Towards a Bio-Politics of the Future – Nietzsche against the Present.

Stephen Zepke

More and more, I tend to think that because the philosopher is necessarily a
man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, he has always been and has had
to be in conflict with his Today: in every instance, Today’s ideal was his
enemy.’ (BGE 212)

Do we have ears to hear Nietzsche today?1 Can his Übermensch (over-human) from
Übermorgen (the day after tomorrow) still be heard in the cacophony of our present?
Does Nietzsche’s strident ‘critique of modernity’ still have any relevance? If
Nietzsche is to be heard today these questions must be posed in relation to our
contemporary bio-political mechanisms of control, mechanisms that have succeeded
in grasping the vital processes of biological life. Today, I would like to argue;
Nietzsche’s concept of an untimely future can still show us how to ‘philosophise with
a hammer’, but if it does then its blows must fall on the great idols of today; our
digital prostheses. For Nietzsche the future can only emerge from a critique of the
present, a critique that manages to escape its contemporary conditions to reaffirm the
inhuman and unchanging horizon of the becoming of life. In order for this to happen
Nietzsche’s transcendental ontology of becoming – or will to power as he called it –
must once more be affirmed, but not abstractly, as an academic exercise of
scholarship, or worse, in a quasi-mystical expression of faith. The fate of the future,
the fate that is of becoming itself, rests in its embodiment. Our challenge then, is not
so much to think the future, as to produce it, to produce the untimely sensations that
escape our times, but in doing so rupture their continuity and explode their self-
evidence. How, as Nietzsche so dramatically described himself, might we stop being
human, and become dynamite (EH, Why I Am a Destiny, 1, see also TI, Expeditions
of an Untimely Man, 44)? This dynamite future is an internal outside that confronts
our times with their alterity, with their otherness, in order to produce a break through
which might flow ‘the unexhausted procreative will of life’ (Z, ‘on Self-
Overcoming’). Nietzsche’s ‘critique of modernity’ still provides us with many
insights into contemporary life, and much useful advice for overcoming the
challenges facing us today. These will certainly be helpful to us. But his insistence on
the distance and loneliness of the ‘noble spirit’ of the future, his insistence that is on
the future’s otherness, seems irrelevant within the hyper-connected digital networks
now determining our present. It is this ambivalent status of his thought – both
prescient and redundant – that we must understand today, or Nietzsche risks being
reduced to a ridiculous crank, or worse, a dreaming mystic.
Our first question then, is what weapons Nietzsche’s ‘critique of modernity’
offers us in the ‘great war’ (EH, Beyond Good and Evil, 1) to liberate the future from
the present? Late in his life Nietzsche doubted whether anyone had heard him, and
indeed based on the very small dissemination of his books up to that point, his doubts
were justified. Nevertheless, Nietzsche not only refuses responsibility for this (all his
texts were fish hooks, he claims, but it wasn’t his fault nothing was caught, ‘There

1
My inspiration for this question, and for my attempts to answer it, comes from Gilles Deleuze’s essay
‘Nomadic Thought’, published in 1973. This essay ends with the question; ‘who are today’s
Nietzscheans?’ (2003 260), and my own essay is a response that tries to account for some of the
developments that have emerged in the 40 years since.
weren’t any fish’ (EH, Beyond Good and Evil, 1)), but interprets it as evidence that he
was right. In the Foreword to The Anti-Christ he writes;

This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them is even living yet.
[…] how could I confound myself with those for whom there are ears listening
today? Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born
posthumously. […] New ears for new music. New eyes for the most distant
things. A new conscience for truths which have hitherto remained dumb. […]
Very well! These alone are my readers, my rightful readers, my predestined
readers: what do the rest matter? – The rest are merely mankind. – One must
be superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soul – in contempt… (AC,
Foreword)

This passage encapsulates Nietzsche’s ambiguous relevance. On the one hand there is
his determined distance, his scorn for the masses, and that contemptuous superiority
that seems to deny any possibility of a collective politics. On the other we clearly hear
the nascent notes of a bio-political critique. His future readers will require a new
physiology; new ears, new eyes, and a new consciousness to articulate its new
experiences. Philosophy in Nietzsche’s sense is therefore nothing less than a program
of bio-political resistance.
But can this bio-politics of the ‘new’, or of the ‘future’, emerge today, when
capitalism seems to have so effectively instrumentalised novelty, creativity, and even
the future itself (‘new’ products, ‘creative industries’, and the ‘futures market’).
Similarly, the forces of affirmation seem to have been captured today in the dubious
enthusiasms of expressing what we ‘like’ (thumbs up). Nietzsche certainly had an
intimation of all this, and he insists on the difference between a human future
(Morgen) and the untimely future of the over-human (Übermorgen). But because this
difference is transcendental, reflecting his ontological distinction between being and
becoming, and their embodiment in the (human) negation and the (over-human)
affirmation of life, his affirmation of a new bio-political sensibility can seem like a
reductive program of dis-engagement. Alternatively, recent thinkers have suggested
that bio-politics is marked by the emergence of capitalism as an ontology of
becoming, arguing that our new technological prostheses have captured living force
(will to power), and that neo-liberal capitalism has made the radical force of
affirmation its very own logic. This essay will attempt to rebut both of these
scenarios, by showing how Nietzsche’s thought can offer us a very concrete form of
political engagement.
This engagement begins from an immanent critique of the present that seeks to
revalue its values. It is only through such a revaluation, Nietzsche argues, that a
‘grand feeling of distance’ (BGE 257) will be established between the human, all too
human and an over-human future that ruptures the present. But this distance does not
demarcate a difference between the human and its beyond, and is instead the
immanent critical principle of will to power – a ‘principle of disequilibrium’ as
Klossowski puts it (1997 103) – by which humanity achieves its ‘self-overcoming’
(BGE 257). We will not, in other words, overcome the transcendent values defining
the human by simply positing an alternative that takes their place. Instead, the
affirmative process of critique produces a new structure of thought and life from
within the conditions of the present. Critique forces the present to produce what
exceeds its conditions of possibility, for it is only by producing such an untimely
future that the will-to-power can eternally return as the principle of life.2 Nietzsche’s
criticism of the present therefore engages with the everyday in order to make it a
stranger to itself. This stranger would be the future, but the future can only be
produced by leaving the present, which does not mean abandoning the present, but
making the present take leave of itself. As Nietzsche writes;

