme value’, when it is really ‘a tool and particular aspect of the total life’ (ibid.: § 707). The ego or ‘I’, of course, is the most important of these categories.

Nietzsche is clear that the ego, subject, or ‘I’ is ‘only a fiction’ (Nietzsche, 1968: § 370). It is ‘a perspective illusion – an apparent unity that encloses everything like a horizon’ (ibid.: § 518) and it results from ‘our bad habit of taking a mnemonic, an abbreviative formula, to be an entity, finally as a cause’ (ibid.: § 548). These terms designate an epiphenomenon that accompanies the dynamic of drives but is mistakenly held to be its unifying centre: ‘The “subject” is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is’ (ibid.: § 481). It is a marker that aids in the ‘coordination and becoming conscious of “impressions”’ (ibid.: § 504), but it has no efficacy itself: ‘The “ego” … is, indeed, only a conceptual synthesis – thus there are no actions prompted by “egoism”’ (ibid.: § 371). The ego is therefore a poor interpretation of the self’s agency, as it fails to recognize how ‘a deed often brings with it a numbness and lack of freedom: so that the doer is as if spellbound at its recollection and feels as if he were an accessory of it’ (ibid.: § 235). The ego’s persistent appearance and the way the order of rank of drives gives rise to seemingly regular sequences of thoughts and actions lead to the erroneous belief that a coherent ‘I’ is organizing these thoughts and governing these actions.

Like any other dominant idea, the ego serves the purposes of dominant forces, as ‘it could be useful and important for one’s activity to interpret oneself falsely’ (Nietzsche, 1968: § 492). And, as Nietzsche demonstrates with respect to slave morality, this faulty self-understanding is easily projected onto others, so that their actions too are interpreted to have their source in a doer behind the deed. ²⁷ This projection, of course, is also crucial for establishing the negative separation of self from other. Once the traditional idea of the moral subject is established in this way, it matters little whether this subject and its ego are conceived as being pre-existing entities or constructs of various constitutive exclusions: the error of assuming the necessity of a centred subject to underpin agency has already installed itself. Nevertheless, such an ego ‘is not one with the central government of our nature’ (ibid.: § 371). Indeed, there is no centre of organization, formed and consolidated through its separation from what it is not. There is only the semblance of a centre generated by the operations of a decentred complex of forces.

Ethics and the responsibility of a decentred self

The second essay of the Genealogy of Morals contains Nietzsche’s most sustained critique of the Christian idea of bad conscience or guilt. This concept builds on the separation of the doer from the deed, which the slaves introduced in the first essay use to condemn the nobles as evil subjects who choose to be harmful, and is completed by the moralization of the creditor–debtor relationship, which places on noble and slave alike not a debt so high it cannot be repaid, but a stain that marks all humans as unworthy of what they have been given. ²⁸ However, Nietzsche also presents, as an alternative to guilty conscience, the conscience of the ‘sovereign individual’, whose ‘mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures’ (Nietzsche, 1967: 2.2). This individual’s strength creates ‘the proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over fate’ (ibid.), and consequently grants him ‘the right to make promises’ (ibid.: 2.1). In this conception of conscience, being responsible means being open to punishment for broken promises, but this punishment is determined without assessment of the intention behind acting to break the promise and so ‘independently of any presupposition concerning freedom or non-freedom of the will’ (ibid.: 2.4). It is a notion of responsibility without the condemnation that is a product of the slavish ressentiment.

But even if one can pass judgement without an appraisal of intentionality, how coherent is this alternative concept of the self? Does it not still presuppose a subject behind the promise that would be held accountable because it chooses to accept responsibility? Is self-mastery not the ultimate meaning of subjectivity? In transferring the self’s agency from the ego to the drives, has Nietzsche not simply relocated subjectivity to another level, creating a variant of the homunculus problem? What exactly is being held responsible for making promises and acting in ways that keep or break them, and what is the nature of its self-control? Similar questions surround Nietzsche’s call to give style to one’s character by surveying our complex of strengths and weaknesses and using various strategies to arrange them in accordance with a single taste. ²⁹ Who or what carries out this survey, makes the necessary decisions and works through the self-creation? ³⁰ The paradox is summed up by two passages in Daybreak. Late in the text, Nietzsche declares:

In an earlier passage, however, he details six methods for combating the vehemence of a drive before proclaiming:

Nietzsche thus seems to be claiming both that one is able to manage one’s drives and yet that one is at their mercy and unable to choose what to do with them.

