(Routledge Studies in Development) Keith Ansell-Pearson - Viroid Life Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition-Routledge (1997)

VI ROI D LI FE ‘This volume offers a trenchant account of the transhuman condition. The author thoughtfully considers the extent to which humankind is poised on the threshold of a transhuman future, and demands that we radically rethink our assumptions about the human animal in order that biology and philosophy might join forces in order to rid Western thought of its pernicious anthropocentric prejudices. Daniel W. Conway, Pennsylvania State University ‘A post-critical toUT de force which leads the reader to reconsider the boundary between the human and the inhuman. An essay which ranks alongside those ofDeleuze and Baudrillard.’ Mike Gane, University of Loughborough Jliroid Life presents a bold ^allenge to existing conceptions of biotechnol^ogy and artificial life through Nietzsche’s thinking of the ‘overman’. Arguing that current debates are lodged in a historical and insufficiently machinic framework, Keith Ansell Pearson insists that artifice must be seen as an integral feature of nature. Far from being able to stand outside and control developments in bio­ technology, the human being is bound up in a very becoming that is implicated in the inventions of te^nics and machines. Resisting uncritical contemporary interpretations in thrall to biotechnology, Jliroid Life reinstates Nietzsche’s ^ ^ ^ n g on life —and death —to make us confront the nature of the human and move beyond the anthropocentrism of technics acknowledge the more complicated conceptions of evolution. Offering insights into Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, the new paradigms of contemporary biology and the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, Keith Ansell Pearson shows how viral developments in science create new. rhizomatic ways of thinking in philosophy. Essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of philosophy, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Tramhuman Condition provides a fascinating new starting point for any discussion on the future of evolution and will interest students of continental philosophy, social theory and cul^tural studies. • K eith A nsell is Senior ^ ^ to e r and Director of Graduate ResearA at the University of W^arwick. He is the author of Ni^zsche contra Rousseau and An Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker,

VIROID LIFE P e r s p e c t i v e s on N i e t z s c h e and the T ra n s h u m a n Condition KEITH ANSELL LONDON AND PEARSON NEW YORK

First published 1997 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge :,29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1997 Keith Ansell Pearson Typeset in Perpetua by Keystroke, Jacaranda ^Lodge, Wolverhampton Printed and bound in Great Britain by Creative Print and Design (Wales), Ebbw Vale All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for book is available from the British Ubrary Library Congres Cataloging in Publication Data Ansell P^^wn, Keith Viroid life: perspectives on Nietzsche and the transhuman condition I Keith Ansell Pearson. p. ^ . Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1 8 ^ H ^90. 2. Superman. 3. Philosophical anthropology. I. Title. B3318.S8A57 1997 128— dc21 96-49700 ISBN 0 -4 1 5 -1 5 4 3 4 -0 (hbk) 0 -4 1 5 -1 5 4 3 5 -9 (pbk)

For friends down under

To open us up to the inhuman and superhuman . . . to go beyond the human condition is the meaning of philosophy, in so far as our condition condemns us to live among badly analyzed composites, and to be badly analyzed composites ourselves. (Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism. 1966) Sometimes he wondered what zone of ^transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance. (1. G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962) Man is such a hive and of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs t^M his, and whether he is anything but another kind o f ant-heap after all. May not man himself become another sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid? (Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872)

C O N T E N T S Acknowledgements Introduction i xi 1 Loving th e Poison The memory of the human and the promise of the overhuman 2 ToWards th e O verhum an On the art and artifice of Nietzsche’s selection 37 3 D ead o r A live On the death of eternal re^turn S7 N ietzsche co n tra D arw in 85 5 V iro id Life On ma^chines, technics, and evolution 123 6 Tim ely M ed itations on th e T^ranshuman C ondition N ^ ^ ^ , entropy, and beyond Bibliography Index 191 199 1S 1 9

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S Five of the chapters which make up this volume have appeared, or ^wil appear, in a number of publishing projects. I ^ grateful to the editors and publishers listed below for their permission to reproduce this material. Chapter 1 is an extended version of a chapter due to appear in John Uppitt (ed.), Nietzsche and the Future t f the Human, Ma^cmillan. Chapter 2 is a modified version of an essay that first app^eared as ‘Toward the Ubermeruch: Reflections on the Year of Nietesche’s Daybreak’, in Nietzsche-Studm 23 (1994), Walter de Gruyter. Chapter 3 is a modified and extended version of an essay entitled 'The Re^turn of Death1 that appear in Journal t f Nietzsche Studies, 1997 in a special issue devoted to the ete^rnal re^turn edited by David Owen. Chapter 4 appear in modified form in D. W. Conway (ed.), Ni^^Ae: Critical <Asssments, Routledge. Chapter 5 is a mo^fied and shortened version of a cchapter that ^wil appear in Keith ^Ansell P ^ s o n (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy, Routledge. ^This book might never have reaped stage were it not for the encouragement, provocation, and critical intervention of several people. Serious are due to Daniel W. Conway, Adrian Driscoll, Mike Gane, Gr^^m Parkes, Paul Patton, and John Protevi. My debt to Dan Conway in particular for his support for what I ^ to accomplish in role in the book’s book is incalculable. Catherine Dale played a co^^^mation, inspiring the end, and continues to play a ‘minor' role in the involution of my and

I N T R O D U C T I O N ‘All truth is simple’ —is that not a compound lie? ‘There are more idols in this world than realities: that is my ‘evil eye’ for this world, that is also my ‘evil ^ear. (Nietzsche, Twilight o f the /do/s). In volume of essays I question, problematize, over^turn, revalue, ^mounce, renounce, adv^^te, interrogate, ^ ^ ro , deny, celebrate, critique, the ‘transh^nan condition’, exploring the h^^an as a site of con^^^ution and abduction by alien forces and rendering, in the process, the phenomenon polyvalent and polysemous. I resist attempts to foreclose the condition by those who would d^m to have defined it and d^onstrated it once and for a l. In recent years the ‘^ ^ h w n a n ’ has ass^raed a life, becoming a cultural meme. But condition does not spread na^^^y; it requires critical and cultivation if it is to possess any genuine se^rc or ‘meaning’. By treating condition I realize I place myself on perilous and treacherous ground, ope^ning myself up to cont^amination by ^ ^ g e forces of ^various kinds and guises. But philosophy is not rimply a tribunal of reason; it is also a battleground of infections and acknesses. My response to the predi^cament I find myself in has been to adopt a ‘perspectival’ position on the phenomenon. V ^ ^ ^ y a l o f the essays in volume confront the same ‘problem’ , ^namely that of the future of the h^^an, with the result that some repetition is inevitable. However, it is my genuine hope that the more eyes, various eyes, that ^ employed to treat the tr^shnmm condition, the more complete and objective the treatment he. It is impor^ n t to resist attempts to reduce the ‘^ transhuman condition’ to a n ^ ^ ^ obviously empirical, su ^ as a ‘biological’ condition or a ‘technological’

VIROID LI FE I 2 one (neither of these are, in fact, simply ‘empirical’). Current teclmo-theorizing contends that evolution - not human evolution but evolution in- and for-itself is now entering a bio-teclmological phase, with biological life becoming more and more teclmological and teclmological Me becoming more and more biological. But the rise of this dubious neo-Lamarckism, which demands that we give ourselves ‘over’ to the future as an act of blind faith and in terms of a quasi-Heideggerian destiny (only a machine save us), rests on a highly anthro­ pomorphic conception of life’s beco^ming, positing a straightforwardly linear and perfectionist model of evolution. The promise of a genetic take-over by mac^nes that is predicted by many, a threat that goes back to S ^ u e l Butler and his writing in the 1860s in the wake of D^win, must be treated with suspicion, ifnot derision. It would not be d ifcu lt to expose the anthropocentric conceits informing much of the discussion and celebration of the coaming of inteUigent robots and machines. In fact, Baudrillard has already done so —in his The ffl^on cjth e End (1994) and now in The Peyect Crime (1996). In this conception of life's evolution leading in the direction of non-affective machines, in which thought exists without a body, there is no future of, or for, invention, since a l is given. The future is no longer virtual: indeed it no longer exists; it no longer 'is’ . Instead what we are being presented with is a paranoid and phobic anthrop^xntritrism that is bent on imperiali^cally and entropically colon^ing the entire k n o ^ and ^unknown universe, a l for the ^sake of immortal life. is the ul^mate Platonic fantasy. So today we find that it is no longer Christianity that is ^^^ing the role of a P la to ^ ^ for the people, but rather a cyberspace cult. In the age o f irreastible, endo-colonistic capitalism never has such an unintelligent hybrid —that o f‘bio-technological' —been more suspect and in need o f ‘critique'. We find ourselves in an ironical situation — what other si^ituation would we expect to find ourselves in at the end of the ^milenni^m? — in w hi^ cyber-celebrations of the ^^uh^nan, or even more dubiously, of the posthuman, condition, ul^mately be s h o ^ to rest on a (non- dialectical) ^cancellation of this condition. It is not a question of ‘self-overco^mingj’ rince there is no^fog to overcome. The process of evolution is uatm^rad and reified, a new theology of capital emerges to cavalierly and legi^^ue the ^^uties of the commodified postmodern present, a legi^^ration which rests on the vicious re^turn of outmoded grand naratives, and there is a complete lack of any appreciation of what it is that has made, and continues to make, the human such an intere^ing ^animal, an ^animal and a machine in need of revaluation and transvaluation. The h^^rn and its genealogical past are simply not being taken ‘seriously’. The result, it seems to me, is a vacuous, peernicious, and politically naive conception of our condition and of our ‘fate' at the end of the

INTRODUCTION I 3 twentieth century. Affirming the inhuman and demonic powers of the future is not equivalent to a biological or technological manipulation of the future: it is not to arrive at a radical conception of the time of the future but to nullify its demonic becoming. The writing in this volume can be interpreted as offering a resistance to the postmodern/ posthuman if these are taken to imply what Fredric Jameson has described as a systematic effacement of all the supposed anachronistic traces of our recent historical past. The reader of this volume, however, should be forewarned that my advocacy and problema^tizing of a genuinely ‘Nietaschean’ conception of the transhuman condition do not desire to preserve anything about the human in terms of notions of its integrity, inviolability, or supremacy. The reading is decidedly ‘supra-moral’ in this regard. Neither do I adhere to fantasies of historical revolution in which we humans will reclaim our rightful control and mastery over nature and society. desire for complete historical immanence, which has i^nspired the major critical theorists of this century from Marcuse to Debord and Vaneigem, and continues to inspire major contemporary theorists like Fredric J^ e s o n , M s me with as much dread and loathing as do the articles of faith promulgated by our contemporary cyberspace gurus. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that these days I find myself out on a limb. In 1979 Lyotard defined the ‘postmodern condition’ as ‘incredulity’ in the face of those grand or meta-^^ratives which have served to provide h^nan existence with teleological m^^ing and si^gnifi^nce, so that the ^ment of the loss of meaning in postmodernity boils down to mo^^ing the fact that knowledge is now no longer principally ^ffrative. The ‘stories’ the West has told of itself to itself and to ‘others’ — such as that of emancipation through rational e^nlighte^ment and progress —^turn out to have been a great conceit and deceit. Now that myth has come to waste and ^ruin, and, so Lyotard wanted us to believe, the period of mo^^ing is over. Little did Lyotard k n ^ at the time of his -writing that the grand n^ative of the E^^fote^nent would soon become replaced by another one, equally ^^dious in its vapid gene^^red c h a r t e r and undemo^nstrable universal­ ization. Although Lyotard acknowledged that he was ‘sim p ^ ^ ^ to the extreme’, his definition and ^^raation proved highly influential, rise to a whole series of l^en^ting, and lamentable, crisis-reflections on the end of history, the end of politics, the end of time, and so on. A genuine perceived as o f ‘critical theory’ ^as place, since if the subject of critique was dead (the prole^riat, man as the p^urpose of ^histry, and a seif-^^^ormative humanity as the goal of history), ^what rem ^ ed of the force and pur^chase of the critical intent? However, Lyotard’s declaration of the end of grand ^^ratives has proved premature since

VIROID LI FE I 4 today we see their return taking place within a variety of contemporary discourses. Within postmodernity a belated ‘return’ to the question of technology is taking place in which philosophy is getting infected by its own perplexity in the face of the sheer monstrous otherness of the question and the confusion it generates, displacing all normal questioning and corroding many human self­ certainties. But is there an^^mg really radically new in this requestioning? The shock of the future was analysed incisively by a postwar generation of leading critical theorists such as Jacques Ellul, Lewis M^nford, and Herbert Marcuse, all o f whom addressed the question o f technology in terms of a concern with the future of time and the time of the future, as well as in terms of a political perspicacity that is often lacking in current discourse. ^What appears to be different in the return to the question today is recognition of the scale of disorientation and displacement created by the impact of computerization, the rise of new forms of engineering and new modes o f knowledge, the creation of artificial life, etc. However, these new realities demand not an impetuous abandonment of a think­ ing and valuing of the ‘h^rnan’ condition, but rather a radical re-ex ^ ^ ^ tio n and revaluation, in which one would show the extent to which this...<:ondition has always been a matter of invention and reinvention, that is, always a matter of the transh^nan. The grand narrative today is likely to take the form of a facile q^uasi-Hege^^^m in which the rise of the machine is construed in linear and perfectionist terms: the ever-growing inhuman c h ^ c te r of ‘technology’ resides in the ‘simple’ fact that it is mac^nes that are proving to be more successful in creating an adequate response to the laid down by evolution than the cr^^ffes whose existence first gave rise to it. ^This new ^narative rests on a curious ^amalg^ of and ^Lamarckian elements. On the one hand, it is claimed that machines are p r o ^ g to be ‘fitter’ in the task of life’s ^ v iv a l against the dissipative forces of entropy, so enjoying a high adaptive value that is far superior to the United capacities which the human being has for further adaptation; on the other ^md, it is also being d^med by some that the rise o f ‘intelligent’ computerized machines s i^ ^ e s a goal-oriented desire on the part of ‘evolution’ itself to attain a trans-h^nan condition (conceived literally and linearly). Clearly, given the techno-phobic nature of the philosophical tradition, thought today needs to embark on a new negotiation with technology. vated in a number of ways. Firstly, one be culti­ reco^m e that from its ‘origins’ the h^^an has been constituted by technical evolution. It is the mediation aforded by te^chnics which makes it impossible simply to describe evolution in te^ns of a self-contained, or monadic, subject that passively ‘adapts’ to an object-like environment. Altho^h technics is not peculiar to the h^nan f o ^ of evolution,

INTRODUCTION I 5 what is distinctive about it is the extent to which it drastically alters the meaning of ‘adaptation’ and ‘evolution’ in the case of the human animal. It is both the sign or mark of human distinctive futurity and the source of the artificial character of human inventions and ‘evolutions’ . The question of what we are becoming and what ‘adaptation’ might mean in an artificially created world (an environment not simply created by us since such creation always exceeds what we ‘are’) is badly treated if technology is read in terms of an extension of natural history. The human being is the greatest freak of nature and the only futures we ^can be cer^in of are monstrous ones characterized by perpetual mutation and morp^ng. The ‘meaning’ of ‘tec^ucs’ and of ‘technology’ is deliberately left open-ended in these essays in order to provoke, rather ^than de-limit or foreclose, reflection. Both notions are clearly caught up in a philosophical tradition of metaphysics, but their determination for the greater part of the history of philosophy has been that of an anthropocentric kind: tec^ucs/techniques are simply tools and devices employed as means to the furtherance of h^man ends. However, an anti-humanist reading of their me^aning reveals its own cavalier aspects, and easy celebrations of the arrival of the posthuman —which is how the postmodern condition is now being treated — are far too unreflective about their historical conditioning and genealogical (in-)formation. Reincation of the most obfuscatory kind takes place when the contingent nature of human becoming and its inventions of technology are taken to denote a desire for runaway adaptation and greater and greater complexity on the part of evolution. I am not denying that such complexity has taken place; what I take issue with in this study is the anthropomorphic claim that the process of comple^fication is ‘inhuman’ and the expression of ‘life’. To declare that technology c o u n t s to ‘the pursuit of life by means other life’ is not to provide insight into the past and future condition of evolution but to encourage blindness regarding matters of life and death within late-capital. Such a claim deprives us of any genuinely interesting and critical in-humanity. The second, and more ^novative, way in which a new negotiation with our te^chnical natures and artificial becomings be forged is by ^ ^ tin g p^macy to the question conce^rning the m a rin e (which is molecular, dealing solely with realities) over the question conce^rning technology (which is perhaps always molar, all too molar, and lacking an appreciation of the virtual character of ‘evolution’). Typically the ^machine is construed as a deficient form of life, lacking in autopoietic formative power, in con^trast to or^ ^ ^ rnc life, w hi^ is regarded as e n jo ^ g a monopoly over fo ^ ativ e power and self-generative evolution. In the work of Deleuze and Gua^ttari we find an innovative and far-reac^hing revaluation of the machine/organism distinction in which the ‘machinic’ is pitted ag^ainSt both

VIROID LI FE I 6 the mechanical and the organic in order to account for novel and complex becomings wi^thin evolution. As a point of fact, however, these machinic or rhizomatic becomings do not so much take place ‘in’ evolution as create or invent it, so marking the ‘o f’ evolution as an event of a genuine becoming (or what Bergson called ‘creative evolution’). When things evolve mac^mcally they do so immanently and pragmatically, by means of contagion and con^tamination, follow­ ing laws neither of resemblance nor of utility (see Massumi 1992: 192-3). A machinic conception of evolution is based on a radical pluralism, in which one ^can speak of a diverse range of alterior becomings to do with technical machines, social machines, semiotic machines, axiological machines, a^mal machines, existential machines, and so on. Inquiry into their nature and becoming is not governed by a reified (humanized) notion of what constitutes their vital autonomy based on an abstract animal model, but in terms of their specific enunciative consistencies (Guattari 1992/ 1995). Moreover, it is not a question of h ^ n ^ ^ ^ g this universe of machines so that everywhere one sees only the ^miror image of our o ^ desire for control, influence, design, and mastery. H^nan thought clearly plays a major role in the evolution of a machinic phylogenesis, but it is hubris which leads to the positing of the h^nan, a l too human as the meaning and telos of ma^chinism. For the greater part of evolution h^nan thought has relied on the mediation of technical machines —an o r i ^ ^ ^memotechincs is constitutive of h^nan —but this ^canot mean that the thought that is generated be characterized as solely or strictly ‘h^nan’ in t e ^ s of some ethic of possessive individualism. Thought is ‘^transhuman’ in a l the senses of the word one ^ e s to of. The music which these machines speak does not provide access to a single, univocal truth ‘of’ Being, as if techne possessed an available only to h^nans as part of their supposed unique and privileged residency in the cosmos; rather, machines provide pathic and ^tographic access to a plurality of beings and of worlds. As Guattari noted, within the machinic inverse beings have only the status of entities; that is, they are ates of beco^^^ in which what becomes is always s o m e ^ ^ alien. In t e ^ s of its fund^ental preoccupations — searc^ng the m^eaning of time, of ^history, of life, of evolution, of humanity, and so on —^ is bbok is a continuation of problems posed in my earlier study Nietzsche contra Rousseau (1991). I am seein g a radical inh^nan philosophy that -would serve to ‘destroy’ the ^ ^ a tu re and imperious cl^ms made upon life by a l fo^rms of philosophical anthiopocentrism. I see the ‘aitical’ task of excessive ^^^ing, w hi^ is u^tilized by the un^mely meditator, as one of direntang^ling the lines which cut across, machincally, the ‘recent’ past and the ‘n ^ ’ future. The aitical ^ ^ ^ er uses history

INTRODUCTION / 7 excessively for the sake of the ‘beyond’, acting contra time, on time, through time, out of time, fo r the sake i f time, which amounts to becoming-other than what history has made us and wishes to make of us. Moreover, this process of becoming also involves overcoming what we make of ourselves since emancipation from the idols of one’s time must necessarily entail emancipating oneself from one’s suffering of one’s time, a time that the self is deeply implicated in as its peculiar sickness. The task of working-through the transhuman condition thus involves the task of ^^^rng beyond the ‘beyond’ . The task of tracing the ‘reality of the creative’, which is not to be confused with iden^^ing with the merely ‘fashionable’, involves an exposition o f a variety of transcendent(al) iliusions, connected to, for e x ^ p le , ^^lfsm (which is only a sign or symptom of decay and the arrival of the new), to entropy, to the death-drive, to ‘evolution’ as classically conceived, and to the alleged autonomous theo-logic of capital. Transcendent(al) illusions conce^rning the h ^ a n condition arise out of an ingrained resistance to fluxes of beco^ming. As the quotation from Deleuze at the start- of this book says, it is not simply the case that we dwell ^ o n g badly analysed composites, but that we ourselves are badly analysed composites. As Deleuze and Gua^ttari state it in their What is Philosophy?, these illusions emanate from an inability to tolerate ^^aite movements and from a deare to master and tame the ^^aite speeds of time and the future which what we are. The illusions of ‘transcendence’, of ‘universals’, and of ‘eternal verities’ explained in this way. The problem that remains is how to future, a mode of a l be transhumanly the of the future that will inevitably appear as ‘inh^nan’ when it comes into contact, and conflict, with all earthly seriousness to date. But this transh^ n m praxis of thought nevertheless enjoys its ‘access’ such a mode of seriousness. To one must be inspired by Bergson’s contention that the ^mction of philosophy is to do violence to the mind by br=^mg with both the natural bent of the intellect and with scientific habits. At the same time, one must reco ^ ^ e and ackn^ledge one’s involvement with anthropomorphism, with its straitjacket, without conceding that ^^^ing and its task must remain, and must restrict themselves to, h^nan-all-too-h^nan. ' ^ s would be, and is, to betray the h^nan. lb is somewhat elevated conception of philosophy is out of sync with the ^midity that crn-ently infects and afflicts the postmodern Stimmung. Postmodernism often ^strikes me as the ^^^matifig point of Western narcissisim and h^ra^^rn. Theoretical po^modernism is thus how a redundant species of intellectuals grant themselves a spurious self-importance in the face of a phasespace transition to inh^nan futures and the birth, evident a l around us, of new ‘alien’ intelligences and beco^^gs. The task today is no longer to seek God, dead

VIROID LIFE I 8 or alive (though there are caves in which his shadow continues not only to flicker but to burn brightly), but to be drawn to the land o f the future where human im potence no longer makes us mad and where it is possible to decode the signs o f alien life wi^thin and without us. For this we do not so much require new truths; rather it becomes necessary to rem em ber and relearn some ancient ones. O ne will then discover them as if for the first time, fo r there is only the ‘first' tim e that is repeated again and again. T he future, for example, has always been ‘out th ere’. It does not simply lie ahead o f us. It is the place o f the ‘outside’ , In w riting as an ‘advocate’ o f Nietzsche I w rite as som eone who necessarily reads N ietzsche contra himself. In its conceptions o f the w ill-to-pow er and the eternal re^turn, through which it endeavours to articulate an alte^rnative biolOgical m odel o f selection to prevailing D ^ ^ ^ a n ones, N ietzsche’s th ^ ^ n g reveals itself to be as in anthropomorphism as any philosophy o f life o f the m odern epoch. It is n o t simply a question o f criticizing N ietz s^ e fo r replacing the prejudices o f morality with prejudices o f his own; rather, the task is to show how his attem pt to go beyond the human is implicated in the becom ing o f the h ^ ^ r n . Fortunately, there are resources in N ietzsche’s texts fo r dem onstrating the fo rce o f this insight. My relationship to Nietzsche, therefore, is decidedly, and ‘com plex’ . T h e essays which make up volume do n o t explore these questions either systematically o r exhaustively. They are b est read as perspectival essays-in-progress — on or towards the transh^raan condition — which pursue m odest ^ b i t i o n s o f exploring, critically and ^ ^ roativ ely , th e phenomenon o f the transhuman, and w h i^ seek to m ake a contribution to , and a critical intervention in, some o f the key questions o f the present. As N ietzsche notes, one c^mbs up the steps o f thought to p a s ‘over' them , n o t to remain settled on them . F u l de^tails o f my source material be found in th e bibliography. It should be noted that I have modified the translations o f Nietzsche used w ithout explicitly signalling this.

1 L O V I N G e m T H E P O I S O N T h e m o r y o f t h e h u m a n a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f t h e o v e r h u m a n Read from a distant planet, the majuscule-script of our earthly existence would perhaps seduce the reader to the conclusion that the was the ascetic planet par excellence, an outpost of discontented, arrogant, and nasty creatures who harboured a deep distrust for themselves, for the world, for all life and hurt themselves as much as possible out of pleasure in hurting. (Nietzsche 1994: 90) Probably we, too, are still *too good’ for our trade, probably we, too, are still the victims, the prey, the sick of this contemporary taste for moralization, much as we feel contempt towards it, - it probably infects us as well. (Nietzsche 1994: 109) The Age of Postbiological Man would reveal the human condition for what it actually is, which is to say, a condition to be gotten out Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, had already seen the truth of back in the nineteenth century: <Man is something that should be over­ come’, he had written in 1883. ‘What have you done to overcome him?’ Back then, of course, the question was only rhetorical, but now in fin-de-riec/e twentieth century, we had all the means in front of us . . . for turning ourselves into the most advanced transhumans imaginable. (Regis 1992: 175) Nothing in biology in general, or in our own human life in particular, makes sense except in the context of memory, of history. (Rose 1992: 327).

VIROID LI FE / 10 The question of the future of the human opens up a zone of monstrous thought, calling into being the necessity of a thinking of the transh^ttan condition. One of Nietzsche’s ‘great’ question: ‘what may still become o f“man”?’ , in which ‘man’ only becomes such at a certain juncture in historical evolution, his name presupposing a transcendence of race and nation (Nietzsche 1968: section 957). 1 Critical questions proliferate: is the overhuman not the peculiar and unique con­ figuration of the future? Can new origins be created for humans, other than those which are ^canonically handed d o ^ to those children of the future who patiently seafare their way to a land that is far away from fatherlands and Oedipal com­ plexes? In discovering ‘for the first time’ the country of ‘man’ do we not also at the same time discover the ‘human future’ (Nietoche 1969: ‘Old and New LawTables’ section 28)? Is not the future our un-na^atural birth-right? Is the future at all intelligible to the human? Perhaps the unintelligibility of the future applies only to the co^mmon sense of h ^ n ^ ty and the good sense of philosophic reason. Nietesche claimed to be able to decipher the hieroglyphs of the future, but for this task there is required an extra-human —and —sense and senability. Several crucial and complex questions are implicated in the p ro ble^ tic of the future of the h^^an as they relate ’to Nietesche, including the foUo^owing: • The fi^gurtion of the future in Nietesche, in which Nietesche portrays ^himself as a posthumous destiny belonging to another hirtory; his is a philosophy ‘of’ the future which claims to speak not only ‘of’ the future but ‘from’ the future. 1 This section runs: ‘Inexorably, hesitantly, terrible as fate, the great and question is approaching: how shall the earth as a whole be governed? And to what end shall "man”as a whole - and no longer as a people, a race —be raised and trained?’ For the German see Nietzs^e 1987, volume H: 581fT. It is interesting to note that one ofthe major studies of ‘te^nics’ of this century, Jacques Ellul’s The Technotyical SOCiety, poses the question of t^echnique ou 1’enjeu du siecle’ in very Nietas^ean terms, in whi^ the question of the ‘wherefore’ of evolution is replaced by the triumph of the last man. For Ellul, though, it is no longer aquestion of the last man b^^mg when he finds ‘happiness’. ‘It is apparently our fate’, he writes conce^^g speculations aabout a genetically designed future, ‘to be facing a "golden age” in the power of sorcerers who are totally blind to the meaning of the h^man adventure. ^When they speak of preserving the rese of out­ standing men, whom pray, do they mean to be the judges? It is hardly likely that they deem a Rimbaud or a Nietzs^e worthy of posterity . . . None of our ^wise men ever pose the question of the end of all their marvels. The "wherefore”is resolutely passed by. The response whi^ would o c ^ to our contemporaries is: for the sake of happiness. Urfo^^rately, there is no longer any question of that.’ To approa^ the question of la technique on the level of genetic design is simply to enclose it wi^an the restricted —human, al too human —economy of te^nology: ‘The last meager motive we could possibly ascribe to the te^nical adventure thus vanishes into thin air through the very existence of te^chnique itself (Ellul 1965: 435^).

LOVING THE POISON / 11 ‘The future speaks in a hundred signs even now’ (Nietzsche 1968: preface), and ‘It is the future which regulates our today’ (Nietzsche 1986: preface). What is the ‘appeal’ to the future which informs Nietzsche’s writing? What would it mean to give the earth a ‘purpose’? To redeem reality from the curse which the ascetic ideal had placed upon it (Nietzsche 1994: II, section 24)? Is Nietzsche entitled to draw upon notions of purpose and meaning in the wake of his critique of metaphysics, of its anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, as-well as his staking on board the impact of • The question of time, which has barely been thought in relation to the question of the time of the overhuman. On the contrary, its a^ u ^ ty has been conceived either in conventional linear terms, as that which comes ‘after’ hum ^s, or eschatologically and apocalyptically as marlking a new be^^^wg. Derrida sought to problematize radically the various moves to of the human ‘and’ the overhuman in his now classic essay of the late 1960s on ‘The Ends of Man’, noting that what is most ^fficult to is an ‘end’ ‘of’ ‘man’ that would not be organized by a ‘dialectics of truth’ and ‘be a teleology in the first person plural’ (Derrida 1982: 121). Within metaphysics the ‘n ^ e of man’ has mean­ ing only in an ‘eschato-teleological situation’. Derrida selects Nietzsche as the key post-metaphysical ^thinker —over and above Heidegger —on account of his plur^alization of style and meaning. Within Nietzsches styles we ^can locate a ‘laughter’ and a ‘dance’ that come from ‘outside’, which neither ‘repeat’ in the same old fashion of metaphysical humanism nor pursue the ‘beyond’ in the form of a ‘memorial’ of the meaning of ‘Being’. However, Derrida’s attempt to think the ‘beyond’ of metaphysics in a way that is attentive to the paradoxes involved in such a move remains entirely with the ‘i d ^ ^ ^ ’ of metaphysics. Thus his invocation at the end of the essay of the notions of ‘active forge^ing’ and festivals of cruelty s^trike us as merely g^^^al and solely writerly, with no regard for the matter of life and its deviant beco^^^ in either biology, technics, or material history. Heidegger’s po^war rea^ding of Nietzsche completely historicized the figure of the overh^man, subje^ing it to a reading of te^mology byit to a ‘future master of the ^^&* who wields to higher p^urposes and powers wwhatt ‘falls’ to the h^rnan of the future with the da^^ing of the 2 The opening sections of Human, A//Too Human strike me as offering a post-Da^^man conception of philosophical cul^e, so that Darwin has to be seen as an essential ^part of Nie^^he’s call for a new Enlightenment in an age of ^hi^lism. In the opening sections he calls for a new style of ‘historical philosophizing’ whose most important virtue will be that of ‘modesty’ (Nietas^e 1986: sections 1, 2).

VIROID LI FE / 12 ‘teclmological transformation of the earth and of human activity’ (Heidegger 1968: 59). The only philosopher of postwar times to connect the overhuman with questions of form and forces in terms of a complex becoming is Deleuze: ‘The question that continually returns is therefore the following: if the forces within man compose a form only by entering into a relation with forms from the outside, with what new forms do they now risk entering into a relation, and what new form will emerge that is neither God nor man? This is the correct place for the problem which Nietasche called the “superman”1 (Deleuze 1988b: 130). Nietzsche does speak of man b elo ^ ^ g to a ‘higher history’ in the aftermath of the death of God, but this higher history is implicated in a still formative ‘pre-history’ and is bound up with history itself in complicated ways. It is a question of ‘evolution’ as a question of foldings and of ‘life’ conceived as the great fold: ‘Man hitherto —as it were, an embryo of the man of the future; — all the form-shaping forces directed toward the latter are present in the former; and because they are tremendous, the more a present-day individual determines' ' the future. " ^ s is the profoundest conception of suffering: the form-shaping forces are in p^^ul collision. —The isolation of the individual ought not to deceive us: something flows on underneath individuals’ (Nietasche 1968: section 686). • The question of N ietas^e’s relation to modern biology and theories of evolution, notably D ^ ^ ^ sm . ^Why does Nietasche u^tilize embryology to articulate his theory of ^wil-to-power, and the it accords to spontaneous and expansive form-shaping forces, in On the Genealoay o f Morality? ^Why does he appeal to biology at certain ^^dal points in his argument on a genealogy of morals (for example, appraising ‘states of le^dity’ from ‘the highest biological point of view’, 1994: 54)? To what extent is Nietasche’s genealogy of morals based on a necessary revaluation of D ^ ^ ^ a n ‘biological’ values? Heidegger’s point contra biologism and a biologistic reading of Nietasche — namely, that biology is also ‘metaphysics’ —remains rn ^ ^ a n t and apposite, but it does not e^uust the question (Heidegger 1961: I, 517ff.; t r ^ . 1987: 39ff.). Moreover, why after a hundred years and more do we need to be told again and again of the ultimate truth of D ^ ^ m ’s theory of 1976) and philosophers (Dennett 1995b) selection by biologists (Dawkins as if it were an uncomplicated ‘truth’ for humans?3 It is here that ‘we’ may sound strangest. The lesson of 3 In his The Se!fish Gene Dawkins seeks to advance a new cultural Darwinism by interpreting the evolution of culture in tenns of a memetics. He argues that concentration on the gene as the unit

LOVING THE POISON / 13 Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality is perhaps more apposite now than ever before. It is not accidental that Nietzsche’s genealogy should ‘select’ humans as it focus. It does this while eschewing anthropocentric naivety. His genealogy shows the extent to which the human animal has been subject to an ‘evolution’ characterized by un-natural selection. In saying this we are not positing a dubious metaphysical division between the art and artifice of humans over the blind and d^mb mechanical workings of nature, for ‘nature’ too has its technics of inven­ tion . However, and paradoxically, it is the refusal to acknowledge the distinctive c^ffacter of h^nan artificial and technical evolution that leads to a reinstatement of anthropocentrism and that fails to come to terms with ‘the real problem regarding man’. It is thus necessary to demonstrate that through the invention of techniques of the self (the invention of the ‘soul’, the formation and deformation of selection is unhelpful when it comes to understanding the ‘evolution of modem man’ (1989: 191). However, he simply fails to appreciate the immense complications whi^ the notion of ‘memes’ raises for a theory of human ‘evolution’. To replace ‘genes’ with ‘memes’ as a basis for understanding ‘culture’ is to remain on the level of naturalism (as opposed to artificiality). Memetics completely reifies the processes of cultural evolution since it has no insight into how su^ processes involve technical and social mediation. The idea that culture develops in terms of a process of self-replication analogous to genetic evolution is an assertion at best and completely unfounded. In spite of his efforts to distance himself from philosophy, Dawkins’s influential theory of the selfish gene is a 'replication’ of a recognizable philosophical position, that of a distinctly Schopenhauerean kind. Brian Goodwin has noted how Dawkins’ argument breaks down into an essentially religio-metaphysical doctrine, along the following lines; (a) Organisms are composed of groups of genes whose ‘goal’ is ‘selfishly’ to leave more copies of themselves (in other wor&, life is born in sin and our inheritance is a ‘base’ one); (b) the inherently selfish qualities of this hereditary material find expression in the competitive interactions between epiphenomenal organisms whi^ result in the survival of the fitter variants are generated by the more ‘successful’ genes; (c) the struggle for life is endless on account of the fact that the ‘fitness land­ scape’, in which organisms evolve and compete with one another, keeps ch^anging (for whi^ we read: we are condemned to a life of conflict and perpetual toil); (d) paradoxically, human beings are able to develop al^truistic ^behavioourthat works against their selfish endowment through the strainingof education and culture (that is, by faith and moral effort h^anity <canbe saved from its fallen, selfish state). See Goodwin 1995: 29-30. D^enett’s consideration of the of Darwin’s dangerous idea on our moral endowment —which he expresses as the idea that ‘An impersonal, robotic, mindless, little ^rop of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, andhence meaning, and hence conscio^rness, in the ^universe’ (199Sb: 203) —leads to the conclusion that Darwinism is unable to provide answers to our deepest dilemmas, though it does, he maintains, help us to see why long-standing ambition of discovering an algorithmic ethics is forlorn (199Sb: Sllff.). One wonders whyy we need Darwinism to in^mct us on this issue.

VIROID LI FE / 14 of memory, and so on), which Nietzsche makes central to his conception of the human animal, humans have created for themselves an environment in which artificial excess reigns and governs both their ‘memory’ and ‘promise’. Shorn of its fatal association with Nazi eugenics, a breeding programme designed to produce and reproduce the eternal return of the same entropically, the figure of the Ubermensch is once again prominent within techno-discourses on the fate and future of evolution. These discourses speak of a new emerging ‘biotechnological’ ci^^ation in which te^mology becomes more and more biological, while biology becomes more and more technological (see KeUy 1994: chapter 1, ‘The Made and the Born’). The ‘superman’ of Nietoche legend has become the emblem of brave new world of meat-metal symbiosis. However, what is forgotten and erased in contemporary use and abuse of Nietesche is that Nietesche’s repeated invocation of the overh^nan caUs us back to the h^nan. The promise o f the overh^^an is bound up in ways yet barely explored, and in ways little understood, with the memory of the h^^an. Contemporary techno-theorizing blinds us to the ‘real problem regarding man’ . For Nietesche, man is the temporal and futural animal par exceUence. The real ‘problem’ of h^n^^ind is the breeding of an ^animal which has the capacity or abftty to make promises, and this requires a certain tr^aining and cultivation. This is a paradoxical task that nature has set itselfin the case of man. The labour of over­ coming denotes the essence of man; his being has always involved a beco^^^ and a birth from the future. Man has been constituted by the over-man from the ‘point’ of his ‘ori^n’. 4 ^his is why attempts to cite Nietesche’s declared goal of transla^ting man back into nature, so as to be able to read the ‘ete ^ ^ basic text of homo natura’, in support of a Nie^rch^rn naturalism or philosophical ecology, are so problematic (Nie^tzsche 1966: section 230). It suugests erroneously that the question of man’s origin is s^Mghtforward, that man simply and ^^mbiguously 'belongs’ ^ o n g the But -we know that for Nietesche man is a ack 4 It is misleading to refer to a ‘point' of origin since in ^^^mg out a complex rendition of genealogy, Nie^^&e does not seek to trace the evolution of man in terms of a punctoal system. On the signifi^rnce of distinguishing between the line (the rhizome as ‘becoming') and the point (genealogy as ‘memory’) see Deleuze and Gua^rn 1988: 294. Whilst recognizing the novelty of their conception of ‘evolution' as a rhizomatic becoming, a form of ‘creative evolution', I am keen to d^^ratruct the unmediated opposition Deleuze and Gua^ttari end up posi^ting between becoming and memory (becoming is an ‘antimemory of man’, they m^^in). 5 Such a profound misrea^g of NietzsAe has inspired some commentators to ^gue that NietasAe's fidelity to the presages a new ecologism or ‘green' politics. For one example of new trend in Nietzscheanism see Lampert's excellent study (1993: 432).

LOVING THE POISON / 15 animal, a strange animal, and that he calls upon us always to aim our vision ^and riddles ‘beyond’ man. Moreover, man’s becoming has never been a quel>tion of harmony or balance; on the contrary, it has been characterized by extreme discord and positive feedback. The evolution of ‘nature’ could also be viewed in such nonequilibrial terms, but the difference in the case of man, as Nietzsche’s genealogy so spectacularly shows, is that he has internalized this discord in terms of an ‘inner evolution’, pursuing an experimental praxis of life that transcends any alleged natural laws of being and becoming. A genealogy of morals as a genealogy of man has a different, more complex and difficult, lesson to teach us ^than simply placing ^ o n g s t the ^^nals. Man is a bridge, not a goal, but the the bridge (man) and the goal (overman) are one, related immanently, as in the ‘lightning-flash’ that emerges from out of the ‘dark cloud’ that is ‘man’. A note from the Nachlass informs us that not only does man return ete^rnaly, but so does the ov e^ an (Nietzsche 1987, volume 11: 281). In other words, the overman would not be possible without the becoming of man, and this ‘becoming’ refers to a ceaseless labour and play of ‘self-overcoming’. The ‘goal’ is immanent, and hence man’s ‘being’ is a beco^ming, nothing other than beco^^^, beco^ming as invention. 6 How else is it possible to comprehend Nietzsche’s statement in Ecce Homo that ‘man is overcome at every moment’ (Nietzsche 1979a: 107)7 A ^■eful reading of Nie^tzsche’s genealogy of morals demonstrates the extent to which for l^m the h^nan is the site of a perpetual overcoming. The question conre^m g origins, and the concomitant desire for self-tr^ansparency, is displaced at the outset of the book. ‘We’ h ^ ^ ^ must remain str^angers to ourselves ‘out of necessity’ ; we ^ ^ o t be knowers, especially when it comes to ourselves. Eq^ualy it is important to appreciate that Nietzsche’s critical question of a genealogy of morals —to what extent are moral values ngns of exuberant life or degen^ting life? —is also subject to a derangement. In his uncovering of the history of morality Nietzsche discovers that it is in his beco^ming-siak, in his ‘blood-poiso^mg’, that h^nan promise is to be fofound. It thus becomes possible to show that any attempt to locate the overh^nan outside the h^man, inclu^ding outside of history, and to give the overh^nan Afferent o^^ra, is ^nd ^ entally misguided.7 The poating 6 See Nietzsche 1968: section 617: 'Becoming as invention (Eifinden), willing self-denial, over­ coming of self (Sich-seselbst Uberwinden): no subject but an action, a positing, creative, no “causes and effects”’. For the German see Nie^tuche 1987, volume 12: 313. 7 Deleuze’s reading of NieteAe (1983) is often interpreted in these terms, as positing history as nothing more than a story of decline. But is to mira the ‘subtle’ and ‘sophisticated' ^^racter of his reading of Nietesche. Deleuze mmakes the experiment of eternal retam central and pivotal

VIROID LI FE / 16 of a pure and purely active overhumanity is out of tune with the spirit of Nietzsche’s music in the genealogy of morals, in which all the so-called ‘reactive’ values ^can be subjected to revaluation if one considers them as tools (techniques) for the further cultivation and enhancement of the human animal. Then one discovers that they conceal an essential activity. Humans’ only justification does indeed lie ‘outside’ — outside themselves, outside nature — but this outside is immanent in their becoming. Nietzsche’s articulation of the need for a ‘critique’ of moral values easily be interpreted as solely a form of negative critique. Such a critique, however, Nietesche designs in positive terms as the development of a new kind of under­ standing and knowledge conce^rning the conditions and dr^cumstances under which particular values evolved and changed, and in which morality acts as a symptom and a sickness, but also as a stimulant and poison. Nietesche insists that an inquiry into the ‘origin* of values and into our tables of good and evil is no way identical with a ‘critique’ of them .8 Revelations of the sh ^ efu l origin of values may result in a feeling of ^minution, but it only prepares the way to a critical attitude towards .them (Nietzsche 1968: section 254). In this new general economy of values and morals the question of the problem of ‘man’ be posed in a way that leads us through and ‘beyond’ morality. The attempt to cultivate a critique of morality and go beyond it also entails ‘discovering’ hitherto uncharted land for the first time. As the ‘d^^er of dangers’ morality is ^rndamentally ^biguous: it has led to the poisoning of ^man, to the darkening of the skies over -------------- ^^^inating in our feeling nausea and pity at the sight of his \ to his reading of ‘transforation’, and it is here that his argument is at its most convoluted. He does not simply argue that eternal retam annihilates the reactive forces; rather, his delicate thesis is that when subjected to the test of return the ‘reactive’ only come back as ‘active’: ‘It is no longer a question of the simple thought of the eternal return eliminating from willing eve^^^g that falls outside this thought, but rather, of the eternal return making something come into being which cannot do so without changing nature. It is no longer a question of selective thought but of selective "being'" (Deleuze 1983: 71). ‘Selection’ is a motif that runs throughout Deleuze’s writings, and demands careful investigation. One initial attempt is made in Aapter 2. 8 Heidegger is thus wrong to claim that in Nietzs^e critique of the highest values hitherto ‘properly means ill^ination of the dubious origins of the valuations that yield them, and thereby demonstration of the questionableness of these values themselves’ (1961: I, 35; trans. 1979: 26). For Nieto^e the question of ‘origins’ is not irrelevant to the formation of a critique of morals, but it -is no way the decisive question concerning their ‘value’. The same ‘genetic fallacy’ is committed by Foucault in his now classic, but deficient, essay on ‘Nie^tzsche, Genealogy, History’ (1977).

LOVING THE POISON / 17 domestication; but it has also cultivated a strange and fascinating breeding ground for his extra-moral self-overcoming. In section 6 to the preface to the genealogy, Nietesche speaks of morality being ‘responsible’ — the accusation of blame by Nietzsche is an indication of his, and our, implication in the evolution of morality — for the human species never reaching its ‘highest potential and splendour’. Nietzsche informs us that he writes for a species that does not yet exist (Nietzsche 1968: section 958), but in truth the ‘ones’ he writes for will not constitute a ‘ species’. In a note of 1883, in which he writes of the rapport between the human and the overhuman, morality is placed wi^in a restricted economy of life conceived as an economy of the ‘species’. If all moralities have hitherto been u^teed so as to m ^ ^ ra e the ‘unconditional durability’ of the species, then once this has been a^Mned the goals be set much ‘higher’ (Nietzsche 1987, volume 10 : 244 ). This openness to the future which is open to the risk and dangers of experimentation is part of Nietesche’s promise —which is, as he tells us, a promise to write for the ‘barbarians of the twentieth century’ (Nietzsche 1968: section 868). Nietesche claims that his ‘di^stinction’ is to read ‘critically’ the long, hard-todecipher hieroglyphic script of our moral part and to take this past seriously. He separates himself from Ree, the author of The Origin o f our Moral S^ensatiom, on this point. Although Ree had read D ^^ro, Nietzsche contends that he had produced a merely ‘enter^^ing’ account of the confrontation between the ‘D ^ ^ ^ a n beast’ and the ‘ultra-modem, humble moral weakling who no longer bites’ (Nietesche 1994: preface, section 7). In other words, Ree has simply not taken ‘seriously’ what is at stake in the return to the question of man’s origins (the ‘real problem’ re^ff^ng man). He then speaks of the ‘reward’ one expect from under^^ng a serious inquiry into the origin of morality, turning the tragedy of human history into a comedy of existence, so that history becomes subject to a higher ‘eternal’ becoming, and a new ^twist and outcome ^unfolds for the Dionysian d r ^ a on the 'fate of the soul’. The preface concludes by appealing to a new memory of man, one that becomes a^^nable once we overcome that mode of forge^ing which plagues ‘modem man’ , namely, a forge^ing of the ‘art of reading’ . Until this art — an art involving a cer^tain relearned, it of memory — is be ‘some time’ before Nietesche’s script on our moral past and extra-moral future become readable. remembrance of reading has to be incorporated and ^^ribed upon our bodies as a writing ‘o f’ the flesh. ^What drives the psyAologist? The question becomes acute in the case of man when historical and pyschological inquiry has degenerated into the task of belit^mg . How Nie^^he the poison so as to resist the temptation

VIROID LIFE / 18 of arriving at a pessimistic suspicion in the face of man, which would be no more reliable than the mistrust of the disillusioned and of surly idealists who have turned poisonous and green? The aim of Nietzsche’s genealogist is not to cut man do^n to size, to allow oneself to be bitten by the tarantula of revenge, but rather to be brave and generous in the face of bitter and ugly, unchristian, post-Darwinian truths. ^What is the value of the priest? The priest is a bizarre creature of ‘life’ that has ^turned against itself and who makes eve^^m g dangerous. It is on the ‘foundation' of this dangerous form of human existence that becomes an ‘interesting animal’. Contra Rousseau, Nietzsche conceives this profound transfo^nation which the h^nan animal undergoes in the hands of morality in extra- or supramoral terms. Thus he write — as a ‘contra Rousseau’ position — that the problem of civilization is not that it has corrupted man but rather that it has failed to corrupt him sufficiently (Nietzsche 1968: sections 98—100). The two basic forms of human superiority over a^nimals — its depth and its capacity for evil — both owe their emergence to the priestly form of eMstence. It is the slaves’ revolt in morality which introduces intelligence — GeiSt — into h^nan history (Nietesche 1994: I, section 7). By ‘intelligence’ NietzsAe means phenomena suA as ^ ^ ^ n g , ^^mcry, patience, dissimulation, self-control, and so on (Nietzsche 1979a: 76). The noble man is really quite stupid and United in inteUigence. '^^ile the noble is confident and with himself, being both ‘upright’ and ‘naive ’, the man of ressentiment is neither, being neither honest nor straight with and hence his potentialities for self-overcoming are that much greater (Nietzsche 1994: I, section 10). Nietzsche goes on to construct an discourse with a d em o ^ t. For the democrat it is superfluous to speculate aabout what is noble since the morality of the common people, and its intoxication, has conquered through bloodpoisoning (Blutvergiftung) (it has mixed up the races). The secular democrat reco^mes that the passage of the poison of the slaves’ revolt thro^^ the whole body of the human is irreversible. The problem he has with the ‘ChurA’ , which professes to be the saviour of the ‘poison’, is that it alienates when it should seduce. It is committed to slowing d^own and blocking to passage when creative energies should be devoted to ‘accelerating’ it. The democrat then confesses that he loathes the Church but ‘not its poison . . . Apart from the Church, we too love the poison (Gift)’ (1994: 1, section 9). Nietzsche offers this passage as the ‘epilogue’ of a ‘free-^^^er’ and an honest ^animal. It is the speech of someone who has to Nietzsche ‘up to a cer^in point’ but who ^canot ‘stand listening’ to his silence. How ought we to inte^ret

LOVI NG THE POISON / 19 Nietzsche’s telling silence? I would suggest that Nietzsche is concealing the ‘truth’ of his own confession w i^ ^ that of the democrat, for as a genealogist he too must learn to love the poison. Unlike the democrat, however, who see only a development (an ‘evolution’) moving in the direction of an increasing equalization and homogenization, the genealogist is able to decode the signs of a different kind of becoming, an involution of forms and forces, in which novel ^mds of self-overcoming be cultivated. Man is the caged animal enclos ed in the ‘walls of society and peace *, subject to an ‘internalization’ process, and notable not only for his experiments on nature, but for his self-experimentation. Originally man’s inner world was stretched ever so thinly as though ‘between two layers of skin’. However, once intern^ized it quickly expanded and extended itself, reaching the point where it becomes distinctive of man’s ‘being’. Impatiently man rips himself apart, gnawing at himself, subjecting himself to self-abuse, so of emptiness’ in his na^^al state —his genetic make-up bestows little —that he had to create for himself a torturec^hamber, a ‘ha^dous wilderness’ entirely within. The invention of a ‘bad conscience’ represents man’s ‘forcible breach with his past’; it is both a leap and a fall into new situations and conditions of existence (Nietzsche 1994: IT, section 16). Nietesche describes this ‘evolution’ in terms of a ‘positive’ critique, sp^^eaking of the prospect of an ^animal against itself as something profound and new, as some^thing p ^ ^ ^ g , contradictory, and as an event on earth that only be understood as ‘momentous’ (Zuku^riftsvol/es), that c^mged the ‘whole ^character of the world’ in an ‘essential way’. This becoming of man is a spectacle too subtle and ^nderful, too paradoxical, to be ‘allowed to be played senselessly unobserved on some ridiculous planet’. And yet, again, there is no hint of anthropocentric naivety on Nietesche’s part in spe^aking of the ^^^al ‘man’ in such privileged terms. Rather, he construes the mark of man in terms of an ‘announcement’, as if through him some^thing other were be^ing prepared, ‘as though were not an end but just a path, an episode, a bridge, a great promise’ (ibid .).9 Although the spectacle of man neces^rily shakes us as one almost too ugly and p ^ ^ ^ to ^behold, it would be a mistake to adopt .a disparagingg attitude towards it. Moreover, even though the inte^^^&tion of gives way to the breeding of a l sorts of reactive values and to the danger of morality, it is also possible to locate an essential activity wi^thin the formation of the bad conscience. ‘Fund^entally’ , Nietzsche writes, ‘it is the same active force as the one that is at 9 Compare Bergson 1983: 265, for whom it is only in a ‘quite special sense that man is the “term” and “end” of evolution’.

VIROID LI FE / 20 work on a grand scale’ in artists of violence who create and build ‘negative ideals’ . He can thus contend: This secret self-violation, this artist's cruelty, this desire to give form to oneself as a piece of difficult, resisting, suffering matter, to brand it with a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a ‘no', this uncanny, terrible but joyous labour of a soul voluntarily split within itself, which makes itself suffer out of the pleasure of making suffer, this whole active ‘bad conscience’ has finally —we have already guessed —as true womb of ideal and imaginative events, brought a wealth of novel, disconcerting beauty and afrmation to light. (ibid.: II, section 18) Nietzsche only have belief in man to the extent that it is possible to iden^tify in his evolution the ‘time’ and ‘space’ of the overh^an. The promise of the over­ human forces us to return to man, to re-collect his memory, while the discovery, or invention, of that memory reveals to us this promise of overh^man futures. 10 The genealogy o f morals constantly folds b a ^ upon itself in its unfolding o f man’s identity and being, an identity that ^diference and a being that only be conceived in terms of an essential only treated as a becoming. We return to the memory ‘of’ man —return in terms of a positive critique of the present — on account of the promise of the overman. The ^task is to e ^ ^ ^ e the ‘a^^m^ation and increase o f forces’ so as to know ‘what might yet be made cfm an' and to l^earn that ‘is still unexhausted for the greatest po^ssibilities’ . The genealogist of man knows from the ‘most p ^ ^ ^ memories what wretched have so far usually broken a being of the highest rank that was in the process of becoming, so that it broke, ^sank, and became contemptible’ (Nietzsche 1966: section 203). Nietzsche thus for a new and cultivation of the human that prevent its degeneration into a herd-^^nal by ‘putting an end to that gruesome d o ^ ^ o n of nonsense and accident that has so far been called ^"hi,vtoryw (ibid.). In other places, Nietasche reco^mes the futile and counter-productive nature of deluded quest for control over evolution and hi^ory. The most promising po&ibilities 10 One of the earliest, and still few, attempts to approach Nietzsche in the te^ra of this ^apter can be found in Arendt's The Human Condition. However, whereas Arendt restricts the promise of the overhuman to the faculty of promises itself, I wish to enlarge it by taking into account human cultivation of cruelty, of pain and sufering, of self-experimentation throuugh tecclmical engineering, in short the whole r i^ panoply of human culture and civilization. Arendt reads the cultivation of promise-making as signalling in Nietzs^e’s analysis a transcendence of the notion of will-to-power, a fact, she says, ‘frequently overlooked by Nietzsche scholars’ (Arendt 1958: 245, n. 83).

LOVING THE POISON / 21 for ‘higher’ evolution arise unpredictably and incalculably from a new and spon­ taneous amalgamation of disparate forces and desires. As he notes, at points of punctuated equilibrium ‘variation’ suddenly appears on the scene in the greatest abundance as ‘deviation’ and as ‘degeneration and monstrosity’.With these noncalculable ‘turning points of history’ it is possible to observe a mutual involvement and entanglement of diverse and opposite values and desires, denoting a ‘manifold, junglelike growth and upward striving’ , a ‘tremendous ruin and self­ ruination’ that breaks the discipline of the old morality and renders superfluous the preaching of moral philosophers, including any pretensions Nietzsche might himself have in this field (ibid.: 262). - The attempt to ‘save’ activity from the ‘con^^^^tion* of morality results in a highly idealistic, quasi-apocalyptic reading of Nietzsche and his figuration of the beyond of man. We should not be surprised at the extent to which, for e x ^ p le , Deleuze*s reading in Nietzsche and Philosophy concludes by placing a l the emphasis on a conversion of thought in order to reactivate active forces and move from the negative dialectic to the positivity of the overman (Deleuze 1983: 175).11 This reading, however, produces little more a new idealism of man and encour­ ages us to practise the most sshallow of inversions: ‘For the speculative element of negation, opposition, or contradiction Nietzsche substitutes the practical element of difference . •. N ie^^he’s "yes” is opposed to the dialectical "no”; afrm ation to dialectical negation; ^diference to dialectical negation; joy, enjoyment to dialectical labour; lightness, dance to ^alectical responsibilities* (ibid.: 9). Deleuze’s ‘NietzsAean empricism* offers no^^^ more an empty formalism and remains stuck wi^thin an id ^ & ^ of the ove^^m. In working through the ‘real problem* of man, Nietzsche insists on m^aking a ^^inction between the ‘actual ins^^ments* of culture and the ‘vir^tual bearers* of culture. ‘Culture* simply means the breeding and teaming of the beast o f prey ‘man* into a civilized ^^mal. The te^chniques of ^culture are to be cultivated without ^^^inating in a will-to-power that only ‘no^thingness*, that is, a passive in which the process of the intern^alization of the ^wil-to-power has gone so far that culture produces an that is no longer able to produce an^^ing 11 Deleuze cites Nietzsche’s reference to man as the ‘skin disease’ of the and poses the question whether another sensibility and another becoming would still be those of ‘man*. For Dele^^ the *human condition* would compromise or ’contaminate’ the selection of ete^rnal re^turn —making it an object of ^^msh and repulsion —only if it was the case that the re^turn of active forces took place in terms of the eternally reactive, so rendering transmutation impossible (1983: 65).

VIROID LI FE I 22 out of its sickness other A m self-loathing and contempt. On account of what man has become today, history results in the paradoxical situation in which we only identify in the instruments of culture deformation, so that an attitude of suspicion towards the discipline of culture becomes manifest and acute, resulting in our peculiarly modern misarchism. One wants the poison not in order to turn against man but in order to overcome . Hence Nietesche write that what constitutes our aversion to man today is that we sufer from him because we have n o tin g to fear from ^m , for he has become ‘a teeming mass of worms’ . History results in the ‘une^^ing’ spectacle of the ‘end of history’, an end in which the ‘incurably mediocre’ have learned to regard themselves as the aim and pinnacle, as the very meaning, of history (Nietesche 1994: I, section 11). We have grown tired of man, for not only have we lost our fear of love and respect for ^ m , our hope in 12). We no longer digest , but we have also lost our , and ‘even our to be man’ (ibid.: (see Nietesche 1994: I I , section 16 on digestion and indigestion). Out of this confrontation and reckoning with man and the history of culture, Nietesche endeavour to argue that man remora constituted by his futurity and by his inventions of the future. Man, he says, is more uncertain, unstable, and c^mgeable ^than any other ^animal. He be defined generically as the »ck animal on arcount of the fact that he has dared, innovated, and braved more ‘^than a l the rest of the animals taken together’ . As the great ^experimenter with ^m self and insatiable struggler for control over ‘^animals, nature, and gods’ —through the aid i f machines and ‘the completely unscrupulous inventiveness of technicians and engineers’ (ibid.: 9) —man remains ‘the still-unconquered eternal fu ^ ra t’ whose ‘future mercilessly digs into the flesh of every present like a spur’jib id .: 13). The promise of lies in the fact that even the ‘No’ which he says to life brings with it a ‘wealth of tender “yeses”". Although he is the animal who deliberately wounds himself, it is these wounds —and the memory of them —which forces this selfvivisector and master of destruction and self-destruction to live. 11 The phenomenon of memory is multiple: one speak: of molecular memories, social memories, s h o rt-te ^ and long-term memories, relative and absolute memories, sick memories and healthy memories, of a technics of memory and of an excessive invention of memory, and so on. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and

LOVING THE POISON / 23 Guattari oppose ‘becoming’ to ‘memory’ in their attempt to construct a nongenealogical model of evolution (that is, one which does not restrict evolution to the linear schema presupposed in trees of life). While conceding that molecular or minor memories exist (such as anti-colonial memory), they nevertheless insist that such memories always exist as a factor that is integrated into a molar, or majoritarian, system (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 294). Deleuze and Guattari’s negative appraisal of the creative, and subversive, power of memory rests on their association of it with a mnemotechnics (ibid.: 295). Memory is viewed as functioning in terms of a punctual org^^^tion in which the present refers simultaneously to a horizontal line captures the flow of time, moving from an old present to an actual present, and to a vertical line that captures the order of time, going from the present to the past, or to the ‘representation’ of the old present. They oppose ‘multilinear systems’ to punctual ones, arguing that these kind of open, complex systems, so evident in the work of musicians and painters, free the line from the vertical and the horizontal, making it diagonal. It is in this sense of the line over the point that they argue that every act of creation is, ultimately, ‘transhistorical’: ‘Creations’ , they write, ‘are like mutant abstract lines that have detached themselves from the of representing a world, precisely because they assemble a new type of r^eality that history only recontain or relocate in punctual systems’ (ibid.: 296). On this model ‘becomings’ ^ke place ‘in’ history but are never reducible to it: ‘When this is done [the freeing of the line] it always goes down in History but never comes from it’ (ibid.). History, for Deleuze and Gua^ttari, is molar by dentition. The only history there be, noted ever been and ever possibly be is the history of man (although it should be they do allow for ‘many beco^rnings of man, but no becoming-man’). The technics o f memory has been cultivated in order to serve the mol^arization of history. But where memory fxes, codes, and assigns functions, the activity of beco^rnings liberates by into play trarnv&sal communication between hetero­ geneous phenomena, and so they create the genuinely new and Afferent.12 12 Perhaps the most powerful statement by Deleuze and Guattari on the invention of becoming is to be found in their thin^g of the monument in What is Philosophy?, where they seek an immanent meaning to the becoming of ‘revolution’. See Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 168-9 and 176-7. On ‘becoming-revolutionary*, whi^ is to be indifferent to questions of past and fufuture, see also Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 292. The innovations made by Deleuze and Guattari in their remapping of ‘evolution* thro^ugh‘^rcomings’ are utilized in 1988: ^apter 5. The point I ^ seeking to make here is that, awhile I concede that the molecular/molar distinction in their work does not function as a metaphysical opposition, even less a ma^inic one, it nevertheless remains the case that the critical genealogist (in Nietesche’s sense) cannot completely abandon

VIROID LI FE / 24 It has to be noted that Nietoche will employ a reading of culture, of mnemotechnics, to quite different effect in his GenealoBJ cfMorality. A recent study of memory confirms the impression that Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition between memory and becoming simplifies and distorts the actual history of mnemotechnics in which memory was seen to offer an artifice of resistance to established powers (Rose 1992: 6 7 -8 ; see also Yates 1966). In the time of the Renaissance 'theatres of memory’ were constructed as theatres of magic. For Giordano Bruno, a contemporary of Galileo’s, who ^was burned by the Inquidtion, these theatres of memory fonned an essential feature of occult, hermetic philosophy, that is, of ways of das^^ing the universe and penetrating its mystery. 13The opposition drawn between ‘memory’ and ‘becoming’ not only rests on an unmediated privileging of becoming, but also ignores the ill^ ^ ^ tio n that Deleuze's earlier work brings to bear on the source of the tremendous power of memory. Becoming is inconceivable without memory, including a technics of memory, in which the ‘product’ always exceeds the law of production (as in the e x ^ p le of NietesAe’s sovereign individual in which the ‘tree’ of the social straitjacket —the morality of ^ t o m —gives rise to a ‘fruit’ that enjoys the supra-ethical power of ‘living beyond’). So we ask: what is the work pe^culiar to memory? What is being worked-through and worked-out in memory? ^an there be a ‘historical memory' that is not at the ^roe ^me an invention of history, an invention of itself (Benj^nin)? In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze employs Freud's notion of ‘mnemonic traces’ , in which consciousness is born at the site of a memory-trace, to ill^ninate the movement of memory in Nietesche’s Genealoaj o f Morality. In Moses and the territory of history and concede defeat. In the instance of ‘historical memory' it is a question of not taking the molar as given and treating it as a kind of historical a priori. The fonnation of ’the human' as the molar category par excellence, in whi^ anthropocentrism gets constructed in tenns of a ‘gigantic Memory' that serves to capture nature and teAnics by filtering their rhizomatic becomings through a centre-point, establishing the one 'frequency’ and the one ‘resonance*, requires an overhuman —or mol^^^ —demonstration (a different history) (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 293). In this way history is opened up to other becomings and the illusions of the molar exposed. This is what I see Nietzsche providing in his GenealoBY. In respect, Deleuze and Guattari are quite right to point out that wherever they use the word ‘memories’ they meant to say, and were saying, ’becomings’ (ibid:: 294). But this is to speak ofbecomings that are complicated in ‘memories’, but whi^ ^ never reducible to, or identifiable with, them. 13 Bruno is, in fact, di^^ed by Deleuze in his study of Leibniz and the baroque (Dele^ 1993: 23-4).

