Book Summary by Jeffrey M. Jackson

Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories

Genealogy and Convalescence 

by 

Jeffrey M. Jackson

This book presents a reading of Nietzsche as a thinker of the suffered social histories of subjectivity.  It suggests that Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of idealism needs the concept of convalescence to be coherent.  Genealogy is a form of reflection that traces the suffered scenes of which that reflection is symptomatic, whereas convalescence is the ordeal of reflection’s coming to bear its limits within scenes of embodied suffering.  Only convalescents can engage in genealogy. The term “scene” is borrowed from Freud’s appeal to infantile scenes, which shape subjectivity; the often-discussed commonality between Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche is found not in suspicion or hermeneutics, but rather in modelling the ordeal of a reflecting subject which traces its independence as a symptom of a more or less unbearable suffered historical dependence.  This theme is developed by appeals to Freud’s notion of mourning and the object relations theories of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott, which insist on the primacy of suffered relationality in the genesis of subjectivity.   Moreover, Adorno’s notion of negative dialectics and its emphasis on the primacy of the object are suggested as an alternative context within which to read Nietzsche’s writing, in contrast with dominant modes of criticism.  From here, certain popular readings of Nietzsche are discussed: e.g. those by Kofman, Ricoeur, Foucault, Blondel, Haar, Deleuze, Derrida, etc.

Chapter One, “Convalescence, Mourning, and Sociality,” examines Nietzsche’s concept of convalescence by comparing it with the Freudian work of mourning.  In contrast with influential subjectivist readings of Nietzsche—specifically those of Derrida and Deleuze—the comparison with Freud helps to show the suffered nature of socio-historically embedded subjectivity.  For Freud, the mournful work to slowly decathect from all subtle attachments to the lost object; similarly, the convalescent undergoes a sustained labor of decathexis from ressentiment.  In his preoccupation with convalescence, Nietzsche is articulating the conditions for the possibility of the overcoming of bad culture for beings who carry the weight of that bad culture within their subjectivity.  That this salutary ordeal is conditioned by its relational context implies an imperative to transform social conditions. 

Chapter Two, “Relationality, Trauma, and the Genealogy of the Subject,” examines the first two essays of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality from the perspective of relational psychoanalysis, which insists on the genesis of human subjectivity from foundational relationships with others.  This suggests that naturalistic and other common interpretations of this text fail to do justice to the excessive, negative character of suffered social history.  Such interpretations often resort to subjectivist or quasi-metaphysical accounts of repression or instincts to explain the origins of bad conscience, for example.  Nietzsche’s position should rather be seen as proto-psychoanalytic in that his notion of bad conscience is best understood as a type of symptom, precisely because its source is not a naturalistically-conceived cause, but rather a socially-conditioned, concretely and symbolically-mediated ordeal.  This problem can be connected to passages in which Nietzsche discusses the suffered, social dimensions of shame and liberation.  Moreover, slaves’ morality is not merely a type expressive of subjective weakness, but the symptom of the unbearable history of the human animal that gave rise to subjectivity.  “Free will” is the fantasy of agency for beings who experience agency at unbearable.  On one hand this unbearable experience has material, historical dimensionality, with connections to slavery, trauma, physical weakness, sickness, etc.; on the other, it is reproduced symbolically as the basis of all meaning.  Far from ending in fatalism, this reading suggests that the path toward Nietzschean liberation leads through cultural convalescence from the weight of social—both material and symbolic—histories.

Chapter Three, “Nietzsche’s Negative Dialectics: Ascetic Ideal and Status Quo,” offers an account of Theodor Adorno’s philosophical position, which is then used to analyse various aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking.  Both thinkers interrogate the way in which the status quo is calcified within dominant forms of subjectivity—in the ascetic ideal for Nietzsche and the primacy of the subject in Adorno.  Consequently, neither thinker is merely advancing a subjectivist critique of identity—which would celebrate difference or the plurality of perspectives, for example.  Rather, they insist on the suffered objectivity of the non-identical.  In contrast to views of Nietzsche as valorizing immediacy, the body, necessity, or difference, one might see Nietzsche’s fragmentary style and critique of systems as expressions of a negative dialectics, based in the primacy of the object, in which subjectivity would trace and negotiate the suffered social histories that condition it.  From this perspective, the third essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy—and its focus on the ascetic ideal as the basis of the modern subject—can be read as a critique of modern culture and of the philosophy that seeks liberation from that culture.

Chapter Four, “Working-through Perspectives in Nietzsche and Object Relations Psychoanalysis,” provides a reading of certain aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking with that of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott.  For Klein, the infant begins in a primitive schizoid position from which the object (i.e. the world) is encountered as a precarious fluctuation from satisfying to persecuting, and a key developmental task in Kleinian psychoanalysis is the ability to integrate these primitive schizoid partial objects into a more holistic position.  Nietzsche’s critique of the opposition between Good and Evil, and his relating of the thought of eternal recurrence to the ability to embrace all aspects of existence can be read on this model as valorizing the integration of the nonintegrable.  Similarly, Winnicott’s concept of transitional phenomena presents a model of an environmentally-mediated ordeal of integrating subjectivity with objectivity, which is similar to Nietzsche’s account of subjectivity’s formation within suffered social scenes.  These thinkers suggest that purportedly “pure” or “independent” subjects are symptomatic of relational histories that have not gone well, and thereby need to be changed.