Chapter 6 of
Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is such a long and winding essay that I need to outline its entire trajectory to feel like I understand Klossowski's crucial idea about, "
The Vicious Circle as a Selective Doctrine". Closely tied up with the idea of the Return's
selection is the equally difficult concept of the
simularcum, which Klossowski here uses in a positive sense, as if the very
goal of ER were to produce a simulacrum. As we dive into these ideas, we can try to hold a single, albeit paradoxical, thread as our guide -- the
selection of the Return is already a
production, and the
production already a
selection. This means that the
re-production that constitutes the simulacrum is simultaneously cause and effect, epiphenomenon and ground of phenomenon itself. It's clear that, like always, we're going around in circles here. But this is the only adequate way to respond to another version of the basic question that the paradoxical experience of ER always poses for us. What does this momentous experience actually
change for us? What are we supposed to
do about the revelation that we've done all this before?
Klossowksi begins exploring this paradox by reminding us that Nietzsche doesn't believe in the concept of the will (as we normally understand it) at all. To believe that we have some sort of (inevitably homuncular) will power is always, for Nietzsche, to confuse cause and effect. The feeling of willing arises from a particular arrangement of power dynamics amongst the impulses or drives. When one impulse succeeds in dominating others (which is what every drive 'wants' to do) it construes this state as a 'goal' that the agent's 'will' sought to reach. But both the goal, and the will power needed to arrive, there are epiphenomenal illusions. All we can really say is that nature works.
'Nature has no goal and realizes something. We others have a 'goal' but obtain something other than this goal.'
We interpret our obscure impulses, in accordance with institutional language, as if they had a will, which presupposes a cause exerting its effect. A play of forces, of relations between forces, fallaciously interpreted. (NVC, 122)
If Nietzsche doesn't believe in the efficacy or even existence of the will, it would seem that the question of what to do about ER simply falls apart. Nobody does anything at all. But here is precisely where the paradoxical subtlety of the Return reveals itself. Even if our will is an illusion, we nevertheless act in the world. And of course, we always act (pretend) like we have a will and a goal. These 'illusions' seem to be necessary byproducts of our every action, and they too must return. ER seems to itself invent the illusion that keeps the wheel turning (or at least accompanies its turning). We must posit a goal because without it, or without faith in things being guided by a divine plan, we would not act at all, but merely sink into a passive nihilism. The will is a 'necessary illusion'.
"If no goal resides in the whole history of human destinies, then one must be inserted into it: assuming that a goal is necessary for us, and on the other hand, that the illusion of an immanent end has become transparent to us. A goal is necessary for us because a will is necessary for us - our dorsal spine. The will as a compensation for belief, for the representation of a divine will, which offers something to our intention."
But to give a meaning and a goal to existence - what would this amount to? To nothing, insofar as existence (under the guise of human destinies) invents meanings and goals by itself, through individuals and societies. (NVC, 123)
Now the question of the selective power of the Return comes into better focus. Does ER select things on its own, or does it require our conscious help? Yes! These two options are no longer mutually exclusive when we understand that ER produces a 'real illusion' -- a simulacrum -- of the will. To believe in the Return of all things is to acknowledge ourselves as automata, to will not to have our own will ... only to paradoxically having this very simulation of willing brought back to us and repeated as a simulacrum.
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While this solves the problem of whether or not the Return requires us to do something, it doesn't provide any guidance on exactly what to do. Should Nietzsche tell the world about ER (and if so, to what end?), or should he keep it to himself?
... either the selection depends on the disclosure of the Eternal Return (as a sign of the Vicious Circle: putting humanity to the test; the result: a new species, or rather, the attaining of a higher level through which every orientation, every decision, and all behaviour would be changed. A scientific demonstration of the Eternal Return becomes necessary.)
or else the selection will take place in secret (the Vicious Circle), that is, it will be undertaken in the name of this secret by certain experimenters (the Masters of the Earth). A purely experimental doctrine of selection will be put into practice as a 'political' philosophy. (NVC, 124)
Klossowski's focus in this chapter will be on the second of these two options, the idea of the philosopher as an 'attempter' who tries to create the conditions of the (anyways inevitable) Return.
