Nietzschean Not-Self (Chapter 2)

Klossowski's second chapter appears to be a completely separate essay that does not build on the first one.  This means we have to start again from scratch with another difficult and slippery text.  The main goal seems to be to elaborate a Nietzschean theory of not-self (anattā) that would apply successively at various levels of abstraction ranging from the personal, to the psychic, and all the way down to the organic. 

Klossowski begins at the personal level, with a discussion of the relation between Nietzsche's writing and the fluctuations in his health.  The letters he quotes demonstrate that while Nietzsche's famous migraines often kept him from writing and even thinking, these same sufferings seem to have been brought on by Nietzsche's own overactive brain.  So Klossowski's first point is that this cycle -- a thinking that rises to a fever pitch which blots out thinking, resulting in a forced rest that restores thought but resets the mechanism -- got Nietzsche thinking about the relationship between a thinking brain and suffering body.

The act of thinking became identical with suffering, and suffering with thinking. From this fact, Nietzsche posited the coincidence of thought with suffering, and asked what a thought would be that was deprived of suffering. Thinking suffering, reflecting on past suffering - as the impossibility of thinking - then came to be experienced by Nietzsche as the highest joy. But does thought really have the power to actualize itself without itself suffering, without reconstituting its own suffering? Does thought itself suffer from its own inability to actualize itself? What then is doing the suffering or enjoying? The brain? Can the cerebral organ enjoy the suffering of the body of which it is a function? Can the body rejoice in the suffering of its supreme organ? (NVC, 23)

While the questions that conclude this passage are at this point rhetorical, they introduce the main idea of the essay -- the material and the spiritual are not always on the same page, and perhaps are even directly at odds with one another.  In itself, this idea would be neither novel nor surprising.  Almost every religion, and particularly Christianity, has long claimed that the gross materiality of the body is an impediment to spiritual development.  The thinking soul has a moral obligation to transcend the suffering of the body; salvation lies in precisely this transcendence.  The interesting thing about Nietzsche is that he runs this same logic backwards.  In his case, it's actually the thinking soul, and the brain itself, that is the cause of suffering.  It's only when the attempt to identify with and carry out this thinking is released that the episode passes and Nietzsche begins his convalescence.  In other words, Nietzsche experiences his own brain as a sort of parasite (perhaps the sort of "metaphysical virus" mentioned on pg. 6) attacking his body, which the body in turn fights back against.  Obviously, it becomes difficult to know who's who here.

The agonizing migraines, which Nietzsche experienced periodically as an aggression that suspended his thought, were not an external aggression; the root of the evil was in himself, in his own organism: his own physical self was attacking in order to defend itself against a dissolution. But what was being threat­ened with dissolution? Nietzsche's own brain. Whenever his migraines subsided, Nietzsche would put his state of respite in the service of this dissolution. For the dissolution was judged to be such only by the brain, for whom the physical self and the moral self apparently coincide. But the body provided Nietzsche with a completely different perspective, namely, the perspective of active forces which (as organic and therefore subordinate functions) expressed a will to break with this servitude. But they could do so only if this will passed through the brain. The brain, on the other hand, could experience this only as its own subordination to these dissolving forces: it was threatened with the impossibility of thinking. (NVC, 24)

This passage is complicated not simply because it tries to express the circular aggression of body attacking brain because brain attacked 'first', but also because it alludes to the way these two sides are not symmetrical.  Nietzsche does not merely invert the Christian moral relationship between between body and soul, but distinguishes them in kind in a new way.  'The body' is composed of a multitude of forces or drives that have no pre-established unity amongst them.  By contrast, the brain takes for granted its own unity as well as the unity of its moral self with a physical self (that it also presumes to be a unity).  As a result, it's only on the side of the brain that there can be anything like a fear of dissolution, because it's only on that side that some unity has been posited.  'The body', as we'll see more clearly in a moment, is a chaotic interaction of various impulses that have been imperfectly and temporarily captured by an organism.  Unlike a Christian's identification with their immortal soul, the identification of 'Nietzsche' with 'his body' cannot help but be a paradoxical affair once the founding principle of a unit of identity has come into question.

Nietzsche experienced this dissolving confrontation be­tween somatic and spiritual forces for a long time, and he observed it passionately. The more he listened to his body, the more he came to distrust the person the body supports. (NCV, 24)

Here we see the beginning of the transition to Klossowski's next level of analysis.  Instead of the the brain, he will begin to talk about the conscious self or the person that we often identify with the brain.  But how does this conscious self that we always imagine is 'us' actually get produced by the body?  