In order to see our European morality for once as it looks from a distance, and
to measure it up against other past or future moralities, one has to proceed like
a wanderer who wants to know how high the towers in a town are: he leaves
the town. (GS 380)3

In order to revalue morality, for example, one must consider it from a point outside
morality, a point ‘beyond good and evil’. But this outside is not transcendent, it is
instead produced by those with the strength to go ‘out there, up there’ (GS 380), to a
place free from ‘the sum of commanding value judgements that have become part of
our flesh and blood’ (GS 380). Immanent critique therefore embodies this passage as a
type of bio-politics, but unlike Foucault’s understanding of this term as referring to
political techniques aimed at populations, for Nietzsche bio-politics begins with the
individual and their self-critique. This makes overcoming a necessarily situated
practice, and an – admittedly extreme – form of ‘the personal is political’, or affective
micropolitics. Self-critique in this sense has two aspects, on the one hand it
overcomes the present, but on the other it also overcomes our (too dialectical)
aversion to it. Nietzsche continues;

The human being of such a beyond who wants to catch a glimpse of the
highest measure of value of his time must first of all ‘overcome’ this time in
himself – this is the test of his strength – and consequently not only his time
but also his aversion and opposition against this time, his suffering from this
time, his untimeliness’ (GS 380)

Critique therefore does not revalue the present by negating it; because
negation defines the human nature of the present that must be overcome, instead
critique revalues negation as affirmation, in order to give to the present a new future.4
It is artists who are capable of such a task, because it is artists who create. ‘Art and
nothing but art!’ Nietzsche famously cries, ‘It is the great means of making life
2
Here, I am drawing on Deleuze’s interpretation of the eternal return. The eternal return, he writes;
‘is properly called a belief of the future, a belief in the future. Eternal return affects only the
new, what is produced under the condition of default and by the intermediary of
metamorphosis. However, it causes neither the condition nor the agent to return: on the
contrary it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force. [...] It is itself the
new, complete novelty’ (1994 90).
3
The figure of looking back or down from afar is a recurring one in Nietzsche’s work, from the
mountaintops inhabited by Zarathustra (who also comes down to teach the townsfolk about his
distance) to the cosmic dimensions of ‘a distant star’, from where earth can be seen as a ‘distinctively
ascetic planet’ (GM, III, 11).
4
Roberto Esposito is perhaps the most prominent analyst of Nietzsche’s bio-politics. His exemplary
work is broadly compatible with my own here, although Esposito develops his reading of Nietzsche
within a wider analysis of what he calls ‘immunity’ (in Nietzsche’s terms the nihilism or reactive
power of modern institutions) and ‘community’. Nevertheless, Esposito emphasises the ‘deconstructive
force’ (2008 78) of Nietzsche’s critique, which in ‘Negating the immunitary negation’ is ‘doubly
negative’ (2008 96). As will become obvious, I insist here on the necessarily affirmative condition of
the future, its necessarily non-dialectical force.
possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life’ (WP 853ii). In this
sense, we must be ‘artist-philosophers’, ‘poets of our lives’ (GS 299), capable of
selecting what in our present goes beyond it, capable that is of growing new ears and
eyes by which to sense this future, a new physiology capable of embodying it. Art is
everything for Nietzsche, most especially because art creates the not-yet, and in this it
is the basis of not only his ontology but of his politics. Politics, for Nietzsche, is a war
waged by physiological forces (values) over the fate of the future. The future of
humanity can either deny life by positing a tomorrow (Morgen) in continuity with
today (a nihilist future, or as Nietzsche also calls it, ‘the future as progress’ (WP 62)),5
or it can affirm life by emerging as the discontinuity of the present, as a radical future
that pits itself against the present (Übermorgen). The artist, Nietzsche argues – and
this is the essence of his politics – creates something that does not negate the present,
but affirms in themselves what overcomes their humanity and so their present. This,
Nietzsche says, is the ‘grand style’, it is, as Deleuze acutely comments; ‘style as
politics’ (2004 254). The artist is defined by their generosity, by the strength of what
they create, so while it is true that there is no creation without destruction, destruction
is only a result. Nevertheless, there is no creation ex nihilo, because it is only by
selecting what exceeds their time and place in their time and place that an artist might
create the untimely, or time to come.
The artist is in this sense a ‘signpost to the future’, a signpost that points
outwards from the very edges of the present. The artist, Nietzsche writes;

