“I am body entirely, and nothing
besides; and soul is only a word for something in the body” : Nietzsche, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra
The predominance of body discourses in contemporary
thought for the last four decade was mainly due to Nietzsche’s philosophy of
life that wanted to ground thought, values and human existence on materiality[1].
Till mid nineteenth century the major philosophical systems and religions of the
world explained the meaning of human existence, moral values, truths and
cultural experience in terms of a transcendental consciousness whose roots lie
in the spiritual reality. As a result abstract conceptual reasoning got
predominance over experiential truth of the body and life. Modern civilization
(which is basically European in origin)[2]
thus builds a culture that disallows the expressions of the natural, sensual and
the biological. It is through the containment of the bodily that a culture
devoid of desire[3]
could be built, whose history Nietzsche unravels as nihilism. Nihilism plainly
means life denial, and overcoming it becomes the central project of Nietzsche
philosophical activity. For that the ground of thinking has to be shifted from
consciousness to the body, abstract to the concrete, rational to the sensual and
the spiritual to the material.
Such a shift comes through Nietzsche’s thinking of the
body. Consequently there was a transition of agency from soul to body in recent
philosophy. Although it began with Nietzsche, lately it spilled over to
phenomenology and poststructuralism. Within poststructuralism the two
predominant responses to Nietzsche’s body thinking are that of Foucault’s
analysis of the ‘docile body’[4]
and Deleuze and Guattari’s portrayal of the ‘desiring body’[5].
This paper is meant to critically engage these two responses to Nietzsche’s
thought to explain what are at stake in each one of them with regard to the
formation of a liberatory politics for the contemporary society. Thus, besides developing a discourse of body
out of Nietzsche’s thought, the following articulation conducts a polemic of
both Foucault and Deleuze with Nietzsche.
1
This ‘body thought’ is certainly a type of materialism.
But its materiality is different from the view taken by the naïve materialist
philosophers who explain the human life in terms of mechanistic laws[6].
Naive materialists totally degrade the value of spirit or consciousness. Even
the Darwinian kind of biologism, the most influential modern materialism lies
very far away from Nietzsche’s bodily materialism that wanted to perceive life
as a flow of desire, which is
explained through the idea of the will to power. In a diametrically
opposite pole to materialists is situated the spiritualists who wanted to
dispose of everything associated with body and matter to be valueless thrash[7].
Even in those Philosophers who accept the relevance of both the spiritual and
material an unresolved dualism between matter and consciousness is existed.
Consciousness has viewed by them as something entirely different in quality and
kind. And the body is treated as something that does not interact with
consciousness, except functioning as a home for a temporary halt of
consciousness.
References to the body could be seen throughout
Nietzsche’s major works. Yet a well formulated theory of the body, like we see
in Merleau Ponty or Foucault may not be clearly visible in Nietzsche’s thought.
Nietzsche spoke always more about life, organism, biology, animal, nature and
food. By all these he was actually referring to body itself. In his opinion
values are not the result of dialectical thinking or original archetypes. He
always said that the origin of values of a people have to be sought in the food
a people eat (Nietzsche, 1969, p.237-38) and the climatic condition of a land in
which they live (ibid, 240-41). This is to say that all the beliefs, thoughts
and values of human being have a bodily origin. Thus his aim behind
philosophizing was to ground thinking on life and materiality that promote an
earthly, geocentric life.
Nietzschean body
is not strictly the human body as we see it in Foucault or Merleau Ponty. It
includes the entire organic world with the will to power as the force of it.
Human being is also seen as a part of the organic life-world. But previous
philosophies and social science-discourses were not ready to see the animalistic
in the human[8].
The anthropocentric attitude of them tends to place the human in an exclusively
rational realm. Like the religious thinking they also give a divine origin to
humanity, consequently cutting the human roots from the natural-animalistic and
placing human being in the realm of the spiritual. Nietzsche’s one project in
this regard was meant to bring the human being back from the divine to the
worldly and link man to the animalistic. Thus he writes that “we no longer trace
the origin of man in the spirit, in the divinity, we have placed him back among
the animals” (Nietzsche, 1990, p.134). From this it could be seen that
Nietzsche’s project of the body politic includes the affirmation of the
animalistic at large[9]
rather than privileging the human being at the helm of the social. Such a body
discourse of Nietzsche has to be differentiated from the body discourse of
phenomenology and Foucault’s thought of the body, as both of them are concerned
only about the human body.
Nietzsche’s
thought produced two streams of discourses of the body within continental
philosophy. One is the phenomenological idea of the ‘lived body’ by which that
tradition underlines the bodily consciousness[10]
in opposition to a transcendental consciousness of the self. Another stream of
body discourse comes from the poststructuralist tradition, whose task was to
examine the political investment of the body in the modern social sphere. It is perceived that the body in the modern
culture is deformed and reorganized through markings engraved on it in order to
make it a useful body in carrying out tasks assigned to it.[11]
Poststructuralist project sets out to unravel the techniques employed by the
dominant powers to tame and organize the human body in different periods in
history. Their project is to produce a
genealogy of the body instead of providing simply a theory of the body like the
phenomenologists.
As
Heidegger rightly pointed out, Nietzsche’s mission in philosophy was to overturn
Platonic tradition that conducted thought through the abstract universal
concepts that devalued the concrete historical experiences. Human embodied
existence then get discarded and cast out from the sphere of philosophy.