Klowssowki here gives us an intriguing, but in my mind not completely satisfying, explanation of how the brain forms consciousness in response to bodily pain.  The idea seems to be that the body sets up the brain as a specialized organ for combatting a painful excitation that appears to invade from the outside.  However, this system for avoiding pain or pursuing pleasure can only work if the brain codes the excitations coming from the body according to whether approaching or retreating from them has resulted in other painful or pleasant excitations in the past.  Since the excitations coming from the body are so manifold, the brain has to reduce them to a simple code of valence, and the key to this code is nothing more than whether it is self-reinforcing -- does classifying an excitation as painful lead to actions that avoid other excitations that would be classified as painful?  Klossowski's idea seems to be that this valence code is almost completely self-referential and independent of what the excitation might actually mean for 'the body'.  As a multiplicity, the body doesn't have a single point of view on what is pleasurable or painful.  The brain, however, as possessor of a unified code, does have a single point of view, though this viewpoint is only constructed from what habitually appears pleasant or painful for the brain.  This unified self-reinforcing viewpoint is what we call consciousness.  

   The body wants to make itself understood through the intermediary of a language of signs that is fallaciously deci­phered by consciousness. Consciousness itself constitutes this code of signs that inverts, falsifies and filters what is expressed through the body.
   Consciousness is itself nothing other than a deciphering of the messages transmitted by the impulses. The deciphering is in itself an inversion of the message, which is now attributed to the individual. Since everything leads to the 'head' (the upright position), the message is deciphered in a way that will maintain this 'vertical' position; there would be no message as such if this position were not habitual and specific. Meaning is formed in the upright position, and in accordance with its own criteria: high, low, before, after. (NVC, 26)

From a biological perspective, this explanation isn't quite satisfying because it seems that my body comes with any number of pre-programmed interpretations or reflexes that don't depend much on my consciousness of their valence.  I drop hot things, orient on noises from nearby foliage while hiking, and duck when people swing a cleaver at my head.  So it seems that my organism probably has some sort of unity, some sort of 'mind of its own', independently of my consciousness.  However, I'm willing to investigate whether the unity of my body may perhaps be an illusion, and whether these reflexes can perhaps be de-conditioned.  And it's clear that moving the unity back to the level of the organism doesn't solve the philosophical problem of how it arises to begin with, so perhaps the objection is not so important.  At any rate, Klowssowski seems to be adopting the hypothesis that the body has no unity of its own.  It's unity is fictitiously imposed by the consciousness installed on top of it, which seeks to keep itself upright simply because that's what it has always done.  

Nietzsche did not speak on behalf of a 'hygiene' of the body, established by reason. He spoke on behalf of corporeal states as the authentic data that consciousness must conjure away in order to be an individual. This viewpoint far surpasses a purely 'physiological' conception of life.  The body is a product of chance; it is nothing but the locus where the group of individuated impulses confront each other so as to produce this interval that constitutes a human life, impulses whose sole ambition is to de-individuate themselves. (NVC, 26)

 

At the end of this passage we see the idea I mentioned earlier -- the body is a chaos.  This chaos is structured by a clash of impulses that seek to "de-individuate" themselves, which I think is another way of talking about the will to power.  In truth, the impulses don't want anything at all, even power.  Goals and intentions are fictions posited at the level of consciousness.  Instead what the impulses 'want' is simply to act, to dominate, to "draw their ultimate consequence at every moment" (NVC, 45) -- in other words, to make themselves universal.  It's as if each impulse wants to swallow everything and is only prevented from doing so by the all the other like-minded impulses it encounters.  We can imagine shifting constellations of warring Leibnizian monads, red in tooth and claw, without a pre-established harmony between them.      

From each of our fundamental impulses comes a perspectival appreciation of every event and of every lived experience. Each of these impulses is hindered or favoured or flattered by every other impulse, each with its own formative law (its risings and fallings its own rhythm, etc.) - and one impulse dies when another one arises. (NVC, 44)

The fortuitous and chaotic body does nothing to preserve itself because it has no sense of self at all.  The conscious brain built on top of it, on the other hand, seeks to preserve the body within a set of states compatible with its own cerebral existence, almost as if the whole point of having a body was merely to produce a conscious brain.  The root of the principle of identity that we see developing here always goes back the brain's desire to code the flux of the body in a simple, consistent, and upright way.  But the branches of that principle have profound ramifications.  Once some identity has been installed in the organism, the chaotic body becomes my body.  All the forces or impulses felt in this body must be assimilated to the code that constitutes the unity of the conscious brain.  These are the initial steps in forming a person or self that maintains a continuous identity over time despite the fluctuations of the body.  This person is actually a product of the body, but the way it takes possession of the mechanism that created it leads us to reverse the cause and effect.  

