Table Of ContentGenealogy and Convalescence
JEFFREY M. JACKSON
Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories
Jeffrey M. Jackson
Nietzsche and
Suffered Social
Histories
Genealogy and Convalescence
Jeffrey M. Jackson
University of Houston–Downtown
Houston
TX, USA
ISBN 978-1-137-60152-0 ISBN 978-1-137-59299-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59299-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937463
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For Alli
A
cknowledgements
This book is dedicated to Alli Antar—my best friend. Her uncompromis-
ing commitment to beauty, justice, and truth allows little rest for my lazy
sensibilities. Without her, who knows where I would now be.
I am grateful to Stefan Bird-Pollan for many years of conversation
about Adorno and other matters. I also want to thank other colleagues
and friends who did me the great honor of reading my first book or of
taking an interest in its argument: Tammis Thomas, David Ryden, Greg
Getz, Ed Hugetz, Mohsen Mobasher, Kristin Anderson, Camilo Garcia,
and Brad Rappaport. Thanks to Jason Winfree for the hospitality at CSU
Stanislaus. Norman Whitman provided feedback on the draft of parts of this
book. I am grateful to John Rocco for the inspiration through his tireless
leadership of roc4nbcure.org, and for discussions about future cover art.
If there is anything valuable in this or my other work, it was surely
shaped by the many great teachers that I have been fortunate to know,
especially—in alphabetical order—Rudolf Bernet, James Chastain, John
Compton, Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Cynthia Hampton, Michael Hodges,
Gregg Horowitz, Girard Krebs, Ursula Lawson, Algis Mickunas, Jeffrey
Tlumak, David Wood, and Arthur Zucker.
I am the beneficiary of consistent support from amazing parents. And,
as it is sometimes the case that younger siblings take the benefits of hav-
ing older siblings for granted—oblivious to the lessons, examples, and
opportunities afforded by having someone around to show them how to
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
live—I want to thank my older brother James for everything, including
that which I was too young to remember.
And, thanks to Eleanor, the naughtiest puppy in the world.
An earlier version of Chap. 1 was published as “Nietzsche on Cultural
Convalescence” in Subjectivity.
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 Convalescence, Mourning, and Sociality 43
3 Relationality, Trauma, and the Genealogy
of the Subject 69
4 Nietzsche’s Negative Dialectic: Ascetic Ideal
and the Status Quo 107
5 Working-Through Perspectives in Nietzsche and Object
Relations Psychoanalysis 143
Bibliography 179
Index 183
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This book draws on psychoanalysis and critical theory to interrogate the
ways in which Nietzsche’s work explores the suffered sociality of reflec-
tion. For Nietzsche, that which seems independent—or is symbolically
or metaphysically sanctified as independent—is the symptom of a more
fundamental socio-historically conditioned dependence. In other words,
Nietzsche interrogates the way in which social history produces sub-
jects that are allergic to their own socio-historical conditions of possibil-
ity, taking various forms of a symptomatic insistence on independence.
There is therefore a reflexivity between the reproduction of social crisis
and the reproduction of subjectivity, such that social critique must also
be a critique of the subjectivity which is socially reproduced and which
engages in that social critique. Adorno expresses a similar thought in
Negative Dialectics, where he writes: “Identity is the Ur-form of ideol-
ogy … the critique of ideology is not something peripheral … but philo-
sophically central: the critique of the constitutive consciousness itself.”1
One might say that there is a parallel in the conception of the dominant
form of subjectivity as identity-thinking in Adorno and as grounded
within the ascetic ideal in Nietzsche. For both thinkers, as will be dis-
cussed in Chap. 4, reflection on social crisis implies a need for the self-
critique of reflection that is a symptom of the suffered crisis it attempts
to conceptualize.
On this reading, for Nietzsche, thinking is a symptom of suffered,
social histories. New thinking is therefore symptomatic of new forms
of suffered socio-historical life. Consciousness and will are themselves
© The Author(s) 2017 1
J.M. Jackson, Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59299-6_1
2 1 INTRODUCTION
expressions of suffered, social histories and Nietzsche’s concepts of gene-
alogy and convalescence might be seen as characterizing the working-
through of our suffered social pasts as the condition of possibility of
overcoming that past and creating a new world. Instead of an appeal to
free will or other form of subjectivism—which express the reproduction
of the status quo—Nietzsche suggests that any overcoming must take a
path through the ordeals of breaking from the relational histories that
have left us fixated in our ressentiment. From this perspective, Nietzsche’s
philosophy is not anti-reflection, nor the assertion of some sort of direct
expression of the body or dynamism, but rather reflection avowing its
conditions and limits in its imbrication within suffered, social histories.
Put another way, the main thesis of the following discussion is that
Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy needs a concept like that of convales-
cence to be coherent. Genealogy is a form of thinking, but one in which
thinking encounters its condition of possibility and limit in suffered his-
tory. In other words, for Nietzsche, there is a primacy placed on socially
mediated suffering—not merely the reflection on that suffering, but also
the suffering of reflection—the conditioning and rupturing of that reflec-
tion by that suffering. This includes reflection on “the body,” “life,”
“nature,” and so on. Here then, emancipation, or however one conceives
of the salutary norm asserted by Nietzsche’s philosophy, would need to
be characterized as a mode of suffered life which includes reflection as
one of its moments—as in convalescence, for example—rather than as the
result of a spontaneous subjective action.
Convalescence is a concept for the subject’s negotiation of the objectiv-
ity which conditions and ruptures reflection. In illness, our objectivity has
primacy over our subjectivity. Our vulnerable bodies suffer as objects; our
ideas are undergirded, exceeded, and ruptured by this objectivity; thoughts,
goals, and desires are thwarted and interrupted, and we are forced to work-
through and adapt them to an embodiment that was taken for granted. Our
desire, concepts, and anticipations arise from and are destroyed by the objec-
tivity with which they can never catch up and can never freeze or fix. In this
sense, “objectivity” refers not merely to epistemological correspondence
with the object, but to that which exceeds, conditions, and ruptures ideas.
Objectivity is both reflected upon, and the suffered basis and limit of reflec-
tion. Genealogy does not simply interrogate history, but rather the non-
identical character of suffered relationality; genealogy is itself symptomatic
of that relationality; that is, it is symptomatic of that which it interrogates.
Nietzsche’s genealogical narrative is, as we will see, a kind of primal scene,