Philosophers could never think that body could exist by its own power without
the support of a spiritual substance from outside. Like the god of Semitic
religions they all posited an external agency that trigger and control the
movement of the body from outside, situated in a transcendental world. A
classical example is the god in Aristotle who is the unmoved mover of the
material substance.
Nietzsche for the first time in the
history of thinking showed that the body does not require an external principle
or a mental substance for instigation of its movements and thoughts. With the
announcement of the ‘Death of God’[12]
he was actually making the body free of all external control of a spiritual
substance. He replaces it with a force that is an attribute of the body itself
which is the will to power[13].
Among
the various responses to Nietzsche’s thinking of body, this paper focuses on two
prominent responses. The first view comes from a body politic but with a
different perspective. Michel Foucault, drawing inspiration from Nietzsche’s
critique of nihilism presents body as something perpetually molded and reshaped
by the forces that take control of it in each historical period. However, in a
slight deviation from Nietzsche’s view, for him the body is always the human
body which perpetually undergoes disciplinary practices either in the form of
physical torture or discourses. Narrowing down his reflection further he
confines his articulation of the human body to a body within history, marked by
culture. This marking gives meaning to the body. In the absence of any cultural
inscriptions a body has no content or essence of its own. If at all the human
body has any characteristics, qualities or attributes all of them come from
outside, imposed on it by external agencies. He does not speak of any bodily
attribute or force that works from within the body that shape its agency.
Rather, “the body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down
by the rhythms of work, rest and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values”
(Foucault, 1984, p.83). Foucault’s attempt is to show that neither the human
nature follow from any universal psychological characteristics nor the bodily
movements the result of physiological laws. Disciplines of the society shape
human nature as well as movements of the body.
The second one represents a body politic that wants to
set free the bodily desires through making connections of flow with other
bodies. This is proposed as a liberatory politics particularly by Deleuze and
Guattari, the figures of schizoanalysis. In place of Nietzsche’s will to power
Deleuze and Guattari perceive desire as the attribute of the body. But
this desire is being contained and blocked in modern civilization by
various social stratifications. They develop the idea of the body without organ which is the body
that could free itself from the inscription made on it by the various social
stratifications. The Body without
organ is the surface on which various cultural inscriptions are made so that
it is converted into a stratified, formed and an organized body. Here the
‘organs’ represent the various cultural meanings and institutions that have been
added upon the body to make it an organism. In the view of Deleuze and Guattari
human liberation largely depended on removing such organs to get back to a state
in which desire becomes productive once again. This position of them could be
seen as the consequence of the Nietzschean affirmation of the body as something
primordial, pre-cultural and natural that possesses will to power as a
pro-life force.
2
Foucault’s Preoccupation with the discussion of body, however, comes from
the realization that in modern civilization “the body is a volume in perpetual
disintegration” (Foucault, ibid, p83).
His genealogical investigation is intended to trace the “process of
history’s destruction of the body” (ibid) that produces ultimately a society
controlled by administrative power structure. The genealogical enquiry is
intended to trace the causes of this descent. Foucault writings are thus not
meant to merely provide a theory of functioning of body in society. Rather it is
meant to evolve a program for resistance against the forces that wanted to take
away the joy of the body through subjugating and imprisoning it for maintaining
the interests of the dominating powers of the society.
The body analysed by Foucault is a body within history.
History is a process which always reconfigures society through reshaping of the
human bodies either through direct punishment on it or through discourses. In
most of the occasions in human civilizations the shaping of the bodies has been
to cater the advantages of the anti life forces than the pro-life forces. Among
Foucault’s histories, except the classical Greek period in The Use of Pleasure (Foucault, 1984),
all other histories are occasions of subjugation where bodies are made to
surrender to dominating powers.
However, it could be observed that none of his histories
suggests any political program to deliver the body from subjugation. Instead,
Foucault always speaks of a body that is manipulated, shaped and trained. His
political concern leads him to perceive the human history from the side of the
marginalized other. Therefore his investigations are basically directed to
uncover the suppression of human bodies in modern societies by various regimes
of administrative control to make it useful for production of profit. His
genealogical works such as Discipline and
Punish(1975), The History of
Sexuality: An Introduction (1976) and The Birth of the Clinic (1963) exposes
how modern techniques are applied to make docile bodies, which are subjected,
used, and transformed for utility and control. It is very much evident in his
observation that “the body is directly involved in a political field; power
relations have an immediate hold upon it ; they investigate it, mark it , train
it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit
signs” (Foucault, 1975, p.25). Techniques made possible meticulous control of
the operations of the body. Foucault’s works obviously can be seen as an
analysis of rise of various forms of discipline, whereby the body and its
desires are regulated within the modern cultural space.
Then why a political program of resistance is missing in
Foucault’s corpus? One could argue that his objective was to merely analyse the
social reality where bodies are produced discursively and engraved by the signs
of culture. Was he, as an analyst who does not side with any theory or
evaluations, merely exposing the social strategies deployed on bodies in each
age to function it according to the needs of various social situations? If his
intention is merely analytical we need not demand from him to make any positive
or negative evaluation.