LOVING THE POISON / 25 Monotheism, in fact, Freud employs the notion to lend support to his predilection for a Lamarckian schema of evolution. The idea is that memory-traces operate not only ontogenetically but also phyiogenetically, constituting an ‘archaic heritage of human beings' equivalent to Lamarck's notorious doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Freud 1990: 345ff.). Freud insists that he carmot do without this notion as a key factor in the explanation of biological evolution. His position, however, appears to rest on a conflation of human ‘tec^Mcal’ evolution and animal ‘biological' evolution, evident in his contention that the transmission of ancestral life — the phenomenon of tradition — takes place independently of direct communication and education (in other words, he biologtzes the question of heredity). 14 If there is one mode of evolution which would seem to lend itself to a ^Lamarc^kian intepretation, it is hunman culture. But here one is not dealing with 'biology’ but with 'te^nology’ .I5 Let us re^turn, however, to the question of Nietzsche and memory. As in Freud, Deleuze contends, so in N ie^^he we find a theory of two memories (Deleuze 1983: 115). The first is a.memory specific to the man of resentiment in whom the traces of memory become so indelibly s^mped on his consciousness that he is no longer capable of action (w hi^ requires forgetting). It is not ^roply the case that his only action is reaction; rather, he is unable even to act out reaction since he feels his reaction, it endless (indigestible) in the process. The second is an ‘active memory’ that no longer rests on traces (Deleuze 1983: 112-15). Here memory is no longer simply a function of the past, an inability to let go, but become transformed into an activity of the future, a ‘memory of the future itself’ (ibid.: 134). Reinterpreting the memory of the human, one might suggest, involves tracing an evolution or becoming that has failed to enter contem po^y consciousness in which what one is looking for are the traces of ‘signs’ of the overhuman, and in which a memory of the h^^m would liberate us from our festering wounds, from the contempt and pity we experience in the face of m^ankind. An inquiry into ‘origins’ is thus always an inquiry into future becomings and the becoming of the future. 14 For an excellent study ofheredity andmemory in the context of an analysis of Victorian biology and letters, and a nascent anti-D^winism, see Morton 1984, in whiA the f^ocus is on the likes of Butler, Thomas Hardy, Wallace. 15 As Stephen Jay Gould has ^argued, cul^tural evolution ^ proceed faster by orders of magnitude than biological Aange at its maximal Darwinian rate. Secondly, whereas biological evolution is ‘indirect' and largely D^^^an, cultural evolution is ‘direct', ^translineeal, and ^Lam^arckian. See ‘The Panda’s Th^b in T^inology' in Gould 1991: 65-7.

VIROID LI FE / 26 As Deleuze maintains in his study of Proust, memory works as a ‘tool’ — one not simply subject to a manipulation and exploitation of the human, all too human kind that ^can be placed in the service of an overcoming. The subject ‘of’ memory is nothing other than this self-overcoming. Thus, he contend that the orientation of Proust’s work is not the past and the discoveries of memory, but rather the future and the progress of learning (Deleuze 1973: 25).The philosopher is neither a physicist nor a metaphysician but an E^^tologist, that is, a figure of truth who is devoted to life as a task of learning how to read signs that are necessarily complicated and implicated in equivocal meaning (Deleuze 1973: 9 0 -1 )."This is to dwell in the ‘obscure zone’ of the monstrous. Again, wwhatt is being critiqued here is a pasave model of memory, as if recollection were simply an act of discovering what was already there as a kind of timeless secret or truth (the transcendent illusions of volmtary memory). model pays ins^Sdent attention to the interpretive, inventive, v ir ^ l, and machinic character o f memory and its construction. 16 If froust revives the Platonic equivalence of creating and remembering, he also shows in the process that memory and creation are but . two aspects of the same production — that is, interpreting and deciphering are:' the ‘process of production itself’ (Deleuze 1973: 130). ‘Remembrance’ be conceived as the working through of memory (Dele^K 1994: 14). We repeat the past not smply to work through it, however, but to ^% ^^ge and create beyond (beyond ourselves). The is not to conserve the past but to lighten its load, so as to make it b e ^ b le by m^aking it light. The ‘creative evolution’ p e ^ ^ ^ to memory resides in its ‘destructive’ character. 17 The construction of the future requires the activity of a profound memory, as Deleuze brings out clearly in his study of Foucault, in which he seeks to ill^^ rate how the process of ‘fol^ng’ takes place in terms of a memory, n ^ e ly ; 16 It is on this point that Deleuze connects Proust’s immersion in the ‘being of the past in itself with Bergson’s emj^^is on the virtual character of memory in Matter and MMemory' (Deleuze 1973: 57ff.). On the ‘machinic’ see the chapter entitled ‘Antilogos, or the Literary Machine’ which Dele^re added to the later edition of his Proust book (1973: 93-159). On Proust and Bergson see also Benjamin 1979: 159^0. Benjamin is astute in arguing that the ‘eternity’ to which Proust opens up time is not ‘boundless time' but rather ‘convoluted time’. The heart of Proust’s universe is ‘convolution’ (ibid.: 213). . 17 Benjamin cites a remark by the American psyAologist Theodor Reik: 'Remembrance (Gediichtnis) is essentially conservative, memory (Erinnenmig) is destructive’ (Benjamin 1979: 162). Needless to say the two are mutually implicated in a more complicated process of ‘becoming what one is’.

LOVING THE POISON / 27 the ‘absolute memory’ or memory of the outside, beyond the brief memory inscribed in strata and archives . . . . Memory is the real name of the relation to oneself, of the affect of self by self . . . time as subject, or rather subjectivation, is called memory. Not that brief memory that comes afterwards and is the opposite of forgetting, but the ‘absolute memory’ which doubles the present and the out­ side and is one with forgetting, since it is endlessly forgotten and reconstituted: its fold, in fact, merges with the unfolding because the latter remains present within the former as the thing that is folded. Only forgetting (the unfolding) recovers what is folded in memory (and in the fold itself.) (Deleuze 1988b: 107) If it is ‘habit’ that constitutes the ‘foundation’ of time (Deleuze follows Butler on this point, 1994: 7 5), that is, as that which secures the continuity of life and its survival, then it is ‘memory’ which be posited as the ‘ground’ of time, acting as that which causes the present to pass. Whereas the foundation represents the ‘moving soil’ of ^me, of the passing present, the ground in fact comes from the sky, challenging the proprietorship of becoming by depriving time of an active subject (Deleuze refers to the ‘profound passive synthesis of memory’, 1994: 7 9 ).18 Memory is the ‘fund^ental synthesis’ of time since it constitutes the being of the past (n ^ ely , that which allows the present to pass). 19 The story o f the human provides evidence of both a technics of memory and a technics of forgetting (forge^ing is also subject to molar operations, such as 18 Deleuze argues this position through a rereading of Kant’s teaching on time, in which he main­ tains that ^rgron, far from being the great critic of Kant he considered himself to be, was mu^ closer to himthan he ever realized. In short, Deleuze reads the ‘subjectivity’ not as a property of us ourselves but as belonging to time itself, as ‘the soul or the spirit, the virtual’ (Deleuze 1989a: 82-3). Duration is not subjective in any simple-minded sense, as an illusion of the self. Rather, it is the case that the fold of time resides in its own complex unfolding. Time is not internal to us; we are internal to ‘it'. For Deleuze on Kant see also 1984: preface. For Bergson on Kant see Bergsonl960: esp. 232ff. 19 See Deleuze 1994: 81, on the si^^^cance of Bergson: If Matter and Memory is a great book, it is perhaps because Bergson profoundly explored the domain of the transcendental synthesis of a pure past and discovered all its constitutive paradoxes.’ One of these paradoxes is that the past needs to be co^nstrued not as a dimension of time but as the synthesis ‘of all time’1in whi^ the present and the future constitute the dimensions of time. We ^canot say of the past ‘it was’ but only that it mrists and conrists (Deleuze 1994: 82). Compare Nietzsche 1969: ‘On Redemption’. See also Deleuze 1989a: 78ff. For Bergson see 1990: 133ff., and 1983: ^ 5 : ‘Memory .. . is not a faculty of pu^ttingaway recollections in a drawer, of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no ^^wer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently. . . .In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically.’ For ^rther inaght into the ^aracter of profound passive syntheses of time and memory see Williams 1996: 47-61.

VIROID LI FE / 28 we see in commemorative rituals and social disciplines in which collective remembrance also involves collective amnesia).20 The breeding of memory is a condition of promise-making and gives rise to a control of the future. But there is also present in memory another beCOming. A conception of the memory of humans and promise of the overhuman is possible in which the future is not an event of control or prediction, but in which the technics of memory and of promise-keeping gives way to a supra-technics of invention that always exceeds the desire for control of the future through the imposition of forces of blockage. Nietesche notes that man experiments on himself in ways thait he would never tolerate on ^ m a ls: ‘we me^rrily viVisect our souls out of curiosity’ (Nietesche 1994: III, section 9). This self-experimentation on the part of man does not so much reveal a desire for 'salvation’ (of the soul, for e x ^ p le ), Nietesche notes, as a fascination with the infectious character of h^raan sickness and ^^ering: ‘being i l is instructive, we do not doubt, more ratructive then being well, —people who make us ill seem even more necessary for us today ^than any medicine men and “saviours”’ (Nietesche 1994: III, section 9). '^While ‘hubris’ may well be the distinctive character of our attitude towards nature and machines, such self­ experimentation ultimately takes us beyond ourselves and puts to the test our self-rer^rnties and fixed es^mations of the value and worth of life. The attempt to confront the human being with the ul^mate ^ t h of D ^^m an selection, and then hopelessly to erect on its base a naturalistic ethics ‘fit for man’ , is pernicious since ‘man’ is a dangerous ^animal who has not been subject to its laws, 20 A point well brought out by Marcuse in his discussion of the education of memory and forgetting in Marcuse 1987: 232ff. Forgetting is both an indispensable requirement of mental and phySical health, and the mental faculty that sustains submissiveness and renunciation. In a discussion of Proust’s great novel, Benjamin notes that the rituals of experience with their ceremonies and festivals are quite properly nowhere recalled in Proust’s work (1979: 161). One of the earliest accounts of the power of ‘involun^tary memory’ be found in Ewald Hering’s lecture of 1870, ‘On Memory as a Universal Function of Organized Matter’, an English translation of which appears in Butler 1880, reissued 1922: 63ff.: ‘The word “memory” is often understood as though it meant nothing more than our faculty of intentionally reproducing ideas. . . . But when the figures and events of bygone days rise up again unbidden in our minds, is this not also an act of recollection or memory? We have a perfect right to extend our conception of memory so as to make it embrace involuntary reproductions of sensations, ideas, perceptions, and efforts; but we find on having done so, that we have so far enlarged her boundaries that she proves to be an ultimate and original power, the source, and at the same time the unifying bond, of our whole conscious life’ (68). Hering, as Freud was to do later, utilizes this notion of a powerful unconscious memory to support ^Lamar^’s thesis on the inheritance of acquired ^aracteristics. See also, in this regard, Diderot 1963: 55.

LOVING THE POISON / 29 such as ‘survival of the fittest’ and the competitive struggle for existence, since ‘pre-historic’ times. Nietzsche’s critique of Strauss’s attempt to found a genuine Darwinian ethics remains apposite; namely, that any natural scientist who attempts to derive ethical and intellectual values from the ‘laws of nature’ is guilty of an ‘extreme anthropomorphism’, and, Nietzsche adds, in the spirit of Kant, of an employment of reason that oversteps the bounds of the permitted (Nietzsche 1983: 31). Human history cannot be modelled on natural history, since its mecha­ nisms of selection have always been ^matural. It is thus risible of Baudrillard to lament the new forces of artificial evolution in which he only iden^fy the desire of a species to remove itself from the laws of natural selection (one should, how­ ever, consult the context in which Baudrillard provokes this claim) (Baudrillard 1994: 84). H^man becoming has always involved a reliance on art and artifices of self-preservation and self-enhancement. 21 There is no natural h a^ on y or balance with nature to be striven for, only non-equilibrial self-overco^^g, with the ‘genius of the species overflowing from all cornucopias of good and bad’, and in which the -highest desires’ get ‘gruesomely entangled’ (Nietasche 1966: section 262). Is it a case o f nature sele^cting technics or o f technics sele^cting ‘nature’?Today, palaeoanthropologists speak of our accelerated ‘evolution’ taking place in terms of a series of positive feedback loops between ‘l^earned behaviour’ and biology in which the main feature of evolution is its ‘techno-organic’ nature (Schick and Toth 1993: 316). Leroi-Gourhan’s meditations on the distinctive features of h^man evolution pointed to the fact that man accesses technology but then technology becomes the criterion of selection: the evolution of an erect posture, a short face, a free hand for locomotion, the absence of fangs, a l lend themselves 21 One of the few issues on which Darwin and Wallace, the other major inventor of the ‘laws’ of natural selection, differed was over the problem of mankind. Wallace argued that through tools and techniques mankind has ‘taken away from nature that power of slowly but permanently changing the external form and structure in accordance with changes in the external world’. Wallace even went so far as to claim that ‘all force is will-force’, and adopted a philosophy of life in which the universe exhibits ‘intelligence and will-power* (1891: 175ff.). In his most recent untimely meditation, Baudrillard develops a more incisive appreciation of human selection and refers, in fact, to the debate betw^n D^^in and Wallace (1996: 56-7): ‘The human race has already gone beyond its potential. Excess of potential intelligence. . . . If the law of natural selection were true, our brains would have to shrink, for their capacities exceed all natural pu^^ses and endanger the species. This is the same question Darwin and Wallace debated, the latter resolving it by the intervention of God. . . . But if God is responsible for this biological extravagance, then he is in collusion with the spirit of Evil, whose specific peculiarity is to drive the universe to exce^. Are there not signs of the abe^rrancy of the divine will in the cat^frophic of man?'

VIROID LI FE / 30 to the use of artificial organs and implements (Leroi-G ourhan 1993: 9). Thus, the uniquely organized mammalian body of the human ‘is enclosed and extended by a social body whose properties are such that zoology no longer plays any part in its material development’ (ibid.: 2 1 ). The history of technics involves a post-evolutionary ‘evolution’: ‘Our tech­ niques, which have been an extension of our bodies since the first Australanthropian made the first chopper, have reenacted at dizzying speed the events of millions of years of geological evolution until, today, wealready make an artificial nervous system and an electronic intelligence’ (ibid.: 173). The history of human memory is graphic in both senses of the word: the first involves an inscription of the body as ^^pMcally depicted by Nietas^e; the other, still genealOgical, is to do with the invention of writing techniques: ‘The first genealogies were written at the precise moment when social hierachization began to itself’ (ibid.: 179). Early instruments from the Upper Palaeolithic are symbolic instruments designed as a reckoning tool which very rapidly turned into an in^^rnent of historical memory. We ask: what kind of a reckoning tool, in the service of a differential ‘historical’ memory, is Nietesche’s ‘genealogy of morals’? Leroi-Gourhan drew a decisive conclusion from his analyses: ‘The whole of our evolution has been oriented toward placing outside ourselves what in the rert of the ^animal -world is achieved inside by species adaptation’ (ibid.: 235).The freeing of tools, and a freeing of the word through the ability to transfer our memory to a social organism outside ourselves, are both essential aspects of tec^ucal invention of ‘man’. However, it would be a parochialism to suggest that technics must be limited to humans, since technical action is found in invertebrates. The main difference lies in the extent to which the h^^m being has exteriorized its memory in ma^unes and apparatuses of all kinds. Our ‘organs’ are extraneous to us —the plough, the windmill, and the sailing ship be viewed as ‘biolOgical’ mutations ‘ of that external organism which, in the human, substitutes itself for the phyaological body’ (ibid.: 246). Thus, the si^gnifi^nt genetic trait of the h ^ a n is ‘phyacal (and mental) nonadaptation’ (ibid.). Evolution has now entered a new phase with the exteriorization of the human brain, so that ‘the distance between ourselves —the descendants of reindeer hunters —and the intelligent machines we have created is greater than ever’ (ibid.: 252). The question then arises of our physical compatibility with the artificial environment we now i^tabit. Is the h ^ a n now compelled to withdraw into the palaeontological ^ ^ ^ h t with the rise of the machine? The environment is an ^artificial world.There be no re^turn to a naive nature, and attempts to establish ‘once and for all’ a natural order or balance on which to

LOVING THE POISON / 31 base an ethics or politics of technology is utterly foolish. There is only the excess of technics. This is why one must question the wisdom of Leroi-Gourhan’s own final conclusion, in which he invited his readers to envisage a h^man of the near future who wills to remain sapiens: ‘we must stop miming the behaviour of a microbic culture and come to grips with the management of our planet in terms other than those of of a game of chance . . . . Our species is still too closely bound to its origins not to strive spontaneously for the balance that made it h^man in the first place’ (ibid.: 408) . The appeal to an originary ‘balance' as a constitutive future of the h^nan being enjoys no more than a mythical status. ^foere Nietasche lays stress on the ‘internal’ aspects of human evolution, such as the creation of a ‘soul’, Leroi-Gourhan’s analysis would appear to single out the ‘extem ^ration’ of memory and of organs as the distinctive feature of the h^nan. However Nietzsche is perceptive in showing that the extem ^ration of h ^ a n memory and organs through the supplement of technics serves only to complicate ^^foer the si^gnifi^mce of human in te^ ^ ^ tio n , so that it becomes possible to see in h ^ a n involvement with machines and technics an expression and an inte^ensification of human becoming-sick. Te^nics is driven by an evolutio^ffy force that places it outside h^nan control and regulation. But the idea that h ^ n ^ are outstripped by their te^nology is commonplace, and ^ ^ e n t celebrations of evolution getting ‘out of control’ offer little more than platitudes lac^king in historical acuity (see Winner 1 9 n ). A biology of te^nics is as ‘metaphyacal’ as a biology of nature. Thcre is only a technics of m^^ind and of nature that demands a critical and supra-moral reading. The ^task is to render the concepts of soul, life, value, and memory genealogical in Nietzsche’s (uncommon) sense, not metaphysical, which requires, in part, removing them from the techno-sciences and their complicity with a metaphysical h^anism . This is tan^mount to losing humans in the act of finding them. H ^ ^ ^ are forgotten in the praxis of making a memory of them.22 In contemporary discourse the question concerning the ma^tine is being posed in unequlv^^ linear terms as that w h i^ comes after and supersedes the h^^rn. At present we witness a revival of the ‘cosmic ev o lu tio ^ ^ ’ associated with the dubious spiritutualism of le ^ ^ r f de C h a r^ , in which machine intelligence is co^^ rad in terms of a global cerebralization that leads ‘inexorably to the emergence of the “noospheric brain'" (Stonier 1992: 190). "^^at is &^^^ing about this revival of co^ u c evolutiomnism is the attempt to eexplaln the aleged phase-space tr^^tion in ‘intelligent’ evolution in biological terms, w hi^ ^results 22 Compare Derrida on the necessity of reinven^ting invention (1992 : 339).

VIROID LI FE / 32 in gross anthropomorphisms. Evolution, we are told, has been ‘searching’ the planet to find ways of ‘speeding itself up’, not because it is anthropomorphic but because ‘the speeding up of adaptation is the runaway circuit it rides on’ (Kelly 1994: 361). The excess of contingent evolution in the domain of technology is treated as if it revealed a necessary and conscious ‘desire’ on the part of evolution (it ‘wants’ to become metal). Kelly speaks of ‘what evolution really wants’ as if evolution wanted anything. In the follo'^ing claim the entire process of culture and society is made subject to a purely biological reading, in which questions of teleology and technics — understood in Kant’s sense23 — are treated as purely determinant judgements: ‘life, having evolved a being that internalizes the process of ra^ral selection, has finally transcended that process’ (Stock 1993: 215). Not only is this statement guilty of what Nietesche called ‘anthropocentric naivety’, but it naively depoliticizes questions of evolution. ‘Through Metaman’ (the n ^ e given to the new global super-org^^ra), we are told, ‘trial and error are giving way to conscious design. Thus, the future will be ever more directed by the present’ (ibid.). From a ‘Nietzschean’ perspective, in the sense in which the term possesses ‘m^^ing’, recent reports on the transh^an condition ironic^y amomt to an ^anulmnent of that condition, to an erasure of the ‘memory’ of man out of w h i^ the promise of the overman be thought. A recent popular account of ‘post- biological man’, for e x ^ p le , treats the h ^ a n condition as an affiction which shouldn’t happen to a dog. H ^ n ^ , we are told, are beings with ‘cheap bodies’ subject to disease and disability, with ‘erratic emotions’ and ‘feeble mentalities’, and ‘battlegrounds of w^^mg impulses, drives, and emotions’ , with only a limited capacity for memory and intelligence (Regis 1992: 145).24 All that which 23 In his critique of teleological judgement Kant seeks to legitimize a ‘te^nical’ understanding of nature in terms of the reflective judgement whiA enjoys a purely regulative status. To treat nature as a system of ‘technics’ is to consider it as operating intelligently —as opposed to functioning as a blind mechanism —but not to credit it with acting ‘designedly’, which would be tantamount to basing teleology on a constitutive principle. See Kant 1982: introduction. Nie^tzsche’s justification of the notion of will-to-power in Beyond Good and Evil in terms of the ‘conscience of method’ comes close to Kant’s position (1966: section 36). 24 It should be noted that there is northing particularly of ‘now' about Regis’s depiction of the transhuman condition. In the 1960s Arthur C. Clarke speculated on the ‘progress’ of evolution ‘from a biological level to a technological one’, and, like Regis, even cited Nietzsche on man as the rope stretched between animal and superman to lend some philosophical 'authority’ to his claims (Clarke 1964: 212-27). See also, in this regard, McHale’s The Future i f the Future (1969).

LOVING THE POISON / 33 Nietzsche regarded as providing fertile soil for an immanent process of continual self-overcoming is here treated as a condition that is to be escaped from. The trans­ human condition has become transformed into a classic expression of an ancient ideal - the ascetic idealY As Hans Moravec, one of the chief engineers of this profoundly un-Nietzschean vision of the transhuman condition, has openly confessed, this is ‘a sort of a Christian fantasy’ in ‘how to become pure spirit’ (ibid.: 176). Indeed, this llight into ‘machine intelligence’ resembi es a hi-tech Hegelian­ ism much more than it does the inhuman futures envisaged by Nietesche. 26 Downloading the brain into a computer, in order to attain the transhuman condition (read: to become ‘immortal’), would involve ‘losing the body’ and all that goes with it: ‘the world, flesh’, and, most revealing of all, ‘the devil’ (ibid.: 5). The gains would be ‘freedom from physical constraints, faster ^^^ing speed, a bigger memory’. Why is the a ^ ^ ^ e n t o f the ‘faster’ and the ‘bigger’ to be regarded as a gain? Is it simply a question of adaptation to a technological environ­ ment (the danger here is that of naturalizing such a process of adaptation)? As Heidegger noted, with reference to the da^wning of the age of information (‘IT ’), one must hear the ‘basic words’ for capturing the demeanour of contemporary existence with an A m erica pronunciation. Only young Americas are able to attain the realm of the superfi^al out of superficiality. in point of fact, however, we do the fantasy of cyberspace too much honour in de^fining it as the latest expression of the ascetic ideal since it does not even wish to work through its own paradoxical and paralogical concepts; it ^mply begs for belief and wants believers. 27 A new fiction (who’s te^ng lies? ooh visionary!) is being promulgated within so-called ‘posth^nan’ postmodernity (to coin an ugly p^hrae for an ugly phenomenon). It is contended, by people who should know better, in d u in g the cyber-gurus of our deranged times, that with the emergence of a biotechnological 25 See NietzsAe 1994: III, section 28: ‘It is absolutely impossible for us to conceal what was actually expressed by that whole willing, whid was given its direction by the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animalistic, even more of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself . . . longing to get away from appearance, transience, growth, death, wishing, lounging itself. 26 On the rise of ‘hi-teA Hegelianism' see Stallabrass 1995: 3-33. 27 See Jameson (1995: 28-9), who, in reference to current collective fantasies of DNA recombi­ nation through the artificial hybridization of ‘domesticated' species —the word ‘domestication' says little given that h^^^ have dom^esticated not only themselves but the entire planet — perspicaciously of ‘our quad-re^^u longing for social ^^^bs^tiation into another flesh rad another reality'. On readmg muA of what passes for the posth^rn condition amounts to nothing more the inevitable mutations of a repressed history.

VIROID LIFE / 34 vitalism, the rise of artificial life-forms and intelligences, and developments in genetic engineering, we are now moving into a historical future in which life will exist ‘beyond’ natural selection. Baudrillard, for example, who does know better, has argued that as a result of its conquest of mortality the human race is now putting an end to natural selection (that which guarantees the death of each species ‘in accordance with the laws of evolution’). He writes: In ending evolution (of all species including his own), he is contravening the symbolic rule and hence truly deserves to disappear . . . in his arrogant desire to end evolution, man is ushering in involution and the revival of inhuman, biogenetic fonns. (Baudrillard 1994: 84) He even contemplates the idea that it may be evolution’s own destiny to create for itself a species that escapes its o-wn ‘laws’ of selection, chiefly death. However, while I find myself sympa^^rng with many of the sentiments which inform fou^U ard’s appraisal of new developments in genetic engineering —let us hope, he says, that a random universe smash the glass co^ b which posthumanity is building for itself, so rescuing us from the facile scientific euphoria that is being sustained by drip-feed —at the same ^me I want to take issue with his that only now with the rise o f new computerized technologies and new forms of engi­ neering is m^ankind leaving behind and learning to live beyond natural selection. is a far too historical reading of the perversity of the human. As Nietzsche never tired of insisting, evolution, human and non-h^nan, has never been solely about ^ v iv a l or preservation (only ‘mediocre Englishmen’ such as D ^^m , Herbert Spencer, and John S^tuart believed this); rather, ‘evolution’ — and h^^an evolution has always enjoyed an originary involution (^w is the me^aning of its o f the ^ t h ) —is about the spontaneous and expansive growth of gratuitous desire. In the case of the human a^mal the ‘law of selection’ crowed some time ago. Bau<^rilard goes badly -wong when he suggests that as soon as the h^nan is no longer defined in the terms of ‘freedom’ and ‘transcendence’ , but solely in terms of ‘genes’ , then the detrition of the human, and hence that of h ^ n^^m , is ‘wiped away’ (ibid.: 97). On the con^ary, freedom and ^^^rendence have always involved the experimentation of sublimely inhuman practices (also consisting of tremendous humaneness). It is gene-ism, in fact, that rests on a ^preme h ^ n ^ ^ m , just as Nazi eugenics amounted to a Vollendung of ra"^cisstic ^vrents within European h ^ rc^ sm . There is no^^^ ‘inhuman’ about a Nazi. fou^^W d is correct in my view, however, to insist that this quert for complete omnipotence and t:\le ‘gluing’ of control over evolution through biological

LOVING THE POISON / 35 manipulation —this lazy mode of thinking simply fails to appreciate that ‘evolution’ is nothing other than an ‘invention’ of man —amounts to a caricature of the trans­ valuation of values (Baudrillard 1994: 94). This desire for the ‘beyond’ of man no longer assumes the form of the old religion but remains entirely wi^thin the h^man, ‘humanity reaching beyond its own condition, achieving a transcendence which arises out of its own capacities —an illusion perhaps, but a superior illusion’ (ibid.). In the face o f this clean and tidy conception o f the transhuman, which reeks of antiseptic post-humanism, it becomes necessary to advocate once again Nietzsche’s philosophy of the future conceived as a complex teaching of ‘evil’ . ‘Man’ , Baudrillard writes, ‘is the scorpion.’ ^Wht binds living ^ings together is not ‘ecological, biospherical solidarity’, a homoeostatic equilibrium that is another term for death. Rather, in liberating the good we also liberate the evil, and it is their inseparability that constitutes ‘our true equilibrium’ and balance (ibid.: 82) (see also Baudrillard 1996: 78 and 139). Rather ^than reconciling ourselves to nature we need to reco^ ^ e that promising futures reside only in the afrm ation of a malificent ecology: ‘Good and evil •. . should be weapons and ringing symbols that life must overcome itself again arid again! . . . the greatest evil belongs with the greatest good: this, however, is the creative good’ (Nietzsche 1969: 125, 139). Or, as Baudrillard points out, nature is made up not simply of well-adjusted and h^monious, stable ecosystems; it also includes germs, viruses, bacteria, chaos, and 78 scorpions. For Nietesche the only condition to be ‘perfected’ is '^^en he speaks of the ‘arrival’ of ^hi^lism — a wisdom which comes from an ancient time — in terms of a ‘pathological transitional stage’, not only is it important to ‘h ^ ’ the reference to Ubagang in formulation; it is equally important to remember that the tr ^ itio n is without end. To acclaim the arrival of postbiological m^^ind is not to ^mounce the ‘end of ^^ ^ ind ’ but to re^turn us to the ‘real problem’ regarding m^^ind, since the problem has never been a biological one. ^This is the filthy lesson of Nie^rche’s ‘genealogy of moraIs’ . is a ‘genealogy’ that only 28 This is in the context of a dis^scuson of the ‘Biosphere 2' project, whiA Baudrillard points out is notable for its exclusion of suA phenomena from its ^artificial re-creation of nature. But as he also astutely notes, the project is not an experiment but an ‘experimental attraction’ along the lines of Disneyland (1994: 85-6). The ‘Bio 2 project is treated at length in Kevin Kelly’s Out 1" Control (1994: 15Of.) as a ‘fine example of ecoteA, the symbiosis of nature and teAnology’ (162). For Kelly the ‘lesson’ to be learned from the 'expe^ment’ of the project is that 'Ufe is the ultimate teAnol^ogy (165). Such a baldly stated declaration amounts to a relation since what Kelly is referring to is not ‘life’ at al —ce^^ly not viroid life as we know it —but a particular form of technologically engineered life motivated by specific humanist fantasies.

VIROID LI FE / 36 promise inhuman futures to the extent that a monstrous memory of humans is perpetually cultivated and overcome. To speak of the memory ‘o f’ man is to speak double, of the memory which belongs to man as constitutive of his being, and of the human becoming which belongs to a memory which may not be its, but which heralds something other and ‘over’. If ‘all forgetting is a reification’ (Adorno), the reification we have identified in accounts of the transhuman condition consists in a forgetting of ‘man’ —not of his ‘identity’ but of the ‘diference’ in his making. I suppose the question that remains now is are we wanting too much in this genealogical remembrance of humans —and of the overh^nan?

2 T O W A R D S O n t h e T H E a r t O V E R H U M A N a n d N i e t z s c h e ’s a r t i f i c e o f s e l e c t i o n In this book you will discover a ‘subterranean man’ at work, one who tunnels, mines, and undermines. . . .Does it not seem as though some faith were leading him on, some consola­ tion offering some compensation? As though he perhaps desires this prolonged obscurity, desires to be incomprehensible, concealed, enigmatic, because he knows that he will thereby also acquire: his own morning, his own redemption, his own daybreak? . . . He will return, that is certain . . . as soon as he has ‘become man’ again. (Nietzsche 1982: preface) As always, it costs me the greatest effort to come to a decision to accept life. I have mud ahead of me, upon me, behind me. . . . Forward my dear Lou, and upward! (Nietzsde, letter to Lou Salome 8 September 1882) Ja! Dber clas Dasein hinla'!fen! Das ist es! Das ware es! (Nietzsche 1974: section 60) O F VISION S, R ID D L E S, AND A SC E T IC IDEALS It would seem abund^dy c l ^ that the notion of the ove^^m is a deeply problematic one, d o tting uncomfortably in Nie^^&e’s 'work when placed beside his critical exposition of the mea^ng of ascetic ideals (ideals of escape). If God is dead, if all gods should now be laid to rest, and if we are to venture forth to explore ^ ^ an t lands across exp^ ansve new ^ seas, is it credible for Nietesche to invent the of ^Zarath^ustra as his companion in order to te a ^ that God is dead and the ove^^m should now be the sole m^^eaning and p^urpose of the earth? Is the o v ^ ^ ^ , in an act of incomplete simply to occupy the

VIROID LI FE / 38 vacant residence of God? One solution to the problem, adopted by a number of commentators in recent years, is to abandon the notion altogether and discount it for its lack of coherence as a futural ideal. It has been contended that it is necessary to read the story of Zarathustra’s Untergang (to the land of the human) in terms of a narration in which the initial teaching of the book —that of the over­ man — is progressively and decisively abandoned in favour of the teaching of eternal return. Laurence Lampert, for example, is opposed to any rea^mg which would place the overman (he prefers the translation ‘superman') at the centre of Nietasche’s teaching since this, he argues, would be to impose on the story of Zarathustra’s ‘descent’ a notion of the eschatological ^ ^ ^ e n t of time that is out of sync with the deepest core of Nietasche’s critique of metaphysics. Nietzs^e’s prefiguration, in the denouement to the second essay of the Genealo8.Y i f Morality, of ‘the one who must come one day’, shows a l the h^alarks of a theological day of judgement, but one from which the beau^W (not sub^ne) teaching of the eternal return liberates us (^Lampert 1987: 258). Similarly, Daniel Conway has argued that the proclamation of the ^ ^ ^ e n t rnival of the reign of the ove^^m in passages of Nietzsche betrays a ^^^stic commitment to the deficiency of the human condition and is a perfect illustration of the ascetic ideal which entropically reduces the desiring-becoming of life to the one goal (Conway 1989: 212). Finally, Robert Pippin has argued, following Heidegger’s lead, that the demand to create the overman is motivated, like the ideals of ^Christian-moral culture, by a revenge against time and a resentment towards reality (Pippin 1988: 55). Furthermore, is it not the case that the notion of the ove^^m disappears from Nietasche’s •writing after the publication of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, making only a brief and inconsequential appearance in section 4 of The Anti-Christ? Is nothing easier, therefore, ^than to reco^rae the ov e^ an as a paradoxical and incoherent fantasy which Nietzsche himself never took seriously? Elsewhere I haveve sought to show that the notion of the overman is inseparable from the experience of Untergang contained in the eternal return ^ c e it is the thought-experiment of the latter which is able to disclose the experience of time out of which ‘we’ are to become those ‘who we are’ , the ones who are new, unique, and incomparable, e^^ing and creating beyond the m ^^ffe o f i^an (Nie^^foe 1974: section 335) (Ansell Pearson 1992 : 309-33). “^^en rituated in the riddle of re^turn, the vision of the overman becomes ^^wformed into a conception imposable to conceive either along fantastical lines of superh^^m stre^ngth or in spatial te^ra as that which ^mply comes ‘after’ man; rather, the w^roan is born in acts of repetition, in which repetition constitutes an original ^creation (an ^maculate conception), o^ing eve^^^ug to the past but gi^ving itself completely at the same time only to

TOWARDS THE OVERHUMAN I 39 the future. The overman remains faithful to the earth, that is, to man’s promise. One can only restore man to time if one is situated outside or beyond him. But the question, as we shall see, is precisely how one is to get ‘over’ there. It ^ ^ o t be simply a question of explicating ascetic ideals; rather, the task is to reveal one’s implication in them. The journey of the overman becoming ‘man’ again consists in revealing the meaning of ascetic ideals. He will ‘return’ once he has become man again (and again). in the middle of the 1880s, a decade of breaks and breakdowns, it dawned on Nietesche that, owing to the deformed c^^acter of modern humans, it would be the fate of his philosophy beyond good and evil to be a philosophy ‘of’ the future. He would find himself forever on the way ‘towards’ the overman, and so would his readers. He designed his writings as an exemplification of this way, of the sufering, torment, torture and cruelty experienced in following it. One does not explore the paradoxical and the paralogical —part of the meaning of the ascetic ideal — without becoming paradoxical and paralogical ‘in return’. Nietesche openly wants to know whether his traversing of the ‘way’, and his execution of the task, is merely the reflection of a personal odyssey or whether it contains a more universal si^gnificance. in what follows I want to show, largely through a consideration of the year of Nietzsche’s ‘daybreak’ in 1886, the year in which Nietzsche added new prefaces to editions of his texts, that readings which urge us to abandon the notion of the overman as a contradictory and incoherent ideal rest on a deep misunderstanding of the import of his exploration of the meaning of the ascetic ideal. To abandon the notion of the overman is to give up on reading Nietzsche ‘well’. For readers of Nietesche, and inheritors of the self-overcoming of morality, it is necessary to recognize that there is no escaping the fate of the h^nan and its sufering. Only buffoons ‘man’ can be leaped over, and today we find ourselves s^rounded by them on all ades. It is the bufoons who have hijacked the idea of the tra^nsh^nan condition. O F TH E ENIGMA OF LIBERATION The identity of the ‘we’ in Nietzsche ^ ^ m es vvarious guises in the prefaces he ^rote to the new editions of his books pub^lishd between 1886 and 1887. They are d^escribed at ■various ^mes as the ‘^ ^ roers’ , as the ‘self-overcomers of morality’, as the Europ^eans’, as the spirits’ , and as ‘tragic p^^mists’. On one level, the question of the ‘we’ in Nie^rche refers to those who ‘read’

VIROID LI FE I 40 ^ m , who will read him well (that is, slowly), and so constitute, in an unrealizable sense, his authorship. These are the ones who know how to practise ‘the art of intepretation' (Kunst der Auslegung), not only by reading the signs of ascending and descending life, but also by knowing how to give those signs ‘meaning’ (Nietzsche 1994: preface, section 7). But the journey to and beyond Nietasche will be a perilous one. The opening sentence of the preface to the first volume of H um an, All Too H um an, written in Nice in the spring of 1886, begins by announcing a series of wa^rnings to Nietasche’s future readers: I have been told often enough, and always with an expression o f great surprise, that all my writings, from the Birth o f Tragedy to the most recently published Prelude to a Philosophy o f the Future, have something that distinguishes and unites them together: they all of them, I have been given to understand, contain snares and nets for unwary birds and in effect a persistent invitation to the over­ turning of habitual evaluations and valued habits. What? Everything only —human, all too human? (Nietzsche 1986: preface, section I) This passage would be read too quickly if one supposed that Nietzsche here is spe^aking only of the net and snare of the human, all too human: there is also the net and snare of the overhuman, all too overh^nan, which is why he is referring not solely to ‘eve^^ting only h^^m , all too human’. The ‘invitation’ to over^turn a l previous valuations and ideals asks for more than a simple inversion and reversal. Nietasche goes on to describe his writings as a schooling in suspicion, in contempt, in courage, and in audacity. It seeks courage to question the land of morality, since morality would prefer us not to question. But, paradoxically, the ‘critique’ of morality only be performed ‘“out i f ” morality’, for the simple reason that immorality also places a closure on questio^ng (Nietesche 1982: preface, section 4 ) . Immorality deceives itself in ^^^ing that it has gone beyond the question. No wonder NietasAe tells us that all his ^^^ing may not only be a consolation but also a ‘deception’. ’This, he says, is to speak ‘u n m o r a l extramorally, "beyond good and evil”’. Nietesche writes in ‘solitude’ not by Aoice but by necessity since his time is not yet; he still wanders. As a critic of the idols of the present age one easily feels oneself alone and isolated. Out of this isolation one artificially invents for oneself a fiction or two. ’This is the paradoxical practice of an ‘artificial art’ (kiinstliche Kunst). On one level, therefore, the ideal of the overman is one such fiction, a fiction w hi^ Nietesche devises as his consolation in the face of the world-weary, retired sickness of man and his re^^ra. On another level, however, the overman is much ‘more’ ^than an ideal born out of

TOWARDS THE OVERHUMAN / 41 asceticism and suffering: it is also the excessive invention of an overflowing abundant, newly discovered, newly redeemed, great health. That one cannot simply choose between these two aspects is the profound message of Nietzsche’s daybreak contained in the 1886 prefaces. His art of selection is always an 'artifice’ and, as such, it can be continually reinvented and rethought. Indeed, of what concern is it that today Herr Nietzsche has become well again? The ‘free spirits ’ Nietzsche appeals to in his ’writings are a fictional product of his imagination which he needed to invent for himself so as not to feel alone in his difficult task of teaching man how to go beyond himself by going down to himself. The free spirits do not actually exist; all one do is to describe their ‘coming’ and seek to lay down in advance ‘under what vicissitudes, upon what paths’ it is possible to see them ‘coming’ (ibid.: preface, section 2). ’^ s is to speak of a ‘decisive experience’ of a ‘great liberation’. The liberator discovers that hitherto it has been chained and fettered not only to the past but to its most supreme moments. As a result there necessarily arises a terror and suspicion in the face of what it had loved, producing: a rebellious, arbitrary, volcanically erupting desire for travel, strange places, estrangements, coldness, soberness, a hatred of love, perhaps a descecrating blow and glance backwarcls to where it formerly loved . . . perhaps a hot blush of shame at what it just done and at the same time an exultation that it has done it, a drunken, inwardly exultant shudder which betrays that a victory has been won - a victory? over what? over whom? an enigmatic question-packed, questionable victory . . . such bad and painful things are part of the history of the great liberation. (ibid.: preface, section 3) Even in his desire to overcome himself, to free himself from the bondage not only of the past but of his o ^ self, the liberated prisoner who engages in ‘wild experiments’ and singularities’ expresses a kind of sickness. In learning the ‘truth’ that all values be ^turned around, that good is evil, and that God is only an invention of the Devil, the emancipated h^nan being becomes on his ^•ioaty and wicked laughter. Initially, and perhaps for a not inconsiderable duration of time, such a spirit who strives to be free will experience the icy breath of solitude, even the ^risk of madness on the road to the achievement of superabundant health. Along the way ‘from’ man ‘to’ overman long periods of conval^ence are undergone in which the free spirit comes to see himself for the firrt ^me (ibid.: 4 and 5). The ove^ur^ug and inverting of values and all previous ideals is only an initial step on the way, one which must not be taken at face value since it contains a grrat deception. Ultimately such over^^aing and inversinn have to be put to the ‘^test’ :

VI R O I D LI FE / 42 From this morbid isolation, from the desert of these years oftemptation and experiment, it is still a long road to that tremendous overflowing certainty and health which may not dispense even with wickedness, as a means and fish-hook of knowledge, to that mature freedom of spirit which . . . permits access to many and contradictory modes of thought. (ibid.: preface, section 4) The eni^rca of liberation involves a process of ‘self-mastery’ in which one conquers not only one’s virtues but also one’s own overcomings. This requires a training in perspectivism: You shall learn to grasp the sense of perspective in every value judgement —the displacement, distortion, and merely apparent teleology of horizons and whatever else pertains to perspectivism ■ . . . You shall le^™ to graps the nectary injustice in every For and Against, injustice as inseparable from ^e, life itself as conditioned by the sense of perspective and injustice. (ibid.: preface, section 6) One wants ‘more’ ^than the perspective, but even desire for more is only a perspective, a judgement of a Crated horizon of being only from the perspective of the total horizon, a horizon one the selection, to be for or never at^in (death). In invi^ting us to make the perspective of eternal re^turn, to be ^ ^ g e d or ^^shed by it, N ietzs^e is not invi^ting us to engage in a blind ^ r a a t io n of forces, but rather deman^mg that we the neces^sary injustice of our willing, which is to be more ^than h^man and to be human again. The question of ththeir ‘active’ or ‘reactive’ nature is not suspended, but simply becomes superfluous, with the result that one ‘lives no longer in the fetters of love and hatred, without yes, without no, n ^ or as far as one wishes,’ (ibid.: preface, section 4). Health of the productive ^md is to be prescribed only in smal doses since too m u ^ sickness is a good O '.e is to ‘remain sick for a long time, and then, slowly, slowly, to become healthy, by which I “healthier”,’ (ibid.: preface, section 5). One has l^earned to say yes to one’s ‘yes’ and one’s ‘no’ . Who ^shal judge? Deleuze proposed a major ^novation by repla^cing the naivety of question with another, not ‘what’ is jud^ging, but ‘w hi^ one’ is jud^ng? In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze ^akes cen ta l to an active, A m a tiv e , antiHegelian mode of philosophy par excellence the do^rine of eternal re^turn, proposing it as an ‘ethical and selective thought’ . His r e a ^ g of its vision and riddle is immensely complicated and convoluted, and it pays to return repeatedly to it. A consideration o f Deleuze’s reading should serve to show ‘what’ is at stake in the question of the art and ^artifice of Nie^tzsche’s selection. Deleuze is badly read if it is thought that his construction of the expe^ment of re^turn ^mply closes

TOWARDS THE OVERHUMAN / 43 down the question of judgement. ^While not at all times altogether clear or coherent, showing moments of real blindness, ultimately Deleuze’s reading of the doctrine of return is able to show how it is possible, through ultimate affirmation, to move beyond judgement through judgement. Deleuze reads Nietzsche’s philosophy as effecting the realization of ‘total critique’ in the form of a ‘critical reversal’. It does this by directing attention to genealogy as a philosophy of values, in which the problem of critique becomes one of dete^^^mg the value of values, that is, the evaluation from which values arise and so the problem of their creation. Deleuze would seem to pre-empt the exercise of genealogy as critique, however, at the very outset, since he simply asserts that critique is not the ‘re-action of re-ssentiment’, but the active expres­ sion of an active mode of existence (Deleuze 1983: 3). The question of the ‘becoming’ of critique is not allowed or addressed here. Deleuze devotes a chapter to ‘Nietesche’s evolution’, but, ironi^cal the reading he develops in the opening of the book deprives Nietesche of any ‘serious’ becoming. "This is why the intro­ duction of the thought of eternal return in the unfolding of- his reading becomes so Deleuze places the notion of ‘forces’ at the heart-of his appreciation of Nietzschean critique. in deciding whether values and ideals reflect ascending or descending modes of life attention needs to be focussed not on isolated or reined persons and ^things but on the forces which constitute them, n ^ ely , active or reactive. argument, however, is not a straightfoward one, since he does not want to posit a simple bifurcation of forces. Under his construction, for example, the eternal re^turn does not simply negate or cancel out the power of the reactive, but rather ensures that the reactive comes back but as active. The issue, however, is how their ‘selection’ is to be designed and ^artificed. An organism be understood as a play of forces. The important point Deleuze makes is that forces, including reactive ones (such as ‘consciousness’, ‘memory’, ‘habit’, ‘adaptation’, ‘nutrition’, ‘reproduction’, etc.) (ibid.: 41), are precisely that —forces and not merely mechanical means or ends. As such, they are capable of becoming: ‘each time we point out the nobility of action and its superiority to reaction in ■way we must not forget that redaction also designates a ^pe of force’ (ibid.: 42). In seeking to ‘judge’ the becoming of forces, Deleuze appeals to Nietesche’s ‘art o f interpretation’ (a ‘^ f f i ^ t art’, he notes), ^re^ting of the need for a ‘concrete phyara’ over an abstract one, so that it becomes possible to decide whether the forces that ‘prevail’ are inferior or superior, reactive or active (ibid.: 58). So, how are we to ‘decide’? Deleuze notes that one ^canot appeal to the state of a system of forces as it is, or the result of the ^ ^ ^ l e between forces, in order to determine which are active and which

VIROID LI FE / 44 are reactive. If one looks at humans now, for example, one will have to conclude, ‘contra Da^rwin’ , that the thesis on the survival of the ‘fittest’ is wrong since in this case, the case of mankind, it is precisely the weak and distressed who have survived and flourished (ibid.).' Hence ‘evolution’ establishes nothing. So where is one to look? Deleuze’s answer is that one looks not to the facts of history but to the inter­ pretation of qualities of difference. In contrast to the merely ‘free thinker , whose humanism and positivism bind him to the human, all too human, the free spirit is able to judge forces ‘from the standpoint of their origin and quality’ (ibid.: 60). But is this to at all ‘genealogically’? Deleuze would seem to go astray at this point since the question of ‘quality’ gets reduced to a matter of ‘origins’ (which has little to do with ‘becoming’), co^mmitting in the process the so-called genetic fallacy. As Nietzsche notes, uncovering the origins of values is not to begin the task of deter^^img their value, but is merely to arouse our suspicion about them and their alleged noble descent (Nietasche 1968: section 258). Deleuze demands an ultimate selection and believes that it is the doctrine of eterrnal return that provide with one once it is conceived as a selective experiment guaranteeing only the becoming of the active. But what his reading of return demonstrates is that its ^ ^tag goes beyond the need which gives rise and out for a selection. The eterrnal return implements only becoming, neither beco^^^-active nor becoming-reactive (this kind of ‘absolute knowledge’ about becoming is denied in the thought-experiment’s ^^roation). Deleuze notes Nietasche’s fas^ation with the reactive, even noting that there is some^ing admirable and dangerous about the ‘becoming-reactive of forces’ (ibid.: 66). Thus, while reactive forces do not take us to the what we but insist on separating us from do, they also bring with them ‘new feefogs’ and teach ‘new ways of being afected’. But then, as Deleuze notes, it ^canot be the same force which both separates me from what I do and at the same time endows me with a new power, the power of becoming. It is at this point in the unfolding of his presentation, when the eternal return gets hooked up to beco^ming as ch^ge and ^transformation, that we perhaps best locate the import and importance of his cons^trual of the experiment of the eternal return. Eternal return is deemed a ‘selective’ thought on Deleuze’s reading in that, firrtly, it grants the will a practical rule, and secondly, it effects a synthesis of being as becoming, repeating: ‘whatever you will, it in a way that you also 1 Deleuze amply cites Nietzsche on this point, from Twilight ofthe Idols, and does not recognize the gross anthropomo^^^ implicit in Nietzsche's ‘critical' reading of D^win. This topic is freated at length in chapter 4.

TOWARDS THE OVERHUMAN / 45 its eternal return’ (ibid.: 68). Thus, for example, a laziness, a stupidity, a baseness, and a cowardice that willed their own eternal return would not come back as the same but as different. They would come back as ‘creations’. Consequently, Deleuze claims that it is the thought of return which makes ‘willing something whole . . . it makes willing a creation’ (ibid.: 69 ).2 The willing of eternal return is even more complicated than at first appears since it involves two selections. A second selection is needed simply because one must realize that wi^thin the first selection it is possible that reactive forces that go to the limit enter into the experiment: ‘far from falling outside the eternal return’, such forces ‘enter into it and seem to re^turn with it’ (ibid.: 69). The second selection, Deleuze tells us, involves the most obscure bits of Nietesche’s philosophy, gyantifig eternal re^turn an almost esoteric aspect. Without going into the details of Deleuze’s presentation of the second aspect of selection here, we need only note the impor­ tant point that wwhatt is performed in it is ultimately a selection that moves beyond selection, pronouncing the highest ‘yes’. in this second selection reactive forces re^turn but are not recognized or treated as such, that is, they have changed and become something different, part of another evolution. No longer is it a question of ‘e^minating eve^^ting that falls outside this thought’; rather, the task is now to perform an experiment in which things come into being only on the condition that they change their ‘nature’ (that is, they re^turn not as ‘facts’ but ‘interpreta­ tions’, not as ‘things’ but as ‘forces’) (ibid.: 71). Nietzs^e’s selection, therefore, consists in the discovery and creation of the forces of ‘his’ becoming, transmuting reactivity into activity. It is not for Deleuze a question of ‘resolution’ but only of the movement ‘beyond’ . Deleuze is not seeking a ‘moment’ of selection, then, which decide once and for ali, and in advance, the nature of the return, for it has no ‘nature’ —it is art and sheer artifice. For Nietesche, the proof of the test of re^turn lies not in the ‘in ad^vance’ but in the glance ‘hacWards’ , that is, it lies in ^ ^ o ry cons^ucted as genealogy. To grant the eternal a ‘second’ selection, in wh i^ the 2 Compare Klossowksi (1985: 115-16). Klossowski's rra^^ maintains that the rewilling of past time which is demanded in the experience of eternal returnm also requires an admission that ‘forgetfulness alone’ is what enabled us ‘to undertake old creations as new creations ad infinitum’. The ‘object’ of the rewilling of eternal return is the ‘multiple alterity’ that is inscribed in the individual. Klossowski concedes that the ‘wll- to-power’ is a ‘humanized' term to indicate the nature of the ‘vicious circle' that is the eternal return; but he insists that the circle itself is a ‘pure intensity without intention’ (ibid.: 117). As su^, the teaching does not practise ‘expiation', ‘purifi­ cation', or ‘immutable purity' ance ‘Pre-existence and post-existence aree always the surplus of the same present existence, according to the economy of the vicious circle' (118).

VIROID LI FE / 46 becomes an object of itself as an object o f affirmation, is not to ‘solve’ the riddle of return but simply to show its conditions of possibility —not, of course, ‘once and for all’ , but for the moment which endures eternity. 3 Deleuze knows this, and he is affirming it in his complicated reading of Nietzsche. In the experiment of eternal return, therefore, what is being affirmed is the necessity of the return of selection. It is precisely this insight which informs Deleuze and Guattari’s later ^^^ing on ‘good’ and ‘bad’: ‘Good and bad’, they write, ‘are only the products of an active temporary selection, which must be renewed’ (Deleuze and Guatori 1988: 10). Here they write not as moralists but as metallurgists and ethologists, appreciating that in terms of the functioning of a machinic plane of ^^^mence, in which everyt^ng is interconnected and subject to transmutation by hetero­ geneous forces, good and bad ^ ^ o t be treated as a dualism or a dichotomy. If 'life’ is process and becoming, then no^^^ be known 'once and for all’ in advance. Hence the desire of the selection of return and necessity of selection: 'You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is a danger that you reencounter org^^ations that restra'tify eve^^ung, formations that restore power to a si^gnifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject ...{. from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions’ (ibid.: 9). The eternal re^turn is designed to offer a responsibility one to, providing a burden or a weight one make joyous. freely accede is to become one’s o^n path and goal, saying yes to one’s o-wn secret yes and secret no. In the ^ral section of the preface to Human, A l Too Human, N ietes^e argues that the imperative of the free spirit, the spirit that has unl^earned the command ‘thou shalt’ and learned the supra-moral autonomous entitlement to ‘I may’, must become universal by beco^ming a categorical imperative ‘for a l and none’. The free spirit generalizes its own singular and unique ^ e and l ^ m to adjudicate on the basis of this experience (the experience of the ‘midday’): What has happened to me, he says to himself, must happen to everyone in whom a task wants to become in^carnate and 'come into the world'. The secret force and necessity of this task will rule among and in the individual facets of his destiny like an unconscious pregnancy - long before he has caught sight of this task itself or knows its name. Our vocation commands and disposes of us even when we do not yet know it: it is the future whiA regulates our today. (ibid.: preface, section 7) 3 On the ‘once and for all’ again see Klossowski (1985: 115). The ruse of re^turn —rewilling the events of one’s becoming innumerable times —‘removes the “once and for all” Aaracter from all events’.

TOWARDS THE OVERHUMAN / 47 In affirming the task of his own becoming Nietzsche admits to his own paradoxical and paralogical status as a free spirit and seelf-overcomer —he speaks only, he tells us, of his overcomings, but then what else is there to speak and 'write of? His ‘greatest danger’ has always been ‘disgust at mankind' (Nietzsche 1979a: ‘Why 1 am so Wise’ , section 8). His ^ ^ ^ n g is deeply paradoxical in that it seeks an overcoming of the philosophy of the ascetic priest, which teaches humanity always to sacrifice the present for the promise and lie of a better, ill-defined future, by also teaching us to sacrifice the present for the sake of the future: ‘I love , says ^arathustra, ‘who justifies the h ^ a n ity of the future and redeems the humanity of the past, for he wants to perish by the present’ (Nietzsche 1969: prologue, section 4). Concealed within the excessive logic of Nietzsche’s becoming, there­ fore, is the necessary return ‘o f’ ascetic ideals (again: who, or which one, will judge?). But if their first -^^ing was tragic, their second will be comic. Nietzsche desires to live ‘beyond’ selection, to be only a yea-sayer, to affirm the grand economy of life as it is, without subtraction or addition, without any kind of selection at all. The economy of life, however, is unjust and demands negation as well as ^^roation, the creation of new law-tables and their destruction. Nietzsche desires a new supra-moral politics beyond the spirit of ressentiment, and yet it is arable to conceal its own disgust towards h^an ity. Emancipation, however, is implicated in the injustice of perspectivism, and so it is necessary to one’s ^own negations since they constitute an essential part of one’s own beco^ming. There is concealed the ‘yes’ even in the ‘no’.To refrain from judgement is the ‘judgement’, the yes, of the refrain. This reflection on the necesaty and impossibility of judgement shows the extent to which art and artifice are wedded together in Nietzsche. Nietzsche speaks of ‘artists of the future’ as those who not only belong to the future or come towards it, but also undergo the responsibility for its invention as both a sign of their audacity and as a measure of their gravity. This invention of the future speaks of an art ‘o f’ great politics. O F R O M A N TIC ISM N IETZ SC H E AND S IC K N E S S : ‘C O N TRA ' R O U S S E A U In be^tween the prefaces to the first and second vol^nes of Human, All Too Human, Nie^rche wrote his weU-kno-wn and esteemed ‘attempt at a self-critique’ in The Birth■<fTra0a/p in Sils-Mma in the Au^M of 1886. Here we find ^m p reo^ p ied with the nature of romanticism and with distingui^ang his o ^ tragic form of

VIROID LI FE / 48 pessimism — a pessimism born out of the health of the recovery of invention and its injustice — from the morbidly sick type of pessimism he designates as ‘romantic pessimism', that is, pessimism that can only lament the loss and its failed recovery. The attempt to distinguish and separate the two kinds of pessimism, so as not to avoid but to confront contamination, is an overri^ding theme of the year of Nietzsche’s daybreak. Nietzsche appreciates that he too is a sick ^^raal, for he too, like the priests and moralists he castigates throughout his writings, sufers from life. The question of concern to tom is whether he sufers from its impoverahment or from its excess. If the latter, then his sufering may be radically distinct from thrt of priests and feeble windbags. So he asks: Is pessimism necessaria sign of decline, decay, degeneration, weary and weak instincts —as it once was in India, and now is, to all appearances, among us ‘modem’ men ^ d Europeans? Is Aere a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for the hard, gruesome, evil, probematic aspect of existence, prompted by well-being, by overflowing health, by the fu//nes of existence? Is it perhaps possible to suffer from overfullness? (Nietzsche 1967: ’Self-Critique’, section I) Here it is a question o f ap^^ing not so m ud to in^incts as to their beco^^g, to their incorporation, and intem^ration with a process of cultural selection and tr^aining. This is where Nietesche’s attempt to ^ frm the pathos of distance that separates mm from Rousseau often appears disingenuous. Reco^^m g the ‘identity in difference’ of Rousseau and Nietesche is not simply a matter of point­ ing to their common misanthropic moralism, since both despised h^ra^K out of love for them. Nietesche sought to ^ ^ c e himself from Rouleau in truly snobbish, Galtonesque fashion, appealing to a ^differentiation between Rousseau’s plebeian origins and his own noble ones. But does Nietzsche really expect his claim that he is the advocate of life (in a l its immorality) and Rousseau the great denier of life to be taken seriously? Perhaps Nietesche was simply a better artist than Rousseau, more accomplished at artifice because he needed to be because he had so much to conceal. Any attempt to construe their relationship in terms of a simple opposition, such as we find in the early Derrida, where a ^^de and unconvincing distinction is between Rousseauian seriousness and nostalgia for lost origins and Nieteschean pla^^bess and mockery of origins, to see the ‘re^turn’ of Rousseau in Nietzsche (Derrida 1973: 292). As We saw in chapter 1, Nietzsche makes the demand that we get very ‘serious’ about ‘lort o^^ra’: there is work to be done and a task to be executed. The land of the overman is not simply that of a children’s playground. The ^m is to get serious about lost

TOWARDS THE OVERHUMAN I 49 origins in order to recover them for a new invention. This is the becoming of genealogy. In fact, both Rousseau and Nietzsche are compelled to construe the question of their authorship in terms of a destiny which heralds a time ‘of’ the future. In Rousseau’s case this is a providential future, a future of providence, and in Nietzsche’s it is an unknown future which regulates the today and which prepares itself as if it were an unconscious pregnancy (the future goes right back ‘in time’ to conception). In his lifetime Rousseau is widely read but ineffectively under­ stood. ^When a Frenc^nan reads one of his books he does not read what is before ^m , Rousseau protests, but reads only in accordance with the prejudices of morality, that is, the common prejudices of the public imagination which stands in the way, he says, of a true appreciation of his genius (he is not simply a man). One day, he anticipates, there will be a day of ‘judgement’ in which his teaching will be seen for what it really is, and so its author (Rousseau 1990). Nietzsche, by contrast, is read neither badly or well in his own life^me: he is simply ignored. All he anticipate is a posth^nous destiny, but it is still a future in which ‘I am not read, I will not be read.’ Thus, the one who demands that his readers learn the art of intrepretation also points to the n e c ^ ^ ^ ^misreading in reading ^ m . So many snares and nets. ^ k e Rousseau, however, Nietzsche construes his destiny in terms of an eventual day of decison in which those who read ^m will reach a terrible and seductive judgement about their lives and the future of humanity. His writings will have forced them into a making a decision, but this decision will contain necessarily the injustice of every perspectival ‘for’ or ‘against’ . His ques­ tioning of morality will ‘break history into two’, into those who live ‘before’ and those who live ‘after’ (Nietesche 1979a: ‘^ ^ y I ^ a Destiny’, section 8). But still Nietzsche offers ^mself over to man. The uniqueness of Rousseau and Nietzsche is thus destined to become part of tJ..e common ‘stock’ of mankind.4 In deliber­ ately removing themselves from their own time, and retreating into solitude, both wiU ass^ne the guise of the ‘^h^man’ when they come into contact, in their own ^me and posthumously, with earthly e^roestoess (Rousseau 1990: 99). Even Rousseau could d^m with a degree of legi^macy that his sickness concealed the marks and betrayed the masks of a new health. Again, who ‘^can’ or ‘may’ judge? This becomes an especiaUy acute problem once one recognizes that 4 In my study of 1991 I was con^cerned to show the extent to which for both Rousseau and Nietzsche the malaise of the present age stems from the fact that we mod^erns are no longer 'material' for society. Thus, both can be seen to articulate a politics of transfiguration in which the possessive individuals of bourgeois society are enticed to overcome themselves.