scents out those cases in which, in the midst of our modern world and reality
and without any artificial withdrawal from or warding off of this world, the
great and beautiful soul is still possible, still able to embody itself in the
harmonious and well-proportioned and thus acquire visibility, duration and the
status of a model, and in so doing through the excitation of envy and
emulation help to create the future. (HAH, II, 99)

Within the horrors of the present the artist affirms everything that escapes it. In so
doing he or she expresses will to power’s force of overcoming, a force that is the
internal outside to everything that negates it. The immanent externality of genetic
force is seen in Nietzsche’s famous account of European nihilism in The Genealogy
of Morals. There he argues that although science is the latest version of man’s ‘ascetic
ideal’, inasmuch as it renounces the body in the name of a higher ‘truth’, this ‘will to
nothingness’ nevertheless carries within it its own overcoming, which is the power to
will. Man, Nietzsche writes, ‘would prefer to will nothingness than not will’ (GM, III,
1). When we understand science’s ‘will to truth’ in this way, Nietzsche claims,
something strange happens; ‘the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a
problem’ (GM, III, 27). This critical consciousness is at once situated in our world,
but only as that which transforms it, as that which embodies the transcendental
principle of life. Nietzsche triumphantly concludes; ‘All great things bring about their
own demise through an act of self-sublimation: that is the law of life, the law of
necessary ‘self-overcoming’ in the essence of life’ (GM, III, 27). The critical
affirmation of the will to power therefore creates a problem for the present, but this
problem is outside, but not beyond, the present. The beyond is rather the transcendent
5
As Nietzsche elsewhere writes; ‘Mankind does not represent a development of the better or the
stronger or the higher in the way that is believed today. ‘Progress’ is merely a modern idea, that is to
say a false idea. […] onward development is not by any means, by any necessity the same thing as
elevation, advance, strengthening’ (AC 4).
guarantee of the human present, of the universal values that justify humanity’s
negation of everything that threatens it. ‘Slave ethics’, Nietzsche argues, ‘begins by
saying no to an “outside,” an “other,” a non-self, and that no is its creative act’ (GM,
I, 10). It is not true that the masses are not creative, they are. The difference lies
instead in how and what they create. The masses create according to the human values
enshrined as the measure of all things, preserving a ‘present lived at the expense of
the future.’ (GM, Intro 6). The artist of the future on the other hand affirms what
escapes humanity, what exceeds it, and in this self-overcoming constructs an outside
that might produce a proliferating change operating on the scale of a society, a
culture, an age, or an epoch. This is what we call today ‘micropolitics’, but it is not a
politics that expresses aims or directly contests the existent. It is instead a
micropolitics of experiment and invention, a politics of creation that does not offer a
program, but only a method. Politics in this sense means becoming an artist, it means
creating values distant from todays, and so open to an undetermined future.
Our values are expressed first of all by our perceptions and feelings, and then
in our desires and beliefs. Furthermore, Nietzsche will argue, although words are
signs for concepts, concepts are signs for recurring sensations, expressions of our
‘inner experience’ (BGE 268). Sensations themselves are interpretations of existence,
valuations that negate or affirm the powers of life, and thus, Nietzsche says, ‘all sense
perceptions are permeated with value judgements’ (WP 305). As a result; ‘Every
individual may be regarded as representing the ascending or descending line of life.
When one has decided which, one has thereby established a canon for the value of his
egoism’ (TI, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 33). The individual on the ascending
line possesses, Nietzsche argues, a body blessed with an ‘animal’ sensibility, a
sensibility that isn’t opposed to the human, but is the animal in the human. This
animal sensibility revalues human values by affirming its own will to power; revelling
in the intoxication of the creative act, relishing the cruelty of exercising superior
force, and enjoying the ‘ecstasies of sexuality’ (WP 805).6 For Nietzsche it is this
unleashed feeling of ‘animal well being’ and ‘desire’ that ‘constitutes the aesthetic
state’ (WP 801), making art nothing less than ‘the complete certainty of functioning
of the governing unconscious instincts’ (GM, I, 10).