   The body, insofar as it is grasped by consciousness, dissoci­ates itself from the impulses that flow through it, and which, having come together fortuitously, continue to sustain the body in an equally fortuitous manner. The organ that these impulses have developed at the 'highest' extremity of the body considers this fortuitous yet obvious sustenance to be necessary for its conservation. Its 'cerebral' activity therefore selects only those forces that preserve this activity, or, rather, those that can be assimilated to it.  And the body adopts only those reflexes that allow it to maintain itself for this cerebral activity, just as the latter henceforth adopts the body as its own product. 

   To understand Nietzsche, it is important to see this reversal brought about by the organism: the most fragile organ it has developed comes to dominate the body, one might say, because of its very fragility.  (NVC, 27)

This is one of Klossowski's main points, so it pays to belabor it.  We have magicked up a self-referential identity that rests on nothing but its own continuity, yet which appears to be not only a solid thing in itself, but to be the 'head' and owner of a body as well as the cause of its actions.   The body possessed in this way is the impulsive body enslaved (to choose the most dramatic term) by our self.  The tail has come to wag the dog.  The epiphenomenon has become the phenomenon.  The 'means' has come to posit itself as end, with the quotes here indicating that the very distinction between means and ends cannot exist at the level of the fortuitous and impulsive body.  The notion of an aim or endpoint only comes into existence alongside the principle of self-identity.  

So how can we combat this cerebral takeover that imprisons the impulsive body within a fictitious self?  Can we set a conscious intention to overcome the tendency to construct of a conscious state that constantly classifies and assimilates anything new to its unconscious and habitual patterns?  Won't that just enmesh us more deeply in the same problem?  It seems like our only option for liberating the body would be to go back to being 'unconscious', to do away with our own brain and self entirely.  But what could this even mean?  In fact, the distinction between conscious and unconscious meets with the same fate as the distinction between means and ends.  It is only from the perspective of and by contrast with consciousness that there is anything that could be called the unconscious.  Consciousness is really nothing more than the new application of an old and often repeated code -- which Klossowski increasingly calls, "the code of everyday signs", ie. words.  The 'unconscious' and habitual world would seem to be structured in the same way and by the same codes as the conscious one.  From the perspective of the liberated impulsive body, both sides of this code's assimilation are equivalent fixations and falsifications of its ceaseless and manifold flux.  Indeed, the only difference seems to be that one side speaks in the present while the other side remains silently implied by the past.  

Moreover, let us try to understand how. given his notion that conscious life is subordinated to fluctuations of intensities, he explains what we call an intention and a goal at the level of consciousness, and what this latter term signifies in relation to the term unconsciousness. What do these these refer to in Nietzsche? Are they different from the term conscious and unconscious, in Freud's sense of the 'iceberg'? For it would seem that neither consciousness nor unconsciousness - nor willing or non-willing - have ever existed. Within a system of designating fluctuations, there is only a discontinuity between silence and declarations in the agent. (NVC, 37)

What we need to find instead of this code of everyday signs is something like 'the unconscious of the body' rather than a cerebral or individual unconscious.  But this would seem to be some sort of impossibly complex representation of the constantly shifting battle of the impulses, created by means of those very impulses. If we do away with the level of the conscious code that only pretends to float free of the impulsive body, we would be left with the infinitely subtle 'language' of this body alone.  This 'language' wouldn't be any sort of fixed and continuous code though, but something closer to a music that can swing rapidly and discontinuously from one affective state to another.