VIROID LI FE / 50 it is a question o f forces and their genealogical becoming. Like Rousseau, Nietzsche experienced the compulsion to write. ‘One should only speak when one may not stay silent’, he writes. All else is to be treated as ‘chatter, “literature”, lack of breeding’ (Nietzsche 1986, book II: preface, section 1). Nietzsche’s aphorisms contain ‘precepts of health’ which may be recommended to the more ‘spiritual natures’ of the present generation who will read him in terms of a voluntary discipline (‘disciplina voluntatis’) (ibid.: preface, section 2). But these are ‘precepts of health’ that ‘ come’ with the warning of having been con^^anated by deep sicknesses. One only go ‘beyond’ romanticism by adopting an attitude of mistrust towards oneself, so that one is able to take sides become one’s greatest enemy as one’s deepest friend, and in oneself, way find one’s way to ‘that courageous pessimism that is the antithesis of a l romantic mendacity’ (ibid.: preface, section 4). The ch^m of 'writing is to write as a suferer and self­ denier while not appearing to be such (ibid.: section 5). Nietesche identifies the real paradox of his becoming, however, when he writes about his ^campaign against the ‘unscientific tendency’ of romantic pessimism which interprets and ^Aates individual personal existence into ‘universal judgement’ , and into condemnations of the world. He then ^asks inq^uiringly: Shall my experience — history of an illness and recovery . . . have been my personal experience alone? And only my h^an, all too-human? (ibid.: preface, section 6) Nietesche seeks to universalize his experience, but in terms that not not simply ^inflate merely personal experiences into unjustifiably universal judgements about life and history. He would like to believe that his ‘travel books’ were not •written solely for himself, so that, with growing confidence, he ‘venture to send them off again’ (ibid.). But this requires that Nietes^e’s self-overcoming is more ^than merely his self-overcoming. The r ^ ^ n this might be possible, he speculates, lies in the fact that what his overcoming of is not only his o^n personal past —it does not, hence the insi^gnifi^nce of the fact that Herr Nie'^^he has become welf again — but rather man’s genealogical past. N ie^^be is fatally and audaciously claiming that within his being there finds expression the tremen­ dous co ^ ^ ^ into being and sufering of those form-shaping f o r ^ that collide with the present since they are riddled with the past and are pre^gnant with the future. If he been infected by the disease of the past (mman), he has also been granted the power of the future (overman). And so he addi^^s ^mself to those who have to be ‘the co^nscience of the modem soul’ and to possess its knowledge.

TOWARDS THE OVERHUMAN I 51 These are the ones in whom ‘all that exists today of sickness, poison, and danger, comes together’, and whose ‘lot' is to be sicker than ‘any other kind of individual because you are not “only individuals”’ (ibid.) Something flows on ‘underneath' these individuals which explains why they are ‘more' than themselves and what they simply appear as. The preface to the second edition of Daybreak was written in Ruta, near Genoa, in the autumn of 1886, and it is here that Nietzsche now speaks of his ‘return’, of his return to life and his desire to be ‘man’ again. What could easily have turned out to be a funeral oration —the year of 1886 and a l that led to it — now be celebrated as a self-overcoming to good health and a courageous knowledge of, and for, the forbidden. He has emerged from his questioning of man and morals free of bitterness towards man and his moral past. It is not that he has not been con^^anated by coming into contact with it, for he knows he already was poisoned by its sickness. He simply now recognize it as a formative training or selection in a process of beCOming, and not only his beco^ming. GAV S C IE N C E AND A SC E T IC THE R E T U R N OF IDEALS To re^turn to the ‘name’ of ‘N ie^^he’ is to re^turn to the name that ‘comes’, the name of the future that is on its way and wanders. It is of this n ^ e that Nietzsche speaks in the preface to the second edition of The Gay Science whiA he wrote again in Ruta, this time in the aut^umn of 1886. The preface represents the consummation of his daybreak. He begins by suggesting that the gay science heralds a book which 'nay require more ^than the one preface, and he doubts whether there is another being alive who has ever lived thaough suA e:^xpeienences. The book expresses above a l the ‘^^titude of a convalescent’. ‘Gay Science’ a ^ ^ e s the ‘&tur^&a of a spirit’ who with patience and time on his side has resisted a terrible, long pr^^u-e ‘severely, coldiy, without submitting, but without hope’ , but who. is now suddenly ‘attacked’ by hope, the hope for health and the intoxication of convalescence that has ^turned out well (Nietzsche 1974: preface, section 1). The book sp^eaks o f both a death and a rebirth. .After long privation and impotence it now rejoice in the attainment of a strong spirit that enjoys a ‘^^^&ened faith in tomorrow and the day after tomorrow’ since it con^tains a ‘sudden sense and anticipation o f the future’ . It is in this preface that Nie^^he o^penly admits for the firrt time, to

VIROID LI FE / 52 himself and to his readers, that his radical retreat into solitude was a retreat, since it emanated from a feeling of lofty isolation from the concerns of humanity. Now, however, after undergoing recovery, he realizes that his stubborn pursuit of solitude was nothing more, and nothing less, than a form of self-defence against a contempt for man that had become ‘pathologically clairvoyant’. Moreover, he ran now appreciate that his nausea at man developed out of a spiritual diet called romanticism. In seeking the beyond of man Nietzsche had, in the retreat of his solitude, forgotten man and his concealed potentialities for future becoming. Now he is ready to leave behind Herr Nietesche since the fact that this gentleman has become weU again is of no great consequence (just as his decline into sickness was of no ultimate importance (ibid.: preface, section 2 )). For any philosopher who has a training in psychology, Nietesche states, the most important question concerns the relationship between health and philosophy. ^What is it, he ^asks, that gives rise to all searches for the ‘beyond’? In some, he notes, it is deprivation that motivates philosop^^^, in which philosophy is reduced to a need, serving as a kind of sedative or self-alienation. In others, however, it is stren^h and excess of energy flows which lead to philosop ^ ^ g , and in ^ e philosophy acts as a beau^tifu luxury, expressing a ‘triumphant gratitude that eventually still has to inscribe itself in cosmic letters on the heaven o f concepts’ (ibid.: 2). Nietzsche is not here erecting a strict partition between the two since he reco^ ^ es that the distinction is largely an arbitrary one. The important thing to be grasped is the extent to which the two species of philosophizing are born from the same soil and the same sun. The question of sickness, however, perssts in raising a certain disquiet and alarm: Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale, some final state of some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or 1jligious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above (Abseits, Jenseits, Au&erhalb, Oberhalb), permits the question whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher. (ibid.) However, this question is only a provisional one since it is clear from man’s genealogical record that it is indeed a profound sickness that has motivated all constructions and inventions of the beyond and the outside. Here we are not d ^ ^ ^ Simply with ‘^uth’ but with some^thing m u d more important which, to speak beyond good and evil, c o n c e ^ ‘health, future, growth, ^w er, life’ (ibid.). Philosophy is, in fact, the 'art o f tr^ansfi^guration’ whiA is defined by Nietzsche as the capacity for traversing for many kinds of health, inclu^ding the health of

TOWARDS THE OVERHUMAN / 53 sickness, and passing through many kinds of philosophies. Great health, therefore, entails, as an essential part of its coming, an cdfirmation of sickness and of the ideals it inspires: We are not thinking frogs and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: constantly, we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe. Life —that means constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame —also everything that wounds us; we simply can do no other. And as for sickness? Are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along ithout it? (ibid.: preface, section 3) The paradox is that this is to judge sickness ‘beyond’ judgement, to ‘beyond’ the beyond. Only this kind of paradoxical involvement in the movement beyond speak genuinely of the becoming-active of forces. This is not, however, to define a ‘moment’ of judgement — is this active? is this reactive? — unless the moment be understood genealogically. Unmasking morality —through consolation and deception — entails revaluing values not in terms of a new reverance and ^canonization. Impiously one is now able to see them as signs of ‘the most fateful abortion’ . ^What makes them ‘fateful’ is the fact that they exert a ^ ^ g e ‘fascina­ tion’. ^Why? Because they have ‘crossed’ the law t?! selection (‘das Gesete der Seleektion gekreuzt’) (Nietesche 1979a: ‘^ ^ y I am a Destiny’, section 8). The experience of going into the depths and then re-emerging with a new-found sense of joy is not designed to make us any ‘better’ as h^nan beings, only more ‘profound’ creatures. Through rigorous self-questio^ning, a questioning that freely draws on a l the resources of cruelty and violence of its acetic past, the trust in life disapp^s as it becomes a problem. And yet, Nie^^he encourages, we are not to ‘jump’ to the conclusion that life is without m^^eaning, us despondent and gloomy. In through the problem of life the task is to Mutate che^wing cows, not fretful frogs. Instead, one is to ‘re^turn’ from one’s abysses and severest and most s e ^ t sickne^es ‘n w b o ra ’ (ibid.: section 4). Our has been shed; we have fl^own away and then re^turned home. But one discovers that one has not re^turned as the same but as Afferent, that one’s ^ n ^ y has changed and one has new eyes, more subtle, more sophisticated. One has been trained out of sickness. The p r e ^ ^ ^ tio n with the ‘outside’, with how one is to get there and to emancipate the flight into the beyond from the deare of secret to no^^^- ness, informs book 5 of The Gay Sdence, which Nietesche added in 1886 for its publication in the follo'^wing y^-. For Nietesche the tzsk is to not of the

VIROID LI FE / 54 of the future but of its coming, and to attempt to do so in a way that reveals signs of one’s liberation from one’s romanticism. In other words, the crucial art of selection involves knowing whether it is the spirit of revenge that informs one’s willing and invention of the future, or whether it is the spirit that has emancipated itself from the longing of the future, which is nothing more than the (cry of the distressed and the impotent. But this is not simply a matter of deciding whether the desire for the future is a human desire or a more than human desire, since the two are entangled. Again the moment of final or ul^mate decision is deferred. The doctrine of e te ^ ^ return is not offered as a resolution of this lack of decision. It only gives us back the overman who has become man again, that is, it gives us back our task: Finally, our reward is the greater of life’s gifts, perhaps the greatest thing it is able to give of any kind —we are given back our task. (Nietzs^e 1986: book II, preface, section 5) speaking of the ‘outside’ , Nietzsche states that if one wants to know how high the towers in the town are one simply leaves the town. But the case of man would seem to be of a Afferent order since one simply leave’ behind one’s 'flesh and blood’ in the se a r^ for what lies 'beyond’ ^m (Nie^tzsche 1974; section 380). But the problem persists since if thoughts about moral prejudices — about humanity — are to be more than mere prejudices about prejudices, they presuppose a position ‘outside morality, some point beyond . . . to w h i^ one has to rise, climb, or fly’. It is not so much a question of wanting to go out there or up there —it would be more a^^rate to of i^free ^wil ^than free will in this regard —but rather of knowing whether ‘one really can get up there’ (ibid.). It is the future that is the source o f our unCreedom in this regard (recall: it is the future which regulates our today). N ie^^he’s reponse to the question of the outside and how one is to get there is amply to appeal to its ‘manifold conditions’ of possibility. In essence, the qu^tion takes us back to the eni^na of liberation, n ^ e ly , that to become a h^nan being of su ^ a ‘beyond’ who desires to behold the ‘aipreme m ^ u re of value of his time’ requires ^ m firrt of a l to overcome (iiberwinden) this time in himself. Overcoming one’s own time in oneself involves overco^ming one’s prior aversion to it, one’s ^sufering from it, the ^nd of sufering that gave birth to romanti^cism. Again, the e te ^ ^ re^turn sp^eaks not of the liberation from time but only of its enigma. Nietzsche is careeful to show that the ascetic ideal be uncovered hi^ng in the most ^^unlikly places: in science in general, and in the positivist sciences in

TOWARDS THE OVERHUMAN / 55 particular, such as historiography, and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, in the self­ proclaimed Antichrists, immoralists, nihilists, and sceptics of every degree. He reserves his greatest mistrust for those preachers of a new faith who desire only believers. He does not, he tells us, deny that faith ‘brings salvation’ - but it is precisely because it does that he denies that faith proves anything. Such faith does not bring ‘truth’, but only establishes a certain probability —of deception. But all of these ‘free, very free spirits’, spirits of today only, are simply the ‘last idealists of knowledge’, since all they desire to do is to ‘j^rnp’ (Nietzsche 1994: III, section 24). Since these spirits stand too close to themselves, u^mowledgeable about the art of distance or selection, they ^^not see that the ascetic ideal is simply their ideal as well, that they are its current ‘representatives’. Indeed, Europe is currently experiencing massive ‘overproduction’ in the field of ideals, opening up a new trade in the marketing of ‘little idolatrous ideals’ and new ‘idealisms’. Nietesche speculates: how many shiploads of s^ham idealists, hero-outfits and tinny rattle of great words, how many tons of sugared, alcoholic sympathy, would one have to export in order to make the air of Europe smell cleaner? We are polluted not only by the toxic wastes of industry but much more by the overproduction of our decay, our overproduction of ascetic ideals that simply reveals our inability any longer to overcome ourselves. The only real opposition to the new ascetic idealists is to be found in the ‘comedians of this ideal’, since they at least arouse in one mis^ust (ibid.: I I , section 27). So, we learn, Nietesche’s o ^ teaching is not to be taken on ^trust; on the contrary, and as Nietzsche en co ^ g es us, it is to be treated with the greatest suspicion. Science —especially ‘modern science’ —offers the best ally for the continuation of the ascetic ideal on account of the fact that it is the most unconscious, voluntary and subterranean. Science suffers from the fact that it slacks independence, that it is always placed in the service of a value-creating power, never creating values. Science suffers from the lack of a great love. As a result it ^ffbours a place for all kinds of d i^ n ten t, for resentment, and for gnawing worms. Science unconsciously performs its own kind of revenge on ^man by serve to belittle at results that (ance Copernicus man, Nie^^he notes, has' been rolling on a do^w ard path). Nie^^he, by con^trast, s^^ches to give articulation to a Bay science, a science that speal:s of both man’s tragedy and comedy, a form of expansive knowledge that the heat up the universe and render it conducive for of aU kinds of foreign elements and the explosion of new sparks. If normal science belittles ^man, hiding its o ^ ascetic ideal, the task of a gay science is to expand his horizon so that it becomes possible to a g^mpse of the future of the ove^^m and of man a^dn. In working through the real problem of man

VI ROI D LI FE / 56 Nietesche does not bind us to the history of morality. Morality is Wlable to go ‘beyond’ good and evil, Wlable to traverse outside itself. It is for this reason that it be defined as the 'danger of dangers’. Its restricted economy of life makes impossible the actualization of the ‘highest potential power (Miichtigkeit) and splendour’ since it desires that the present exist at the ‘expense of the future’ (atif Kosten der Zukurift) (Nietzsche 1994: preface, section 6). The future is too valuable, however, too compulsive, to be sacrificed to the impoverished economy, the Wlpayable but always requested, guilty debt of morality. Time waits — indeed it slows down —for the ove^nan. Nietesche goes ‘beyond’ the ascetic ideal by reco^^ting its tremendous power. From a genealogical perspective it becomes possible to appreciate that —‘you take my meaning already’ (my italic) — the ascetic priest, the negative man in and for himself —'a^^ctualr belongs to the really great forces in life which comene and acreate the positive’ (ibid.: III, section 13). The ascetic ideal has inscribed itself into the ‘whole history of man’ and in a way that is both ‘terrible and urifoTfJettable’ (my italic) (ibid.: I I , section 21). But this ‘real ca^tastrophe" on planet earth also offers real promise —for some^rng flows not simply beyondor outside individuals but und^eath them.

3 O n t h e D E A D O R A L I V E d e a t h o f e t e r n a l r e t u r n In effect, death is everywhere, as that ideal, uncrossable boundary separating bodies, their forms, and states, and as the condition, even initiatory, even symbolic, through whid a subject must pass in order to change its form or state. (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 107) Everywhere resound the voices of those who preach death: and the earth is full of those to whom death must be preached. (Nie^tzsche 1969: 'Of the Preaders of Death’) You must want to b^ro yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes! (Nietzsde 1969: ‘Of the Way of the Creator*) If the eternal re^turn speaks o f death and rebirth, of daybreak, what kind of death belongs to the eternal re^turn? A heat-death or a fire-death? The di^inction would be between death conceived as a judgement w hid denies, restricts, and condemns, and death experienced as a ^transportation, a flight, dissolution and passage, true beCOming. "This ^^inction is allo'wed and invited by N ie^ ^ ie ^m self in the w eU -kno^ passage on the greatest weight in The Gay Science, where he speaks of the impact of the eternal re^turn in terms of either a ^ ^^ing (zermalen) or a ^^^orm ing (verwaadela), de^m^ding on the pre^disposed forces present at the time ‘of1 the moment (A u g ^ Iid ) when the experiment is undergone and tested. "^^at does it mean to be ‘free for death and in death’? Further, how is it possible to di^^stinguish between ‘good’ death and ‘bad’ death (Nietesde 1969: ‘O f Free Death’)? Does one only die well one when one dies for the ^ e of the ‘beyond’? Is ^hat happened to Nietesche when he underwent the experience of eternal re^turn six th o ^ ^ d feet beyoad mas aad timee? The task: to die at the ‘right time’

VIROID LI FE I 58 and to make of death a festival. What Nietzsche calls ‘the consummating death’ (den vollbringenden Tod) is a death that contains a promise, a promise ‘of’ life and of death to life (promise considered as a pledge, ein Gelobniss). What matters is not the death that ‘comes’ at the end of life but the modes of one’s dying in this life. The theme of ‘death’ has been little explored in the becoming of Zarathustra. Indeed, for far too long interpretation has concentrated too much on the misguided question of Zarathustra’s identity (the question, again and again, 'who is Zarathustra’?). "This question is overburdened simply because an essential component of the process of beco^rng, as Nietesche understands it, and as governs the becoming of ^^thustra, is that the subject ‘o f’ becoming does not know who or what it is (‘Is it ny teaching? ^Who ^ I?’, Nietesche 1969: ‘The Stillest Hour’). Repeatedly, Zarathustra’s disciples and ^animals implore Zarathustra to reveal his identity, to disclose who he really is, and to end the uncertain, polysemic character of his becoming. Zarathustra resists their demands, and continues to dance to a diferent tune: the tune of ‘pure becoming’ . In D ifrence and Repetition Deleuze produces a positive conception of death — death conceived as the condition of possibility of diference and as the progenitor of repetition — in the context of a critique of Freud’s formulation of the deathdrive. Deleuze criticizes Freud for restri^cting death, conceived as the qualitative and quantitative return of the living to ^ ^^nate matter, to an ‘ex^insic, scientific and objective’ definition. Altho^ugh he aUowed for plural models of exigence in the cases of birth and ^ ^ a tio n , Freud reduced death to an objective dete^^Mtion of matter, with the result that the phenomenon of repetition ^canot be thought along any other lines than those of undifferenciation, 1 with the result that repetition becomes real, a l too real, e^^ing without displacement or ^disguise (Deleuze 1968: 1 4 7 -8 ; 1994: 111-12). Deleuze’s emphasis on the p^macy of the unconscious aUows to conceive of the phenomenon of ‘^diference and repetition’ in terms of a productive and positive unconscious, an unco^nscious that is not driven by negation and contradiction, but by questio^ng and problema^aing (a novel philosophical interpretation of Freud’s well-known declaration that the unro^raous knows no negative would be one ^ h iA poated the unconscious as the gen^nely presuppositionless organon of ‘^^^ing’). '^Wht makes the unconscious productive and positive is that it is driven by the ^^n^own, the ^ im ^ ^ rable, the alogical, and so on. It is not restricted either by l^altation or oppoation. It knows northing of the I The words ‘differentiation' and ‘differentiation' are used to translate the FrenA differentiation and differentiation.

DEAD OR ALIVE / 59 world as representation (it is a factory, not a theatre). We should recall the warning which Deleuze and Guattari make in Anti-Oedipus, concerning the necessity to avoid the attribution of dark and sombre horrors to the unconscious solely derived from the horrors of consciousness. As they so classically put it, ‘The unconscious has its horrors, but they are not anthropomorphic. It is not the sleep of reason which engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 133; 1983: 112). Is it possible to formulate death as a question and a problem before it becomes marked as a limitation and a negation? ^his is precisely the move made by Deleuze in his working through of the question of ‘difference and repetition’. Contra Freud’s human, aU too human interpretation of the death-drive, Deleuze contends: Death does not appear in the objective model of an indifferent inanimate matter to which the living would ‘return'; it is present in the living in the form of a subjective and differentiated experience endowed with its prototype. It is not a material state; on the contr^^, having renounced all matter, it corresponds to a pure form —the empty form of time. . . . It is neither the limitation imposed by matter upon mortal life, nor the opposition between matter and i^mmortal life, which furnishes death with its prototype. Death is, rather, the last form of the problematic, the source of problems and questions, the sign of their persistence over and above every response, the 'Where?’, and ‘When?1 whiA designate this (non)-being where every af^ation is nourished. (Deleuze 1968:148; 1994: 112) Deleuze has written that Beyond the P l^ ^ e Principle is the place where one can find Freud most directly and penetratingly engaged in ‘specifically philosophical reflection’ (Deleuze 1989b: 111). By this he m^eans that in setting out to ^think the ‘beyond’ peculiar to the pleasure principle Freud is ^^^ing out a ‘trans­ cendental’ analysis. By the ‘beyond’, Delf"uze argues, Freud does not simply mean to refer to empirical exceptions to the principle, suA as the unpleasure the r^eality principle imposes on us or the circuitous route of its beco^ming, since these are a l merely apparent exceptions that be reconciled with the ple^ure principle. So, if there are no ‘real’ exceptions to it, what does the ‘beyond’ in Freud’s title refer to? Dele^re’s ^position is to argue that although contradicts the principle and ev e^ ^ ^ ^ be reconciled to it, there is an excess that while ‘governed’ by the principle is not entirely ‘dependent’ on it. "This is to sp^eak of a ^nge of elements and pr^^^es that ^ake up its complicated application. If the ple^ure principle ‘rules’ , it does so never as the or ^highest ‘authority’ (it has p ^ e r without legi^^^y in this regard). The fact that there is some^ang which ‘fals outride’ and ‘is not homogeneous’ with the ple^ure

VIROID LI FE / 60 principle — something ‘beyond’ (Jenseits) — explains why Freud is involved in a transcendental analysis of the ‘phenomenon’. The ‘beyond’ for Deleuze refers, ultimately, to the higher authority and power of ‘repetition’, which, he contends, Freud conceives in terms of a transcendental synthesis of time, that is, a repetition which is ‘at once a repetition of bifore, during, and after (ibid.: 1 15). From the ‘natural standpoint’ the past simply follows upon the present and the present upon the future in terms of a linear unfolding. From a transcendental perspective, however, the three modalities of time are constituted ‘in time simultaneously’ (ibid.) (they enfold as much as they unfold). But there is also a furthther movement, one which makes repetition what it is, which is the fact that one add the future (the ‘after’) to the other two dimensions (past and present) because there could be no constitution of time without the opening up to, and the creation of the possibility for, the future (the future that is not only ‘in’ time but also ‘of’ ^me). In his reading of sadism and masochism Deleuze locates the monstrous force of repetition that is at work and play. Here repetition takes on a life of its own, wild, and becoming independent of a l previous pleasure. As a result a ^^damental inversion be seen to have taken place in their practices, since ‘Pleasure is now a form of behaviour related to repetition accompan^g and foUowing repetition. P l^ u r e and repetition have thus exc^mged roles’ (ibid.: 120). For Deleuze there is always a double process of desexu^ization and resex^^ration place in the economy of pleasure and pain. It is in the ‘on between’ of the two that the death-drive ^mounces itself. However, because the process is c^rartem ed by an ‘instantaneous leap’ , is it always p le ^ r e which endures and prev^is. It is here that one might locate what be termed the ‘transcendental illusion’ of the pl^ ^ ^ e principle. Pleasure —and pain —are real, but what the ‘beyond’ announces is the coming into play of new sensations, new afects, and new bodies of becoming. To live and die ‘beyond’ the ple^asure principle, therefore, is to enter into the excessive economy of diference ‘and’ repetition. However, contra Deleuze, it be argued that the difficulties w hiA beset Freud’s b ^ ^ e presentation of the death-drive stem from the fact that his analysis is both ‘too’ philosophical and not philosophical enough. We need to ask: wwhatt is the status of Freud’s cl^m that ‘the of all life is death’, in t^^w of both its biological ^validity and its philosophical legi^maacy?What kind of teac^ng of ‘life’ is offered in Beyond the Pleasure Principle? It is by no means obvious that Freud should ^turn to biology in the way that he does in order to lrad' scientific support to his metaphyacal speculations on the fund^ental of a l life, a speculation that ul^timately posits a particular conception of evolution. It s e ^ s that he made ^turn because only a biological expl^tftion was capable of a^»unting for the

DEAD OR ALI VE / 61 alleged ‘primordiality’ of the power at work in the compulsion to repeat (that is, repeating past experiences which offer no possibility for pleasure in their relived experience) (see Boothby 1991: 74). There is also a reading of memory offered in Freud’s account in which it becomes a faculty that serves the desire to restore an earlier state of things (the inorganic). 2 As such, the death-drive refers to an urge that is inherent in the entire manifestation of organic life. The death-drive is fundamentally ambiguous in that one aspect of its ‘beyond’ dimension is the curious fact that it leads not to a decrease in psychical tension but to its increase (we get fixated on p^^ul memories; repetition becomes a pain). On the other hand, however, its quest for Nirvana — the reduction of psychical tension to an absolute minimum — also means that, in its ultimate sense, the death-drive does desire equilibrium and stasis, a state beyond the restless and deceiving wanderings and shenanigans of pleasure (this is the point at which the theory comes vvery close to Schopenhauer, as Freud himself acknowledges in his essay). The paradox here be resolved by recognizing that Freud’s presentation of the death-drive actually involves two (at least) thoughts of the ‘beyond’ . It is only on the ‘psycho­ logical’ level that Freud is positing a ‘beyond’ in the sense of a tremendous heightening of psychical tensions; while it is on the level of biolOOJ' that he is construing the ‘beyond’ in a ^finalistic sense as that which escapes the senseless striving of p le ^ re . Several important questions about Freud’s presentation remain to be examined, including his equation of repetition and regresaon, an identification that colours his ^^^in g on evolution. I s^ ^ now seek to explore and other questions in an inquiry into the death that peculiarly belongs to the eternal return. Important differences between Nietesche and Freud —in their ^^^ing on life, evolution, and death — then emerge. Although I ^ unable to establish the point firmly here, I would contend that the ^fference hetween the two is that w h ^ ^ Nietzsche conceives death in terms of an open-ended beco^ming of forces, Freud ^construes death in terms of a biological lock-in (a deadlocked), model­ ling its being along the lines of a Lamarckism in reverse g ^ . It was one of the 2 For a provocative, if theoretically flawed and incoherent, account of memory going back into deep or geological time, see Ballard’s novel of 1962, The Drowned World- ‘The brief span of an individual life is misleading. EaA one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory’ (Ballard 1987: 44). As one Aaracter in the book says to another: ‘^foat wasn’t a dream, Robert, but an ancient or^roc memory millions of years old. . . . is the lumbar ^transfer, total bioopsychic r^ ll. We really remember these swamps and lagoons' (ibid.: 74).

VIROID LI FE / 62 merits o f Deleuze’s early reading of Nietzsche to show the extent to which Nietzsche’s ^ ^ ^ n g on life and death was informed by an engagement with thermodynamics, and he successfully located in his writings a critique of modern physics and biology by focussing on their grounding in a reactive metaphysics. According to Deleuze, Nietzsche’s ^^^ing of the becoming of forces attacks all forms of the undifferentiated, such as logical identity, mathematical equality, and physical equilibrium (Deleuze 1983: 45). In his reading of eternal return Deleuze seeks to show that the attempt to conceive of becoming without reference to final ends results in an attack on both mechanistic and thermodyn^amical conceptions of energy. In fact, both mechanism and thermodynamics are based on a depreSSion of difference since in both cases it is possible to iden^fy a passage from a principle of finitude (the constancy of a ^sum) to a principle of ^^^sm, such as the cancelling out of differences in quantities, the sum of which is always constant. In mec^mism, for e x ^ p le , an idea of eternal re^turn is ^^ m ed , but only by ass^ in g either a balancing or a ^racelling out of produced ^fferences between the initial and final states of a reversible system. On this model the final state is identical with the initial state, a ‘process’ is which there is no differentiation in relation to intermediate stages. In thermodynamiCS ^fferences in quantity ^mcel each other out in a final state of absolute heat-death and identity vanquishes ^fference (ibid.: 46; for Nie^rche’s engagement with thermod^^mics see 1968: sections 1062-7). In effect, Deleuze is endorcing Bergson’s trenc^mt critique of mechanism and ^finalism, which contends that both regard the future and past as ‘calculable functions of the present’ with the result that ‘all is given’ (Bergson 1983: 37). In other words, ‘becoming’ remains the great monstrous unthought in mec^hanistic and thermodyn^amical conceptions and calculations of the energy of the universe. A positive, dyn^amical and processual conception of death, which would release it from an anthropomorphic desire for death (for stasis, for being), spe^aking instead only of a death that desires (a death that is desire, where desire is construed along the lines of a machine or a macchinic assemblage), only be arrived at by freeing the becoming of death from both mec^mism and ^^Usm. To use the ian^uge of the contemporary science of complexity, the ete^rna re^turn is a thought of non-linear becoming in w h id the stres is on non-equllibri^ra and positive feedback as the conditions of possibility for a truly ‘creative’ and complex (involuted) mapping of ‘evolution’ (as we shall see in later dapters, the notion of ‘evolution’ simply proves inadequate to the task). a ‘monster is to post the world as m^eral without be^^^ug and without end, a Dionysian world of ‘eternal’ self-creation and ‘ete^rnal’ self-destruction, moving from the simple to the complex and then back again to the simple out of abundance: cold/hot/

DEAD OR ALI VE / 63 hot/cold, ‘beyond' satiety, disgust, and weariness, a world of becoming that never attains ‘being' , never reaching afina/ death. For death (becoming) lives on itself; it is its own food and excrement. II Deleuze’s reconfiguration of the death-drive be ill^wninated by considering the distinction he makes, drawing on Blanchot, between ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’ death. ‘Personal’ death refers to the death of the ‘I’ which is encountered as the ultimate limit, the ‘present’ which causes eve^^mg to pass but beyond which ‘I’ cannot pass. "This is what Blanchot calls ‘inevitable and inaccessible death’ . 3The difference between the ‘I’ or ego is a difference which exists, says Deleuze, only in order to die, which only be represented in terms of a re^turn to inanimate matter, ‘as if calculated by a kind o f entropy’ . "This is the negative image of death formed from the restricted point of view of the ‘ego’. Even when this death seems to constitute our o^^most possibility, it is a death which comes from without (as Blanchot says, in it I do not die). The other death, the one Deleuze is so keenly interested in, refers ‘to the state of free ^fferences when they are no longer sub­ ject to the form imposed upon them by an I or an ego, when they ass^ne a shape which excludes my o ^ coherence no less that of any identity whatsoever’ (Deleuze 1968: 149; 1994: 113). There is, therefore, always a ‘one dies’ which is more profound than ‘I die’, the death —exemplified in, but not restricted to, the death of the gods —w hi^ takes place endlessly and in a variety of ways. Deleuze contends that Freud modelled the death-drive on the firrt kind of death, and could not, therefore, access the more profound death, which is the death of repetif )n, the death ‘of’ ete^rnal re^turn. O f course, informing Freud’s (re-)presentation of 3 Blanchot is put to use in the same way to problematize Freud’s death-drive in Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 329-31, where it is maintained that to speak of a death-drive that stands in qual­ itative distinction from the life-drive is absurd. It is not death that is desired, but rather death which desires. The question becomes: what kind of desire is it within its ma^inic operations and functio^ttgs? It is nec^es in spea^ng of the desire oflife and that of death to s^peakof two parts, ‘two ^nds of desiring-ma^we parts’ , that of the wor^ng organs and that of the body without organs. Viewed as a ppart of the desi^ring-^^^ine, death c^mot be treated, as it is in Freud, in the abstract and independently of its functioning in the machine and its system of energetic conver­ sions. Deleuze and Gua^m ultimately appeal to Niet^zsche’s analysis of the ascetic priest and ascetic ideal to account for Freud’s ^^^on of a ^^^endent death instinct.

VIROID LI FE / 64 the death-drive is the opposition between the conflictual forces o f Eros and Thanatos.4 But it is precisely this negative opposition which Deleuze’s positive ^^^rng of death undermines. The death-drive cannot be distinguished from Eros, either in terms of a difference in kind between two forces, or by a difference in rhythm between two movements. To posit the difference in either of these ways would be to take difference as already given. Instead, Deleuze proposes that Thanatos is conceived as indistinguishable from the ‘desexualization of Eros’ (Deleuze 1968: 149; 1994: 113) (‘desexu^^tion’ in the sense of forming a neutral and displaceable energy). There is no ‘analytic ^fference’ between Eros ' and Thanatos. This is to introduce differenciation where Freud argnes there be none, n ^ e ly , in death. Deleuze’s attempt to introduce ^fference into death is anticipated by Nietesche. In an astonishing Nachlas passage he demands that we cease to of ‘the return to the inanimate as a regresaon’ . Rather, we are to ‘perfect ourselves’ in the ‘reinterpretation’ and revaluation of death, and thereby ‘reconcile ourselves with what is actual, with the dead world’. False evaluations of the dead world stem from the fact that we judge it from the ‘vantage point’ of the sentient world. But it is ‘afestafestval’, he writes, ‘to go from this world across into the “dead world”’ . The is to see thro^ugh the comedy of sentient being ‘and thereby enjoy it!’ (Nietzsche 1987: volume 9: 11[70]). In a fundamental inversion we are to treat death not as the opposite of life but as its true womb. Indeed, Freud’s whole model by which he seeks to understand the biological evolution of death —death’s invention —is an entropic one. If death is not -^ b le in earlier, primitive or^^rations of life, this is not because it was not there, he argues, but simply because the interernal processes that cultivate death have not yet revealed themselves and ove^aken the processes of life. ^^^^W eism ^m ’s contention that death is a late acquiSition of evolutionary life, and one that may not even be present in protista, Freud argues that this assertion applies orly to the ‘manifest phenomena’ of death, and in no way imperils his assumption concerning the fundamental internal proccesses that reveal a tendency to^M’ds it. The result of Freud’s inveraon is to make the human death-drive into the telos of the entire evolution of life. In other words, death becomes in Freud’s schema the endogenous motor oflife: ‘the 4 See Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle' in 1991, volume 11: 269-339, especially 322-3, where Freud confesses that his on life and death has unwittingly steered him into the harbour of S^openhauer’s philosophy. In addition Freud notes the similiarity of his on the life and death instincts to August Weismann's distinction between soma and germ-plasm. Weismann collaborated with Wilhelm Roux on the theory of ‘mosaic development' that influenced Nietzsche. On Roux’s influence on Nietzs^e see ^apter 4.

DEAD OR ALI VE / 65 aim of all life is death’ . He maintains this position in the face of the evidence of natural selection, which he construes in terms of decisive external influences obliging the living substance to diverge ever more widely from the original course of life and make ever more complicated detours bifore attaining the ultimate aim of death. In spite of apparent evidence to the contrary, therefore, such as the evidence of increasing complexity in evolution, Freud is able to insist that the goal of life is not life but death. "This Insistence is a direct result of his privileging of the ‘conservative’ nature of the living substance. Change and development are thus placed not in the service of variegated life but in that of entropic death. How does the thought of eternal return connect to a model of productive and engendered death? The relation only be thought by working through the notion of repetition. Repetition demonstrates that it is impossible to die one time, impossible to die once andfor all. And yet the ete^rnal re^turn of death does not mean that one undergoes the s ^ e death again and again. The death belonging to ete^rnal re^turn is a plural one ass^uming multiple guises. Death is disguise itself, the mere appearance and apparition of another becoming. The repetition implicated in the ete^rnal re^turn is not the repeating of an original model since there is no original moment which (can. be subjected to a law of repetition. Eternal re^turn already takes place wi^an the element of difference and sim u la^ . This is why Deleuze is so insistent that the ‘^Same’ in Nietzsche’s elliptical formulation ^ M o t be taken to denote a content (since none exists prior to the creation of repetition), but rather must be t^%n to refer to the act of re^^aing (revenii) itself. ^What returns is repetition and the difference it engenders (eternal re^turn as a ‘groundless law’, or as the law which thatters and explodes law, decoding and deregulating it). If it was the One which Nie'^tzsche intended to re^turn in his thought-expe^ment, then surely it could begin only by never being able to leave itself. As a ‘force [or power] of ^^roation’ (‘puissance d’^ ^ ro e r’), eternal return ‘ev^^^ing’ of the multiple (the ‘moment’ which is ‘eternity’) (Dele^re 1968: 152; 1994: 115). The connection between eternal return and (negative) death is that it a^^^res the death of the ‘One’ (what dies ‘once and for all’, never to re^turn, is the ‘One’). The repetition of ete^rnal re^turn only excessive syrtestems, ^ ch in es of ^chance and strategies of ^risk. ^This is the ‘divine game’ of life In which there are no pre-exis^ting rules, in which the game bears only upon its own rules, in which the child-player only ^in, the ‘whole’ of chance being ^^roed ‘each' time and for ‘a l ’ times. If notions of the ‘same’ and the ‘s ^ ^ a r ’ are to be allowed, it be in the form of Emulations, not in the fo^n of error but as inevitable ilusions. ‘Identity’ and ‘resemblance’ would be products of systems the Afferent to the Afferent by means of (diference.

VIROID LI FE / 66 The difference o f eternal return —the difference o f its repetition —comes out clearly when contrasted with the test of repeatability and universalizability presupposed in Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative. Here repetition is made subject to ‘law’ in which it is known and decided in advance what is ‘good’ and what is ‘evil’. The demonic is to be defeated by the ‘man of duty’ through devotion to the consistency and coherence of the test. As a result repetition is turned into a moralism. In ^^^ing repetition ‘beyond good and evil’ in the thought-experiment of eternal return Nietzsche juxtaposes repetition to the moral law ‘to the point where it becomes the suspension of ethics’ (Deleuze 1994: 6 ), that is, a genuine and creating that is beyond the law of good and evil (see Nietesche 1974: section 335) (compare Blanchot 1993: 279; Ansell Pearson 1991/1996: 194-9). There takes place in Nietzsche, there­ fore, an ironic and humorous overturning and overcoming (Uberwindung) of Kant. The formalism of the ete^rnal re^turn defeats the categorical imperative on its o ^ ground, pushing the tert to the extremities of excess, since instead of relatog repetition to a (pre-)supposed moral law, it makes repetition itself the only form of a ‘law’ beyond morality. Repetition becomes for Deleuze the thought of the future, opposed to both the generalities of habit and the particu^nties of memory.as Blanchot em^ratically expresses it, the eterad re^ ra forces desire to r e to n without b e^ ^ rag or end, and, as su ^ , it ‘does not belong to the temporality of time. It must be thought outside time, outside Being, and as the Outside itself; is why it be ^named “ete^rnal” or aevum’ (1993: 280).s To use the form of paradox we could say that the ete^^l re^turn ‘is’ the same of the Afferent, ‘is’ the one of the multiple, ‘is’ the resemblant of that which returns, etc. The distinction here, between the unconscious becoming of eternal return (a force which seizes and overtakes) and consciousness of a '^^ing and des^ing of repetition, ‘resembles’ the ^ l y a s presented in section 354 of The G'!Y Science. In this section Nietzsche sp^eaks of the ‘superfluous’ and superficial nature of consciousness, which for him is the do^main of identity, representation, 5 For another, truly innovative reading of the thought-experiment of eternal re^turn as ‘outside’ time see Caygill 1991: 21^^^, who provides what is v^ftbly the finest essay on the eternal re^turn in the Englsh language. For Caygill the question of eternal re^turn derangges the power of judgement —it asks, do you want once and a^gain and innumerable times more? —rev^^g both its compulsion and its conditions of impossibility. Within the experience of re^turn is ron^ined the *wi^ed parody’ in the heaviest burden ^turns into the greatest joy (ibid.: 236).

DEAD OR ALI VE / 67 resemblance, measurement, etc. Consciousness develops through the pressure for communication and sociability. By contrast, that which is incomparably unique and infinitely ‘individual’ (different) ^ ^ o t be accessed through the human, all too human ‘faculty’ of consciousness. The inhumanity of ‘(difference’, the sheer non­ human monstrosity and cruelty of it, requires that we undergo a fundamentally other kind of experience — of the shattering and explosive kind presaged in the down-going and perishing of eternal return. Perish man! Perish consciousness! Perish common sense, perish good sense! Perish identity! Perish representation! Perish Zarathustra! Perish one more ^me again and again! Perish thought! Experiment! 111 Of course, things are never this easy. The matter of death is rendered more complex in A Thousand Plateaus. In this text of multiple texts the figure of death is traversed by lines of flight: death in itself is meaningless, but death for-itself becomes the point o f access to the fluid and the mobile. The discussion of death takes place in the context of an exploration of lan^guage. The di^inction made between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ refers to two different treatments of language: the ‘major’ extracts co^^mts and norms from language, while the ‘minor’ places language in constant variation and mutation. ^What Deleuze and Gua^ari the ‘order-word’ is the ‘variable enunciation’ which brings about the condition of possibility of language and which defines the deployment of its elements accor^ng to either major or ^minor. As a result, the usage of language is doubled. In the order-word we locate both a death sentence —a major deployment — and a of flight —a ^minor beco^^^, Order-words, such as ‘you or ‘you not do do that’ , bring the threat of death to those who receive the order. is death as judgement and p^ra^nent. At the same time, h^ever, the order-word con^tains a w^^arning a message to e ^ p e . It would be ^^taken to reduce the cry or message to a state of reaction; rather, the e ^ p e or flight is included in the death judgement as an integral part of its complex assemblage. The roar of a lion —an e^xample whiA could not be more appropriate in the context of zarathustra, ^conceived as the pre^ffsor of et^^al re^turn —enunciates at one and the s ^ e ^me negation (death) and ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ t io n (flight). The words of the prophet sp^eak of both a lounging for death and a longing for flight. Death heralds ^transformation. As Deleuze and Gua^ari point out, even though death c o n c e ^ ^bodies, that whiA

VIROID LI FE / 68 lives, grows, and dies, the immediacy and instantaneousness of death lend it the character of an incorporeal transformation. ‘Death’ is the figure of the uncrossable and unsurpassable. It is the ultimate challenge, the limit to the practice of sovereignty which lies at the extremity of the body. Death would like to limit metamorphoses, to give figures clear and stable contours. Empty space, time void. Death completes and gives shape. However, the revolutionary force of the line of flight lies in the fact that it is capable of making death a variable of itself. The overcoming, but not the elimination, of death. An incorporeal transformation is still attributed to death, but now, rendered in the language of the ^minor, it is a passage to the limit. Deleuze and Guattari write: We witness a transfonnation of substances and a dissolution of fonns, a passage to the limit or flight from contours in favour of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and matter, such that a body or a word does not end at a precise point. We witness the incorporeal power of that intense matter, the material power of that language. A matter more immediate, more fluid, and more ardent than bodies or words. . . . Gestures and things, voices and sounds, are caught up in the same ‘opera', swept away by the same shifting effects of stammering, vibrato, tremolo, and overspilling. A synthesizer places all of the parameters in continuous variation. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 138-9; 1988: 109) At the moment when a conjunction between death and flight ^^uns, defined as the moment when ‘fu n d ^ e n ^ y heterogeneous elements end up into eaach other in some way’ (ibid.), the point of the abstract machine, the diagram of the assemblage, has been reached. As Deleuze and Guattari mothdishly put it, the 'synthesizer’ takes the place of ‘judgement’, music replaces law, the plane of consistency assumes the role of a defunct morality, and there o^ccurs a creative synthesis of, on the one hand, biological, physio-chemical, and energetic intensities, and, on the other, mathematical, semiotic, and aesthetic intensities. The question should not be formulated in te^ns ofhow to elude the order-word, but rather how to erupt the death sentence it envelops, and, moreover, how to prevent escape or flight from veering into the unproductive black hole. To br^ing into play the musi^cality o f death, to interpret life in terms of continuous ^variation, is to bring forth the ‘vir^tual co n tin u e of life’ (ibid.: 139; 110). Beneath the order-words (for example, 'God is dead! And we have killed ^ m !’) there lie pass-words ( ‘The overman now be the meaning of the ^ ^ & ’). '^ ^ en words pass, when they presage passage, the compositions of order and org^^ation are ^transformed into the compositions of passage and consistency: ‘In the order-word, life must ^^wer the ^^wer of death, not by fleeing, but by create’ (ibid.). Or, as Zarathustra sings it: flight act and

DEAD OR ALIVE / 69 One does not kill by anger but by laughter. Come, let us kill the Spirit of Gravity! I have learned to walk: since then I have ^m. I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed in order to move. Now I am nimble, now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me. (Nietzsche 1969: ‘Of Reading and Writing’) I know how to speak the parable of the highest things only in the dance — and now my greatest parable has remained in my limbs unspoken! . . . I am invulnerable only in my heels. You live there and are always the same, most patient one! Always you break on through out of all graves! (ibid.: 'The Funeral Song’) As Bataille points out, in one sense death is the common inevitable (the great equalizer and normalizer). In another sense, however, it is ‘profound, inaccessible’ (the great diferenciator). Must one not be a god in order to experience, to live, . a sovereign death? In speaking in Inner EExperience of the necessity of anguish in the ' face of death as man’s mark of distinction, of his inhabiting a tragic world in con^ast to the untragic world of the ^^nal, Bataille is perhaps gran^ting too m u d si^gnificance to the one, ultimate, final heat-death, disregarding the se^minal impor­ tance of the many little deaths w h id the productive unconscious entices us to undergo, again and again. The jo^ul quality of this kind of repeated death —death as repetition — is poetically captured by Bataille in another piece appropriately entitled ‘The Practice of Joy Before Death’ . As always in the case of Ba^^e, the difficulty resides in deter^^ung whether his d r e ^ of ^^^alation represents the h^^rn pushed to its limit, and ^^crushed under the weight of it, as a kind of ^^aite trtragedy of the h^^an, of the impossibility of overcoming it, or whether in the practice of joy there is prefigured a comprehension of something genuinely inh^^rn. We might sp^eak of Ba^taile’s ode to the practice of joy before death in terms of a translation of the non-h^^rn into the h^raan. In his darkest dre^ns, Bataille imaagines ‘the projected in space, like a woman scr^^fing, her head in Junes’ (Ba^taile 1985: 239). To conceive of the ^limitless possibilities of h^^m movement and excitation is to the of an ^ ^ rite ^sufe^ring, of blood and open bodies, in the image of an ejaculation cutting down the one it jolts and abandoning ^ m to an e^tt^ustion ccharged with nausea’ . ‘Only a shameless, inde^cen ^saintliness’, Ba^taile writes,lead to a efficiently happy los of se!f. ‘Joy before death’ means that life be celebrated from r ^ t to ^ ^ ^ u t, since it is in and for itself the apotheosis of the —beyond co^rc^retion, beyond resreraition, and beyond prese^rvation.is death lived as pure life. Bataille: ‘it

VIROID LI FE / 70 appears that no less a loss than death is needed for the brilliance of life to traverse and transfigure dull existence, for it is only its free uprooting that becomes in me the strength of We and time. In this way I cease to be anything other ^than the mirror of death, just as the universe is only the mirror of light.’ B a ilie is imagining nothing less than the transformation of man into overman, now waiting the arrival of ‘the first ligh^tning’ (Nietesche 1969: ‘Of The Tree on the Mountainside’): Before the terrestrial world whose summer and winter order the agony of all living things, before the universe composed of innumerable ^^nng stars, limitlessly lOSing and consuming themselves, I can only perceive a succession of cruel splendours whose very movement requires that I die: this death is only the exploding co^^mption of all that was, the joy of existence of all that comes into the world; even my o ^ life demands that everything that exists, everywhere, ceaselessly give itself and be ^^thilated. I imagine myself covered with blood, broken but transfigured and in agreement with the world, both as prey and as jaw of TIME, which ^ceaselessly kills and is ceaselessly killed. There are explOsives eve^where that perhaps will soon blind me. I laugh when I that my eyes persist in demanding objects that do not destroy them. (ibid.) The problem o f death as transformation (flight) or as a leap into a black hole revolves around the ^task of dete^^^^^ the extent to which the desire to perish is motivated by a deare for destruction borne of the spirit of revenge —the spirit which animates the deare of despisers of the body and the preachers of death — or by an emancipated deare for the heights which is propelled by a love of freedom. As Zarathustra says to the ‘young man’ he meets in the mountains surroun^rng the town kno^n as ‘The Pied Cow': You are not yet free, for you still seorch for freedom. . . . You long for the open heights, your soul thirsts for the stars. B .t your bad instincts too thirst for freedom. Your fierce dogs long for freedom; they bark for joy in their cellar when your spirit aspires to break open al prisons. To me you are still a prisoner who im^agines freedom: ab, su^ prisoners of the soul become clever, but also decei^tful and base. The free man of the spirit must also purify himself. Much of the prison and rottenness still remain within him: his eye still has to become pure. (ibid.) In another rea^ding Deleuze has tho^ught death in relation to the aporetic ^stru^cture of truth and p^ower, see^king a way of ^ we cross the beyond, or acro& ,1the line’. ‘How not re-^tabU^ the ‘truth of p^ower* over the ‘power of truth’ ( D e l e ^ 1988: 94-5)7 F ^ ^ e m o re , much further in fact, how

DEAD OR ALI VE I 71 is it possible to ‘attain a life that is the power of the outside’ which is not the outside of a ‘terri^fying void’ , in which life is lived as though it were not the simple distribution within the void of ‘‘‘slow, partial and progressive” deaths?’ (ibid.: 95). In other words, how is it possible to escape the ‘reality’ of Freud’s beyond, his ultimate death-drive that would mercilessly destroy everything in order to guarantee the realization of life’s one true goal, final heat-death? But Nietzsche shows, and Deleuze shows that he shows, that the question of death, of its voluntary or servile nature, of its good or bad condition, ^canot be settled once and for all: it has to be made subject to the higher ‘law’ of eternal return. IV The problem of dete^^^ing the difference between lines of flight and lines of death informs Deleuze and Guattari’s reworking of Freud in A Thousand Plateaus. In speaking of a line of death, they are not, they insist, invoking a mysterious ‘death-drive’ (pulsion de mort). As they say: ‘There are no internal drives in desire, only assemblages (agauxmrnts). Desire is always assembled’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 280; 1988: 229). It is important that they do not succumb to the temptation of positing wi^thin life a desire for death (death as ^^is, as final end, as entropic becoming), since such a desire is nothing more ^than life ^^aing againrt life, and is a phenomenon which is h^^an, a l too h^nan. The positing o f a death-drive is nothing less ^than a reification of death, pla^cing it wi^an a restricted h^nan economy of life. Take, for e x ^ p le , as they do, the ex ^ p le of suicide. The option of suicide is taken by the one who is world-w^eary and e^uusted: one would rather engage in uncreative destruction ^an embark upon radical transformation. One recalls in context ^^athustra’s speech to the ‘beyondworlders’ (Hinterweltlmi), in which he sp^eaks of the ‘w^^rnew which swishes to reach the ultimate in a single leap’, a leap he describes presciendy as a ‘death-leap’ (Todes>iiinge). is a ‘poor, ig n o ^ t w^^raess, which no longer ^ants even to ■^ant’ . It is the sufe^ring of the weary and impotent whiA lies behind the creation of a l ‘beyond worlds’. Deleuze and Gua^ari follow Virilio in arguing that the f^ ^ & State, suA as the National Socialist State, is bert understood, not in terms o f a totalitarian State, but in terms of a ‘suicidal State’. Nazi statements invoke the cause of ‘sa^crifice’ not for the sake of the generation of new life, but for the preservation of r^eactive, dead life: ‘They always contain the “stupid and r e p u ^ ^ t” cry, Lang live d^ k\ , even at the economic level, where the exp^ansion

VIROID LI FE / 72 replaces growth in consumption and where investment veers from the means of production toward the means of pure destruction’ (ibid.: 282; 231). In appropri­ ating the war machine for its own ends, the State apparatus can reach a state where the war machine is placed solely in the service of war, substituting destruction for mutation.6 In an astute insight they note that mutation does not signal a trans­ formation of war; on the contrary, war signifies the fall, or failure, of mutation. At this point ‘the war machine no longer draws mutant lines of flight, but a pure, cold line of abolition’ (ibid.: 281; 230). The blind, senseless ‘passion of abolition’ is the passion which turns lines of flight into lines of death. O f course, is not to devalue the suicide that takes away life out of fidelity to its failed promise. Such a suicide does not serve to denigrate life but, on the contrary, it keeps alive its burning desire. Here the act of suicide is not a lazy one but vital and generous since it still bestows the poisonous of life on the living and the dead. ’TIUs is to ^rite, with Nietzsche, of the ‘proud death’: ‘Death of one’s free choice . . . with a clear head and joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses, so .that an actual leave-staking is possible while the one who is leaving is still there. . •/. From love of life one ought to die . . . freely, not accidentally’ (Nietzs^e 1979b: 88). ^foen ^nihilism has become truly contagious then voluntary death needs to be practised with a scientific conscientiousness, and a ‘new responsibility’ be granted to the physician, allowing the li^ving the ‘right time’ to die. Such a priaxis of death liberates life from the fatal objection. The to love’ must be coupled with the -^^in^ess to die, since from eternity ‘loving and peris^hing’ have gone together (Nietesche 1969: ‘O f Immaculate Perception’). Thus speaks a new innocence and a new beauty: ‘For it is already co^^^, the glowing sun —its love of the earth is coming! A l ^m-love is inoceennce and creative desire! ’ A l that is deep rises to greet the coming of the sun (ibid.). The death ‘o f’ eternal re^turn, therefore, must be taken out o f the bounds of the death-drive, at least as fo^ulated in Freud. The drive in itself is interpreted by Freud in terms of co^nservation and retention: ‘It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge ^herent in organic life to restore an ^ l i e r state of ^rngs’, Freud ■writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The ‘organic e^lasticity’ revealed by the ^uious drive c o u n t s to n o ^ ^ ^ less ^than the di^scovery of ine^u as inherent in all organic life. Far from being the progenitors and agents of change we thought they were, the 6 The ‘war machine’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s work does not refer to a machine that makes war an object of life; only the forces of State-capture do that (1980: 535ff.; 1988: 429ff.). It would be absurd to attribute to them a desire to naturalize war as a ^mment metaphysical feature of historical existence. Their concern is to establish its ma^inic conditions of existence.

DEAD OR ALIVE / 73 drives now reveal themselves to be the expression of the conservative nature of all living substance (Freud 1991: volume 1 1, 3 08-9). In this positing of the goal of life as death, death is understood in terms of a negative, unproductive conception of repetition: repetition not as the condition of possibility of perpetual difference, but as the ‘restoration’ and maintenance of an ‘earlier state of things’ , in short, as the eternal return of identity. This is not life conceived in terms of a law of ‘self-overcoming’ (Nietzsche 1994: III, section 27), but in terms of a law of self-penitence (Freud 1991: volume 11, 310). U e is condemned from the start. As soon as it begins it is dead matter, a fatal return which wants its final end right at the b e ^ ^ ^ g . This is the self, this is life, conceived as becoming-entropic, as heat-death, as self-same identity. In Freud’s depiction of the death-drive one might say that the future ‘comes’ without ‘becoming’. For Freud it is equally impossible to imagine the coming into being of the new, the unique, and the different and to entertain the possibility of self-generating life. The only law of organic life he will allow is the eteraal return of death as death: Let us suppose, then, that all organic instincts are conservative, are acquired historically and tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things. It follows that the phenomena of organic development must be attributed to external disturbances and dive^ing influences. The elementary living entity would from its very beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained the same, it would do no more constandy repeat the same course of life. In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the . Every modification which is imposed upon the course of the organism’s life is accepted by the conservative organic instincts and stored up for further repetition. Those instincts are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of being forces tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths old and new alike. Moreover it is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving. It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal oflife were a state of things had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to re^turn by the circuitous paths along whi^ its development leads. (ibid.) Ul^mately, one must reco^rae that infor^ming Freud's entropic model of death (which does not become: it always is) is a negative appraisal of destruction and disintegration. '^While the ^m of the life is to bind energy together and so estab^& ^stable unities, that of the death-drive is to unbind and disintegrate. Instead of loca^ting poative possibilities for emancipation from the ^ ^ m y of the ego in unbound energy, Freud chose to privilege the organism (as he did the imaginary ego) — the production o f which he ^mply takes as a ‘given'

VIROID LI FE I 74 — and to interpret the passages and tunnels of death mechanistically and entropically. In declaring the aim of all life to be that of death, Freud places death wi^thin a restricted economy of the organism. This economy is then read back into biology as if it constituted a general economy of ‘life’ . In Freud the conflict between psychic representation and unrepresented somatic forces does not lead to the productive and machinic unconscious but to an anthropomorphization of death. The ‘practice of joy before death’ — the ‘festival’ of death Nietzsche speaks of —is inaccessible to Freud. If there be no subject ‘of’ death —if death is dead — it is because death is its own becoming: ‘Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life — it be eternally reborn and re^turn again and again out of destruction’ (Nietzsche 1968: section 1052).7 v Deleuze acknowledges that Freud’s grgreat innovation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle consists in ^ ^ w g up the death-drive not ^mply with detractive tendencies, but with phenomena of repetition. If the ‘pl^easure principle’ is only a ‘psy^ological’ principle, the death-drive by c o n ^ ^ serves as an ‘originary, positive principle’ for repetition. To extent, it be conceived as a ‘transcendental’ principle (Deleuze 1968: 27; 1994: 16).Freud’s ^^ing up of the death-drive and repetition, Deleuze contends, is his real^tion that a negative schema, such as amnesia, is insufficient for exp^^ing repetition. We do not repeat because we repress; we repress because we repeat. At point in his d is ^ a o n Deleuze proposes a highly novel revision of Freud’s formulation of the death-drive. In efect, he destroys its credibility as a material model (the desire of living matter to re^turn to an inorganic state), and in its place, he construes its reality and efficacy in terms of a play of repetition. Deleuze contends that in praxis the death-drive disguises, which be seen to repetition only in the form of disguise. The be located in the work of d r ^ ^ and symptoms, su d as condensation, displacement, and ^ ^ ^ ^ ration , do not actu^rae a ‘brute repetition’ (a repetition of the Same). Does not ‘Dora’ elaborate her role and re^ » t her love for her father only through the ena^ment of other roles and the 7 Marcuse offers a powerfrful critique of Freud’s death-drive and its ‘b io l^ ^ rationale’ in terns of its stifling of ‘utopian’ energies of overcoming: ‘The powers that be have a deep ^afty to death; death is a token of unfreedom, of defeat’ (Marcuse 1987: 236).

DEAD OR ALI VE I 75 creation of disguises, the don^rng of masks and cos^tumes —masks and costumes which are not secondary to the original sin, but which constitute the internal genetic element of repetition itself? If one is to utilize the idea of a drive for death (or rather, of a death that desires, that wants to live) and in terms of a thought of production, not simply representation, then it only be in terms of its rela­ tionship to masks and costumes, to the dramatization of repetition phenomena. The constitution of repetition takes place, in effect, through disguise. Repetition does not lie under or behind the mask, but is formed from one mask to another. Does not eve^^ling profound, such as the phenomenon of repetition, love the mask? The mask is profound out of superficiality: it hides northing but another mask. It desires nothing but another mask. 8This means that there ‘is no firrt term which is repeated, and even our childhood love for the mother repeats other adult loves with regard to other women’. In other words, ‘there is no bare repetition which may be abstracted or inferred from the disguise itself’ (ibid.: 28; 17). In order to make the move from the ‘really real’ to the fan atical (the element of the death-drive where eve^^ling is always masked and disguised), Deleuze argues that it was necessary for Freud to abandon the hypothesis of real childhood events. It is in these terms that it is possible to account for ‘difference’: Difference is included in repetition by way of disguise . . . This is why the variations do not come from without, do not express a secondary compromise between a repressing instance and a repressed instance, and must not be understood on the basis of the stiU negative forms of opposi­ tion, reversal or ove^^rang. The variations express, rather, the differential mechanisms whiA belong to the essence and origin of that whiA is repeated. (Deleuze 1968: 28; 1994: 17) Repetition dpes representation: its true subject, which always be to it, is the mask. The repeated as suA must always be a ^ ^ e d , never repre­ sented. And yet, it is masked by what si^gnifies it, and it itself ^masks what it a ^ ^ e s . As for Freud, so for Deleuze: becoming conscious c o u n t s to little. and si^mess are not generated by simple an^nesis, but rather operate 8 Se Nie^^he (1966: section 278): ‘Wanderer, who are you? I see you walking on your way without scorn, without love, with unfathomable eyes . . . who are you? what have you done? Rest here: this spot is hospitable to all —reracuperate! And whoever you may be: what do you desire now? what do you need for recreation? Name it: whatever I have I offer to you!’ ‘Re-creation? Recreation? You are inquisitive! ^What are you saying! But give me, please —’ ‘^What? ^What?say it!’ •Another mask! A second mask!’

