By means of what Nietzsche calls “the slave revolt in morality,” the ill-constituted slave achieves a reversal of all values, and thus triumphs over the master. The master is better constituted as his confederacy of wills (will to power) strikes a productive balance between the active force that commands, and the reactive force that obeys. Conversely, the circuitous process by which the slave moral system develops reroutes the drive so that “life”—that is, difference, power, creativity—is inhibited. This means that in the slave-type the most passive (or reactive) drives dominate and subdue the most active. Like a herd animal, the slave lives so as not to draw to himself the attention of the stronger, better constituted, beast of prey. Thus life in the main is reduced to a mode of self-preservation rather than increase, or greater perfection. The master-type, on the other hand, will come to be “tamed,” alienated from his power, through the acquisition of conscience, or more precisely “bad conscience”: the feeling of guilt that serves to reign in the expression of power. The victory of slave morality is to universalize the viewpoint of the servile, the downtrodden, the victim, and to install this viewpoint in the master, at whose hands the victim had suffered. In grammatical terms, guilt consists in identification with the object of an action rather than its subject, and thus all become passive, so unable to give expression to their impulses. Yet, the conversion of the noble to slave morality is not figured simply in terms of suppression. The twist to the plot of Genealogy consists in the master’s coming to be libidinally attached to this guilt—taking pleasure in the bad conscience—and thus it is through a positive expression of his impulses that he succumbs to slave morality. The master is accomplice to his subjection.
I will return momentarily to the noble’s libidinal investment in bad conscience. At this stage I would like briefly to pause and consider the reader’s subjection to Nietzsche’s text, in terms of how she might encounter this discussion of noble and slave. Nietzsche seems clearly to favor the master type—the one who engenders her environment—over the slave type, presented as a mangled organism. Yet desire for nobility presents itself as a problem in Genealogy: for how are we to negotiate a path from this botched, slave mode of life, back to something more original and pure? Moreover, desire for the place of the noble is often contaminated by ambivalence. The master mode of evaluation may be more direct—a healthier expression of corporeality—yet it also necessitates behavior repugnant to the modern (already servile) sensibility. As indicated earlier, however, ambivalence is vital to the success of interpellation. Whereas the reader finds himself or herself caught between admiration for the master type and guilt at the prospect of inflicting suffering upon another, the interpellation is contingent upon an ambiguous and unstable (and thus incomplete) resolution of such conflict. Indeed, “the success” of the interpellation depends precisely upon the reader’s ambivalence toward Nietzsche’s most exalted (and excessive) figures, into which she works to propel herself, through identification, in order to assuage the anxiety induced by such ambivalence. The reader might tell herself that a negative response to the noble is merely a hangover from her slave upbringing—that she can work through this discomfort by devoting herself to Nietzsche’s works. Or, she might deny the unbridled malevolence that Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote of the noble as “a beast of prey.” Yet either way, the noble is the ambiguous object of the reader’s aspiration and fear: a figure of excess through which he or she casts subjectivity.
Furthermore, the noble is not only the excess of the narrative structure—not strictly making sense in terms of Nietzsche’s argument—but also comes to resonate with what the reader identifies as her own excess, or own lost origin. In the first instance, the noble is a glitch in Nietzsche’s system: the piece of the puzzle that does not quite fit, or does not make sense. Perhaps this figure is merely remnant of Nietzsche’s nostalgia for ancient Imperialism:[18] yet it also performs a function for the text in recruiting readers and advocates. This is because the figure of the noble performs a function for the reader. It represents a glitch in the reader’s system, or a stain upon her field of vision, at once fascinating and repulsive. As will be theorized in the chapters that follow, “the excess” figured by the noble reminisces an aspect of the reader that must be discarded and hidden within “the object” (or text) in the very production of her subjectivity. In this respect, the reader identifies with the figure of excess, yet ambiguously, as it represents a lost wholeness and what she must disavow, in order to ensure the integrity of the self. Accordingly, it makes sense that the noble would not tally in terms of Nietzsche’s argument, but could only emerge after the historical process of servility had already taken place. In keeping with the logic of excess, the relation of affect with the figure of the noble can be produced only from the slave point of view. As will become clear, the noble is impossible as an event of prehistory since the conditions of its advent arise from within slave morality: and more precisely, from the slave’s guilt regarding the noble’s possibility.
This adds a different inflection, and another degree of complexity, to Nietzsche’s genealogical narrative. For if the noble is a product of the slave’s guilt—a retroactive projection from the point of view of the victim who imagines herself as the aggressor—then the genealogy must be read in reverse, or even as circular, rather than as a lineage beginning with the master and ending with the Übermensch. It is at this point, then, that we can begin to tease out a second order narrative from Nietzsche’s text: a fairy tale whose monsters arise from the fantasies of good, Christian folk. Arguably the most interesting section of Genealogy is also its most oblique. The second essay describes the condition of socialization of the human, who would have to become “calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is to be able to stand security for his own future” (58): in order, that is, to have the right to make promises. Nietzsche’s variation on the theme of the social contract, therefore, demonstrates what must have occurred before we were able to make a contract in the first place. We must have had to install a sense of the other’s well-being into ourselves at the expense of our own “free” expression of power, and this is exacted at the level of corporeality, according to Nietzsche: whereby the body is forced to work against itself, in what must have necessitated an extremely painful and protracted process of shaping the individual as a more or less exchangeable type within the social economy. “‘If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory’—this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth.” (61) Only in the context of a social economy of sameness could the notion of guilt arise, according to Nietzsche, out of the concept of debt (the German for both guilt and debt is Schuld) (62–63). Punishment thus consists in the creditor’s right to extract from the debtor’s body the pleasure of freely discharging one’s power at the expense of another. The nature of the economy is that all are exchangeable, and the juridical system regulates this principle by converting masters into slaves and slaves into masters, in what Nietzsche calls a “carnival of cruelty” (65).[19]
In order to become a social animal—and thus a regular participant in the economy of the social contract—the master has had to renounce its own stake in life as will to power: that is, the enactment of jouissance upon the other’s body. For the wielding of force has come to be regulated by the law rather than by individuals, and the master is thus equally subject to law as the slave. This is where we find the subject returning to its bodily depth: for this enjoyment through the infliction of pain upon the other is redeployed to become the very impetus of social behavior. Enjoyment is reconfigured as bad conscience, wherein the persecutor takes her or himself as the object of cruelty. In bad conscience, “will to power” turns in upon itself—makes itself its own