The term 'Versucher', which occasionally appears in Nietzsche's texts, has the double meaning of 'experimenter' and 'tempter'. Every creator is at once someone who tempts others and who experiments on (tempts) himself and others in order to create something that does not yet exist, a set of forces capable of acting upon and modifying that which exists. (NVC, 127)
It's important to pause here to appreciate the context around this philosophical 'tempter' or 'imposter', and consider what kind of conditions they select. Naturally, it's tempting to think of this person as some sort of Übermensch dictator breeding a new race of humans who are tough enough to realize Nietzsche's philosophy. Despite Nietzsche's incendiary language about Masters and Slaves, however, Klossowski makes clear that this is not what we're talking about. Remember, the experiment itself is quite paradoxical. Perhaps you might even call it a simulacrum of an experiment. After all, the goal is to create the conditions for an action that has already occurred, to fabricate as an aim what was already inevitable. In other words, the point is to create someone capable of supporting the idea of the Return, someone capable of affirming themselves as an automaton (obviously a strange sort of 'Master'). This ability actually defines who is a Master and who a Slave for Nietzsche.
The Master and the slave are states which, respectively, are the result of a test. And this test always remains the adherence to the sign of the vicious circle, or its rejection. (NVC, 126)
So when Nietzsche so often focuses on the violence and cruelty and monstrousness of the Master, these traits are aimed first of all at the Master's own
identity. As we've
seen, to embrace the Return means to
dissolve your own identity, to accept that you will
forget this singular moment, and to understand that to return to it, you must pass through a whole series of other identities before it comes back to you as a new
revelation. This is not exactly the road to world domination. It does, however, make some sense to suggest that this experimenter aims at a
disruption of the political status quo. To 'make' the return happen, we have to create the conditions in which identity, and its correlates, gregariousness and equilibrium, fall apart.
If the meaning of all eminent creation is to break the gregarious habits that always direct existing beings toward ends that are useful exclusively to the oppressive regime of mediocrity - then in the experimental domain to create is to do violence to what exists, and thus to the integrity of beings. Every creation of a new type must provoke a state of insecurity: creation ceases to be a game at the margins of reality; henceforth, the creator will not re-produce, but itself produce the real. (NVC, 129)
The final line of this quote encapsulates the strange status of creation in Nietzsche's philosophy. In a sense, it's always the ultimate thing he strives for, the ultimate test of value. But this ultimate action is only possible because the identity of both creator and creation are empty, fabricated. Creators produce the real only by acknowledging that there is no such thing. They liberate us and themselves from the straight-jacket of identity, which always cloaks the average forms necessary for the life of the mediocre masses beneath a veneer of essentialism and 'common sense'. In fact, just as the singular Master is defined by her capacity to operate without identity, the masses of slaves are defined by the fact that their identities are fixed in place as so many interchangeable units. These definitions are what make Nietzsche sound like he's talking about a 'political' philosophy when his actual concern is an ontological creativity. This is the thrust of the fantastic long quotation from Nietzsche's notebooks that Klossowski reproduces on pp. 130-132 and proceeds to comment on. All the traditional values we hold to be highest -- Truth, Goodness, Reason, Beauty -- are merely deceits fabricated by the attempt to contain creativity within an average form suitable for reproduction across a mass of people. The philosopher breaks these forms open to reveal the societal will to power (not the will to knowledge, reason, or moral goodness) that fabricated them and then proceeds to experiment with new forms. That passage ends with the commentary:
To be fair to Nietzsche, we must first of all emphasize the shocking nature of this proposition: "The simulacra are ours! Let us be the deceivers and the embellishment of humanity!" This is what all potentates worthy of the name are supposed to say. But Nietzsche now wants the savant to speak this kind of language. In this sense, he is taking up an occult conception of political mystification and making it pass into the hands of the philosophers. (NVC, 131)
