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Title: Deleuze, Active Nihilism & Revolt Author: Lucrezia Date: 2014 Language: en Topics: nihilism, revolt, Deleuze, Nietzsche Source: Retrieved on September 12, 2019 from [[https://archive.org/]] Notes: “Deleuze, Active Nihilism & Revolt” first appeared on the site Nomadic Negativity in November 2014 https://nomadicnegativist.wordpress.com/2014/11/17/deleuze-active-nihilism-and-revolt/.
Gilles Deleuze’s thought is explicitly affirmative; his philosophy is
known for its articulation of life as vital force, difference,
creativity and becoming. It would be a misreading of Deleuze however to
understand the affirmative drive of his thought as implying that he
thinks only in positivities, or that he is concerned with affirming the
world as it exists. Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and becoming,
contrary to many readings of his work (both critical and celebratory),
is in fact shot through with themes of aggression, antagonism and
destruction which make his thought, and the tactical pointers he
proposes for struggles against the existent, anything but an escapist or
naively positive philosophy. As he writes in Nietzsche and Philosophy to
affirm is to “set free what lives” and “instead of the labor of
opposition or the suffering of the negative we have the warlike play of
difference, affirmation and the joy of destruction.”[1]
This text proposes a reading of Deleuze which foregrounds the influence
of Nietzsche’s philosophy of active nihilism on Deleuze’s thought and on
what he means by affirmation. Through the lens of active nihilism,
“becoming” and “nomadism” can be understood as concepts for an ethics of
creative destruction and as strategies to escape capture by the State
and the identities and orders it seeks to impose.
To understand Deleuzian affirmation, it is important to note that,
alongside new creation, there is a violence and destruction inherent in
becoming: the violence of an outside which destroys the self as it was
and spurs it into new directions. This is a form of creation which
leaves a trail of destruction in its wake. Deleuze and Nietzsche make
clear that the force of negation which accompanies affirmation does not
persist as an independent power, but is transformed or “transmuted” into
something light and joyful, into a new affirmation. As Deleuze tells us,
we can imagine this force of negativity as being like “soluble fire
which ignites and then disappears into affirmation.”
Readings and uses of Deleuze which ignore this negative shadow to
affirmation, and which celebrate Deleuze’s vitalist optimism while
neglecting his joyful pessimism, risk obfuscating the destructive and
nihilist elements of his thought. And it is this negative shadow which,
it is argued here, gives Deleuzian affirmation its aggressive and
antagonistic character: which make concepts such as becoming, nomadism
and imperceptibility into concepts and strategies for the refusal,
sabotage and destruction of systems which attempt to organize and
capture forms-of-life into distinct, hierarchically organized, and
controllable categories and identities.
Furthermore, Deleuze’s notion of negativity offers a way to
conceptualize the affective mutations of contemporary existence, such as
depression, cynicism, hopelessness and passive nihilism, not as
dead-ends roads of resignation nor as states of angst and alienation to
be fetishized, but as strategic resources: fuel to the fires which burn
through the existent and open up possibilities of other worlds.
In a thesis titled “Escape”, Andrew Culp writes:
Cynicism, depression, and hopelessness fill reservoirs unleashed against
Empire in revenge for the wounds it causes. Dangerous emotions pose a
threat, not just to those who bear them, but to their source, Empire –
the political imperative is to channel them. This should not be
understood as an uncritical celebration of alienation or a politics of
ressentiment. But these dangerous emotions are not unhealthy reactions
to a sound world; they should be everyone’s natural reaction to the
terrible situation facing us all. To throw them away would only rob some
subjects of the only thing Empire has ever given them. So instead of
avoiding their terrifying energy, dangerous emotions can be made
political by giving them an orientation. This politics can become
reactionary, as when it is used to restore a lost time or attack
abstraction with stubborn disbelief. But once politics is freed from the
demands of preservation, reproducibility, and repetition, innovation,
difference, and singularity begin to flourish.[2]
This is a counterforce whose strength lies in an “immense capacity for
making new galaxies of joy”[3] out of and against the misery of
capitalism. Depression, cynicism and hopelessness are transformed from
states of paralysis in which our capacity to act is reduced into the
negative shadow of insurrectionary joy.