To use conscious categories as a means to attain an end outside consciousness is still to remain subordinate to the false perspective of consciousness. A consciousness that would be conscious of being an instrument of Chaos would no longer be capable of obeying the 'aim' of a chaos that would not even ask it to pursue such an aim. Chaos in term would then be 'conscious' -- and would no longer be Chaos. The terms conscious and unconscious are therefore applicable to nothing that is real. If Nietzsche made use of them, it was only as a 'psychological' convention, but he nonetheless let us hear what he did not say: namely, that the act of thinking corresponds to a passivity, and that this passivity is grounded in the fixity of the signs of language whose combinations simulate gestures and movements that reduce language to silence. (NVC, 43)

Klossowski's essay ends with an exploration of how such a 'language of affects' (analogous to a "culture of the affects") might differ from the code of everyday language, and how this everyday code could have been built on top of the impulsive body.  Because the new 'language' we are looking for would operate below the level of our everyday language, Klossowki begins all the way back at the beginning with a discussion of what separates the organic from the inorganic.  Nevertheless, this way of presenting things leads to a bit of confusion in my mind.  We've been talking all along about various levels of duality -- a thinking mind and a suffering body, a brain that habitually codes for valence and an impulsive body, a continuous conscious self, and a discontinuous chaotic body.  Some form of 'the body' is always the term employed for the multiple, flowing, side of the duality, for Becoming as opposed to Being.  Yet now, in trying to answer the question of how codes get formed, Klossowski employs the same dualism in a way that seems to put the impulsive body on the side of the inorganic.

   'Every movement should be conceived as a gesture, a kind of language in which (impulsive) forces make themselves heard. In the inorganic world there is no misunderstanding, communication seems to be perfect. Error begins in the organic world.'
   In the inorganic world, communication seems perfect. Nietzsche means: there is no possible disagreement between what is strong and what is weak. 'Every power draws its ultimate consequence at every moment'. he says elsewhere. Persuasion is immediate.
  In the organic world, by contrast, where exchange and assimilation are necessary, misunderstanding becomes poss­ible, since exchange and assimilation take place only through interpretation: from trial and error to certainty - the certainty of the conditions of existence. The latter can be obtained only after a long experimentation with the similar and the dissimilar, and thus with identity. Only then can points of reference, repetition and comparison appear - and finally, comparable signs.
  Now in a universe dominated by the inorganic, organic life is itself a fortuitous case - hence a possible 'error' in the cosmic economy. It is within this economy that interpretation, grounded in the fear of error, becomes susceptible to error.  Even if the origin of organic life lies in purely random combinations, it can no longer behave randomly once it comes into existence. It must believe in its necessity, and therefore it must maintain the conditions of its existence, and to do so it must avoid chance and not commit any errors. Hence the double aspect of error in Nietzsche: life depends on an illusion (its 'necessity') - whence the verdict: 'Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live.' (NVC, 45)

Viewed from the perspective of the energetic fluctuations of the inorganic, organic life is nothing more than a temporarily self-reinforcing feedback loop. From the organic perspective though, this same feedback loop appears to be selective, to have a goal and a will (its own self-preservation).  It's the same dualism we saw before, but now the organic (the body) is on the side of an illusory principle of unity, namely the unified organism (which appears to contradict the earlier idea that the body has no unity of its own but borrows it entirely from the self, thus pulling itself up by its own bootstraps, as it were).  

This curious inversion seems intended to situate the impulses somewhere between the level of the inorganic and the level of a fully signifying conscious self.  Perhaps this is why Klossowski earlier introduced the idea of the brain as a level of analysis or intermediary step between the body and the person?  It's not clear to me if I'm missing something important here, or whether Klossowski is not being completely sober and consistent in his terminology.  At any rate, the idea now seems to be that there are 3 levels.

1) The inorganic has no need of the concept of valence and the unified perspective of interpretation this implies -- at this level things just happen, there is perfect communication and no need of signs.  This is what we were earlier calling the "impulsive body", which we saw the brain fighting against with its "code".  

2) Once an organism has been formed though, the various excitations it receives are interpreted according to a "code of signs" that classify them as attracting or repelling the organism.  Klossowski will now refer to this level as the level of impulses and "signs" (ie. not quite a "code" properly speaking).  Impulses in this sense do appear to refer to the unity of an organism (as I argued before that they should).    These impulses are not just a raw energy or dimensionless number, but are a sort of vector defined on one end by the unity of the organism, and on the other end by what the impulses 'seek' or 'avoid'.  The quotes here indicate that even at this level, an impulse in itself has no goal or aim, and in fact is not even individuated.  It's only the constellation of impulses, and their interrelationship in service of maintaining an organism, that individuates them and produces the appearance of what we might term an "attractor" (to distinguish it from a goal), or what Klossowski calls a "phantasm".  Thus a phantasms seems to be the motive force for an organism, whose movements and "gestures" are the signs of the impulsive forces reaching a fragile and moment to moment arrangement consistent with the existence of the organism.  