What we see at work here is a positive notion of the false, which, as the basis of artistic creation, is now extended to every problem raised by existence. Mystification, according to Nietzsche, is not simply the way a potentate operates It is the very ground of existence. (NVC, 132)
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But wait, what are "
new forms" in a world governed by the eternal return? This homage to the freedom of creativity is a peculiar one. Creativity has a deconstructive aspect, bordering on nihilism, where traditional forms are revealed as empty expressions of the will to power. But its reconstructive aspect is
equally empty. Those new forms, those simulacra that the philosopher uses to embellish humanity to his taste are merely another expression of a different will to power (the
number of "wills to power" is a strange question), namely, the philosophers own. Like the traditional societal simulacra (which Klosskowski will now start referring to as products of the "intellect"), what the experimenter creates is simply the simulacra that she
must create to become, that is to return to, what she
is. This is a strange kind of 'creation' that seeks only to retrace the forces that account for itself, which Klossowski's calls the life of the impulses. We saw
early on in the book that these impulses operate via attractors called phantasms at what we would usually refer to as an 'unconscious' level. This term becomes problematic, however, when we deny the separate reality of a 'conscious' level that would contrast with it. In fact, the idea of our consciousness and intellect is nothing but a 'creation', and it's creation all the way down as well.
This line of thinking leads directly to a full statement of non-duality, albeit one that contains Nietzsche's characteristic (mis?)interpretation of Nirvana as a kind of final nihilism:
If we affirm that 'the only being guaranteed to us is being that represents itself, and is therefore changing, non-identical to itself, completely relative' - in other words, that existence is sustained only through fabulation - then we are stating clearly that existence itself is a fabulation. Thus Nietzsche, who feared the spread of Nirvanaism in the West, was in fact simply dreaming of inverting this Nirvanaism into a praxis of the simulacrum: the attraction of nothingnes can be overcome only by developing the very phantasms the Buddha tried to liquidate. (NVC, 132)
This is about as close as you can come to the Tantric perspective that embraces everything that arises as "a magician's illusion" or a "beautiful display". While it at first appears to break the world into two distinct systems -- an unconscious one whose 'aims' are defined by the attractive quality of the phantasms and a conscious one that creates simulacra -- the fact that the simulacra are nothing but a conscious redoubling of the unconscious forces that made them possible means that these two systems are non-dual. The simulacrum is a willed copy or simulation of a phantasm that operates beneath the level of will. It is precisely the necessary illusion we saw was produced by (and productive of) the Return.
Nothing exists apart from impulses that are essentially generative of phantasms.
The simulacrum is not the product of a phantasm, but its skillful reproduction, by which humanity can produce itself. through forces that are thereby exorcized and dominated by the impulse.
In the hands of the 'imposter' philosopher, the Trugbild - the simulacrum - becomes the willed reproduction of
non-willed phantasms, born from the life of the impulses. (NVC, 133)
To fix a goal, to give a meaning - not merely to orient living forces, but also to elicit new centers of forces: this is what the simulacrum does: a simulacrum of goal, a simulacrum of meaning - which must be invented! Invented from what? From the phantasms of the life of the drives - the impulse, as 'will to power', already being the first interpreter. (NVC, 135)
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However, despite the fact that the simulacrum is not ultimately different from the phantasm, these two levels can also fail to correspond. In fact, most often they do fail. Nietzsche's critique of a traditional notion like Truth as a simulacra that doesn't recognize itself as such revolved around exactly this failure. The intellect, our gregarious inheritance that seeks to see the world through exchangeable identities designed to benefit the species, can easily misinterpret the phantasms that arise within the individual. Thus it replaces the messy world of the impulses with common sense ideas of what our goals should be, eg. truth, pleasure, even survival. In other words, the intellect functions just like what we often disparagingly call our 'rationalizations'. As in, "I was just trying to be honest, not seeking revenge". So we cannot safely look to the intellect for a simulacrum that corresponds to our individual phantasms, but instead have to rely on the more plastic power of art.
