Promising Animal, Confessing Animal
Reading Nietzsche and Foucault to ask what kind of animal we are
A key premise of Nietzsche’s historico-philosophical practice of genealogy, as well as Nietzscheanism as a whole, is that the human body is not a substance, the res extensa of Descartes, or the fixed psycho-physiological constitution Brian Leiter claims to discover in his reading of Nietzsche as a naturalist. Instead, it is a site of perpetual struggle, an unceasing combat of unconscious instincts striving to consolidate their own tyrannies over their competitors — Nietzsche's (mature) hypothesis and metaphor of the will to power functions, in part, to illuminate this. But these instincts are tortured in history; they bear the scars of the cruelty that Nietzsche reevaluates as the most ‘ancient and basic substrata of culture’, a base which ‘simply cannot be imagined away’ (EH, 768). For this reason, there is no ‘dull constancy of instinctual life’ in Nietzsche, as Foucault puts it in his essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, the manifesto of his own genealogies of sexuality and discipline (NGH, 82-83, 87, 89). Indeed, in a not trivial way, the Nietzschean text is about what has been done to our instinctual life, refusing narcissistic enchantment with the putative glories of our only contingently moral and rational nature to dig up the — to speak with the Adorno and Horkheimer of Dialectic of Enlightenment — ‘subterranean history of civilisation’.
For Nietzsche, the primitive human being derived ‘a robust health’ from their instinct to forget (GM, 43-44). Arising from the torture of this archaic instinct is the late human animal which is ‘free to promise’ — the singular ‘sovereign individual’ whose ‘conscience’ is an instinctual knowledge of this freedom (GM, 45-46, 48). This knowledge is separate from the instinct of cruelty turned back upon itself that Nietzsche names the ‘bad conscience’ and identifies as the cradle of all 'artistic and ideal phenomena' (see the discussion in Butler's Psychic Life of Power) (GM, 70, 73-74; PLP, 74-76). The brutalisation of the primitive's instinct to forget, and the corresponding constitution of memory as the site of the promise as a will which unbreakably extends from a ‘pledge’ to the ‘discharge’ of this pledge, was accomplished by a ghastly punitive machinery, instituted at the dawn of human history (GM, 44, 46-47, 50). This regime was predicated on the notion that ‘every injury’ or crime — in some sense a failure to uphold a promise — had an ‘equivalent price’ extractable as recompense, a payable debt; Nietzsche holds that ‘“Everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off”’ was the founding ‘maxim’ of penal justice and its associated pantheon of morals, including ‘guilt’, ‘conscience’ and ‘duty’ (GM, 49, 51-52, 56, 59). This punishment was ‘a real feast’, a festival: the punishing creditors — those owed payment — indulged themselves in ‘the rights of the masters’ by tormenting, mortifying, breaking, sacrificing, flaying, castrating the bodies of their debtors; the payment extracted was the ultimate ecstasy and ‘enticement to life’ that the creditors experienced in the ‘sheer violation’ of these bodies (GM, 50-52).
This horrific punishment invents a memory for the reason that ‘pain is the most effective aid to mnemonics’, the most potent device to degrade the instinct to forget; the creditors engage in — to use Elizabeth Grosz’s phrase — a ‘body writing’, a literal engraving of the body and its skin with excruciating ‘reminders of what was not allowed to be forgotten’ and what promises must be fulfilled (GM, 44, 46-47, 50; VB, 131-32, 134, 137). For Nietzsche, the first political subject was he who was sufficiently tortured to fulfill ‘five or six’ fundamental promises to his society, to obey its fundamental moral prohibitions (GM, 48). One can say that on Nietzsche’s account ‘torture is the original landscape of the political’, to borrow Justin Clemens’ words (PA, 123).1 The sovereign individual, the Nietzschean promising animal, is the culmination and the completion of the torture of man; the original subject of politics erupts in history at the earliest stage of this process. Revealing the ‘drop of cruelty’ in his will to knowledge, his violence against tranquilising ‘appearance and superficiality’, Nietzsche cannot resist adding that the ‘splendour’ of man — the totem of his reason — is conditional upon and indexed to the historical advancement of this torture; it is only the increasing comforts of society, purchased by the increasing volume of promises made to it, that nurture our rationality (BGE, 181).
