(no relation)

Not long ago, the Innocence project announced the release from prison of the 200th person to be exonerated by DNA evidence. Convicted in 1982 for crimes of rape, robbery, assault and kidnapping, Jerry Miller (no relation) spent the next 24 years of his life in prison, as well as an additional year as a paroled sex-offender. ¹ His guilt was secured by two eyewitnesses who tied Miller to the scene of the crime, though as the official press release stressed, Miller had no relation to the perpetration of these violent deeds and therefore bore no responsibility for them.

Yet it is not quite the case that, certified ‘innocent’ by the courts and the eponymous organization indispensable for ending his incarceration, Jerry Miller divests himself from this crime and others like it, as this overturning of his sentence does not restore to him the presumptive innocence prior to his arrest but codes him among the discomfortingly high number of black men in this country wrongfully convicted of sexual assault (and, moreover, wrongfully accused of sexual violence upon a white woman, as if the case were not already cartoonishly tropic). This legal declaration of innocence does not fully dissociate these crimes from Miller but places them in obverse relation to him and others said to have committed such deeds (whether enacted or not). Thus, while mercifully out of prison, he nevertheless continues to circulate not only within whatever national and international criminal databases his original arrest authorized but also within the ethical circuitry of racial embodiments of innocence and criminality.

As I have indicated, Jerry Miller and I are not, so far as I know, related; at the same time, however, I recognize my arrest when first reading of his release, a reaction that appears to owe itself to some sense of relation between Jerry Miller and myself (Jerry Miller). Is such a feeling of connectedness, too, an instance of mistaken identity? Our name is common enough that one could argue that it offers no grounds for commonality: it interpellates so many disparate, apparently unrelated subjects as to undermine its ability to signify any irreducible singularity with respect to those to whom it is said to belong. On the other hand, such diffuse multiplicity might be precisely that which fosters our relation. A few years ago police jailed my sister, another ‘commonly’ named Miller, citing a warrant for her arrest for shoplifting $68 worth of groceries. Forfeiting her life savings for a bail bond, she later appeared in Los Angeles County Courthouse where she had to convince police and prosecutors that they had mistaken her for another African-American female with the same name. Without admitting any error or retracting and clarifying the warrant, the judge instead fabricated for her a document that states, in effect, that she is not that criminal Miller that her own name names, and which, he instructed, she must now carry with her at all times to avoid future ‘accidental’ incarceration. It is, paradoxically, because my sister has ‘no relation’ to this other woman that their intimate relation through common names – proper, racial and gendered – has been secured.

The name is capable of forging such a bond only insofar as it extends beyond any neutral signifier to actuate as a criminal relation. But this risk of criminal duplication posed by the name in turn configures its antidote of ‘innocence’ not as the proof of unsullied moral personhood but as the distancing and disaffiliation of the subject from the criminal name. Innocence, herewith, is acquired through a refusal of the ethical relation and performative extrication of the self as a singularity, which is to say, an attempted escape from evaluative relations arranged by the name. Thus the modern positing of liberty as the birthright of the individual is no less a plea for the subject’s original criminal innocence (Kant: ‘For every man is born free, since he has not yet committed a crime’). ² Criminal liability, it would follow, punishes not through guilt but by loss of singularity through the name; correspondingly, singularity becomes the prize and proof of moral innocence, the successful shearing-off of all such illegitimate relations. The possibility of this non-relational ethical subjectivity, however, requires a mark that could demonstrate its selfsame identity in all contexts, one capable of differentiating absolutely and in every instance this Jerry Miller from that Jerry Miller, assuring each its own unique, unrelated existence. Could it be, however, that singularity does not affirm the irreducibility of the ethical subject that criminal misrecognition effaces but instead emerges as the effect of such affiliations? What if innocence as the prior component out of which all ethical relations are taken to be configured were itself an adjunctive that stems from criminal association?

The suspicion that any original, moral singularity is obligated to and enabled by the inextricability of subjectivity from criminal relations is, in large part, Nietzschean: ‘It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things – maybe even one with them in essence.’ ³ Within these terms, the subject asserts its selfsame ethical identity apart from the evaluations of others only insofar as it partakes of an ‘insidious’ relation with them. But this insidious relation of morality and its opposite – of high and low values out of which the ‘innocent’ subject is drafted – may itself arise from an illicit liaison to which Nietzsche is comparatively unreceptive, that between value and interpretation. Rather than mock this division as itself an invested opposition Nietzsche regularly embraces it, describing the nature of actions as ‘perfectly empty of value’ and value as a ‘misinterpretation’ of phenomena. ⁴ Valuation, he asserts, indicates the overlaying upon a prior, ethically neutral grasp of phenomena an arbitrary attribution, one that (further) falsifies and misrepresents already perspectival intuitions. As such, he implies, valuation is by nature criminal; despite having no relation to interpretation it forges fictive and disfiguring associations with our phenomenal representations of the world.

This article does not seek to rescue innocence or ethical singularity from the abuses of the criminal relation that Nietzsche seems both to affirm and reject. Rather, it considers the contradiction of, on one hand, the apparent impossibility of the extrication of innocent singularity from the evaluative circuits of the name, and, on the other, the subordination of all valuation as that which fabricates false kinships with ‘neutral’ interpretations. This inconsistency belongs not solely to Nietzsche but returns in theories of the subject engendered by the post-Deleuzean renaissance of Nietzsche, including, notably, those of Alexander Nehamas, Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault, all of whom ultimately insist upon the non-relation of valuation and interpretation as an ontological and political commitment. Tracing the route of this commitment back to Nietzsche, I reconsider his discussion of this non-relation to show that the claim of valuation as an agent of misrepresentation relies, in fact, on valuation as indispensable for the possibility of any representation. Hence, the hypothesis of ‘no relation’, I propose, is philosophically beholden to the criminal association against which it protests. I then conclude with some critical implications of this structural configuration for contemporary analyses of morality and justice.