Now there is only one mediator that can say what a phantasm 'wiils': through its conventional procedures, art essential reconstitutes in its own figures the conditions that have constituted the phantasm, namely, the intensities of the impulses. The simulacrum, in relation to the intellect, is the license that the latter concedes to art: a ludic suspension of the reality principle. (NVC, 134)
The idea of a mismatch between the life of the impulses and the world of the intellect is clearly a powerful one. But we can see a danger here of reintroducing a duality between art and the intellect. After all, we are in effect saying that the categories of the intellect are a sort of 'fake simulacrum', which seems like an incoherent idea. Klossowksi's next twist, then, is to begin brilliantly dismantling the duality he just described. In the end, both intellect and art reflect a single voice of being -- the will to power.
It might be objected, however, that if the fluctuations of intensity in the impulses are necessarily inverted by the intellect, in accordance with a meaning and a goal (the guarantors of gregarious security), it goes without saying that the herd's 'will to power' would win out over al the other impulses. How can we fail to recognize that the intellect and its categories are the organic products of this primordial impulse (of the conservation of the species), and that if there is a phantasm, here as elsewhere, it is one that has managed to produce its own simulacrum - the most efficacious simulacrum of humanity - from which human behaviour has created for itself a whole set of diverse spheres, all of which are so many aspects of the reality principle - namely, the demarcation between acting and non-acting. Now knowledge itself - initially contemplative and theoretical, then increasingly experimental - is also an interpretive 'will to power' that in each case reinvents the real in terms of its own modes of apprehending its objects, and then of manipulating them. It is here that two wills to power collide: the gregarious will to power, and the will to power which, through individual initiative, breaks with gregariousness. (NVC,135)
All the concepts we earlier disparaged as fictions or illusions are actually what we might call 'collective simulacra'. God, Self, Will, etc ... can be seen most clearly as simulacra produced by the impulsive life of the social body. These appear to be the illusions necessary to hold society together as if it were an organism. Perhaps, whether independently, or, more likely, as a byproduct of manufacturing social subjects, a new level of individual phantasms and simulacra have been produced. But can this level claim to be any more real and fundamental than the gregarious social one? All we can say is that two wills to power collide -- the individual, and the idea of subject society installs in this individual.
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At this point we move from metaphysics into truly strange political territory (what follows is my limited understanding of the very complex passage on pg. 138-9). If we interpret all the concepts Nietzsche usually wishes to deconstruct (subject, knowledge, etc ...) as societal simulacra, then we have to admit they they too reproduce some sort of
social phantasm. As we saw earlier, the role of this reproduction is to posit what what was already happening on its own as an
intention. So the social system that fabricates our intellectual reality (which in the modern world is 'science', the ultimate social arbiter of what is knowledge) already has its own impulses and
phantasms. The forces that 'unconsciously' structure this system are redoubled in the form of the concepts that we consciously consider common sense. For Klossowski, the essence of this system is the production of exchangeable unitary identities that possess an
intention, a
will (ie. morally responsible agents or subjects) This is both a description of what the social machine unconsciously
produces, but also of what, in the manner of all simulacrum, it goes on to posit as
necessary (meanwhile forgetting that the necessity is only relative to its
own mode of life). It's as if the structure of society were itself projected on the natural world, and, no surprise, found itself mirrored there. Science says: there
must be objects which follow laws that scientists can know. Society says: there
must be subjects who follow laws that the government can know, and there
must be consumers who follow laws of desire that businesses can know. Through modern science and industry, we effectively
produce the subjects (natural and human) that will follow these laws. And we do this 'in order' to reinforce the functioning of the existing system of subjectivity. Unfortunately (from the perspective of maintaining society) the methods by which we fabricate phenomenon go well
beyond this 'goal'. Remember that in Nietzsche's world nothing has a true goal, and no organism 'wills' its own self-preservation, but everything simply
executes. Our modern society tends to the
over-production of subjects and objects. This is not actually the goal of society, but merely the way it functions. The subject/object machine that fabricates identities cannot be
turned off. Eventually, this over-production actually
destabilizes society, and allows for the possibility that certain unique individuals will be produced who escape this schema entirely. They gain the power to invent their own simulacra in place of the social simulacra that no longer function to hold their identities in place.
