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precisely through these contradictions. Indeed, Nietzsche referred to
them as genealogies . Instead of believing that there is a past that one
can narrate, one recognises that any past is traced back from the
present. One should, therefore, write histories that destroy, rather than
stabilise, truth. In the Genealogy of Morals (1887), for example,
Nietzsche describes the origin of truth: truth was invented by those who
were simply too weak to affirm their will as will. The Genealogy
therefore offers itself as the truth of truth, as the paradoxical claim that
if we look at the past honestly and without all the deceptions of
morality, we will perceive an original will to deceive (Nietzsche
[1887] 1969a, 150 1). Far from being embarrassed by such
contradictions Nietzsche s aphorisms maximise conflict (Kofman 1993).
One cannot say that there is no such thing as truth without involving
oneself in contradiction. But the style of contradiction can itself be
employed in order to show, if not state, that any true world any world
IRONY OUT OF CONTEXT 99
that supposedly does not conflict with what we say can only be
produced through a repression of the force and will of language.
According to the Yale school critic Paul de Man (1919 83), this leads
Nietzsche beyond a critique of the subject to a critique of the
performative: the self that precedes and governs language is an illusion,
but the idea of language as act, as something that is done, performed or
controlled is no less illusory. For the very distinction between self and
world, active and passive, act and effect is produced through language:
By calling the subject a text, the text calls itself, to some extent, a
subject. The lie is raised to a new figural power, but it is
nonetheless a lie. By asserting in the mode of truth that the self is
a lie, we have not escaped from deception. We have merely
reversed the usual scheme which derives truth from the
convergence of self and other by showing that the fiction of such
a convergence is used to allow for the illusion of selfhood to
originate.
(de Man 1979, 12)
Nietzsche s irony was also crucial in attacking one of the concepts that
had been central to the definition of Romantic irony: the concept of the
subject. The Romantics had argued that the notion of the subject was
unavoidable and impossible. Any event of speech or writing, any
experience, presupposes that there is a subject who speaks, writes or
perceives. If we have a world of forces and relations, then there must be
some ground or subject or some point of view who brings these
forces into relation and into a perceivable world. Nietzsche, by contrast,
argued that the subject was an effect of force. It is not that there are
subjects who then synthesise the various forces of life and becoming
into an organised world. Rather, there are forces and fluxes that, through
collision and conflict, create subject positions. The subject, for Nietzsche,
was an effect of grammar. The will, in all its human and inhuman forms
what Nietzsche referred to as will to power is an eternal or
boundless site of force and conflict. Certain forces produce points of
relative stability. Language, for example, is a mode of force, life and
action that produces regularities. By speaking in propositions it takes
the flux of life and orders it into subjects and predicates. Instead of
thinking of pure actions dancing, for example our language creates
a subject who dances. Poetry, and other forms of non-propositional
100 IRONY OUT OF CONTEXT
writing, aim to disengage thinking from the logic and politics of the
subject. Instead of imagining that there is some ultimate human or
subjective ground which then engages in action and conflict, Nietzsche
insists that there are just contrary forces from which we assume some
preceding subject (Nietzsche [1887] 1969a, 119). We should use
language ironically, being aware that it creates an illusion of relative
stability. But we should not think that there is a truer world behind or
before language, for it is only through language that we can have any
priority of before and after, original and secondary, literal and
figurative, subject and predicate.
DECONSTRUCTION AND AFFIRMATION:
DERRIDA
Derrida, similarly, but in quite different ways, also performs, rather than
states, the limits of truth. Nietzsche saw metaphysics as the means by
which weak wills enslave the strong. Socrates genius lay in this
production of a style of speech that presented itself, not as a style, but as
a selfless presentation of the truth. In effacing itself, or in presenting
himself as absolutely selfless, Socrates produced one of the most
powerful forms of self: The moralism of the Greek philosophers from
Plato downwards is pathologically conditioned: likewise their
estimation of dialectics. Reason=virtue=happiness means merely: one
must imitate Socrates and counter the dark desires by producing a
permanent daylight the daylight of reason (Nietzsche [1889] 1968,
33). Nietzsche s own project was both to admire and reverse this
strangely self-denying will to truth . And this could only be done by
producing a style other than that of true discourse, such as the masks,
aphorisms, genealogies and fictions of Nietzsche s own work. In Thus
Spoke Zarathustra ([1891] 1969b) Nietzsche writes an almost novelistic
narrative, with the central character Zarathustra being an enigmatic
figure of magisterial pronouncements rather than a coherent
psychological type. By creating characters and voices, rather than a
reasoned argument, Nietzsche presents forces of language that cannot
be reduced to reason or some pre-linguistic truth. Derrida, by contrast,
recognises that while truth or concepts such as presence may have [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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