Before we inquire as to whether value has been falsely posing as family or has been unjustly disowned, let us sketch in more detail the controversial relation of criminality through which the innocent subject has been said to emerge. How can mistaken identity constitute the moral uniqueness on which innocence depends, especially if the self’s disambiguation from valuations attending all others is necessary for its ethical recognition? That this ethical recognition hinges upon our mistaken appropriation by infelicitous associations is, however, a poignant if underexamined feature of the Althusserian structure of ideology. Althusser explains that the constituting hail almost always hits its target (‘nine times out of ten it is the right one’); while many raise the question as to what happens on those occasions when it is wrong, what typically goes unremarked is that Althusser includes these instances of criminal méconnaissance as within and part of, rather than as exceptions to, the ideological function, indicating that such misfires in the transformation from individual to subject belong to that very process. ⁵ Hence the ideological call successfully ‘arrests’ the subject not despite the potential for mistaken identity but because of this structural quality of the hail to exceed its mark. This means, in effect, that if ideology does hit its target it is only because non-targeted others do turn around, do sense themselves as vaguely assailed even when ‘innocent’, and do experience unease reading of the torment multiple state apparatuses have enacted upon a subject whose interpellation is uncannily homonymic with what yours would be but who remains nevertheless a subject to whom you have no relation. (Is ‘vailing’ too horrible a neologism for this critical repercussion, for the echo of the hail heard through the DuBoisean veil that makes it sound both distant and jarringly close? Is it not the case that we are supposed to recognize these instances of misinterpretation, suggesting that ideology enacts us as subjects not only when making us the destination of its attentions but also through this indirect vailing in which its traces and excesses disseminate as the collateral damage of the original appeal?)

If misfires and ricochets belong to the structure of ideology, the effects they produce must also be instrumental to subjectivization. Further, these reverberations would pulsate through and because of the indissociable relations between subjects established and sustained by ideological identifications. Indeed, a key component of Althusser’s appropriation of the troubled Marxian concept of ideology is its radical externalization of what had been conceived previously as internal, mental (mis)representation. ⁶ Ideology, he stresses, is not inside the subject’s mind as a set of mistaken perceptions; instead, the ‘center’ of ideology is the ‘relation’ that effects and ties subjects to labor, state and society through material, ritual practices. ⁷ Thus ideology brings subjects into being – i.e. inaugurates them as recognizable, proto-innocent characters – through a setting-in-relation whose ligature is ethical association, the consequences of which, including criminal misrecognitions and the liabilities incurred therein, therefore belong essentially rather than circumstantially to ideological representation. As such, the ‘singular’ name by which one could be hailed, condemned, or exonerated achieves its propriety for the subject through a kind of joint ownership or tenancy-in-common that implicates others in one’s ‘own’ material practices.

This tenancy-in-common or ‘unrelated relation’ of myself to Jerry Miller is extended therefore by our holdings in race and gender, in particular by the loaded coefficients of black masculinity. While thus confident in my assertion that Jerry Miller is of no relation, it is beyond me to contend that he and I are therefore without relation, instituted as we are in associations epoxied by historical evaluations that our common names inflect. This distinction means to exhibit the disclaimer of (no relation) as ideological and evaluative rather than ontological; ‘(no relation)’ signifies not the fact of the absence of any and all contrastive identities against which what is unrelated somehow makes its appearance, but an active putting-at-a-distance made necessary only because of an unrelenting proximity. (Here I am thinking along the lines of a procedural inversion of Heidegger’s notion of Entfernung – translated as both ‘remoteness’ and ‘desevering’ – as the abolishing or ‘desevering’ of distance that occurs merely in the recognition of what is ‘remote’. ⁸ In contrast, I am proposing, ‘no relation’ insists upon the objective remoteness of what is phenomenologically and threateningly ready-to-hand.) But does redefining avowals and disavowals of relationality as ethically constituted mean that all affiliations, as thereby secondary and derivative, reaffirm the primacy and purity of singularity? Can we hold normative tenancies to be anything but fictive or superficial relations?

My ethical transitivity with respect to Jerry Miller through the happenstance of appellation, race, gender, and any of a host of other possible characteristics might be challenged as facetious or at best tendentiously metaphoric, especially when compared to, say, the possibility that Jerry Miller turned out to be, of all persons, my father or son, which would mark him not as Jerry Miller (no relation) but as Jerry Miller (Sr/Jr). Yet suppose this were true – that Jerry Miller (no relation) were indeed Jerry Miller (Sr/Jr): would the presumed authenticity of that paternal relation be predicated fundamentally on anything other than another set of normative associations coded variously as biological, cultural and religious? ⁹ On what basis do we deem the paternal relation ‘real’ and the racial (non)-relation false?

It is not obvious, as a start, that the ‘false’ relation is not a relation on account of its falsity. Relation, like metaphor, is that which vouches a connection between the disparate. In other words, relation obtains not in cases of sameness (we would not say, for instance, that ‘Jupiter’ and ‘the fifth planet from the sun’ are related) but in those of difference, by which is fabricated an alliance between what is presumably heterogeneous. And yet, true heterogeneity is precisely that which cannot be set-in-relation, a possibility denied in advance by virtue of the absolute incommensurability that defines it. If, then, a relation of identity cannot be forged out of complete heterogeneity, it would follow that ‘real’ relations do not traverse any pure difference but rather actualize and formalize an extant commensurability, disclosing thereby an already latent conjunction. But how would this veiled commensurability not be also the condition for the possibility of the false relation? The false relation, while not ‘real’, cannot be said to reflect genuine heterogeneity, insofar as heterogeneity would prevent even the imposture of the relational; it would not denote, therefore, the absence of a shared point of reference said to be present in the real relation. On the contrary, the false relation is that which must be declared so precisely because of its deceptive mimicry of the ‘real’ relation, its manifestation and consecration not of an incommensurability but of a disingenuous and perverted association. Accordingly, the false or non-relation is to be distinguished from the true or real relation not on the grounds of actual commensurability but in the avowal or disavowal of an always possible affiliation. To be sure, without this already abiding kinship by which one could disinherit a relation as ‘false’ there would be no way for anything ever to come into relation, for all would be shut up in advance in a manner that would prohibit from the start any apposition, arrangement, or comparison. The premise of an original and total disjunction would preclude, that is, the initiation of any movement out of that state towards the relational.