The day human beings learn how to behave as phenomena devoid of intention - for every intention at the level of the human being always implies its own conservation, its continued existence - on that day, a new creature would declare the integrity of existence. (NVC, 139)
As we've seen, "inventing your own simulacra" is an oddly passive sort of creative activity. Since it involves consciously redoubling the workings of your unconscious automata, it is akin to affirming your own existence as a pure product of chance encounters between forces, amongst them the social forces that accidentally produced you as a byproduct of their over-production of objects. Ultimately, the simulacrum is produced only at the point where an agent is able to see itself as completely devoid of will or intention, to dissolve itself into a meaningless chaos.
Laws exist only because of our need to calculate. Only quantities of force exist. Chaos, then, is already nothing more than the term of a negative formulation that we establish on the basis our own conditions of living. Chaos does not exist as an intention. And we cannot conceive of ourselves other than intentional beings. Where does this impossibility come from? From the fact that the forces we improperly name 'Chaos' have no intention whatsoever. Nietzsche's unavowable project is to act without intention: the impossible morality. Now the total economy of this intentionless universe creates intentional beings. The species 'man' is a creation of this kind - pure chance - in which the intensity of forces is inverted into intention: the work of morality. The function of the simulacrum is to lead human intention back to the intensity of forces, which generate phantasms. This is not the function of science which, denying intention, compensates for it in beneficial and efficacious activity. (NVC, 140)
The production of the individual simulacrum by the experimental-philosopher passes through the decay of what we were calling the social simulacra that science and intellect succeeded in producing. Klossowksi argues (pp. 146-147) that we should read Nietzsche's descriptions of the way the philosopher will employ the means of science to go beyond science's reinforcement of the current institutional forms (justifying schemes that otherwise sound dangerously like eugenics to post-war ears) in the light of this 'the goal is a lack of goal' philosophy. In other words, it's not that the overhuman has a goal for society, but that the overhuman is the (secret) goal of society. Seen in this context, the overhuman seems to function as the precise simulacrum corresponding to the breakdown of the old social simulacra (ie. the death of god). Perhaps society's goal all along was to produce a new kind of human through its crashing and burning.
Thus formulated, the postulate of the 'overman', which is not an individual but a state, is the means by which Nietzsche - who does not believe existence has a goal - will nonetheless give existence both a meaning and a goal to pursue. In this way, Nietzsche winds up substituting the creative initiative of the individual for the million random events of existence. In doing so, however. he is suppressing the crucial point of his thought, namely, that these 'random events' were implicit in the Eternal Return. which alone makes them succeed in producing something, independently of the willing or non-willing of humans. (NVC, 148)
I think reading the overhuman as a 'goal', in precisely and only the way the simulacrum is a goal, goes a long way towards helping us understand why the overhuman is such an important concept in the early parts of TSZ, but then fades as the story progresses. The "creative initiative of the individual" is in fact identical to the "million random events of existence". It's just that we're more accustomed to starting from the perspective of an individual with will.
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To summarize the political argument so far. One the one hand, 'modern society' or 'humanity' considered as an agent produces certain phantasms like Will, and the Self, that structure how it operates. These phantasms in a sense reflect the 'industrial creativity' of the modern world. This agent appears to function by machining humans into identical and exchangeable commodities -- namely, consumer subjects. On the surface, the goal of the machine appears to be the production of exactly these uniform subjects. On the other hand, it appears that this machine works almost too well for its own good. Because they don't ultimately have any goal at all, the methods of science and the productive power of the commodity economy can't stop. They must produce the material overabundance and decadence which the philosopher can use as raw material for selecting something new. In this sense, Nietzsche can depict the overhuman as the unacknowledged 'goal' of all this overproduction. The whole system is secretly aimed at the overhuman, who accidentally, but necessarily, appears as its Master. After all, this system is for him. Of course, it's a strange kind of master who is as much a product of as a producer of the social and economic system, but this confusion is always part of the simulacrum. In short, the overhuman is the simulacrum of humanity as a social species.
