Reading Kofman Reading Nietzsche

Reading the classic Nietzsche and Metaphor

Kofman launches Nietzsche and Metaphor with a question: can we do justice to Nietzsche’s philosophy with a conceptual discourse? Nietzsche’s text famously abounds with metaphors; as Kofman observes, the event of Nietzsche, the rupture announced and accomplished by his text, consists partly in his refusal to participate in the tradition’s obsessions with founding a discourse free from the supposed impurity of metaphor and disguising ‘the fact that the conceptual is itself metaphorical’ (NM, 17-18). Kofman’s striking answer to her initial question: we can only do justice to Nietzsche if the concepts with which we discuss his philosophy are accorded ‘no greater value than a metaphor’ and we ally with him in mocking – indeed, laughing at – the very distinction between concept and metaphor (NM, 3). For Kofman, only this discussion would be a worthy tribute to Nietzsche’s ‘new and original type of writing’, his fundamentally ‘uncategorisable text’, evasion of both science and poetry (NM, 1).

Kofman’s sophistication ensures that she is careful to differentiate such mockery of the concept-metaphor distinction from the simple enthronement of metaphor over concept. Not only would this operation be in unwitting solidarity with the tradition of metaphysics as a series of ‘oppositions’, it would be an act of despotism; the conferral of ‘absolute value’ upon metaphor, or anything else, would be in Kofman’s eyes nothing less than ‘tyranny’ (NM, 3, 5). Of course, the characterisation of metaphysics that Kofman relies on here, and throughout the remainder of Nietzsche and Metaphor and her other texts such as the The Enigma of Woman (for Kofman’s anti-metaphysical Freud, there is only ‘a difference in degree’ between man and woman, child and adult, normal and pathological, civilised and primitive) (TEOW, 165), is derived from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil; there, Nietzsche denounces metaphysicians for their ‘faith in opposite values’.

Kofman identifies Nietzsche’s ascription of an original ‘metaphorical activity’ to man, and thus ridicule of Aristotle’s portrayal of the human being as ‘the rational animal’, as a decisive moment in his mockery of the alleged gulf between concept and metaphor (NM, 25).  For Kofman’s Nietzsche, this metaphorical activity artistically generates a world, writes a text, that is genealogically indispensable as a symptom of ‘a certain type of life’, whether ‘noble or base’ – noble and base being themselves metaphors, rather than markers of determinate socio-political positions (NM, 82, 87, 95). Indeed, with absolutely no prerogative to an ‘original text’ or eternal essence, the human being’s metaphorical activity, through a series of ‘anthropomorphic transpositions’, petrifies the world into the ‘set of forms’ which impose its particular masteries (NM, 28, 82). These forms are precisely the concepts whose serene autonomy from metaphor is proclaimed by philosopher and scientist alike, the two sharing a desperation ‘to speak ‘properly’ and demonstrate without using images or similes’ (NM, 17). One could risk saying that, for Kofman, Nietzsche’s fundamental anti-metaphysical gesture is to demystify the concept as a ‘condensate’ of metaphor (NM, 40).

For Nietzsche, Kofman says, the birth of concept from metaphor is treacherous, violent: it effaces ‘individuality’ and ‘difference’ in a chain of transpositions (NM, 34). This violence obeys the facts of physiology – or more specifically, the  ‘nervous system’ (NM, 31). Indeed, the metaphorical invention of concepts derives, in the first instance, from nerve stimuli; the ‘impressions’ which flow from these stimuli are subjected to an ‘analogical reasoning’ that transforms these impressions into ‘so many analogues’ of a singular thing (NM,  35). This analogical construction attains the ‘unity’ of the concept – a lying unity which conceals diversity – from the ‘imposition of the word’ or the ‘name’, a metaphorical making equivalent; naming, for Kofman’s Nietzsche, flatters the human being by convincing them that they have mastered what they name in what it essentially is (NM, 36, 38, 83). Kofman locates this metaphorical production of concepts from nerve stimuli to names at the level of the instinct and the unconscious: it must be ‘forgotten’ – Kofman is unable to resist her temptation ‘to speak with Freud’ and summon the word ‘repression’ – in order to be efficacious (NM, 25, 35). The philosophical and scientific traditions’ aspirations to discourses emancipated from metaphor are secondary to this more primordial repression. For Kofman’s Nietzsche, human consciousness unknowingly expresses itself in ‘metaphors’ of this primordial writing of worlds, which it encounters only in a ‘masked and transposed form’; the derivation of consciousness’ ‘reason’ and ‘logic’, the totems of the magnificence of man for Aristotle and the broader Western tradition, from this unreasonable and illogical metaphorical activity extinguishes an opposition fundamental to metaphysics (NM, 25, 33).