The formation of the relational and non-relational is therefore no less a procedure of ethics than of ontology. Enacted through comparative and active valuations, relational declarations naturalize evaluative dynamics of authenticity and inauthenticity, of the sanctioned and the criminal, the blessed and the bastard. ‘[T]he saying “I am not one of the family” does not simply describe a fact’, remarks Jacques Derrida; ‘it can also mean: “I do not want to be one of the family.” “I am not one of the family” is a performative, a commitment.’ ¹⁰ The paternal and racial instance not the presence and absence respectively of a genuine classificatory alliance but rather licit and illicit discourses of filiation, the formulating conditions of which become all the more closely supervised in instances in which those discourses of radically disparate legitimacies intersect in complicated, ‘improper’ ways (as Thomas Jefferson’s and Strom Thurmond’s heirs could confirm). Accordingly, relations like the paternal that exert the authority of the most powerful conventionality and are publicized thereby as natural and non-metaphoric nevertheless remain anxious and conditional associations maintained under the constant if covert threat of illegitimacy, falsification and rupture: risks not of disaffiliation but of devaluation. As no less a highly cathected valuation, race is charged, on the contrary, as a disingenuous intimacy the destruction of which, it is imagined, restores paradoxically both autonomous singularity and genuine relationality (not only that of the paternal but also of personhood, humanity, family, etc.). ¹¹ This effort to break the tenancy-in-common of the racial name and its purportedly indiscriminate attributions struggles against the ideological circuits and criminal misrecognitions within which the situated subject emerges. But if the false relation or non-relation signifies not an impossible linkage but one normatively disqualified, would this not merely confirm the tenancy of the racial name as criminal rather than non-existent? If so, ardent ventures to cleanse ethical subjectivity from the taint of crimes accrued through shared racial identity would effect at best a derangement rather than termination of those unrelated relations; the insistent stamp of ‘no relation’ meant to protect the innocence of the singular subject would instead ratify race as a kinship operating under an assumed name or alibi.

The question of the relation and its variables of mistaken identities and long-lost ancestries cannot but presume the ethical. This dependence, however, limns a philosophical indecency taking place between determinations of what the subject ‘is’ and its accorded social valuation, one that embarrasses claims assuring their original disjuncture. Such kinship of identity and worth through the name occasions a subject that forms within rather than outside of evaluative currents: of limited consequence perhaps for proper names like ‘Jerry Miller’ but scandalous for designations of race proscribed from hosting normative valences, beneficent or criminal. Indeed, racial nominations are tolerated only in conjunction with a tight-fisted belief that they need not be denominations – that ascriptions such as ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ can and therefore must function as morally vacated terms. ¹² Barred from ethical signification, race ideally becomes exclusively indexical, i.e. pointing only to ‘what is’ (or ‘who is’) rather than presaging normative evaluations of subjects and their practices. These indomitable convictions, in no way exclusive to racial discourses, are rather subsidized by ostensibly post-foundationalist accounts of representation that map the cloaking dynamic of interpretation and truth onto that of value and interpretation, such that value becomes the invidious obscurant that distorts and misrepresents the subject’s original and pre-ethical perspectival interpretations. My proposal, then, is that the disclaimer of (no relation) meant to protect a detached, pre-ethical singularity from the stain of criminal denominations like race finds its philosophical justification in a stalwart disambiguation and ordered ranking of interpretation and value that is both expressive of and undone by Nietzsche’s critique of morality.

What encourages us to accept certain relations like the paternal as authentic and thus acceptably determinative of who we are, and others, like those woven by proper or racial names, as fictive and thus irrelevant to our true selves? If we hypothesized, again, a paternal relation between myself and Jerry Miller, transfiguring Jerry Miller (no relation) into Jerry Miller (Sr/Jr), what would we say emerged from the abyss previously separating us as unrelated and why would it require its own marking? In his book In My Father’s House, Anthony Appiah takes as legitimate the ethical lines of privilege that extend to family but hopes to disassemble as a ‘moral error’ those same networks operating within and between races (especially those that tend to transfer punishments rather than privileges). ¹³ Yet this distinction not only presumes ‘family’ as a natural kind in the way that race is not (leading Appiah to claim that race derives its fraudulent force as a metaphor of ‘family’, even though the modern conception of family, as has been argued from Kant to Foucault, owes itself in no small part to the concept of race) but it also accords to ‘family’ alone the mysterious power to function as an identity whose ethical benefits and debts we rightly inherit merely in virtue of that relation. ¹⁴ But what, we should ask, is the source and site of this power afforded the paternal house? That is, how does the paternal relation enact what is vehemently denied other relations, that of shaping the supposed ethically neutral factuality of ‘what it is’ I say or do, thus hitching the definition of my practices to this privileged association?

Nietzsche, for his part, offers a counter-intuitive proposition for how a paternal relation may actively condition the interpretation of phenomena:

[W]e construe ‘what is’ as what exerts an effect on us, what proves itself by exerting its effect. … Supposing, though, we put certain values into things, then these values have effects back on us after we’ve forgotten we were the ones who put them in. Supposing I think someone is my father, then much follows from that concerning everything he says to me: it’s interpreted differently. ¹⁵

Nietzsche rejects here the conventional sequence that we first recognize ‘what is’ – the meaning of the paternal utterance – and, subsequently, experience a moral reaction to it; affect, he implies, does not ‘respond’ to or succeed experience as a separate, non-cognitive emotional supplement, nor does apprehension of phenomena generate a separate and secondary moral assessment of these intuitions. Instead, the ascertainment of phenomena – in this case, the comprehension of ‘what is being said’ – arrives in the affective context of the imagined relation. ¹⁶ Like Althusser’s reading of ideology as an (imagined) relation to a (representational) relation between the subject and its ‘conditions of existence’, interpretation is drawn through valuations that suffuse affective associations, meaning that, in Nietzsche’s examples, the ‘truth’ of the linguistic utterance actuates through the ethical kinship of the paternal.

Despite this passage and, as I later show, others like it, Nietzsche just as frequently expresses serious misgivings about value as what effects interpretation. Remarks such as ‘There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena’, ¹⁷ for instance, levy against his above conjecture a temporal and qualitative separation of interpretation and valuation whereby phenomena arise prior to and outside of a worth that subsequently disfigures them. At these moments Nietzsche excludes value as formative for representation, subordinating it as an occlusive effluvium of the will that attaches to, distorts and obscures value-neutral interpretation.