VIROID LI FE / 76 through a much more theatrical and dramatic enactment —as in the theatre and drama of Zarathustra’s Untergang (he is sick, but he is becoming health) —namely, ‘transference’ . As Freud ^mself points out in his essay on ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working '^tfough ’ , ’the patient does not remember anything of what s/he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out’. Transference is nothing other than repetition, Deleuze claims (Freud had acknowledged this himself). Transference ^kes place in a m^mer similar to scientific experimentation. The patient is expected to reproduce their disturbance in privileged, artificial conditions. However, in tr^ feren ce, repetition does not serve to authenticate people, places, and things, but rather it selects masks and erects symbols. Repetition then ass^nes the guise of a transformative power, a 'demonic’ power which both makes us ill and cures us, both enchains and liberates us (Deleuze 1968: 30; 1994: 19). In Deleuze’s rewor^king and rewriting of the death-drive, it is no longer a desire on the part of life to endure a bare repetition by re^^aing to a previous, initial state of inorganic life, but is now that which gives repetition its ‘disguising power’ and its ^amanent meaning, mingling the a^^&ty of terror with the movement of active selection and freedom. In repetition, in eternal return, one cons^nes oneseself in one’s own fl^ e s —consummation (VoUendung) as constant productive death and going beyond. A^mttedly, Deleuze’s emphasis on the work of production performed by the ^^ensese power of repetition remora highly formalist. But what it succeeds in sh^owing is that the ‘death-drive’ enjoys no teleological g o v e^ ^ ce over life since it too is subject to the production of ^fference through repetition which constitutes the costumes and drama of a life that is lived in terms of a creative and destructive evolution. 9 VI That ‘other world', that ^ ^ a n , dehumanized world, whi^ is a heavenly Nothing, is well concealed from humans; and the belly of being does not speak to man, except as man. Truly, all being is difficult to demonstrate, it is difficult to bring it to spee^. Yet, tell me, my brothers, is not the most wonderful of all things most clearly demonstrated? (NietzsAe 1969: ‘Of the Beyondworlders’) 9 In his own critical reading of the Fort-Da refrain and the death-drive, Guattari has argued that it is a question of making a Aoice between a 'me^chanical conception of deathly repetition and a machinic conception of processual opening'. S e Guattari 1992: 1^^7; 1995: 74-5.

DEAD OR ALI VE / 77 Not only does the work of Deleuze, and that of Deleuze and Guattari, illuminate the becoming of Nietzsche’s philosophy, its lines of death and flight, but, and most appositely in the context of this chapter, the becoming peculiar to Zarathustra and to the playful repetition which is affirmed in the thought-experiment of eternal return. Here, in this final section of the chapter, I utilization of Deleuzian-inspired thought only begin to show how a make novel sense of the complex, acentred narrative stru^ure of Zarathustra’s going-down and going-across. Towards the end of Difference and Repetition, in the conclusion when all is to begin again, Deleuze notes that Zarathustrn is radi^cal incomplete and ^^mshed as a text. He also notes that in the Nachlass of the plans of the text, Nietzsche set himself the task of composing a further part which would revolve around the meaning and signifi^nce of Zarathustra’s death. However, Deleuze leaves the si^gnifi^nce of this irresolution concerting Zarathustra’s life and death suspended in mid-air, and fails to realize that his own ^^^ing through of the question and problem of difference and repetition provides us with the key that unlock the mystery and the riddle of Zarathustra’s aborted foal death. Might it not be that Nietesche did not have Zarathustra die a final dramatic death because he knew that such a death both was rendered superfluous by and ran counter to the import of Zarathustra’s ‘pure beco^ming’? Zarathustra does die in the text, not once but many times; he dies many little deaths (petites morts), again and again, in the d^^tion of his perishing and ^^form in g. A final heat-death would undermine the counter-entropic principle of ete^tal return, which demonstrates that it is impossible to die ‘once’ and ‘for a l ’. An examination of the Zarathustra-Nachlass serves to validate these cl^ms. There are plans and outlines of acts and parts in which Zarathustra not only ^sufers a fatal and final death, but is also murdered. For example, in a plan from the period November 1881 to Febru^y 1883, Zarathustra forgets the misery of life through teaching ‘re^curence’ , but then his pity increases when he realizes that the theory c^mot be ‘endured’.The plan then reads: ‘C^max: the sacred murder. He devises the thcory of the overman’ (Nietzsche 1987, volume 10: 152-3). In another plan, time from June/July 1883, Nietzsche has Zarathustra die at the moment when the ‘vision’ of the over^man departe from and he becomes a^are of the ^sufe^ring he has caused (he dies of the pity he feels to^^ds man, precisely that which, in Zarathutira, Nietzsche says ‘killed’ God) (ibid.: 4 9 5 ^ ) . In a plan from late 1884, by which time the first three parts of Zarathtustra have been ^^&ed, Nietzsche has ^Zarath^^^ teach the e te ^ ^ re^turn, w h i^ is at first presented in m^^Uiche te^ro, depressing the nobler and e n ^ ro ^ ^ the ‘lower natures’ , and then ou^mes a scene in which the teac^hing has to be suppre&ed and Zarath^^^ killed (ibid., vol^ne 12 : 281).

VIROID LIFE / 78 As this Nachlass material so clearly demonstrates, the relationship between the teachings of eternal return and the overman is highly complex and under­ determined. While in the ‘completed’, published text it is the teaching of the overman which is announced first, with that of the eternal return not appearing, in disguised form as well, until the end of part 2 (in the discourse on ‘Redemption’), in the Nachlass it would seem that Nietzsche formulated the teaching of return first and was led to' positing a notion of the overman as a result of his inability to conceive of its affirmation by man: the thought of eternal return is not human at a l, hence its ‘undecidable’ and un^cany quality. Only the overman is able to endure the thought of ete^rnal return, to dance and play with it, and then deploy it ‘as a means of discipline and tracing* (ibid., volume 10: 378). It is only the prospect of the o v e^ an which make the thought of return conceivable (an i^mmaculate conception). Once possible, however, the overman then becomes the progenitor of the thought of ete^rnal return as an ^ fo ^ tiv e , uber-menschliche thought. 10 One of the most enigmatic confessions from this period as follows: Goal to reach the overman for a moment. For that I would suffer everythhmg. That triad! (ibid.: 167) This is paradoxical on a•number of counts: to be^rn with, the ‘^sufering* referred to is a sufering grounded in ^^rite joy (O Ewiokeitf). Secondly, to ‘reach* the overman for a moment would be to reach forever (O Ewiokeitl). And, fo ^ y , to suffer e v e^ ^ ^ g , in the sense that one would gla^y perish oneself in order to a^rin that which is ‘over* , would, in effect, amount to an ^^roation of eternity since what been a^ttained, or ‘reached*, is no^mg other ^than eternal return, 10 This involuted and convoluted play between the two d^octrines, or thought-experiments, has been overlooked and downplayed by the great majority of readers of Zarrathustr’a, including the most diligent and ^astute, s^uch as Maurice Blanchot. See, for example, Blan^ot 1993: 148-9, where Blanchot con^^te 'the categorical Clarity with which^arathustra announces the overman with the anxious and hesitant announcement of the external re^turn, s^ugestingg that the profound truth of the latter ra^rsedes the truth of the former. I remmain one of the few readers of Niete^te to indst on the creative entwinement of the two d^^mes and ^ 1 for the ^^roation of the promise and the danger of the d^^toe of the iibermmch. Such an insight becomes attainable when one ^ceases to of the production of the overman in terms of a linear pr^rcss of ‘evolution* but re^^mzes that it be at^ined ‘at every moment’. The ‘tri^’ is to ‘see’ (blicken) the ‘moment’ (Augenblick) of the overman from the ‘per^^^ve’ of a genealogical becoming.

DEAD OR ALI VE I 79 the very thought of ‘difference and repetition’ (as the eternal return of the ‘moment' (see Nietesche 1968: section 1032)). The ‘evolution' of Zarathustra in the book can be understood in terms of this excessive economy of repetition, in which Zarathustra evolves or becomes in terms of a passage through masks and disguises. It proves impossible for Zarathustra to reveal at any point, least of all at the end, who he truly is, for he ‘is’ not, he only becomes. Zarathustra is already dead when he descends to the market-place from his mountain retreat. He appears to men as a cross between a fool and a corpse. What is not perceived by those gathered around Zarathustra is that his dying is only a bridge and not a goal. 'Sacrifice' — the act of p eri^ ^ g through active auto-destruction — is to be afrm ed when the perishing it inaugurates is for the sake, not of the ^ars beyond, but of the earth, not for the sake of the preservation of the present, but of the cre­ ation of the future and the redemption of the past. Invoking himself in terms of an uncanny fate, a dark precursor, Zarathustra declares: I love all those who are like heavy drops falling singly from the dark cloud that hangs over ma^nkind: they prophesy the coming of the lightning, and as prophets they perish. ' (Nietzsche 1969: prologue) In terms of this aspect of ^^athustra's identity as a prophet, Deleuze's reading is apposite and correct. As the herald of the new, the unique, and the incomparable, and as the concomitant destroyer of the identical, the s ^ e , and the similar, Zarathustra must perish, must die. But what perishes is not Zarathustra in-himself but rather Zarathustra as 'hero' , as ‘redeemer' . Zarathustra as liberator and creator lives on to fight another day: Zarathustra-hero became equal, but what he became equal to was the unequal, at the cort of losing the sham identity of the hero. For ‘one' repeats eternally, but ‘one’ now refers to the world of impersonal individualities and pre-individual singularities. The eternal retum is not the effffect of the Identical upon a world become similar, it is not an external order imposed upon the ^aos of the world; on the contrary, the eternal re^turn is the internal identity of the world and of ^aos, the Chaosmos. (Deleuze 1968: 382; 1994: 299) The ultimate death of Zarathustra, as a kind of fatal perishing (the pera^ng of the dice-throw of existence), if po&ible and conceivable, would be equivalent to a sovereign dissolution and sa^crifice. But eveven suA an ‘ultimate' death more be no a paswge to an ‘over-death’, a creative tr ^ fo ^ a tio n of the ^uos whiA gives b^th to a dancingg ^ar. Towards the end of the prologue —and here I con^ff with Deleuze when he argues in Nieusdte and Philosophy that the prologue

VIROID LI FE / 80 o f Zarathustra contains ‘the premature secret of eternal return’ (Deleuze 1983: 70) — Zarathustra, who up to this point has been plagued by death (by his own corpse, by the dead bufoon, etc.), resolves not to be what he is not: namely, herdsman to the herd and universal gravedigger. He needs ‘living companions’ who follow him because they wish to follow themselves and who go where he desires to go (Nietzsche 1969: prologue). He has 'spoken to a dead man for the last time’, and now resolves to ‘make company with creators, with harvesters, with rejoicers’. ^rus is the line of death ^ ^ ^ g into a line of flight: ‘I will show them the rainbow and the ^ ^ w ay to the overman' (ibid.). The expe^ment unfolds. Here, through a reading of the prologue, 1have sought to show how it is possible to ^ad the repetitive figure, Zarathustra in terms of a and symbol of ofpure beco^^^, of ‘^fference and repetition’ . A reading of the rest of the book -would, 1 believe, consolidate this interpretation. In the crucial and deeply eni^natic discourse in part 2 on ‘The Prophet’, for e^xample, Zarathustra once again repeats his encounter with death, what he now calls ‘the rasping silence of death, the worst of my companions’ . But far from being overwhelmed/and depressed by death’s persistence, Zarathustra has now learned how to combat the screw s of coffins with ‘a tho^usand peals oflaughter’ (Nietzsche 1969: ‘The Prophet’). Zarathtustra has detected the hidden, negative death-drive wi^m the ‘despisers of the body: ‘Even in your foUy and contempt, you despisers of the body, you serve your Self. I tell you: your Self itself wants to die and ^turn away from life’ (ibid.: ‘O f the Despisers of the Body’). It is not a question of death being contra life, but of a certain kind of death fighting another kind, another species, of death and the dead: ‘Everyone treats death as an important event: but as yet death is not a festival . . . one should l^earn to die, and there should be no festivals at w hi^ a dying man does not consecrate the oaths of the living f’ (Nietesche 1969: ‘O f Free Death’). I propose that the becoming o f Zarathtustra, the beco^ming o f N ietes^e’s philosophy, be read as a monstrous fire-machine. The machine of ^unce — the machine of the dice-throw which is et^^ d re^turn —is utterly diferent from the engine, the of and ultimate heat-death, the engine of entropy, w hi^ ^inspired thermod^^mic conceptions of ^rne and beco^ming (but for nineteenth-century entropic thought there ain’t no becoming, only death, only the death ‘ of’ being and the being ‘of’ death). In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze compares the ‘power’ of re^turn to fire in that it an ^ ^ ^ u tion of multi­ plicity ‘a l at once’ . Fire is the element which plays with being, the beco^^^ of being and the being of becoming (Deleuze 1983: 30). The fire-machine is a machine which chance by cooing and bo^ng it, in w hi^ immense forces

DEAD OR ALI VE / 81 are released by small, multiple manipulations. If the task of transfiguration is one involving the transformation of suffering into joy, negation into affirmation, the same into the different, the heaviest of burdens into the lightest of weights, then the ultimate test and challenge must surely consist in the transformation of death: from the undifferentiated black nothingess of the death-drive to the differentiated fire-death of eternal return. The task, then, my friends? To traverse the line of flight beyond good and evil, but not beyond ‘good’ and 'bad’ death. Again, this is a tr^aining in life and death that requires cultivation, the cultivation of an ^animal capable of living even beyond the 'beyond’ . From Zarath^ustra’s teaching on ‘Free Death’ (Vomfieien Tode): Free for death and free in death, a solemn No-sayer when there is no longer time for Yes: thus he understands life and death. That your death many not be a blasphemy against man and the earth. my friends: that is what I request from the honey of your soul. In your death, your spirit and virtue should glow like a sunset glow around the earth: othe^rwise your death Hies into a bad death. Thus I want to die myself, that you friends may love the ^^th more for my sake; and I want to become ^^th again, that I may have peace in her who bore me. Truly, ^vathustra had a goal, he threw his ball: now may you friends be the heirs of my goal, to you I throw the golden ball. But best of all I like to see you, my friends, throwing on the golden ball! So I shall move on a little longer: forgive me for it! Thus spoke ^Zarathustra. V II The death of ete^rnal re^twn, conceived in accordance with a mode of production and reproduction, to be an objection to life, beco^^^ its only posable ultimate and unequiv^oca ^^roation (Bejahung). The et^ ^ d ret^ro does not establish a totality or unity of life, but is, above a l, a tea<^^g of the fra^nent, of fragmentary death and ^^mentary life. i 1 In undergoing its convoluted experience one does not become whole, an organic unity, or an or^^^m that 11 The emp^hass on^^^rent here is potentially misleading. I do not m^ean to ^sugest that the eternal re^turn lacks completenes or ^wholeness; on the con^^y, conceiving the eternal re^turn as a positive ^^^utive of the ^^roent is designed to baring out the

VIROID LI F E I 82 knows in advance what it shall become and wants to become, but rather a machine of partial objects and open boxes. The time of eternal return introduces the death that is always half, always incomplete, the time of severed deaths. For Deleuze it is this neither entirely alive nor entirely dead condition that makes it possible to describe humans as ‘monstrous beings' (Deleuze 1973: 143).They are ‘monstrous' precisely because their condition is punctuated and pricked by the half-death; their time is that of an ^^uite and immeasurable horizon, and these tiny creatures walk through life as if giants on account of the measurele^ depth granted to them by time, plunged into years and stretched along aeons exist in vast remoteness from each other. When Nietzsche declares that he is a l the n ^ e s in history he is not arrogating to himself some great, immodest cosmic identity, but rather afrm ing the immeas^^bility of his ‘identity’ and stretching history out into the distances of aeonic becoming. It is far from being a mad thought, though it may be overh^^an, quite overhuman. ‘Death is an invented state’ , repeats Artaud, advising us to be suspicious of the preaching of warlocks, ^ ^ ra , and conjurers of no^thingne^. But if death is an ‘invented state’ then it ^can be reinvented anew ^ d repeated again and again. conception of death as invention corresponds to Deleuze and Guattari’s cons^trual of the experiment of eternal return as involving the deterritori^Ked circuit of a l the cycles of desire. A ^ »r^ng to their energetics of desire there is no death instinct ^mply because both the ‘model’ and ‘experience’ of death reside in the unconscious. Locating death in the context o f a machinic (^mal-functioning means that death (can. no longer be treated as an abstract principle, but to be evaluated in terms of the system of ‘energetic conversions’ and" the des^ingmachines of which it is part. There is no death-drive, no being-for-death, not even a speculative investment of death, because the ‘experience of death’ belongs ^ o n g the most common events of the unconscious, whi^ 'occurs in life and for life, in every passage or becoming, in every intensity as ^ ^age or becoming. It is in the very nature of every intensity to invest within itselfthe zero intensity from whiA it is produced’ (Deleuze and Guat^ri 1983: 330). There ^ ^ o t be either a m e ^ ^ ist or a fin a ls (entropic) model of d^eath since death is ‘what sever ceases and processual/mac^mc character of the test and e:xpe^ment. In the plateau entitled '1730: ^Koming Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible. . . ' in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari contend that it is not wwritingg that is the real isue in NietzsAe, but rather the production of speeds and movements between particles. They thus procl^m Zarathustra's teaming of eternal re^turn in therms of ‘the firrt great concrete freeing of nonpulsed time’.

DEAD OR ALI VE I 83 never finishes happening in every becoming’ (ibid.). Death is folded wi^thin and enveloped by intensity. Death happens, but only in terms of a ‘becoming'. Its experience is thus not at all a personal one, amounting to an existential deepening, but a ^^ction of the cycles of the desiring-machines. Construed as the operation of a static dualism, as in Freud's human, all too human schema, the death-drive (death working itself to death contra Eros) does not function as a simple limitation but as the very liquidation of the libido. The product of analysis is not the free and joyous 'person’ who is the carrier of life flows, and who has the courage to them into the desert of life and decode them, but the person who is weighed down by sadness and ^anxiety, whose Dasein gives off only the sour smell of entropic decay (on non-heroic courage see Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 341). The human body dies, Artaud says, only because we have forgotten how to transform it and change it. And a l the while Nie^whe dies ^ o n g his ‘daughters of the desert’, seeing to re^mind us of the ‘over-death’ : Wonderful, truly! Here I now sit, beside the desert, and yet so far from the desert, and not at all devastated: for I am swallowed do^ by this little oasis - it simply opened, yawning, its sweetest mouth the sweetest-smelling of all little mouths . . . Here I now sit in this smallest oasis a date, brown, sweet, ^^oozinggolden, for a girl's rounded mouth, but for more girlish, ice-cold, snow-white, cutting teeth: for do the h^earts of all hot dates lust. Selah . . . The desert grows: woe to him who harbours deserts! Stone grates on rtone, the desert swallows down. monstrous d^eath glowing bro^ and ^ews - . its life is its Ae^wing . . . Forget not, 0 humtm. b^t out by lust: you —are stone, <^tksert, and death. (Nie^^fe, ‘The Desert Grows' , Dithyrambs 4' Dionysos, 1889)

4 N I E T Z S C H E C O N T R A D A R W I N I write for a species that does not yet exist. (Nietzsche 1968: section 958) History ultimately proves something quite different than what man wanted: it turned out to be the surest means of destroying those principles. Darwin. . . . One gets to know better the real forces in the movement of history, not our ‘beautful' ideas! (Nietzsche 1987, volume 9: 10 [D88]) H^ankiHnd likes to put questions of descent (Weriurift) and beginnings out of its mind: must one not be almost inhuman to detect in oneself a contrary inclination? (Nietzsche 1986: section 1) Nietasche’s both pubfehed and unpublished, are riddled with critical reflections on D ^^ in and the theory of natural selection. While Nietzsche’s explication of the Uberamensch as involving a non -D ^ ^ ^ an style of evolution is often noted (if little understood), his engagement with D ^ ^ in has not received the kind of attention it merits. 1 Where it has been treated, it has been so ^cursorily, without any serious effort being made by commentators to render com prd e^ble Nie^^foe’s ‘philosophical biology' , indu^ding its problematic aspects. This is not a ‘minor’ of his in Nietzsche-reception, since at the very heart of Nie^^he’s outline concerns in his major text, On the GenealOOJ' o f M o^itj, we find a critical e^agement with the D ^ ^ ^ a n paradiigm of evolution. The GenealO[J is a 1 The conn^ection be^ren Nie^tzsche and D^arwin is touched upon by Heidegger in his 1930s le^ctures on Ni^^^e, but the treatment of D^arwin is perfunctory and cavalier. See Heid^eger 1961, vol^ne I: 72; 1979: 60. Heidegger’s reading of Nie^tzsche's ‘biologism' and Heidegger’s o ^ e^^ement with modem biology will be examined in the final section of this ctapter.

VIROID LI FE I 86 te x t steeped in nineteenth-century biological thought and ideas, and is u n ^ ^ ^ b l e without this heritage. The task o f determining Niefesche's relation to Darwin and D ^ ^ ^ s m is an immensely im portant one, but also com plicated. No attem pt will be made here to pit Nietzsche against Darwin in any simple or straightforward sense. This is fo r a number o f reasons. Firstly, it is necessary to appreciate that there is an essential ‘ evolutionary’ basis to Nietzsche's most radical philosophizing (as when, fo r exam ple, he argues in the opening o f H u m a n , A il t o o H u m a n that there are no absolute values o r eternal truths, and argues in favour o f the adoption o f a ‘historical' m ode o f p h ilo so p ^ a n g ).2 Secondly, it is im portant to appreciate that even when Niet7.<sche presents him self as ‘contra’ D^arwin, he is, in fact, frequently writing 'p ro ' Da^rwin and refuting only an erroneous image o f D^arwin which he has derived from popularizations o f his thought. Now that these im portant qualifica­ tions have been made, however, it re^mains to be examined w hether in som e vitally important sense N ietesche is a philosopher whose essential ^ ^ ^ in g poses a serious ^ a lle n g e to D^arwin’s ideas on evolution, and thus b e construed in some crucial sense as a ^ ^ i e r who is indeed ‘contra D^arwin’ . 3 I shall endeavour to show that N ietzsche’s position 'co n tra’ D^arwin is flawed and does not ^ o u n t to a decisive critique or attack. Rather, w hat is decisive is the critical perspective which D^arwn's ^ ^ ^ in g on natural selection brings to bear on Niet7.<sche's Lebensp h ilo s o p h ie , since it is able to show the extent to w h i^ it rests on an untenable anthropormorphization o f nature, life, and evolution. Many o f N ietesche's m ost penetrating insights into the genealogy o f moralities and molarities gain their potency by having their basis in the insights o f scientific m aterialism . T h e burgeoning disciplines o f physiology, thermodynamiCS, and atheistic biology in the nineteenth c e n t^ y left a decisive ^mark on his critique o f m odernity and his attem pt to evolve a philosophy o f the future. ^This does not prevent however, from criticizing n a t ^ l science fo r displaying residues o f m oral theology, as in the apocalyptic ‘heat-death’ vision o f the second law o f 2 In fact the influence of an evolutionary paradigm on NietzsAe's ^^^mg on life is evident as early as 1867 in his speculations on Kant and the qu^tion of teleology. In this early outline of a planned dissertation Nietzs^e comes close to ar^^^ that Kant’s ^^tang on nature is irredeemably pre-D^winian on account of its inability to conceive of nature producing through contingent mechanistic means life-forms that are capable of complex self-organization. In essay it is perhaps significant that NietzsAe embraces an Empedocl^a standpoint since Empedocles is often portrayed as an ancient precursor of Darwin. See Nie^tzsche 1933-42. volume 3: 371-94. For Empedocles see Wheelwright 1966: 122-54. 3 For insight into the reception of Darrin in Germany in the period of Nietzsche’s writing see Kelly 1981.

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN I 87 thermodynamics. Science halts before the ‘petty facts’ and is unable to generate new visions and riddles o f life that could be placed in the service of the cultiva­ tion o f ‘higher’ types and form s o f life. I intend in this chapter to concentrate on N ietzsche’s engagement w ith m odern biology, especially Darwin’s theory of natural selection, since it reveals novel insights into the difficulties o f N ietesche’s thin^^g. There is plenty o f evidence to suggest that N ietesche was familiar \\-ith the w ork o f the English Dar^winians (and prom inent German Da^^ulans to o , such as E rnst H aeckel), but no evidence to suggest th a t he had any d irect acquaintance with the work o f D^arwin itself.4 Besides H erb ert Spencer and Thomas H e^ty Huxley, for e x ^ p l e , N ietesche was familiar w ith the work o f a figure like W alter Bagehot, whose P h y sics a n d P o litic s o f the late 18 6 0 s was sub-titled ‘Thoughts on the Application o f the Principle o f “Natural Selection” and “Inheritance” to Political Society’ (a reference to this work a s E d u c a to r). It be found in the final section o f S c h o p e n h a u e r be quite easily shown that at the points at which N ietzsche he is differing from Da^rwin, he is, in fact, endorsing the subtler D ^ w in he never cultivated an appreciation of. These points also show the e xten t to w h i^ N ie ^ ^ h e i s , in fact, closer to Darwin in his ^ ^ ^ in g on evolution and adaptation ^than to the explicit Lam arckian position frequently attributed to ^ m .5 In using Huxley contra Spencer in the second essay o f the G en ealO lJY i f ' M o r a lit y , for e x ^ p l e , Nietzsche is, by im plication, endorsing the a t t a ^ made by, among others, W i l l i e Jam es on Spencer's ^Lamarckism.6 Lam arckism offers a too perfect 4 It would be erroneous to attempt any sstrirt detennination of Darwinian and Lamarckian components in the biological thought infonning Nie^tzsche’s ideas. It is early in the 1880s with the work of Weismann (never cited in Nie^tzsche's work) that D^^msm emerges as a theory wholly di^inrt from its Lamar^ian heritage. Hae^el, for example, freely incorporated Lamarckian elements into his Darwinism. In the Origin tif S e r i e s is ignorant of the genetic causes of heredi^ry variation, and so freely innco^irates into his theory of de^scent with modification ^ ^ w ^ ’s theses on the use and of o^rgans and on the inheritance of acquired <iaracteristics. 5 See, for example, Kaufmann 1974: 2^^5, who speaks of Nie^tzsche as remaining fai^thful to Lamardc's d^octrine of the inherit^e of acquired ^characteristics throughout his intell^^wl life. 6 Nie^tzsche's remarks about Spencer are always contemptuous. In Nie^tzsche t 974: ^^ran 373, for example, he refers to as 'that pedantic ^Eng^^man’ who raves tediously about the eventual reoondliation of egoism and altruism, argues that a human race that adopted a Spencerian ^^pective would be worthy of ‘^^anation'. The Noch/os makes it d ^ " that the text Nietzs^e was making notes from and commenting on was Spencer's D ata tif Ethics (tr^lated into Gennan in 1879). S e Nie^tzsche 1987, volume 10: 550; volume 11: 525. For ^further references to Spe^nce ^ Nietzsche 1979a: ‘^Why I am a ^ ^ ^ y ’, section 4, and 1979b: 'Expeditions of an Un^mely Man', sections 37 and 38.N ie^ ^ e 1966: s^ection 253 where D^^ta, J. S. andd Spencer are lum^^ t ^ ^ ^ r as ‘mittlemisger Englander'.

VIROID LIFE / aa model o f adaptation and does not place the emphasis in evolution, as Dar-^in and as Nietzsche do, on the role of functional indeterminacy in complex evolution. In Darwin it is clear that the process by which adaptive traits are produced is initially independent of their potential usefulness in adaptation. This is what contemporary theorists have called ‘exaptation’ , denoting an adaptation which either originated as a non-adaptive characteristic or one which evolved with a diferent function from that which it enjoys in the present.7 Nietzsche reads natural selection as lending support to the reactive forces of life and to their triumph in modernity.8 Nietesche does not refute natural selection, but emphasizes the extent to which it is the ‘me^chanism’ by which reactive forces are able to at^in a position of do^minance. Nat^ura selection is conceived by Nietesche as a largely negative feedback mechanism that enro^^ges the physiologically weak and ill-constituted to gather together in herds in order to m^^^tee their opportunities for self-preservation.9 Nat^ura selection reveals an entropic tendency; as one commentator on D ^^ro has succinctly expressed the 7 For an account of exaptation see Plotkin 1995: 54ff. 8 One of the few commentators to expose this point is Deleuze, who refers to 'adaptation, evolution, progress, happiness for all, and the good of the community’ as examples of new reactive values peculiar to modeernity that take the place of the old disCTedited r^reactive values associated with God and a Christian-moral culture. See Dele^* 1983: 151. Earlier in this essay (61) Deleuze characterizes reactive force as (a) a utilitarian force of adaptation and p^tial limitation; (b) a force that separates active force from what it ^ do (su^ as the example of the separation of the lightning and its flash that Nietzsche gives in the parable of the lamb and bird of prey in the GenealoBJ Morality, I, section 13); (c) a force that denies and turns against itself (the process that Nietzsche refers to as the ‘internalization of man', whi^ is almost constitutive of rus very being). 9 The influence of thermodynamiCS on the theory of nat^l sel^ection is more readily apparent if one looks not at D^win's conception of it, but that put forward by Alfred Russel Wallace. Just a few years before the publication of Darwin's Origins in 1859, Wallace '^^vered’ the principle of natural selection after a psy^edelic experience caused by a malaria attack, resulting in deliri^, while in Indonesian ^rain forests. Wallace explained his ‘discovery' by comparing the action of the principle as ‘exactly like thet of the cen^^^al governor of the engine, which and ccorreects any irregularities almost before they become evident’. Wallace makes the analogy with the centrifugal governor of the steamengine in the context of a discussion of the role of mimicry in evolution and how evolution works in favour of counteracting the potentially disastrous effeects of unbalanced deficiencies. Thus, a deficiency in one set of (say, weak feet) is always compensated by an increase in the development of other org^ (powerful wings, for example). See Wallace 1958, reprinted 1971: 26^^0. In his Mind and Nature Gregory Bateson went so far as to cl^m that if it had been Wallace, rather than D^win, who steered the theory of natural selection, then today we would have a very different throry of evolution and

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 89 essential import of the tautologous ‘survival of the fittest’ thesis: ‘natural selection is the difJerential loss of differently constituted individuals’. 10 It ■is clear, however, that natural selection reveals both aspects of feedback. Natural selection — which would be more accurately characterized as ‘natural destruction’ since nature does not in this schema so much positively select the fittest as ‘exterminate’ the ill-adapted in a purely mechanistic fashion — compels organisms and species to strive for stability and preservation (the important task in evolution is not to be selected against), but the selective pressures of a changing and variable environment m^m that they mmust le^ n to operate their capacities for adaptation innovatively at the ‘edge of chaos’ . The ‘Red Queen hypothesis’ pro­ vides another example of feedback in evolution in which even stable environments be upset, that is, rendered unpredictable and non-linear.11 It is by no means certain that life-forms evolve by main^^wg a tightly adjusted relationship with their ‘environment’. Natural selection, in which the emphasis is placed on preservation, is one means of measuring the adaptive success of life-forms, but it is, in Nietesche’s eyes, a highly conservative, if not ‘bourgeois’, measure of evolution. It is on this level of argument that Nietzsche is engaging with D arrin ’s theory of natural selection and proposing ‘self-overcoming’ as an alternative ‘law of life’. In his ‘mature’ thought Nietesche seeks to ^^culate an alternative conception o f life. He was immersed in the debates w h i^ took place after the publication of Da^rwin’s Origin i f Species about the precise m e ^ ^ m of evolution (exogenous or endogenous). Indeed, it is in the context of tthis fund^ental debate cybernetics may have appeared one hundred years earlier. For fufurther insight into Wallace see S. J. Gould, ‘Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace’, in Gould 1983: 43-51, P. j. Vorzimmer 1970: 187-213, and Cronin 1991. For ^further insight into negative and positive feedback, and for a discussion of the Watt governor in terms of its application to biology, see the chapter on ‘Explosions and Spirals’ in Dawkins 1991: 195-220. See also Sigmund 1995: 47, 59, 128ff. In one of the most important contributions to biology in recent years, Manfred Eigen has argued that ‘selection’ is not the blind sieve people have considered it to be since Darwin, but rather is to be conceived as a highly active prrcoces that is ‘driven’ by an internal feedback melanism. His reformulation of selection in sud terms is ^^ble of making a valuable contribution to a Da^inian conception of creative evolution. Eenen maintains that selection does not possess an inherent drive towards some predestined goal; rather, it is on account of its inherent non-linear meA^ism, whi^ gives the ap^arance of goal-directedness, that selection functions as a discriminating searctong device lro^ng for the route to optimal performance (but note, optimality is never final in life, that sel^ection is a continuing process). See Eigen 1992: 121-7, ‘Res^e: Darwin is dead - long live Dar^ta!’. 10 See Howard 1992: 22. 11 For an account of |the Red h^mthesis see Sigmund 1995: 148ff.

VIROID LI FE / 90 about the nature and motor of evolution, which still divides the community of biologists today, that Nietesche specifically provides the most succinct formulation of his notion of ‘ will-to-power’ (in essay 2 of the GenealoBJ' ojMorality). Ultimately, Nietzsche will read natural selection as positing a certain evaluation or measure­ ment of life, arguing that it rests on particular ‘values’, notably, the value and utility of preservation. 12 Thus, a fundamental aspect of the revaluation of values conducted in a genealogy of morality will be a revaluation of ‘D^^^tian’ values. This revaluation, however, as I shall endeavour to ill^uminate, is not without major problems since it raises the complex issue of unwaranted anthropomorphizations of nature and corresponding reifications of natural and technical life. In the GenealOEJY, in which he calls for a frul^ul exchange between philosophy, phySiology, and medicine, Nietzsche’s overriding is to expand the horizon of value, so that the fund^ental question, ‘what is the value of this or that table of values and morals?’, be ex^amined with the benefit of a wide array of perspectives. Nietzsche advocates such a pluralism in order to prevent any ampleminded reductionism conce^rning the fund^ental questions of ‘life’. He sees selection as lending itself to such reductiomtf: approaches, and he is keen to point out that som e^^g which possessed obvious and enormous value in relation to the ^ v iv a l of a ‘race’ (ft&se), su ^ as the improvement of its power of a^ptation (Anpasun^fo^e) to a particular ^ ^ ^ te, or to the preservation of the ^greatest number, would not at all enjoy the same value if it were, say, a question of the production (herawhddm) of a ‘stronger’ type. It is, he contends, only the naivety of English biologists which permits the two questions of value to be conflated (Nietzsche 1994: I, section 17). This particular confrontation shows, I would argue, the extent to which Nie^^he is responding to not so much as a biological theory but more as a social theory, as social D ^ ^ ^ s m . 12 It is not at all clear that Darwin was supplying a mech^sm in order to explain evolution with the principle of natural selection. For example, in the third edition of The Origin tif S^ies he makes it clear that natural selection is not to be construed as inducing variability; rather it implies only the preservation of variations that arise and ^ t prove ben^dal ‘to the being under its conditions of life’. In the s^ e passage he stre&es the solely metaphorical quality of the expres­ sion 'natural selection’ so as to ward off any personification of nature. For farther analysis ofthis issue see Young 1985: 95ff. It was Wallaace who tried to get Darwin to drop the misleading phrase 'natural selection’ and replace it with ‘the survival of the fittest’. In a letter to Darwin he maintains that *na^d selection’ is ‘indirect’ and ‘incorrect’ as a metaphorical expression. If one must personify nature, he argues, it is better to speak of 'natural extermination’ since nature does not so much select variations as ^exterminate unfavourable ones. See Paul 1988: 411-24.

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 91 Nietzsche construes the experimental creation of the Ubermensch not in ‘Darwinian’ terms as a superior type evolving through natural selection; rather, he configures it in terms of a notion of emergent cultural complexity and deterritorialization, laying particular stress on the hybridic emergence of diversity and d ifre n c e wi^thin the order of things. The Ubermensch operates on a number of planes in Nietzsche’s thought: as the thought of singularity and incomparability; as the supra-economic thought of a cyborg future; as a vision of the ‘higher’ type of a complex evolution, and so on. Its me^aning is both radically other and relative to what we know of the h^nan and what we think still might become of it: ‘a relatively overhuman type, is overh^rnan precisely in its relation to the good —the good and the just would this overman the devil’ (Nietesche 1979a: ‘Why I ^ a Destiny’ , section 5). The higher type, and the stronger, more evolvable, ‘species’, signified in the overman represents the ‘secretion of a luxury surplus of mankind’ made possible by m^^ind’s ‘machinery of interests and services’ becoming integrated in more and more intricate terms. On the plane of human cul^tural evolution there ^wil occur, as there is occurring now, Nietesche argues, a kind of stationary adaptation. Once the common economic management of the earth has been at^ined, ‘m^^ind service of be able to find its best me^aning as a machine in the economy’. Economic development result in such an intelligent symbiosis of man and ^ ^ ^ in e that the need for command and domination will become superfluous: ‘a tremendous clockwork, composed of ever smaller, ever more subtly “adapted” gears; as an ever-gr^^ng superfluity of all dominating and commanding elements; as a whole of tremendous force, whose individual factors represent minimal forces, minimal values’ (Nietesche 1968: section 866; 1987, volume 12: 462—3). On another plane, evolution ^wil take place in an opposite direction, away from a specialized utility and the production of a ‘synthetic, s^^marizing h ^ a n ’. The exigence of the ‘transformation of man^nd into a machine’ is a precondition of the emergence and cultivation of this new overhuman type. If one wanted to look at pi^ure of the future moraUy, it would have to be conceded, Nietzsche a^mts, that this ‘overall machinery’ and ‘solidarity of all gears’ of the h^nan-so^al machine represents a high point in the exploitation of ^man. Nev^ertheless, he insists, higher evolution ‘presupposes those on whose account this exploitation has me^aning’ . Nietzsche offers this vision of the overh^nan as a rival to the ‘economic op^timism’ w h i^ gove^w at the present time, hol^ding that the incre^^^ expenditure of everyone involve the incr^^ng welfare of everyone (ibid.; see also section 898). Here we find Nietzsche combatting what he reg^ards as the ‘leve^lling tendencies’ of modem s^ocial evolution with an entirely diferent conception of the e^ngineering of man and his future

VIROID LI FE / 92 becoming, one which rests on a particular praxis of selection that is radically at odds with the ‘natural’ type posited by Darwin. Nietzsche’s artificial selection of ‘man’ aims to combat the animalization of man into the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims’ (Nietzsche 1966: section 203). In his writings Nietzsche will often equate English empiricism and liberalism with the preservation of the perfect herd animal (see Nietzsche 1979b: 92-3). ‘Humane Englishmen’ such as Darwin, Spencer, and John Stuart Mill simply lack music; the movements of their ^^^mg are devoid of rh^^m and dance. Indeed, what these bankers lack is ‘the real profundity of spiritual perception; in brief, philosophy’ (1966: section 252). The only vision of the highest h^nan achievement which English cl^nsiness and pedant seriousness offer is that of a ‘Salvation .^roy’ type (ibid.). In the ^^cial section on ‘historical method’ in the GenealO[J i f Morality Nietesche puts forward a novel valuation of evolution and selection. The theory of will-to-power does not place ‘adaptation’ (Anpassung) in the foreground (as inner adaptation to external circumstances and provocations). For Nietesche, this is an entirely ‘reactive’ notion of life. An ‘active’ notion of life only be given articulation if the emphasis is placed, not on adaptation, but on the priority of the ‘spontaneous’, ‘expansive’ (iibergreifenden), and self-org^^ling ‘form-shaping forces (g^estaltenden Kri^e) that give new directions and interpretations’ (Nie^tzsche 1994: II, section 12). ‘Adaptation’ is a secondary effect which takes place only after the fo ^ ativ e powers have exerted their influence. Nietesche does not mention D^^an in the section of the GenealO[J where he formulates his own conception of evolution through the priority of form-building forces, but refers instead to Herbert Spencer. The Nachlas note of this crucial section, however, from the end of 1886/early 1887 (simply stated as 1883—8 in the Kaufm^an translation of The Will to Power), makes clear that a scientificaly informed if ina^^rate critique of English D ^ ^ ^ s m lies at the heart of Nie^tzsche’s postulation of a notion of ‘willto-power’ to account for the primacy of spontaneous and form-giv^g ‘activity’ (Aktivitiit) in the beco^ming of complex life not Spencer is the ^ ^ e Nietesche mentions in the original formulation of this passage). In contrast to an e m p ^ ^ on the ^influence of ‘exte^rnal O T ^ ^ w tances’ (ausseren Uimmstide), he stresses that the essential phenomenon in the life process is precisely the ‘tremen­ dous shaping, form-creating force’ (ungeheure gestaltende heiformsch<!lfende Gewalt) that works from within and then u^tilizes and exploits ‘external circ^nstances’ .,3 13 NietzsAe 1968: section 647; 1987, vol^e 12: 3^^5. A similar critique of Darwinism be found in Bergson's Creative Evolution of 1907 (whiA curiously nowhere refers to NietzsAe). See, for example, Bergson 1983: 101-3, where Bergson

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 93 It has been little noted that the notion of will-to-power is, in large part, inspired by work Nietesche read in the early 1880s in experimental embryology (notably Wilhelm Roux) and orthogenesis (notably Carl von Nageli). One of the original passages in the Nachlass where Nietzsche develops the ideas that will inform the crucial section 12 of the second essay of the Genealo8J i f Morality is entitled ‘Gegen den Darwinismus’ . It begins by insisting upon a principle of method that Nietesche will make fundamental to the understanding of ‘evolution’ or becoming which he propounds in that work, namely, that the ‘use’ of an organ in no way serves to explain its ‘evolution’ (Entstehung) (Nietesche 1987, volume 12: 304). This principle finds an exact correspondence in von Nageli’s theory of evolution (Abstammungslehre). 14Von Nageli construes evolution taking place in terms of the synthesis of external causes and internal causes that operate under the influence of molecular forces (Molecularkriifte). Von Nageli construes evolution by adaptation as ^^tag place in terms of the primacy of internal factors that result in increasing complexity (ever more elaborate ‘configurations’ of forces) corresponding to external conditions. Natural selection prunes the phylogenetic tree but does not cause new branches to grow. The- phylogenetic process is a double one, with the combination of forces producing a new configuration while the new configuration produces new combinations of forces. ^This process of a contin^^y ‘in c r ^ ^ g complexity of confi^guration by the action of internal forces’ constitutes the ‘auto­ matic perfecting process . . . and entropy of organic matter’ (von Nageli 1898: 8). For von Nageli it is double process and resul^nt play between the interior and the exterior which account for the complex reality of variation: ‘The same external causes may, according to the nature of the organism and other endeavours to steer a course beyond the opposition of melanism (neo-Da^rinism) and finalism (neo-Lamarckism), by developing a conception of evolution which places the emphasis on an ‘internal push' that cities life ‘by more and more complex forms, to higher and higher destinies’. The issue of vitalism should not serve to downplay the continuing si^ficcance of Bergson’s text. On this point see Kampis 1991. Bergson’s thi^nkingon evolution and entropy has been defended against the many charges of mysticism levelled against it by Georgescu-Roegen (1971: 192). 14 Von Nageli published his theory of evolution, Mechanisch-physiologische Theone der Abstammun^s/ehre (Leipzig, Oldenburg, 1884), in two volumes, 1: Die Schranken der naturwissensch<ift1ichen Erkenntniss, and 2: und G^toltungen immoleculCiren ^Gebiet. correspondence between Nietzs^re and von Nageli has been expertly annotated by Andrea Orsucci (1993: 380fT.). S e also Orsucci 1996: 53-7. I am grateful to the author for sen^ding me an advance copy of his most recent study. The English translation of work (see von Nageli 1898) simply amounts to a t^ranslation of Nageli’s summary of his r^^^A. The original work ^runs to well over 500 ^pages.

VIROID LI FE I 94 circumstances, have very unlike variations as a result. But the internal rearrange­ ment produces in a definite case very definite variations’ (ibid.: 20). For Nietzsche the will-to-power is active in a complex evolution in terms of an unconscious process of interpretation and connection that results in 'greater complexity, sharp ^diferentiation, the contiguity of developed organs and fractions’ .I 5 Nietzsche's argument is that mere variations of power could not feel themselves to be such; rather, ‘there must be present some^thing that wants to grow and interprets the value of whatever else wants to grow’ (Nietzsche 1968: section 643). Indeed, Nietesche goes as far in his privileging of a shaping force as to cl^m that this force ‘desires an ever new supply of “material” (more “force”) ’, and speaks, in this regard, of the ‘masterpiece’ of the construction of an organism from an egg (ibid.: section 660). Moreover, greater complexity does not simply mean greater power in terms of greater mass: the emphasis is on the quality, not the quantity, of power. As recent ‘complexity’ theorists have emphasized, the marker of evolution in a complex adaptive system is not the number of components but the number of <diferent ^pes of components. 16 Nietesche’s whole attack on mechanism has its source in qualitative understanding of force and form (mec^mistic theory, he argues, only describe, not explain the processes of evolution) (ibid.). The notion of ‘utility’ in evolution is clearly problematic. Nie^^he himself formulates a notion of the 'individual’ that reco^^^s its complex evolution, speaking, for example, of the individual’s evolution in terms of a s^ g g le between parts —for food, for space, etc. —whiA proceeds through atrophy and ‘“becoming an organ”of other parts’ (ibid.: section 647). Moreover, he insists that the ‘new forms’ generated and moulded from within are not formed with any end in view. 17 In the spontaneous becoming of organs the struggle of the 15 NietzsAe understands organic memory precisely in these terms of an unconscious formation: 'One must revise one's ideas about memo,),’, he writes. 'Herelies the Aief temptation to assume a “soul”, whiA, outside time, reproduces, i^co^zes, etc. But that whiA is experienced lives on “in the memory”; I cannot help it if it “comes baA”, the will is inactive in case, as in the coming of any thought. . . . Before judgement occurs, the process of assimilation must have already taken place; thus here, too, there is an intellectual activity that does not enter consciousness. . . . Probably an inner event corresponds to eaA organic function; hence assimilation, rejection, growth, etc.' (NietesAe 1968: sections 502, 532). 16 On this point see Saunders and Ho 1976: 375-84 and 1981: 515-30. authors argue that it is not ‘organization' but 'complexity' si^gnifies growth in evolution. An increase in organization is treated as a secondary effect that comes about simply because the more a system evolves in complexity the more organization is required to faciliate survival. 17 Compare WWicken 1987: 62: 'Adaptation is an “end” of evolution in the sense of cornsequence rather ^thangoal.'

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 95 d^erent parts results in a new form which is eventually related to a partial usefulness, which then develops itself more and more completely in accordance with its use. It is not so much, therefore, a question of refuting Da^rwin’s concep­ tion of utility, where ‘useful’ is synonymous with proven advantageousness in the struggle with others,'8 but of constructing an order of rank, in which the ‘real development’ is located in the feeling of increase in power, ‘the feeling of becoming stronger', apart from any usefulness in the struggle of life as the ‘survival of the fittest' (a formulation long recognized by biologists as tautologous) (ibid.: 649 ) .19 Nietesche thus does not accept that the ‘drive for preservation' is the ^ d in a l drive in the evolution of organic life: One cannot ascribe the most basic rad primeval activities ofprotoplasm to a will to self-preservation, for it takes into itself absurdly more than would be required to preserve it; and, above all, it does not thereby ‘preserve itself, it falls apart. The drive that rules here to explain precisely this absence of desire for self-preservation. (ibid.: section 651) D ^ ^ ^ s m overestimates utility in evolution on account o f its privile^ng of the ^fluence of external cir^cumstances. In positing ‘self-preservation' as the principal law of life Nietesche argues that modern natural sciences are entangled in a 'Spinozistic dogma’ that erroneously universalizes as a general principle of evolution particular conditions of existence (such as the idea that every living desires to maintain itself in its own being) (see Spinoza 1955: 136-7). He 18 For Darwin’s justification of a utilitarian approach see Darwin 1985: 227ff. Darwin’s thmking on utility is a great deal more subtle than NietzsAe allows. He concedes NietzsAe’s point, in fact, when he argues that ‘many modifications, wholly due to the laws of gro^wth, and at first in no way advantageous to a species, have been subsequently taken advantage of by the still further modified d^rendants of species’ (1985: 232). It is not the case for Darwin, therefore, that every m^Mcation and formation ^ acquired through natural selection. Rather, selection operates as ‘preservative power’ by making ‘profitable variations’ of modifications in the ^^strugle for life. 19 Of co^urse, Nie^etzsche wilfullfullymisreads D^win for his o-wn purposes and in order to bring out the radical difference of his own position. It is clear that ‘fitness’ for Darwin only makes sense in relation to a given environment. It d ^ not refer to an absolute scale of perf^tion, and so lacks the teleolOgical intent that Nie^tzsche ascribes to the theory of natural selection read as a social theory or theory of culture. However, Nie^tzsme is correct to insist that ’^survival of the fittest’ denotes a passive, if not r^eactive, principle of life. The only criterion of usefulnes or fit^nes is the process of na^atural selection itself, namely, the outcome of sel^ection. For clarifification of the phrase ‘^survival of the fittest’ se Dawkins 1982: 179-94.

VIROID LI FE / 96 warns us, in speaking o f the ‘incomprehensibly onesided doctrine o f the “struggle for existence”’, that Malthus is not nature.20 On the contrary, the species of English Da^^^sm breathes the ‘musty air of English overpopulation, like the smell of the distress and overcrowding of small people’ . 21 He thus insists contra Da^rwinism that it is not conditions of distress (Nothlage) and scarcity that are 20 As early as 1875 Nietzsche is contesting the extent to which the ‘struggle for existence’ can be posited as the most important principle within an economy of life. See the note labelled ‘Zum Darwinismus’ in Nietzsche 1987, volume 8, 12 [221: 257-9. For Da^rwin's reference to Malthus see Darwin 1985: 117, where he states that his conception of evolution is ‘the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms’. Evolution by natural selection is conceived by himas nature’s check on an infinite exponential increase and spread ofthe striving of organic beings to increase their numbers: ‘The face of Nature* , he writes in a graphic passage, ‘may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force’ (119). When Darwin returned home to England in 1836 at the end of his five-year-long voyage of discovery on the Beagle, he re^turned, in the words of his biographers, to a ‘re-energized Malthusian world’, in which the new poor law had put into effect the Whig philosophy of ‘middle-class Malthusian values'. See Desmond and Moore 1992: 196. Malthus presents a lucid account of his views on population growth in terms of solid ‘laws of nature' in the opening ^apter of his classic Esay on the Prindple t f Population (1798/1993). 21 Somewhat ^yptically, and perhaps unfairly, Nietzsche locates the source of Darwin’s conception of evolution not only in Malthus but also in Hegel: ‘without Hegel there could have been no Darwin’, Nietzsche 1974: 357. The Hegel-D^win nexus was first outlined and explored by Nietzsche in his scathingattack on David Strauss, his first ‘untimely meditation’ of 1873 (section 7). It should be clear: what Hegel and Darwin is that both are worshippers of the ‘real’ as the rational and hence ‘deifiers of What he abhors in Strauss is the disingenuous attempt to derive from evolutionary theory a possible ‘genuine D^^^an ethics’. Nietzsche's point is a strong one, namely, that any attempt to derive ethical values from the laws of natural science represents the ‘extreme anthropomorphism of a reason that has overstepped the bounds of the permitted'. An echo of Nie^^&e's portion contra Strauss be heard in Stephen Jay Gould’s 1990 Edinburgh Medal Address (Gould 1995). See also Nie^^tzsch 1987, volume 11: 34 [73]: ‘What separates us as much from Kant, as from Plato and Leibniz, is that we believe that becoming (das Werden) even in the realm of the spirit (Ge^gen), we are historical (historisch) through and through. lbis is the great reversal: ^Lamar^ and Hegel — Darwin is only an aftereffect.' Of course, we know that the most important influence on Darwin came from the geologist Charles Lyell. The only significant scientific treatise D^win took with him on the Beagle voyage was the first volume of Lyell's hindples tfGeolOBJ (the second volume he picked up later during his travels). Interestingly, Nietzsche’s own conception of history (Geschichu) o^perates not under the influence of Hegelianism but rather under that of geoloOfl}' and its notion of ‘^strata' (die Schichten). It is because he reads history geologically in terms of processes of Gratification that Nietzsche

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 97 dominant in nature but rather conditions of overflow Ubeifiuss) and squandering (Verschwendung) , even to the point of absurdity (Unsinnige). The struggle for existence has to be regarded as a ‘temporary restriction of the will to life’ (derWille des Lebens). This is to recognize the ‘will to power’ as the formative principle of the ‘will to life’ (Nietzsche 1974: section 349). The extent, therefore, to which Nietzsche formulated his conception of life as will-to-power in terms of an alternative to the depiction of life offered by ‘English Da^^hism’ has been overlooked. For Nietesche the life process evolves in terms of the shaping, form-creating forces working from utilizing and exploiting external circumstances as the arena to test out its own e^ravagant experimenta­ tions. The ‘useful’ establishes itself as an indirect result of complex process. Thus, for e x ^ p le , Nietesche argues that a deficiency or degeneration prove to be of the highest utility insofar as it acts as a stimulant to other organs (Nietesche 1968: section 647 ).22 He even goes so far as to es'^mate the evolution o f strength, the feeling of power’, in terms of its intensity, not its extensity (that is, the feeling o f becoming stronger does not have to depend on one’s comparative advantage over others, as in the D^^™ an struggle for existence). In his theory of opposes all forms of historical evolutionism or historicism. Geology affords insight into the vinual plane t f becoming that established ‘history' conceals and covers over. On this point in Nietzsche see the astonishing section 223 of Assorted Opinions and Maxims entitled ‘Whither to one must Travel', where he speaks of the past as continuing to ‘flow within us in a hundred waves'. In order to ‘discover' the past genuinely, it is not necessary that one travel thousands of miles, constantly moving from place to place and traversing vast distances. The process is rather one of activating and actualizing the buried vir^tuality of past time in a new becoming (‘thus I willed it!' being precisely the moment which captures the temporal flow of geologicalhistorical time). The p^^ge from Axoned Opinions and Maxims closes with the intimation of a possible future/futural humanity (zukiinftige Menschenthum) in which ‘self-knowledge' and ‘self­ determination' have become univmal knowledge and universal determination. 22 The aforementioned Nachlas note from 1875 (8, 12 [22]) stresses, contra the essential import of the principle of the ^^^le for existence (KamP.Jum’s Dasein), the si^gnificance of degenera­ tive natures in the context of a discussion of how the ‘infection of the new' gets accepted and assimilated. This note from 1885 becamme section 224 of Human, AU To Human, entitled ‘Ennoblement through Degeneration' (Veredelung dur^ En^^ung), whi^, in part, states: ‘Degenerate natures are of the highest significance wherever progress is to be effected. ' Every progress of the whole to be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures preserve the type, the weaker help it to evolve . . . the celebrated smuggle for existence does not seem to me to be the only theory by whi^ the progress or strenngthening of an individual (Menschen) or a race (faue) ^ be explained.’ Nieto^e's construal of the feedbag mechanism brought into play by degeneration and defici^des brings close to Wallace’s argument at the conclusion of his aforementioned ^es.

VIROID LIFE / 98 life Nietzsche sharply criticizes the view that the aim and goal of life is self­ preservation (Hobbes, Spinoza, Adam Smith, Darwin), and places all the emphasis on the enjoyment a living thing gets out of simply discharging its force (with preservation a consequence of this overcoming) (ibid.: section 650). The ‘instinct of preservation’ is a superfluous teleological principle in the comprehension of life. Nietzsche’s ^^^rng on this question of struggle between parts evolves under the influence of Wilhelm Roux (1850-1924) and his work of 1881, Der Kampf derTheile im Organismus. Ein Beitrag zurVeervoUstandigung der mechanischen Zwecclunassigkeitslehre, which contended that naturalal selection was unable to account for Orgmbildung since it relied on a purely exogenous influence.23 Nietzsche cites key insights from this text in the notes of 1883 (Nietesche 1987, volume 10: 272-5 and 302-4). It is only several years later in the Nachlass material of 1886/7 that he begins to explore its siginifi^Mce in the context of his formulation of ‘form-shaping forces’ and his critique of D ^^ in (see ibid., v o l^ e 12: 304ff.). It is from Roux that Nietesche borrows the notion of‘form-shaping/building forces’ (or ‘formative powers’). However, the notion is not restricted in Nietzsche to the evolution of ‘organs’ but plays a fundamental role in his positingg of the will-to-power as a principle of ‘historical method’ that is applicable to variegated forms of evolution, whether they oc^ff in biological, physiological, cul^tural, or te^mological domains: there is no more important proposition for all kinds of historical researA that which we ^rive at only with great effort. . . n^ely, that the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate use^fulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends (Zwecken), are toto cwlo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it . . . eve^^^g that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering (l^^waltigen), dominating (Hern/erdden), and in their ^tum, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjust­ ment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' and ‘purpose' (Zweck) must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated. (Nietzsche 1994: II, section 12)24 23 For ful details of Nie^tzsche's utilization of the work of Roux see the editorial comments provided in Nietzsche 1987, volume 14: 684-6, and Muller-Lauter 1978: 189-223. There can be little doubt that Nie^tzsche's contention that 'exploitation' (Ausbeutung) belongs to the ‘essence of what lives' as a basic organic ^^^on (as a consequence of the will-to-power) is derived in large part from his reading of Roux. See NietzsAe 1966: section 259. 24 For a contemporary statement of functional indete^rminacy see Arnett 1995a: 245-75: ‘there is no ultimate User's Manual in wwhiAthe real functions, and real meanings, of biological ^artiacts are officially represented' (270).

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 99 Nietzsche further insists that as a major principle of historico-genealogical method the ‘development’ (Entwicklung) of a thing or of an organ is in a way to be treated in terms of its ‘progressus’ towards a goal, and most de^Mtely not as a ‘logical progressus’. Rather, ‘evolution’ must be approached as operating in terms of a ‘succession’ (Atifeinandeifolge) of more or less profound and independent processes of overpowering in which powerful transformation and resistance play the role of an immanent, open-ended dyn^amics. If the ‘form is fluid, the meaning even more so’ (ibid.). Nietzsche then makes the analogy with the individual organism, cl early drawing on the embryological work of Roux, arg^ng that every time the whole grows Significantly, so the meaning of the individual organs also s^fts, with the result that the partial destruction of organs is to be regarded as a sign of their increasing vitality and perfection. He thus reaches the ‘strange’ conclusion that decay and degeneration, as well as loss of meaning and purposiveness (Zweckmiisg k eit) (in other words, ‘death’), are a l to be regarded as the conditions of an actual progressus. The notion of ‘form-shaping forces’ operating in terms of a non-linear and non-teleological becoming is crucial to understanding the morphological basis of his Kulturkritik — dem^ ra ry and its modern misarc ^ ^ , the hegemony of herd morality, the tri^nph of reactivity, etc. As Nietesche tells readers of the ‘genealogy’ , stress is to to be placed upon the major points of a historical method in order to combat the p r e ^ ^ ^ instinct and fashion which would rather accept the view that a randomness (Z^Mligkeit) and mec^rnstic senselessness governs all events ^than that a ‘theory of a power-wili (Macht-Willens)’ is played out in a l that happens and evolves. It is thus woe^ful inadequate to claim, as one commentator on Nietesche’s critique of D ^^ in ^w, that Nietesche was an opponent not of ‘scientific but only of the attempt to derive moral formulations or conclusions from D ^ ^ ^ sm (Stegmaier 1987: 2^M38). Nietesche is ar^fing that the m e ^ ^ m of has influenced physiology and biology to the extent that the baac con^cept, that of ‘activity’ (Aitmtiit), of the objective sciences, is ‘spirited away’ . this ‘^usive’ model of evolution is moved into the foreground, thro^ugh a notion o f‘adaptation’ , the ‘essence of life’ , n ^ ely , its ^wilto-power conceived as the of the reinterpeting, redirec^ting ‘formative powers’, is lost sight of. Nietzsche politicizes this conflict wi^in the ‘natural sciences’ by d^^ing that me^chanistic physiology and biology serve to lend support to the cause of the modem dem^ratic idio^n^^^, the political philosophy of the man, is o p ^ ^ d to CTe^^^g that do^minates and wants to do^^ute as a higher power. At the same ^me Nietesche bioloaizes the question of the political by uphol^ng a theory of ■^wil-to-power which seeks to dem o^tote that a system

VIROID LI FE / 100 of law conceived as sovereign and universal is ‘anti’ the fundamental ‘activity’ of life. A society that employs law not as a means ‘for use in the fight between of power’ but as a means 'against fighting in general’ not only is hostile to life but would equally represent ‘an attempt to assassinate the future of man’, concealing a ‘secret path to nothingness’ (Nietzsche 1994: II, section 12). It is only by understanding the theoretical basis of Nietzsche’s celebration of immanent diversity and variety, which he sees as ‘evolving’ spontaneously and endogenously through the s^urplus of overpowering and architectural excess, that we make sense of his attempted critique of D^^in (and, by extension, social D ^ ^ ^ sm ). He views the ‘struggle for life’, vulgarized in socio-biological thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the level of the ‘survival of the fittest’ , as the exception rather than the rule. The ‘general aspect of life’ , he contends, is not lack (hunger) and distress, but rather wealth, lux^y, and prodigality (Verschwendung) (Nietzsche 1979b: ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’, section 14). If we admitted that the popular D^^^an-Malthusian view of life predominates in nature, then it would be necessary to acknowledge that hirtory proves the theory wrong, for, in the case of man, it is not the ‘strong’, active type that has flourished but the weak, reactive type. Nietesche argues that we history of the only account for such a perverse ‘man’ in terms of the evolution of the ‘mind’ (Geirt) (the weak have become strong through patience, ^ g en ce, self-control, etc.: in short, through moralty). It is only on the level of history and culture that the triumph of the D^^^an-Malthusian view of life as a general economy of nature be accounted for, and it is precisely such a ‘history', that of and of morals, that Nietesche sketches in his genealogy of moorality. Nietzsche attacks biologists for importing into the logic of life moral evaluations (the altruism of the herd, for e x ^ p le ). Both the ‘species’ and the ‘ego’ are illusions. If we are to posit a notion of the ‘ego’ it should be in terms of a complex unit in a chain o f members, and not as an isolated, self-sufcient monadic entity. The notion of the species is merely an abstraction from the multiplicity of ^ ^ ra . The theory of descent, on Nietesche’s view, must construe individuation as degeneration (the fa ln g apart of one into two, the becoming of multiplicity, ^fference, heterogeneity) (Nietesche 1968: section 679). In a note of 1881 he main^ins, ‘In any case there are no species (Gattunj), but only different kinds of individuals (Einzelwesen)! . . . Nature does not desire to “preserve the species”!’ (Nie^tzsche 1987, volume 9: 11 [178]). The o f evolution for Nie^etzsche belongs not to species but to individuals who embody ever greater levels of complexity, by which Nietesche means ‘a greater of co-ordinated elements’ . He appreciates that greater complexity means that su ^ a higher type renders itself

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 101 more vulnerable to disintegration (‘The genius is the most sublime machine (die sublimste Maschine) there is — consequently the most fragile’, 1968: section 684; 1987, volume 13: 315). Nietzsche’s affirmation of the higher type goes against the grain of evolution, which favours the gradual selection of that which endures. The higher type, by contrast, squanders itself; it does not last, and is but a lucky stroke; it ^cannot be bred or passed on through heredity. It is precisely for this reason — the fact that natural selection so rigorously favours the weak and the mediocre — that Nietzsche argues for the protection of the strong (the lucky strokes, the fragile complex types) from the herd-desires of the w^eak (1968: section 685; 1987, volume 13: 3 03-5). Nature is blind and dumb; the intelligence of the lucky stroke is a freak, a qquirk, of evolution. If man is the product of natural selection, the overman —considered as thefuture of evolution —will be the inven­ tion of a wholly Afferent kind, and it is in the context of Nietes^e’s engagement with D ^ ^ m that we perhaps best understand his positing of the eternal return as promo^ting an alternative principle of selection to be placed in the service ‘of strength (and barbarism! !)’2s: M y philosophy brings the triumphant idea by which all other modes of thought will ultimately perish. It is the great cultivating idea (ziichtende Gedanke): the races that c^mot bear it stand condemned; those who find it the greatest benefit are selected for mastery (Herrschafi)' (Nietesche 1968: 1053; 1987, volume 11: 250). Nietoche reco^^es that his ‘contra D ^ ^ m ’ position is deeply problematic since it overturns the basis on which a D ^ ^ w an perspective evaluates evolution. The a ^ ^ ^ e n t of the ‘highest ^pes’ — by which is m^ean ‘the richest and most complex forms’ (Nie^tzsche 1968: section 684) —takes place only rarely, and once at^ined has to be nurtured with extreme ^ e and attention. The problem of culture, as that w hi^ gives culture its raison d'etre, is no^wg other ^than that of how to cultivate the conditions which give rise to the flourishing of the highest ^pes. Nietzs^e does not ^ ^ ^ , however, that one the genius. Rather, a culture manufa^cture only lay d o ^ conditions that are favourable to the unpredi^ble and non-calculable ligh^mg-like appeararance of unique, singular beings. T^ypes are hereditary, but then a ^type is not a ‘lucky stroke’ , ‘no^rng extreme’ (ibid.). The ^task is to make ‘the ^scales more delicate and hope for the assistance of favourable accidents’ (ibid.: section 907; see also sections 933, 957, 960). Nie^^foe is compelled to engage with D ^ ^ m ^mply because he appreciates that na^tural selection ^stands opposed to the ^radamental conce^K o f his own 25 A point made several decades ago by Haas (1929).