But if such is his approach to body it would be doubtful
if any resistances could be built against the disintegration of the bodies. Because, in order to engage a political
struggle the body has to harness a counter power that helps it to either resist
or evade the power structure of the subjugating forces. Such a power has to come
either from within the body or to be drawn from outside. But no resistance can
be drawn from outside, as all the existing outside forces in contemporary
civilization like state, police forces, social sciences and cultural
institutions are manifestations of anti-life power that only disintegrate
bodies. All such institutions as well as other bodies are the inscribed surfaces
produced discursively through reactive power and none of them is outside the
bounds of discourses.
Then the only possibility for the body to resist the
subjugation shall have to come from within it. Nietzsche has already shown that
bodies are driven not by external spiritual principles but by its own internal
force which is the will to power. But
surprisingly Foucault could never conceive power as a force or essence of the
body like Nietzsche believes. Nor he thinks like the psychoanalysts that the
body has libidinal desire as its force which is prior to all social
stratifications.
Foucault’s rejection of a force of the body like the will to power or an internal desire
like the libido of psychoanalysis can be seen in the stand he has taken in The History of Sexuality. Here Foucault
explains sexual desire as a product of power, rather than an instinct of the
organism (Foucault, 1976). Thus, instead of perceiving desire as an attribute of
the body desire is seen as something discursively constructed by
culture.
In The History of
Sexuality bodies have seen as succumbing to the power of the discourses of
sex. Foucault says that sex is not an inner energy of the human bodies but is
the product of the discourses of Christianity, medicine, psychoanalysis and
other social sciences. Human desire for sex was not there before the operation
of those discourses. Prior to that there is no sexuality for the body other than
the presence of some anatomical elements, biological functions and sensations (
Foucault, 1990, pp.152-55), which were discrete and never felt as a sexual
instinct.
Cultural
theorists like Herbert Marcuse on the other hand regard ‘Eros’ to be a drive
that could subvert the institutional order of the society[14]
(Herbert Marcuse, 1956). This hope stems from the belief in sex as a natural
instinct which has been suppressed by power of the social. However, Foucault
does not subscribe to such views which assign a liberatory task for sex and
instead claims that sex is merely a product of the institutional power. One to
experience sex is amounts to succumbing to power rather than liberating oneself
from institutional power. Thus, in his opinion one only gets normalized by
indulging in sexual experience.
If sexual desire also is a discursive power of the
institutions meant to dominate bodies, it is doubtful if any other force of the
body remains there to be called back. As Foucault never recognizes a
pre-historical beginning where bodies are nature-driven and free of all
inscriptions, the body for him is always organised. Getting back to a body without organ is like taking an
idealist metaphysical position, which is not acceptable to him. His notion of
body thus can be seen as a body with
organs, which means a body organized by the inscriptions of culture. A kind
of cultural determinism in his thought does not allow him to draw a liberatory
project via permanently erasing of the cultural inscriptions carved on the body.
As the body cannot exist as a primordial object free of cultural meanings, even
if one inscription is erased it will be replaced soon with some other
inscriptions. The new inscription must be one that leads to the activation of
the body positively. But we are not informed of its sources of origin and
therefore it remains unavailable to the body. Foucault does not speak about it.
It is left unexplained.
In Foucault’s opinion a primordial body free of all cultural inscriptions
is impossible. In history events after events appear as a result of struggle
between different powers for domination. Dominating forces in history always
make new inscriptions on the body over the existing inscriptions. For him “the
body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by
ideas), the locus of a dissociated self and a volume in perpetual
disintegration” (Foucault, 1984 p.83). Genealogical investigation is employed by
him “to expose a body totally imprinted by history” (Ibid). If history is the
repeated struggle between various forces for domination and body always its
product it is doubtful if Foucault could effectively justify the scope of a
political struggle. Foucault has been considered as an advocate of emancipatory
politics. But the picture he gives of the body is a passive one without having
any agency to resist the subjugation. Body in Foucault’s opinion is always an
organized one by practices of power applied on it from outside. Whether it is in
Discipline and Punish or The History of Sexuality or The Birth of the Clinic, in all of them
the body is always seen as vulnerable to disciplinary practices without any
resistance to offer. Power explained in
Foucault’s texts is always one sided, where body is always being bombarded from
outside. This situation results from the failure of Foucault to perceive the
internal power of the body or a libido. Foucault, having no theory of embodiment
to offer, lacks a proper ground to situate himself.
Foucault while formulating his theory of the body based on Nietzsche’s
notion of a primordial will to power misses out to count this power as a
pre-discursive desire. This failure of him leads him to lose a ground to firmly
situate, from which he could wage a war against the power that subjugates the
body. For him in every age there was
certain regulations of the body, some are positive and some others are negative.
For instance he speaks of the history of the body of the ancient Greek
civilization where they had a very positive economy of pleasure (Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 1992). Greeks never
saw body as something to be subjugated to extract labor power out of it. But in
modern urban culture body is mainly seen as a devise for material production.