A lesson often repeated by Nietzsche is that it is through experiencing
pain and suffering we may come to know a more profound joy. He writes:
In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such
abysses, from such severe sickness, also from the sickness of severe
suspicion, one returns a newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish
and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a tenderer
tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous
innocence in joy, more child-like and yet a hundred times subtler than
one has ever been before.[4]
He continues:
A loss is a loss barely for one hour; somehow it also brings us some
gift from heaven—new strength, for example, or at least a new
opportunity for strength.[5]
Transforming pain into joy, heaviness and ressentiment into laughter,
lightness and dance is the primary ethical challenge Nietzsche presents
us with. In an affirmation of life which envelops the tragedies of the
human species, Nietzsche rips apart all doctrines and images of life as
inherently full of suffering, misery and struggle. This lesson is
carried into anti-capitalist struggle by Deleuze and Guattari. As
Foucault writes, Deleuze and Guattari remind us not to “think that one
has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is
fighting is abominable.”[6] Deleuze’s affirmative thought then, is
philosophy for political nihilists and pessimists who are joyful, who
are under no illusion that a communist utopia awaits us on the other
side of capitalism, but rather than this perspective leading to
miserable resignation it can instead liberate us into the terrains of
reckless antagonism and joyful destruction in and against the present,
as we fight for impossible and unimaginable futures.
From Passive to Active Nihilism
For Deleuze affirmation and negativity are closely related as different
powers in the passage from passive to active nihilism. He explains how
the negative always precedes and follows the affirmative: that is,
affirmation cannot take place with-out a corresponding negation. In
Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze begins his discussion of nihilism with
a critique of passive nihilism. In nihilism, “it is always the element
of depreciation that reigns, the negative as will to power, the will as
a will to nothingness.”[7] Nihilism is a negativity that is reactive and
through which the will to power is lost to “the becoming-reactive of
forces” and, for Deleuze and Nietzsche, this reactive negativity needs
to be transmuted (or transformed) into an affirmative will if it is
going do anything, if it is to take us anywhere and create the
conditions for new becomings and new life.
To the question of “how nihilism can be defeated?” Deleuze responds by
reversing his critique of nihilism through the elaboration of a second
form of nihilism. In his explanation of Nietzsche, Deleuze suggests that
a nihilism which is passive and reactive in its mode of negation can
only be defeated by a “fully completed and finished form of nihilism”[8]
This may appear confusing at first blush, but it becomes clearer when
understood as relating to Nietzsche’s two distinct concepts of passive
and active nihilism. Deleuze is here referring to the latter as
completed nihilism.
The process of transmutation brings about completed nihilism. Deleuze
explains why: “it is only by changing the element of values that all
those values dependent on the old element are destroyed.”[9] The
passive, incomplete form of nihilism characterized by negation,
reactionary forces and a will to nothingness is thus overcome through an
active nihilism which seeks out the destruction of all old values in
order to make way for the affirmation of difference. In this way,
trans-mutation, the transformation of negativity into affirmation and
difference which Deleuze and Nietzsche are calling for, is conceived of
as active nihilism.
Deleuze notes a connection between reactive nihilism and the development
of active nihilism: it is the manifestation of the first kind of
nihilism which forces us to know the will to power and to gain knowledge
of it:
The will to power is spirit, but what would we know of spirit without
the spirit of revenge which reveals strange powers to us? The will to
power is body, but what would we know of the body without the sickness
which makes it known to us?[10]
In other words, it is through the negative experience of ressentiment,
sickness, and the reactive spirit of revenge that we are able to come to
know the will to power as the will to affirmation, and to overcome
passive nihilism. Nihilism, which was earlier presented by Deleuze as a
negative force needing to be defeated makes its second appearance as an
active force, and is presented as key to the will to power: “thus
nihilism, the will to nothingness, is not only a will to power, a
quality of the will to power, but the ratio cognoscendi [principle] of
the will to power in general”. This principle of nihilism is however not
an end to itself, but is a necessary step towards affirmation. As
Deleuze writes: “Nihilism expresses the quality of the negative as ratio
cognoscendi of the will to power; but it cannot be brought to completion
without transmuting itself into the opposite quality, into affirmation
as ratio essendi [raison d’être] of the same will.”[11] And elsewhere:
“Destruction becomes active to the extent that the negative is
transmuted and converted into affirmative power: the ‘eternal joy of
becoming’ which is avowed in an instant, the ‘joy of annihilation’, the
‘affirmation of annihilation and destruction.’”[12] Here again we can
see how negation and its appearance as nihilism are only complete when
they are transformed into an affirmative force of joyful destruction and
creation.