3) Finally, a conscious signifying level is installed on top of the organic level.  This is the level of a "code", or what Klossowski will call (following Nietzsche) the "abbreviation of signs".  At this level the phantasm that momentarily bound and ordered the impulsive organic level and attracted the organism is retroactively posited as the original goal.  We already explored the logic of this inversion of cause and effect earlier.  Klossowski again finds its root in the way a fixed code must necessarily compress or abbreviate the rich language of organic signs in a way that keeps the battle of impulses within the narrow range of states compatible with its own (the code's) continued existence.  This compression is lossy however, and the signs are always overflowing the code scheme in the same way music defies our ability to talk about it.

This at least is my interpretation of the complicated section on pages 45-48.  For the most part it seems to reflect the idea of capture and over-coding we've discussed.  Except that there appears to be a duplication of that same logic in moving from levels 1 to 2 and levels 2 to 3. The upshot is that the abbreviation of signs in level 3 quiets the tumult of the impulses by fixing them in a rigid conscious code.

'The contradiction is not between the "true" and the "false" but between "abbreviations of signs" and the "signs " themselves.'  What this means is that the impulses - which confront and interpret each other through their fluctuations of intensity and, at the level of organized beings, through gestures - create forms out of these movements and gestures, and cannot be distinguished from this invention of signs, which stabilizes them through abbreviation. For in abbreviating them, these signs reduce the impulses, apparently suspending their fluctuation once and for all. But in the intervals of the (fixed) signs of language, the intensity of the impulses can only be designated in an intermittent and arbitrary manner, in comparison with these abbreviations. Their movement is constituted as a meaning only if they take this designating abbreviation as their aim, and reach it through a combination of unities. The latter then form a declaration which sanctions the fall of the intensity, once and for all. (NVC, 48)

Given this story of the genesis of signs and abbreviations of signs, the final question is how we could make our way back towards the language of signs, thus liberating ourselves from the constrictive, compressing, code of consciousness.  Klossowski's interpretation of Nietzsche answer to this question is fascinating, but also, I suspect, preliminary; we will almost certainly understand it better as the book progresses.  The basic idea is clear though.  We can't, nor would we want to, go backwards into 'unconsciousness'.  What we can do, however, is to use our conscious "abbreviations of signs" (ie. words) to simulate the forces underlying those abbreviations.  It's kind of like: (simulating your own computer's hardware (simulating your own computer's hardware (...) ) ).  Obviously, to do this, you have to treat your self as an impulsive automaton that operates according the the levels and logic we've described.

First, one must admit everything that is purely 'auto­matic': to dismantle an automaton is not to reconstruct a 'subject'. Since perspectivism is the characteristic illusion of this automaton, to provide it with the knowledge of this illusory perspective, the 'consciousness' of this 'unconscious', is to create the conditions of a new freedom, a creative freedom. The 'consciousness' of the 'unconscious' can consist only in a simulation of forces. It is not a matter of destroying what Nietzsche calls the abbreviation (of signs) by signs themselves - the encoding of movements - but of retranslating the 'conscious' semiotic into the semiotic of the impulses. The 'conscious categories' that avoid, repudiate and betray these movements - and thus remain ignorant of the perpetual combat of forces - sustain the automatism under the apparent spontaneity of thought. To recover an authentic spontaneity, the producer of these 'categories', the intellectual organ, must in tum be treated as a simple automaton, a pure tool. By consequence. as a spectator of itself, the automaton finds its freedom only in the spectacle that moves from intensity to intention, and from the latter to intensity. (NVC, 50)

The idea of a conscious simulation of the unconscious gives new meaning to the Eternal Return.  If we believe that we necessarily repeat what has come before, we turn ourselves into a sort of automaton.  Here we can see ER as the perfect symbol of the emptiness of the do-er.  The impulsive action has occurred before, without any need for the conscious aim we imagined was its purpose and cause.  Of course, we might legitimately wonder whether it's safe to let our automaton cross the street (again?).  Does consciousness and intention have some crucial evolutionary role in keeping us alive?  Are the errors it produces, the falsifications and abbreviations, completely avoidable, or are they truths: errors necessary for life?  Or do we lose nothing if we imply let these errors come and go while we live the unconscious forces that produced them to begin with?  What kind of life would this be that persists through the emptiness of consciousness?  Klossowski leaves the essay with these questions.