VIROID LI FE I 102 conception of life and of selection (artificial selection by means of the experiment of eternal return) (Nietzsche 1968: section 1053; 1987, volume 11: 250). Nietzsche’s appraisal of D^^^usm, however, is awkward and ambiguous. While the thrust of his ^^^ing is to dereify the naturalistic claims of the theory, there are places in his work where he appears to be arguing that on the level of ‘natural’ selection Dar^winism is correct. Survival of the fittest, even at the level i f the 'will-to-power , he suggests at one point, translates itself into a cultural history and evolution that favours the org^^ation and do^minion of the weak over the ‘lucky strokes’ and ‘select types’. Nietzsche’s conclusion is that if one translates ‘reality’ into a ‘morality’ , then this morality ^wil assert the primacy of the ^wil to nothingness over the will to life, and prize the value of the mediocre over that of the rare and the exceptional. It is as if Nietzsche is making the claim that history could only have developed in the way it did, in the direction of the triumph of the slave revolt in morality, ance ‘history' , like 'nature', favours the org^^ation and moral intelligence of molar formations (su ^ as flocks and herds). This is akin to his argument in the GenealOjJY i f Morality that the animal ‘man’ was destined to develop a bad conscience as soon as he be^came trapped within the walls of society and peace (indeed, is it posable to of ‘^man’ before tremendous event?). Encouraged by the tendency of na^tural selection to lead in the direction of the formation of homogeneous totalities and equilib^al unities, the mole^^ff forces become captured by molar aggregations, resulting in the do^minion of herds over packs (such as the blond beasts of legend) and the general victory of reactive forces on the level of both nature and culture. It is out of his confrontation with (what he took to be the D ^ ^ ^ a n theory of evolution) that Nie^rche is forced to become a philosopher of culture as breed^ing and an advocate of artificial selection. Nietesche l^ates within natural selection the prevalence of negative feedback. The ^struggle for existence does not reveal a continual growth in perfection through the p e ^ ^ ^ of the weaker creatures and the survival of the most robust and ^fted, since in this ^^strugle ^chance and accident serve the weak as weU as, if not better ^than, the strong. The reality of nat^ura selection promoted ^ o n g ^^weakr forms of life the cultivation of ^ ^^hg, patience, ^^rnulation, and ^^hicry in the a ^ ^ ^ e n t of the goal of selfpreservation:26 'one nowhere finds any e x ^ p le of Ulconscious selection. The most 26 On the role of mimicry in evolution see Nie^^te 1982: section 26. In s^ection 14 of 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man’ in Nie^tzsche 1979b, Nie^tzscheargues that D^^rn could not ente^rtain the possibility that evolution might favour the ^survival of the w^eak because he left out of his account the mind or spirit (Gein). lbe weak dominate the strong though large numbers

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN I 103 disparate individuals unite with one another, the extremes are submerged in the mass. E v e^ ^ ^ g competes to preserve its type’ (1968: section 684; 1987, volume 13. 315ff.).27 Nietesche contends that every type has its l^^ts beyond which there be no evolution. He refuses to construe the victory of slave values and reactive forces as 'antibiological'; rather, this triumph has to be explained in terms of the interest life has in preserving the type ‘man’ through the ‘method of the dominance of the weak’ (Nietzsche 1968: section 864; 1987, volume 13: 369-70). The problem is ultimately one of ‘economics', in which ‘duration’ as such (the longevity of species of forms of life) has no in^trinsic value from the perspective of a transvaluation of values that places itself in the re^m of Nieteschean ‘justice’, where justice is conceived as the ‘highest representative of life itself (Nietzsche 1987, volume 11: 141) and as a ‘panor^amic power’ that fractions beyond the narrow perspectives of good and evil (Nietesche 1987, volume 11: 188). The molar aspect o f Da^rwin’s conception o f natural selection is evident in the chapter on ‘The Struggle of Existence’ in The Origin i f Species, where Dar^win speaks of the necessity of a ‘large stock of individuals of the same species, relatively to the numbers of its enemies' if the goal of preservation is to be (majorities) and through cleveme^. It is this insight into the role played by mimicry in evolution which informs his contention that the ‘entire phenomenon of morality' , including the Socratic virtues, has an animal origin, that is, the virtues are adaptive traits which have served to facilitate h^an survival. In 1982: section 26 he ^ites: ‘animals le ^ to master themselves and alter their fo^, so that many, for example, adapt their colouring to the colcuring of their surroundings . . . pretend to be dead or assume the forms and colours of another animal or of ^rnd, lichen, fungus. . . . Thus the individual hides himself in the general concept “man", or in society, or adapts himself to princes, cla&es, parties, opinions of his time and place: and all the subtle ways we ha'e of appearing fortunate, grateful, powerful, enamoured have their easily discoverable parallels in the animal world.’ Deleuze and Guat^ri have argued that mimicry is a baddconcept since it relies upon a logic of mimesis which fails to appreciate that evolution does not take place through imitation but through what they call ‘transversal communications’. H^ence they claim that the crocodile no more reproduces a tree trunk than a chameleon be said to reproduce the colours of its surroundings. See the introduction on ‘The Rhizome’ to Deleuze and Gua^ttari 1988. 27 There are a n^ber of passages, like this one, which lend support to the view that Nietzsche had no direct familiarity with the work of D^^ta, including The Origin of Species. explicitly examples of ‘unconscious sel^ection’ in the opening chapter of the book entitled ‘Variation sunder Domestication' ( ^ 93-5 ^^raally). Another example is Nie^tzsche’s ^ern^eous view that ‘there are no ^^^tional forms', a view he expresses in Nietzsche 1987, volume 13: 3156' (1968: section 684), and a topic about whiA Da^rwin has many inter^esting to say in The Origin (see 1985: 2066'. in ^particular).

VIROID LI FE I 10 4 attained. 28 The only writers to have picked up on the importance of the problem of selection - that natural selection works in the favour of large numbers - for Nietzsche’s philosophy are Deleuze and Guattari, in the final chapter of AntiOedipus. The key insight, which is a crucial one for their own molecularization of thought and reality, is that large numbers, or aggregates (molar identities such as species, organisms, and complete whole persons), do not exist prior to a selective pressure that elicits singular lines from them; on the contrary, large numbers arise out of the pressure of selection which either regularizes singularities or eliminates them altogether. The ‘herd instinct' and ‘morality’ are the outgrowth of the pressure of selection. Culture, Deleuze and Guat^ri argue, works in the same way, inventing through ‘inscription’ the Wge n^nbers in whose interests it is exerted. Only once molar formations have effected a ^unification and to^^ution of molecular forces through a statistical ac^ccumulation that operates in accordance with the laws of large numbers do the partial machinic objects of the molecular order appear as a lack (the slave revolt in morality succeeds, therefore, when it manages to seduce the masters into ^^^ing that they lack morality and need the recognition of identity freely offered by the slaves).29 For Deleuze and Guattari it is only when desire becomes welded to lack that it acquires collective and personal ends and intentions (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 410; 1983: 342-3). At the point of molar ^takeover, •we might say, desire no longer desires.30 It has become a will fo r power in terms of a unitary subject that persists in its identity and that has internalized desire in terms of a representation, not a production. Nietzsche clearly felt compelled to respond to D ^^m and was b a fe d by the lack o f any real challenge to his theory on the level of a radical cultural critique: ‘The error of the school of D ^ ^ m becomes a problem to me: hhow one be so blind as to see so badly at this point?’ (Nietzsche 1968: section 685; 1987, volume 28 Darwin 1985: 122. 29 See NietzsAe 1994: I, section 13 on the slave revolt in morality and its invention o f the fiction of the subject in terms of the separation of ‘doer' and ‘deed': ‘This type o f man needs to Wtteve in an unbiased “subject” with freedom of Aoice, ^because he has an instinct of self-preservation and self-^^roation in whiA every lie is sanctified. The reason the subject . . . has been, until now, the best doctrine on earth, is perhaps because it facilitated the sublime self-deception whereby the majority of the dying, the weak and the oppressed of every kind could construe weakness as freedom, and their particular mode of existence as an a^mpiishment.' 30 The notions of ‘^ g e ’ and ‘small’ should not, however, lead one to that the mol^ecular/ molar distinction functions solely in terms of issues of size and ^scale. Mudi more important is the matter of organization and composition. For a m ud fuller insight see Deleuze and G uatt^ 1988: 217.

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 105 13: 305). If the evolution of the species is guaranteed by the survival of the mediocre and the unexceptional, then, ironically, the species that Nietzsche writes for not only does not yet exist but is not, strictly speaking, even a ‘species’ .This openness and complete experimentation is part of Nietzsche’s promise to write for the ‘barbarians of the twentieth century’ (ibid.: section 868).31 The degenera­ tion and decay of the human ^can, however, make possible the conditions of a true progress once a transhuman perspective on life is attained. In Nietzsche’s economy and machine of life the ^ o u n t of ‘progress’ is to be measured by how much has had to be sacrificed to it. Thus, ‘the sa^crifice of humanity en masse (die Menschheit als Masse) to the florns^ng of one single tfron#er species of man (Species Menschy would, he challenges, be progress (Nietzsche 1994: II, section 12). It has been my intention to demoratrate in this chapter the extent to which, in a formulation of this kind, Nietzsche is speaking neither simply of a ‘species’ nor simply of ‘man’ . Critical questions remain in this consideration of Nietzsche ‘contra’ D ^^ro. Let me address what I see as the most salient ones. It is by no means dear that Nietzsche’s critique of D ^^ro is either coherent or con^ncing. In seeking an alternative conception of ‘selection’ and ‘value’ is Nietesche not guilty of anthrop om orp^^ g nature and life? This is an important issue which Nietesche himself admirably treats in section 109 of The Gay Science, where he warns against anthro­ pomorphizing nature. Let us beware, he argues, of treating the world as a ‘lr ^ g being’ and the universe as an ‘organism’; equaUy let us beware of treating the universe as a ‘machine’ (this is to do it too much honour, he suggests). ‘Let us beware’ , he continues, of propo^g that nature follows ‘laws’ , such as a drive for self-preservation, or that the world is either purposeful or accidental. If you get rid of one of these notions, he suggests, you immediately cancel the force of the other. ‘Death’, he ^writes, is not opposed to life, is merely a type of what is dead, and a rare one at that. The world ^mply ‘is’ and none of our ‘aesthetic anthropomorphi^ra’ apply to it. He concludes by proposing a new task for thought, that of de-deifying nature so as ‘to begin to “naturalize” (vernatmlichen) humanity in te^rms of a purely, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature’ (Nie^^he 1974: 109). Seen in the light of this trenchant passage, Nietzsche’s outline of a theory of will-to-power as a rival to 31 Nietzs^e points out that a 'species’ as such mechanism looks decidedly aw ^ ard and only increase its powers of preservation through a pr^ress of molarization and the preponderance of average and lower ^pes over the strong members and children of fortune.Nie^^foe 1968: section 685; 1987, volume 13: 303.

VIROID LI FE / 106 hugely problematic. If it is illegitmate to suggest that life and the universe manifest a desire or struggle for self-preservation, on what basis, and with what legitimacy, Nietzsche claim that the fundamental essence of life is ‘will-to-power’? Is this also not an anthropomorphism? The real illegitimacy in Nietzsche’s ‘philosophical biology’ lies in his attempt in Beyond Good and Evil to employ the theory of will-to-power —here expressed as the view that ‘exploitation’ (Ausbeutun^) belongs to the essence of what lives as ‘basic organic ^rnction’ —to legi^timize an aristocratic radicalism (Nietzsche 1966: sections 257, 259).32 This is as philosophically dubious and pernicious as the attempt of social to derive social and political values from D ^^ro ’s o^^ctual theory of natural selection.33 It is curious that Nietesche himself does not appear to reco ^ ^ e the predicament he is in. In Twilight rifthe Idols, for e x ^ p le , he is astute in reco ^ ^ ^ g crucial ‘social’ elements and historical determinations wi^thin ‘biological’ theory. How is it possible, therefore, for Nietzsche to claim that his theory of ‘wil-to-power’ is exclusively and solely a principle of so-scaled ‘natural life’?With wtat legitimacy he then read off from the text of nature a social and political philosophy, as he clearly does? In negle^ing to attend to these critical questions Nietzsche has forgotten the earlier tren^ant critique he had developed of David Strauss, in which he argued that any na^tural scientist or philosopher who so^ught to assert an^^ing regarding the ethical and inteUe^ctual value of so-called laws of nature was of an ‘extreme anthropomorphism’ that oversteps the ‘bounds of the permitted’ (Nietzsche 1983: 31). Finally, it needs to he noted that the crucial section on historical method in the GenealOfJY rifMorality, which in the Nachlaschlasmaterial of 1886-7 is labelled as ‘contra D ^ ^ ^ ^ ro ’, is wholly ineffectual as a critique of D ^^ro’s theory of ratural selection. Nietzsche’s position on ^racrional in d ete^ ^ ^ ^ , for e x ^ p le , is, in fact, a reformulation of a central insigh+ of D^arwin’s theory.34 Natural selection is, in fact, best construed not in te^rms of a ‘senseless m e ^ ^ ^ ’, but in terms of a complex ‘mec^hanistic purposiveness’ (a variation on the title of Roux’s study on 32 ‘Every enhancement (Erhohung) of the type "man” has so far been the work of an aristocratic society - and it will be so again and again.’ 33 It should perhaps be noted that Spencer's own social and moral theory is not so mud based on a social Darwinism, as is often supposed, but rather on a ssocial Lamarckism. On this see Bowler 1992: 193. 34 This has been cogently pointed out by Dennett inhis recent study, whid I read ^ter this dapter had gone through several drafts. See Dennett 1995b: 461ff., where he has some interesting things to say on the ‘is/ouught’ problem in relation to Nie^tzsche and to socio-biolology.

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN I 107 the struggle between the parts of an organism that so influenced Nietesche). This aspect of the theory of natural selection has been captured well by one commentator in de^fining its operations — which involve a complex temporal dynamic —in terms of ‘transgenerational changes in the properties, propensities, or capacities of organisms’ (Burian 1992: 7). Natural selection operates mecha­ nistically, or algorithmically, on ^rnctions, which means that the evolutionary history of an organ (an eye or a wing, for example), ^can only be explained by conversion of ^mction and not by an analysis of its current usage or present ‘purpose’. This means that on D ^ ^ m ’s model there ^canot be such a ^ing as ‘perfect adaptation’. Natural selection does not consciously or deliberately select traits and organs for their high adaptive value, but does so purely mec^hanistically. On this model notions of ‘active’ and ‘reactive’ would be understood not as expressions of an inte^rnal will-to-power in^insic to life but rather as historically variable and mutable ‘values’ contingent upon the environmental circumstances which particular life-forms inhaabit. This is not to deny the importance in evolu­ tion of endogenous powers of spontaneous self-orga^nization; rather, in the emphasis is on natural selection as the complex temporal factor, of ‘agent’, involved in real evolutio^nary change. ^his is an agent that does not require the notion of a ‘subject’ controlling or steering evolution; instead it refers to evolution as a complex machine made up of multiple component parts. D^arwin was well aware of the danger of ‘perso^^rog nature’, and sought to cl^arify his position by insisting that selection does not induce variability but simply implies the ‘preservation’ of 'variations that o^ccur and that prove, in the wider context and timespan of evolution, ‘beneficial’ to the conditions of life beings operate in. This leads present-day c^hampions of D ^^ m to argue that while indeed it is the ^ e that not a l features of selection be explained as adaptations, natural be posited as the exclusive agent o f any well-articulated notion of evolutionary c^mge (Dennett 1995b: 277). Nietesche departs from this natural selectionist perspective by a^ribu^ting the evolution of organs in terms of a functional indet^^^M ^ to the spontaneous and expanave force of ‘will-topower’. But what is to prevent us from regarding this conception, in con^ast to the mechanism of na^tural selection, as ^enmeshed in a highiy anthropomorphic model of p^^osive, active evolution or becoming? It would appear that Nietzsche, in upholding his ‘contra D^arwin’ position, is fatally propelled back into that hangman’s metaphyaCS — of intentionality, of of teleological p^posiveness —that he ^as so keen to deco^^roct and overcome. It would seem, in a final irony, as if D ^^ m an na^tural selection is far closer to b^eing a d<^^ine of the ‘innocence of ^than Nietzs^e’s o'wn celebrated and complicated

VIROID LI FE / 108 theory of life as ‘will-to-power’ . "This is not to be so naive as to believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution, as a theory about ‘descent with modification’, is completely shorn of metaphysical elements. The contrast does, however, I believe, serve to show the extent to which Nietzsche’s own efforts to overcome meta­ physics and to read nature free of deification — to de-deify it — need to be approached critically in terms of their problematic biophilosophical aspects. In terms of the force (philosophical, political, biological, and historical) of the theory of ‘wiU-to-power ’, this critical questioning would seem to indicate that the difficulties arise from Nietesche’s ambiguous deployment of it in terms of its transcendental and empirical (genealogical) aspects. As a pmciple of ‘historical method’ the will-to-power serves to explain how values and morals have arisen out of particular circumstances and conditions. It thus rules out the possibility of any abstract and ahistorical (agenealogical) law of selection. As a transcendental principle of ‘life’, it shows that ^mctio^naly indete^^mte change, through the dynamics of overpowering and self-overcoming, is a constitutive component of life’s complex becoming. This means that eveA, ‘reactive’ values be shown to reveal an active dimension when they are g n ^ ed historically (Nietzsche 1968: 55). The problems arise when Nietzsche seeks to impose upon his reading of history and cul^ture a normative conception of life — to assert that life is ^wil-to-power only be the b e ^ ^ ^ ^ of a pMorophy of life, not its entire, cons^^mate definition — and to appraise signs of life in terms of their active or reactive conditioning, and then from such an appraisal advocate a new politics of breeding devoted to b m ^ n g about an end to history hitherto considered as the reign of chance and accident (Nietzsche 1968: section 1009; 1974: section 370). Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals is most successful when it shows the extent to which a ‘selection’ of man only be properly and fully developed when the past is taken into account in terms of its genealogical becoming. The tr^ h ^ n a n only becomes and intelligible when it involves an ^^^u tion of the totality and fatality of human becoming. Considered in these terms genealogy then be understood as moving beyond the for any simple-minded, arbitrarily conceived, and uncultivated test of selection. The previous two chapters have s h ^ n the extent to which the thought-experiment of ete^rnal return construed as one that attempts to be beyond the ‘beyond’ , that is, beyond judgement and beyond a selection that simply condemns and denies. It is at the point at which Nietesche seeks to ^turn the expe^riment of re ^ m into a new ‘contra' model of selection, and to cultivate with it the se^ction of the strong and the w^eak. ‘once and for a l ’ at a moment in history, that his ^^^ing failss in its ^task.

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 109 II In the final part of this chapter I want to show how it might be possible to read Nietesche’s will-to-power — and a ‘contra Darwinism’ position — in nonanthropomorphic terms so as to be able to begin to map non-human becomings of life. To do this it is necessary to engage with Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, in particular his examination of the vexed issue of Nietzsche’s ‘biologism’. Heidegger wishes to show the naivety of reducing Nietesche’s innermost ^^^ing to something like the ‘physiological’ and the “biological’. Such reductions might yield interesting insights into his ^^^ing, but they fail to realize the extent to which Nietesche is first and foremost a ‘metaphysical’ thinker; indeed, for Heidegger he is ‘the last metaphysi^an’. This means for Heidegger that Nietesche’s project of ^^^ing the will-to-power only makes sense and becomes me^im^W when read in the context of the history of Occidental metaphysics. This is a history that has to be rendered ‘historical’ since it is not simply given. According to Heidegger, Nietesche’s philosophy brings to ‘completion’ the subjectivism and anthropomorphism of modern (Cartesian) metaphysics. in his lectures on Nietesche of the 1930s and 1940s Heidegger mmain^tains that to remain on the level of biologism in one’s reading of Nietzsde is to situate oneself solely in the ‘foreground’ of his ^^^ing (Heidegger 1961, volume 1: 52 6 -7 ; 1987: 47). To read Nietzsche in terms of a biologism, he says, is not to ‘read’ him at a l. ^Why is Heidegger so hostile to a biologistically read Nietesche? Is not to ignore, and to underplay the si^gnifi^rnce of, the extent of Nietesche’s immersion in the literature and debates of modern biology? Heidegger believes that he has good reasons for resis^ting the temptation of a biologistic reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy of will-to-power. The term ‘biologism’ refer to two things. One is an unfounded extension and transfer of concepts from the field ‘proper to living beings’ to that of other beings; the other, and much more important, is the failure to reco^^re the metaphysical ^^racter of the proposi­ tions of the science of biology. ‘Biologism is not so m u d the mere boundless degeneration of biological ^ ^^ ing’, Heidegger writes, ‘as it is total igno^rnce of the fart that biological ^^^ing itself only be grounded and decided in the metaphysical realm and can never j^ ^ ty itself scientifically’ (Heidegger 1961, volume 1: 525; 1987: 45). Biology is metaphyacal in the s^ue that it fails to inquire into its own conditions of posability and grounds of co^nstruction. It simply does not reflect on itself and its historical dete^^ration by the tradition of metaphysics. Nietzsche’s thought is metaphysical in that it seeks a determination of the be^ingness of beings in the ontology of w ill-to-po^r, but it never opens

VIROID LI FE I 110 itself up to the question of being qua being, that is, it does not pose the question of being free of anthropomorphic reasoning but instead installs a subjectivism through the positing of the self-assertion and self-expansion of the will-to-power that speaks of a desire for constant self-overcoming on the part of ‘life’. Heidegger notes that Nietzsche’s emphasis on self-transcending enhancement contests the primacy accorded to self-preservation within Da^rwin’s theory (1961, volume 1: 488; 1987: 15). However, he wishes to main^in that on a fundamental level there exists no essential ^fference between them since both D ^ ^ ^ s m and Nietzscheanism are trapped wi^in anthropomorphism. The predicament of anthropomorphism is more prevalent and explicit in Nietesche’s work on account of the fact that it makes the question of value central to its ^^^ing on life. As Heidegger notes, for Nietzsche only ‘what e ^ ^ c e s life, and beings as a whole, has value - more precisely, is a value’ (1961, volume 1: 488; 1987: 16). The paradox ofNietesche’s position is that the appeal to ‘life’ is not at a l an appeal to its furtherance in terms of a n a ^ a l selection, at l^east not on the level of ‘man’. There appears in Nietesche’s depiction of it to be nothing ‘natural’ about life’s enhancement and overco^ming in the case of man (on the con^ary, nature for Nietesche, as we have seen, favours the weal; and the ill-constituted), hence the need for the artifi^^ration of his evolution through methods of discipline and breeding. It is in the context of his formulation of a model of ‘artificial selection’ that one appreciate the force of Nie^tzsche’s proclamation concer^ng the need to bring about an ‘end’ to the ‘accident’ and ‘n o n s ^ e ’ of history (NietzsAe 1966: 203). As Heidegger notes, the ‘co^ ^ ^raite absoluteness’ o f the will-to-power in ‘man’ requires •that ‘the ^md of humanity proper to su ^ subjectivity will itself, and that it itself only by ^ ^ ^ y and consciously giving shape to itself as the breed of ^ ^ ^ ^ eally inverted man’ (1961, volume 2: 308; 1987: 230). Nietesche’s demand for the philosophical legislation of a new politics of bree^ug and cultivation, which o^ns up to the artificial c^ffacter of its o^n ar^al tec^ q u es of selection, reveals its ^own revenge against time, against the time of evolution, expo^ng a fear and loa^^^ of con^tingency and the reign of c^mce hitherto. Nietesche’s ‘pain’ &ems from the sight of the e^aordinary h^nan be^ing ^ra^ng from its path and degen^tifig. Moreover, ‘anyone who has the rare eye for the over-all danger that “man” ^m self degenerates; anyone who, like us, has recognized the monstrous fortuity (ungeheuerliche Zufilligkeit) that has so far had its way and play re^tfd^ing the future of man . . . anyone who fathoms the cal^amity that lies concealed in the absurd ardessne^ (Arglosigkeit, or ^nocence and naivety) and blind confidence o f “modern ideas” and even more in the whole C^^^anEurop^rn morality — suffers from an moiety that is past a l comparisons’

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 111 (Nietzsche 1966: section 203). Nietzsche responds, or reacts, to the dominion of Christian-European morality, however, by anthropomorphizing (moralizing) its rise and so takes (human) evolution to its selective extremes. Nietzsche’s vision of the overhuman is thus haunted by the ‘most painful memories’ (Erinnerun^) of the overhuman possibilities of the human past that were ‘broken’ and went to waste in the process of becoming. Nietesche by no means stands alone in ^^^m g the time to be ripe for an explicit and deliberate breeding of man. Even arch-D^^m ans such as Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder of the theory of natural selection, eventually reco^med that the real problem facing D ^ ^ ro’s theory was that of the (artifi^cial) nature of ‘man’. ‘We anticipate the ^rne’, he wrote, ‘when the earth will produce only cultivated plants and domestic animals’, and when ‘man’s selection shall have supplanted natural selection’ (Wallace 1891: 182). For Wallace man’s evolution has been determined not by the laws of natural selection but by the artificial and technical character of his o ^ making. Through the fabrication of tools, weapons, and clothing, man has succeeded in taking away from nature the power of 'slowly but permanently ^ ^ ^ n g the external form and structure in accordance with changes in the external world, which she exercises over all other ^^uals’ (ibid.: 175). H^nans so ^transform their nature through the art of weapo^nry the di'vision of labour, the anticipation of the future, the cultivation of moral, social, and s^npathetic feelings, that the material which natural selection would act upon if it remained a power o f ‘selection’ in their case is fully ^artificialized (ibid.: 179). Walace is a curious example of the D ^^m an species since the only way he could ultimately make sense of evolution —of the fact that, as he saw it, it has created beyond itself in the form of m^ankind —was by invoking a theory of ‘mind’ based on a notion of a dri^ving force that operates in evolution and serves to promote complexity and progress, which he named ‘will-power’ (see ibid.: 213). H ^ ev er, this ^vious teleological D ^ ^ ^ s m is neither peculiar to Walace nor ^^ricted to the ^neteenth cen^tury. Julian Huxley, for e x ^ p le , in his po^^ar aacount of the theory of evolution, maintained that m^ankind re^ffd itself as the sole agent of further evolution^y c^hange on the planet, and as one of the ‘few po&ible in str^ e n ts in the universe at large’ . As the ‘purely biological process’ of evolution comes to an end and gives way to that of ‘human progress’, m^^ind finds itself ^fulfilling the role not of a shepherd of Being but rather of a 'b^usine^ manager for the co^hic process of evolution’ (Huxley 1953: 132). Accor^ding to Heidegger, the m^mer in whiA Nietzsche man is the problem of from b io lo ^ ^ by an ‘aby^’ (Heidegger 1961, vol^ne 1: 567;

VIROID LI FE / 112 1987: 80). He is adamant that in the explicit or tacit characterization of his metaphysics as biologism ‘nothing is being thought, and all Darwinistic thought processes must be extruded’ (ibid.). Moreover, while conceding that Nietzsche does indeed view man and his world in terms of the perspective of the body and his animality, in no way, he contends, does Nietzsche decide that man simply ‘originates’ from the animal —or ‘more precisely from the “ape”’- since he main­ tains that such a doctrine of origin is able to say little about man. Heidegger’s emphasis here is obviously on the Dasein character of human existence, on the ways in which ‘man confronts the Da, the openness and concealment of beings, in which he stands’ (Heidegger 1961, volume 1: 55; 1987: 45). Heidegger wants to show that what makes man such an ‘interesting’ a^nimal for Nietesche is the fact that he is not ‘firmly defined’ (1961: 573; 1987: 86). O f course, it needs to be noted ^ttt Nietesche approaches the question of man’s ‘difference’ not in terms of Dasein but from the perspective of a genealogy of morals. Heidegger’s attempt to save Nietesche from biologism does succeed in yielding important insights into the ‘metaphysical’ character of Nietzsche’s ‘political’ ^^^ing on the future of man. However, it exhausts neither the meaning of the do^ctrine of ^will-to-power nor the resources the notion offers for the ^^culation of a more complex biology. Before these possibilities are explored, it is ne^^^ry to say some^thing about the anthropomorphic c^^acter of D ^^ros o^n theory of evolution. In its failure to read properly Heidegger’s reading of Nietesche misses something important, namely, the fact that D ’s formulation of the general laws of natural selection assumes an anthropomorphic form, and exceeds it, as a result of the fact that it too is ul^mately based on a technological model of evolution. It too finds artifice working in nature and in natural selection. The anthropomorphic character of D ’s articulation of natural selection is evident in his description of it in terms of ‘nature's p ^ e r of selection'. The natural m e ^ ^ s m enjoys ‘visual powers’ that are ‘always intendy watching'. Na^tural selection is described as a ‘s < ^ ^ ^ e r ’ which rejects what is ‘bad' and which ‘preserves' and ‘adds' what is ‘good’. It works ‘silendy’ and ‘insensibly' ‘whenever and whatever oppo^^Mty offers' in order to ‘improve' each being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life (D^arwin t 985: 132-3). It is well k n o ^ that began the Origin i f Species with a d is^sion of ^animal breeders (‘breeding' being a paramount technological notion) and sought to estab^& the laws of na^^al selection by m^aking analogies with ^animal bree^ding and cultiva­ tion. D ^ ^ ^ chose the term 'natural selection' and stuck with it, adding ‘survival of the fittest' to it at the insistence of Wallace, because he found it a term ^red

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 113 repeatedly in works on breeding, in which it refers to an agency that operates outside the sphere of human control. He conceded that the term ‘natural preservation’ might be preferable since it eliminates some of the voluntarist overtones from the interpretation (see Young 1985: 95). The principal difference that he posits between the ‘selection’ of nature and that of artifice is one of ‘time’ . Although it does not work with a view to the future — it is not teleologically driven, in other words (or at least this is the claim of Dar^winians) — natural selection is a power that is ‘incessantly ready for action’ and one that is ‘immea­ surably superior to man’s feeble efforts’. It is so because it works insenably, imperceptibly, and slowly over vvast stretches of geological ^rne without deliberate design. But it still functions technically (or, as Kant would say, ‘intelli­ gently’ — p^urposively — if not ‘designedly’). It is this point which is often lost sight of in accounts of D^win (for an exception see Cornell 1984: 303--44). The products of nature are superior to those of man not because they are not produced techni^cal but rather because they take place during whole geological periods. By contrast, the time of human productions in breeding is short, and it is ^ is factor which accounts for-their inferior quality and ‘deagn’. Nature’s ‘productions’ , D ^ ^ m writes, are far ‘“tru e r ', and they ‘bear the stamp of farhigher workmanship’ (D ^^ in 1985: 133). '^^ere humans simply select for their o-wn ^imediate good, nature by conntrast acts ‘on the whole machinery of life’ (ibid.: 132). However, as one commentator has pointed out, D arrin’s appeal to time does not ^ o u n t to a conclusive empirical argument. On the contrary, it rests strangely on an anthropomorp^hizing of the event of evolution in nature since it presupposes that the effects of nature correspond to what is producible by exte^ rnal environm ental causes: ‘time ^m not even appear c a ^ ^ y adequate for D^win’s mechanism without a reinterpretation of the natural phenomena that have been produced’ (Cornell 1984: 333). in this respects, D^^an’s acc(l’mt of the temporal mechanism of na^tural selection is decidedly utili^rian, even though it alows for complexity (functional indeterminacy) in the evolution of utility (see D ^ ^ m 1985: 227ff.). It is not clear in D ^ ^ in ’s co^^^al o f natural selection whether he has read technology into nature, or whether he has revealed artifice to be the common factor in the technical evolution of both nature and h^nan breeding. What is clear is that his v i ^ of natural selection is entirely conditioned by c o n te n tio n s of utility. It is aspect above all others which makes his theory anthropomorphic (na^tural selection is very m u d a the^y of the true, the good, and the beau^tiful). ^This ^sugests, I ^ u ld contend, that there is needed a notion of ^artifice — of te^chnics — applicable to both nature and art (or industry) that alow for the

VIROID LI FE / 114 excess of invention, an invention of technics that exceeds the claims of a ‘naive’ anthropomorphic model of evolution. The emphasis within modernity on the artificial character of the engineering of life is based on the discovery that not only mankind but the entirety of evolution is undetermined and open-ended. The deterritorialization of life is not a ‘property’ peculiar to mankind. Such an insight serve to disable and disconcert the hubristic view which would posit both nature and ma^nkind as acting in terms of some notion of an ‘anthropomorphic engineering deity’, in which developmental creation or evolution is based on notions of mastery and control (Cornell 1984: 312). The question is whether technics itself is to be treated as intrinsically and irredeemably anthropomorphic. ^What we need to is a technics of excess, in which the inventiveness of evolution would be seen to exceed a utilitarian calculation, so making possible the beco^ming of more complex, non-linear, and ‘machinic’ models of evolution. ^While reco^ ^m g that any and fixed opposition between nature and technology, between art and artifice, is deeply problematic, one must be careful not to collapse the distinction too quickly or hastily. One posit the evolution of life in terms of an o r i ^ ^ ^ technicity, but this should not be at the expense of serious historical labouring. The danger of negle^cting the formation and deformation of these notions, of OT^^^ctog a ‘history’ of them in some sense, is that of my^stification and reification. open for exploration in the next is a matter, however, that I want to leave chapters. A revea^ling and ‘indecisive’ moment in Heidegger’s r e a ^ g of Nietesche takes place when he argues that although Nietes^e relates eve^^mg to ‘life’, he does not life ‘biologically’ . His reading then undergoes a twist in which the desi^utions of'h^nan’ and ‘non-h^nan’, of ‘biological’ and ‘extra-biological’, ccry out for a major revaluation and reconfi^tfation: Nietzsche thinks the ^biological”, the esence of what is alive, in the direction ofcommanding and poetizing, of the perspecxiral and horizonal: in the direction offreedom. He does not the biological, that is, the essence of what is alive, biologically at all. So little is Nietzsche’s in danger of biologism that on the contrary he rather tends to interpret what is biological in the true and strict sense —the plant and animmal —non-biolo$ca1ly, that is, humanly, pre-eminently in terms of the determinations of perspective, horimn, commanding, and poetizing. . . . Yet verdict concerning Nietzsche’s biologism would need a more comprehensive clarification and foundation. (1961: 615; 1987: 122) In p^asge what is ‘biological’ and ‘non-biological’ and what is ‘h ^^m ’ or ‘non-h^ m an’ are ^ cast into question, and not only in regard to Nie^ ^ f o e’s speculations on life. For the most part, however, Heidegger finds Nietes^e stuck

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 115 within the iron cage of anthropomorphism. However, for him this is not to hold a charge against Nietzsche but to open oneself up to his provocation. Heidegger’s challenge is to insist that the emphasis wi^thin modernity on viewing life in terms of experiments in ‘breeding’, evident in Darwin and taken to extremes in Nietzsche, is the reflection not simply of an unconditioned biologism, but of the fact that modernity is fundamentally metaphysical, resting on a voluntarism, subjectivism, and anthropomorphism. The ‘philosophy of life’ found in Nietzsche thus reveals the ‘truth’ of modernity. It is for this reason that Heidegger insists (a) that while one ^canot deny that Nietesche extensively deploys in his ■writings biological language, the attribution to ^m of biologism ‘presents the main (fottacle to our penetrating to his ^rnd^ental thought’ (1961, volume 1: 519 ; 1987: 41); and (b) that the charge o f ‘anthropomorphism’ in no way constitutes a criticism of Nietesche’s ^^^ing, or even that of modernity; on the contrary, it is deemed to provide us with genuine insight into the Aaracter of modernity and its discontents: Anthropomorphism pertains to the essence of the history of.the end of metaphysics. It determines indirectly the decision of the transition (U&!rganges), inasmuch as the transition brings about an ‘over-coming’ (U&!rwindung) of the animalrationale together with thesubiectum. . . . 'This ruthless and extreme anthropomorphizing of the world tears away the last illusions of the modern fundamental metaphysical position; it takes the positing of man as subiectumseriously. (1961, volume I: 654; 1987: 155) A move beyond the impasse o f Heidegger’s reading o f Nietzsche —the impasse of anthropomorphism and which then leads to a devotional mo^^ing of the question of Being in Heidegger’s later work, to waiting for a god — is possible by questioning the anthropocentric prejudices of Heidegger’s own determination o f biology as biologism. It is classic anthropocentrism on Heidegger’s part to assume that the animal is firmly defined and closed in its rapport with the ‘enviro^nent’, that it is, as he maintains, ‘poor in the world’ (see KreU 1992: 121). It is also badd biology. The problem, I want to argue, is that Heidegger, along with the modern G e ^ a n tradition o f thought that he iswithinn (notably ^Kant and Hegel), is trapped wi^m an ‘org^^unic’ conception o f life (and death), and so is unable to articulate the kind' of ‘machinic’ conception o f evolution that is necessary to free the logic of life from anthropocentric naivety and blindness. The most extended treatment of the or^^^m in Heidegger is to be found in his le^cture course on biology in 1929-30. Heidegger’s conaderation of biology is motivated by what he perceives to be the need, already expressed in fein g and

VIROID LIFE I 11 6 Time, for a distinction to be made between the animal’s world and the world of the h^raan. His investigation into the matter yields positions that are remarkably close to Hegel’s emphasis onthe structural unity of the organismin which move­ ment or motility (what Heidegger calls ‘captivation’, Benommenheit) constitutes its essential 'nature’ (for Hegel see the neglected section on ‘Observing Reason’ to do with species andgenus in the Phenomenolo8J' cif Spirit). Inother words, it is not that the organism gets caught up in motility since this motility determines the being of the or^ganismas such(the organismdoes not finditself ‘in’ movement). Heidegger thengoes on to carve out a distinction^betweenthe human world and that of the animal by sugge^stingthat the motility ofthe animmal is not a ‘historical’ motility. Here the crucial matter concerns death: conso^nan with the analysis in Being and Time Heidegger maintains that whereas thedeathofthe humanis always a ‘dying’, the death of the animal is simply always that of a 'coming to an end’ (Heidegger 1995: 267). His central inthis chapter of the book, therefore, is that 'the animal is poor inworld’. Suchaposition, Iwouldcontend, isbasedonaphenomenological biasinfavour of the molar the organismic over the molec^ar and the machinic, which is decidedly anthiopocentric. This bias be seen to be already fully at work in Hegel’s reflections on the or^ganism, where the molecular (what is called ‘sin^^mty’ or 'anglenew’, Vereinzdung) is represented interms of a descent into p^ticularity. Hegel thus speaks of the ‘chaos of animals andplants, of ro^s and metals’ in which only undete^nined universal evolves. ^^^d of finding an immeasurable wealthin this opening up of animmense fieldof organic andnonorganic life, ‘we’ discover only 'the bounds of Nature and its o ^ activity’, the lack of in^trinsic being and the rule of contingency. Such‘life', Hegel maintains, cannot even be describedsnce it reveals onlya ‘rudimentaryindeterminateness’ (Hegel 1970a: 189; 1980: section 245). It is hardly ^surprising, therefore, that Hegel, like Heidegger after ^m, restrict biology —organic nature —to the domain of the pre-historic whichproduces the p^ew of becoming merely in terms of a con^tingent evolution (zufdllige Bewegung). The molecular amply lacks history (Geschi&te) conceived interms of a self-dete^^^ng formative beco^ming inwhichsubstance becomes subject (ibid.: section295). For Heidegger the animal is deficient inthat it lacks recognition of itself. He is thus able to write that the bee is ^mply givenover to the sunand the period of its flight without being able to themas such, 'without being able to reflect upon th^ as somet^hingthus gr^asped’ (Heide^gge 1995: 247). Heidegger moves fromanthropocentric prejudice to bad biology whenhe that the ^^nal is withheld fromthe domainof‘powibility’ since it is takenawayand captivated by

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 117 things. The animal is thus both ‘taken away' frompossibility and and‘^^elated to an^ythingelse’ (ibid.). As we shall see, Nietzsche's speculations onthe becoming of the animal contain a radical and far-reaching overturning of suchanthropocentric naivety. Heidegger’s unfolding of the question of the organism is notable for its meticulous character. He is also attentive to the immense difficulties in delineating the machine and the organism. As he notes, once the question of the organismis posed this raises a whole series of problems to do with howwe are to distinguish between material things, equipment, devices, machines, tools, organs, organisms, animalisms, etc. (ibid.: 213). He also critically considers the ‘autopoietic' character of org^^anic life —that is, questions concerning self-production, self-regulation, and self-renewal —as a way of making the distinction between machine and organism. The move that Heidegger resists is that of being forced to choose between mec^^^m and vitalism. The former has no genuine notion of movement or becoming (here Heidegger is very close to Bergson), while the latter reduces the question of becoming to one of inte^rnal and mysterious causal factors, and as a result it simply eliminates the problem(ibid.: 223). Ultimately, Heidegger seek to make a move ‘beyond’ biology by insisting on a more ‘originary’ structure of animality, such as the ‘unity of animal captivation as a structural totality' . It is ‘thisffund^ental conceptionof captivation’ whichshould form‘theprior basisuponwhichanyconcretebiological question<can. first come to rest' (ibid.: 260). ^^at is most interes^ting about Heidegger’s ‘privileging’ of captivation/ motilityis the wayinwhichit challenges the D^^^uan emphasis onevolutionby adaptation. The problemin is that it construes the animal as ifit were somethingpresent at handwhichthensubsequentlyadapteditselfto theworldasif it too were also something present at ^md. As a result it loses sight of the ‘relational structure’ betweentheanimal andits environment. It failstoappreciate, therefore, that the ‘environment’ is an intrinsic feature of the becoming of the ‘movement’ ofthe or^^^ro (ibid.: 263-4). In thisre^^^ing ofthe ‘beco^^^’ of lifeHeidegger’s comes close to Deleuze's emp^hasisonethology, although Deleuze’sanalysis placeonamud more molecularand^^^anic level, which renders the notion of the organism hugely problematic both philosophically and politically. ADele^^m-inspiredreadingof the ^wiIl-to-po'wer would point to its attempt to conceive ^reality in dyn^amical and te^rms in ^whid the emphasis is placed onacentredsystems of forces, andin^whid‘evolution' is seen to takeplace innon-linear te^ra without fidelityto the^^inctions of species and genus. ^^at interests Deleuze most about complex evolution—a process he will

VIROID LI FE / 118 call ‘involution’ —is the manner in which the becoming of the animal be seen to be open-ended and subject to an interrelated process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that cuts across organismic boundaries. Every territory encompasses or cuts across the territories of other species. The deterritorialization and reterritorialization that characterize the becoming of life gives expression to what Deleuze calls, following the work of the modern vitalist Jacob von Ue^:xkil (whom Heidegger also describes as the most perceptive of contemporary biologists in the 1 929-30 lecture course, 1995: 215), ‘a melodic, polyphonic and contrapuntal conception of nature’ (Deleuze and Gua^ttari 1994: 185).35 E^xamples o fh is musical character of complex evolution (which was of concern to Bergson in his attempts to map a creative model of evolution) include birdsong, the spider’s 35 Von Uexkiill (1864—19#) founded the Institute of Umwelt Research in Hamburg University in 1926. His approach to the ‘invisible worlds’ of animals is inspired by Kant, seeking to explore in highly novel ways the ‘phenomenal world' of the animal (its ‘self-world’), while ‘nature' itself is invoked as the great noumenon whi^ lies ‘eternally beyond the reach of knowledge' (von Uexkiill 1992: 390). One of the most radical aspects of his thinking is to seek to break down the distinction between machine and organism by insisting that the mac^^es, devices, and techi nologies of animal and human life, su^ as spectacles, telescopes, microphones, lathes, andso on, are to be viewed as ‘perceptual tools’ and ‘effector tools’ that are a constitutive feature of the ‘worlds’ of living things. However, he does not accept the theory of those me^chanists who claim that function as 'mere machines’, since this is to neglect the dynamic and formative aspects of animal becomings, that is, the fact that there is ‘a^ing’ and ‘perceiving' ta^^g place. In other words, a machine ^ ^ o t be understoodwithout the input of the engineer who ‘operates* the machine. The relation between marine andorganismis examined at some length in the next ^apter in relation to the ‘machiinism’ advanced by Deleuze and G^ttari. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari stress the importance of those ‘active, perceptive, and energetic ^character­ istics’ which serve to inform the ‘associated milieus' of various animal worlds. The associated world of the ti^, for example, is defined by ‘its gravitational energy of falling, its olfactory characteristic of perceiving sweat, and its active ^aracteristic of latching on: the ti^ climbs a branch and drops onto a passing m^mal it has r^oecogni^zedby smell, then lathes onto its s^n. Active and perceptive ^aracteristics are themselves some^^^ of a double pincer, a double ^artiulation’ (Deleuze and Gra^m 1988: 51). Astheypoint out, asassociatedmilieu is closely related to ‘organic form’. However, su^ a form is not a simple stru^ctue but, rather, a tiructuration so that an animal milieu su^ as the spider’s web has to be seen as no less ‘morphogenetic’ the so-called autonomous ‘form of the organism’ (ibid.). Deleuze and Guattari thus credit von Uexkiill with the first attempt to elaborate a theory of ‘tr^wc^odings’ in whi^ the components of a biological system act as 'melodies in counterpoint’, eaeachsen^g as a motif for another. ^This is to construct ‘Nature as music’ (ibid.: 3 14). Heidegger, by con^ast, restricts von Uexkil’s insights solely to the domain of the ‘ecology’ of the animal, main^^g that the animal is separated from man ‘by an abyss’ on account of the fact thatit does not ‘apprehend something as something* (1995: 264).

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 119 web, the shell of the mollusc which upon the death of the mollusc becomes the habitat of the hermit crab, and the tick (this latter example is taken, in fact, from von Uexkiill; compare Heidegger 1995: 263--4 and Deleuze 1988a: 124—5, Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 2 57-8). For Deleuze this is to replace a teleological conception of nature with a melodic one in which the distinction between art and nature (natural technique) is revealed as an arbitrary one. It is the relationship of ‘counterpoint’, such as that of the shell of the dead mollusc and the hermit crab, which joins planes together and forms compounds of sensations and blocs, which then be seen to be the principal ^fluence on ‘becomings’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 185). in contrast to the anthropocentric privileging of the ‘historical’ that we find in Heidegger, which results in a denigration of the world of the animal, Deleuze conceives of becoming in ‘geographical’ terms, which aUows to conceive of the movements of evolution not in terms of organs, organisms, and species, and their Unctions, but in terms of the affective relationships between heterogeneous bodies. This is to define things not in terms of dete^ninate organs and fixed Unctions, not in terms of either substance or subject, but in terms of lines of longitude and latitude. As Deleuze points out, a ‘body’ be an^^ing — an a^mal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea, a social body or collective, and so on (Deleuze 1989: 127). Deleuze is attracted to the so-scaled ‘mystical of a biologist like von U e^^ ^ because of the attempt to describe animal worlds in terms of overlapping territories in which becomings take place in terms of affects and capacities for afecting and being affected. Since an animal ^rnnot know in ad^vance what affects it is capable of, and neither liaisons it know in advance which be good or bad for it (Is this poison or food I am eating? Poison be food!, etc.), this means that ‘evolution’ must assume the form of an ‘experimentation’ (ibid.: 125). This experimental evolution speaks, in fact, of an ‘involution’, that is, the dissolution of forms and the indete^^racy of fractions, as well as the freeing of ^mes and speeds (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 267). Deleuze and Guat^ri are a d ^ an t that ‘none of these formulations ^caries the slightest risk of anthio^morphism’ (Deleuze and Guat^ri 1988: 318). It is only in the counterpoint that the sonorous, rh^^m c, or melodic of life ‘becomes’ . Ue^^M was similarly criticized in his day for putting forward a new romantic philosophy of nature that rested on a possible anthiopomorp^^tion of ^animal worlds (for ^ m , however, it was solely a matter of empirical researd). Deleuze and Gua^ari go m u d ^ ^ h er ^than U e ^ ^ l in rendem g the leve^mg of such a ccharge their work inapplicable and based on a deep ^misconception of its import. Their conception of ‘unformed matter’ , of an intense ‘anor^mic’ or

VIROID LIFE / 120 ‘non-organic’ life, and of non-human becomings, goes beyond traditional hylomorphic models of the creative relationship between form and matter, seeking to effect what they describe as a ‘postromantic turning point’ in thought by placing the emphasis on matter as immanently creative (ibid.: 343) (this is to matter deterritorialized and molecularized). One is no longer dealing with metaphysical dichotomies, antinomies, or oppositions, such as form and matter, or subject and object. On the plane of immanence (nature, life, technics), there is no longer any subject or object. The organism has been unbound (compare Nietesche: ‘The or^mism must be studied in a l its immorality’ , 1968: section 674). Indeed, the ‘essential thing’ is no longer questions of subject and object, and of form and matter, but of forces, densities, and intensities. In short, this is to arrive at ‘the immense mechanosphere’ beyond the opposition of nature and artifice (technics, assemblages) in which the ‘cosmi^cization of forces’ is harnessed (ibid.). It is this plane o f immanence, the domain o f affects and capacities, that informs some of Nietzsche’s most novel ^^^ing on the life of the animal, in which the animal ‘becomes’ art and art ‘becomes’ animal. Here it becomes possible to unsettle Nietesche’s attempted humanization of the forces of evolu- •• tion and locate in his ^^^ing a tapping into the transversal character of life’s functio^nal in d ete^ ^ ^ te and complex becoming. On model of becoming the will-to-power is to be conceived neither as subject nor substance but as marking out the affective and pathic dimension of life in which tr^versality be sho^n to take place. This is why it is is necessary, contra Heidegger, to take Nietesche’s biology seriously. It is not thro^ugh a deconstruction of metaphysics that anthropo-cen^^m and -morphism is to be overcome, but only through an improper biology that is far^thful to the complex, n o n -lin ^ , and mac^nic/pathic chasacter o f ‘evolution’ . For Nietzsche the Apollinian and the Dionysian — d r e ^ and intoxication — appear in as if they were forces o f nature, compelling ^m to undergo visions and orgiastic states. The former releases in us the ^ tistic powers of •vision, association, and poetry, while the latter releases in us those of ge^ure, passion, song, and dance. The passion of intoxication speaks of the a ^ ^ ^ e n t of an increase in power, where power is conceived as potential for further becoming. ^his is the strength or potential for ‘new organs, new accomplish­ ments, colours, and forms’ (Nietesche 1968: section 800; 1987, volume 13: 2 9 4 -5 ). ^his is life lived as the ‘grand style’ , and involves the ‘beco^ming beautiful’ of an enhanced will through the increased co-or^dination and ^raonization of strong desires. In other words, what ‘beco^^^’ of the will-to-power speaks of is a beco^^^ of the

NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN / 121 T h e sensations o f space and tim e are a lte red : trem en d o u s d istan ces arc surveyed and, as it w e re, f o r th e first tim e a p p reh en d ed ; th e e x te n sio n o f vision o v er g re a te r m asses and ex p a n ses; th e re fin e m e n t o f o rg a n s f o r th e ap p reh en sio n o f m uch th a t is e x tre m e ly sm all and fleetin g . . . ‘in te llig e n t’ sen su ality —; s tre n g th as supplen ess and p leasu re in m o v e m e n t, as d an ce, as levity and presto. (ib id .) Nietzsche insists that good artists are those who are full of surplus energy like ‘powerful animals’. Indeed, he goes so far as to describe ‘the aesthetic state’ as one in which the transfiguration and fullness of existence amounts to a positive, ^firmative response on the part of the which experiences excitation of a l the spheres in which pleasurable states are attained and is able to ‘blend’ the delicate nuances of animal well-being and desire. The primary artistic force is precisely animal potency, a kind of readiness for excitation and harmonization of heterogeneous forces. Art e^ances and excites the muscles and the senses, increasing strength and desire through the operations, Nietesche says, of a ‘special memory’ that works to penetrate the states of intoxication undergone (ibid.: section 809). The aesthetic state is thus attainable for Nietesche only by natures capable of the ‘bestowing and overflowing fullness of bodily vigour’ (ibid.: section 801). is why the sober, the world-weary, and the exhausted — su ^ as modern Mensdten — are mable to receive anything from art since they lack abundance. And those who cannot give, Nietesche adds, also cannot receive. How the is elevated and man degraded in this consideration of art! The animal thus figures in Nietesche’s ^^^ing as, extraordinarily and profoundly, the ‘highest asign of power’ , namely, a life lived beyond violence and in terms of pure potential becoming (ibid.: section 803). The highest power is attained when life is lived beyond opposites without tension and domination, since obedience has simply become superfluous. thus speaks of states of animal vigour, which, on the one hand, expresses an exceK of phyacality into a world of ^images and desires, and, on the other ^md, provokes an excitation of the ^ ^ m l fractions through the images and desires of int^^£ed life (ibid.: section 802). Conadered in this context of vigour and phya^ftty, artbe conceived as no more and no less ^than the enhancement of life and a stimulant to it. Art does not simply resemble life or bear tes^mony to it; it incites and excites it, and expresses its real becoming. Art for Nietzsche is quite lite ^ ^ ‘an organic function’ (ibid.: section 808), a function of the t r a ­ versal o f life. Here it matters little, Nietzs^e insists, whether one is h^^m or ^unial. In ^ ^ a l s the experience of the tr^ ^ o a tio n of values p rod u ^ ‘new weapons, pi^nents, colours, and forms, above all, new movements,

VIROID LI FE / 122 new rhythms, new love calls and seductions. It is no different in the case of man’ (ibid.). Art is the great bestowing virtue and is not the peculiar property o f the a^nimal ‘man’. For Nietzsche it is modern man whose world is impoverished since he lacks the real need of art, desiring only the will to nothingness. The animal remains rich in the world, which is why we need to denigrate it out of a concealed spite and envy. '^What we are in danger of most is the perishing of ‘truth’ —namely, the truth of man, the truth of an exhausted and world-weary will that knows no longer how to affirm the beau^tiful illusions and form-shaping forces of artistic becoming. in his essay on ‘The End of Philosophy’ of 1964 Heidegger speculated on the completion and consummation of philosophical moderernity in the ‘scientific attitude of socially active humanity’ that finds expression in cybernetics, the ,.. science of control and communication in the ^animal and the machine, that privileges a ‘te^mologistic’ modelling of evolution (Heidegger 1972: 58). But again he too readily assimilates the ^^^rng of this new science, and of phyrics and biology, into the alleged anthropomorphic project of Western metaphysiq;. It is to questions of the macyme and of technology — and the related questions of evolution and of entropy —that I now want to chapters. My is to ^explore the attention in the next two possibilities of a new ‘ma^^uc’ p^ d igm that has emerged both wi^m the new biology, such as autopoiesis and complexity theory, and wi^m a neglected and m a r ^ ^ ^ ^ strand of so-caUed continental philosophy, namely, the innovative work of Deleuze and Gua^ttari.

5 V I R O I D O n m a c h i n e s , e v o L I F E t e c h n i c s , a n d Iu t io n The possibility of metaphor is disappearing in every sphere. This is an aspect of a general tendency . . . affecting all disciplines as they lose their specificity and partake of a process of contagion - a viral loss of determinacy which is the prime event of all the new events that assail us. (Baudrillard 1 993: 7) This is evolution: the use of new technics. There is no such thing as ‘biological evolution’ . . . . The most terrible mistake of the nineteenth century: the abandonment of creation theory was based on a biological rather than a technical-^artificial foundation. We are the ^ildren of the consequences of this mistake. Instead of technical practices, we ^inherited the master-race as our God-function. As good children of the master-race elders, ‘we’ believe (green as we are) that we can prototect o ^ e lv e s against fascism w th ‘nature' (instead of realizing that only technics abolish fascism). ^^eweleit 1992: 260) C^^ent continental philosophy contends that the h^^an is necessarily bound up with an orginary technicity: technology is a constitutive prosthetic of the h^m ^ ^animal, a dangerous supplement that enjoys an originary status. 1 ^ a t is, the origin of the ‘h^rnan’ as a species and a D^ein is radically aporetic since what lies at the 1 As early as 1907, however, Bergson was insisting that mechanical invention, as well as the te^chnics of invention, had to be seen as constitutive of the kind of intelligent life-form we label ‘human’ since ‘from the first' technics has been ‘its essential feature' (Bergson 1983: 138). A powerful critique of twentieth-century ^schools of neo-Hegelian humanism for their forge^mg of the tedno. genesis of the human, such as Debord’s situationism, has recently been evinced by Regis Debray, who argues that these ‘essentialist ontologies’, which fantasize about a final reconciliation of essence with h^man existence, are based on delusions of historical ^transparency and effective ^ to rical agency that stern not only from their erasure of te^mological d e te s ta tio n , but from their disclaiming of the ‘hard labour of real mediations’, su d as ‘political mediation’, conceived as a structuring instantiation of coll^ective existence, and ‘t^^mcal mediation’, conceived as a instantiation of the h o ^ ^ ^ tio n pr^ ^ ^ ’. See Debray 1995: 136-7 ..

