Remembering / Forgetting
A specific active force must be given the job of supporting consciousness and renewing its freshness, fluidity and mobile, agile chemistry at every moment. This active super-conscious faculty is the faculty of forgetting.
Psychology's mistake was to treat forgetting as a negative determination, not to discover its active and positive character.
Nietzsche defines the faculty of forgetting as "no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression", "an apparatus of absorption", "a plastic, regenerative and curative force."
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.113
[...] there are two simultaneous processes: reaction becomes something acted because it takes conscious excitation as its object and reaction to traces remains in the unconscious, imperceptible.
Let us suppose that there is a lapse in the faculty of forgetting: it is as if the wax of consciousness were hardened, excitation tends to get confused with its trace in the unconscious and conversely, reaction to traces rises into consciousness and overruns it.
We can thus finally see in what way reactive forces prevail over active forces: when the trace takes the place of the excitation in the reactive apparatus, reaction itself takes the place of action, reaction prevails over action.
Even the functional decay of the faculty of forgetting derives from the fact that it no longer finds in one kind of reactive forces the energy necessary to repress the other kind and to renew consciousness.
We rediscover the definition of ressentiment: ressentiment is a reaction which simultaneously becomes perceptible and ceases to be acted: a formula which defines sickness in general. Nietzsche is not simply saying that ressentiment is a sickness, but rather that sickness as such is a form of ressentiment.
The man of ressentiment is characterised by the invasion of consciousness by mnemonic traces, the ascent of memory into consciousness itself.
[...] when reactive forces prevail over active forces in this way they themselves form a type. We can see that the principal symptom of this type is a prodigious memory. Nietzsche stresses this incapacity to forget anything, this faculty of forgetting nothing and its profoundly reactive nature [...]
As a result of his type the man of ressentiment does not "react": his reaction is endless, it is felt instead of being acted.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.113-15
The type of the master (the active type) is defined in terms of the faculty of forgetting and the power of acting reactions.
The type of slave (the reactive type) is defined by a prodigious memory, by the power of ressentiment; several characteristics which determine this second type follow from this.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.117
Related posts:
The Eternal Return
What is the being of that which becomes, of that which neither starts nor finishes becoming? Returning is the being of that which becomes. "That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being - high point of the meditation".
It is not being that returns but rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity.
In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.48
Related posts:
The Ascetic Ideal
The will to nothingness from the beginning, inspires all the values that are called "superior" to life.
This is Schopenhauer's greatest error: he believed that the will is denied in all values superior to life. In fact, it is not the will which is denied in superior values, it is the superior values that are related to a will to deny, to annihilate life.
Thus interpretation makes its discoveries by excavating three layers: knowledge, morality and religion; the true, the good and the divine as values superior to life. All three are connected: the ascetic ideal is the third moment, but also the sense and value of the other two moments.
Morality is the continuation of religion but by other means; knowledge is the continuation of morality and religion but by other means. The ascetic ideal is everywhere, but its means change, they are no longer the same reactive forces.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.97-8
[...] the ascetic ideal expresses the will which makes reactive forces triumph.
The sense of the ascetic ideal is thus as follows: to express the affinity of reactive forces with nihilism, to express nihilism as the "motor" of reactive forces.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.144-5
Related posts:
Neutral
[...] it is assumed in the major premise that the bird of prey is able to not manifest its force, that it can hold back from its effects and separate itself from what it can do: it is evil because it does not hold itself back.
It is therefore assumed that one and the same force is effectively held back in the virtuous lamb but given free rein in the evil bird of prey. Since the strong could prevent themselves from acting, the weak could act if they did not prevent themselves.
Here we have the foundation of the paralogism of ressentiment: the fiction of a force separated from what it can do.
It is thanks to this fiction that reactive forces triumph. It is not sufficient for them to hold back from activity: they must also reverse the relation of forces, they must oppose themselves to active forces and represent themselves as superior. The process of accusation in ressentiment fulfills this task: reactive forces "project" an abstract and neutralised image of force; such a force separated from its effects will be blameworthy if it acts, deserving, on the contrary, if it does not.
[...] force, which has been divided in this way, is projected into a substrate, into a subject which is free to manifest it or not. Force is neutralised, it is made the act of a subject which could just as easily not act.
Nietzsche constantly exposes "the subject" as a fiction or a grammatical function. All subjects - the Epicureans' atom, Descartes' substance or Kant's thing-in-itself - are the projection of "little imaginery incubuses".
[...] the force thus neutralised is moralised. For, if it is assumed that a force is able to not manifest the force that it "has", it is no more absurd to assume, conversely, that a force could manifest the force that it "has not".
"Just as if the weakness of the weak - that is to say their essence, their effects, their sole ineluctable, irremovable reality - were a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritorious act"
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.123-4
Related posts:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)