Towards the end of her book, Kofman recasts Nietzsche’s mature introduction of the will to power ‘hypothesis’, and related deployment of the metaphorical field of ‘perspectivism’, as a redescription of metaphorical activity of the Nietzschean unconscious, the ‘work’ that writes the world and makes impossible any separation of conscious from unconscious (NM, 39, 82). The will to power – whose ‘meaning’ is frequently sketched as the promotion of ‘unfettered domination’ in social relations, as in Jan Rehmann’s recently translated Deconstructing Postmodernist Nietzscheanism (DPN, 55, 167) – thus appears in Kofman as a device to expose the despotism of the pretension to unveil the in itself. To name things in their essential natures, to claim to discover ‘one’s own laws’ in the deepest depths of being, is ‘to make oneself master of all and everyone’, including oneself; one becomes a ‘prisoner’ of their frozen perspective (NM, 82-83, 104). In an interesting contrast to Domenico Losurdo’s monumental unification of the Nietzschean corpus as a ‘denunciation and critique of revolution’, a defence of the masters ‘called upon to guide the chariot of culture’ against the hordes of vengeful slaves from Socrates to the Paris Commune (NAR, 827, 847), Kofman’s Nietzsche defies the masters, resists their claim to an original text in all its ‘ontological truth’ (NM, 92). One could even say that, on Kofman’s reading, Nietzsche’s endless deployment of metaphors emerges as a textual praxis: ‘diversifying metaphors’ is a strategy to pluralise perspectives, to contest the purported discovery of essence and law (NM, 102).

Kofman’s example to elaborate Nietzsche’s refusal of ontological truth is, perhaps surprisingly, the Nietzschean figure of homo natura – surprising because Nietzsche’s language in invoking this example suggests a constraint to the dance of metaphor and perspective. The appearance of homo natura in a later chapter of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is a flashpoint for much contestation about the Nietzschean text and its status. Nietzsche announces his ‘strange and extravagant task’ to dispel the ‘vain and fanciful interpretations’, the discourses of metaphysics and religions, that the ‘terrible [and] eternal basic text of homo natura’ has vanished beneath. Brian Leiter, in his influential Nietzsche on Morality, marshals Nietzsche’s invocation of homo natura in his polemic against a wider family of ‘postmodern’ or ‘skeptical’ readings of Nietzsche – though Derrida, Foucault and Alexander Nehamas are particular antagonists for Leiter – as a subverter of the notion of ‘“objective truth”’, thereby putting Nietzsche on the side of Kofman’s masters (Nietzsche on Morality, 11, 212, 219). For Leiter, homo natura is nothing less than a proclamation of Nietzsche’s ‘naturalism’, rendered by Leiter as the prosecution of a critique of morality – that is, the (in)famous re-evaluation of all values – which maintains consistency with the empirical discoveries of the natural sciences and their methodologies (NM, 28). (Note, in passing, Leiter’s attempt at a flattening of Nietzschean text; Nietzsche’s discourse is stylistically and substantially subordinated to an aspiration for continuity with natural science.)

The ‘truth’ of Nietzsche’s homo natura, for Kofman, is simply that there is no truth, that the subject of knowledge’s tyrannical claim to a foundation of truth is illusory. The eternal basic text of homo natura is the will to power; the scope of Nietzsche’s hypothesis ultimately exceeds the human animal and its metaphorical activity, at once embracing the totality of the world in its ‘intelligible character’ and erasing the oppositions - subject-object, matter-mind, life-spirit - that human history has etched upon it (Nietzsche and Metaphor, 94). But the will to power is itself unabashedly a metaphor, not a concept whose claim is to capture ‘the real essence of all things’; it exposes the master’s tyranny without reproducing it, for its avowedly metaphorical and hypothetical character ‘authorises us to do without’ the notion (NM, 94, 96). Kofman observes that the appearance of the will to power in Nietzsche’s text is inextricable from a striking metaphoric circuit; the will to power is continuously substituted by Nietzsche with ‘mythical figures’, such as Apollo, Oedipus and, most centrally, Dionysus (NM, 96). For Kofman, Nietzsche’s Dionysus does not deliver being in its full presence and grandeur, but embodies the strength to emancipate oneself from the humiliation and guilt of perspective and metaphor, ‘to accept and love oneself without having to put on a mask’ (NM, 97). The religious and metaphysical discourses that Nietzsche contends have become encrusted over homo natura express a diseased revulsion of the will to power; Dionysus represents the recovery of metaphorical activity in all its beauty and innocence.