VIROID LI FE / 12 4 origin of the making of man is the lack — or excessiveness, depending on one’s perspective —of origin. History appears to have reached the weird point where it is no longer possible to determine whether technology as an extended phenotype is an expression of the desire of our genes or a sign of nature’s cultural conspiracy. As Lyotard has put it: the ‘truth’ of the time of technics is not a ‘revelation’ but a ‘betrayal’ (Lyotard 1991: 52). The task of the new technologies is to unblock the ‘obstacle’ constituted on earth by h^man life. However, this collapsing of bios and technos into each other is not only politically naive, producing a completely reified grand n^rative of technology as the true agent and telos of natural and (in)h^nan history, but also restricts technics to anthropos, bin^ng history to anthropocentrism, and overlooking the simple fact that the genesis of the human is not only a technogenesis but eq^uly, and just as importantly, a bio-£technogenesis. The phenomenon of symbiosis provides the clearest demonstration of this thesis, presenting a genuine challenge to the entire Occidental tradition of spe^tative thought and s^ugesting the urgency of adopting a rhizomatic praxis. The image of the tree has dominated ‘a l of Western thought from botany to biology aJ)d anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, a l of philosophy . . . ’ (Deleuze and Gua^ttari 1988: 18). These new anthropocentric readings of history lead to the entirely spurious cl^m that with the coming of computers and the ^vival of robot inteUigence the planet is now entering a ‘silicon age’. ^that this ignores is the fart that metallurgy has an ancient preh^nan history, with h ^ a n metalworking following the bacterial use of magnetite for internal commpasses by almost three thousand miUion y ^ s (Margulis and Sagan 1995: 194). Moreover, symbiosis has a filthy lesson to teach us: the h^^rn ^ an integrated colony of amoeboid beings, just as these ^ o e b o id beings (protoctists) are integrated colonies of bacteria. like it or not, our origins are in dime. Biologists have established that the nucleated cell of eu^ffyotic life evolved by a^uisition, not of inherited ^^acteristics 4 la ^Lamarck’s model of evolution, but of inherited bacterial symbionts, in which ‘^amid ceU gor^mgs and aborted invasions, merged beings that infected one another were reinvigorated by the incorporation of their per^manent “disease”’ (ibid.: 90). The attempt to develop a general theory of evolutionary systems is entirely dependent on the kinds of problems being set up. To consider the nature of species, org^^m s, and evolution itself, independently of the ^cognitive fr^^ng and mapping of theoretical inquiry — and a l theory needs to be understood as a pr^axis (Reuleaux 1876/1963: introduction) — is to produce no^^^ but reitication. As Bergson pointed out in his ^^^ing of ‘creative evolution’ in 1907, our science is contingent, relatively both to the variables it selects and to the order in

VIROID LI FE / 125 which is successively stages problems (Bergson 1983: 219). Conceptions of 'evolution’ only make sense in relation to time-scales wi^thin which they are framed. For example, from the perspective of 'universal evolution’ species and organisms cannot be treated as fixed or static points of reference or interpreted as the end-points of life's novel activity ofinvention. The boundaries between species are constantly shifting, mobile, and porous, while geographical landscapes harbour only extrinsic harmonies ofan order of ecology in which any equilibrium between populations only be regarded as temporary. Indeed, on a certain model one could legitimately claim that the ‘success’ of a species is to be measured by the speed at which it evolves itself out of existence. Deleuze and Gua^ari’s most radical gesture is to suggest that there has never been purely ‘biological’ evolution, since ‘evolution’ is technics, nothing but technics: ‘There is no bio­ sphere or noosphere, but everywhere the s ^ e Mechanosphere’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 89; 1988: 69).2 A l systems from the ‘biological’ to the ‘social’ and economic are made up of machinic assemblages, complex fol^ngs, and movements of deterritori^ration that serve to cut across and derange their stratification. This explains why for them ‘pragmatics’ (or ‘schizo^^ysis’) becomes the fund^ental element upon which ev e^ ^ ^ ^ else depends. Deleuze and Gua^ari are most keenly interested in the ^ ffe r e n ^ rh^^ms and afective intensities of evolution, the ‘inviable’ becomings of non-organic life that only be effectively navigated and mapped when situated on the plane of abstract machines which consists of non-formed matters and non-fo^nal fractions (ibid.: 637; 511). in this chapter I want to show how Deleuze and Gua^ari’s mapping of the ‘creativity’ of machinic hfe provides a fund^ental challenge to both the natural bent of the intellect and to major scientific habits. 2 The term ‘noosphere’ was coined by Bergson’s successor at the College de F^mce, Edouard Le Roy. It was taken upby Teilhaardde Chardin, palaeontologist and priest, as a conscious layer of life superimposed upon the biosphere, and represents the ^rndamental component in the evolution of the 'human phylum’. See de C^tf^ 1965: 211 ff. In the work of the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky the ‘noosphere’ is ^usedto account for the emergence of matter in terms of an emergent symbiosis between living matter and h^rnan te^nology. For Vema^adskythe plastics and metals of industry stem from an ancient life process that co-opts new materials for a surface geological flow that ^rcomes ever more rapid. See V^^^^y 1945: 1-12. For a contemporary version of his position see Margulis and Sagan 1995, who ^proa^ ‘life’ as an autopoietic, photosyntheticplane^taryphenomenon, and who invoke mystically a to account for the ‘sentient symphony’ of life made up of h^man ^ ^ ^ , systems from the energetic to the informational, global markets, and so on (189-95). ^This ‘superh^rnanity’ ingests not only food but also ^coal, iron, oil, and silicon. .

VIROID LIFE / 12 6 In Difference and Repetition Deleuze deploys biological ^^^ing in the service of a philosophy of internal difference. He approaches 'evolution’ on the level of a philosophical embryology (‘the world is an egg’), insisting that ‘Evolution does not take place in the open air’ since 'only the involuted evolves’ (Deleuze 1994: 118). (Kant speaks of the need to move from a theory of ‘evolution’ to one of 'involution’ in a discussion of 'individual’ and ‘generic’ conceptions of preformationism, while also drawing on a notion of ‘virtuality’, in 1974/1982: section 81.) Embryology demonstrates, for e x ^ p le , that there are vital movements and torsions that only the embryo is able to sustain, and which would tear apart an adult. This means that there are ‘spatio-temporal dynamisms’ which only be experienced at the borders of the liveable: ‘Something “passes” between the borders’ , he writes, ‘events explode, phenomena flash, like thunder and lightning’ (ibid.). Moreover, in this work Deleuze is already articulating the kind of ‘molecular D ^ ^ ^ s m ’ that characterizes Deleuze and Gua^ari’s joint work and their u^tilization of population ^^^ing in modern biology with its attack on typological essentialism. Deleuze does not read natural selection as a theory about the evolution of ‘species’; rather, for ^ m , what is p^^ary is the play of the individual and processes of individuation, in relation to which the evolution of species is only a tr^cendental ‘illusion’ (ibid.: 250).3 In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Gua^ttari argue that n eo -D ^ ^ ^ sm ’s emphasis on populations over types, and ^diferential rarates and relations over degrees, makes for a vital conrtbution to an understanding of biology as nomadology, steering the logic of life in the direction of a science c f multiplicities. In the former work Deleuze reverse •the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny as dassi^cal depicted in biological thouught, such as Haeckel’s fiamous biogenetic law, inSisting that it is the ^ e not that ontogeny simply recapi^tat^ phylogeny but rather that it creates it;4 while in the latter work Deleuze and Gua^ari make the identical point, spe^aking of the relationship between embryogenesis and phylogenesis as one that involves the beco^^g of a creative ‘universal 3 For Darwin on the importance of ‘individual differences’ in selection see Darwin (1985: 101ff.). On neo-D^^™sm see Mayr (1991), who writes that ‘the di^very of the importance of the individual became the cornerstone of Darwin's theory of nata^ selection’ (42); on the move to population genetics within evolutionary theory that Aararterizes the modem synthesis see Eldredge (1995: 10-30). 4 The inversion of Haeckel’s law dates baA to work done in the 1920s. For ^further information see Wolpert (1991: 185), who argues that the ‘repetition' place in ontogeny is not that of phylogeny but simply of other ontogeny, that is: ‘some embryonic fratoes of ancestors are present in embryonic development'. For a comprehensive historical introduction to the problematic see Gould (1977).

VIROID LIFE / 12 7 evolution’: ‘the embryo’, they write, ‘does not testify to an absolute form preestablished in a closed milieu; rather, the phylogenesis of populations has at its disposal, in an open milieu, an entire range of relative forms to select from, none ofwhich is preestablished’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 48). One can only insist on the irreducibility of the forms of folding. 5 The antinomies of modern biological thought — individual/ species, selector/selectee, organism/ environment, varia­ tion/ selection, and so on — are fully caught up in the antinomies of bourgeois thought and are atplay in Deleuze’s ‘Bergsonism’ . In Difference and Repetition, I would argue, Deleuze too readily assimilates natural selection into the project of t^^king difference and repetition at the level of philosophical embryology and morphology. He cl^ms that selection works in favour of ^^anteeing the survival of the most divergent (Deleuze 1994: 248). In this work Deleuze conveniently ignores Nietasche’s critique of D^arwin where the critical focus is on the reified notion of ‘fitness’ . On Nietas^e’s understanding, natural selection may well be a machine of evolution, but it functions in accordance with a specific entropic principle, n ^ ely , ‘survival of the fittest’ (see Nietzsche 1968: sections 684 and 685).6 It 5 Deleuze suggests that the double helix of DNA should be treated in tenns of the operations of the ‘superfold’. See Deleuze 1988b: 132. 6 Nie^tzsche felt isolated in his ‘contra Darwin' position, in which ‘the error of the s^ool of Darwin' be^came suA a ‘profound problem’ to ^m. How could one see nature ‘so badly'? he asks. In short, NietzsAe is main^^mg that D^^™sm is a biological theory shot through with assumptions of society and morality. ‘I rebel against the translation of reality into a morality’, he writes (1968: 685), while insisting that Malthus is not nature (NietzsAe 1979b: 75). Ultimately, the Auseinander^uung becomes for Nietzsche a matter of transvaluation of so-called strictly ‘bio­ logical' values. Se, for example, the ‘critical' denouement to essay 1 of On the GenealoBJ Morality. The phrase ‘s^^ival of the fittest' app^^ed in the fifth edition of the Origin Species. It is associated with the work of He^«rt Spencer and was adopted by Darwin at the insistence of Alfred Russel Wal^re, who considered it a better description of evolution than the misleading ‘natural selection', with its anthropomorphic personification of nature. Throughhout the Origin D^^m speaks of the ‘^rcnomy' and ‘polity' of nature, and there are places where it becomes undecidable whe^CT he is U^ng of ‘nature' or of industrial society. Marx, for one, saw ‘civil society', the Ho^^^an bellum omnium contra omnes, as playingg a major role in Darwin's model of ‘nature'. One shouldnote the extent to whid a philosophy of ‘good and evil' figures in his description of the ^animal kingdom, and at times he comes dangerously close to reading the text of nature through the lens of an anthropomorphic sentimentalism. The best example of this is his claim that sel^ection acts solely for the good of each being, ^uleavo^uring to strike a ‘fair balance' betw^m the ^go and evil ca^d by ^each organ. It is selection is not perfect, however, that it is ^posble to explain a biMn-e phenomenon suA as the sting of the wasp whiA when used in atta^ ^canot be withdraw, so resulting in the wasp's own death through the ripping out of its wviscera (D^^ro 1985: 230).

VIROID LI FE I 1 28 thus not be so easily regarded, as it is in Deleuze, as a positive power of differenciation (a ‘differenciator of difference’). Indeed, the term ‘natural selection’ is something of a misnomer since nature does not at all select; rather, it operates as an arbitrary force of extermination, resulting in the differential loss of differently constituted individuals. Nature does not so much select the fittest as exterminate the ill-fitted, adapting forms of life to the environment slowly and imperceptibly in an entirely mechanistic, algorithmic fashion.Thus, we find in Difrence and Repetition major tensions emanating from the uneasy alliance Deleuze makes between the competing cl^ms of ‘complexity’ and ‘selection’. In the work with Guattari primacy is dearly given to ‘involution’ over ‘evolution’ and to modes of deterritorialization, that is, to the power of endogeny over that of exogeny: ‘The more interior milieus an organism has . . . assuring its autonomy and bringing it into a set of aleatory relations with the exterior, the more deterritori^teed it is’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 5 3 -4 ). It is precisely the ‘creative’ reality of deterritori^teation that Deleuze was articulating in DYJerence and Repetition in such novel terms and that serves to the work up with cm-rent complexity theory in philosophical biology. For e x ^ p le , in D!frence and RepRepetition, the ‘formula’ for ‘evolution' (Deleuze has the word in s ^ e quotes) is given as: ‘the more complex a syrtem, the more the valuesp^uliar to implication appear within it’ (Deleuze 1994: 255).7 It is the ‘centres of envelopment’ that function as both a ‘judgement’ of the complexity of any given system and as the differenciator of ^fference. For e x ^ p le , we know today that the difererce between humans and chimpanzees consists not in their genetic ^fference, w hid is ^^ ^ral anyhow, but in the spatial orga^nization and fol^ng of their cells. Such an ^&ght counters the reductionism of those biologists who place the emphasis on the determination of genes and so erase the trace of genetic indetermination. It is precisely the endogenous powers of spatio-temporal rhythms and intensities that Deleuze is privileging in D1ference and Repetition as a model o f ‘evolution’ over the strictly exogenous mechanism of selection. ’'This thesis is now supported by leading complexity theorists su d as Stuart Kaufman who argue that many of the highly ordered features of ontogeny are not to be regarded as the achievements of selection, but rather as the self-organized behaviours of complex genetic regulatory systems. Moreover, the properties of 7 Compare Simondon (1992: 305), whose text on the genesis of the individual, published in France in 1964, exerted a major influence on Deleuze's philosophy of internal difference: ‘The livingg being resolves its problems not only by adapting itself, whiA is to say, by modifying its relation­ ship to its milieu . . •but by modifying itself thro^A the invention of new int^nal structures and its complete self-insertion into the axiomatic of organic problems.’

VIROID LIFE f 129 self-organization are so deeply immanent in these complex networks that ‘selection cannot avoid that order (Ka^^nan 1993: xvii). On this model selection in no way be regarded as the sole or primary generator of evolutionary order and composition. When in Diference and Repetition Deleuze calls for a ‘kinematics of the egg’ , insisting that what is seminal in embryology is not the division of an egg into parts, but rather the morphogenetic movements, such as the ‘augmentation of free surfaces, stretching of cellular layers, invagination by folding’ , and in which ‘trans­ port is Dionysian, divine, and delirious, before it is local transfer' (Deleuze 1994: 214), he is anticipating the ^turn to questions of embryogenesis and morphogenesis that c^ffacterizes current attempts amongst biologists to move beyond the hegemonic n eo -D ^ ^ ^ a n paradigm. Here the focus is on the production of spatial patterns that are explicable not in terms of the nature of the components involved, such as cells, but rather in terms of the way the molecules interact in time and in space (their relational order). Deleuze goes further in insisting that these processes involve the creation of a space and a time that are peculiar to that which is a^^ctualized. On this model of a philosophical embryology, time and space are no longer treated simply as universal a priori forms of -sensible intuition, but rather are understood as components in the production of variation and ^fference. As one e^minent neuroscientist who works on embryology has recently put it: ‘Diversity must inevitably result from the djnamic nature of topobiological events' (Edelman 1994: 64). In short, what Deleuze does not appear to appreciate is that his ^^^ing of difference and repetition, in terms of a ^^^ing of the creation of the new and the different, along the lines of a philosophical embryology and morphology, presents a fundamental chalienge to some of the core tenets of the neo-D^^™ an syntheas.8 8 It is inte^^restin to note that the major figure who appears after the cursory treatment of Darwin in and Repetition is von Baer. It is the ideas of von Baer that Deleuze utilizes to maintain the highest generalities of life point beyond species and genus in the direction of individual and pre-individual singularities (1994: 249-50). On von Baer's understanding of development as a process of ‘individu^a.liz.ation’ and ‘differentiation of the unique' see Gould (1977: 52-9). It is cl^- that Darwin was unable to take on board the full challenge of von Baer's stress on ontogeny over phylogeny dnce it would have fundamentally altered his theory of natural selection. At the time of Darwin's writing of the theory of descent embryology was undergoing a significant transformation in its own ‘evolution’. away from Naturphilosophie in the direction of modem epigenetic ^rary. Darwin's position on embryogenesis —that embryos ^miror the history of the ^raceby beingjsimilar to adult, though extinct, forms—is the one that Haeckel was later to advance in his biogenetic law, and whi^ stannds discredited today. For ^rther raight into (crucial mat­ ter ^ t^^^eimer 1959 and, more recently, Lovtrup 1987: 150-65, who g ^ so far as to contend that to ^oose Darwin is to be contra von Baer and vice versa. Delete’s work is unique

VIROID LI FE / 1 30 A strand of contemporary biology has sought to move away from the genetic reductionism of ultra-Darwinism — best typified in Richard Dawkins’s Schopenhauerean-styled theory of the selfish gene —insisting that questions of form ^ ^ o t be reduced to those of simple adaptation, since the organism enjoys an integrity and autonomy of its own and has to be treated as a self-organizing structural and functional unity (see Goodwin 1995). But this move from genetic reductionism to organismic holism in complexity theory is by no means a straightforwardly progressive move. The ’organism’ is always extracted from the flows, intensities, and pre-vital sin^arities of pre-stratified, non-organic life in order to produce, through techniques of normalization, hierarchization, and organization, a disciplined body, a controlled subject and a subject ‘of’ control. The organized body of both biology and sociology is an invention of these techniques of capture and control. It is the judgement of theos: ‘You ^wil be organized, you ^wil be an organism, you will articulate your body — othe^rwise you’re just depraved.’ (Deleuze and G ra^m 1988: 159). becomes necessary. to explains why it about machines, about the reality of parts ^and wholes, about m ac^&c modes of ‘evolution’, and about a ‘machinic s’^ plrnvalue’ that produces an excess which ^canot be located wi^in a ‘subject’ tince it lies outside. Evolution, like the egg, does not take place in the open air: invention in evolution takes place not simply in terms of a process of complexification, say from a less to a more ^fferentiated state, but rather in terms of a process of what Deleuze and Gua^ttari ‘creative involution’ . The word ‘involution’ should not be confused, as it is in Freud, for example, with regression, but suggests the. emergence of a symbiotic field that allows assignable relations between disparate things to come into play. It is this ‘block of becoming’ that represents the ‘transversal communication’ between heterogeneous populations, making beco^ ^^ a rhizome and not a classificatory or gracalogical in its su^estion that the work of D^win and his so-called ‘pre-D^arwinian’ predecessors, suA as Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and von Baer, ^ be held together to provide a more complicated connception of ‘evolution’, one that is not evolutionist. See Deleuze 1988b: 129, where it is argued that the tendency to diverge is produced through endogenous processes of folding. The same shortcoming which contemporary embryologists, such as Lovtrup, find in Darrin, has also been identifed as a major weakness of the modem synthesis (neo-D^^msm). One commentator, for ex^ple, has ar^ed that the modem synthesis is tunable to generate a theory of ontogeny since it assies individuality as a basal ass^ption (Bus 1987: 25). On the of von Baer compare in this regard Heideeger, who argues that the a^gnifi^nce on his work was impeded and finally buried by D^^msm (1995: 260).

VIROID LIFE / 131 tree.9 The ‘tree' model of evolution is highly ambiguous, being both genealogical (the tree of the family man) and the tree of non-human nature that shows no particular concern for mankind. As one commentator has also noted, it is both an oppressive colonial image and an organic image (Beer 1986: 239). Becoming is to be conceived neither in terms of a correspondence between relations or identities nor in terms of progression or regression along a series. This is to posit evolutionism as linearism (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 292; 1988: 238—9). It thus becomes necessary to of a reality that is specific to ‘beco^ming’ . 9 Evolutionary trees were introduced as the standard iconography for phylogeny in the 1860s by Ernst Haeckel, and have served to buttress an anthropocentric view of life, based on the ladder of progress and a cone of increasing diversity, in which evolution gains a ‘moral' meaning as it slowly but surely becomes imbued with consciousness after a history of upward striving and vertical perfection that culminates in ‘man’. Stephen Jay Gould has sought to expose the anthropocentric conceits of this tree model of life in his magisterial study of the Burgess Shale dating from the Cambrian period. See Gould 1990: 240ff., especially 263-7. The word ‘involution’ to account for distinctive features of ‘evolution’ is used prominently by de Chardin in his The Phenomenon ojMan (first published in France in 1955): ‘Regarded along its axis of complexity, the universe is, both on the whole and at each of its points, in a continual tension of organic doubling-back upon itself, and thus of interiorization’ (de Chardin 1965: 330). De Chardin employs orthogenesis to support a theory of evolution that gives, in quasi-Hegelian fashion, primacy to self-consciousness and spirit (see ibid.: 176). Thus, for him the physico­ chemical process of organic involution —an involution of ‘complexity’ —is ‘experimentally bound up with a correlative increase in interiorization, that is to say in the psyche or consciousness’ (ibid.: 329). In this schema of, supposedly, ‘biological’ evolution, in which ‘cosmic involution becomes the key pers^^tive thro^ugh whi^ to grasp its essential dynamic, consciousness is co-extensive with the universe, and the universe ‘rests in equilibrium and consistency, in the form of thought, on a supreme pole of interiorization’ (ibid.: 338). The ‘great human machine’ only ‘work’, and must work, in terms of the production of ‘a super-abundance of mind’ (ibid.: 282). Deleuze and Gua^ttari’s contention that there is no ‘noosphere’ or ‘biosphere’, only the ‘me^anosphere’, must be seen as being, in ^part, directed at the overly spiritualist and cosmicist interpretation of ‘evolution’ and ‘involution’ adv^ated by de Chardin. Deleuze and Guat^ri’s conception of evolution as ‘creative involution’ is radically different from that found in the likes of de C^hardinin that it does not in any way privilege m^^ind as the apex of evolutionary life (in spite of his utilization of involution de Chardin is still reliant on a ‘tree’ model oflife to support his elevation of consciousness and spirit). ‘^Man’ for them is the molar category par excellence; the ‘h^an being’ only becomes an inte^^^ phenomenon when it is conceived mac^mcally. In his 1^9605 study of Ber^wn, Dele^% cites ^pro^ngly Bergson’s idea that, in m^^ind, nature has created a machine that ^^c^cends mere m^^^m: the h^an condition is to go 'beyond’ 'its condition. ‘Man’ is capable of scrambing the planes of nature ‘in order to express Nature’ (Deleuze 1991: 107). S e Bergson 1983: 2^^5.

VIROID LIFE / 132 The impor^mt role played by symbiosis in the history of tec^ology, in which previously disjoint and unconnected technologies merge, is widely recognized (Sahal 1981). In biology, however, symbiosis has had a ^tfiously awkward history which reveals much about the anthropocentric determination of the subject and about hominid fears of contamination. It has played, and continues to play, a subversive role in biology since it challenges the boundaries of the organism. 10 Indeed, it has been argued by one commentator that it was not until 1950, when geneticists extended their field of study to micro-org^^ms, that biology reCO^raed that there were means other ^than sex for tr^^rni^ing genes, such as infections and symbiotic complexes. Prior to it was the institutio^nalized boundaries of the life sciences themselves, such as zoology, botany, bacteriology, virology, genetics, pathology, etc., which prevented the synthetic studies of symbiosis from being properly assessed (Sapp 1994: 208-9). The importance of symbiotic bacteria in the ‘origin of species' - repeated bacterial symbiOses result in the emergence of new genes — is now widely appreciated, but must ultimately be disturbing to our anthropocentric cl^aims upon life (and death). The detailed structure of the organelles in e^ukaryotic cells, such as the nitochondrian, and the composition of the DNA in those organelles show that evolutionary processes were not the result of slow ^ ^ ^ u latio n of irandom changes (mutations) in the genes of ances^tral prolcaryotic cells. Rather, it seems highly probable that they were the result of intracellular symbiosis in which some cells incorporated into their own cell contents partner cells of another kind that had different metabolic abilities. Over time the genetic and metabolic orga^nizations of host and guest cells fused to the point where it bec^ne impossible to d i^ ^ ^ ^ ^ where one cell began and another finished. The strength of hypothesis lies in the fact that it offers the most convin^ng explanation as to why both mitochondria and chloroplasts contain their own ribosomes and DNA. The ^ae of multi-cellular o r g ^ ^ ^ is now part of the ‘orthodoxy’ of contemporary biology, but there are other more disturbing examples of the transversal ^ ^ a c te r of genetic lineages such as ^^ues (‘poisons'), for ex ^ p le. Modem biology has identified not only ‘^bacteroids’ as playing a crucial role as ^symbionts in c^ ^ rn metabolic processes, 10 The seminal text is Margulis 1970. See also Margulis 1981 and Jacob t974: 311-12. Margulis has used her work on symbiosis to challenge the view that namtural selection provides the prime explanation of evolutionary life. The fossil record and other evidence suggest that evolution from bacterial to nucleated cellular life did not by ^ d o m mutation alone, but rather through ancient motility symbioris. For an excellent introduction to the extensive use of models of symbiosis to a^» unt for a wide range of evolutionary phenomena se the essays in Margulis and Fester 1991.

VIROID LIFE / 133 but also symbiotic 'viroids’. Indeed, a leading researcher in the field in the 1940s postulated the idea of a distinct kingdom for such viroids, the Archetista, arguing that wi^thin evolution they have acted, on account of their molecular composition, as highly adaptable intracellular s^nbionts, so supplying from ‘amoeba to man’ a virtual ‘reservoir’ for viruses in the course of evolution (Sapp 1994: 1 5 1 -2). More recently, Dennett has referred to these pioneers of evolution as ‘macros’ , which is the name given by computer progr^m ers to cobbled-together fragments of coded instructions that perform particular tasks, in order to draw attention to the similarities between the machinery of ‘natural’ viruses and ‘artificial’ ^viruses such as computer viruses. Both are ‘bits of program or algorithm, bare, self-reproducing mechanisms’ (Dennett 1995b: 156-7). Standing as they do at the border between the ‘living’ and the non-living’, and virtually real, viruses serve to ^challenge almost every dogmatic tenet in our ^^^ing about the logic of life, d^^ng any tidy division of the physical, such as we find in ^Kant, for e^xample, into organisms, the inor^ganic, and engineered artifacts (for further insight see Eigen 1992: 1 01-6). Creative evolution on earth would have been impossible without the intervention of the genetic engineering that characterizes viroid life. The scientific work that was carried out on genetic engineering in the 1950s, which today provides the basis for recombinant DNA tednology, derived from observations of the of recombination in bacteria. The emphasis was on ‘transformations’, such as ‘conjugation’ and ‘transduction’, which involve the transfer of genetic material from one cell to another by a (Sapp 1994: 158). This research, however, must nece^^^y lead to a fundamental revision of d o ^ ^ ^ t models of evolution. If it is the case that virooid life is one of the key means by w h id the ^ ^ ^ erral of genetic information has taken place, then it is necessary to enter^in the idea that there are cases where transfer of ir-formation passes from more highly evolved species to ones that are less evolved or which were the progenitors of the more evolved species, with the result that reticular schemas would have to be substituted for the tree schemas that do^minate ^most a l about the logic of life. T^nsversal communications between Afferent lines serve to ‘^^m ble the genealogical trees’ (Deleuze and Gua^ttari 1988: 11). The existence of complex phenotypic straits in or^ganisms has long been reco^ ^ ed as a p r o b l^ for D ^ ^ w ’s theory of evolution by na^tural selection, but recent research in biology seeks to show that the paradigm of ^symbiosis used to explain how novel phenotypic straits be come about through the ^ ^ ^ u ti on of o r^ ^ ^ r a of Afferent species. One ^^mple given of a ^^^iotic pheno^pic strait, in -^hid these straits only sexist by virtue of the association of the partners, is the leghemoglobin protein of the root nodules oflegumes, which are coded in part

VIROID LI FE I 134 by the Rhizobium genome and in part by the le^ ^ ^ o u s host (Law 1991: 58). The boundaries which ensure the evolution of separate identities begin to collapse and a machinic mode of evolution comes into play. This is a perfect illustration of the rhizomatic evolutionary schema proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, who them­ selves supply the example of the type C virus with its double connection to baboon DNA and and that of certain domestic cats. Here we have staking place an ‘aparalkl evolution in which there is neither imitation nor resemblance. The becomingbaboon which characte^rizes the cat does not mean that the cat is imitating the baboon, but rather denotes a rhizomatic becoming which operates in the zone of the heterogeneous (a zone of invention as opposed to S ta tio n ) and the connection of already ^fferentiated lines: ‘We f o ^ a rhizome with our ■^viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to form a rhizome with other ^animals’ (Deleuze and G ^ ^ rn 1988: 10). Or: the organism unbound. Taking machines seriously requires that the autonomy of the mac^ne is de-reified, along with a linear-evolution^y model of machine development, in favour of an ^analysis of complex ^ c ^ m c becomings. like philosophy, the field of biology is of born Platonics, but ^symbiosis shows that the delineation of ‘organic units’, su ^ as genes, pla^smids, cells, o r g ^ ^ ^ , and genomes, is a tool of a ce^ertain mode of investigation, not at a l an absolute or ideal model. It challenges notions of pure autonomous entities and unities, since it functions throuugh assemblages (multiplicities made up of heterogeneous terms) that operate in terms of aliances and not filiations (that is, not successions o r lines of descent). The only unity wi^rn an assemblage is that of a plural ^motioning, a symbiosis or ‘sympathy’ (on the im po^^ce of ^ropathetic relationships in creative evolution see l^^gson 1983: 173-4). An ^ ^ a l , for e x ^ p le , be defined just as productively in terms of the assemblage into which it enters ( m a n - ^ ^ ^ symbiosis, ^ ^ a l^ ^ im a l symbiosis, plant—^^nal symbiosis) as it by standard biological claslascation in terms of genus, species, organs, and so on. ^When viewed in terms of ^mbioses a clear establishment of distinct ^ngdoms is rendered problematic and ^what becomes important is a ‘ma^chinic’ phylogenetic beco^^^. Symbiosis chalenges the notion of informationally closed systems, and corresponds to the function of the idea of the ‘rhizome’ in the work of Deleuze and Gua^ttari, in w hi^ evolution is removed from the ^rnts imposed by filiation. A rhizome operates as an open system, both entropically and informatio^nal, designating, in the words of one commentator, ‘a constructive feedback loop be^tween independent information lineages’, whether they be cultural, lin^^^c, or scientific lincages or biological germ lines (Eardley 1995) (an essential part of the of symbioas be to formulate ge^ns not ^mply as ‘dis^e-causing’ but as ‘life-gi^ving’ entities). As opposed to conventional

VIROID LI FE / 135 phyletic lineages, rhizomatic lineages serve to demonstrate the extent to which exclusively filiative models of evolution are dependent on exophysical system descriptions that are simply unable to account for the genuinely creative aspect of evolution (machinic becomings). If the organism is a function of the frame within which the science of biology encodes it, then it is necessary to recognize that the frame captures only a small part of the possible information that assemblages are able to express. A code is inseparable from an intrinsic process of decoding (no genetics without genetic drift, as Deleuze and Guattari pithily express it). Modern work on mutations shows that a code, which is necessarily related to a population, contains a margin of decoding. decoding takes place not only through the 'supplement’ that is capable of free variation, but also within a single segment of code that may be copied ^roce with the second copy left free for variation. In u^^ing the notion of a ‘surplus value of code’ — codes are always paralogical, always beside —to account for the transferral of fragments of code from the cells of one species to those of another, Deleuze and Grn^ari insist that this is not to be understood as a process of ‘translation’ (viruses are not translators), but rather in terms of a sin^^ff process of ‘side-communication' (communication d’a-cote) (Deleuze and Gra^ari 1980: 70; 1988: 53). In accordance with new model o f mac^fuc evolution becoming is to be conceived neither along the lines of a correspondence between relations nor in terms of a resemblance or an imitation. ”This is not to becoming but to reduce it to the given.There are no series or stages involved in bero^mg, whether regy^Mve or progresave. '^What is actual in becoming is the ‘block of becoming itself’ and not the fixed terms through which becoming passes. ”This is the force b^ehind Deleuze and Gua^ttari’s idea that ‘becoming is not an evolution’ (ibid.: 2 9 1 -2 ; 238). That is, not an evolution if evolution simply denotes descent, heredity, or filiation along an " f l i n ^ or genealogical becoming. 11 The only 11 It should be recalled that in the Origin Species Darrin's account of evolution is a theory of ‘common descent', what he calls ‘descent with m^odification', whiA is genealogical identity in difference. The dis<^^on of matttters of embryol^ogy and morphology in the final chapter of the ^rok, before the ‘re^capitulation andconclusion', takes place in the context of an ex^^^ation of ‘classification': ‘communityin embryonic structure reveals community ofdescent’ (Da^rwin 1985: 427). D^arwin does not understandgenealogy in lin ^ terms, but rather in tenns of a ‘bran^mg' in whiA ‘all living and ex^tinct beings are united by complex, radia^ting, and circuitous lines of affinities into one system' (ibid.: 433). D^arwin makes it clear, however, that what he is establishing with this model of gencaloogyare filiations of blood, in whiA the amount or value ‘of the differences betw^m org^^ be^s' becomes ever more widely diferent in the course of evolution, and yet, ‘their gencalogical arrangement remains strictly true' (ibid.: 405).

VIROID LI FE / 136 veritable becomings present in evolution are those produced by symbioses which bring into play new scales and new ^ngdoms. Only involution breaks with filiative evolution by forming ‘blocks’ which allow things to pass through and freely become. Involution is difference conceived not on the order of filiation or heredity but excessively in terms of the surplus value of code. Involution is genuine free­ dom, the rhizome as opposed to the genealogical tree. The model of becoming that the rhizome brings into play has obvious ^^Mties with recent attempts wi^thin feminist and postcolonial theorizing to go beyond the genealogical prejudices of an autochthonic politics of identity. Hybridization, however, takes us only so far away from arborescent schemas. Hybrids involve the connection of points, but do not facilitate the passing between points. A point remains wedded to a point of origin. in rhizomatic-styled becomings becoming denotes the movement by which the line frees itself from the point and renders points indiscernible. Machinic ‘evolution’ refers to the synthesis of heterogeneities, whereas hybridization is still tied to the idea of there being elements that are pure and uncon^^^ated prior to the ^^m g they undergo in hybridism. The difference is ^ucial and enables Deleuze and Gua^ttari to posit ‘ethology’ as a privileged molar domain on account of its demonstration of how the most varied components —from the biodemical, the hereditary and acquired, to the social —are able to crys^tale in assemblages that do not respect the ^^inction between orders. ^What holds the various components together are ‘transversals’, in which the ‘transversal’ itself is to be understood as the deterritorialized component within the complex adaptive system, that is, as the non-subject ‘agent’ of the evolution of complexity (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 336). in this novel conception o f ethology the ‘assemblage’ is being privileged over the classical emphasis on ‘behaviour’. that we must arrive at a much more complex understanding of ‘evolution’ ^than is facilitated by the D^^anian emphasis on adaptation to external circumstances, which ultimately rests on a reined and ^ ^ ed iated notion of the ‘enviro^nent’. On Deleuze’s ethological model an or life-form is never sep ^ b le from its ra p ^ rt with the ‘world’ and its relations with it, but that world is never jurt ‘given’ or simply passively adapted to. ‘Evolution’ involves l^^aing. in rature there is invention (tec^Mcs): ‘Artifice is fully a part of Nature’ (Deleuze 1988a: 124).An originary te^chnics thus informs Deleuze’s so-called Naturphilosophie. W i^in philosophy the machine has been c^&ically defined in contradistinction to the or^^^m along the foll^^owing lines: an or^ ^ ^ R is a self-organized being in w h id the p^arts are recipr^^ly cause and effect of the whole, forcing not just an ‘aggregate’, or an ‘asemblage’ , but a ‘unity’ . Accor^ng to Kant, only or^mi^ra display ‘^ ^ h ty’ (p^^osiveness), that is, a self-org^^rng capability (for e x ^ p le ,

VIROID LIFE / 137 in its genus, Gattung); a tree produces nothing other than itself, and so preserves itself ‘generically’. By contrast, a machine is entirely lacking in (self-propagating) formative power (fortpfianzende bi}dende Krcift), and so is unable to self-produce, reproduce, and self-organize. The efficient cause of the machine lies outside the machine in its designer. The only power given to the mac^me is a ‘motive power’ (bewegende Kraft) (Kant 1974/1982: section 6 5 ).12 On Kant’s model an ‘organized’ being is one in which each part has been trained and disciplined to exist fo r the sake i f the other’, so that all the interacting parts exist for the sake of the whole which is ontologicaliy prior and primary (Kant 1995: 60). It ^canot be simply a question of inverting the dualism of machine and organism which has structured the history of metaphysics. Rather, the mapping of machines be constructed in novel ways to the point where the ^tity and certainty of techno-ontological boundaries and distinctions begin to de-stabilize and break d o ^ in true machinic fashion. The idea that when we speak of living things as machines we are being merely metaphoric also needs to be contested (Emmeche 1994: 50), since again such a view rerts on little more than an anthropocentric bias, which itself is not ‘natural’ but ‘artificial’ , the product of a cer^tain.historical formation and deformation of the h^nan animal/machine. For aU its good sense, this philosophical determination of the machine rests on the privileging of notions of unity and finality that then allows for the strict partition between org^^anic and non-organismic life. Dawkins has conceded that the concept of the org^^m is of dubious utility precisely because it is so difficult to ariv e at a satisfactory definition of it. Much depends on the hierarchy of life which we are seeeking to e^blish. To plant biologiSts, for e^xample, the leaf may be a more salient ‘individual’ ^than the plant, since the plant is a ‘straggling, vague entity for whom reproduction may be hard to distifiginsh from what a zoologist would happily “growth”’ (Dawkins 1982: 253). For Nietzsche, the organism is not to be reified as a monadic entity but to be viewed as a ‘complex o f systems strugg^ling for an increase in the feeling of p ^ e r ' (Nietzsche 1968: section 703). 12 Compare Hegel (1970a: 198-202; 1980: sections 25^^0), where the constitution of the organism is compared to the constitution of self-consciousness, as that which ‘distinguishes itself from itself without producing any distinction’. ’This non-machinic conception of the organism as a functional and unity resulting from self-or^mization figures in the work of one eminent contemporary biologist, Brian Goodwin (1995: 182-4). For another account of the difference betw^m m^machines and living organisms see Serres (1982: 81). For further insight into the relationship between Deleuze’s ethology —mediated by the diverse likes of Simondon, Spinoza, Raymond Ruyer, and von Uexkill —and the philosophical tradition (notably Hegel and Heidegger) see Ansell Pearson 1997.

VIROID LI FE / 138 Moreover, there are only ‘acentred systems’ (ibid.: 488). The ‘organism’ enjoys a largely semiotic status and cannot be conceived independently o f our cognitive mapping of systems and their boundaries. In his 1867 speculations on teleology since Kant, Nietzsche questions the extent to which Kant demonstrates that only organisms ran be viewed as ends of nature, arguing that in nature ‘a machine would also lead to underlying final causes’. H^nan thought only reify the ‘eternally becoming’ (ewig Werdende) of life by grasping hving things solely in terms of their forms. In an insight that anticipates the Bergsonian-Deleuzian understanding o f creative evolution, he argues: our intellect is too dull to perceive continuing ^rransfonnation: that which it comes to know it names fonn. In truth no fonn is given, because in each point sits infinity (Unendlichkeit). Every thought unity (point) describes a line. A concept similar to form is that of the individual. We call organisms unities, as centres of purpose (Zweckcentren). But unities only exist for our intellect. EaA individual has an of living individuals itself. 15 In spite o f eve^^ung Kant seeks to do with the notion o f teleology, Nietaschfe insists that the s^ d p o in t o f reflective judgement is utterly whimsical and arbitrary (wiUhurlich) . The moves Kant makes, in which the end o f the existence’ of nature only be discovered by looking beyond nature, amounts to a violent (moral) subordination o f nature to the h^^rn reason. Today, he argues, as we undergo the experience o f morality’s self-overcoming (the self-overcoming of the will to truth), we are compelled to recognize that man has become an ^animal whose existence in the visible order of things appears as ‘arbi^ary, beggarly, and quite dispensable’ (Nie^^foe 1994: II, section 2 5). It is no wonder that the issue o f teleology so often appears as httle more ^than the refractive influence of provincial human interests. The tr^uhuman imagination does not rest content w'th anthropocentric prejudices about machines but seeks to devise ways o f tapping into their non-human enunciation. A philosophy of the raichine begins with the ron^ntion that the machine ‘is’ not, since it does not exist in itself but only through ahenation. As Deleuze and Gua^ari point out, an ab^ract machiIie is d^estratified and deterritorialized vvith no f o ^ o f its o ^ . An abstract machine in itself, that is, viewed from inside accor^ug to its intelligible (virtual) character, is neither 13 This passage is taken from Nie^tzsche’s 1867 dissertation ou^toe on W»fo#ie seit Kant (not available in Nie^tzsche 1987), in NietzsAe 1933—42, volume 3: 371-94. A Ge^^m original and helpful English translation of this intriguing early piece ^ be found in the appendix to Crawford 1988: 238-67. In this Aapter I have used my own ^translation, however.

VIROID LIFE I 139 physical nor corporeal. It is not semiotic but diagrammatic, operating by matter, not by substance (too hard), and by ^mction, not by form (too unelastic). In other words, the abstract machine is ‘pure Matter-Function’ that exists independently of the forms and substances it brings into play and distributes. A critique of the machine in terms of a machine’s inability to replicate and reproduce itself does not begin to touch on the problematic of machinic heterogenesis. As Butler points out, it is illegitimate to declare that the red clover has no reproductive system simply because the bee must aid and abet it before it reproduce. He writes: ‘Each one of ourselves has spr^ung from ^minute animalcules whose entity was entirely distinct from our o ^ , and w hi^ acted after their kind with no thought or heed of what we might about it. These little creatures are part of our own reproductive system’ (Butler 1985: 211).14 The notion of machinic evolution, therefore, does not refer specifically or exclusively to h^nan contrivances, gadgets, or tools, but rather to particular modes of evolution, such as s^nbiosis and contagion, and is not specific or peculiar to the hum an-m arine relationship, since it also speaks of the machine-machine nexus and alterity. The ‘machinic’ is the mode of evolution that is specific and peculiar to the ‘beco^ming’ of alien life. A machine only exist through exterior elements. It thus enjoys an . existence in terms of being a complementarity, and not ^mply in terms of its relationship to h^^an design or a designer. A mac^ne lives and dies in connection with other vir^tual and actual machines, suggesting ‘a “non-h^nan” enunciation, a proto-subjective di^^im (Gua^ttari 1992: 59; 1995: 37). An assem­ blage works through invention, and does not imply a relationship of anastomosis between its components. Rather, it connects and convolutes things in terms of potential fields and vir^tual elements, crossing ontological thresholds without fidelity to relations of genus and species (Gua^ttari 1992: 56; 1995: 35). The logic of life displays an ^ ^ u te wtuoasity, but, in truth, all that is ^ppe^ng is the tr^ufo^ation of see^mingly dete^^m te points into indeterminate lines. In his ‘book of ^ ^ u n e s’ ^Samuel Butler demo^nstrates, in an unnerving insight into the a^nimal—machine nexus and the h ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ in e nexus, how it becomes v ir^ ^ y imposdble to declare with any on to l^ cal certainty who is the host and who is the ^ ^ ^ te . 14 Even entrenAed thesis on marines has ^be contested by Richard Laing (1979: 201-15), who has argued that deliberate explicit d^esignis not the sole means by whid marines come to exhibit complex behaviour, sucA as self-replication and self-repair. My aim in this Aapter is limited to ^challenging the way in which we about machines and or^misms by privileging wholes over parts, unities over multiplicities, autogenesis over heterogenesis.

VIROID LI FE I 140 In an essay on ‘The Organization of the Living’ Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela set out to define, working from within an assumed non-animistic perspective, living systems as machines. They confess that they are attracted to the word ‘machine’ because of its decisive dynamic connotations. Entities are defined as unities with the power to reproduce and by their autonomy. ‘Autonomy’ is conceived as the ‘self-asserting capacity of living systems to maintain their identity through the active compensation of deformations’ (Maturana and Varela 1980: 73). This definition succeeds in capturing the essentially cybernetic nature of se lf-rela tin g systems in which feedback plays the crucial role. The question, however, is whether in their conception of the machine Maturana and Varela simply take ‘unity’ as given, with an underdefined defo^ation and ‘reproduction’ being posted in naive and essentialist terms (since things don’t just reproduce themselves). In seeking to define a ‘living system’, Maturana and Varela contend that evolutionary thought has ignored the autonomous nature of living entities. ‘Org^anization’ is the principle that is best able to account for the ‘unit^y c^hararter’ of living systems. If living systems are ‘machines’ , then they need to be understood in terms of ‘relations’ and not of component parts. Only in this way is it possible to generate the desired notion of dynamism (entdecheia). The u ^ l view of ma^chines is that they are concrete hardware systems, defined by the nature of their components and by the purpose they ftfulfil in their operations as man-made artifacts. But this view says nothing about how they are constituted. Maturana and Varela are concerned with relations, not components; the latter be any, so it is the orga^nization which is ^^cial and constitutive. The organization of machines then be described as autopoietic. Such machines are homeostatic and a l feedback is internal to them. '^What is peculiar to such machines, however, is not feature but the fundamental variable which they maintain constant. Such a machine is organized as a network of processes of production (tr^ f^ ro atio n and destruction of components) that produces the components which (a) continu­ ously regenerate and r ^ ^ e the network of processes (relations) that produced them through their interactions and ^ ^form ation; and (b) co^nstitute the machine as a concrete unity in the space in which the components ^ & . An autopoietic machine, therefore, is one which continuously generates and specifies its o^n organization through its operation as a system of production of its o-wn components. It does this in terms of an endless ^turnover of components under conditions o f continuous perturbations and comp^^tion of per^turbations. Organiration is the ^radamental v ia b le which it main^tains co^^rat. In other words an autopoietic mac^ne is defined not in terms of the components or their static relations, but by the particular network of processes (relations) of

VIROID LI FE / 141 production. The relations of production of components are given only as processes; if the processes ‘stop’, then the relations vanish. Therefore, machines require regeneration by the components they produce. An autopoietic machine has no inputs and outputs, although it be ‘perturbated’ by independent events which cause it to undergo internal structural change. The claim that autopoietic systems are organizationally ‘closed’ be misleading if it is taken to imply that these systems do not interact with their environment. Such systems are closed simply in the sense that the product of their org^anization is the org^^ation itself. Internal c^mges which take place are always subordinated to the maintenance of the machine organization. A relation between these changes and the course o f pertur­ bations which be pointed to pertain to the domain within which the machine is observed, and not to its org^anization. An autopoietic machine be treated as an allopoietic machine, but this will not reveal its particular organization as an autopoietic machine. An autopoietic machine, therefore, is one whiA maintains as constant certain relations between components that are in continuous flow or change, and it is this which constitutes its modus ope^ndi as one of ‘d^^mic stability’ . The actual meaner in which the autopoietic organization is implemented in physical space varies according to the nature, or properties, of the physical materials which embody the structure of the machine in question. Although there are many different kinds of autopoietic ^^^ines in physical space, a l of them are organized in such a way that any ‘interference’ with their operation outside their domain of compensations Varela result in their disintegration. Maturana and two principal concluaons concerting the machine: firstly, if living systems are machines (phyacal autopoietic machines), which transform matter into themselves in a m^mer such that the product of their operation is always their own organi^tion, then the converse is also true: if it is autopoietic, then a physical system is living; secondly, from ^w, it follows that the ^^inction between machine (automaton) and living (spontaneous) becomes untenable and must break d^own. The classic view is that ^ ^ tin e s are ^man-made a r ^ a ^ with completely d e te ^ ^ ^ ^ c properties and perfectly predictable. Con^ariwise, living syrtems are deemed to be a priori autonomous, unpredi^ctable system. The prejudice is that man could not manufa^ure a li^ng system but ‘only’ a macchine. As a r^esult of these redefinitions, however, certain distinctions begin to break d^own and certain prejudices get supplanted. In spite of the progresave of the last ^ ^ ^ t , a fundamental meta­ physical opposition operates deep wi^in the so-scaled machinic ^^^ing of the s^ o o l of autopoiesis. Maturana and Varela’s conception of the ^^chine as a selfreferential, self-reproductive momdic entity rests on an opposition between pure

VIROID LI FE I 1 42 autonomy (self-maintenance and self-preservation), on the one hand, and impure heteronomy (invasion) on the other. They do not see that a genuinely machinic of the ‘entropy /evolution’ problematic must lead to a corrosion of molarorganized unities and identities, leading to the construal of a fluid relationship between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, between autonomy and heteronomy, and between nature and artifice. Autopoiesis cannot allow for transformation except in terms of a highly restricted economy, presenting us with a stark either/or choice: either entropy or perfect performance. It is guided by a whole conservative metaphysics of living systems, and presupposes a paranoid machine. ^ This is evident in the emphasis it places on systems as closed and recursive unities that are guided by, above a l else, the maintenance of stability. To claim, as they do, that orga^ration is an invariant of a component system is to equate c ^rn ge with ample destruction, and to render orga^ ra tion as some^wg ‘over’ physical reality rather ^ than ‘to’ it. In contradistinction to Maturana and Varela, Vilmos C^ yi and George K^ pis main^in that if new components endowed with new functions come into existence in a system, then the org^^ation of that system ^cannot remain invariant. Moreover, change in a system’s orga^ration, as a result of the emergence of new components, does not result in the disintegration of that system. ^ This must mean that the ‘autonomy’ of the individual org^^m is ‘always relative’ (C^ yi and K ^ p is 1985: 306). For them the main problem with an autopoietic model of evolution is that it fails to appreciate that if a system were to be driven by the desire for perfect autonomy it would get trapped in an evolutio^nary deadlock, unable to fonn further relatio^nships and connections. Exactly the same point was made by Bergson, in the context of a different debate, who argued against a vi^talist position w hiA rested on the ^^raption that nature evolved in tenns of a purely internal finality and absolutely ^^inct individualities ^tergson 1983: 42). It is impoSSible, he argued, to dete^rmine with any degree of ^rity where the vital principle of the ‘individual’ , or autonomous machine, be^ra or ends. In the three sections of ‘The book of the machines’ which m^% up his fiction Ere'Whon of 1872 ^Samuel Butler chaUenges the ^way in which lines are between machinic life and life: Where does copiousness begin, and where end? Who ^ draw the line? Who ^ draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not maAinery linked with anim mal life in an infinjte variety of ways? The shell of a hen’s egg is made up of delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an egg-cup. (1985: 199)

VIROID LIFE I 143 As Deleuze and Guattari argue, Butler’s reflections do not simply contrast two common arguments, one according to which organisms are only more perfect machines, the other according to which machines are never more than extensions of the organism. Butler is not content merely to claim that machines extend the organism (the pre-established unity), or that organisms are machines; rather he wishes to show that (a) the field of evolution is thoroughly machinic from the out­ set, and (b) organisms be compared to machines in terms of the sophisticated engineering which integrates their distinct parts (desire is engineering) (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 3 3 7 -8 ; 1983: 284). As a result, Butler destroys the vitalist argument by ^^ing into question the alleged personal unity of the organism, and, by the same token, he undercuts the mechanist position by calling into question the aUeged stru ^ ra l unity of the machine. tf'life’ be conceived along the lines of a ‘desire-engineering’ , then there be no pre-established boundaries and no fixed determination of what constitutes the parameters and identities of individuated entities, such as organisms or machines. The m s ^ e is to view complex machines as single entities whose individuated existence is pre-given. In truth, every complex machine, Butler maintains, is to be regarded..as a city or society. Like org^^m s, machines reproduce themselves through an integrated network of co-evolution (as in the well-mown example of the red dover and the bumble bee). Butler’s reaso^nmg forces us to question the ^rity of Kant’s ^^inction between motive and formative powers. In Deleuze and Gua^ari’s terms the motive power of the technical machine requires the formative power of the social machine for its actualization and reproduction. The h ^ ^ w animal enjoys no autonomy from nature and from technics. lik e eve^^^ag else it too is caught up in the ‘surplus value of code’ , which denotes an excess that refers to a procew when a part of a machine captures its ‘own* code a code fragment of another machine, and, as a result, owes its reproduction to a part of another machine. It is thus the always excessive desire of machinic becomings that deterritorializes the evolu­ tionary lineages of all phenomena, and which enables us to privilege alliances over filiations, heteronomous asemblages over autonomous entities. It becomes poreible to appreciate the ex p o u n d nature of Deleuze and Gua^ari’s formulation ‘de^^ag-machines’ , in w hiA the machine passes to the h^eart of desire and the machine is desiring desire, ‘machined’: ‘Desire is not in the subject, but the machine in desire/ D^^^^-ma^chines are truly formative machines, but whose for^ tiv ity is poreible only thro^ugh ^rational mis^^ags; that is, formation req^uires defo^ation, and what ^m.alc:es evolution a machinic procere is the fact that it takes place thro^ugh curings, breakages, slippages, br^eakd^^u, and so on. S tru ^ ^ ^ unities and phenomena (such as molar a^^gates) conceal the

intrinsic direction of VIROID LI FE I 144 singular multiplicities (interpenetration, direct com m unication), and force us to lose sight o f the multitude of small machines which are dispersed in every organism, which itself is no m ore than ‘a collection o f trillions o f macrom olecular machines’ (D ennett 1995b: 2 0 6 ). Ultimately, at the point o f ‘dispersion’ , where techno-ontological boundaries break d o ^ , it becom es im m aterial w hether one describes machines as origans o r organs as machines: ‘ A tool or a machine is an organ, and organs are tools or m achines’ (Canguilhem 1992: 5 5 ). Canguilhem also points out that the m echanistic conception o f the body posited by Cartesianism is no less anthropomorphic than a teleological conception o f the physical world. He shares N ietzsche’s view that m achines be considered to be purposive in their endeavour and activity. Indeed, ‘m an’ is only able to make him self the master and proprietor o f nature to the extent that he denies any finality or purpose to what lies ‘outside’ him , such as nature or m achines, w h i^ are then treated solely as means to serve his hubristic Zwe^en. Nature and te ^ n ic s take their revenge when the r^ ^ zation dawns that the entire evolution o f what we take to be ‘sp irit’ is, in a^^ctualiy, the becom ing o f something altogether .^diferent ^than what appears in consciousness and reason, namely, the body: ‘In the long ^run, it is not a question o f at a l , fo r he is to be overcom e’ (N ietzsche 1 9 68 : section 6 7 6 ). So far in book we have seen the extent to w h i^ Nietzsche does not overcoming in term s o f the abolition o f the human b u t rather only in term s o f the destruction o f its anthropocentric determ ination as the superior point o f evolution. If the idea o f autopoiesis is to retain any useful function it has to be thought in relation to entities w hich are evolutive and collective, and w hich ssus^in diverse kinds o f alterio r relations, as opposed to being implacably closed in upon them ­ selves and m a in ^ ^ m g their autonomous existence at the expense o f casting out and dissipating anything exte^rnal that would c o n ^ ^ ^ t e their inner purity (the machine as beau^tiful sou l). In the case o f the machine, entropy and evolution need to be viewed as co-extensive and mu^tually informative. T h e ‘m a n ^ ^ ^ ^ in e alterity’ is inextricably ^aked to a ‘m achine-m achine alterity’ . As Gua^ttari points out, m achines already ‘^talk’ to each other before they ^talk to us. The reproducibility o f m ac^ n es is n o t a pure, programmed repetition, but precisely an evolution. D ifference is introduced at this point o f b^reakdown/evolution and is both ontogenetic and phylogenetic. There is no simple or straightforward univocal historical causality since evolutive lineages present themselves as ‘rhizom es’ , m eaning that ‘datings’ ^ n o t synchionic but heterochionic (on the c r u r a l ro le played by heterochrony in the developmental p r^ x ^ e s o f ontogeny, see RafT and Kaufman 1 9 8 3 : 1 7 3 ff.). The tectonic movements o f history have to

VIROID LIFE I 145 be understood in term s of singularities which them selves have to be mapped out in term s of a virtual plane o f rhizom atic and associative becoming. Such becom ings take place 'in’ history but are not reducible to , or identical w ith, it. G uattari has rightly insisted that the question o f th e ontogenetic evolution o f the m achine, fo r exam ple, is not reducible to the ‘linear causalities o f the capitalistic apprehension o f m achinic Universes’ (1 9 9 2 :7 9 ; 1995: 5 2 ). In m achinic heterogenesis i t is less a question o f the identity o f a b ein g that retains its heterogeneous textu re while traversing d ife re n t regions, and m ore o f an ‘identical processual persistence'. O n e is speaking neither o f a Platonic w hole nor o f an Aristotelian prim e mover, b u t rath er o f transversal creatures that ‘appear like a m achinic hyper-text' (Guattari 1 9 9 2 : 151; 1995: 109). G u attari’s insight into this universe o f m achinic h eterog en eas requires a fu n d ^ e n ta l r e ­ configuration o f ontology. An ontology inform ed by an appreciation o f the m achine would not place qualities or attributes as secondary in relation to substance, nor would it conceive o f being as a pure and empty container o f all powible modalities o f coming-into-being. Rather, it would conceive being as first and forem ort ‘a u to -^ ^ ro a tio n ' and ‘auto-consistency' w hich actualizes itself through virtual and diverse relations o f alterity. l h is would m ean that we would cease view ing exirtence-for-itself and for-oth ers in term s o f th e privilege o f one particular ‘sp ecies', s u ^ as mankind, and appreciate that everywhere ‘m achinic interfaces engender disparity and, in retu rn , are founded by it' (ibid.: 152; 1 0 9 ). ‘B ein g ’ ceases to be a general ontological equivalent and becom es m odelled along the lines o f ‘generative praxes o f heterogeneity and com p lexity ' (ibid.). Evolution by symbiosis — the vitality o f viroid life — and rhizom atic becomings constitute an essential p art o f heterogeneity and com plexity. In term s of the question o f technology, there is no reification o f technical machines in the w ork o f Deleuze and Guattari a n c e they readily appreciate that technical m achines are only indexes o f m ore com plex assemblages that bring into co-evolutionary play m aterial-forces in which the role played by the social machine is decisive. O n e is n ot ‘oppressed’ by a technical machine bu t by a social m achine which dete^rmines at any given m om en t what is the ^usage, extension, and com prehension o f technical elements (com pare Braudel 1981: 4 3 1 : ‘th e re is no technology in its e lf'). Technical m achines are n ot an econom ic category b u t always refer to a socius or asocial machine that is ^ ^ in c t from them . 'This is akin to M ^ x ’s view that machinery is no m ore an ‘econ om ic’ category the plough. D eleuze and Gua^ttari is the ox w hich draws that assemblages are never p ^ e ly tech n o­ logical. Tools always presuppose a ‘m achine’ , and th e ^machine is always social ‘b efo re ' it is te^chnical (compare Ellul 1965: 4 - 5 , in w hich the question o f the

VIROID LI FE I 146 machine is reduced entirely to a question of mechanized ‘technique'). As one commentator has noted, in relation to the new cybernetic machines, in no arena will the te^mologies themselves be determining (Nichols 1988: 45). In other words, questions concerning cybernetic te^mology only be adequately attested to when they are articulated in terms of a social theory of the micro­ physics of power. One of the reasons given for the primacy of the social machine by Deleuze and Guattari is that technical machines do not contain the conditions for their reproduction, but re quire the social machine to organize and limit their development. There is no attempt made in their work to crudely biologize the technical-social; both a biological reading of human history and an anthropological reading of natural history must be avoided since the dangers of either strategy are all too obvious. The social is already ^artificially biologized. The terms of political theory, for example, are terms of capture and regulation, in which the evolution of societies is referred to as ‘embryonic’, ‘nascent’ , ‘underdeveloped’ , and that of third world societies as ‘foetuses’ and ‘abortions’ of culture and ci^^ation. In ^chalenging the reWed conception of the oig^^m found a varietyof discursive practices one is not advocating a retreat into a pre-social biosphere, but rather presenting a challenge that operates on myriad fronts. A politics o f desire — the machinic assemblage of new solidarities and formations — comes into play when it is recognized that technocracy and bureaucracy (the ^nctioning of the social machine) never be reduced to being simply the operation of technical machines along the lines of a perfectly ^run cybernetic machine. In the 1960s Vaneigem argued that, 'by laying the basis for a perfect power stru^cture, the cyberneticians only stimulate the perfection of its re^ral. Their pro^^^^rng of techniques be shattered by the same teehniques ^turned to its own use by another kind of orga^^tion’ (Vaneigem 1994a: 85). In truth, the atuation is now ^^Mtely more complex than the likes ofVaneigem could ever have ente^rtained, since the ‘outside’ — futures o f a l kinds —has been captured. C ap i^ ^ ^ , having embarked upon a programme of endocolonization, has become a futures market on every level one cares to ^^&. ‘Nothing is true; eve^^img is p e ^ itted’ is no longer the slogan of the revolutionary ^nihilist but that of established powers of capture. The revolution will be televised (and already has been). This is the force, for example, behind Umberto Eco’s astute insight into (post)modem terrorism: terrorism is not the enemy of the great systems but their na^tural counterweight, both accepted and pro^^^med (Eco 1986: 116). If the great systems function as headless systems, having no protagonists and not living on individual egoism, then they ^^not be completely automated factory, it by the king: 'if there e^xists a not be upset by the death of the owner but

VIROID LI FE I 147 rather by erroneous bits of information inserted here and there, making hard work for the computers that run the place’ (ibid.: 115). It is no longer sufficient to ponder Marx, he suggests; one must also ponder Norbert Wiener. Capital renders Marx's great insight into history null and void: the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle except Jor the 'history’ i f (late, always late) capital Forever the great c)'TIic, capital cannibalizes all negativity, ‘parodistically going beyond its own contradictions’ (Baudrillard 1994: 52). Technology's powerful illusion of independence is part ofits immense entropic and im p e ^ ^ ^ c success: the essence of te^nology is nothing technological, but it appears as if it is.15 Fetishism of te^nology is an essential —and vital — part of capital’s tr^^m dental illusion. But the social definition of what is technologically feasible or desirable is not external to technology but intrinsic to it. A distinction between the ‘economic’ and the ‘technological’ is arbitrary and unintelligent (see Hornborg 1992). Capitalism rests on a particular conjunction of technical and social machines. As a distinct social formation it functions by ^^ting the technical machines into constant capital attached to the body of the socius (as opposed to ‘h^^m machines’, which are made adjacent to the technical machines). The social axiomatic extends its limits through the ‘non-technical ’ means of a^^ro^ration and ^^ription. Culture works as a mechanism of selection, inventing t^ rngh i^^ription and coding the large numbers —organisms and complete whole persons — in whose interests it acts. This explains why ‘stattistics is not fractional but s tru ^ ^ ^ ’ , conce^rning ‘^ ^ ^ of phenomena that selection has alr^eady placed in a state of p^tial dependence. . . . This even be seen in the genetic code’ (Deleuze and Gua^ttari 1983: 343). The State exists to regulate the decoded Hows unl^eashed by the ^^^w-tendencies of capitalism. ■^While capital melts down eve^^M g that is solid and profanes all that is holy, bourgeois ■Society gu^arantees that the productive forces of change are rendered 15 illusion of the autonomous ^^racter of t e r ^ ^ development is exposed in an instructive ‘critical’ f^ashionby Habe^nnas (1987: 57ff.), who argues that ‘t^echnology’ —conceived as scien^fc^y rati^^^^ control of obj^ectifiod processes —be taken to refer to a 'system' in whiA r^^^^ and ^^mology- are coupled with feedbag from both the economy and from modem social admini^stration. As one of the few attempts to develop a ‘politics' of teiclmology and a ‘democratic’ t^technics, Habermas’s inquiry remains an apposite one in the face of the contem­ porary depoliticcization of questions conce^rning t^echnology and technics. As Habermas notes, one of the ways in w^hichadvanrcd capi^talist ^society ‘^imuni?^’ itself against the deterritorialimpact of technical dJange and the potentiality for free communication about the goals of 'life ^tfvity' is through a depoliti^cization of the mass of the population (120). See also in re^gard Winer’s helpful historical study (1971).