Foucault’s History of Sexuality 1 strikingly alludes to Nietzsche’s animal which promises: Foucault describes Western man as the ‘confessing animal’. To explicate Foucault’s confessing animal and its invention, it is necessary to briefly rehearse the fundamental argument of his text that sexuality is not a ‘stubborn drive’ disfigured by a repressive civilisation, but rather a sprawling ensemble of ‘positive mechanisms’, technologies which accomplish the ‘stimulation of bodies’, ‘intensification of pleasures’, ‘incitement to discourse’, ‘formation of special knowledges’ and ‘strengthening of controls and resistances’ (HS1, 73, 103, 105-06). One can venture the claim that Foucault’s underlying motivation in advancing this argument is to contest the reign of left-Freudianism as a politics, specifically the projects of Marcuse and Reich, though only the latter is actually named and discussed by Foucault. From this perspective, History of Sexuality 1 may be envisioned as a polemical intervention into a specific political debate in the post-war Atlantic left — it is hard not to be tempted to say Foucault’s book is the anti-Eros and Civilisation. For Foucault, the left-Freudians necessarily fail politically — that is, can marshal no effective ‘counterattack’ to the apparatus of sexuality — because they are imprisoned by a conceptual framework that represents an entrapment of sexuality by repressive power: they inherit the negative terms of ‘prohibition’, ‘censorship’, ‘denial’ (HS1, 10, 147).
But to push it even further, Foucault’s left-Freudians unwittingly make themselves accomplices of the biopolitical power that deploys sexuality; not only do the left-Freudians mystify power’s operations in relation to sexuality, the ‘promise’ of sex liberated from repression — the correlate of their discourse — advances the fundamental ruse of sexuality's deployment (HS1, 87). To use the language of Foucault’s Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, sex has no ‘origin’, no dignity of ‘primordial truth’ or an eternal, ‘immobile’ essence, as the metaphysician-historian would purport to discover; it has a history — a descent (NGH, 78-79, 88, 95). Indeed, sex itself, ‘the imaginary element’ which lyingly consolidates ontologically disparate ‘anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations and pleasures’, is an object articulated by sexuality, and renders possible intervention at the nexus of individual body and social body — the twin fields of biopolitics, the domains where the sheer biological existence of the human being is subjected to the calculations of power and indeed suffused by them (HS1, 154, 156). Whence the importance of sexuality for biopolitics as the modern regime of power, and the reason why sex has become in the West the ‘secret which seems to underlie all that we are’ (HS1, 155).2
The technology of confession is the nucleus of sexuality. Foucault observes that the confession, ‘at least’ since the medieval age, has been a privileged site for the invention of truth in the West (HS1, 58). For Foucault, the confession is also politics, for it is structured according to a definite ‘power relation’ — the subject to whom confession is made claims the prerogatives to ‘judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile’ (HS1, 61-62). Of course, Foucault’s conception of this technology in these terms illustrates his fundamental Nietzscheanism. According to Foucault, Nietzsche’s rupture with the philosophical tradition inaugurated by Plato was his abandonment of a mythology of knowledge as simply continuous with the true ‘world to be known’, a knowledge somehow not ‘woven together’ with power (TJF, 9-10, 12, 31). As confessional technologies relentlessly proliferated, and eventually attained the ‘norms of scientific regularity’, there was a vast multiplication of demands to confess to our sex (HS1, 65). Psychoanalysis, for Foucault, is exemplary; this relatively recent technology of confession specifically confers upon itself ‘the task of alleviating the effects of repression’ on the discourse of sexuality, such that the supposed secret of sex — in all its shame, perversion, terror and rage — can achieve its maximal expression (HS1, 129).3
Thus, for Foucault, the Western human being is a ‘confessing animal’ — an animal who confesses their sex as the purported truth of their subjectivity and the secret of their being, thereby collaborating in their own domination. Nietzsche’s promising animal is an artefact of torture written upon the body, Foucault’s confessing animal is a monument to a political project to dominate the body of individual and population. Reading Nietzsche and Foucault together invites us to consider what kind of animal we are today, in late bourgeois society’s apparent twilight, as the caps melt and the deserts grow — in both what is done to our body and what we are made to say.
Nietzsche’s refusal to primarily represent the political with the soothing discourses of ‘citizens’ rights, free will and social contracts’ interestingly anticipates Agamben’s elaboration of the primordial ‘nucleus of sovereign power’ — the infernal (and biopolitical) ‘inclusion’ of bare life within politics precisely in the ‘capacity to be killed’ — as the founding moment of Western political history, and as such the key to the shared genealogy and ‘inner solidarity’ of twentieth-century liberalism and fascism (HS, 12-13, 64).
Joel Whitebook, in his provocatively named article Foucault: A Marcusean in Structuralist Clothing, contends that Foucault merely ‘displaces’ the political thesis of Marcuse and Reich, in that Foucault’s ‘bodies and pleasures’ — his genuinely notorious ‘rallying point’ for a prospective insurgency against sexuality — are still depicted as if imprisoned within this apparatus (FMSC, 68).
Passingly, too, one can note with Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupančič the poverty of Foucault’s characterisation of psychoanalysis: not only does Foucault never cite Freud or Lacan’s texts, the notion of the unconscious — that rupture in our psychic life — is totally absent from his discussion.