With the ‘animal’ artist we have a clear sense of the bio-political dimensions of the
future, and the immanent critique or revaluation of human values required to create it.
But to assess the value this ontological form of politics has for us today, we must
confront it with the view that contemporary forms of capitalism have succeeded in
setting themselves up precisely here, at the interface of a transcendental ontology of
critical creation (will to power) and its situated embodiment within the becoming-
other of human bodies. This confrontation requires a brief outline of this view before
we can consider its possible impact for our question of Nietzsche’s relevance today.
Matteo Pasquinelli has argued that capitalism has established a direct and parasitic
relation to our unconscious and instinctual drives through the production of ‘affect-
commodities’, allowing capital to directly exploit our instinctual goals, and to
modulate and so control their intensity. Rather than repress these ‘animal spirits’, as
Pasquinelli calls them (Pasquinelli 2008), capitalism now attempts to amplify them in
order to maximise its profit. His examples are precisely those that Nietzsche uses to
typify the artist’s ‘animal vigor’ (WP 802); sexuality and the violent cruelty of the
survival instinct. Bio-political capitalism is on this account a kind of financial
affirmation of our animal sensibility, a form of control that operates through
6
‘Making music,’ Nietzsche quips, ‘ is another way of making children’ (WP 800).
monetisation. The idea is simple enough; if our ‘noble’ (as Nietzsche would have it)
desire for sex and violence is catered for by the image-commodities (normal porn and
‘war-porn’) disseminated by the mass media, then the creation of ‘new’ commodities
(a constant necessity for capitalism according to the law of diminishing returns)
becomes the embodiment of becoming itself. In this sense then, capitalism has
captured will to power’s ‘principle of disequilibrium’ and turned it into its most
important principle of profit.
Digital technology has enabled this acceleration of desiring-production and
consumption, inserting capitalist imperatives into the neurological and nervous
networks of our body and brain. This has produced a ‘connective mutation’, as Franco
Berardi has called it (Berardi, 2005), shifting our subjectivities away from traditional
identities and towards a flexible ‘dividual’ or ‘dissolved self’ who is – in its guise as
both worker and consumer – in a permanent state of personal reinvention. This
incessant production of commodified difference has enveloped the globe in its world
wide web, resulting today in what Berardi calls ‘molecular capitalism’, where the
production of ‘infocommodities’ occupies our every moment.7 This has led to a
situation in which our physiological and psychological integrity is permanently
pulverised, and our greatest value for capitalism is in fact our fragmented difference
from ourselves. ‘In all the time of life,’ Berardi claims in typically apocalyptic style,
‘the human machine is there, pulsating and available, like a brain-sprawl in waiting.
The extension of time is meticulously cellularized: cells of productive time can be
mobilized in punctual, casual, and fragmentary forms. The recombination of these
fragments is automatically realized in the network’ (2011, 90).
The interface not only subsumes our every desire and thought, but values them
according to their difference. This means that the creative distance of the future and
its seductive outside has been given a relative (monetary) value by capitalism, and
simply put to work. Steven Shaviro puts it in a typically off-hand way; ‘You won’t get
away from the logic of commodities and the market,’ he writes, ‘by appealing to
utopian yearning and hopes for redemption. For these longings are the ones that
motivate us to go shopping.’ (Shaviro 2006, n.p.) One of Shaviro’s examples is
especially poignant for us, focussing as it does on art. The recent emergence of ‘post-
cinematic cinema’, he argues, incorporates the radical formal experiments of the
avant-garde into the generic structures of B-movies, evaporating their transformative
(and often explicitly political) ambitions in an over-heated but vacuous ride of kinetic
affects (see Shaviro 2010). On his account art has already overcome the human, but
this has not led to a revaluation of values in Nietzsche’s sense, but to the revaluation
of affects as commodities. Berardi makes a similar point; the digital interface has
produced the most efficient utopia yet he argues, the utopia of an infinite virtual space
‘where billions of users meet and create their economic, cultural and psychic reality.’
But this ‘utopia’ is in fact a dystopia, because it ushers in ‘the disappearance of the
human, or perhaps the submission of the human to the [inhuman] chain of
technolinguistic automatisms’ (2011, 53). Humanity has been overcome, but in its
place we have become a society of ‘net slaves’ working in ‘permanent cellular
connection’ (2011, 115).
Maurizio Lazzarato has given a considerably more sober account of this
process that focuses on the way digital technology has inserted itself at the interface
of the transcendental process of onto-genesis (Nietzsche’s will to power), and its
7
‘Contemporary capitalism,’ Berardi argues, ‘can be defined as semiocapitalism because the general
shape of commodities has a semiotic character and the process of production is increasingly the
elaboration of sign-information’ (2011 106).
situated embodiment as the body’s sensual and intellectual power of self-
overcoming.8 Similar to Pasquinelli and Berardi, Lazzarato argues that digital
technology has emerged at the interface of the production and reception of sensation,
imposing a capitalist system of circulation on sensation’s inherent ability to
proliferate and transform itself. As a result the power of revaluation or invention, and
the untimely ‘distance’ it implies, has been, Lazzarato claims, ‘“objectified” within
very precise limits, in a technological dispositif’ (2007 111). Bio-political capitalism
has therefore taken on an ontological sense, inasmuch as it is now seen as the
producer of ‘creativity’ (ie., onto-genesis) itself. Consequently creation, or becoming,
is understood as an ontological process (it is the production of life, as in Nietzsche),
but this process is not simply subsumed by contemporary digital and capitalist
processes, they now in fact produce it. Creation remains that of an immanent and
critical (why not?) difference producing a new future – the newer the better – but this
mode of production is an expression of capitalism, rather than its resistance (2007
116). Over-coming in this sense has become the very logic of capital, which thereby
stakes its claim to any future. ‘Our hypothesis,’ Lazzarato writes, ‘is that the
proliferation of possible worlds is the ontology of our present’ (2009 177).
Berardi sums this up in a pithy statement; we are living, he says, ‘in the future
of no future’ (2011 50). The future is no longer a promise of emancipation from
current forms of control, but is instead the promise of their eternalisation. Why this
dystopian hopelessness? Because, Berardi argues, molecular capitalism fragments our
nervous and cognitive energy and recombines it within the network, a bio-political
revaluation of our physiology and psychology that makes both individual and
collective consciousness impossible. Interestingly, Berardi’s suggested resistance to
this process is almost the exact contrary to Nietzsche’s; where Nietzsche advocates
the ‘great health’ of the over-human and its ‘explosive’ force of becoming, Berardi
suggests an ‘implosive theory of subversion, based on depression and exhaustion’
(2011 138).