But Nietzsche demonstrates that the modern attitude to
perceive body basically as an object for production of wealth does not start
with the modern strategists like psychiatrists, jurists and educationists like
Foucault claims. Nietzsche showed in On
the Genealogy of Morals that the attitude to perceive bodily pleasures as
something undesirable is already in the air since the beginning of Christian
ascetic outlook propagated by the priestly culture. In fact the history of
despising of the body starts from much early period which Nietzsche reads as the
history of nihilism. Modern practices of control of the body are only
intensification of the already existing anti-life attitude propagated by the
Judo-Christian tradition much before. With the advancement of industrial urban
culture the tendency became to convert body finally as automata, whose genealogy
Foucault’s conducts in Discipline and
Punish.
In
Foucault it is through imposing of subjectivity upon the body from outside
that its forces are finally tamed and controlled. Subject or self is something
added to the body through disciplinary practices. It is something produced by
culture and imposed on the body through deliberately thought out plans and
strategies. Discipline and Punish
perceives human “soul as the prison of the body”,( Foucault, 1979, p.30) in the
sense that the soul serves as an internal police agency installed within the
body to check its movements and deeds. Discipline and Punish is the book that
traces the nature of practices and disciplines brought out jointly by the
cooperation of various human sciences and knowledge systems of modernity that
helped to contain bodies. The result was the development of a moral agent
regulating behavior by codes, disciplines and practices.
Foucault’s genealogical investigation is, however, limited to the sphere
of examining of political investments of the body in various historical periods.
Each epoch used different techniques to mark the bodies and thereby carve
different types of subjectivities out of the bodies. Foucault does not believe
in a primordial body that could escape the subjugation of various powers. More
over he could not locate the sources and centers of their origin. He merely
states that power relations are everywhere and as they are so subtle and works
at micro levels, one could never identify its point of origin. Consequently for
a political struggle he does not tell us where one has to be situated in order
to develop counter strategies against the dominating forms of power. He could
not say that one has to be situated at the side of the body because he could
never perceive any neutral or unmarked body. His contention is that as human
life is unfolded within history, human bodies always get marked either in one
way or the other. Like the relationship between matter and form in Aristotle,
body and self can only coexist. Matter cannot exist formless and form cannot
exist matterless. Likewise body always has to be organised in one way or the
other. Organ-less body is thus an unimaginable prospect in Foucault’s scheme of
thinking.
Foucault could
not have taken a different perspective because his interest in analysing the
nature of body is grounded on a socio-political purpose, viz. to distinguish the
powers that curtail human freedom. The motive of the dominating powers which
impose disciplines on the body is not to take away the joy of any particular
human being, but to take hold of the very social body itself, so that they are
able to rule the society according to their interests. Foucault’s political
project is therefore to deliver the polity from the onslaught of administrative
control of various forces. Other than this any subtle political project for the
individual liberation rooted in an economy of desire is missing in
him.
Although the notion of body and power employed by Foucault is a
reformulation of Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power he fails to see the
sources of resistance that could be developed from the body’s internal force.
Nietzsche on the other hand is very clear about the internal potential of the
bodies in resisting domination when he writes that “my idea is that every
specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force
and to thrust back all that resists its extension” (Nietzsche, 1968,
p.339). It is precisely because of this
we would have to say that Nietzsche’s genealogy goes further than the mere
analysis of the techniques deployed to produce subjectivities in different
historical periods. Rather it unravels the very psychology and dynamics of
functioning of the repressive forces. While Foucault unravels the logic of
repression of body of some periods, Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism could
identify the very nature of powers that produce subjugation of bodies for all
times to come. He identifies resentment, bad conscience and ascetic ideal as the
three types of forces that produce nihilism not only in certain ages but at all
times in the history of mankind (Nietzsche, 1969). The very History itself is
conceived by him as the product of those forces. Nietzsche therefore underlines
the need of moving outside the history like animals and children do[15]
(Nietzsche, 1983, p. 61). In Nietzsche’s opinion that probably gives an answer
to the question of overcoming nihilism and points towards a life rooted more on
bodily desires. It is precisely by
situating on this vantage point Nietzsche could interrogate repression of the
body.
In
Nietzsche’s scheme of thinking the body cannot be delivered from subjugation
through any socio-cultural reformulation. The very social is the manifestation
of the reactive, nihilistic will to power. The affirmative and the positive is
always the natural that comes from the bodily desires. The social always
establishes at the coast of the body. For instances the engraving of memory on
the body appears for the first time when the transition of life to a social
order based on buying and selling relationship takes place. There was a time
when pre self experience was possible where bodies could have lived prior to the
imposition of ‘self’ upon it. Nietzsche demonstrates how bad conscience acts as
a ‘self’ which has produced by burning into the body a memory of right and wrong
and duty and responsibility. Self then could be seen as something planted upon
the body to imprison its desires which are often flighty and chaotic. In the
opinion of Nietzsche the self formation always coincided with the creation of a
memory for the human species (Nietzsche, 1969, p.60-61). Foucault also speaks of
a self that works as a prison to check its movements. But this prison in modern
times is instituted not through direct punishment on the flesh, but largely
through discourses in human sciences which is implemented through schools and
hospitals. In ancient regime, however, the containment of the bodies was
effected through the cruelest means like ‘chopping of hands, burning of the body
in oil and trampling the convict by the horses’(Foucault, 1979). But Foucault
could be seen as merely reproducing the genealogical investigation of the
regimentation of the body in order to explain the modern instances of
punishments and discipline. The tools are not his own, rather borrowed ones from
Nietzsche’s corpus[16].