[I can see that there's some confusion here between the phantasm and the simulacrum. For example, Is the Self a
phantasm of society or a social
simulacrum? I'm not sure Klossowski is completely consistent in the use of these terms. They both mean something that operates like a goal. The distinction is supposed to be that the phantasm is impulsive and unconscious, whereas the simulacrum is symbolic and conscious. However, we've also seen Klossowksi argue that the distinction between conscious and unconscious is relative to the notion of consciousness, and that it dissolves when we realize there is ultimately nothing more than 'blind' impulses (the will to power). A more fundamental distinction might be founded on the idea that the simulacrum is always the
return or
reproduction of a phantasm. In other words, the simulacrum is a
copy, not the
original. It's such a
perfect copy, however, that its role is less to
reproduce the original than it is to produce the original
again, in the sense of the Eternal Return (see
Pierre Menard). It's a copy, but one that's paradoxically
necessary for there to even
be an original. Obviously, this makes a complete hash of the difference between a model and a copy, but it leads us in a useful direction. Ultimately, a simulacrum is
self-reinforcing structure, akin to a
self-fulfilling prophecy. We might think of it as a fractal that always contains a copy of
itself. It's an image that reproduces itself endlessly. By contrast, the phantasm only happens
once. It's a
fleeting structure that seems to serves as a goal or attractor, but that lacks any power to reproduce itself once it's reached. This distinction will make more sense in a moment when we examine how the concept of 'a human identity' proves to be unstable and self-defeating, whereas the more mutable concept of the 'overhuman' is produced by a sort of inevitably successful conspiracy.]
In the next section (pp. 153-157), Klossowski goes on to give this same idea a statistical or demographic spin. If we take seriously the idea that 'the human species' or 'society' can be an agent, then we can ask: what would make a species powerful? Do we judge the power of a species simply on the basis of the number of identical units that comprise it? This sounds like a common sense definition of power at first, but turns out to completely crumble upon further inspection. Is a body a more powerful agent simply because it has more identical cells? Of course not. That's just a heap of cells. The power of an agent depends much more on the internal differentiation and organization of its parts. If by 'humanity' we just mean the pile of all the identical units we call 'humans', then humanity as an agent will only be as powerful as the individuals it produces. If our modern society succeeds in mass producing a sea of individually powerless and completely exchangeable identities, then how powerful an agent is it?
To the degree that humanity seeks consistency in and through its conservation alone, it falls ever further into inconsistency. The increase in the number of agents of existence is proportional to the decrease in the power of each of them. If power is already the violence of the absurd, then at the level of gregariousness it must find in the individual agent some. meaning for the species. Hence. the more the species grows, the more it perpetuates itself for nothing. For the species, as a whole, cannot act as the sole agent of existence, which alone would account for the singularity of each individual. (NVC, 153)
The point Klossowksi seems to be making here (in extraordinarily compressed form) is that a species whose power lay in the reproduction of its identical unit would be self-defeating. If its 'goal' (ie. its phantasm, the structure of its functioning) is to produce more and more human widgets, then as we've seen, these individual widgets function like a societal simulacrum. As this production multiples, however, the quality of the widget produced changes and declines. Society in fact fails to reproduce the ideally average type of human it posits as its goal. Not only humans, but 'humanity' deteriorates. Which means that the simulacrum it produces (the individual) doesn't work the way a simulacrum is supposed to, which is to produce the Return of the original. Essentially, the species blows itself up as a stable agent.