Despite the undoubted brilliance of these analyses of contemporary bio-

political mechanisms, I nevertheless want to try to defend Nietzsche’s concept of an
untimely future, and insist that it can still make a transformative difference. This task
is helped by the fact that Nietzsche himself seems to have foreseen some of the
developments that we have seen described above with such horrified relish.
Nietzsche’s caustic but nevertheless prescient depictions of his own ‘modernity’ offer
various suggestions as to how we might critique our present in a way that might
overcome it. Three aspects of Nietzsche’s depiction of ‘modernity’ are important
here; first, is humanity’s self-indulgent hedonism, which makes it unable to be critical
of itself; second, humanity has become obsessed by its own cleverness, it revels in a
kind of computational hubris otherwise known as science; and third is Nietzsche’s
startling claim that bio-political capitalism is not an obstacle to, but in fact a necessary
stage towards, a new future.
Critique, as we have seen, is the first step towards the overcoming of man, and
without its distancing effect we cannot find the momentum to leap into the future.9

8
I should point out that the work of Lazzarato’s that I’m drawing on here, in particular
Videophilosophie, focuses on the thought of Henri Bergson rather than Nietzsche. But as is obvious I
think Lazzarato’s arguments can be applied to Nietzsche’s thought as well.
9
At the beginning of Zarathustra, the tightrope walker (representing the best in humanity – the seekers
of danger) falls to his death when the ‘buffoon’ comes up behind him. But the buffoon does not push
him off, rather he jumps over the tightrope walker, causing him to loose his balance and fall to his
But the spirit of modernity has inoculated us against critique, distracting us with
entertainment, or obsessing us with ‘facts’; ‘Alas!’ Nietzsche laments, ‘The time of
the most contemptible man is coming, the man who can no longer despise himself’ (Z,
Prologue, 5). Modern man is addicted to fleeting and histrionic affects whose
ubiquitous enjoyment has banalised affirmation by turning it into a question of what
one ‘likes’. This modern man, Nietzsche argues, is the ‘last’ or ‘Ultimate man’, a
human that has discovered ‘happiness’ by removing everything that was hard and
cruel in life. In its place culture has become a kind of ‘narcotic’, administering ‘a little
poison now and then’ in order to produce ‘pleasant dreams’ (Z, Prologue, 5). ‘Who
will tell us the entire history of narcotics?’ Nietzsche asks, ‘It is nearly the history of
culture, our so-called higher culture!’ (GS 86). There is still work, but ‘work is
entertainment’, filling life with ‘little pleasures’ that do not rock the boat. As people
are fond of saying today; ‘It’s all good’, which would be the contemporary version of
Nietzsche’s braying ass, whose vacuously repeated cry – ‘Yea-h’ – simply affirms the
monotony of our pleasures. The pleasure of shopping, of possession, of pride in our
own conformity and insignificance. This empty and uncritical ‘enjoyment’ merely
confirms our bio-political enslavement, and inasmuch as it embraces the ‘new’ it does
so only as the negation of any ‘outside’ to those desires and sensations determining
the present; ‘Everyone wants the same thing,’ Nietzsche writes, ‘everyone is the
same: whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily to the madhouse’ (Z, Prologue, 5).
This is the essence of ‘herd-mentality’, it simply repeats what exists, taking the affects
and values it is given, thankful it doesn’t need to do more than dutifully click the
mouse (BGE 192).
This does not mean, however, that ‘narcotised’ human life is bland or
colourless. Modernity is characterised in fact, by what Nietzsche calls ‘the great
fairground boom-boom’ (GS 4), an increasingly intense range of experiences that are
nevertheless rendered harmless by being restricted to the realm of cultural
entertainments (paid for, of course) on the one hand, and on the other by offering us
an ecstatic ‘beyond’ that ‘apes the high tide of the soul’, despite being found in a
cinema (for example) rather than a church (GS 86). We are transported to heights of
experience that we cannot hope to find in our normal lives, and we leave feeling
sanctified, purified, blessed by this higher power. It is the power of ascetic ideals, but
these have been converted into an intoxicating form of entertainment, a ‘whip-lash of
ideals’ as Nietzsche calls it (GS 86). So while it seems we are permanently partaking
of a cornucopia of experience, it all in fact confirms one simple fact; ‘Nothing is
beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivety rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of
aesthetics’ (TI, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 20). For Nietzsche the ‘affect-
industry’ does not produce art but ‘anti-art’, an anti-art that ‘glorifies the religious and
philosophical errors of mankind’ (HAH, I, 220). Nietzsche’s favourite example is
Richard Wagner, but his pillory of Wagner could easily be applied to the ‘anti-artists’
(TI, Expeditions of an Untimely man, 9) of today, most especially those making their
fortunes in Hollywood; ‘all of them great explorers in the realm of the sublime, also
of the hideous and horrible, and even greater explorers of effect, of presentation, of
the art of the shop-window; all of them talents far beyond their own genius’ (BGE
256 see also GS 4). This ‘upward-wrenching’ (BGE 256) art of ever more intense
affects is escapism rather than overcoming, an overwrought Romanticism that
confirms Christianity even as it denies God, and couldn’t be further from the sober