But when Nietzsche tried to build a counter resistance to the institutional
decomposition of the body through a counter will to power whose source is the body
itself, such a program is utterly missing in Foucault.
Instead of rejecting the existence of primary drives, Foucault ought to
have said that the bodily desires could be expressed only discursively. Lacan,
who said that libidinal desires are expressed only in language could have been a
model for Foucault in this regard. Rather than coming near to this position at
least, Foucault merely states that the very desires are the product of
significations or cultural markings, which amounts to saying that before
cultural inscriptions there was absolute void or nothingness. Even for a
discursive construction of desires, some form of force has to be there in the
body to modify it as motives and actions. A discursive formation cannot come
into being from an absolute void. But
Foucault is not interested to explore its origin. He wants to be distanced from
metaphysical questions. In his opinion what genealogy investigates, on the other
hand, is the historical occurrences, and not any timeless beginning. But the
problem with such a stand is that ‘the will to power, or libido cannot be taken
as historically originated. One has to postulate some energy that is
a-historical in order to be situated in a firm ground to conduct a critique of
social realities. If everything is historical and cultural the body has no
option but to succumb to the subjugation without building any resistance.
In
Nietzsche’s thought, however, culture is never postulated as the a priori realty
of life. Nietzsche’s genealogical inquiry locates a beginning of culture in the
transition of life based on accumulation of private property, that could be seen
in the coming into being of buying and selling relationship. This marks also the
beginning of nihilism. Nietzsche always sees the beginning of nihilism and
culture together. He never believed that nihilism is always present in human
existence there is a beginning for nihilism and there fore, a beginning of
culture and historical living. He postulates for the possibility for a
non-historical living, in the unlearning process that has to be practiced by
human being, like animal and human child do (Nietzsche, 1983, p. ).
A meaningful political struggle to
defeat nihilism and the liberation of body can be imagined only by accepting the
possibility of a primordial body that can resist the invasion of anti-life
forces nurtured by the cultural. As culture is mostly the product of the
negative will to power, body cannot be liberated with the cultural. Culture
contains both the positive and the negative forces[17].
But it is not possible to eradicate the negative alone from the cultural. A
healthy culture, in the opinion of Nietzsche, is the one in which affirmative
power predominates over the negative. Humanity had such glorious past moments in
history (Nietzsche, 1969). Like the early Greek age, there were periods when
culture was less affected by nihilism. However the modern culture is entirely
dominated by the negative. That is why the modern culture is perceived as
acutely nihilistic. But Nietzsche will
not argue that pre-nihilistic ages like the early Greeks were entirely free of
cultural inscriptions. Rather the Greek culture had gone more in tune with the
bodily desires. But still there must be some kind of organization of the body in
order to have a cultural existence possible. A healthy culture in the opinion of
Nietzsche, on the other hand, is the one in which the bodily and the instinctive
predominate over the law and administrative control.
Then
the idea of making oneself a ‘body without organ’ may not be seen as the
establishment of a culture free of nihilism and anti-life inscriptions. One
could be able to make it while living within the cultural. It is not by changing
the surroundings instead through taking a flight from the social that the body
is affirmed. Hence it can be seen that Nietzsche’s body politic addresses two
tasks. The first is to defeat a nihilistic history through the establishment of
a culture that permits to live out the bodily desires. Such a culture would be a
healthy culture that goes more in tune with the natural and the
instinctual. The second is practicing of
a playing out of the bodily by each individual, even when existing in the midst
of a negative social order. The second is more individualistic, which made him
to be known as an existentialist thinker.
The
practicing of the living of the bodily is what Nietzsche characterized as the
aesthetic dimension of existence. Body is the site of desire that is poised to
enhance itself through overflowing energy and superabundance. This desire is
being manifested in the human activities of heroism, love and artistic
creativity. This is expressed in the aesthetic, the site of the internal power of the body. Nietzsche
wrote “Art produces….an excess and overflow of blooming physicality into the
world of images and desires… and it excites the animal functions through the
images and desires of the intensified life” (Nietzsche, 1969, p.809). Further it
is stated that “art exercises the power of suggestion over the muscles and
senses….it works tonically, increases strength and inflames desires of the body”
(ibid).
But
power within the body can act negatively as well. This is specific to certain
body’s preferring of its own submission along with its imposition of control on
other bodies. This is the occasion of the will to power functioning as a
negative force that turns against body and its desires. The metaphysician’s
condemnation of the senses and sensuality in favor of reason and spirit in the
opinion of Nietzsche comes from such a negative power. This is resulted from a
weakness to live a life of becoming. Thus we see two types of bodies in
Nietzsche’s thought. One is the type that acts positively, expressing its inner
energy in the form of desires. They are unconcerned about the painful
consequences it likely to produce. Whereas, the negative type is the weak who do
not dare to live heroically by affirming becoming, consequently out of
resentment they turn against life and go inactive. Unable to act its own, it
turns out to be reactive and stand in the way of the affirmative to put hurdles
on their way. While the active is able to compose new forms of desire, the
reactive decomposes and degenerates bodies thereby creating a sickly
civilization. The reactive power manifests in ascetic attitude that degrade body
as ugly. Thus they claim that body is something to be transformed and elevated
into spirit. Nietzsche writes “here an attempt is made to employ force to block
up the wells of life; here physiological well being itself is viewed as askance,
and especially the outward expression of this well being, beauty and joy”
(Nietzsche, 1969, p118). The reactive type seek ‘pleasure in ill constitutedess,
decay, pain, ugliness, self mortification and self sacrifice’ (ibid). it
downgrades physicality to an illusion. As a substitute to desire the reactive
seeks ascetic regimentation of the body.