At the level of the species, then. the unbridled power of propagation destroys the species' raison d'etre: it cannot be its own justification. It is justified only in terms of the differences it is able to produce in relation to itself, that is to say, the different degrees of intensity of existence. But the greater the number of living beings becomes, the more these differences tend to be effaced, for each difference is reproduced at the same rhythm, and consequently they re-form a homogenous totality in which this difference is in turn annulled. (NVC, 153)
Obviously, this disintegration of the agent should remind us of Klossowski's central thesis about the way that individual identity dissolves in the eternal return. The point here is precisely that the species as an agent cannot be the sole stable agent of evolution. This agent too must dissolve into a series of differences, and as this differentiation increases, its statistically inevitable, though (from the perspective of the species) accidental and monstrous, byproduct, is the overhuman. The ubermensch is literally a mutant; but with enough simple reproduction, mutation is inevitable.
Similarly, as propagation, power also exceeds the human species as the sole agent of existence and it is by exceeding it that power turns the species into a teeming monstrosity: at this stage, the species is no longer the master of its own destiny.
The total devalorizalion of power through the propagation of the species, the usurping agent of existence, has as its counterpart the singular case, which is where surplus power finds its image: the image of chance. For if the singular case can be defined only negatively in relation to gregariousness, it is defined positively with regard to power. The singular case is not hereditary, and its originality cannot be transmitted; on the contrary, it is a threat to the species as species; in relation to it, gregariousness is nothing more than a raw and living material, characteristic of an elaboration of chance. (NVC, 154)
Klossowski suggests that if we keep in mind this backdrop of Nietzsche's 'political' philosophy -- the Return needs a reintegration that follows a cycle of decadence and disintegration -- we can reinterpret a number of the concepts he's famous. For example, he often writes in praise of the necessity of slavery. But who is a slave in this system? Almost everyone in fact, and most of all those we consider the rulers, those who serve to reinforce the working of the homogenizing 'human rights' machine. It isn't that the overhuman is a pre-established goal, and slavery is a necessary means to produce that end. Recall that for Nietzsche the 'goal' is always an illusion, or at best a simulacrum. Instead, the overhuman is produced as a sort of justification for slavery after the fact. Nietzsche frequently says that the overhuman gives humanity a goal in the same way we give someone a gift ("Zarathustra replied. 'Why did I speak of love? I bring mankind a gift.' "). To bear all that suffering and its endless Return, we must conceive that it is for something. As if the means justify themselves by finally producing an end. This is how we 'rationalize' the absurdity of universal slavery.
What is our function, our cloak of slavery? Our teaching? - Slavery must not be suppressed, it is necessary. We would simply like that such (men) for whom we are working always be formed, so that we do not waste this enormous mass of political and commercial forces. If only for there to be spectators and non-partners! (NVC, 157)
Similarly, the cruelty and 'license with regard to every virtue imperative', that makes Nietzsche's overhuman appear monstrous is simply a vivid way of describing a mutant who escapes the dominant commodification of life we see in modern societies. These 'virtue imperatives' are precisely the phantasms that structure a societal machine that appears to be aimed at the production of 'equilibrium man'. For example, in this passage you can hear Klossowski's 1969 echo of Zarathustra's 1882 description of the "last human".
As exploitation developed, it demanded, under the pretext of a massive (and thus average) saturation, that completely conditioned reflexes be substituted for the appetitive spontaneity of individuals on a vast scale. Consequently, it also arrogated to itself the 'moral' and 'psycho-technical' mission (inherited from the essentially punitive element of the economies of the two world wars, which were prototypes of planetary planning) of exterminating any impulse that might induce human nature to increase its emotive capacity - notably, the propensity of the individual to put its 'useful' specificity at risk by seeking that which exceeds it as an agent: namely, the most subtle states of the soul, which are capable of inducing a rapture that surpasses its congenital servitude, and therefore of producing an intensity that corresponds to the impulsive constraint of its own phantasms - even if they are themselves due to this congenital servitude, thus magnified. (NVC, 157)
The last human is the completely virtuous, completely productive, completely satisfied, completely average, phantasm of society. A perfectly manufactured cog in a machine. In short, a slave. But the overhuman is a slave as well, albeit one who becomes master by acknowledging the internalized conditions of their own slavery. In fact, as we've observed, the overhuman is a byproduct of society, really a sort of inevitable parasite on society. We have to hear Nietzsche's constant praise of "nobility" and "aristocracy" in this light.