death. This is an allegory of affirmation, which succeeds in over-coming man, and in doing so
destroying him, but does not do so through negating him but only as a consequence of the creative
leap. The success of critique does cause the destruction of man, but this is not its aim, only its result.
Classicism that defines Nietzsche’s own aesthetic. Against all of this Nietzsche
marks, as Deleuze remarks, ‘the dawn of counter-culture’ (2002 253).
Similarly, and in a phrase entirely applicable to today’s obsession with ‘social
media’, Nietzsche condemns the ‘fanatics of expression ‘at all costs’’ (BGE 256),
because such expression merely confirms what everyone already knew and felt,
delivering the ‘commonness’ of the ubiquitous ‘thumbs up’. ‘The easy
communicability of necessity (which ultimately means having experienced only
average and common experiences),’ Nietzsche writes, ‘must, of all the forces that
have heretofore controlled humans, have been the most forceful’ (BGE 268).
Nietzsche’s precise description of today’s bio-politics does not deny the importance
of ‘difference’ or the ‘new’ within contemporary capitalism, nor does it deny the
intensity of contemporary experience, rather it claims that these simply conform to
and so confirm the human values that are their condition. This argument is not
refuted, it seems to me, by claims that the technological acceleration and exploitation
of affectual production/consumption afforded by digital media has produced a ‘post-
human’ mutation leading into a new cybernetic future. Nietzsche casually admits the
importance of man’s technological prostheses, but what is important about their
development, he claims, is not the way they seemingly fragment the integrity of
human psychology and corporeality, but the way in which this makes human values
ever more ubiquitous.
It is for similar reasons that Nietzsche will condemn science. The ‘ultimate
human’, he argues, is a scientific type who possesses great ‘intelligence’; ‘They are
clever and know everything that has ever happened’ (Z, Prologue, 5), but like
entertainment this ‘knowledge’ is based upon the assumed universality of human
values, and the scientific ‘beyond’ of established ascetic ‘truth’. Infotainment. Such
scientific ‘knowledge’ effectively removes becoming from history by making it
subservient to truth, an act that, Nietzsche tells us, ‘uproots the future’ (UM, II, 7).
Modern men are merely ‘walking encyclopaedias’ (UM, II, 4) who reduce the forces
of historical becoming to ‘information’, allowing them to be instrumentalised by the
demands of a capitalist techno-science. Nietzsche has a clear sense of the future this
will produce, a future in which human activity is restricted to ‘labour of the greatest
possible common utility [that allows] science to become ever more profitable in an
economic sense’ (UM, II, 7). Nietzsche calls this ‘nihilism’ because it is the point at
which life tries to destroy itself. In a sentence that echoes today in an uncomfortable
way, he writes; ‘Are there still human beings, or perhaps only thinking-, writing- and
speaking-machines?’ (UM, II, 5)
Nietzsche’s pessimism about science extends into a remarkably prescient
vision of contemporary capitalism. In fact, we could almost call the dystopian
depictions of current day bio-political control by Berardi and co a plagiarism (with a
bad conscience) of Nietzsche’s own work;

Once we possess that common economic management of the earth that will
soon be inevitable, mankind will be able to find its best meaning as a machine
in the service of this economy – as a tremendous clockwork, composed of ever
more subtly “adapted” gears; as an ever-growing superfluity of all dominating
and commanding elements; as a whole of tremendous force, whose individual
factors represent minimal forces, minimal values. (WP 866)

This strange echo of Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’ in the Grundrisse understands

science as being the ‘modern’ economy’s condition of possibility, but in a fateful
reversal science’s elevation has in fact lead to its subservience, as it has become
entirely defined by the aims of the economy it makes possible. As a result, science
and the ‘knowledge’ it produces cannot discover (ie., invent) any future that does not
have the economy as its end, which means, as Marx had it, the total subsumption of
the human ‘general intellect’ by capital.10 But this does not mean for Nietzsche the
end of the human, far from it. Science in this sense is in fact, and as we have seen, the
most refined version of the old human values, and the Internet merely confirms this
fact. This is not to say that human values do not change, clearly they do, but these
changes must be seen as relative, changes that leave the human, all too human
structure of negation and piety (the ascetic ideal of truth) in place.
What contemporary capitalism signifies then, is ‘a kind of stationary level of
mankind’ (WP 866), but this is not a reason for despair, because it announces,
Nietzsche claims, a transformation that now must take place.