3
Another interpretation of Nietzsche’s idea of the body is the one that
sees it primordially as a desiring substance. This view is the extension of the
psychoanalytic view of body as the locus of libido. Can a body sustain without
organizing it to some form of subjectivity is the central question raised in the
second part of this paper. Schizoanalytic[18]
theory of Deleuze and Guattari show us that a body can wash away all
inscriptions marked on it by culture and administrative practices and can get
back to zero intensity. But this zero intensity is not the absence of any force
or power in the body. Instead it is the starting point of all play of desire.
The traditional philosophy thinks that in order to have
essence the body has to have some form or principle acquired form outside, given
by some external agency. Metaphysical thoughts interpret the body in such a way
as a crude matter organised by a rational self or transcendental spirit. But
this zero intensity is not a lack, as psychoanalysis perceives. Drawing on
Nietzsche’s view of the Will to power schizoanalysis demonstrates us a body
inhabited by desire which is a force internal to the body itself. This body is
not the body of the human being or of the animal, rather it could be any body of
living or non-living entities. All bodies have desire as their essence and they
always try to make connection with other bodies without any rational plan or
design. This makes schizoanalysis to call the body a desiring machine (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1983, p. 15-20 )
Modern
social order however hinders this desiring process by blocking the connection
between bodies. Like Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism schizoanalysis finds a
parallel in Oedipus[19]
that blocks the wells of desire and tie the bodies to various subjectivities.
But this process of Oedipalization is a process found only in human civilization
and schizoanalysis does not believe that this process is a necessary
precondition for one to be a human animal. Schizoanalysis thinks that Oedipal
repression is something historically emerged. Deleuze and Guattari believe that
it is the task of Schizoanalysis to unravel the history of that repression. So
as a parallel to Nietzsche’s genealogy of nihilism schizoanalysis sets out to
conduct a genealogy of Oedipus.
To
explain the zero intensities of bodies schizoanalysis introduces the idea of
‘body without organs’. This idea has been introduced to demonstrate how a human
body can free itself from the markings made on it by various regiments of power
such as state, family and moral institutions. While cultural institutions try to
organise bodies by imposing molar identities of gender, class and caste, the
bodies can resist them or create lines of escape by making molecular connection
of desire with other bodies. Body without Organs is not a body that dismantles
physical bodily parts or organs. It only means shedding of inscriptions and
meanings drawn on the surface of the body by repressive cultural practices. The
bodies of animals, stones, plants and stars may not make deliberate attempts to
make lines of flight from identities because they are already comprised of
unstable matters of flows that pass through in all directions and various
speeds.
“The Body without Organs causes intensities to pass: it
produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking
extension….it is non stratified, unformed, intense matter….that is why we treat
the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and organisation of the organs, before the
formation of the strata…”.( Deleuze and Guattari, 2002, p.153).
But a human body
has to take deliberate attempts to make itself a body without organ. As the
human body is already organised and constituted through various stratifications
of class, groups and selves without conducting experiments with its potential
traits and affects it may not be possible to reach back to a full body without
organs. But in order to make the flow of
bodily desire, a unified or organised body is not essential.
The position of Deleuze and Guattari can be seen as a
remarkable deviation from the general poststructuralist theory where language is
a necessary medium for all communication and transmission of desire from one
body to another. Deleuze speaks of a bodily communication without the medium of
language. Although poststructuralist thinkers speaks of the unavoidability of
language, they are very much conscious of the limitation of the possibility of
desires in language. This leaves Lacan to say that desire is metonymically
expressed and thereby it becomes need in a socio-symbolic order. Desire as the
primordial libido is forever remain to be an impossibility ever since the
subject is entered into the symbolic. Deconstructionist engagements of Derrida
also endorsed this impossibility of conveyance of desire and experiential pluralities of life through
signs. Thus, in a radical deviation from the structuralist practice he, in his
deconstructive writings sought to extend the possibilities of language to the
optimum levels, thereby it no more becomes linguistic signs, but becomes
‘trace’, a term invented by Derrida to explain the multiple levels of
significations. Still Derrida could not free himself from the textuality until
the ethical phase of his later philosophy came into being.
It is precisely this poststructuralist preoccupation
with linguisticality in experience that make Foucault’s body to remain in
subjugation of the socio-symbolic order through succumbing to cultural
inscriptions. But there is certainly a way out.
Foucault has to understand that this linguistic determinism is a specific
feature of bodies within the cultural and there is possible for the bodies to
resist and break this situation. However Foucault fails to articulate the
possibility for the expression of bodily multiplicities because for him, for any
such expression recourse to linguistic signification is necessary. This
excessive reliance on language makes him to keep silence about the primordial
desire of the body. If that exists, it cannot be revealed other than through
signification. But Foucault must understand that for the transmission of desires
such mediums are not necessary. Desire can be passed from one body to the other
without any recourse to cultural signs. It could be direct. Deleuze and Guattari
thus create a theatrical philosophy where bodies meet each other, and moves
beyond the textual levels of their existence.