   On the one hand, forgetfulness and unconsciousness are necessary to life; on the other hand, there is a 'will to unconsciousness' which, precisely because it is willed, implies the consciousness of our conditioned state: an irresoluble antinomy.
   Now 'life itself created this grave thought [of the Etemal Return]; life wants to overcome its supreme obstacle'. (NVC, 54)

The French Nietzsche (Chapter 1)

Having finished with Heidegger, we can finally move on to phase 3 of our original project.  Klossowski's seminal Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is interesting right from the start.  But the shift from the German back to the French style of philosophy is quite bracing.  Heidegger is difficult to read because he writes in such an abstract and technical manner.  Simple words stand in for complex concepts in a way that creates a sort of coded language.  Once you crack the code, however, things speed up considerably, and, as you translate the text back into your own terms, you begin to wonder if the code was really necessary to begin with.  Klossowksi, on the other hand, doesn't write in code, which makes him superficially more accessible; it's pretty clear what each sentence says.  The trade off is that the nimble and allusive style of his thought means that while I think I understand a sentence or even a clause, I can't always figure out why this sentence is next to that one.  The two together don't seem to express an immediately clear train of thought.  As a result, the text benefits from the kind of forward-and-backward reading style I find myself adopting with Deleuze.  This involves bracketing some vague guess as to a passage's meaning, reading a little further, then going back and rereading the first section using the new light cast on it by the later part, which of course then changes the context for the second section enough so that it's necessary to push on to a third bit which casts new light on the second, and etc ...  With the French, we're always circling through a text, getting progressively deeper as we go. 

All this preamble means is that I feel the need to stop and collect my thoughts after reading chapter 1, "The Combat against Culture", even though I have no clear idea where Klossowski is headed.  The basic idea of the chapter seems to be to introduce two types of "culture" that we might call macro and micro culture.  Macro-culture corresponds to what we generally mean by the word culture -- the collection of artistic and scientific output we take to define the achievements of a particular society.  Culture in this sense is clearly elitist; we're talking about the "high" culture of a society by which it justifies itself as "refined".  Culture in the second, micro, sense, is the hierarchy of drives and passions that define what we usually call a single individual's personality.  This culture too is, in Nietzsche's view, elitist.  Here it's essential to understand that Nietzsche is always operating below the level of the individual subject, always discussing the unconscious or subconscious drives and impulses that we associate with psychoanalysis.  An individual personality is constructed from some particular arrangement of these drives, which are always in competition with one another for power.  Micro-culture, or what Klossowski calls a "culture of the affects" occurs when some particular drive is able to give expression to itself by controlling and organizing the others.  An affect (a micro-cultural product) produced from this internal struggle is inherently "elitist" even if the result has nothing to do with the "high macro-culture" to which the individual belongs, because it reflects the dominance of a particular impulse over other impulses.  Culture, then, is in either sense a product of politics, if we understand this word in the general sense of a competition for power among various actors.

The reason Klossowski introduces the idea of two types of culture seems to be to clarify Nietzsche's ambivalence to the concept of culture.  On the one hand, Nietzsche is no systematic state philosopher interested in justifying and preserving the status quo.  In this sense, he is uninterested in a culture whose highest expressions often seem designed merely to reinforce its already dominant ideas.  On the other hand, Nietzsche's very personal interpretation of philosophical systems means that he's quite interested in the micro-culture internal to a philosopher that leads him to produce these systems that are sometimes (and sometimes are not) taken up as exemplary by the macro-culture.  This ambiguous relationship to the concept of culture gets even more complex when we consider that micro-cultures are embedded in and partially derived from macro-cultures.  So how can we evaluate whether a given culture is positive or negative, to be combatted or aspired to?

As always with Nietzsche, the creative power of a culture is the ultimate yardstick by which to judge it.  Are you for or against Life?  Does the micro-culture that produces it reflect the great health of a creator able to go beyond their macro-culture and even themselves?  Or is it the product of an instinct to stop, of a weariness and insecurity that seeks to eliminate further questions, to secure ourselves and reinforce our macro-cultures?  