In opposition to this dwarfing and adaptation of man to a specialized utility, a

reverse movement is needed – the production of a synthetic, summarizing,
justifying man for whose existence this transformation of mankind into a
machine is a precondition, as a base on which he can invent his higher form of
being. […] Morally speaking this overall machinery, this solidarity of all
gears, represents a maximum in the exploitation of man; but it presupposes
those on whose account this exploitation has meaning. (WP 866)11

It is here that Nietzsche’s riposte to the apocalyptic depiction of contemporary

capitalism we have already seen emerges in its clearest form; ‘a counter-movement,’
he writes, ‘is inevitable’ (WP 866). Why? It is inevitable because will to power as the
force of overcoming is the principle of life, and life is lived, so no matter what
negations humanity invents, life finds a way through the cracks. While this argument
clearly rests on an ontological axiom, it nevertheless has strategic implications of a
directly political sort. The Italian post-Operaist critics seek to find a distance within
capitalism through the Marxist strategy of negation (perhaps best seen in Hardt and
Negri’s definition of politics as ‘being-against’,12 or Autonomia’s ‘refusal of work’,
but also evident in Pasquinelli’s concept of ‘sabotage’). For Nietzsche this is never
going to work, because the distance it achieves will always remain relative to – and so
within – the system it opposes, inasmuch as it shares the negative values upon which
capitalism is ultimately based. Nietzsche seeks instead to affirm what in capitalism
10
Pierre Klossowski, in his wonderful book Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, has gone furthest in this
reading of Nietzsche’s work;
The point of departure for [Nietzsche’s] projects is the fact that the modern economy depends
on science, and cannot sustain itself apart from science; and it rests on the ‘powers of money’,
corporations, and on their armies of engineers and workers, whether skilled or not; and at the
level of production, these powers cannot develop their own techniques except through forms
of knowledge required by the manipulation of the objects they produce, and through the laws
that govern the exchange and consumption of these products. (1997, 149)
11
The prescience of this late note from Nietzsche seems to extend to a rejection of neo-liberalism;
It is clear, what I combat is economic optimism: as if increasing expenditure of everybody
must necessarily involve the increasing welfare of everybody. The opposite seems to me the
case: expenditure of everybody amounts to a collective loss: man is diminished – so one no
longer knows what aim this tremendous process has served. An aim? A new aim? – that is
what humanity needs. (WP, 866)