How might we begin to understand or synthesize this apparent inconsistency? In his influential Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze argues that for Nietzsche we must view representations of the will not only through ‘active’ or ‘reactive’ forces whose differential, as interpretation, ‘gives sense to a thing’, but simultaneously as expressions of a differential of ‘affirmation’ or ‘negation’ that also ‘gives value to a thing’. ¹⁸ The conjunction of these vectors, he continues, allows Nietzsche to contend that ‘the will to power is not only the one that interprets but the one that evaluates’, such that the subject tethers to the world through meaning-making and valuation. ¹⁹ Thus, Deleuze surmises, will to power demands measure through two ‘qualitative’ axes, activity/reactivity (axis of interpretation) and affirmation/negation (axis of valuation): ‘Affirming and denying, appreciating and depreciating, express the will to power just as acting and reacting express force.’ ²⁰

Yet while Deleuze helpfully positions valuation and interpretation as primary manifestations of will to power, he nevertheless has great difficulty articulating their interaction, or, more precisely, deciding whether their interaction is genuine or illusory. His account thus culminates with a reading of the two axes as autonomous yet indissociable, discordant yet symbiotic:

This distinction between two kinds of quality [interpretation and valuation] is of the greatest importance and it is always found at the centre of Nietzsche’s philosophy. There is a deep affinity, a complicity, but never a confusion, between action and affirmation, between reaction and negation. … On the one hand, it is clear that there is affirmation in every action and negation in every reaction. But, on the other hand, action and reaction are more like means, means or instruments of the will to power which affirms and denies, just as reactive forces are instruments of nihilism. And again, action and reaction need affirmation and negation as something which goes beyond them but is necessary for them to achieve their own ends. … It is as if affirmation and negation were both immanent and transcendent in relation to action and reaction … ²¹

On the one hand, Deleuze proposes, interpretation (action/reaction) and valuation (affirmation/negation) inhabit the ‘center’ of will to power, share a ‘deep affinity’ and ‘complicity’, and flow through and ‘inside’ the other. Further, each is an instrument and an end for the other, where neither functions as the exclusive precedent or instigator. Irreducible to and extending ‘beyond’ each other, their mutual dependence constitutes the locus of will. On the other, Deleuze contends that the appearance of intimacy between valuation and interpretation is misleading, for they behave only ‘as if’ they were ‘immanent and transcendent’ in their relations, retaining all the while their impermeable independence. This specter of inseparability, he continues, is not merely false disguise but contrary to the telos of both ‘achieving their own ends’. Moreover, in a sentence prior to this passage, Deleuze assigns value a supplemental status, defining it as a ‘necessary addition’ to the force of interpretation. ²²

If, as Deleuze writes, Nietzsche’s distinction between interpretation and valuation exists without ‘confusion’, his explanation gives less than convincing evidence of it. We might wonder, then, why this evidence of solidarity must be revealed as deceptive. If interpretation and evaluation have the same (inconceivable) origin, do not appear in each other’s absence and effect themselves only through and by means of each other – features discrediting a claim of fundamental and radical difference – why imagine their complete and self-contained individuation? Moreover, what in the above description of their ultimate incompatibility justifies a reading of value as the supplement of interpretation? At the close of his explanation, Deleuze reiterates that the separation of interpretation and valuation is ‘of the greatest importance’. ²³ But why? What is at stake in this doctrine of no relation?

Deleuze’s troubles here reflect a genuine theoretical knot within Nietzsche’s own analysis. Nevertheless, much of the scholarship indebted to Deleuze’s reintroduction of Nietzsche to French and broadly continental audiences has presumed this matter largely settled on behalf of the organic non-relation of interpretation and valuation. Accordingly, while Deleuze’s activity/reactivity metaphor becomes in these discourses a common heuristic for understanding will to power, its ethical complement of affirmation/negation, though admittedly underemphasized in his text, drops out altogether. Whereas Deleuze presents a Nietzsche conscientiously, if not equally, attentive to the valuation that inheres in interpretation, contemporary exegeses favor a Nietzsche who fully subordinates the evaluative to the epistemological.

In his Life as Literature, Alexander Nehamas initially affirms the evaluative component of will when explaining that Nietzsche ‘calls our views, practices, and modes of life “interpretations” … in order to call to our attention the fact that they are never detached or disinterested’, ²⁴ drawing from this that, for Nietzsche, ‘all practices are interpretive and value-laden’. ²⁵ Yet his actual detailing of perspectivism clarifies this ‘value-laden’ quality of interpretation as a corollary feature of the ‘simplification’ and ‘ignorance’ characterizing epistemologically inadequate interpretation. ²⁶ Perspectivism for Nehamas refers to the incomplete representation of reality by subjects who, as cognitively limited, achieve only a fragmentary view of the world and thus possess at best partial and insufficient knowledge of it, making interpretation tantamount to a circumscribed objectivity. ²⁷ On this account, value as excluded from the conditions for the first deviation or iteration of reality therefore only seduces subjects further away from this initial derivative yet ‘real’ relation. But if, as Nehamas informs, ‘interpretation’ refuses the possibility of ‘detached or disinterested’ perceptions, how might fragmentation and insufficiency – signifiers of absence and lack suggesting greater distancing and detachment – create without evaluative affect the ‘attached’ and ‘interested’ knowledge that comprises interpretation? Nietzsche’s earlier example of the paternal utterance, in contrast, proposes we think phenomena not as a reality incapacitated by the mind’s limitations but as experience afforded through structures of affective engagement. Without this ethical relation of ‘interested attachment’ that occasions subjective knowledge, interpretation becomes, as Nehamas shows, a species of the incomplete, making will to power a compromising rather than compositional force. Conversely, interpretation that manifests as preferential inclination suggests that if perspectivism denotes the ‘partiality’ of truth it does so not as ‘inadequacy’ but in the sense of a being partial to.