   For Nietzsche, to make an assessment of Western culture always amounts to questioning it in the following manner: what can still be created from the acquisitions of our knowledge, our practices, our customs, our habits? To what degree am I the beneficiary or the victim or the dupe of these habits? (NVC, 6)

   There are therefore two powers: the levelling power of gregarious thought and the erectile power of particular cases.
   This allowed Nietzsche to identify those metaphysical systems commanded by moralities whose only aim is to perpetuate the reign of gregarious norms and instincts: any system that does not receive their approval cannot survive. But there also exist systems that are impracticable to the greatest number, and which are consecrated to a particular case (Heraclitus, Spinoza); and others that form a code reserved purely for a limited group (La Rochefoucauld). The metaphysics of a Kant, by contrast, harbours a behaviour that Nietzsche summarized in the image of the fox who retums to his cage after having broken out of it. (NCV, 7)

For Nietzsche, every philosophical doctrine is judged from this perspective of the life that it expresses and propagates, or, by contrast, denies and limits.  

The second half of chapter 1 seems to revolve around the question of culture's elitism.  Does culture require slavery, and if so, should everyone who participates in it feel guilty?  Here, Klossowki quotes a young Nietzshce horrified by, but strangely sympathetic to, the communards who burned the Tuileries.  Here again, we see the same ambiguity towards culture.  The Paris Commune destroyed this culture because it symbolized the exploitation of what we would now call the working class.  While hardly a communist, the idealistic young Nietzsche seems to have conceived this as a blow directed against the hypocrisy of a culture that pretends to value a Christian moral equality but in reality necessitates a class slavery to function.  Yet on the other hand, as a lover of art and music and literature -- in short, as a lover of high culture -- Nietzsche is horrified by the destruction of these magnificent aesthetic works.  Are the communards guilty of attacking culture, or is this violence justified because culture itself is guilty of exploiting all of us?  

And if we are exploited, who exactly are we exploited by?  Who should feel guilty?  For the Marxists, the answer is obviously our capitalist masters.  These idle aesthetes feel no responsibility for exploiting anyone.  For Nietzsche though, the question is more complex, because so much of our culture is actually the culture of slaves, not masters.  As we've seen, what's important to Nietzsche is not the materialist circumstances of a person's class, but whether what they offer us develops from their own healthy micro-culture.  Since so many of our "masters" create nothing new that would rock their favored position in the macro-cultural boat, these people are effectively slaves.  And the modern world multiplies these slaves into an entire bourgeois class.  As Deleuze paraphrases it:

A slave does not cease to be a slave by taking power, and it is even the way of the world, or the law of its surface, to be led by slaves. (D&R, 54)

In a complicated passage, Klossowski points out that this logic is similar to Kojève's Marxist reading of Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic.  Since the Master needs the acknowledgement of the Slave to feel like a Master, it turns out that the Slave, through his self-effacing labor in service of the Master, creates an entire culture that enables him to grow into his own consciousness, a consciousness that sees itself reflected in every other Slave become Master.  I'm not sure how important it is though to follow the complex layers of analysis that Klossowki touches on here.  The main point seems to be that Nietzsche too believes culture is guilty of exploitation, but for almost the opposite reasons the Marxists would give -- macro-culture itself is criminal because it represents the triumph of a herd of sick micro-cultures over the few singular cases of life affirming individuals.  

So should the Slaves feel guilty of exploiting these 'true' Masters?  Perhaps, though in fact guilt is only what the slave invents in revenge for his (initial) lack of power.  Would Nietzsche prefer a system where the 'idle aesthete' really does enslave others in order to make possible the expression of his aesthetic will?  Not at all.  What Nietzsche is interested in is simply that there be an individual will to express itself aesthetically, that the world afford the circumstances for such a will to form at all.  

... in his phantasm, Nietzsche saw the marvels of the Louvre in flames. What was important were not the marvels, but the emotions that lay at their origin. For these emotions make inequality prevail: and if inequality makes life unbearable, then 'courage and endurance' are required to bear it. (NVC, 13)

In the end, what Nietzsche wants is for us to overcome the link between inequality and guilt.  This doesn't mean that we fight for a more unequal society as something necessary to produce great art.  What it means is that we combat that leveling tendency of a macro-culture that tries to convince us that the inequality which prevails in a creative micro-culture is something we should feel guilty for.  The combat against culture is in service of the passions that create culture.  Nietzsche is searching for, "the perfect innocence of becoming," where our internal micro-culture can reflect the unequal dominance of a single instinct without needing to feel guilty for 'enslaving' all the others.  It's good to be out of equilibrium.  That's called being alive.  And we shouldn't make ourselves feel guilty for it.