12
I have discussed Hardt and Negri’s dialectical and non-Nietzschean conception of politics at more
length in Zepke 2012.
might enable life’s leap over it.
Strategy apart however, it still might be argued that Nietzsche’s ontological
affirmations do not dispense with the claims that contemporary capitalism does not
only totally subsume the human, but the over-human as well. There is no doubt that
for Nietzsche the over-human is multiple, fractal, and escapes any form of human
values (BGE 212). The ‘supernatural and nomadic type of man is distinguished,
physiologically speaking, by having a maximum of adaptive skills and powers’ (BGE
242). The over-human is, as Deleuze insists, a nomadic assemblage of sub-individual
forces, constantly changing, constantly making new connections, constantly
experimenting and inventing. Good. But what if this sub-individual state of
conflicting forces (fluctuations and intensities) is in fact the ontology of contemporary
capitalism? What if contemporary capitalism actually imposes a dissolved self? If this
were true then the necessity of Nietzsche’s fundamental distinction between human
and over-human would be sublated by the very system it was necessarily supposed to
defeat. Such a possibility would redefine the political field of contestation as that of
the dissolved self, itself. While I have tried to show how we might understand
contemporary subjectivity as still-human, despite its fragmentation by technological
prostheses, we must also take seriously the idea that the figure of the artist-
philosopher is a ‘flexible personality’, a ‘creative’ worker within ‘cognitive
capitalism’. If this is the case, then what might distinguish an ‘over-human’ dissolved
self from one that merely embodies a further stage in the instrumentalisation of
humanity?
This question takes us back to the political agenda of those thinkers we have
seen answer it in the negative. This denial, and the despair it engenders, is based upon
their realisation that contemporary capitalism has subsumed any sense of collective
resistance. This is a problem that Nietzsche does not have, inasmuch as he envisions
the over-human as a resolutely singular and unique actor, a superior individual
capable of embodying the will to power in a critical and affirmative act. Politics that
privileges the collective is counter-productive according to Nietzsche – who saves a
special wrath for democracy and socialism – because it enshrines the law of
mediocrity as the ultimate social good. In this sense, capitalism’s co-option of
collectivity into its network of ‘dissolved selves’ does not mean the end of political
hope for Nietzsche, quite the contrary because the collectivity of the ‘herd’ gains its
true political significance by producing its own overcoming in an individual that
expresses the superior form of all things. This individual revives the collective within
themselves, returning it reborn within their synthetic expression of everything that
sought and still seeks to overcome itself. The over-human would therefore be doubly
dissolved; their individual and human subjectivity is dissolved in expressing the
multitude that is their condition, while the ‘democratic’ political claims of the herd are
dissolved in the singular critical distance of the over-human that transforms it. This is
the sense in which the superior type of the over-human is, Nietzsche claims, ‘both
multifarious and whole’ (BGE 212, see also WP 883). The over-human is a ‘dissolved
self’ condensing all the revolutionary moments of history, all previous eruptions of
the future, into a single glorious leap in which everything of worth in the masses
returns in an undetermined expression giving will to power plastic force. Self-
overcoming in this sense, is the domination and revaluation of history in the name of
the future, that moment when, as Nietzsche claimed in the last letter he wrote ‘every
name in history is I’ (UL 153, see also GS 34). An ‘I’ dissolved in the open whole of
becoming, a critical act of self-overcoming transforming ‘the universally known into
something never heard before. … only he who constructs the future has a right to
judge the past’ (UM, II, 6).
On the one hand becoming is certainly found within the processes defining our
present. The characteristics of ‘ordinary and mediocre men’, as Nietzsche describes
them are clearly recognizable. They are; ‘serviceable, industrious, diversely useful,
[…] loquacious, weak-willed, and extremely handy workers’ (BGE 242). It is
precisely these characteristics, Nietzsche claims, that will mean ‘the strong man, in
the individual and exceptional case, will have to turn out even stronger and richer than
he ever would have before, owing to the impartiality of the training, owing to the
tremendous diversity of his activities, arts and masks’ (BGE 242). The over-human is
a dissolved self because the human ‘herd’ is also ‘dissolved’, the over-human is
simply the critical and transformative moment of this historical movement. In this
way the over-human ‘enters into every skin, into every emotion; he is continually
transforming himself’ (TI, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 10). As a result,
Nietzsche writes; ‘It would be quite unworthy of a more profound mind to see an
objection in mediocrity as such. It is even the prime requirement for the existence of
exceptions; a high culture is conditional upon it’ (AC 57).
Nietzsche’s methodology is, as we have seen, a kind of artistic bio-politics that
involves revaluing human physiology and psychology on the level of memory,
language and perception. Forgetting plays a crucial role in Nietzsche’s aesthetics,
because it provides a distance from the past within which the future might emerge.
Similarly, one must forget the present, one must absent oneself from the ‘breathless
haste’ of the modern world where one is ashamed of keeping still. Today, ‘One thinks
with a watch in hand, as one eats lunch with an eye on the financial pages’ (GS 329).
By forgetting past and present negations of life it becomes possible to carve out the
space and time required to produce a new perspective. The linguistic aspect of this
process lies in seeing things that have no name and cannot be named, and naming
them; ‘Those with originality have usually been the name-givers’ (GS 261). In
Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, it means creating concepts. Perception too must
become selective; ‘To distance oneself from things until there is much in them that
one no longer sees and much that the eye must add in order to see them at all’ (GS
299). This is the creative side of critique, a kind of subjective distortion of perception
so that things appear according to one’s personal aims, rather than those of everyone
else. ‘All this,’ Nietzsche writes, ‘we should learn from artists’ (GS, 299, see also
UM, II, 6). This is all a careful and patient work of composition, ‘a protracted
assembling, accumulating, economizing and preserving’ (TI, Expeditions of an
Untimely Man, 44). This is what Nietzsche claims to have learned from the Ancients,
the ‘grand style’ of simplifying and arranging, of affirming appearances, a process
that finally amounts to creating – or as he calls it ‘fabulating’ – reality. Only in this
way will we see what is necessary in things, what is ‘true’ in them, because the
necessary and true are finally values that can only be judged according to the future
they create. This is precisely what Foucault will take from Nietzsche, a method of
‘genealogy’ that does not discover history, but interprets it in the name of a future it
wishes to create. As Foucault says, and it is a very beautiful thought; ‘Knowledge is
not made for understanding; it is made for cutting’ (1977, 154).
To put it in even more contemporary terms; it means revaluing knowledge and
experience so that is not information, so that it cannot be summarised by Wikipedia,
or searched on Google. It means affirming everything so that it returns in and as a
new sensibility and a new consciousness. This is politics as method rather than as
program, because these new sensations do not determine in advance the physiology
capable of appreciating them. That is not at all how it works. Instead, Nietzsche is
suggesting that each individual undertake such revaluations for themselves, and each
time again. That each perception be an aesthetic creation, and each thought an
irruption of the unknown. In this way the future will emerge as untimely, as our
greatest hope, but as well, it must be said, as utterly outside the self-important
individualism that currently dominates contemporary life. As Nietzsche feared (but as
he also hoped), do we really, today, have ears to hear him? Nietzsche lives in the
future, do we have the strength today to join him?

Live in seclusion so that you are able to live for yourself! Live in ignorance of
what seems most important to your age! Lay at least the skin of three hundred
years between you and today! (GS 338)

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