Nehemas’ truncated concession to valuation nonetheless strikes Richard Rorty (who draws his assessment of Nietzsche in part from Nehamas’ text) as excessive. Rorty objects to the ‘resentful’ critique of bourgeois morality that Nietzsche ‘ran together’ with a critique of truth, remarking that he ‘do[es] not think that there is any interesting connection between these two sets of criticisms’. ²⁸ More strenuously, he chides this entwinement of phenomena and value as a ‘dangerous’ fusion that has afflicted the work of subsequent philosophers like Heidegger and Foucault. ²⁹ On its own, Rorty conjectures, Nietzsche’s casting of truth as interpretation reveals him to be, like Rorty himself, a genuine pragmatist. This invocation succeeds, however, on the premise that Rorty can segregate through a strict policy of containment the creditable, perspectivist Nietzsche from the discreditable, immoralist Nietzsche. It requires little effort, however, to evidence this operation as more fraught than Rorty imagines, insofar as Rorty himself articulates the pragmatist understanding of truth in evaluative language. Specifically, he limns pragmatism as a position whose supporters ‘view truth as … what is good for us to believe’ and who ‘use the term “true” as a general term of commendation’, ³⁰ a definition that, predicating truth on the ‘good’ and ‘commendable’, unabashedly categorizes it as a species of value.

Rorty’s distrust of this relation comes from what he takes to be its unwelcome consequences, in particular a willful indifference to protective norms against socially degenerative acts such as cruelty. He bases this charge primarily on his suspicious assessment of Foucault, whom he regards as gleefully and irresponsibly capitalizing on the Nietzschean miscegeny of phenomena and value. ³¹ To be sure, Rorty keeps company here with many who similarly reproach Foucault for retaining crass, anti-bourgeois sentiments they believe themselves to have jettisoned as the corrosive bath water of an otherwise trenchant anti-foundationalism. Yet while it is difficult to overestimate Nietzsche’s influence on Foucault, as Foucault himself admits, the contention that Foucault continues and extends Nietzsche’s campaign of transvaluation explicitly within his genealogical study of knowledge finds surprisingly negligible support in his published writings. ³² Accusations that Foucault’s historicizing of truth as discourse inappropriately enjoins an epistemological to an ethical deconstruction tend to evidence either his ‘anarchistic’ silence on the merits of liberal social norms – which indicates abstention from, not enthusiasm for, a Nietzschean invocation of the evaluative – or his oft-reported preference for the notion of ‘creating oneself as a work of art’, even though, as is rarely noted, Foucault voices this as a preference over the neo-Kantianism of Sartrean ethics, and not, as is widely assumed, as his own cohesive position. Indeed, even this self-assessment seems questionable considering that his focus on askēsis and akrasia in the last two volumes of his History of Sexuality reflects as much the Sartrean concerns of ‘bad faith’ as it does Nietzsche’s pre-Freudian exploration of desires and drives. ³³

Despite allegedly and irresponsibly enjoining representation and value, Foucault more routinely accords the same inessentiality to this relation as do Rorty and Nehamas. The failure of Enlightenment morality, he claims, effectively eradicated any hope of ‘an analytical or necessary link between ethics and other social or economic or political structures’, leading him to conclude that ‘it’s not at all necessary to relate ethical problems to scientific knowledge’. ³⁴ This hypothesis motivates his staging of an entire theoretical reconfiguration of knowledge through a Nietzschean concept of power without any significant reference to value, despite the enormous debt this radical shift owes to one that struggled with valuation no less persistently than with truth. ³⁵ Accordingly, Foucault’s explanation of why history must give way to genealogy – mapping the move from truth to interpretation – appeals like Nehamas to the impossibly chaotic and subjectively incoherent nature of the world, where genealogy ‘can evade metaphysics … if it refuses the certainty of absolutes’. ³⁶ If Foucault continues to attract nettlesome accusations of nihilism for dehydrating truth into an expression of power, then, it is not because he neglects to emphasize the productive and creative qualities of power but because, in severing ethics from epistemology, he cuts loose the source of this constitutive force. In other words, his renovation of Nietzschean will-to-power into the language of discourse foregrounds the Deleuzean active/reactive axis of interpretation (as power/resistance) only by simultaneously rendering the complementary affirmation/negation dynamic of valuation as epiphenomenal. Hence Foucault’s charting of how relations of power effect rather than inhabit subjectivity minimize valuation by rendering it, in his earlier work, as a mode of actuated sovereignty and, in the later writings, as self-disciplinary ‘conduct’.

This displacement of Nietzsche’s critique of morality suggests that Foucault resides closer to Rorty on the divisibility of interpretation and value than the latter imagined. ³⁷ Both share in their commitment to this non-relation a belief that valuation has more to do with how we respond to the disjunctive quality of phenomena – our affective disposition towards the contingency of truth – than to how phenomena come into being in the first place. From such a starting point, the ethical challenge of post-metaphysics not surprisingly registers as more psychological than philosophical, demanding that we face up to our hermeneutical limits and abandon as chimerical our long-standing aspiration towards representational plenitude. Hence the bell Nietzsche tolls for metaphysics rings through Foucault and Rorty as a bitter-sweet requiem, inducing in their writings a subtle tone of mourning. This seems particularly true for Rorty, whose apostatic essays exhibit as much resignation as repudiation, and which, with only a slight metaphoric shift, read as a dispiriting journey of detoxification from an ontological high that yielded visions of reality no less hallucinatory than those engendered by the opiate of religious revelation. Crucially, however, the pragmatic resignation that weans him from the crackhouse of metaphysics does not relinquish subjective meaning and purpose to a higher power, as a new and salvational transcendent; on the contrary, this declaration of helplessness has us turn meaning over to a lower power, namely, the common denominator sustaining the public sphere of liberal democracy. In this portrait of philosophical sobriety, citizens content themselves with proud participation in the polite activities of civic and national life alongside a wistful capitulation to a future whose anticipations will never match the rush of the promise of metaphysical discovery. In contrast, the Foucaultian rehab., both more and less somber, similarly finds redemption in a ‘lower’ power, though such power is not recouped, as with Rorty, in the discount amalgam of ethnocentric sentiment, but rather in ephemeral moments of microtheater. This restitution, achieved less in performances of resistant practices than in pleasures derived from the cataloging and romantic recitations of those quickly dissipated occasions, demands a more comprehensive and thus more abject submission of the determined subject for whom the future or ‘becoming’ holds little promise except as the stage for spirited re-enactments of inert social historicisms. ³⁸