Drawing on the Freudian libido theory of the pre-Oedipal
stage of the children, schizoanalysis argues that desire always passes through
partial objects only. The global person is someone born as the result of the
mirror stage that marks resolving of the Oedipus complex. It is through
repression of desires a global person comes into being. Attacking the cult of
global personage it shows that desiring machine does not need a global person
and it works with partial organs: “The breast is a machine that produces milk
and mouth another machine connected to it”; the eye that connected to a lock of
hair of another forms a different machine (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983 p.4).
Desire flow from the one to the other without the structure of a self or fully
developed individual. A ‘Schizo’ is the one who is able to make such connection
perpetually with the various beings of the world, even with the stars and
animals, hereby undergo multiple becomings. Becoming animal, becoming woman and
becoming plant are such multiple lines of flight through which a human being can
reach the Body without Organ.
Deleuze and Guattari never claim that a body can be insulated of
inscriptions and historical changes. Even Nietzshe would not argue that humanity
can be delivered for ever to an a-historical natural order free of all
nihilistic formations. Interpreting Nietzsche’s perspective of the body Deleuze
wrote that “a thing is sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes something more
complicated- depending on the forces which take possession of it….but the thing
itself is not neutral and will have more or less affinity with the force in
current possession” (Gilles Deleuze,1962, p.4). This stand of Deleuze goes in
tune with the general poststructuralist perspective of the body as the site of
investment of meanings and forces that take control of the body in each
historical period. Foucault very powerfully endorses this stand in Discipline and Punish. If a body is
destined to be organised for ever genuine freedom would be impossible. How
Foucault would be able to get out from this impasse. He never seems to be
suggesting any line of flight to reach to an organ-less body. Like the Lacanian
psychoanalytical tradition, a way out to the desiring body is once and for ever
closed before Foucault.
Schizoanalysis may not have any
program to transform the bodies to Body without Organs for ever, nor it suggest
any molar political project to reorient society based on desire. The social
stratifications and organizations may stay here for longer periods. But
Schizoanalysis shows that at least momentarily, you can, dismantle the
organisations of the organs, which we call the organism, and reach the Body
without Organs. The way Deleuze and Guattari suggesting is “Lodge yourself on a
stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place
for it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of
flight, experience them, produce flow of conjuctions here and there,…it is
through meticulous relations with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines
of flight ….and bring forth continuous intensities for a Body Without
Organs”(Deleuze and Guattari, 2002, p.161).
The
project of body liberation proposed by Deleuze and Guattari may not provide a
permanent accommodation for bodies in the territory of desire. As life cannot be
entirely cut off from the cultural and the social, some form of organization of
the body has to be there. Yet their
development of a different life for the bodies beyond the socio-symbolic order,
away from all recourse of signification process, casts the embodied existence as
a novel challenge to be practiced by contemporary human civilization. This is an
extension and radicalization of Nietzschean body politic, which Michel Foucault
could not properly develop in his writings.
[1] In the history of philosophy Nietzsche is considered as
a break from the long metaphysical tradition. Before him the history of thought
from Parmenides to Hegel conducted thought in abstract conceptual manner that
does not give any room for the concrete, which is the site of the body. In
Nietzsche’s thinking about the concrete and worldly things, a thought about
the particular embodied experiences are
heralded for the first time.
[2] Modern civilization can be seen as the culmination of
the project of European modernity whose logistics lies in Enlightenment
philosophy. The hall mark of enlightenment philosophy is the rationalization of
all domains of life thereby the experiencial elements like dreams, sensuality,
passions, the poetic are all goes to the margins social life. Foucault discusses
this plight of the modern life in detail in his Madness and
Civilization(1961)
[3] Desire is used as a technical term of contemporary
thought, and it may not be understood as a want or wish to posses some object
that satisfy our need. It represents more our libidinal, instinctual, aesthetic
dimension of human existence.
[4] Docility of the body is the central theme of Michel
Foucault’s Disciline and
Punish(1979). However how the human body in modern times become a controlled
or silenced one is a main enquiry in almost all major works of
Foucault.
[5] The idea of desiring body of Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari appears for the first time in their joint work Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia(1984) where all bodies are seen as desiring substances.
Drawing both from the libido theory of
psychoanalysis and Nietzsche’s theory of ‘the will to power’, desire is however
presented not as an unconscious principle but a conscious energy that wants to
find its expression in real life. But controls of the social order disallow its
proper expression.
[6] Naïve materialism refers to those forms of materialist thinking which gained
strength from the gains of natural science beginning from the work
of Newton
[7] Plato is the forerunner of such an argument who in his
Pheudo set the task of philosophy as dissociation of soul from the polluting
contact with the body. (Plato, Symposium and Other Dialogues, Penguin Books,
1978, p178). This platonic position
revived through the Biblical theology of St. Paul
[8] Humanism is the hall mark of European metaphysics that
perceives human nature essentially as spiritual thus placing man in a divine
order, far away from the animalistic. Animal functions of human being such as
reproduction, sex, loving, emotional expressions are looked down upon. With the
entry of human being into history, into culture in place of the animalistic,
another set of values such as rationality, religiosity, chastity, duty
consciousness, work, sense of responsibility etc have been privileged over the
natural functions. The meaning of the world and life are measured in terms of
human yardsticks and thus produced alienation of the human-rational from the
animal-natural. The social science discourses are the products of metaphysical
thinking which are meant to support human life in the social against the chaotic
order of the natural. The strongest criticism against humanism comes from the
Nietzsche inspired poststructuralist tradition. Also see Martin Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism
(1937)
[9] Human liberation according to this stand-point lies to
a very great extend in the retrieval of the lost natural-animalistic mode of
existence
[10] Phenomenology in general, and Maurice Merleau Ponty in
particular says that the seat of consciousness is not the self rather it is the
body that is conscious. Merleau Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (1996)
[11] Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Judith Butler, Kristeva all
believe in one way or the other that the body is something culturally
produced.
