I can take how folowers I want in few hours But this is not the case now. LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT SOMETHIMG NEVER READED BEFORE
We sense all the dangers that lurk in this question: what is Nietzsche today? A demagogic danger ("the young with us"...) A paternalistic danger (advice to a young reader of Nietzsche...) And then, above all, the danger of an abominable synthesis. The trinity is taken as the dawn of our modern culture: Nietzsche, Freud, Marx. It doesn't matter that everyone here is disarmed from the outset. Marx and Freud may be the dawn of our culture, but Nietzsche is clearly something else; he is the dawn of a counterculture. It is clear that modern society, in its essence, does not function based on codes. It is a society that functions on other foundations. Now, if we consider Marx and Freud, not literally, but the becoming of Marxism or the becoming of Freudianism, we see that they paradoxically launched themselves into a kind of attempt at recoding: recoding by the State, in the case of Marxism (“you are sick because of the State, and you will be cured by the State”, it will not be the same State); recoding by the family (being sick because of the family, being cured by the family, not the same family). This is what truly constitutes, on the horizon of our culture, Marxism and psychoanalysis, as the two fundamental bureaucracies, one public, the other private, whose goal is to operate, for better or worse, a recoding of that which never ceases to be decoded on the horizon. Nietzsche's case, on the contrary, is absolutely not this. His problem lies elsewhere. Through all the codes—of the past, the present, the future—for him, it is a matter of making something pass through that cannot and will not be codified. Making it pass through a new body, inventing a body in which it can pass and flow: a body that would be ours, that of the earth, that of the written word.
We know the great instruments of codification. Societies don't vary much, they don't have many means of codification. We know three main ones: law, contract, and institution. We encounter them very well, for example, in the relationship that people maintain or have maintained with books. There are books of law, in which the reader's relationship with the book is governed by the law. In fact, we more specifically call them codes, or sacred books. Then there is another kind of book that is governed by the contract, the bourgeois contractual relationship. This is the basis of lay literature and the book sales relationship: I buy, you give me what to read—a contractual relationship in which everyone, author and reader, is trapped. And there is yet another kind of book, the political book, preferably revolutionary, which presents itself as a book of institutions, whether present or future. All sorts of mixtures are created: contractual or institutional books that are treated as sacred texts... etc. All types of codification are so present, so underlying, that we find them within each other.
ResponderExcluirTake another example, that of madness: the attempt to codify madness takes three forms. First, the forms of law, that is, of the hospital, of the asylum—this is repressive codification, this is confinement, the ancient confinement that will be called upon in the future to become a last hope of salvation, when the mad will say: "Good times when they confined us, because nowadays worse things happen." Then came a kind of formidable coup, the coup of psychoanalysis: it was understood that there were people who escaped the bourgeois contractual relationship as it appeared in medicine, and these people were the mad, because they could not be contracting parties; they were legally "incapable." Freud's coup was to place a portion of the mad, in the broadest sense of the term, the neurotics, under the contractual relationship and explain that a special contract could be made with them (hence the abandonment of hypnosis). He is the first to introduce into psychiatry, and this is ultimately what constitutes the psychoanalytic novelty, the bourgeois contractual relationship that had until then been excluded from it.
ResponderExcluirAnd then there are the more recent attempts, whose political implications and sometimes revolutionary ambitions are evident—the so-called institutional attempts. Therein lies the triple means of codification: either it will be the law, or if not the law, it will be the contractual relationship, or if not the contractual relationship, it will be the institution. And upon these codifications our bureaucracies flourish.
ResponderExcluirFaced with the way our societies are decoded, with codes escaping on all sides, Nietzsche is the one who doesn't attempt recoding. He says: this hasn't gone far enough yet; you're just children. At the level of what he writes and what he thinks, Nietzsche pursues an attempt at decoding, not in the sense of a relative decoding that would consist of deciphering old, present, or future codes, but of an absolute decoding—making something uncodable pass through, scrambling all codes. Scrambleing all codes isn't easy, even at the level of the simplest writing and language. I only see a similarity with Kafka, with what Kafka does with German, based on the linguistic situation of the Jews of Prague: he assembles, in German, a war machine against German; by dint of indeterminacy and sobriety, he makes something that had never been heard pass through the German code. As for Nietzsche, he lives or considers himself Polish in relation to German. He seizes German to assemble a war machine that will convey something that is not codable in German. This is style as politics.
ResponderExcluirMore generally, what constitutes the effort of such thought, which seeks to force its flows beneath laws, rejecting them, beneath contractual relations, denying them, beneath institutions, parodying them? I'll return briefly to the example of psychoanalysis. In what way does a psychoanalyst as original as Melanie Klein, nevertheless, remain within the psychoanalytic system? She herself says it very well: the partial objects she speaks of, with their explosions, their flows, etc., are of the order of the phantasm. Patients bring lived states, intensely lived, and Melanie Klein translates them into phantasms. There is a contract there, specifically a contract: give me your lived states, and I will return phantasms to you. And the contract implies an exchange, of money and words. In this respect, a psychoanalyst like Winnicott truly remains at the limits of psychoanalysis, because he feels that this procedure is no longer appropriate at a certain point. There comes a time when it's no longer about translating, interpreting, translating into phantoms, interpreting into meanings or signifiers—no, that's not it. There comes a time when it's necessary to share, to be in tune with the patient.
ResponderExcluirEven so, this is certainly more complicated. What we feel is rather the need for a relationship that would be neither legal, nor contractual, nor institutional. With Nietzsche, that's it. We read an aphorism, or a poem by Zarathustra. Now, materially and formally, such texts are understood neither by the establishment or application of a law, nor by the offer of a contractual relationship, nor by the establishment of an institution. The only conceivable equivalent would perhaps be "being in the same boat." Something Pascalian turned against Pascal. We embarked: a kind of Medusa raft, bombs falling around, the raft drifting toward icy underground streams, or else toward torrid rivers, the Orinoco, the Amazon, people rowing together. Rowing together is sharing, sharing something, outside of any law, any contract, any institution. A drift, a movement of drift, or of "deterritorialization": I say this in a very nebulous, very confused way, since it is a hypothesis or a vague impression about the originality of Nietzschean texts. A new kind of book.
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