In both eulogistic accounts, the compensation for relinquishing metaphysics is the muted yet safe prosaicness of a modest consciousness, an abnegation that further underscores the supposed richness of unevaluated, objective truth compared with which our situated, fragmentary experiences pale. What makes Rorty’s depiction of a post-foundationalist republic disturbing, then, is not so much the tiny playpen he reserves for the ironist’s self-fashioning (which, unsettlingly, some philosophers critique as too generous) than the pathos produced in the juxtaposition of this heavily circumscribed ‘private’ orb of intellectual creativity against the vast expanse given over to perfunctory, grin-and-bear-it rituals obliged by membership in a shared moral community. ³⁹ Likewise, those who find Foucault advancing a Nietzsche-inspired hedonism overlook the exceedingly dreary and grey portrait he drafts of our subjective emergence within the mundane and colorless institutions of schools, families and workplaces. The few sanguine moments he concedes – no Sadean bursts of jouissance, these – disclose instead the exaggerated effort necessary to locate within such grim routinization pleasures still capable of elevating our heart rates.

Such bleakness, however, is inseparable from, if not indebted to, a latent vision of what lives lived in the space of truth could be were it not for the incomplete nature of perception. Against this robust, lingering fantasy, interpretation necessarily disappoints as the mechanism of an impaired consciousness that delivers amputated representations: functional yet ‘incomplete’ and ‘lacerated’ percepts that call forth the anamnesic specter of their (distant) unadulterated relation. ⁴⁰ Yet this disability model of modest consciousness – of loss, resignation, performance, irony – in contemporary anti-foundationalist philosophy funds itself from an investment in the ontological split of valuation and interpretation that, though credited to Nietzsche, exhibits the spirit not of the revaluation of all values but of their wholesale devaluation.

Nietzsche routinely, though not consistently, distinguishes ‘value’ [Wert] from ‘morality’ [Moral], the former expressing the affective intensity of experiential phenomena in general and the latter describing a formalized hierarchy of affects exclusive to the late-Christian West. ‘Moral values’ therefore designate for him a set of comparatively privileged affects that have ‘hitherto been the highest values’ and whose historical devaluation, far from contracting shared social norms to the point of collapse, merely reveals ‘morality’ as a virulent naturalized ranking of values whose particular justificatory function no longer obtains. ⁴¹ Nietzsche objects not to value – which would require the fantastic challenge of lodging a negative value judgment against value – but to the procedure of abstracting personal affects into formal standards that had so far allowed ‘moral values [to] dominate over all other values’. ⁴² One therefore underestimates the philosophical significance of this devaluation and displacement of morality by asking what belongs in its stead, as if ethics as the study of value originates with morality. Ethics, however, does not commence with questions Platonic (e.g. Why should we be good?), modernist (e.g. What rules should we follow?), or communitarian (e.g. What conditions should abide for developing shared norms?), but is presupposed in their assumption that actions and subjects do or can signify, express and possess relative values. This is why Nietzsche insists that ‘value’ must first be placed under scrutiny. How is it possible? What conditions its appearance and dissipation? What is its relation to that which it is said to ‘value’? Such inquiries precede and destabilize any ostensible metaethics that, taking value as a given, sees fit to commence with a search for true or universal particular values, even that of life itself. ⁴³

Nietzsche’s strategy for undermining the prejudices of morality differs little from that he employs against prejudices of truth, aiming not at proper origins but at comparative worth. The critique that opens the main text of Beyond Good and Evil by assessing the ‘problem of the value of truth’ performs the same operation on morality: ‘Oh yes – the value of morality! Will anyone be allowed to take the floor who has doubts about just that value?’ ⁴⁴ This sly hearing on the ‘value of morality’ revokes morality’s identity as the first word of ethical discourse by placing it in the impossible position of proving its own worth. Why, then, if Nietzsche deploys value as the deconstructive catalyst for his dual critiques of truth and morality do his inheritors see in his writings the radical liberation of truth from all evaluative resonance, and, moreover, take him to have executed a refiguring of truth so much more masterful than that of morality?

Assuredly, many passages in Nietzsche’s writings do present interpretation and evaluation as extricable and layered, and, as captured by Deleuze’s characterization, regard any profound critique of Enlightenment morality as dependent upon this distinction as apodictic. The portrayal of the proper Nietzsche as patrolling the border across which ‘no relation’ is possible does not so much reflect a misreading, I propose, as it does reify a tendentious hierarchy that Nietzsche is himself unable to sustain. As we will see, his most direct efforts to posit the apprehension of value-neutral phenomena as a ‘first’ stage of consciousness presume already a division of phenomena and valuation that, paradoxically, is itself an expression of valuation.

Take, as a start, Nietzsche’s spare yet forceful definition of valuation as a derivative of interpretation:

What does valuating mean itself? Does it refer back or down to a different, metaphysical world? As Kant (living before the great historical movement) still believed. In short, where did it ‘originate’? Or did it not ‘originate’? Answer: moral valuating is an interpretation, a way of interpreting. ⁴⁵

Nietzsche rejects Kant’s thesis of value as drawn from a metaphysical reserve, reasoning therefore that value must also be an interpretation. From this it follows that some interpretations are valuations while others are not – that there exist, accordingly, both evaluative and non-evaluative (or affect-free) interpretations. What, though, would such unevaluated interpretations look like? More importantly, how should we compare these ‘neutral’ interpretations to the evaluative interpretations that succeed them – as more ‘true’, or perhaps more truly subjective?