[12] Nietzsche, The
Gay Science, Sec.125. The famous ‘God is Dead’ pronouncement has to be seen
a replacement of origin of values, meanings and life from the heaven to the
earth, from abstract to the concrete, from divine to the animal and from the
soul to the body.
[13]
Nietzsche philosophy is built around this central idea by which he explains the
entire processes of the world and life. .The will to power is considered as the
driving force of all organic and inorganic things. He says that it not pleasure
that organisms seek but power, by which all organic and inorganic entities
strives to persist in existence. Power is also the essential force of the things
that motivates them to grow more and enhance itself by overthrowing all oppositions in their way.
In learning new things, in the winning of competitions, in the experience of the
works of art, in the processes of loving and so on, the motivating force of all
these activities is considered as power.
[14] Marcuse, in Eros and Civilization (1956), employing the
Freudian notion of libido criticizes the contemporary civilization for its
suppression of the erotic pleasure. In his opinion the unconscious libidinal
pleasure has to be harnessed to make a changed society where the human being
will be more creative and happy.
[15] Nietzsche in Untimely Meditations, explains the need of human being learning to
cultivate forgetfulness as a virtue. Memory here is seen more as a curse than a
virtue as it tie human being to historical living that creates unnecessary
burden of the past and the future. Affirming the value of the present moments is
suggested as non-nihilistic act which the animals and human child
do.
[16]
The direct punishment on the flesh
explained in Discipline and Punish is
somewhat the same type of punishment Nietzsche explained in the second essay of
On the Genealogy of Morals where he
speaks of the means employed to create memory for the human being in ancient
times
[17]
Human history is seen as the product of the perpetual struggle between positive
and negative will to powers to gain upper hand. Modern culture is perceived by
Nietzsche as a time of the victory of the negative that plunges life into into
nihilism. The positive is the pro life force that makes the play of desire
possible, whereas the negative hinders the play of desire and joy by creating
perpetual hurdles before the positive. Modern cultural institutions such as
state, churches, military and all types of administrative ordering could be seen
as the manifestation of the negative force. A parallel to the negative and
positive will to powers could be seen in the Paranoiac and Schizophrenic desires
articulated in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti
Oedipus (1983).
[18]
Schizoanalysis is an extended form of psychoanaysis but it rejects the tendency
of psychoanalysis to contain the unconscious through the Oepipalysing treatment
of psychiatry. Schizoanalytic practice developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari on the other hand perceives a liberatory potential in freeing the
libidinal desires into the social domain. It sees Oedipus as a myth produces by
anti-life forces such as despotic governance and ascetic religions.
[19]
According to psychoanalysis resolution of Oedipus complex at the early stages of
a human child helps to contain the polymorphous libidinal desires of the
unconscious. Oedipus complex also is understood to help the self formation of
the human individual and make him to develop into a rational ‘subject’.
References:
Deleuze, Gilles and
Guattari Felix (1983): Anti Oeidipus,
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, R Hurley & M Seen (trans.),Athlone Press,
London
Deleuze and Guattari,
(2002)A Thousand Plateaus:Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi (trans.) Continuum Books, New York
Deleuze, Gilles,(1962): Nietzsche and Philosophy, Hugh
Tomlinson(trans.), The Athlone Press
Foucault,
Michel(1984)“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, In The Foucault Reader, Pantheon Books,
New
York
Foucault, M (1979): Discipline and Punish, Alan Sheridan
(trans.) Vintage Books, New
York
Foucault, M (1980): The History of Sexuality: An
Introduction, R. Hurley (Trans.)Vintage Books
Foucault, M (1982) : The Use of Pleasure: The History of
Sexuality Vol.2, R. Hurley (trans.) Pantheon Books, New York
Marcuse, Hebert (1955):
Eros and Civilization, Routledge, London
Nietzsche, F (1990): The Antichrist , Walter Kaufman
(trans.), Penguin Books, New
York
Nietzsche, F (2001): The Gay Science, Josefine Nauckhoff
(trans.) Cambridge Univerdity press.
Nietzsche, F (1968): The Will to Power. Walter Kaufman
(trans.), Vintage Book, New
York
Nietzsche, F (1969):On the Genealogy of Morals, Walter
Kaufman (trans.), Vintage Books, New
York
Nietzsche, F (1983):Untimely Meditations, R.J Hollingdale
(trans.), Cambridge University
Dr. Abey
Koshy,
Associate
Professor,
Deptt. of
Philosophy,
SSUS, Kalady.
Aby.koshy6@gmail.com
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