In the transmutation of negativity into affirmation there is a “change
in quality”[13], from a negative quality to an affirmative one. This
qualitative change brings about a radical transformation: “in place of
depreciated life we have a life which is affirmed – and the expression
‘in place of’ is still incorrect. It is the place itself which
changes.”[14] The negative is said to become a power of affirming when
it is no longer at the service of reactive forces but instead “is
subordinated to affirmation and passes into the service of an excess of
life.”[15] The negative here is neither denied nor suppressed but is
rather put to use as the force which desires destruction and thus,
through an active nihilism, leads to affirmation. This is how we can
understand the function and the force of negation. “At the limit” of the
destructive process of active nihilism, writes Michael Hardt, there is
the moment of transmutation when, “at midnight, the focal point, there
is a transformation, a conversion from knowledge to creation, from
savage negation to absolute affirmation, from painful interiority to
joyful exteriority.”[16]
The destruction which is implicit to negation leads to affirmation, as
the source of creation. Referring to Zarathustra’s “supreme degree of
negation”, Deleuze writes, “destruction as the active destruction of all
known values is the trail of the creator.”[17] In this way, affirmation
leaves a trail of destruction in its wake, as that which always
accompanies any affirmation but is never is primary object. Furthermore,
Deleuze states that negation also always precedes affirmation as
“[d]estruction as the active destruction of the man who wants to perish
and to be overcome announces the creator.” In this way Nietzsche’s
discovery is “the negativity of the positive”[18] which is able to break
out of all forms of ressentiment and reactive thinking and living. As
Nietzsche writes: “We negate and must negate because something in us
wants to live and affirm – something that we perhaps do not know or see
yet.”[19]
Michael Hardt suggests that Deleuze’s affirmationism has been
misunderstood by the Hegelian tradition (which we can extend to Benjamin
Noys’s recent critiques in The Persistence of the Negative). Hardt
writes that “[t]he great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, for example,
have conceived of affirmation as a passive acceptance of the
contemporary state of affairs, as a naïve and irresponsible optimism”, a
perspective which according to Hardt remains in contemporary Hegelians
(as, for example, in the critique of Deleuze made by Judith Butler in
Subjects of De-sire (1987)), when they claim that philosophies of
affirmation “remain impotent because they have deprived themselves of
the power of negation”. Hardt argues, however, as is also be suggested
here, that “[a]ffirmation [...] is not opposed to critique. On the
contrary, it is based on a total, thoroughgoing critique that pushes the
forces of negation to their limit. Affirmation is intimately tied to
antagonism.” Furthermore, and crucially, this negative moment has an
“absolute, non-dialectical character.” When the Hegelian critics
conceive of affirmative thought as “uncritical” or “anti-critical”
thinking, according to Hardt,
We are once again faced with a nuance or an alternative that is
misunderstood as a polar opposition. In other words, Deleuzian
affirmation does indeed contest the Hegelian form of negation and
critique, but it does not reject negation and critique tout court;
rather it highlights the nuances that form alternative conceptions of
negation and critique more adequate to his project.[20]
Negativity then, clearly has a place in Deleuze’s thought and within
Deleuze’s concept of affirmation, as is seen in his reading of
Nietzsche’s philosophy of active nihilism. Deleuze makes it clear that
affirmation cannot take place without the negative, as that which both
drives us to affirm and as a force destruction which opens the way for
creation. Affirmation can only occur through the transformative power of
an active nihilism, a desire for “overcoming”. In order to establish the
will to power as a will to affirm, we must first pass through the
passive negativity of ressentiment; to know what it is that makes us
suffer in order to seek the destruction of these forces, but not
destruction as an end in itself but rather as necessary for affirmation.