In an aphorism entitled ‘Restoration of “nature”’, Nietzsche offers that ‘in itself an action is perfectly empty of value; everything depends on who does it. One and the same “crime” can in one case be the highest privilege, in another the mark of shame.’ ⁴⁶ Nature’s trajectory is indifferent to our approval or disapproval of its expressive arc; one can no more expect each individual to exert the same force and in the same manner than one could expect every hurricane to strike with the same intensity or to trace the same bilious course. ⁴⁷ ‘Restoration’ thus returns to each subject its idiosyncratic nature by removing the overlay of moral valuations that, in their absurd hostility to nature, violently assimilate this uniqueness. Nietzsche objects to how moral systems force incommensurable subjectivities into an artificial economy of exchange that commodifies the invaluable quality of each. This distaste of moral universality as a procrustean mechanism that homogenizes radical human differences appears to many to stage a frightening justification for an anti-social egoism. Yet any such stage that would support the ‘natural’ actualization of ethical singularity would be the same that upholds the positing of pre-ethical rational or pleasure-seeking beings in orthodox theories of value. Thus, Nietzsche’s purported defense of self-interest does not break with or overthrow the modern philosophical premise of a pre-social and innocent subjectivity but instead affirms it, disclosing him, thereby, not as the true nemesis of Kant but, on the contrary, a close and dear relation. ⁴⁸

Nietzsche champions singularity as the incontrovertible right to be judged without reference to the actions of others to whom one might be unfairly joined through value, a claim reflected in his allegation of valuation as precisely a kind of mistaken identity: ‘Morality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena, [and is] more precisely a misinterpretation.’ ⁴⁹ But if, translating this statement into the thematic language of our article, the evaluative is a mistaken or misfired relation extending out of the primordial phenomenal relation, should not we suspect, as with Althusserian ideology, that such misinterpretations belong to and facilitate any possible uninflected interpretation? And that, consequently, the potential for any non-evaluative, ‘singular’ interpretation is from the start criminally corrupted by its tenancy-in-common with evaluative misinterpretations? This is, in effect, another way of asking whether Nietzsche’s allegation of the artificiality of values is not meant to ensure a ‘false relation’ with the ‘natural’ interpretations they presumably attend as a way of arguing that the simultaneous appearance of valuation with interpretation merely evidences, as Deleuze warns, the duplicitous nature of value and its seductive mimicry of `real' relationality.

The predominance of this Nietzsche of ‘no relation’ that services the severing of valuation from interpretation diminishes, however, what in Nietzsche inclines against this reading both interpretively and logically. Such moments are those that demonstrate not merely an alternative conception of this relation by Nietzsche but, I offer, instances in which Nietzsche suspects the possibility of ‘no relation’ as already philosophically beholden to the affiliation it protests. A close reading of any of several passages could demonstrate this, though for the sake of brevity I shall focus on his speculation upon the manner by which value is said to pollute interpretation, a theory we might refer to as ‘interjection’ in order to designate both its forcible method of entry and its presumably affective content.

Let us revisit an abridged version of the earlier passage on the father: ‘[W]e construe “what is” as what exerts an effect on us. … Supposing, though, we put certain values into things, then these values have effects back on us after we’ve forgotten we were the ones who put them in.’ ⁵⁰ Value, he suggests, as what we interject or ‘put into things’, takes up occupancy within phenomena subsequent to the latter’s formation. As Nietzsche then describes, these value-infused representations reappear as primary percepts, becoming in turn the ‘original’ phenomena that had earlier preceded ethical (mis)interpretation. Having forgotten our earlier application of worth, we respond to these valuated phenomena as neutral interpretations – the raw fodder of our subjective yet still pre-ethical experience. From this point on, each such recognizable ‘thing’ would be constituted by value – as what, through every subsequent forgotten cycle, continues to interject and newly render that ‘thing’. On this model, the construal of ‘what is’ comes into being already contoured in value, a value not appending to or parasitic of apprehension but intrinsic to the phenomenon itself. Thus my ‘interpreting differently’ what my imagined father says cannot be contrasted to an interpreting that could serve as the pre-ethical default whereby I might compare my specialized reading of these words to the meaning of the ‘same’ utterance untainted by such a relation, for instance, that utterance contained in a written statement or spoken by another man not taken to be my father (say, perhaps, a priest, a carpenter, or a john). This leaves us, then, only relational interpretations that, as indigenously evaluative, cannot be traced back or ‘restored’ to an unevaluated, original representation.

How, though, can value inhere in phenomena while remaining persistently alien to it – as what is both ‘put into things’ and simultaneously determinative of those ‘things’? Can there be a first, unevaluated interpretation that commences this chain of ethical metalepsis? Is there, for that matter, any point to such a question when, unable to recall previous infusions of value, we cannot confidently distinguish unevaluated from evaluated phenomena? We might rest content knowing merely that this antecedent ‘thing’ – what has been conjectured so far as a mode of pre-ethical representation – has some requisite if undefinable content prior to its forced entry from the outside. But as Nietzsche explains, this coherence is itself, remarkably, a product of yet another instance of this same dynamic of interjection: ‘There is no “fact-in-itself;” instead, for there to be a fact, a meaning must always first be projected in’ [original emphases]. ⁵¹ If we reflect on the structure of these contentions that meanings and values are ‘put into’ more elementary percepts, we see that it synthesizes two contradictory ideas: the first is that of the percept punctured by a qualitative foreignness, a postulate that hypothesizes in advance the boundary pierced by that externality, that is, a circumscribed ‘thing’ defined by a border that could be perforated from without; the second, however, asserts that what is penetrated cannot exist prior to that penetration – cannot, as it were, take a form that could enable it to be violated and contaminated except through that violation, such that it is in disfigurement that the interpretation becomes figured.

Nietzsche’s explicit statements asserting the subsidiary nature of valuation must be thought, therefore, in conjunction with those suggesting that the border between interpretation and value – the line of demarcation establishing their non-relation – forms itself through the primordial irreducibility of that relation. Like the old joke about Abraham Lincoln building the log cabin he was born in, this more latent argument theorizes value as installing the neutral interpretation out of which its existence as a misinterpretation emerges. But if valuation forges that which it is accused of perpetually disabling, it follows that, contrary to the prevailing view, value does not trail the rendering of the perceptual as an inessential, secondary apparatus but occasions its enactment. ⁵² Not an epiphenomenon of an anterior interpretation, valuation names the hierarchical differentiation of force through which a phenomenon becomes some thing to be apprehended.