Yet, crucially for Nietzsche, there is no ‘one’ at all. There is neither an ego standing behind the drives nor a particular drive that dominates the others and directs the self (since drives are not distinct entities but relational impulses). The ‘one’ who acts and who might be held responsible is therefore neither a (reflexive) subject behind the drives nor a (blind) individual drive. ‘One’ is simply shorthand for a multiplicity – for an assemblage that only as an assemblage can be said both to control its drives and to be determined by the relational component forces that constitute it by virtue of the ascendancy of some of them against various resistances. Agency resides in this dispersed but synthesized assemblage, which is irreducible to any unity, and this agency implies control, but not necessarily choice. Thus at a fundamental level, choice or the lack of choice is no longer an issue. Instead it is a matter of assessing how the synthesis of disparate impulses, in conflict and in flux, makes the self what it is at any particular time. One does not perform a generous or a miserly act absent already being constituted as either a generous or a miserly person, and as the latter is not a free choice of some neutral subject, neither can the former be. Or, as Deleuze says in the opening paragraph of his seminal work, ‘we always have the beliefs, feelings and thoughts that we deserve given our way of being or our style of life’ (1983: 1). The self’s capacity to ‘choose’ is really only a function of its power – of its ability to endure strife, from which follow particular beliefs, values and interpretations that enframe any ‘decision’ it could be said to make.

A return to Sartre is helpful here. For Nietzsche would certainly agree with the early Sartre not only that the ego or subject is only a semblance, but that it is essential for certain types of sustained agency. Many activities – including those kinds about which moral judgements are frequently passed – could not persist without an ‘I’, not because they require a ‘chooser’, but because they involve a self-to-self relation (which is that of a multiplicity relating to itself) and therefore their endurance necessitates coordination in reference to a point that appears to function as a governing centre: the components of such activities, in accordance with the demands of representation, must be apprehended in a single intuition as ‘what I am doing’ even though the self continually changes while they are being performed. ‘Choice’ is therefore only a name given to an ostensible conjunction between the multiplicity in flux that we are and the centre we seem to have. The latter is a merely a semblance that arises from the former, but it reacts back upon these conditions of emergence by coordinating the way drives enter consciousness, without having causal efficacy itself. Our drives determine what we are and what we become, but they function only by operating beneath the appearance of a subject that seems to choose for itself.

Nevertheless, for Nietzsche the most important moral – or, better, ethical – orientation is one that uses the semblance of the ‘I’ in order to overcome it. He refers to this overcoming as a willing of the eternal return, and formulates it as a transformation of every ‘it was’ into ‘thus I willed it’ and finally into ‘thus I will its eternal return’. Standard interpretations treat the eternal return either as a cosmological doctrine that holds that given the finity of chronological time identical events lived by identical subjects will be repeated forever, or as a psychological doctrine that tests whether the subject is strong enough to endure the thought that it will live its life over and over again. Lost in these readings, however, is the fact that given Nietzsche’s critique of the ego, subject, or ‘I’ as being a semblance, the ‘I’ that would seem to will the eternal return in his formulation cannot really be willing anything at all. If Nietzsche’s doctrine must be posed in this way, then, it is because the activity of overcoming requires that one interpret oneself falsely: in the eternal return, the ‘I’ is a necessary fiction that is taken by by a self composed of multiple heterogeneous drives in order to overcome its attachment to this appearance of unity. Zarathustra thus maintains that the first step in willing the eternal return – turning ‘what was’ into ‘thus I willed it’ – threatens to trap the will in ressentiment: while this move overcomes the ressentiment felt when past events are seen as random or outside one’s control, it saddles the self with guilt and responsibility for its past, simply transforming the injuries that happen to me into something I bring upon myself (Nietzsche, 1966: ‘On Redemption’, 139–40). Accepting the burden of past contingencies might reconcile the will with the past, but ‘that will which is the will to power must will something higher than any reconciliation’ (ibid.: 141). The second step in willing the eternal return is thus not one of reconciliation but rather one of overcoming. It does not erase the past or make its injuries any less painful, but instead expunges ressentiment completely by moving the self beyond one that defines itself as an ego in relation to past suffering, demanding justification for this suffering. Nevertheless, the process must begin with a self that appears unified enough to take these tremendous steps. To affirm the eternal return is thus to use the image of the subject in order to dissolve it. To adapt a Kantian ethical formulation here: there is no ‘I’, but for the sake of the eternal return one must act as if there is, in order finally to leave it behind.

Whether or not the self overcomes is, of course, a question of its strength and not choice. But it is certainly also a matter of conscious awareness – or, to use a term Nietzsche frequently employs, a matter of sensibility – since, again returning to Sartre, consciousness need not refer to an ‘I’. The ethical sensibility required for overcoming is a consciousness of the ego’s superficiality, of its being a façade, and not of its being an entity constituted through its separation from what it is not, nor of the ultimate impossibility of finalizing this separation. Indeed, in contrast to those contemporary post-foundationalist philosophies that seek a temporary consolidation of identity while negotiating identity’s ultimate impossibility, Nietzsche calls for an ethics that can move beyond crude oppositions. Of course, these philosophies too seek to move beyond opposition and towards engagement with more subtle and complex forms of difference. From Nietzsche’s perspective, however, they still take the foundation of opposition – the subject – far too seriously.