... the 'aristocratism' which, according to Nietzsche, must be represented by at least ant group, one particular case, not as a fraction of humanity but as its surplus (and hence, for the totality, as an exterminable, shootable, odious leech).
This aristocracy is not the cause or controlling force in the machine, but its autonomous surplus product, a little piece of the machine that escapes its attempt to control and average human life.
... a new mercantile class that wis incapable of revolting, and for this reason was enslaved by the satisfaction of its own needs. Those who are excluded are excluded by their own moral non-satisfaction: superior natures, living prostheses, austere and sober. But the 'main consideration' is 'not to see the task of the higher species in leading the lower (as, e.g., Comte does), but the lower as base upon which the higher species performs its own tasks - upon which it alone can stand'. (NVC, 158)
In a way, Nietzsche's political vision is not that far from Marx. Both foresee the inevitability of a 'socialism' in which all desires are fulfilled and almost everyone become equal. Marx imagines, however, this is a world of a million Masters, whereas Nietzsche argues, much more presciently, that this is a state of near universal Slavery. The only Masters to appear at the end of this (failed) trajectory towards equilibrium are those rejects who grasp the way their desires have been machined by the gregarious forces of society. This effectively turns Marx's socialist utopia into an accidental conspiracy on behalf of one human-- the overhuman.
The 'rulers'(industrialists, military men, bankers, businessmen, bureaucrats, etc.), with their various tasks, are merely effective slaves who work unknowingly on behalf of these hidden masters, and thus for a (contemplative caste that ceaselessly forms the 'values' and the meaning of life. (NVC, 159)
There are a number of other insightful passages in this section (pp. 159-165) that I'm tempted to quote (from both Nietzsche and Klossowksi). But I think the main idea is probably fairly clear by now, and we should try to steer the discussion back to its starting point in the Eternal Return. The attempt to perfect the mechanism of society into a system for total human and planetary dominance necessarily breaks down and defeats itself. Society destabilizes itself and the human species fractures. Humanity's "self-domestication" is the tragedy of Zarathustra. But if a few of us can really live through and fully experience our universal servitude, it can produce a catharsis. This is one of the great lessons of the Return. Even the worst is necessary! Even the smallest and most pitiful must also return. That's the only way we also get the greatest. Paradoxically, like Oedipus, humanity must resist the idea of ER in order to fulfill it.
If the enslavement of everyone coincides with justice, the only practicable justice, it is only because, somewhere, freedom bursts forth from an iniquitous and absurd flash that servitude alone can have an equitable meaning. It is in this relation, in this tension - in this final intensity - that the luminous achievement of the sinister Circle appears. (NVC, 166)
At the end of the chapter (finally), Klossowksi comes back to the theme of the Return as a selective doctrine. Like everything about ER, the idea of selection has become a paradoxical one. What we've seen is that society is secretly 'selecting for' the production of a new type of human, though in an entirely accidental fashion that belies its self-conscious goal of reproducing the average type of human. Since this 'selection' doesn't require any intention, we might call it 'natural selection'. But this of course makes for a strong contrast with the idea of Darwinian selection, which is all about reproducing the 'fittest' unit, namely the one that most perfectly reproduces itself. In a sense, the Return is selecting for mutation, for variability, for the ability to create a difference, rather than for the repetition of the best reproduction. And yet, since it's this same difference that comes back, and only comes back by producing a will capable of willing itself, we might equally call ER the most 'artificial' form of selection. So is the Return a real metaphysical law that exists in its own right, or is it merely another quasi-religious illusion for us to believe in? As always, the answer is yes. That's what the simulacrum -- emptiness -- is all about.
On the one hand, the meaninglessness of existence serves as an argument for the philosopher to free his hands and start pruning on the spot. On the other hand, the 'truth' of the Return is virtually renounced as a chimera, and
considered as a pure phantasm. Hence it is the simulacrum of a doctrine invoked by those who pursue the simulacrum of a goal: namely, the 'overhuman'. (NVC, 169)