VI R O I D LI FE I 1 48 equilibrial through the territorially fixed and juridically invariant structure of the modern State (Balakrishnan 1995: 56-7) (and news of its death is premature). Moreover, through State regulation and control the decoding practices of science and technics are subjected to a social axiomatic that is more severe than any putative ‘scientific’ axiomatic. The social and cultural revolution of postmodernity is about the potential liberation of technical machines from monopolistic and scientistic control by the molar forces of capture that characterize the modern capitalist State, a bifurcation point at which capitalism is no longer able to mono­ polize for itself technical machines as the constant capital attached to its social body. The critical task of an alien thought-praxis, therefore, only be that of decoding and deterrito^^^ing the prevai^ling a ^ ^ ^ ^ a tiv e and regulatory machines — in the State, in philosophy, in science, in culture and information — that have defined and restricted the present by despotically blocking the free flow of energy and knowledge throughout the social machine. Grand narratives, it would seem, are coming ^back in fashion, and with a vengeance, assu^ming a ^^inctly inhuman character, in which we are offered a plethora of apocalyptic scenarios concerning an alleged phase-space ^ ^ itio n to a new, ‘higher' level of evolution based on machine intelligence, resul^ting in a genetic take-over of carbon life by soft machines (robots and computers) (for two a^»unts of our neg-entropic de^iny from vastly different ^ ^ ta r s , see Lyotard 1991 and Tipler 1995). But this depiction of neg-entropic de^stinies, in which the human plays the role of a mere conduit in the in h ^ an proces of complexification, only provide simple options that are not options at aU, s u ^ as a retreat into a new ethical purism (mo^^ing the event, b^^ng tes^mony to the Event), futile Luddi^tlsm, or vacuous cyber-celebrationism. The dangers in conHa^ting biology and technology are immense. Today palaeoanthropologists speak of life on earth staking place in tenns of the evolution of techno-or^ganic life that has cultivated positive feedback loops between ‘intelligence’ and biology resulting in an accelerated evolution, with the incr^^ng hegemony of life over natural life being understood as a ^Lamarckian invaaon and take-over of so-called d^nb and blind natural selection (see and Toth 1993: 315-16). A new m^foology of the machine is emerging and finds expresnon in ^UTent claims that technology is simply the pursuit of life by means other ^than life.l6^1ms 16 Compare Deleule (1992: 205-6), where he ■writes: ‘Ufe d ^ not imitate the ra^rne, nor is it reduced to a meAanical construct. It is the marine that a^^ctual simulates life. . . . Marines not built in order to free h^raans from servile tasks. The function of madlines is to increase the power of life itself, to life’s capacity for mastery and conquest. The machine does

VIROID LIFE I 149 dubious neo-Lamarckism, which reaches an apogee in Kevin Kelly's assertion that the advantages of a Lamarckian style of evolution are so great that nature herself has found ways to make such an evolution pOSSible , is not only philosophical idiocy but also politically naive, resting on a highly vertical and perfectionist model of biotechnical evolution. He constantly speaks of ‘what evolution really wants’ , as if one could easily speak of ‘evolution’ in terms of a global entity, as in the following gross assertion: ‘Evolution daily scru^ tinizes the world not just for fitter organisms, but to find ways to increase its own ability. . . . Evolution ^searches the surface of the planet to find ways to speed itself up, to ^make itself more nimble, more evolvable - not because it is anthropomorphic, but because the speeding up of adaptation is the runaway circuit it rides on’ (Kelly 1994: 361). Sueh ‘sea^rching' on the part of evolution, we are told, results in the human b^rain providing the ‘^^wer’ to the problem of h w evolution gain the complexity necessary in order to peer ahead and ‘direct evolution’s course’. In the process of ridicu­ lous anthropomorphism questions concerting the u^tilizations and abuses of A-life and bioengineering, for life are rendered completely ^uninteresting, a n « , as Bergson would haveput it, ‘a l is given’. In effect, what is happening in kind of depiction of evolution is a blind, and dumb, reading of the d^^mics of contempo^rary hyper-colonistic capi^^rn —Kelly’s identification of speed with ^mple a lte r a tio n ill^ustrates this — ^back into the me^unics of the biosphere, resulting in a biological j^ustification of entropic mode^^ation in its most guise (speed is ireastible). X1There are other reactive forces at play in recent pa^eans to the rise of machine intelligence. As Baudrillard has pointed out, halving lost our metaphy&cal utopias we now build prophylactic ones in which our immortality is ^ ^ ^ t e e d (you d^ownload your brain!). If in the past it was not in any sense replace life.’ "This so-called ^^taodern thesis on the machine was captured in its import by Samuel Butler in his ^^^^ly titled ^esy ‘Darwin among the Ma^chines’ of 1863, where he poses the question con^^^^ the machine in quasi-Nietzsmean terms, poisingit as a questiion about ‘the sort of creature’ that will succ^eedman in the supremacy of the dearth. His ^concluding opinion, not surp^^^ly, was that ‘war to the death should be instantly prrocl^med them’. See Butler 1914-. ^What Butler is the r^^ecognition that while machines have proved to be an indispensable aspect of human existence —‘man's very sou! is due to the ^^^faes; it is a ma^chine-made , he iwrites -in the fu^ture hegemonic evolution of m^adUneintel^ence the human may prove to be u^tterly d^^vable as far as the d^^ra of the m^^mes conrccerned (Butler 1985: 207). 17 Of ^cou:ne, the irony of Kelly's position is that he is a control freak. His opposition to na^tural sel^ection is on the fact that it takes time, time he d ^ not have, he tells us. ‘Who ^ wait a million y^ears?’ he writes (359).

VIROID LIFE / 1 50 the dead who were embalmed for eternity, today it is the living who are being embalmed alive in a state of survival (life owes me a right not to die!) (Baudrillard 1994: 8 7 -8 ). At present what we are witnessing within the discernible logic o f post­ modernity is a transition from the thermodynamic machines of industrial capitalism to the cybernetic machines of contemporary information societies that govern through intelligent control. But this is still a mutation within entropic (post)modernity in which the development of new forces of production outstrips existing relations of production but in no way guarantees their radical transforma­ tion or liberation from s o ^ l control and molarization. Society - and ‘we’ who exist outside - a r e beco^ming more like snakes every day. Did the ‘political’ die with the collapse of the great empires, including the great empires of thought (-control)? Today the life of the great empires has assumed a retroviral form, fragmented and peripheral, genetically infecting their wastes and by-products, their basic cells and ugly growths, no longer on the order of the political but of the transpolitical whose pasaon, notes Bau^drilard, is that of the inte^^^M e work of mo^^ing, lost in ‘the melancholy of homeopathic and homeostatic systems’, in w hi^ evidence for the death of the political is impe^rmissible since it would ‘reintr^uce a fatal into the vir^al immortality of the transpolitical’ (Baudrillard 1994: 51). Po^ modeernity (h^^an, a l too h^^an) spreads the of voluntary servitude, an ‘ecological miCTO-seratude, which is everywhere the successor to totalitarian oppression’ (and how green were those Nazi ^valeys). There is only the contagion of technics and the freedom of becoming imperceptible, invisible, and ignoble (l^earn to growl, burrow, and distort yourself).

6 T I M E L Y M E D I T A T I O N S T R A N S H U M A N N i h i l i s m , O N T H E C O N D I T I O N e n t r o p y , a n d b e y o n d In the investigation of nature, human reason is not content to pass from metaphysics to physics; there lies within it an instinct (which, though fruitless, is not inglorious) to transcend even the latter, to fantasize in a hyperphysics. -<Kant 1995: 17) Once more we are seized by a great shudder, but who would feel inclined immediately to deify again after the old manner this monster of an unknown world? . . . Alas, too many ungodly possibilities of interpretation are included in the unknown, too muuch devilry, stupidity, and foolishnett of interpretation - even our o ^ h^an, al too human folly. (Nietzs^e 1974: section 374) It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most ^difcult ^k, or the ^ k of a mode of existence still to be discovered on the plane of immanence today . . . (we have so many reasons not to believe in the human world; we have indeed lost the world . . .). The problem has indeed Ranged. (Deleuze and Gua^ttari 1994: 75) History as contingency is a pro^^: that is more than the h^an spirit ^ ^bear. (Heilbroner 1994: 77) 1. Today, one migght suppose, it is not so much we who are in v esti^ ^ ^ the future as the future w h id is investig a ting us. The fu^re ap^ pears to have ^mounced its rnival in a hundred and one signs. If the Messiah rnived he would go unreco^raed not simply his arrival would be belated, but more the flash o f the future is imperceptible. The future seems to haveve drived quite a long time ago: a ^^wn-datingg experiment would probably fix its ^rival around five hundred and seventy million years ago. Even darting, however, w hi^ refers to the ap^^^nce o f hasd-bodied plants and a n i^ ls in the

VIROID LI FE / 152 Phanerozoic aeon, suffers from what we might call a Cambrian chauvinism. A less anthropocentric timeline might fix it as one thousand and seven hundred million years ago, during the Proterozoic aeon, with the earliest appearance of eukaryotes and the birth of speciation. No doubt this attempt to determine the future is beside the point. One of the reasons why we are so blinkered about the future and its coming is the fact that we indulge in a highly anthropocentric meditation on the time of technology. ^When that perennial species, Luddites, declare that they are ‘not into’ technology, they need to be reminded that it is not so much a ques­ tion of their personal likes and dislikes, but much more a question of technology being ‘into’ them. It is ne^^^sy to get the question of technology into some kind of perspective. The universe offers a comprprehensive ^^em of technics and technology, while humanity has discovered ways of employing and exploiting it. As E^rnst: Jimger pointed out in his 1932 study of ‘The Worker’ , humanity oscilates between conceiving itself as the apprentice of a sorrcerrer that has conjured up powers beyond its control and as the creators of an ^^toppable progress that hhasteens towards artificial paradises Oiinger 1982). The h^^m fantastt is to devise a technological system so omniscient that it the power of the future, ^^w for^^^ the universe into a perfectiy administered megamachine of predi^ble outputs and calculable energies. Technology, we like to ^^& , holds the ‘promise’ of a life lived in pure ^imedidiacy and total ^ ^ ^ ^ e n cy . The ^task is now one of knowing how to cultivate a critique of heU in which life is being lived ‘beyond’ illusion. As we continue to labour under what Bau^^ard has scaled the ‘subjective iUuaon of technology’, we fail to iden^tify the ^true ironic character o f technology’s coming. i For Bau^^Wd such a proposition delivers us from the Heideggerian viaon of technology as the phase of metaphyacs, and from any nos^stalgia for Being and from aU ^unhappy critique abased on outmoded notions of alienation and disenchantment (BaudriUard 1996: 83). If it is more a qu^tion of technology inventing the h^nan ^than it is a question of h^nans inventing technology, then it is necessary- to take invention seriously. 2. The time o f te^hincs always exceeds itself beca^rc it is a time of invention (of the future, of ^me itself). In raising the question of te^mology, one wonders whether Heidegger is about about the invention ‘of’ technics at aU (in spite of his emplo^ng the Gherman die Technik), or simply about the h ^ a n world of 1 Baudrillard meditates on the 'irony of te^mology' in his The PrfM Crime (1996: 82^). Such a condition, however, wwas already noted and meditated upon by Jacques Ellul in his classic study of la technique. See Ellul 1965, and Winner 1977: 611T.

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION / 153 technology that has become estranged from, and foreign to, mankind and now appears as something that is tremendously inhuman. The question of technology would appear to have little to do with the complex evolution of technics, and more to do with the control and mastery of all kinds of techniques for the purposes of h^rnan preservation and the political control of the flow of materialforces. To maintain that technology is making us ‘less human’ is to suppose that there exists some fixed nature of the human by which one could measure the excesses of technology, and so appraise its inventions in terms of some meta­ physical cost-benefits analysis. Heidegger’s thesis that in order for the ‘truth’ of technology to be revealed it is necessary that m^^ind finds its way back to the breadth of the space that is proper to its essence (Wes^waum) would appear to underes^mate massively the extent of technology’s invention o f the h^man ^^nal and the nature and extent of its investment in mankind (Heidegger 1991a).2 Heidegger’s o^n mistake was to argue that the production o f machines, which he recognizes is not identical to technics, exists to ‘realize’ the ‘essence of technics in its objective raw material’ . The ‘essence’ of technics here refers to the desire of technology for total mobilization and control. But this deare for control be recognized as a h^nan, a l too h^nan desire, a^u^ued within specific social formations and modes of production. Heidegger’s questio^ng of technology contains its o^n strange irony. In seein g to invert our ^^^rnen^talist and anthro­ pocentric questioning of this event by corn^^mg it not as the invention of man but as a gift of Being, he turns the h^nan into little more than an ‘^ ^ ^ ro en t’ , a mere organ of the time of technology, so that m^ankind is sa^crificed on the altar of self-withdrawing Being. ‘Being’, we are told, ‘has sent itself into Enfr^ning.’ A l the voluntarism that Heidegger takes away from ‘man’ is now given back to ‘Being’. It is not ^ ^ r a in g that he should reaeh the portion he did: only a god save us. 3. Any of the future would seem to be n e^ ^ ^ d y implicated in questions of theology and teleology, with questions of first and last ^ ^ ^ s. It seems pe^thar to our so-called ‘postmodern’ age, however, that whereas we have ^abandoned concern with the f o ^ e r (northing is more intelle^^ctual discredited ^today the question of origins), it ^ ^ o t completely eschew the kttCT. The most radical 2 This separation of m^ankind and teAnology, whiA rests on the supposition that m^ankind stands in some way ‘outside' teAnoloogy, ^becomes evident in his MessHkirch Memorial Addres of 1955, where he that the ‘proper' relationship to teAnology is one where we ^ te^mical devices as they o^ught to be ^used, and let them alone as something whiA d ^ not afect our inner and real core' (Hei^^^r 1966: 54).

VIROID LI FE / embracement of our current inhumanization 154 thus read like an upturned version of the Hegelian ascent to the Absolute, the absolute knowledge which, ever since Adorno, has proclaimed the horror! the horror!, now screams the delight! the delight! When it confronts the inside that comes from outside and invades its domain - the future - the human goes beyond itself and becomes subject to strange experiences and thoughts of the transhuman. The attempt to map the future is not a pastime peculiar to futurotogists. It has been a preoccupa­ tion of ^^^ers ever since ^nihilism started knocking on the door. In the case of modernity, this probably be dated back to Kant. Nie^tzsche’s pithy that Kant believed in morality not because it is demo^nstrated in nature and history, but rather in spite of the fact that nature and history continually contradict it remains one of the most disturbing, but perplexing, insights into the ^character of our modernity. If the morality of a kingdom of ends ^canot be located in history — and where else it materialize? —then it becomes necessary for Kant to show how it is possible to read history as a story of a possible moral progress, an openended progression towards morality. A l the resources of the h^nan intellect. and knowledge are to be g^rcered to en ^ -e that we do not begin to gloat on the r^^ration that history —the story of the becoming-sick of the h^^m —is utterly beyond redemption, that it is the site of ^ungo^iness and immorality. 3 does not n ^ ^ ^ r f y ^cancel the moral project, but it does call for its thoro^^ revaluation, especially once the autonomy of the hu^man is called into question. 4. The idea of a ‘philosophy of history’ is one of the str^^est to emerge in modernity, sugges^ting, as it does, against all evidence to the contrary, that history is not a completely irrational, ^ o r a l, and purposeless afair, wwhatt Nietzsche calls the gruesome dominion of nonsense and accident, the great ‘monstrous fortuity’ (Nietzsche 1966: section 203). Rather, nature con^ins a hidden plan, and reason ass^nes a ^^^ing diSguise in history, working behind h ^ ^ ^ ’ backs, deploying eevil in the service of the ultimate triumph of good, making h^^ms slaves ofhistory in order finally to make them masters of it, and con^^ing the promise of the ulti­ mate conquest of that senseless beast called history and lea^ng to the co^nstitution 3 See Nie^tzsche 1968: 12A; 1987, volume 13: 46fT.: ‘Nihilism, ^ct, is the ^ra^tion of the long waste of strength, the agony of the “in vain”, insecurity . . . bebeingashamed in front of oneself, as if one had deaired oneself al too long. This me^ng could have been the “^^feent" of some highest ethical ^non in all events, the moral world order; or the ^o^th of love and harmony in the intercourse of beinings; or the gradual approximation of a state of universal happiness; or even the development toward a state of universal ^^anation —any ggoal at least constitutes some meaning . . . now one realizes that becoming aims at nothing and aAieves nothing.’

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION I 155 of a thoroughly humanized world. Kant’s presentation of the ‘idea’ of a ‘Universal History’ is deeply paradoxical. The human species likes to of itself as the superior design of nature. However, Kant concedes that this intelligence is, in fact, thoroughly stupid, and, consequently, all the intelligence guiding history must be ascribed to nature and its hidden plan. If mankind is to become the purpose and goal of history it will only be the as the result of an inhuman force (nature), and not on account of h^man intentions or designs. In other words, ma^tind’s ultimate humanity only be actualized through a process of in h ^ n ^ ^ tio n (Kant 1991: 4 1 -2 ). In Kant the emphasis is placed on n ato e and its concealed plans for man’s perfection, which also represents at the s ^ e time the perfection of nature. A^ctual history encourages revulsion and a turning away, while philo­ sophical history may be more ^than a work of fiction. ^What is weweird about Kant is not his attempt to posit a no^nenal reading of history, but rather his belief that the signs of hidden becoming of history (can. be interpreted so as to conform to the ^wil and wishes of a moral humanity. Informing his ^^^ing on nature’s design for m^ankind, whieh partly includes her invention of ^^^m d, is a particular conception of evolution, one which stands at odds with the functional indete^^Mcy embraced by both D ^^ ro and Nietzsche. Kant insists that an organ ‘whieh is not meant for use or an OT^^ement whieh does not ^fulfil its purpose is a contradiction in the teleological theory o f nature’ . If principle is abandoned then we replace not only a law-governed nature but a rature that enjoys and knows p^urposes, including ones, with an ‘^aimless, random process, and the dismal rereign of ^chance replaces the guiding principle of reason’ (ibid.: 42).4 Contingency is amply a truth too a^ful for the philosopher to bear. S. It is this mora^&tion and h^n^^ation of the forces of life that has c^rarterized the imagination of modernity and that now strikes us as naively critical. The real danger lies in suppo^sing that (can. be c\ ercome through the reassertion of h^^rn ^wil and autonomy over the r^nlci^ant heteronomous forces of nature and history. This has been the great of m u d critical modem thonght, perhaps nowhere better ilustrarated ^than in Raoul Vaneigem’s ^mlution c f E v ^ fay Life, in which a total ^^^%ndence of is in te^rms of a great re^fusa that breaks ^^ory into ^two, pogroms ^rfore and a new ^nocence afte^wds, leadingg to the estabha^nent of a non-alienated body and a thoroughly h^^rn time and 4- Kant also differe ^radicaly from Nie^tzsche in his belief that na^e ^acts prudently and ^^^y, doing ‘no^^g uun^ssarily’ and never being 'extrav^agant in the m^eans employed to rereach its ends' (Kant 1991: 4-3).

VIROID LI FE / 15 6 humanized world (Vaneigem 1994a: 179). Speculating on the possibility of investing the cosmos with a human meaning, Vaneigem fantasizes, in a distintly Rousseauesque fashion, about history resulting for the first time in the achievement of a genuine 'people’ and a new form of social organization in which 'all the individual creativity will have free rein, so that the world be shaped by the dreams of each, as harmonized by all’ (ibid.: 219).The task now, he claims, is ‘to subvert history to subjective ends’ (ibid.: 232). History will become authentically lived history when human action becomes transparent to itself. Not only is this socalled libertarian situationist philosophy of life saturated in a vacuous subjectivism, inane demands for absolute inalienable h^nan rights over life, and metaphyacal infantilism, but it is destined to result in a highly authori^^an politics, which indeed becomes clear with the publication in the 1980s ofVaneigem’s The Movement i f Free Spirit (1994b: introduction). IfVaneigem’s Rousseauian-^spired mo^ralism was concealed in the ‘Revolution’ book of the late 1960s, which did at least ^rive towards some dialectical comprehension of the antinomies of the present broken condition, its moral fanaticism is now a l too apparent. The thesis of the book is frighteningly simple: the market economy is the evil destroyer of a l h^^m value and dignity, and it only be fought ag^rat in terms of an ethics oflove. ‘I take the demands of love’ , Vaneigem writes, ‘to co^nstitute entirely, at a l ^mes and in a l places, the sole alte^wtive to market society.’ This passage provides unequiv^ocal evidence o f the absolutism ofVaneigem’s position (‘entirely’, ‘at a l Ernes’, ‘the sole alternative’ , etc.). He speaks naively of an authentic human species creating, contra the market, conditions favourable to its o ^ ^^monious development; and, ^ finaly, he advocates his own back to basics progr^^m e as a solution to the ills of the market, claiming -that beneath the rubble of lies and fraud, late-modern citizens are be^^aing to re-experience and revalue some ‘plain truths of the ^^ant past’ . ^is nostak^a for a l things palaeolithic leads ^m to the cl^m that economics ‘has been the mort durable lie of the appro^mately ten millennia mistakeuly ^acpted as history’ . His commitment to h^armony and static eq^ibrium not only belo^^ to a historically redundant theoretical paradi^n — the entropic one of modem critical theory —but also reveals a deep hatred of history, beco^^^, life, etc. In the face of the marke^ution of the entire globe, his opposition has about as mueh practical value and rele^vance as a recommendation to the Eskimos that, in the face of global w^^ting, they should take up habitation on Venra. The implementation of green ^vision o f life would require a highly authori^rian politics, a new f ^ ^ ^ , of the ^nd -that would forcibly stop the ^^ntaneous emergence of ^^markt exc^mge, resulting in the unl^^ting of an ^ ^ ra^ ^ & le politics not of love but of hate.

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION / 157 6. Viewed from a post-historical perspective, Guy Debord’s Society 1" the Spectacle now reads as a paradigmatic e x ^ p le of a classically modernist interpretation of the time of capital and technology. Looking back in 1988 on this work of 1968, Debord claimed that what he had revealed in his analysis of the spectacle —a ^md of Marxian application of Heidegger’s thesis on das Gestell —was a gradual waning of the sense of history. This concern with the atrophy of historical transcendence has been a common feature of the various strands of critical theory since at least 1945, reaching an apogee in the works of Debord and Marcuse, and present also in the work of Lewis Mumford and his neglected classic of 1957, The Tra^ormations i f Man} The society o f the spectacle denotes the ‘autocratic reign’ of the market economy which has acceded to an ‘irresponsible sovereignty’ . In the spectacular society life is no longer lived immediately and resonantly, but has become detached, mediate, and illusory (it has, says Debord, become philosophical). Eve^^img which hitherto had been lived directly has n ^ moved into the domain of representation. We now live in a reality that is quickly becoming completely ^ ^ ^ ^ e d . As the concrete inversion of life, the spectacle is the ‘autonomous m o v e^ n t of the non-living’. In confo^rmity with M^arxs ^^lysis of commodity fetishism, Debord maintains that the spectacle does not co^nstitute a collection of images, but rather denotes a social relation between people whose existence is mediated by reified images. G^rasped in its to'tality it is both the result and the project of the ^rnent mode of production. It is not to be treated as a supplement to it, which would be to take it as merely decorative, but is to be analysed as the very heart and soul of ‘unrealism of the real society’ . In its own terms the spectacle represents an ‘^^roation of appearance’, of a l h^nan life as nothing but an appe^arance, co u n tin g to the end of history as a history of depth. The spectacle is like a -^virus, spreading everywhere and infecting everyone who becomes contaminated by its illusion, and whose only goal is s e lf-p ^ ^ ^ tio n . This autonomous self-reproduction o f the economy is ‘the 5 Frrederic Jameson defines postmodeernism (the cull^tural logic of late capitalism) as a crisis of historicity in whi^ people's capacity for historical praxis — the activity of being subjects and obj^ects of their own destinal m^ng —has been completely nullified by the world space of multinational capital (Jameson 1991). But post-historic man was already being described as a ‘defe^ve monster' in the 1950s by Lewis Mumford. Jameson provides some and on ^ ^ cognitive mapping into the realities of our tecbnological futurism in his tour deforce of an essay on ‘Totality and Conspiracy' in Jameson 1995: ^9-87. Here he sp^^lates on the extent to whi^ ^^taodem subjects are no longer able to ‘pr^ocess history' owing to the structural limits of their memory and the fact that the human o r^ ^ ^ is not able to mat^ the velocities and dem^^^Mra of the new world system (16).

VIROID LIFE / 158 true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers’ (Debord 1983: paragraph 16). ‘Spectacular technology’ does not dispel the religious clouds under which m^^ind has led an alienated existence, but merely provides it with an earthly cloak. ‘The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected wi^thin the interior of man’ (ibid.: 20). The critique which exposes the shallow truth of the spectacle, claims Debord in a moment of privileged insight, reveals itself as the total negation of life. With Debord we find ourselves once again in a Manichean universe, an absolute mor^^rn and h ^ n a n i^ confronting an equaly absolute ^ ^ o r ^ ^ m and inh^nanism, with history and life posited as ^unmediated, estranged forces: the demon of history doing battle with the angel of life. 7. It is the forces of production that are responsible for inau^vating the time of history. History has always existed, but not in a historical f o ^ . The coming of history amounts to nothing less for Debord ^than the h ^ ^ ^ ^ tio n of time:. 'the unconscious movement of ^me mmanifests itself and becomes true within historical consciousness’ (ibid.: 125). Debord notes that it is the bourgeoisie who. perform a revolution of time by subj^^ug it to a law of perpetual ^change and ^novation (as M ^ x said, bourgeois society only exist through the constant revolutio^^mg o f the forces of production). Historical time is not the time of being but the time of auto-production. In an agrarian economy the coalesced forces of tradition which fetter a l movement are no^^hed by a cyclical time. By con^trast1:he irreversible time set into motion by the bourgeois ^economy eradicates all vestiges of tradition around the entire globe. ‘History, which had seemed to be only the movement of individuals of the ^ruling class, and thus was ^written as the history of events, is now understood as the peneral movement, and in relentless movement individuals are sa^crificed’ (ibid.: 141). The ^unfolding of economic time m^eans that m^ankind is subjected to the ‘time of ^ ^ ^ ’, the of objects produced accor^ding to the pr^uction of the commodity. The result is a daily invention o f history but also of a loss of lived ^me. However, history is not ^ ^ r ic a l, merely the repetition of the ^same, an ‘abstract movement of ^ ^ ^ s which dominates a l qualitative usage of life’. Debord counters this ab^ract and inh^^m movement of history with the poating of a subject of history as the subject ‘ of’ ^^orical time, in whieh the non-alienated self-co^nstitution and p r ^ a l ^^^ormation of the worker are pitted a ^ ^ ^ the alienated and automatic obj^ectification of the commodity form (don’t you reco^^re yourself in your alienation, you miserable co^nsciousness?). The subject of history nnames a living

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION / 159 being which produces itself by becoming ‘master and possessor of his world which is history’ . The tale being told is one of progress in which the proletariat seizes control of the forces of history, and in the process transforms the invention of history brought into being by the bourgeoisie. If it was the destiny of the bourgeois class to unleash historical time into the rhythms of material existence, it is now the destiny of the working class to humanize this inhuman unleashing by ass^uming its rightful ownership of, and control over, it. 8. This ^^^ing on time and history is suffused with a metaphyacs of authenticity and inauthenticity. The worker, according to Debord, desires not only to make or produce historical time, to be immanent in himself, but to live the ^me it makes and produces. The ‘particifiar’ ^me of the bourgeoisie, which ^masquerades as the ‘universal’ time of the globe, will be replaced by the genuinely authentic time of the worker (echoes of Jiinger in Debord —as in Heidegger, M a r^ e , and so on). Spe^ctacular time is inauthentic, the time of the commodity that exists in a co^^^able pseudo-cyclical ^me of repetition. Authentic time denotes the time in whieh, or ‘of’ which, history is simultaneously made and lived (it jl' not alienated history). The existence of the spectacle serves to remind us of the false consciaousness of time, of a ^me that is not ^imediate and transparent to the subject who makes history. Debord writes poetically of the prospects for a new prole^^an dwelling in ^hieh offers the promise of the ‘total r^ ^ a tio n ’ of h^nan time. The ruse of history is that that whieh threatens this ‘^dlight world’ is also ‘the force whieh could subject space to lived time’ (ibid.: 178). Debord ends his anthropo^mtric speculations on the fate of history and geography by s^^^ng of the ‘historical ^ ^ aon of ins^^ing truth in the world’, a truth that only be ^ ^ ^ ed when individuals link themselves up with the progresave forces of history. God have been dead for Debord, but he wwas keen to res^rect his bloody spirit in the guise of a lordly h^nanity over not only history but the entire evolution of life. 9. In a recent incisive ^analysis Regis Debray has compared Debord’s ^^ rferto on the ^society of the spectacle to the ^ ^ t o e of theYoung Hegelians. He p^^mivcly b^bringS out the s^^ing p^aliels betweeen Debord’s depiction of the sp^^ectacl and Feuerbach’s critique of religious illusion in his Essence i f Chritiianity of 1841, that, other ^than for the detail of p^^^ag, the ^^»urse of Situationism foUows word for word a Heg^elian and ^ ^ s a l , of alienation, objectification, negation, in a reve^al of the reversal. In the ^mds o f Deebord, De^bray notes, the tradition is kept safe. Following a ‘recognition’, a reversal of the reversal, h ^ a n s ^wil come b^ack d^own to earth from their e^^nged heaven,

VIROID LI FE / 16 0 overturn their love of God, of ideology, of the State, of the spectacle, into ‘a love of active and sentient humanity’ (Debray 1995: 136). Debray astutely attributes to Debord a singular failure —a failure he has in common with the broad current of humanist Marxism —to the ‘technogenesis of the human’ (it is the lack of origin that lies at the origin of mankind’s making). The theological postulate o f a human essence continues to inform the atheist humanism of neo-Hegelians like Debord that dreams o f a final reconciliation of existence with human essence. As a result, essentialist ontologies like Debord’s erase the trace of eve^^ung that has been discovered about the h^^rn animal and evolution since the middle o f the ^neteenth century, as if D ^ ^ m , Freud, Leri-Gourhan, and Simondon had never existed. Debord’s e s s e n ^ ^ ^ g o f the tr ^ h ^ n a n condition be located wi^an the very term s in which he chooses to ‘f r ^ e ’ his analyas: the society o f the spectacle. This is to erase all social, historical, and technological dete^^nation, with the result that an ^analysis is offered w h i^ disclaims a l mediation, whether ‘political’ mediation in the form o f the stru^^ting ^^antiation o f collective existence, or ‘technical’ mediation in th e form o f the s tr u ^ ^ ^ ^ instantiation o f • the hominization process (ibid.: 136—7) : T he issue confron^ting critical theory is no longer one o f political ‘correctness’ , but that o f intellectual ^ c f i n o n i ^ . In an ironic condition o f technology it is necessary to reco^ rae that the 'dialectic has indeed ^ ^ fle d itself . . . not at a l by in the negative, as in the dr^eam o f critical thought, but in a total, irrevocable positivity’ (Baudrillard 1996: 7 5 ). It is no longer one’s alienation one is figh^ting aginst, but rather one’s tr ^ p a r e n c y 10. The thesis o f the end o f history which now dominates the postmodern Stimmung was, in fact, a common one in the sensibility o f the 1950s. In the work o f Maurice Blanchot it is specifically linked to the time o f technology. As Blanchot notes, it is not that history comes to an end, but rather that certain principles, questions, and formulations stop making sense. Once the idea o f a angular and unique origin, and the idea o f a universal historical ^^rative that ^acm panies it, is given up on, then we no longer enjoy the right to a in w h iA the categories that have supported it up to now have become invalidated (categories such as unity, identity, primacy o f the Same, the exigency o f the self-Subject, etc.) (Blanchot 1993: 272). The tim e o f technology does not mean the end o f everysince, as B la n ^ o t notes, the end o f ev^^^ ing doesn’t amount to much. An apocalyptic declaration o f the collapse o f the world the d o ^ ^ ^ c e o f te^mology and the e r ^ ^ e o f m^ankind doesn’t say a ^ ^ t deal since it belongs to a lan^wge o f eschatology wholly out o f ^me with the mood generated by the plural event o f As Magnus Enzensberger has noted, in a port-

THE TRANSHUMAN / CONDITION 161 modern, posthistoire world the apocalypse ceases to be a unique, singular event, becoming a regular, almost daily, occurrence (Enzensberger 1990: 15 1- 60 ) . The danger for ^ ^ ^ in g now, Blanchot holds, is that in taking note of the immense changes taking place as a result of the coming of modern technology, the philo­ sopher will concoct a horrible of vague science, confused vision, and dubious theology. While speaking in the name of science he writes as an author o f science fiction. This contains a healthy wa^arning against superficial attempts to map inhuman futures and indulge in premature ejaculations celebrating the death o f the human (an anthropomorphic declaration if ever there was one). One might begin to locate a way out of the impasse o f the ‘end’ by reco^^ung ^hiUsm as an inevitable feature of the tr ^ ^ ^ n a n condition. The question is whether one has the capacity and resources to emerge from the experience o f Untergang free of anthropocentric conceits. 11. ^What takes place when nature is unhum^anized and m^ankind is artificialized? Does ^ ^ ^ m not start k n o c ^ g on the door as the u n ^ ^ u est of a l guests?^While ^ ^ ^ m may not be quite the a priori o f universal history — or maybe it is as a parody of history that makes buffoons o f h ^ n ^ u — it vir^tual truth of a l h ^ a n history to date. It is fo r that the causes o f be reco^tized as the reason that N ie^ ^ h e cl^aims lie in our faith in the categories o f reason by which we have measured the value of the world in accordance with categories that refer to a purely fictitious world. Considered psychologically — that is, from the perspective o f a psychological a priori —h^raan values are the result o f utilitarian perspectives that have been designed to enhance h^nan control and mastery over nature and the exte^rnal world but which in the process have been falsely projected into the essence o f ^ ^ ^ s (Nietesche 1968: section 12B). The poating o f them­ selves as the m^^eaning and m^easure o f evolution is the anthropocentric conceit o f h^raans that is exposed with the advent o f N ^ h ^ ^ feel very ^ a l , dwarfed, as if their entire horizon o f m^^eaning had been wiwiped away, with the e^arth unchained from itsthe so-called p ^ a c le o f life on world gro'^wing colder by the finds its mo^oving away from a l ^suns, p l^ ^ ^ £ backwards, ddeeways, forn ^ d s, in a l ^ ^ ^ o n s (N ie^^he 1974: section 125). It is n o t ^raply a question of humans recu p ^ tin g from the illness of capacities are severely terted by it. Their since their adaptive and so^^are have been ^ ^ u lted and invaded by the future. One solution to the problem o f h ^ ^ ^ and their d ^ becoming is to en^don the o v e rh ^ a n as the ^vision o f a nonanthropocentric future of the h^ ^ m . ^This would be to conceive o f the ‘h^nan/transhuman’ as neither a predicate nor a property that belo^ ^ uniquely

VIROID LIFE / 16 2 to a ready-made subject (such as ‘man’). This is a ‘subject’ best grasped as a ‘free, anonymous, and nomadic sin^alarity which traverses men as well as plants and animals independently of the matter of their individuation and the forms of their personality’ (Deleuze 1990; 107). This requires a fundamental reconceptua^lization of the ‘value’ of evolution. For Nietzsche we lack the right to posit consciousness as the and wherefore of the total phenomenon of life. Becoming conscious is simply one means by which the powers of life unfold and extend. It is no more than an anthropocentric prejudice to posit spirituality or morality, or any other sphere of consciousness, as the highest value and seek to j^ ^ fy the world by means of (Nietzsche 1968: section 707). The objection to be placed ag^rat all cosmic theodicies to date, to a l the highest values in theology and philosophy (it is theological prejudice that has dominated in philosophy), is that one kind of means —consciousness and human existence —has been misunderstood as the end, with the result that life and the enhancement of its powers are reduced to a mere means. Our logic of means and ends is based on a perverse ^^understanding of the processes of life. It is this reWed logic of life that human philosophies of pessimism and such as that which we find in ^^openhauer, where the denial of life is posited as the not conform to the explain all • of evolution. If life does and wishes of human needs and deares then it is to be denied and cal^ ^ ^ ted ! S u ^ a lunatic interpretation’, Nietzsche says, is only possible because life is being me^asured by aspects of copiousness. In this the means of inhuman life are made to ^andthe wished-for human end. The mi^ake is that ^^cad of a purpose being identified which might explain such a means, a goal that a^^uly excludes such a means is presupposed and posited in ad^mce. Nietzsche identifies the error of Kant's on technics and teleology, for example, as follows: we take a deadera^tum in respect of co^ain means as a norm —^namely, p le a ^ t, rational, and virtuous ones —on the baas of which is then poated the general p^urpose of what ■would be d ^ ^ b le . Kant’s ultimate solution is to poat God (theological prejudice), but it is precisely God who life into a mo^nstroaty. The greatest reproach of God is the e^xistence of God. liberation from the e^ ten co about the h^^m condition and lot is po^ ble once the total co ^ cio ^ eM that poats m^eans and ends is eliminated. It is unwise to posit a conception of becoming which appeals to necessity in the shape of an overreaching and domina^ting total force a^ ^ g as a kind of p^me mover: ‘Th^^ is no total constio^mera of beco^^^’ (ibid.: section 708). If the total value of the world ^canot be evaluateded, su ^ as its ultimate p^^ose, then belongs among comical ^things. There is no ‘in-itself’ behind evolution (evolution is not ‘spirit’) (ibid.: section 709). The world is not

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION / 163 an ‘organism’ but in all respects ‘chaos’ (ibid.: section 711). The standpoint of overhuman value, if one is to be articulated, would be that concerning the conditions ‘of the preservation and enhancement for complex forms of relative life-duration wi^thin the flux of becoming’ (ibid.: section 715: 1987, volume 13: 36-7). This is not to deny that Nietzsche is not caught up in the net of anthro­ pomorphism. The paradoxes which aa fc t the doctrine of eternal return are sure evidence that Nietzsche is ensnared in naiveties and conceits like any other mo dern philosopher. It is, to give just one e x ^ p le , a massive contradiction on his part to urge us to will eternal meaninglessness as a way of embra^cing an eternal (Nietesche 1968: section 55; 1987, volume 12: 212ff.).6 12. The transh^man condition is not about the transcendence of the human being, but concerns its non-teleological becoming in an immanent process of ‘anthropological deregulation’.7 ^When Nietesche asasks his ‘great’ question, what may stil become of man?, he is speaking of a future that does not cancel or abort the h^nan, but one which is neces^rfy bound up with the inhuman and the tr^^ ^m an . ^Whatbecome of the h^man — including its meaning and application as a technical and ontological category —is a question ‘o f’ the future. We children of the future lend our weight to Nietzsche’s essential insight into ‘this fragile, broken time of tr^mtion (Ubergangszeit)’: the ice that supports people today becomes ^^mer with ^each passing day, so that ‘we ourselves who are home­ less constitute a force that breaks open ice and other a l too "realities'"’ (Nietzsche 1974: section 377). 13. Nietzsche maps the m ival of the future, therefore, in terms of an inexorable logic of an event w hi^ no longer come differently since it repre­ sents the logical concluaon of our great values and ideal so far (Nietzsche 1968: preface, section 4). It is in^ght into the logical inevitabilty of ^ ^ s m ’s opening that enables Nietzsche to declare that it is the future w hi^ re^riates our today. With the advent of event of the pr&ent becomes a fractured time, a time of spli^tting, in which the very question of ‘man’ and the fu^re of the h^man is called into ^suspicion and undergoes critical treatment. Nihilism ^ iv e s 6 The passage I am referring to reads: ‘Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without m^^mg or . . . . ^This is the most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the “meaningle^,,), ete^emaly!’. 7 I owe wonderful to Baudrillard (1994: 97), who, unnec^^^y and somewhat myopically, restricts its to the genetic ^transmutation ^^ently underway in the h^^m engineemg of genes.

VIROID LI FE I 164 to scramble the codes of the present and to under^mine m^^and’s anthropocentric claim on history. Why, Nietesche asks, is it necessary to ascribe to eve^^img that happens in na^^e and history a moral meaning and purpose, such as, he mentions, technology? The task is to become superficial about nihilism by exploring its depths, transmuting oneself into a perfect ^nihilist who has left- the experience ‘behind’ oneself. An economic, and economical, reading of nihilism is called for. One should not give excessive weight to social distress or suffering in general, since every exaggeration of a narrow point of view is itself already a sign of sickness, like the preponderance of every ‘no' over the ‘yes' . The ‘active negation’ , the decisive ‘no’, ^ v es out of the tr^endous strength and tension of the ^^^ u tive ‘yes’ (Nietzsche 1968: section 1020). In exposing the tr^^^ndental illusion — showing that ^nihilism canot account for its ^own creative conditions of possibility and excessive becoming, or the fact that it is always ‘beyond’ itself — Nie^rche frees the time of nihilism from any p^ave movement and from any entropic conception of becoming. 8The danger does not lie in the failure to defeat or conquer ^^^sm , but rather in the insistence that it should not happen and * should not be ‘aliowed' to happen. Nihilism always speaks of the future, heralding the arrival of something other itself, and without its event growth would be impossible. N ^ ^ ^ n arives for us as a nec^^ry experience which has been implicit in our positing of values all along. Is therefore, solely a problem pe^^ar to man? ‘The most universal sign of the modem age’, Nietzsche writes, is the fact that ‘man has lost dignity in his <^m eyes to an incredible extent' (Nietzsche 1968: section 18). Losing the centre of gravity by virtue of which we have lived, and doing penance for having been for tho^usand y ^ s , we abruptly plunge into opposite valuations ‘with a l the energy that such an extreme overvaluation of man has generated in man’ (ibid.: section 30). Nihilism on this level of extremes is a pathological condition: from the realization that m^ankind enjoys no ul^mate purpose in the evolution oflife the inference is that there is no m^^ing at all. As such, ^nihilism ^^unes the guise of a ‘mo^nstrous event’ (uflJ1£h eu re Ereisniss) that is ‘on its way and ^wanders' (Nie^tzsche 1974: 125). 8 Nie^tzsche's cons^trual of the arrival of nihilism in tenns of the ‘un^^raest of al guests’ finds an echo in the literature of biology, where entropy is often perceived as the ‘^uninvited guest' that signals death, decay, and degeneration. A great deal of and cult^ural thought from the late nineteenth century onwards has construed nihilism as an entropic force, corrosive in its effects, damaging to the endurance and perfonnance of asocial and institutions. The only way to critically nihilism and entropy is by the ^trans^^dental iUudon of both: ‘I seek a conception: of the world that takes this fact into ^ ^ ^ t —^^oming must be explained without recode to final intentions . . . ' (Nietzsche 1968: section 708).

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION I 165 As a sign from the future — and the past — of imminent collapse, decay, and transformation, the event of nihilism is monstrous in two senses: firstly, in the sense of scale, as something so tremendous that ‘man’ may not prove equal to it and will have to undergo a process of self-overcoming in order to endure it; secondly, in the sense of excess, the excessive time of its event which establishes new horizons of meaning: the horizon has become ‘free again’ (ibid.: 343). The geanealogy of morals establishes a new pathology of life. 14. Not only is it futile, but it is also deeply unintelligent to lament the lo « of a centre of gravity, including the alleged corrosion in late modernity of an effective historical agency. Would not the praxis of sueh a historical agency ironically signal the death of any genuinely interesting becoming? A machinic philosophy of history, whieh displaces man as the phallogocentric object and goal of history, does not claim that it is machines as opposed to men that ^make history, ance there is no subject or agent of history. To say that machines are inventions of humanity is to utter a ^^^n. To say that the time of their invention is inhuman because it follows a logic of exceM is to begin to extra-mo^raly beyond good and evil (whieh also includes the ^^roation of good and evil). The end of history as conceived by critical modernity enables one to conceive of a more radical notion of becoming which does j^ustice to its complexity. The notion of the ‘rhizome’ , for example, serves to demonstrate that there is no cental control^ag agent, or overarching self-poating subject, in a process of complex evolution. Thus, it is no longer possible to conceive of evolution, whether of na^ture or of ind^ustry, in te^ns of isolated and individual d^^ralc regimes. The rhizome enables one to conceive of evolution in of an intricate, interweaving web of regimes and adaptive sy&ems. The rhizome cuts across (which ^&orical time, both heralding the future come from anywhere), and of a ^^rabling of codes of life that rapidly approach o^ssification and pe^trification. So far as the question of teehnology is con^cerned, a rhizomatic mapping of our evolution would suggest the ne^cesty of moving away from a Faustian ^conception of teobnology —what Toffler has called a ‘^cho-materia^lism (Toffler 1^990: 6^9-84) —with its predilection for total control over nature, over maehines, and over teehniques of life of a l kinds, to one in wbicp the 'undecidability’ (in the deployed by Dele^K and Guattari) and non-calculability of our 'machinic ^ lavem ent’ and involvement with the ^becoming of te^mira are ^^roed and e^ngaged with. 15. At pr^esent we are witu^^ag in a wide grange of di^»urses, including ^cybertheory, of continental philosophy, and the new biology, a r m ^ ^ c e of grand ^ ^ r a ti^ in whieh pre-D ^ ^^ ^n notions of evolution are a rapid

VIROID LI FE / 16 6 come-back. Our objection to this come-back is partly a matter of taste — they smell offensively of a popular Hegelianism —and partly a matter of intellectual conscience. As Stephen Jay Gould has noted, all classic forms of evolutionary spin doctoring, now revamped in the guise of a techno-Lamarckism, are designed to avoid the unwanted consequences of the Darwinian de-anthropocentriration of evolution, namely, the fact that human beings are not the result of predictable evolutionary progress, but simply a ‘fortuitous cosmic afterthought’ (Gould 1996: 327). Spin doctoring revolves around two Afferent subjects: the first is the ‘process' of evolution considered as a theory and a mechanism; the second is the ‘pathway’ of evolution considered as a description of the history of life. In the former subject spin doctoring is evident in the attempt to construe evolution as ^herently progressive, and as working towards some higher good (the species, for example), producing better-designed organi^s in terms of some linear progres­ sion; in the second subject spin doctoring is evident in the attempt to read life in terms of a continuous flux displaying directio^nality towards more and more complex entities, such as beings with large br^ains. Both o f these expr^resns of „ spin doctoring are present in the techno-^Lamarc^kism which characterizes many postmodern conceptions of evolution, in which the elevation formerly and anthropocratri^^y assigned to humans as their rightful privilege over nature is now bestowed on machines as theirs. But here there is an interes^ting story to tell about the coming of machines, a story of entropy and negentropy. 16. In a novel rewor^king of the philosophy of history, Richard Bla^ckb^rn has argued that it is entropy and the destructive forces of nature, such as microparasitism, which serve to corrode the h^^m species and its artificial environment. That which gives ^rise to h ^ ^ r a ’ invention o f an ^artificial evolution is also that which compels them to en^rnce their arartifi^ality continualy: it is, ironicaly, both the producer and consumer of h^^rnty and its ^tm ctive artificial habitat (Blackburn 1990: 20). Our entire civiliration has evolved, therefore, in a^»rdance with thermodyn^amic instability, tr ^ fo ^ ^ n g stable systems into ^unsable ones in order to release free energy. The of ^ t f ^ o n —Treason's •empire — exists in symbiotic relatio^^p with the h^^m ^animal, with the detractive forces absorbing h^^m action and su c ^ g h^nan blood ^ y . As the rational species which cultivates an intelligence trough trial and error in order to devise increasingly superior m^eans to at^in its ends, homo sapiens ‘is persistently assailed by v ^ p r a h objects and agencies whose coUective negativity designated as the predatory enemy of rationality, the be of reason’ (ibid.: 22).This is where speculation on the coaming of the mac^nes enters the pi^^re. It

THE is machines that TRANSHUMAN CONDITION I 167 now be read as an essential part of the biological ruse of reason. Recent scientific studies, including one on robotics by Hans Moravec, and another by the eminent mathematical physicist Frank Tipler, seek to demonstrate that what is driving the evolutionary push into a machine-dominated and controlled future, including the colonization of the universe, is the problem given to life by entropy, the ‘gift’ of ultimate and final heat-death (Moravec 1988: 147ff.; Tipler 1995: 109ff.). Tipler, who writes as a self-confessed anti-Heideggerian cybernetician, argues that the colouration of the universe by intelligent selfreprodu^cing machines is the biosphere’s only c^rnce of surviving the inevitable demise of our solar system at the ^mds of the second law of thermodyn^mra. He resurrects de C^ffdin’s notion of the ‘Omega Point’ to support his negentropic promise of ^guaranteed immortality for a l in the fu^ffe (see de C ^^^n 1965: 283ff.).9 The Omega Point refers to the point at which the noosphere coalesces into a supersapient being. Tipler does not deny ■that the second law is operative in the universe’s meltdown, but maintains that the ‘energy of the ^^vitational shear near the Omega Point is sufficient to avoid Heat Death’ (Tipler 1995: 109). As the Omega Point is approached a free energy source —the differential collapse of the universe —diverges to of 17. If so escaping the moment death. -vision of the future sounds like a horrible concoction of science, science fiction and highly dubious theology, it is even more ^^u rb^g ^than appears at first ^sightt. vision of neg-entropic future ul^mately rests on a biologistic le^^rnation of capital and universal imperierialism. This comes out clearly in Lyotard’s depiction of the monster of the future in his ^^^ing of the time of the inh^^rn. In an essay entitled ‘Time Today’ Lyotard teel an uncomfortable —and, one ^ ^ ^ t ^ ^ ^ , irrelevant —rtory aabout the next few billion years. '^While you read book the sun gets older and older. In 4.5 ^bilon years, though it is not to fix an erart date, it ^wil eexplode in a ^truly ^th-shattering 9 In the ve of ‘noogenesis’ the ^m, de Chardin says, is not to 'humanize' time and space but ratherto ^super-humanize them. Far fom bebeingmutably exclave, the ‘universal’ and the ‘per­ sonal' (the centred) <canbe posited as growing in the same direction and culminating simultane­ ously in one another. Thus, ‘The Fu^ture-Universal could not be an^ything else but the H^ype-Personal —at the Omega Point’ (de C^^^ 1965: 285—6). It ^ould alsoobe noted, as not iradental to his conreption of the neg-entropic fu^ture, that de adv^ted the utilization in the of a ‘n^le fonn of eugenics' in order that moral and medical fartors r^lace 'the crude forcra of sel^ection’ (ibid.: 310).

VIROID LI FE / 1 68 display of fireworks. At the moment the earth is just a little beyond the hal^ay point of its expected lifetime, a life devoted to death, no doubt casting life on earth into a mid-life crisis. The only future one ^can be certain of is that of arrangements of matter and energy facing constant self-creation and self­ destruction. At the limit point of the death of the sun - a death which will dwarf that of God’s in comparison - history will truly end and our insoluble questioning will matter no more, existing beyond piety. Of course, the limit spoken of only makes sense in a human context. Once the sun explodes there no longer be suob a lim t since the h^nan no longer be ‘there’ to experience either side of it. Only matter will remain. but, as we Daseins know', matter does not matter. 18. According to Lyotard, we are witnessing in the age of hyper endo- and exocolonistic capital the gathering of forces in a process of neg-entropy that has been underway since life first began on earth. 10 The problem —same as it ever ^as, and it was - is that of time, or rather to be more precise, the fact that the universe is ^^aing out of it. Moravec puts it like ^ m : in a continually expanding universe time is cheap but energy has to be care^by husbanded, while in a collapsing universe, such as the one we ^unfor^mtely o^Mpy, energy is cheap but there is no time to waste. A l life-forms, Lyotard s^ugests, be regarded as te^chnical devices for fflte^ng information useful to an org^^m’s ^survival and for processing information in self-regula^ting terms. Now, the human being be broken into its hardware and so^-are aspects. The body is the ^ f f^ a r e of the complex tecchnical device we ‘thought’. The so^ware is the s ^ b o lic and recursive power ofh^man language. The fate of technology is being decided by the attempt to provide the h^^an s o ^ a r e with a that is independent of the entropic conditions of life on planet ^ t h . The n w computer te^mologies are .naking possible the progn^^aing and control of info^ration, such as its m e m o ^ tio n , less and less dependent on e^arth-bound conditions. The h^^an race thus finds itself pulled forwards — but not upwards — by tins time of information at an ever-incr^sing velocity, experien^ng more and more ‘future shock’ , such is the race a ^ ^ ^ ^rne. Time is not, and never has ^ b e , on our side. The h^man brain now be depicted as the midwil’e that services tins cosmic 10 See Margulis and ^gan 1995: 23: ‘One should not assume that only are future-oriented. Our own frenetic attempts (and those of the of life) to survive and pr^^r may be a special, four billion-year old way the universe has organized itself “to” the ^rond law of thermodynamics. ’

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION / 169 process of complexification. n Cybernetics appears as the (in)human science of control and communication which freely places itself in the service of the negentropic evolution of the great cosmic mind, confirming Heidegger’s prophetic insight into the take-over of the heritage of philosophy by the new science of cybernetics (Heidegger 1972: 58). In this autonomous process of comple^fication the is to stock more and more form atio n , to improve competence, and to make efficiency gains (such as the j^ ^ ^ g of the outlived h^m n body), and in this way to m^^^rae performance and increase our chances of success against the demonic powers of the future. When seen in this context, Lyotard’s argument goes, capital be seen for what it is, not so much a figure in or of human history, but more the effect of an ancient cosmic destiny. H^nan beings have never been the subjects of this process, even though they have been ironic agents of it, witless collaborators in the making of their o^n redundancy (the irony of technology would appear to be a lethal one). 19. It is in the context of these paradoxical —human or inhuman? —reflections on the time of the future that Lyotard reconsiders his d^nition of the postmodern condition as sign^fog the end of grand narratives of emancipation and enlighten­ ment. 12 He n ^ suggests that we of it in terms of a split between two pro’s, on the one hand the project of enlightenment modernity and its of self-^^^arency and social immanence, and on the other, the ‘progr^^ne’ of inhuman neg-entropic postmodernity. The modern project of emancipation through the maturity of enlightenment was novel in not being governed by the past, being in essence futural. In way it has served the process of complexifi- cation, the process which ironically leads to its own demise. The ^ i l o n it endures, however, is behe^ng that the entropy of time and its neg-entropic evolution be made subject to h^nan history. Unfort^^tely, at least from the perspective of our exigence as h^anoids, it is the ‘p ro g r^ m e’ that is proving better able to meet the cchallenges th r o ^ d^own to life by entropy. As Lyotard sees it, the do^^&nce of the progr^^me barings with it the attempt to neutr^fce as far as posdble the unpredi^^le effete engendered by the freedom and contingency that belong ^tiquely to the h^^m project. The reign of b^M es form ation m^eans nothing less ^than the end of the event (of time). The task of philosophy 11 One of the earliest accounts of phenomenon be found in de C^^^rn 1965: 53, who of the law of comple^^tion’ as the ‘great law of biol^ogy’. 12 See Lyotard 1989, where he ^^es: ‘^ is is what the postmodern world is all about. Most people have lost the no^l^a for the narative. It in no way follows that they ^ ^reduced to baAarity. Seience . . . has tauught them the harsh austerity o^rfsm ' (41).

VIROID LIFE / 1 70 today is simply that of bearing testimony to the non-event of the event. If in The Postmodern Condition Lyotard had sought to live beyond nostalgia and mourning, he is now fomly entrenched in such a condition, devotionally mo^^rng the event of lost time for the rest of time. 20. Unknown to himself, Lyotard has in fact resurrected in this grand narrative of the time of the ^inh^man an old theory of technics that characterized a strand of thought in the late ^neteenth cen^ry, notably in the writings of Henry Adams, which was taken up again in more recent times by Jacques Ellul in the 1950s. Adams, for example, believed that history was governed by a law of acceleration whieh involved a process of increasing energy, org^anization, and complexity that defied a l attempts at either conscious direction or opposition. "^Whn the machines land we humans simply become the ^ T ie rs of their will: ‘A law of acceleration’, he wrote, ‘^ ^ o t be supposed to r e ^ its energy to suit the convenience of ^man’ (Adams 1931; 493). On this model o f the time o f the inhuman, history is reduced to physics in which ^ ^oncal development is to be accounted for in terms of the r gove^ment of thermod^^miCS, the science of the relationship of hcat and mec^mical energy. The increase in energy and or^^teed complexity is what constitutes the anti-entropic becoming of material reality (Winner 1977: 4 8 -9 ). There are a number of problems afflic^ting well-wora depiction of evolution by neg-entropy (there is northing postmodern about it). For a l its of complexity, or comple^fication, it rests on a dubious linear", ra tio ^ , additive accumulation (see ibid.: 63), with the result that on this model technics does become Gei&, nothing but & to. As one commentator on the phenomenon has noted, entropy and the laws of thermodyn^nics, like a l scientific co^^^cts, be deployed to se^ffe an anthropocentric conception of life’s evolution (^^un 1981: 260) (on the h^man or^^^ro conceived as ‘the perfect animal’ , on account of its being a ‘spontaneously, self-producing' neg-entropic ‘end’, and hence the apotheosis of nature in spirit, ^ e Hegel 1970b: 108-9). J^ e s o n is ^mply wrong when he ^ ^ e s ts that within po^modernity we witness the emergence of a new kind of n ^ a tiv e that is more consistent with the d^^miCS of the world ry^em th ^ the older anthropomorphic or h ^ ^ ^ ^ t kind whieh centred on notions of personal agency (1995: 56). The new grand ^^ratives are as anthropormorphic as hell. The danger of anthropocentric u^tilization of entropy ^^^ing is that the phenomena of in^^m ental rationalty and technological m ^ e ry are provided with a biologistic reasoning and the evolution of te^mics is unproblematically compared to the pr^oces of na^tural selection sele^ing ever more complex forms of life. ^This, for e x ^ p le , is the portion of Bl^&b^ro, who ^^takenly a^ b u tes

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION / 171 to D ^ ^ ^ sm a teleological drive in favour of the selection of complexity (1990: 211). But natural selection contains no inbuilt tendency in favour of complexity (indeed, it has real difficulties in explaining it). There is no ‘law' wi^thin the theory of natural selection that would enable one to claim that evolution displays any kind of teleological progressivism, including a drive towards complexity. To propose otherwise, and to apply such a model to human technical evolution, is to naturalize and r e ^ the contingent, non-linear, and rhizomatic character of our technological becoming. 13 It is also to give the evolution of technology the status of socialwhich rests on a highly ^ude conception of ‘fitness ’ . Indeed, this wwas precisely how S ^ u e l Butler conceived of the coming of machines as far back as the 1860s as the next line of the fittest. S u ^ a view necessarily results from any attempt to place ‘D ^ ^ m among the mac^nes’ (and, one might add, the humans). Instead of reco^^rng the challenge D^^amsm presents for the philosophy of history, Blackn^ro identifies Kantian and Hegelian speculations with natural selection. 14The problem with current theorizing on our inh^nan futures is that it ends up r e ^ ^ ^ the demonic powers it sets out to dertys^^. In the case of Lyotard’s ^^^ing on time today, the monstrous logic of capitalism is granted a logic of autonomy w hiA in reality it does not enjoy. His presentation of the time of our neg-entropic destiny results in an abstract and historical opposition between a pure ethrdsm on the one ^md and the unstoppable — because cosmic —accumulation process on the other. Is this not to be seduced by capital’s own desire to co ^ ^ ^ rt itself as the transcendental ground of all and innovation?15 Capital enjoys a monopoly on neither entropy nor neg-entropy. 13 One wiU find little evidence in D^^Wan theory for Bl^to^rc’s contention that nature manifests a tendency towards an ever more complex and expansive order, an order, he claims, wwhiA has been ‘promoted in the case of living by natural selection and in the case of human beings by means of the higher fo^ra of existence’ (1990: 160). Of course, the positing of a drive for complexity is entirely intelligible wi^n a Lamar^an schema of evolution. For more onsee Bur^rodt 1995: 15 Iff. 14 ‘The i^^ing of reason in human for Hegel and the ^^^ing of nature in political history for Kant be seen as intimating the operation of progressive forms of natural selection’ (Blackb^™ 1990: 161). The only pr^lem here is that it is not ‘na^tural’ selection that is being identified but an entirely different process. 15 There is little that is ‘empirical’ about the claims of our current ‘capital-lo^dans’, as Jameson has called this new of idol wor^ppers. On the con^^, their claims are purely ‘philosophical’: ‘what Hegel . . . caled Absolute Spirit, is now from our pe^^^ve rather to be identified as Capital i^li, wtase study is now our true ontology . . . for us the absent to^ty, Spinoza's God or Nature, the ultimate (indeed pe^^s the only) referent, the true ground of being of our oown time’ Jameson 1995: 82).

VIROID LI FE As Deleuze and Guattari argue, capitalism / 1 72 be treated as an ‘^iom atic’ precisely because it operates immanently. In other words, it has no laws of devel­ opment other than immanent ones, which is why when it confronts limits these prove to be nothing other than its o'wn limits (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 579; 1988: 4 6 3 ).16 Lyotard has, in key respects, provided a postmodern update of Marcuse’s well-kno^wn and untenable thesis on one-dimensionality advanced with a degree of historical acuity in the 1960s. One-dimensionality in Lyotard’s schema is part of life’s long battle with entropy. The real problem with Lyotard’s fantartical account is that it ^ ^ b e s to capital a vi^^m and a teleology. He thus ends up, ironically, offering us the kind of meta-narrative which he had sought to thow in the earlier essay on the postmodern condition was now di^edited. Grand n^artives concerning a neg-entropic future end up being complicit with the image that the system of control likes to project of itself, that is, portraying advanred technological life as if it were amply a mere continuation of natural history. The ^^ernetic dr^eam of a virtually instinctive machine of self-regulation is, as Habermas has noted, equivalent to the 'biological base value of survival at any • cost, that is, ultr^tability’ (Hab^rnas 1987: 60). It is precisely for this r ^ o n that one must demand a continual politicization (and ^ ^ ^ ^ ra tio n ) of evolution. 21. The thesis on the autonomous c ^ ^ ^ e r of tecchnical development ignores not only the crucial mediatingg role played by the social ma^rne, but also the o^^ra of self-re^ala^ting capital in specific relations of production, such as private property. No matter how much cybernetic capital ass^nes a monstrous, reified form, abstractly and inh^nanly pursuing its own logic of autonomy, this does not mean that it has transcended its origins in specific social relations of produc­ tion. It simply gives the appearance or illusion of such tr^ ^ ^ d en ce. To propose the end of politics as far as the question of technology is concerned —on the basis of the intelle^^ctualr laty cl^m that technology is ge^tting 'out of control’ — is amply to become seduced by capi^^m ’s effective depoliti^ration of the matter of plane^tary evolution. Ce^ain power interests are nicely served by such 16 The difference Deleuze and Gua^ttari are refe^ing to hm: is that an 'axiomatic’ and a 'code’. The former o^rates immanently in the sense that it deals directly with functional elements and relations, the nature of wwhiAis 'indete^^rminae', while the latter works transcend­ entally and expresses s^^&c and determinate relations betwren elements that ^canot be mbs^ed by a higher formal unity except by means of ^^^^^ence (1980: 567; 1988: 454). The passage from political obligation by (^transcendent) divine right to obUgation by (immanent) rational self-dete^^^^ agency (con^^ by consent) illustrates the dife^^re on the level of the transition to political modernity.