Negativity is however always secondary to affirmation for Deleuze; it is
its “zealous servant”, while “[o]nly affirmation subsists as in
independent power”. Negativity becomes “absorbed” into affirmation like
“soluble fire” so that only affirmation persists as a power: “the whole
of negation is converted in its sub-stance, transmuted in its quality,
nothing remains of its own power of autonomy”. As Deleuze writes: “we
are concerned with negations, but with negations as powers of
affirming.” Negativity is therefore key to affirmation but ultimately it
is always superseded by affirmation, remaining only as “the mode of
being of affirmation.”[21] There is thus no purpose in sustaining
negativity as an autonomous force and it is a mistake to consider it as
such: negativity is understood by Deleuze as a force of the will to
power only when it is transmuted into affirmation. The purpose of
Deleuze’s concept of negation is always and only in how it “opens the
field of affirmation.���[22]
As anarchists and negative spirits, we can make use Deleuze’s particular
conception of negativity, and its articulation of a force of destruction
which is “active, aggression profoundly linked to affirmation,” and in
which “critique is destruction as joy, the aggression of the
creator.”[23] In this way, we can bring the philosophy of active
nihilism, as an ethics and a weapon, to our terrains of disorderly and
antagonistic composition.
This philosophy teaches us the crucial importance of not becoming
reactive to forces of repression and offers an ethics to combat affects
of defeat issuing from the inevitable losses of the struggles in which
we are engaged. Deleuze’s active nihilism also offers a philosophical
framework for thinking through and against the nihilism of late
capitalism; to experience the current organization of social misery as
that which we must come to know in order to destroy; to destroy what
destroys you.
Of the demon who follows Zarathustra on his travels on earth, Deleuze
writes that he represents the purely negative form of nihilism, “because
he denies every-thing, despises everything, he also believes he is
taking negation to its supreme degree”. In the character of this demon
we are given a warning against “living off of negation as an independent
power” as “having no other quality but the negative [...] a creature of
ressentiment, hate and revenge.”[24] Similarly, we can draw a difference
between a fatalist and total nihilism which arms itself solely with
forces of negation, and an active nihilism which is capable of both
affirmation and negation; which sets upon the negation of the existent
through affirmative destruction.
Lucrezia
Nov, 2014
There is a violence and destruction inherent in
becoming: the violence of an outside which destroys
the self as it was and spurs it into new directions.
This is a form of creation which leaves a trail of
destruction in its wake.
[1] Deleuze, G. (2006 [1962]) Nietzsche and Philosophy, The Athlone
Press: London, p.174 and180.
[2]
http://www.academia.edu/5516631/Escape_Dissertation_
, p.136.
[3] Nietzsche, F. (1974 [1844-1900]) The Gay Science, “Our Eruptions”,
Random House: New York, p.86.
[4] Ibid. p.37.
[5] Ibid. p.256.
[6] Foucault, M. (1983 [1972]) “Introduction to non-fascist life” in
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, G. Deleuze and F. Guattari,
Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
[7] Deleuze, G. (2006 [1962]) Nietzsche and Philosophy, The Athlone
Press: London, p.161.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid. p.162-163.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid. 164. and quotes from Nietzsche F. (1888) Ecce Homo.
[13] Ibid. p. 165.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Hardt, M. (1993) Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy,
UCL Press: London, p.51.
[17] Deleuze, G., (2006 [1962]) Nietzsche and Philosophy, The Athlone
Press: London, p.167.
[18] Ibid, p. 170.
[19] Nietzsche, F. (1974 [1887]) Thus Spake Zarathustra, New York: Dover
Publications, p. 246.
[20] Hardt, M. (1993) Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy,
UCL Press: London, p.115.
[21] Deleuze, G., (2006 [1962]) Nietzsche and Philosophy, The Athlone
Press: London, p.166-169.
[22] Hardt, M. (1993) Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy,
UCL Press: London, p.116.
[23] Deleuze, G., (2006 [1962]) Nietzsche and Philosophy, The Athlone
Press: London, p. 81.
[24] Deleuze, G., (2006 [1962]) Nietzsche and Philosophy, The Athlone
Press: London, p. 169.