This dynamic by which the description of the interjection of phenomena by value (and meaning) cannot separate itself from and collapses into one asserting interjection as requisite for the appearance of phenomena is not uncommon in Nietzsche. His statement that valuations ‘play a part in almost every sense impression [in that] our world is colored by them’ ⁵³ stops just short of making value necessary for phenomena. Here, the qualifier ‘almost’ [fast] suspends at the last moment this primacy by implying the possibility of uncolored sense impressions, those not imbued with value. Elsewhere, however, Nietzsche opposes the notion that value ‘has given color to existence’ in the same way that paint covers a canvas, ⁵⁴ rejecting the feasibility of achromatic percepts: ‘There is no doubt that all sensory perceptions are entirely suffused with value judgments. … A particular color simultaneously expresses a value for us …’ ⁵⁵ In this vein, Nietzsche takes all sensory input to be ‘colored’ and, more importantly, understands this spectral quality not as what stains impressions but as what affords their visibility: ‘[W]hatever is some being’s “external world” consists of a sum of valuations; that green, blue, red, hard, soft are inherited valuations and their emblems. … [These] valuations must stand in some kind of relation to the conditions of existence, but by no means that of being true, or exact.’ ⁵⁶ If perceptual experiences of rudimentary properties like color or density presuppose a particular and subjective viewpoint, Nietzsche reasons, this viewpoint should not be metaphorized through space and location – as nearer to or further from reality – but instead as representing a ‘standing-in-relation’ to ‘the conditions of existence’ that creates the illusion of an ‘external world’. ‘Valuation’ is therefore, like ideology, best described as a relation to a relation. The mistake morality makes, then, is to believe that such constitutive valuation, if not a falsification, therefore designates a ‘true’ relation. As we have seen, however, this ranking of the true and false relation that initiates the play of the legitimate and illegitimate as well as the innocent and the criminal is not a consequence of but rather intrinsic to ontological differentiation. How, indeed, would interpretation distinguish itself from valuation if valuation is an affective intensity that shapes interpretation or ‘what is’, a generativity that should, as Nietzsche writes, indicate that ‘[a]ll experiences are moral experiences, even in the realm of sense perception’? ⁵⁷

Our discomfort with the prospect of being tainted by the criminal vailings that naming institutes, where even innocence and singularity unfold as rhetorically cauterized matrices of larger networks of ethical associations or tenancies, coordinates with the attempt to disaggregate value from interpretation, or to privilege certain expressions of that relation (like the paternal) over others (such as race). Minimally, this effort subjugates value to epistemology; more emphatically, it codes value as extraneous to primary modes of representation, logically disqualifying it as first philosophy. Thus the so-called ‘ethical turn’ in continental theory in the 1980s tellingly refers not to a turn within ethics or to a reading of truth as evaluatively constituted – as with, say, the ‘linguistic turn’ – but denotes merely a turn to the topic of ethics, as if, having done the prior requisite hard labor on epistemology, theorists could direct their attention (at last!) to normative matters.

This historical marking of a ‘turn to ethics’ is more emphatically a turn away from Nietzschean studies of value at a point when, after several seasons of anti-metaphysical critiques of truth, the question of what it would mean to think ethics under the same conditions could no longer be elided. Yet instead of directing acute activity towards the ‘value’ of morality, those previously heralding Nietzsche in their analyses of history, truth, embodiment and science became complicit with the catcalls against him as a harbinger of the narcissistic dead end of aesthetic self-fashioning and pledged themselves once more to doctrines of rights and duties. Hence, the surge of continental interest in figures like Levinas and Badiou arises not as a correction or response to Nietzschean ethical analysis but in its stead – that is, as a refusal to address the constitutive ethical relations of criminality even as it professes its cosmopolitan love for the other, the non-human and the transnationally dispossessed. Indeed, this disavowal has become the first condition for ethical investigation in some discourses, for instance, those subscribing to Derrida’s assertion of ‘justice’ as the one thing that is ‘not deconstructible’. ⁵⁸ In this case, it is value as this non-deconstructible justice whose purity is said to depend upon the absolute partitioning of valuation and interpretation: ‘justice has to be distinguished not only from law, but also from what is in general.’ ⁵⁹ For Derrida, justice preserves itself by ‘exceeding’ all relations and tenancies-in-common, modes of belonging that for him signify only that ‘we know in common that we have nothing in common’. ⁶⁰ This notion of singularity as what, in escaping joint tenancies, permits the subject ‘to keep [its] freedom’ thus culminates in the permanent disclaimer that ‘what you should have facing you should have no relation … with what I myself see facing you … [in this] no relation is possible … for when [singularities] speak to one another there is no relation, no passage’ [emphases added]. ⁶¹ The ethical turn for Derrida is here exampled through an attempted extrication of the ‘free’ subject from the criminal relation as the first obligation of value, a parsing that is yet made possible through an appeal to the ethical, specifically, a command that one should confront the other as pre-ethical. For Derrida, ethics begins with the demand for recognition of the self beyond the ligatures of the name and its Althusserian misrecognitions. It begins, that is, with a performative plea, unequivocal and stubborn, that Jerry Miller have no relation to Jerry Miller.

At least, for Derrida, it should work like this. He asserts that ‘the proper name’ confers singularity because ‘[it] is not part of the language, and is thus untranslatable’; yet the problem of criminal misrecognition is not that of translation but rather, as he himself painstakingly details in his earlier work, a consequence of the necessary iterability of any mark. If the proper name confers singularity, then, it does so not through the preservation of what is irreducible and untranslatable but through an iterability that allows a ‘singularity’ to congeal within multiple repetitions of the assortment of proper names for which there are no singularities but only joint tenancies to which any subject is criminally beholden for the sake of that subjectivity.

The philosophical legacy Nietzsche leaves us admits, despite these defiant maneuvers, of no such ‘ethical turn’, insofar as valuation does not designate a simple, self-willed supplement that we confer upon pliant phenomena but rather indicates what is primary to and enactive of the perspectival reformulation of truth. This means that the increasingly dominant movement against traditional metaphysics cannot disown its paternal relation to valuation – its father, its son – even as it petitions for interpretation as an independent (and innocent) expression of the singular name. But how could it be otherwise? What has brought us to this juncture where we readily posit subjects as effects of truth who, in some unexplained, magical reversal, effect their own value?