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION / 173 depoliticization. Taken in themselves machines explain nothing since they are always part of apparatuses and assemblages that are as much social as they are technical. Moreover, the evolution of technology does not take place in terms of some rational teleology, and in its concrete details its history carmot be said to be either linear or a matter of destiny. Rather, the development of technical machines, including technology as a global system, is the story of contingencies and situations of historical lock-in. For example, the u^rntion and exploitation of certain energy resources and fuels is the result of such historical contingency and lock-in, in which the ‘decisions’ of the social machine of a capi^^t world economy are crucial. Today new lessons about economics and politics be learned from the biology of distributed control in fields of self-org^^ation and in processes of emergent ‘informal’ order in complex systems, in which the role of central control is positively disastrous and simply unintelligent. On the level of global culture and politics the imperialist-entropic logic of ‘development’ needs to be contested in the light of knowledge gained from observation of these phenomena. The d o ^ ^ ^ t mono-agricultural policies imposed upon ^ard world f^ ^ w g practices is just one example of entropic logic of development pur­ sued by technologies whose evolution is driven by capital’s logic of accumulation. The f^^ung techniques of these local cultures already contain their o^n highly sophisticated and intell^ent mec^misms and systems of feedback in which l^earning and adaptation take place and in which innovations are tried and tested. ‘^hnd world’ economists and others have effectively ^ ^ en g ed the widespread view prevalent among Western ‘experts’ that f^^hng p ^ ^ c e s based on biodiversity enjoy only low productivity (see Goodwin 1995: 213ff.). New developments in genetically en^meered agriculture are a prime e x ^ p le of entropic development, the product of a monocultural mind-fome that ignores the qualitative fertility of ^^cies diversity in favour of q^mtitative red u ctio^ ^ , in which ^variety and diversity are ra^tfced in favour of the cultivation of s p e ^ c species’ traits that are m ^ ^ ^ e d in order to give a high yield of ce^ain produ^, sueh as cows, seed from g^ain, and so on. This is not an ar^rnent from e^nginee^ring and artifice in favour of some questio^&le re^turn to nature; rather, it is an argument about types of ^ ^ in e^ ^ ^ and modes of a^culture. Legislations of the economic forces of entropic capital are based on the application of crude D^^iman models of survival of the fitt^ :, but in sueh ^acunts the ‘test’ of fitness is n a ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ and depoliticized. The ^ ise of ‘development’ is not an issue of n a t ^ but one ^mut politics. To account for the app^ent univer^ t r i^ p h of c a p i^ ^ development by app^^ag to the l^ ^ n of e n t o ^ , as Lyo^d does, is amply to evade the ^task of about political options, oppo^^Mties, and

VIROID LI FE / 174 struggles. It provide us with a debilitating vision of our future inhumanity which, through the biologization of the forces of evolution, spuriously takes on the appearance of a destiny that is judged to be beyond ‘human’ influence. 22. There is much that is apposite in Lyotard’s reflections on time today. He is correct to claim that capital is a far greater inhuman force than we dare admit to ourselves. As he notes, capitalism is only the n ^ e given to a socio-economic process of development of which no one is master (Lyotard 1993: 96). However, this insight opens up spaces of resistance as much as it encourages acquiescence in an evolutionary system alleged to be ‘out of control’ . Here it is necessary to divorce a speculative comprehension of capital from conventional fascist-paranoid images of it. As Baudrillard has noted, capital is a ‘sorcery’ of the social relation, a challenge to society that needs to be responded to as such, not denounced according to some ^ rto rica l criterion of morality or economic rationality (Baudrillard 1992; 174). Capital operates as a vir^tual machine trapped wi^rn a productionist logic of eternal repetition. As Brian Mass^umi has argued, capital operates virtually in the sense that it ^ ^ fo ^ n s production into futural process suality in which activity is ^m d^entaly energetic rather ^than object-oriented. It" is not, for e x ^ p le , isimply a question of late-modern society capi^^ting on lifeforms in terms of imposing upon them an e ^ ^ t a l m e c ^ ^ of capture and putting them up for sale. Rather, life-forms that have never existed, being solely the product of an artificial manofa^^rog, are commerci^teed at the point of their emergence. Within po^modera capital, h^man life e^xist wi^thin a ^ ^ a l modality and from the angle o f its mutational aptitude (Massumi 1992: 135): ‘The capitalist machine has developed perceptual abilities that enable it to penetrate life and direct its unfolding. It go straight to the code of its molarity, resolve it into its constitutent part-objects (in this ^ e genes), recombine them to yield a special-order product (adult individuals) and ^^&et the product — or the transformational process itself, at any one of its steps’ (ibid.: 133-4). Deleuze and Gua^ttari have noted that as the molar mode of o rg ^ ^ tio n ^^racte^ ^ c of the modern social m^^ine becomes ‘stronger’, it reveals a tendency to effect a molecularization o f its elements and relations. S u ^ a process of defines the existence o f the h^nan ‘^mas’ individual late-modern capitalism, which in order to perfect its exploitation o f the human has l^earned how to molecul^ue the individual and introduce a whole micro-^management of p ety fears, so crea^ting a macro-politics of society that is governed by a micro­ politics of inse^ffity (Deleuze and Gua^ttari 1988: 216). If it is the that politics has been rendered superfluous in the face of the economism of capi^talist deterritoria^ation, becoming little more than the effectuation of a pro^^^me

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION / 175 of administration and management, that is, a system of anti-production soa^mg up machinic surplus value, then a si^gnificant refusal consists in not granting capital the first and last word as the ‘subject’ and goal-less goal of evolution (goal-less because it is motored by cybernetic self-stabilization, the eternal return of entropic death cultivated as a living system). Capital is a certain type of machinic assemblage, a particular social machine which operates on the machinic phylum but which neither controls nor steers machinic evolution. With the advent of the modern State a mutation takes place in which the regime of 'machinic enslave­ ment’ that c^ aterized the imperial Si^gnifier is replaced by a regime of ‘social subjection’. The condition of the modern/postmodern is an ambiguous one beca^& under capital decoded flows of energy and matter do not cease to flow or cease to engender new flows. The ^fference between enslavement and subjection be understood along the following lines: in the former, pre-capitalist condition h ^ a n beings exist as constituent pieces of a machine which they form ^ o n g themselves and with other things, such as animals and tools, under the direction of a higher unity (a m eg^achine) (Mumford 1966: 1-15). In the latter, capitalist condition, however, h^man beings are no longer simply components of the great machine, but workers and users sociaUy subjected and mediated rather ^than enslaved. Capi^^ra brings with it the triumph of motorized machines and the deterrito^^^tion of technical machines, as M ^ x recognized, arguing that it is not ma^chines that create capital but capital that creates machines ( M ^ 1976: 492ff.). It would be a to view our modern condition as simply a novel form of ancient enslavement to the meg^rachine, ance what is distinctly modern about it is that it takes place on the level of the immanence of an axiomatic, and not under the transcendence of a formal unity. Moreover, the rise of rybernetic and info^rational machines implements a more generalized and insidious mode of subj^ection: ‘recurrent and reverable ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ m ach in es systems” replace the old nonre^curen. and nomeverable relations of subjection between the two ele­ ments; the relation between h^man and mac^ne is based on inte^rnal, mutual communication, and no longer usage or action’ (Deleuze and Gua^ttari 1980: 572; 1988: 458). W :^ the evolution of late-modern capital any ^^inction be^reen the or^rac com ^ation of capital (the source of h^man ^surplus value) and the ma^chinic compoation of capital becomes b lared and a^ ^ ^ y breaks doowni as a tenable or useful th^inction (compare Mar^we 1968: 2 7 -3 7 ).17 17 For ^further into the development of h^an and ma^inic surplus value see the impo^ant analysis in ^de^% and Gua^ttari 1984: 232ff. & they note, the flows of <^e liberated in science and by the capitalist mode of production engender a ma^inic surplus value, in whi^

VIROID LI FE / 176 23. The ‘evolution’ of the system of capitalism be de-reified by exposing, through a machinic analysis, the illusion of total control it inevitably gives rise to. It has to be seen as a system of production that is subject to a complex evolution which proceeds by way of experimentation and testing, utilizing a pra^natic adap­ tiveness in the face of an ever-changing ‘environment’ that it itself has immanently and artificially produced. The fraction of an axiomatic —whether one is speaking of politics, morality, science, or technology — is to put a stoppage on decoded flows, to arrest their movement, so as to ensure that they do not break out in a l directions and lead into uncontrollable and unpredictable trajectories. Deleuze and Guattari lirt four main flows that perast in tormenting the centr^teed powers of the world economy: the flows of matter-energy, the flow of population, the flow of food, and urban flow (Deleuze and 1980: 5 8 ^ 5 ; 1988: 468). The problems associated with these flows are generated by the axiomatic but are not resolvable by it (an obvious example is the circulation and distribution that would make it possible to feed the entire population of the world). It thus becomes necessary to speak on b e ^ ^ of life in a l its immorality so as to give ex p r^ io n , to a l the other sonorous machines which up the messy universe. As Deleuze and Gua^ari argue, the very conditions that make the State and its capture of the war mac^ne poSSible, ^namely, constant capital (tools, techniques, and equipment) and l i a b l e capital ( h ^ ^ invention and ingenuity), also contin^ualy re-create unexpected possibilities for ‘counterattack, ^unforeseen initiatives dete^^^ing revolutionary, popular, minority mutant machines’, and for the creation of new non-organic social relations (ibid.: 1980: 526-7; 1988: 422-3). It is not a question of a (post-)historic creature —the h^^rn ^animal —facingg inevitable and tragic death at the ^mds of a monster from outer space (neg-entropic capital). It now becomes a matter of ^ ^ ^ ^ g our involvement in a machinic beco^rng and actively participating in our humanization, as opposed to ^^^ing that the h^nan being s-tands outside the machine with the power to negate abstractly its o ^ machinic conditions of existence. knowledge, information, and specialized education are as muA parts of capital (‘knowledge capital') as is the most elementary labour of the worker. Toffler calls this the ‘Global K-Factor', whiA he regards as decisive for an understanding of the economic and political dynamics of ‘third wave' societies (Toffler 1990: 391fT.). Indeed, Toffler goes so far as to claim that the K-factor poses a far greater long-tenn threat to the power of organized stance ^than orgamzed labour and anti-capi^talist political interest groups and p^tira (ibid.: 89). SuA an ^^ght Ao Wormed Lyotard’s conception of the ‘postmodem condition', in whi^ it was noted that in the age of compute^red machines ‘the question of knowledge is now more ^thanever a question of gove^ment' (Lyotard 1989: 9).

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION / 177 24. As Immanuel Wallerstein has pointed out, the crisis of capitalism as a geo­ political world economic system is not ‘moral’ but ‘structural’ (Wallerstein 1991a: 111). By ‘crisis’ he means something quite specific, referring to the situation in which a complex historical system evolves to a point at which the cumulative effects of its internal contradictions means that it is no longer possible for the system to resolve its dilemmas through adjustments in its ‘ongoing institutional patterns’. The capitalist world economy constitutes a ‘historical’ system with a historical life — a genesis, cyclical rh^^rns, and secular trends — and a set of contradictions that ultimately s i^ ^ its demise. Contradictions, Wallerstein main^tains, are not to be viewed simply as conflicts but rather denote a special case of transition. The latter always exist in a system, whereas the former emerge at ^ y^ ^ teed points of transformation and are specific to Singularities or phase transitions. Contradictions refer to ‘structural pressures’ which compel groups to move in opposite directions at the same time. They do so, not because of some natural ^hizophrenia, but because their ^imediate interests conflict with their long-term interests. As a result, so^al groups engage in behaviour deagned to resolve these dilemmas which then'tteates secular trends that serve to under­ l i n e the viability of the historical system. Or^rnized opposition, he ^&sts, is endogenous to the evolution of the sy^em, that is, it be viewed as part of the same secular development that c^racterizes the system’s structures. Wallerrtein argues that short-term contradictions lead to middle-term solutions which tr ^ la te into long-term ^ffves that then approach ^m ptotes (ibid.: 14). As these asymptotes are approached the pressures to re^turn to an equilibrial condition ^ ^ ^ s h , leading to incr^^ng osculations and bifurcation in the syrtem. The result is not a small ^^nge in a curve emer^ng from large rrandom flu^rations, but large c^mges resul^ting from small fluctuations. This condition of ‘complexity’ in an adaptive ^^em such as late cap i^ sm the of has become so endemic to the serve to explain ’-.hy on every level from the ^»nomic to the moral, political, and cul^tural. On the economic level, the is generated by, firstly, the secular ^end of complete co^m^odification (now widely ^acpted as the ^ a n ^ ^ deration of the po^modera condition), and, seconfy, the political trend to a on long-tem profit mar^ns. It does not matter if this economic and structural aisis manifests itself most ^ably on the level of a cul^tural politics. As Wallerrtein notes, the worldwide assemblage of antisysymic movements has, from 1% 8 on-^^ds, Wronger, bolder, and more d iv ^ e and ^difcult to con^in and m^wge. The sense of ^^is ^flects a general, pervasive thsmay at ‘^te flowe^ng of tendencies whieh seem on the point of ge^tting out of control’ (ibid.: 110). However, if bifurcation points ^

VIROID LI FE / 1 78 unpredictable in their outcomes it is impossible to locate any inevitable secular line of human history that would enable one to speak securely of ‘progress’. ^&e all great historical systems, capitalism will perish more as a result of its successes than its failures. Wallerstein thus suggests, as did Deleuze and Gua^ari in the infa­ mous analysis of capitalism ‘and’ schizophrenia in Anti-Oedipus, that it is only in the acceleration of the decadence of the present system, and not in its controlled transformation, that the prospects lie for creating a new world-historical system (Wallerstein 1991b: 36) . 18 25. Deleuze and Gua^ttari themselves offer a politics of multiplicities which contends the power of that whiA ^cannot be calculated by the preva^ng axiomatic. The becoming-minoritarian to be ^^roed does not simply refer to a small number but to that whiA escapes statistical capture and regulation, speaking of ^wgs whiA do not admit of ‘resolution’ . They insist that ^ is is not to denigrate the struggle and resistance that take place on the level of hegemonic axioms, such as the s^ ^ ^ les of the ^wd world, the s^ ^ ^ le for women’s ^ h ts , the ^ ^ ^ l e . for abortion, and so on. The emphasis is on these ^^strugles as indexes of another beco^ming, one whose and objectives ^ ^ o t be assimilated or co-opted by the axiomatic. It is not a question of the ‘minority’ entering and over the majority system; rather, the ^task is one of b ^ ^ ^ ^ to b ^ the force of the non-denumerable. The issue is badly considered if it is posed in terms of ^guarAy versus org^anized molar politics, or decentralization v e r ^ centratam. ^ th er, it is a matter of a calculus of difference which ^ ^ o t be calculated in te^ns of the logic of an identity politics. The contention of the non-denumerable is not, it should be stressed, the expression of a political id ^ ^ ^ or an abstract moralism. To d^m that it is, is to ignore ev e^ ^ ^ ^ Dele^K and Gua^ttari say about capi^ ^m and its outside or other. They ^ h tly w^n a^rnst r^ ^ ^ g politics either by trea^ting its theory as an apodictic science or treating its p^xis in te^ns of a world super-gove^ment that makes a l the ^final, one-dimensional decisions. As they point out, no one is in a position to control the money supply, let alone control once and for a l the molecular Hows and ^^^ormations produced wi^thin the ^^^w-logic of the capi^talist machine. They the politics of the undecidable as follows: 18 ‘So what is the solution? W h i^ is the revolutionary path? . . . To w ith ^ w from the world market . . . in a rarious revival of the fascist “economic” solution? Or might it be to go in the o^osite direction? To go stiU ^further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization?’ ^ eleu ze and Gua^ttar 1984: 239)

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION / 179 when we talk about ‘undecidable propositions’ we are not referring to the uncertainty of resolutions, which is a necessary feature of every system. We are referring, on the contrary, to the coexistence and inseparability of that which the system conjugates, and that which never ceases to escape it following lines of flight that are themselves connectable. The undecidable is the germ and locus par excellence of revolutionary decisions. Some people invoke the high technology of the world system of enslavement; but even, and especially, this machinic enslavement abounds in undecidable propositions and movements that far from belonging to a domain of knowledge reserved for sworn specialists, provides so many weapons for the becoming of everybody /every­ thing, becoming-radio, becoming-electronic, becoming-molecular. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 590—1; t 988: 473) 26. Almost a l modem thought has privileged an equilibrial model of reality. This is true of both positive and G e ^ a n idealist traditions of thought in the nine­ teenth century. Classical economics, for example, in spite of its early appreciation of self-regulatory systems thaough bottom-up emergence, and the free play of ^OTket forces, rests on the assumption that stable and harmonious order is generated through the power of the invisible hand. In short, classical economics, like classical social theory, has no conception of positive feedback and the role it plays in social-tednical evolution. In idealist philosophy the classic e x ^ p le of an e^ ^ b ria l model is Hegel’s speculative dialectic, which gives expre^ion to a cognitive faith in the power of the ^mind to triumph over the complex, chaotic, and unpredic^le forces of evolution. In spite of his recognition of the role of ^^ »rd , di^OTmony, and ineq^dity in the generation of life, Hegel’s holism is one which only construe the functioning of the whole in terms of ‘stable eq^ibrium of a l the p^te’, ev o l^ g in terms of the ‘alienation of opposites’, with ‘^eachpart a Spirit at home in On whole’ (Hegel 1980: sectioro 462 and 486). model a l ‘negativity’ (what is alien or outside) only exists to confirm the immense self-recuperative powers of Reason, which e n ^ ^ of and open every vein in them’ and even look into ‘the find itsetf at home in the universe (Hegel 197fo: 186). Today, the sciences of ^raos and complexity theory' are ex p o ^ g the extent to which the real is no longer ‘rational’, and vice versa, but rather the mort probable, g i^ g priority to c^mce, to ^ ^ ^ m ty and phase-space trandtion, and to non-linear dyn^amical systems which ^ i v e on poative feedback: ‘A l knowledge is bordered by that about w hi^ we have no ^ o ^ ation’ (Serres 1982: 83). .Ground the time that Hegel was see^ king to d e ^ ^^ory (the ^ory of ^ ^ ’s m ar^^^ on with his speculative proportions, a little-known FrenA ^my e ^ ^ e e r by the ^ name of Sadi C^not ^ a s work on out e ^ ^ es which would la r a ^ the science of the^ od ^ ^ m i cs and b^ r t apart the eq ^ ib ^ al ^ ^ a s > tions of the new id^ ^ ^ . In his on the

VIROID LIFE I 180 Motive Power i f Fire Carnot stressed the extent to which in the steam engine heat — what, following Lavoisier, he called 'caloric’ —flowed from a high-temperature region (the boiler) to a low-temperature one (the condenser). Carnot incorrectly concluded that no energy is lost from the system, but newrtheless realized that the more efficient the system the less energy it needed to run on, and that what produced the energy was the diference between the boiler and the condenser (Carnot I960: 50). Carnot enthusiastically drew analogies between natural heat engines and synthetic ones, insisting that it was to heat that the motive power of life owed its ori^ns and evolution. '^^at C^not enables us to see is that human technology is basically a species of neg-entropic capture designed to ward off catastrop^^, but whose invention always exceeds its o ^ constructed apparatuses of capture on account of its deteerntori^^ing c^racter.19 It was Rudolf Clausius who coined the term 'entropy’ in 1865 to account for the heat lost from any mechanical system. In the Newtonian model no energy is lost in the system, with the result that all processes are reversible and c^mce has no role to play. In the new thermodyn^nic model, however, e n e ^ is no longer conceived ' mechanistically and irreversibility becomes the principal direction ‘law’ o f time, serving to introduce ^cdo^uess and disorder into any system from the ^^table borders of a cloud to the movement of tides and a j^ged shoreline. M chel Serres has d r a ^ a useful ^^inction between the two models by de^ribing me^^nical systems as ‘statutes’ that are based on ^rity and eq^ibrium, and post-^^not systems as ‘motors’ that create movement (d^^mcs) and that go beyond the »mple relations of forces through the creation of innovative energy (Serres 1982: 71). It is thus only on the basis of the second ^w that we the dyn^nics of multi-temporal living systems, including the begin to conceive of ^reverable thermal flow, the quaa-stability of eddies, the conservative inheritance of genetic nuclei, the erratic b^^m g of aleatory mutations, and the upstream flows of neg-entropic islands sueh as recycling, refuse, memory, growth in complexity, etc. (ibid.). Entropy thus becomes the ‘marker’ of ewlution in a ^ e m , its '^row of time’. Moreover, in^^^ing entropy points t^^^ds the ^mntaneous evolution of that system. The achievement of Bol^man lay in shoeing that irreverable 19 Manuel de ^wda provides a helpful a^unt of C l o t ’s invention of marines' (1991: 141-2). C l o t ’s ab^ract depiction of the heat engine is ab^^rt eno^ugh for its terms to be reversed so that it could be used to build a re^erator. Once an is dissociated from its physical materiality, it enters the lineages of other ^^mologies. For ^further into C^not see &n-es 1982: S^^S. On computers as the ‘r^zation’ of pi^ic ‘abs^^ marines’ see ^wgton 1988: 11.

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION I 181 increases in entropy are expressions of growing molecular disorder and of the gradual erosion of initial states of diss^netry. 27. Prigogine has argued that life expresses in specific ways the conditions in which the biosphere is embedded, ‘incorporating the nonlinearities of chemical reactions and far-from equilibrium conditions imposed on the biosphere by solar radiation’ (Prigogine and Stengers 1985: 14). The ‘rediscovery of time’ within science — by which is meant the primacy of irreversible processes —takes place a new model o f ‘evolution’ that conceives o f non-equilibrium, the How of matter and energy, as generative of special and complex kinds of order, for example, ‘dissipative structures’ which are dissipative because their inner organi­ zation is capable of upholding a minimum entropy production (the excess of entropy is passed on to the environment). Vilmos C ^ y i has argued that the laws of thermod^wmiCS, of the conservation and dissipation of energy, only stipulate the general conditions neces^ry for a living system to exist, and on their own are insufficient for expl^aing the functioning, complexity, and structure of biological systems. In other words, trare is a fundamental difference between the complexity of a living cell and the orderliness of a ample chemical reaction ( C ^ y i 1989: 31). Brooks and Wiley lend support to this view when they argue that if living organisms ‘obey’ the second law, just as steam engines do, then strictly thermodyn^nlc considerations are ^ ^ ^ ly to explain the diver^cation of org^^ros compared to the lack of diversity among steam engines (Brooks and Wiley 1988: 33). C ^ y i insists upon a q^ditative distinction between order and organization. It is the self-org^^Mg phenomenon of replication that is able to account for the complexity of org ^ ^ tio n . An individual bacterial cell is able to spread its mode of or^^ration by producing its ^own components in a large number of copies at the expense of the system's energy resources. The bacterial cells be viewed as a ‘system pre^ffsor’, defined as a ‘^^im al n e t^ r k of components that is able to maintain its o'wn o^^^ration andto ^^uform an u n o r^ ^ ^ d system into one of or^ ^ ^ ^on ’ ( C ^ y i 1989: 4 ^ . C ^ y i's work is in expoang the ^transcendental iUusion of entropy, but it r e ^ ^ ^ stuak wi^thin an autopoietic, or autogenetic, model of evolution, and so is tunable to accotmt for the m a ^ c ^^racter of the complex, implicated of living ^^em s. 28. ^What are the implications of para^^n-^^: in the na^tural sciences, away from static and eqrfib^al models to non-linear and dyn^amical ones, for an under^anding of so^al and ^reality? The bert way to think is by way of a contrast between and po^mod^^ models of science. ^ ^ ^ ca l science pictures a world in every event is determined by initial conditions w hi^

VIROID LI FE / 18 2 are, in principle, determinable with absolute precision. This science emphasizes stability, order, harmony, uniformity, etc., and concerns itself with closed systems and linear relations in which small inputs uniformly yield small results. Its hubristic nature is best captured in the image of Laplace’s well-known demon, which, equipped with Newton’s laws of motion and gravity and knowledge of the position of every particle of matter, believes itself able to predict the future of the entire universe (it is reported that Metternich always went into battle with a copy of Laplace stuffed in his ^ o r m ) . The new paradigm, however, concentrates attention on open systems (such as the earth in relation to the cosmos) and non-linear relations in which small inputs ^ capable of triggering tremendous change and innovation. A chaotic system is simply defined as one w hi^ shows a sensitivity to initial conditions. goes completely ag^nst the grain of classical science, since it is based on the insight that any uncertainty in the initial state of a system, no matter how seemingly small or trivial, lead to growing errors in any attempt to predict its future behaviour. Complexity theory reco^mes that there are closed systems, but insists that these constitute only a small part of the physical universe. Most biological and social systems are open sy st^ s, exchang­ ing energy or matter and fo rm a tio n with their environment, and enjoying potentialities for evolution (pre^^ly what ‘evolution' means in complexity be addressed shortly) that are not susceptible to simple mechanical equations and predictability. A l systems contains sub-systems which experience constant fluctuation. At ^raes a angle fluctuation, or a combination of fluctuations, may become so powe^rful that, as a result of positive feedback, the existing or prevailing structure and organration are shattered. be defined as the moment of ‘revolution' in a system, a point o f singularity and b ^ c a tio n . In recent decades molecular biologists have found that positive feedback loops — what chemists auto-catalyds — constitute the very of dynamic life, showing that self-org^^tion emerges spontaneously under conditions that are far from equilibrium and that produce ^^matic reorg^^tions of matter. It is this emphasis on non-linear processes that reach points of bifurcation, in which slight fluctuations or deviations have masave consequences, that Walerstein has deployed to effect in his treatment of historical systems as complex systems. For the fact that the ‘solution’ of a bforcation is indeterminate does not mean that it is beyond the of serious research or speculative inq^ry. By cl^^^ng the network of forces at work, and elaborating posable vectors, it ought to become possible, he ^sugests, to ^cast light on ‘real historical choices’ (Walerrtein 1991b: 270).

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION / 183 29. Developments in artificial life, such as genetic algorithms, biomorphs, and neural networks, are affording a better understanding of the non-linear dynamics of evolutionary life, with computer models demonstrating the actual process of spon^neous emergence and self-organization. ‘H^nan' evolution is fast becoming susceptible to, and manipulable by, synthetic engineering. Indeed, engineering no longer be restricted to electrical and mechanical models, since it is becoming increaSingly open knowledge that engineering models be applied with far-reaching results to the domains of historical change and cultural politics. Systems, including human social and te^nical systems, are ex^angers and connectors of energy and information. It is these complex adaptive systems that have shaped h^^an history and knowledge. InteUigent life is both assembled from, . and the assembler of, information-evolution. This is to speak of an inescapable neg-entropic loop but one which, contra Lyotard, is not governed by a single theo-logic. ^ e ’s self-comprehension and engineering are best scared out not through top-down philosophical determination (and obfuscation), but rather through the te^nical (diagr^^rntic) study of its and specific engineerings and bottom-up processes of spontaneous self-org^uzation. What the new praxis of A-life has shown is that the d o ^ ^ ^ t (D^^mian) biologies have failed to tell the iful story of evolution. The problem with the hegemonic models is that ch^ange is viewed in te^ra of fixed and me^anistic processes ^fcng place in a closed universe. In its concreteness and dmplicity evolution by selection of the ‘fittest’ is ^alogous to classical sta^tistical mechanics and an outgrowth of the political economy of English lib e ^ ^ ^ in which the competition of units of production was seen as bringing progress to the whole. The union of natural selection with Mendelian genetics simply ^ r ie d fo^rard the tradition of classical mechanics that merged with statistical dynamics at the end of the nineteenth cent^y (Wesson 1991: 35). Population genetics, however, which construes the gene as the basic atom of evolution, is i^ b le to account for complex evolution grasped as the ‘ability to transitions’ since it neglects self-or^mizing and self-regula^ting systems which function in conditions of uncertainty and instability in a universe that is open and unbounded (ibid.: 36). On the model of complexity o r g ^ ^ ^ have to be conceived as open systems that undergo con^stant flux and that self-generate internally as well as externally, evolving interactively within an ecological and ethological context, in w hi^ any ^^nge is irreverable simply because there is no stable equilibri^n to they re^turn. Simondon propo^d the idea of a 'metastable eq^brium ’ as a way of the 'beco^^^’ of a li^ving syrtem. For ^m , a being does not possess a 'unity in its identity’ , which would be that of a stable state in which ^^^onnation is not posable, but rather

VIROID LI FE I 184 it enjoys a ‘ tr a n s d u c tiv e u n it y ’ , meaning that it is able to ‘pass out o f phase with its e lf. O n this understanding, becoming is a dimension o f the being and not simply something that happens to it follOwing a succession o f events that affect a being which is already given and established (Simondon 1992: 3 0 1 - 2 , 31 1). "This is to speak o f com plex ‘evolution' as a vital and dynamic process. Simondon was convinced that all processes o f ‘invention’, whether in the domain o f biology or that o f ‘epistem ology’ (know ledge), b e underwood as ‘transductive', as opposed to being either inductive or deductive, ance what is of prim ary im portance in invention is the 'd isco v ^ y o f the dimensions according to w h iA a problem atic be defined’ (ibid.: 3 1 3 ). In other words, transduction is nothing other ^than the process o f ontogeneas itself. means fo r Simondon, in a powerful argument he uses against the dialectic, that 'tim e' is also invented in accordance with the ‘beco^ming* o f ontogeneas (the dialectic presupposes a previous tim e period in w h i ^ th e ^ tiv ity o f auto-genesis ^rfolds) (ibid.: 3 1 5 ). 30. The construction o f the engine was the ^ ^ ^ r a tio n o f theoretical work dealing with a specific technological problem (how to pum p w ater out o f m ines), w h iA unpredictably led to a w hole new science and thought-paradigm, n ^ e ly , thermodynamics. It is a classic ^ ^ w c e o f the feedback loop that exists between technics and theory. T h e engine is a good example in the history of human te ^ n ic s o f te^ m ology both evolving in accordance w ith the ‘law’ o f pathdependency and ilustra^ting the phenomenon o f ‘punctuated e q u i l i b r i a ’ , w h i^ serves to account for ^ novation on the level of both biological (natural) and human (artificial) evolution. Contingency in this con text refers to the fact that a historical event is contingent w hen it takes place as the result o f a long string o f unpredictable antecedents, as opposed to the o u tc^ n e o f nature’s so-called fe e d law s (Gould 1 9 9 1 : 6 9 ). Contingent events are dependent upon choices from a past that seemed tiny and trivial at the tim e, ^ ith the result that ‘^ ^ o r p e rm e a tio n s early in the g ^ e nudge a p r^ ^ ss into a n w path w ^ , w ith ^ ^ a d in g consequences that produce an outeome v^ d y different from any a lte r a tiv e ’ (ibid .). This is tru e o f both the o f m ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ io lo g y ) and the d o ^ ^ r a c e of the qw erty typew riter system (technology). In an ^ulysis o f ‘f i t o e s la n d ^ p e s ’, in which 'adaptation* is co^nstrued as an attem pt to o p ^ ^ r a that are riddled with conflicting co ^ ^ ^ in ts, S ^ a rt K a ^ ^ ^ n has followed Gould in mainthat the increasing diverrity o f the biosphere and technosphere, or m eat and m etal, are f o r m e d by th e same or -<nmilar fundamental ‘laws’ 0 1989 and 1 9 9 5 ). G ould, however, e m p ^ ^ M the exten t to w hich the i a r d e n t and chance in evolution r e ^ t s in non-adaptive and pre-adaptiv

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION I 185 A classic example is the human brain, but the history o f technics is littered with examples o f non-adaptation or pre-adaptation where many m ajor inventions were designed to solve small local problem s but then mushroomed into something entirely different. 31. A number o f theorists associated w ith com plexity have seen in it the chance to reconcile Clausius and Darwin, or entropy and evolution (the one spearheading in the direction o f total dissipation, the other revealing ever-increasing novel and creative adaptations). Prigogine is perhaps the best-know n exponent o f this reconciliation whose notion o f ‘dissipative stru ctures’ gives expression to com plex adaptive systems which ^ ^ n ^ i n themselves at the cost o f energy. O n this model entropy acts as a progenitor o f com plexity, o f order out o f chaos. It is develop­ ments in the new geology, however, w hich pose the greatest challenge to the gradualist ethic o f classical D ^ ^ r a s m , placing at the centre o f our understanding o f the evolution o f the earth a truly radical notion o f contingency, one w h i^ makes it even m ore alien ^than the de-anthropocentrization perform ed by D ^ ^ in . As one o f today’s leading lunar and terrestrial geochem ists has noted, if the asteroid w hich impacted on ^ t h 65 miUion years ago, removing the giant reptiles in a global ca^tastrophe, had missed, it is highly unlikely that species o f humans like us would have evolved at a l (Ross Taylor 1 9 9 2 : 2 9 4 ). A notion o f d ^ » n tin u ity or punctuation is to any radical conception o f chaotic, com plex, non-linear evolution. The thesis o f ‘punctuated equilibrium ’ (PE) asso­ ciated with th e w ork o f Stephen Jay Gould and N iles Eldredge has dramatically remodelled the notion o f ‘evolution’ bequeathed to us by D ^ ^ in (who spoke o f a graad ^^t ‘descent w ith modification’) (Eldredge and Gould 1972; Eldredge 1985). O n m odel species and individuals are construed as hom oeostatic ^ t e m s in which a gradualist phyletic evolution is d ist^ ^ ed ra-ely, but pro­ foundly, by rapid and episodic events o f speciation. In fact, the ‘material theory o f evolution’ p u t forward by the maligned geneticist and &udent o f embryology R i^ u rd Goldschinidt in 1 9 4 0 anticipated the thesis o f PE by several decades. G ol^ ^ ^ rn d t put fo^TO'd the notion o f ‘macrom utations' in a r ^ ^ r for a leaps and bounds theory o f evolution in w h iA life on planet by long periods o f is A ^ c t e r i z e d foUowed by abrupt periods o f ^exploave change (the ^ r n e -^ le is a geological o n e ). On m odel there are two types o f speciation, one that is continuous, ^cumulative, and adaptive, and one th at is d^rontinuous ^and non-adaptive. The efectss in embryology o f the macro-m utations ^ und^^^ood as *^ ^ »d in g ’ . A p ^ ^ e l in to be be found in the philosophy o f te^m ology a g ra d ^ ^ ^ model has dominated until quite recently. Even tho^ugh

VIROID LI FE / 18 6 classical economists, such as Steuart and Smith, distinguished between a sudden and a gradual introduction of new machines, the overriding conception in their appreciation of technological change is one of gradual applications of new methods of production with technology understood as evolving in terms of small, incremental steps. The emphasis has been, therefore, on downplaying the role of major innovations and conceiving change as a process involving the steady accumulation of minor improvements and modifications. M o^^ has proposed that a parallel process of macro-mutation be seen to be at work in the evolution of technology, or what he calls ‘macroinventions’ (Mokyr 1990: 291). Although they may constitute a minority of a l inventions ever made, it is not numbers which are important but ‘cascading effects’ . His cl^m is that it is the emergence of new ideas and macro-inventions, such as the screw propeller, shemical fer^tilizers, and the Bessemer process, that prevent the into the law of of cumulative inventions returns. A condition of positive feedback —irreversible and drastic technological take-off — is arrived at through the ‘wave-effect’ of macro-invention. The ‘cascading effect’ of technological innovation would t h ^ appear to c o n fo ^ to a chaotic model (on the distinction between innovation and invention see Schumpeter 1976). Sush a model even be found in M ^ x’s analysis of capital, m which he traces the evolution of technics back to smal, revolutionary changes through an appreciation of the phyacal characte^^cs of mechanical equipment (tools, the slide rule, automated ma^linery systems, and so on) and of capital as effec^ting an integrated syrtem of machines. It is for reason that M ^ x main^tains not that it was the s t e ^ engine 'taken as an isolated technology which created the Ind ^ ^ al Revolution, but rather that it was the invention of machines which made a revolution in the form of the r t e ^ engine necessary (M ^x 1976: 4 9 6 -7 ). 32. In short, the conception of evolution is stuck wi^thin a N ew to^^ and m e c ^ ^ ^ c p arad i^ . In a recent article Mike D aw has ro ^ ^ t to s h ^ that selection conceives evolution in terms of a weU-regulated mec^rncal ry^em, and that in regard it is the influence of Lyell’s Prindples i f (& > I^ that proved decisive in D ^ ^ ro’s formation and articulation of ^rad^^^ evolution in the theory of selection. Lyell’s unifo^ni^^m geology expels ca^^rophe and chaos from the the non-linear and contingent evolution of the ^ t h in several ways. Firstly, it co^^ ^ed tectonic change as ^^ng place ^^d^uly over v ^ periods; secondly, it sought to expose a steady-state ^ e m in the evolution of the planet by that any crow-section of geological ^me would ^ c a l the same processes and land form; and hardly, it neces^^y the 'evolutionirt’

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION / 187 conclusion that the present is an analogue for the past. In Darwin’s theory of biological evolution this results in an expelling of saltation, an emphasis on extinc­ tion and speciation as merely the result of uniformitarian scales and rates in which adaptation is constantly fine-tuned by natural selection, and in which evolution, therefore, proceeds in terms of a subtle and progressivist logic (Davis 1996: 54). By contrast, the new geology of ‘bolide impact’ construes the evolution of the earth as an open system in which the major events of evolutionary change are events of punctuation and, moreover, not simply the result of plate tectonics but of extra-terrestrial impact. On this model, therefore, the solar system is fund^entally ‘historical’ (as outlined in Gould’s sense above), a ‘bricolage of unique events and assemblages’, and open to galactic perturbations; catastrophic and uniformitarian processes are seen as interwoven on a l temporal levels, and the past be treated as only a partial analogue for the future (Davis 1996: 61). F^^erm ore, the new geology, which is aspired by chaos and complexity theory, lends support to the thesis of punctuated equilibrium as the real ‘agent’ of evolutionary change. As Davis puts it: ‘Mass extinction events are non-D^^™an factori^ of natural selection. At its extremes, evolution is a pun^rated equilib­ rium between autonomous d^^miCS of enviro^nental and genetic c^rnge’ (ibid.). The dogma of grad^^& evolution by natural selection as the d o ^ ^ ^ t, albeit not exclusive, agent of evolutio^y Grange is seriously s^iken.20 As Davis notes, it is ^difcult to reconcile the irefutable evidence of mass extinctions —such as the Permian one, which extinguished 96 per cent of the e ^ ^ ’s m^ine species and 84 per cent of a l genera 245 million years ago — with the ^ in wedge and 20 No doubt Davis exaggerates the rivalry between the thesis of PE and na^atural selection, and no doubt orthodox D^^imsts would have to major difficulty in reconcitog the phenomenon of regular extinctions with the stepby-st^ ^dualism of natural selection. They do not necesarily amount to an incompatible theory of evolution once it is appreciated that natural sel^ectionworks in terms of the short-term sel^^n of Art-term advantage (any ‘progress’ will t o for only a short time and be short-lived). We need to allow for a plurality of tempos and modes of ‘evolution'. The thess of PE, for e^xample, works best as a novel account of ^rnatlon. ^Wht is needed is a comprehensive and multi-dimensional appreciation of con^tingent ‘evolution’ which would take seriously the existence of historical lrck-in, as well as geological catasfrophism, and deprive selection of any residual linear and (ultimate) teleological prejudices. Although a rigid ^^inction between ‘extra-tOT^^^I' ‘terrestrial' would be an ^i^ary one,, it ^ be ^gued that even on the level of development the geography of the is subject to constant and dramatic <^^^e on ^acunt of a numher of major factors, sum as the ^constancy of the magnetic field may be dir^riy caused by impacts from space), continental drift, and tectonic and vol^rnc activity. In the ktter c^e the effects are unpredictable since the earth

VIROID LI FE / 188 fine-tuning which characterize evolution on the model of natural selection. In short, the history of the planet is the story of ‘irreversible and unpredictable contingency’ (ibid.), in which innumerable possible evolutionary pathways be prescribed out of the same initial conditions (ibid.: 70), and in which catastrophe ‘replaces the linear temporal creep of microevolution with nonlinear bursts of macroevolution’ (ibid.: 75). On this new model terrestrial events are inseparable from their continuum with extra-terrestrial processes. Comet bombardments act as ‘superchargers’ of geological and biological evolution. History meets its other and is overtaken by becomings on account of the fact that not only is it marked by fault lines but it is also ruled by the contingency of ca^strophe in which explosions fuel innovation (for an application of PE to the evolution of the ‘h^nan ’ from the long stability o f homo erectus to the sudden explosion of new ‘h^nan ’ types, see Eldredge 1985: 125ff.). "This is the domain of ‘evolution’, not normal, gradualist adaptation, but a wild and un^med proliferation of monstrous variety and diversity. Natural history and human history come together on the level of the new ‘impact’ theory, guaranteeing that the future be deviant, degenerate, and. monstrous. Or, as one of the first philosophers of punctuated eq^fobri^n wrote: either be billed by volcanic activity, through dust being poured out into the stratosphere, or warmed by such activity through the pou™g out of carbon dioxide. Thus even the ‘explosions’ of evolution have to be seen as taking place, when situated on an appropriate geo­ logical ^me-scale, against a bac^^ound of constant change. It is within suA an ‘environment' of geological Aange that ultra-Darwinists (non-progressivists) see natural sel^ection operating. However, on the level of macro-evolution, a major revision of a central tenet of Da^^wsm is undoubtedly called for. On the model of catastrophic contingency, offered by the application of non-linear dynamiCS to the domain of geology, ‘evolution' is a story of the survival not of the ‘fittest’ but of the hackiest'. To give an example cited by Davis (1996: 75), the adaptive advantage enjoyed by mammals during the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million y^s ago may simply have been the result of the fact that they were concentrated in cir^m-polar regions that were least by the low-latitude Chicxulub impact whiA led to the dinosaurs being wiped out. In his unconvin^g, and at times silly, attack on Gould, Dennett singularly fails to grasp the historico-geological nature of Gould’s thesis on contin^ncy with its claim that if the tape of life were wound back and allowed to play again from an identical sUrtng point it would not produce the same phenomena, suA as the Cambrian explosion (Dennett 1995b: 299-312). Conce^rning the evolution of life on dearth Gould rightly insists: ‘Uttle quirks at the outset . . . unleash cascades of consequences that make a particular fu^e seeminevi^le in retrospect. But the slightest early nudge contacts a different groove, and history veers into another plausible ^^mel, diver^g continuity from its original pathway. The end results are so different, the initial perturbations so apparently trivial’ (Gould 1990: 320-1).

THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION / 18 9 At these turning points of history we behold beside one another, and often mutually involved and entangled, a splendid, manifold, junglelike growth . . . a tremendous ruin and self-ruination, as the savage egoisms that have turned, and almost exploded, against one another wrestle for ‘sun and light’ . . . . All sorts of new what-fors and wherewithals . . . decay, corruption, and the highest desires gruesomely entangled. (Nietzsche 1966: section 262) 33. ‘Evolution’ o f the earth, and o f the life and death on it, be configured in terms of a theatre of cruelty. The only teaching that is fa it ^ l to life’s betrayal of itself, to its complexity and contingency, to its desire for creative destruction, is one of evil. ‘Just like the plague there is an evil time, the victory of dark powers, a higher power nourishing them until they have died out’ (Artaud 1993: 21). In the theatre of cruelty, as in the plague, there appears a i^ ^ g e ‘an unusally bright light by which the ^difcult, even the impossible suddenly appears to be our natural medium’ (ibid.). For ‘us’ the effect of this theatre of life and death is not simply a ‘contagion’ but, like the event of the plague, a ‘revelation’ which urges forward the exteriorization of a latent undercurrent of cruelty and perversity. The ‘poison’ of the theatre destroys when injected* but it works like a plague, con^^ing a ‘redeeming epidemic’, spea^ng of a ‘superior since it is nothing other than an ‘absolute crisis’ in which matters of life and death are played out (again and again). Energy is intensified and life driven into delirium. ^ e as a good or bad S e c tio n , gasping for its resurrection: I am the future, I arn tomorrow, I arar the end. Nothing distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an animal . . . we are drifting together toward the noise and black depths of the universe, and our diverse systemic complexions are flowing up the entropic stream, toward the solar origin, itself adrift. Knowledge is at most the reversal of drifang, that strange conversion of times, always paid for by additional drift; but thrs is complexity itself, whiA was once called being. . . . To be or to know from now on will be translated by: see the islands, or fortunate, the work of dance or of necessity. 1982: 83)

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I N D E X abstract machine(s) 125, 138-9, 180 n. 19 Adams, H. 170 adaptation 4-5, 30, 33, 88, 9^92, 99, 107, 117, 130, 136, 149,174, 184-5, 187; and exaptation 88; gradualist 188 Adorno, T.W. 36, 154 anthropocentrism 2, 6, 11, 13, 24 n. 12, 115-17, 119, 124, 132, 137-8, 152-3, 159, 161-2, 164, 170; se ak de-anthropocentrization anthropomorphism 5, 7-8, 11, 29, 32, 59, 62, 86, 90, 105-7, 109-15, 122, 1-H, 149, 161, 170; and Darwin 127 n. 6; and 110; Deleuze and Guattari on 119; Nietoche 163; and Niete^eanism 110 Apollonian 120 Arendt, H. 20 n. 10 ^to^^tic ra&calism 106 Artaud, A. 82-3, 189 ^artificial life (A-life) 4, 34, 148-9, 183 ascetic ideal 33, 37-9, 47, 5^5 ^aslage(s) 71, 120, 139, 145, 174; theological 145; se a/so machinic auto-catalysis 182 autopoiesis 117, 122, 125 n. 2, 1^^2, 1^autopoietic m^^fte 1^^1 bacteria and origin of 132 Baer, K.E. von 129-30 n. 8 Bagehot, W. 87 Bataille, G. 69-70 Bateson, G. 88-9 n. 9 Baudrillard, J. 2, 29, 29 n. 21, 3^5, 147, 149, 152, 174; on the subjective illusion of technology 152 becoming(s) 5-8, 11-12, 15-16, 19-20, 25, 27-8 , 43-5 , 4—51, 58, 61-3, 73, 77, 80, 83,92-4, 99, 107-8, 111, 116-21, 125-6, 131, 135—6, 138, 150, 154 n. 3, 156, 162-5, 183-4, 188; ofalien life 139; of the animal 118, 120; anti-enttopic 170; block of 130, 135; and evolution 135; and history 23; and memory 14 n. 4, 23-4, 24 n. 12, 28; -^minori^rian 178; -molecular 179; Somatic 134, 145; and technology 171 ^mj^amin, W. 24, 26 n. 17, 28 n. 20 Bergson, H. 6-7, 27 n. 19, 62, 92-3 n. 13, 117-18, 123 n. 1, 124—5, 125 n. 2, 131 n. 9, 134, 142, 149-50 b io l^ ^ 12, 1^-12, 114—15 Bh^&^ro, R. 166, 170—1 Blanchot, M. 63, 66, 78 n. 10; on teAnology 160 fol^mann, L. 180 Braudel, F. 145 B^oks, D.R. 181 B ^ o , G. 24 Buder, S. 2, 139, 142-3, 149 n. 16, 171

INDEX Cambrian explosion 188 n. 20 Can^lhem, G. 144 capitalism 2, 145-50, 171 —2, 174-8; see also late-modem capital Carnot, S. 179-80, 180 n. 19 categorical imperative 46, 66 Chardin, T. de 31, 125 n. 2, 131 n. 9, 167, 167 n. 9 Christianity 2 Clausius, R. 180, 185 complexity theory 93, 122, 128, 179, 182-3, 185, 187 Conway, D.W. 38 Copernicus, 55 Csanyi, V. 142, 181 cyberspace 2-3, 33 / 200 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F.: 7, 14 n. 4, 23, 46, 67-8, 77, 82, 104, 118 n. 35, 119, 122, 126, 130, 13[ n. 9, 134-6, 138, 143, 145-6, 165, 172, 172 n. 16, 174, 176, 178; Anti-Oedipus 104, 178; on the death-drive 71; on mimicry 103 n. 26; on non-organic life 120, 125, 130; on politics 178; on social and technical machines 143, 145-8, 174-5; A Thousand Plateaus 22, 67, 71, 118 n. 35, 126; on undecidable propositions 178-9; ^ot is Philosophy! 7, 23 n. 12 Dennett, D.C. 133; on S.J. Gould 188 n. 20 Demda, J. 11,48 desiring-ma^chines 143 Dionysian 17, 62, 120, 129 Dionysus 74 Darwin, C. 2,4, 11-12, 13 n. 3, 17-18, 29 n. 21, 34.44, 85-113, 115, 117, 127, 127 Eardley, M. 134 n. 6, 129 n. 8, 133, 148, 155, 160, 171, Eco, U. 146 185-7; complexity 171; and genealogy Eigen, M. 89 n. 9 135 n. 11; and grad^^^ 185, 187; and Eldredge. N. 185 A.R. Wallace 30 n. 21; see also Nietzsde Ellul, J. 4, 10 n. 1, 145, 152 n. i, 170 Davis, M. 186-7, 187-8 n. 20 embryogenesis and morphogenesis 129; and Dawkins, R. 12-13 n. 3, 130, 137 phylogenesis 126-7 de-anthro^xentrization 116, 185 Empedocles 86 n. 2 death-drive 7, 58, 60, 63, 63 n. 3, 64, 71--6, engineering 4, 34, 91, 114, 143, 173. 183; 80. 82 bio- 149; desire- 143; genetic 34, 133, 173 Debord, G. 3, 123 n. 1, 157--60 entropy 4, 7, 63-5. 73, 80, 82--3. 88. 93, Debray, R. 123 n. 1, 159^0 122, 127, 134, 142, 147, 149-50, 156, Deleuze, G.; on active and reactive 16 n. 7, 164, 166-70, 172-3, 175; as co-extensive 21 n. 11, 43-5; his Bergsonism 127; on with evolution 144; development 173; the ^^y 119; and complexity 128-9, 136; and negentropy 166, 171; andi^^sm 164 Differaux and Repetition 58, 77, 126-9; on n. 8; s& also negentropy ete^rnal re^turn 15 n. 7, 42-6, 65-6; on En^^^rger, H.M. 160 ethology 117, 136, 137 n. 12; contra Eros 83; and '^^ratos 64 Freud 59; on Matte and Memory 27 n. 19; e t^ ^ retom 8, 14, 38, 42, ^^6, 54, on memory 24-7; and molecular 57-83, 101-2, 108, 163, 175; as an alter­ native principle of selection 101; as Darwinism 126; on natural selection 1W; and so-scaled Naturphilmophie 136; Niet^he counter-entropic principle ^ ; and over­ and Philosophy 21, 24, 42, 79-80; on man 78. 78 n. 10; as sel^ective thought 44; and th^ermodynamics 62, 80 Nietzsche's superman 12; on reactive force ethology 117, 136; s& also Deleuze 88 n. 8; on selection 43-5. 76. 127-9, 147 eugenics 14, 34, 167 n. 9

INDEX feedback 15, 29, 62, 88-9, 97 n. 22, 102, 134, 140, 147 n. 15, 148, 174, 179, 182, 184, 186 Feuerbach, L. von 159 Foucault, M. 16 n. 8 Freud, S. 24, 26, 58-61, 63-4, 71-6, 83, 160; and involution 130 Galileo 24 Geist 18, 99, 102-3 n. 26, 170; see also technics God 7, 41, 123, 160, 162, 179; death of 12, 37, 68, 159, 168 Goldschmidt, R. 185 Goodwin, B.C. 13 n. 3 Gould, S.J. 166, 184-5, 187, 188 n. 20 grand narratives 2-4, 124, 148, 165, 169, 170, 172 Gua^ari, F. 6, 76 n. 9, 128, 144-5; on complexity 145; see also Deleuze Habermas, J. 172; on te^mology 147 n. 15 Haeckel, E.87, 126, 129 n. 8, 131 n. 9 Hegel, G.W.F. 96 n. 21, 115-16, 137 n. 12, 179 Heidegger, M. 11-12, 16 n. 8, 33, 38, 114-15, 117, 118 n. 35, 119, 122, 157, 159, 169; on von Baer 130 n. 8; on Nietzsche's biologism 109-12; on the organism 115-16; on technology 152-3, 153 n. 2 Hering, E. 28 n. 20 Hobta, T. 98, 127 n. 6 Huxley, J. 111 Huxley, T.H. 87 hybridation 136 hylomo^tasm 120 involution 19, 34, 118, 130, 136; creative 130, 131 n. 9; and evolution 126, 128, 131 n. 9; of 13 James, W. 87 Jameson, F. 3, 157 n. 5, 170, 171 n. 15 / 20 1 Junger, E. 152, 159 Kampis, G. 142 Kant, I. 27 n. 18, 29, 32, 32 n. 23, 66, 86 n. 2, 113, 115, 126, 133, 138, 143, 154; on the organism I 36-7; on universal history 155; see also Nietzsche Kauffman, S.A. 128, 184 Kelly, K. 32, 149, 149 n. 17 Klossowsd, P. 45 n. 2, 46 n. 3 Lamarck, J.B. 4, 25, 28 n. 20, 61, 87, 124, 148-9 ; see also neo-Lamarckism Lampert, L. 38 Laplace, Marquis Pierre Simon 182 late-capital 5, 147, 174-5; and complexity 177 Lavoisier, A.L. 180 Leroi-Gourhan, A. 29-31, 160 Lyell, C. 186 Lyotard, J.F. 3, 124, 167-9, 169 n. 12, 170-4, 176 n. 17, 183 machinic 5, 114-17, 122, 130, 134, 136-7, 139, 141-3, 176, 178; assemblages 125, 146, 175; becomings 134-5, 143, 176; death 82; enslavement 165, 175, 179; heterogenesis 139, 145; hyper-text 145; philosophy of history 165; phylogenesis 6; phylum 175; surplus-value 130, 175, 175—6 n. 17; unconscious 74 Malthus, T. 96, 96 n. 20, 96 n. 21, loo Marcuse, H. 3-4, 28 n. 20. 74 n. 7, 159, 172 Margulis, L. 125 n. 2, 132 n. 10 Marx, K. 32, 127 n. 6, 145, 147, 157, 175. 186 Massumi, B. 6, 174 Matu^a, H. 1^^2 Mechanosphere 120, 125, 131 n. 9 memes 1, 13 memory 14, 17, 20, 22, 24-8, 30-1, 36, 61, 66, III, 121; organic 94 n. 15; te^mics of 23-4, 27-8 Mendelian genetics 183 metallurgy 124

IN D E X I 202 Mettemich, F, von 182 Omega Point 167 Mill, J,S. 34, 92 ontogeny 128, 144; and phylogeny 126, 144 mnemotechnics 6, 23-4 order-word 68-9 Mokyr, J. 186 overhuman 10-11, 14-17, 20, 24 n. 12, 28, molar 5, 23, 27, 102— , 1W- n. 30, 116, 136, 142-3, 148, 174; politics 178 molecular 5, 23, 102, 1W-, 104 n. 30, 116-17, 174 40, 82, 91, I l l , 161, 163; see also posth^an and transhuman overman 14-15, 21, 37— 1, 50, 54, 56, 68, 78-80, 91, 101; see also Ubermensch Moravec, H. 33, 167-8 M ^ fo rd , L. 4, 157 perfect n^list 164 Nageli, C. von 93, 93 n. 14 pe^^^vism 42, 47 negentropy 148, 167, 167 n. 9, 168-72, 176, ^losophy of history 154-5, 166, 171; see also Penman extinction 187 180, 183; see also entropy machinic neo-Darwinism 126, 129; se also Pippin, R.B. 38 ultra-D^^™sm neo-Lamarckism J, 149; te^no-Lamarckism plane of immanence 46, 120, 151 political, death of 150 political theory 146 166 N e^on, I. 182 politics of desire 146 Nietesche, F.: on the ^animal 120-2; on art possessive individualism 6 121-2; Anti-ChriM 38; and bad conscience j^ ^ w n an 2-3 , 5, 33-5; see also overhwnan ^transhuman 19-20; Beyond Good and Evil 1 ^ ; The Birth rfTragedy 47; on complexity 1 ^ ^ 1 ; on postmodem(ity) 2 -5 , 7, 33, 148, ISO, 153, critique 16, 19, 40, 43; contra Darwin 86, 157 n. 5, 160, 166, 169-70, 172, 175, 93, 101, 105--6, 108-9, 127; on ^ ^ t o 's 177; capital 174; science 181; terrorism error 1W-, 127 n. 6; Daybreak 51; and death of God 12; fcce Homo 15; ^and 146 prefonnationism 126 ecology 14; and the future 10-11, 39^W, Prigogine, I. 181, 185 4 6 -7 , 49, 163—4; on gay science 5 1 ^ ; The Proust, M. 26, 28 n. 20 Gay Science 51, 53, 57, 66, 105; On the punctuated wpiUbrium 21, 184-5, 187, 187 Genealogy rfMorality 12, 24, 38, 85, 87, n. 20, 188 W, 92-3, 102, 1 ^ ; Human, All Too Human 40, ^ ^ 7 , 86, 97 n. 22; on ^ ^ c e 103; Red Queen hypothesis 89 and Kant 6 6 , 138, 154, 155 n. 4, 162; on Ree, P. 17 mimicry 103 n. 26; on proud death 72; repetition 38, 58, 6 0 -1 , 6 5 -6 , 69, 73-7, 79, contra Rousseau 18, 48 -5 0 ; Sdtopenhauer 158-9, 174; as demonic power 76; of the as Educator 87; on science 55 -6 ; and ^same 158 selection 8, 4 1 -2 , ^ 5 , 47, 53, 101-2, 105, 108; Thus Spoke Zarathustra 38, 77, 80; Twi/ight rfth e Idols 106; s e also rhizomatic/rhizome 6, 14 n. 4, 24 n. 12, 124, 1M, 1 3 4 - , 144-5, 165, 171 Rousseau, J.J. 18, 4 ^ 5 0 Roux, W. 93, 98, 98 n. 23, 99, 1to 7, Roy, E. Le 125 n. 2 21, 35 , 27, 62, 72, 154-5, 160-2, 164-5; NietzsAe on 154 n. 3, 161, 163-4; as pathological 164 ^gan, D. 125 n. 2

I N D E X I 203 schizoanalysis I 25 Toffler, A. 165, 175 n. 17 Schopenhauer, A. 61, i 62 transcendental illusions 7, 26, 60, 126; of self-overcoming 2, 17, 26, 29, 33, 39, 47, 50-1, 73, 89, 108, 110, 165; Nietzsche's 50-1; of the will to truth 138 Serres, M. 179, 180 n. 19 Simondon, G. 12 8 n. 7, 160, 183-4; on ontogenesis 184 capital 7, 147; of entropy 7, 181; of nihilism 7, 164, 164 n. 8 transference 76 transhuman 1-4, 6 -8 , 10, 32-3, 3 5 ^ , 39, 105, 108, 122, 138, 154, 160-1, 163 transversal communication 23, 130, 133, 136 situationism 123 n. 1, 156, 159 Smith, A. 98, 186 Aermensch 14, 85, 91; see also overman soul 13, 28, 31 ultra-Darwinism 130 Spencer, H. 34, 87, 87 n. 6, 92, 106 n. 33 utility 6, 9 4 -5 , 97, 113; Darwin/ism and 95, Spinoza, B. 95, 98 spirit: se Geia 95 n. 18 Uexkiill, J . von 118, 118 n. 35, 119 State 147-8, 160, 175-6 Strauss, D. F. 29, 106 Vaneigem, R. 3, 146, 155^6 suicide 71-2 Varela, F. 1^ ^ 2 supennan 12, 14, 38 Vernadsky, V. 125 n. 2 surplus value o f code 135-6, 143 Virilio, P. 71 symbiosis 91, 124, 130, 132-4, 136, 139, viroids 133 145, 166; bacterial 132 virtual 2, 5 ^ , 68, 97 n. 21, 126, 133, 139, 145, 150, 157, 161, 174; futures 146 tei±nics 4, 11, 29-31, 113-14, 120, 123-4, vitalism 2, 34, 117, 119, 142-3, 172, 184 136, 143-4, 148, ISO, 152-3, 162, 165, 185—6; and evolution 125; as Geia 170; and theory 184 teAnology 4 -5 , IO n. 1, 11, 25, 31, 114, 123, 132, 147-8, 152, 157, 160, 164-5, 168, 173-4, 176, 179, 184, 186; Wallace, A.R. 29 n. 21, 88 n. 9, 90 n. 12, 111-12 Wallerstein, I. 177-8, 182; on the crisis of capitalism 177 war machine 72, 72 n. 6, 176 c^ e ^ «tic 146; and entropy 147; as Weismann, A. W extended phenotype 124; fetishism of Wiener, N. 147 147; as grand^narative 124; irony vf Wiley, E.O. 181 169; will-to-power 8, 12, 21, 90, 9 2 -4 , 97-8, naturals selection 1 12; as neg-entropic capture 180; philosophy of 105-9. 117, I 20; and survival of the fittest 185; question o f4 , 145, 152-3, 172; 102 recombinant DNA 133; as s ^ ^ 171; ‘^ ^tocular’ 158; sub^ctive illusion of 152 Tipler, F. 167 ^ t h u s t r a 37 -8 , 58, 67, 70-1, 76-7, TO, 8 0 -1 ; becoming of 58; death of ^ ; Zarathustra-Nachlass 77-8