Keith Ansell Pearson Viroid Life Perspectives On Nietzsche and The Transhuman Condition

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 âllenge to existing conceptions of biotechnolôgy 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

Wârwick. 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 PEARSON
LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 1997
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge :,-
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© 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

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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
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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 xi
Introduction 1
i Loving th e Poison
The memory of the human and the promise of the overhuman 9
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 1S 1
Bibliography 191
Index 199
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 appêared 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^Âe: Critical

<Asssments, Routledge.
Chapter 5 is a mo^fied and shortened version of a cchapter that ^wil appear in
Keith Ânsell 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 book is incalculable. Catherine Dale played a
role in the book’s 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 êar.
(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^ân as a site of con^^ûtion 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 dônstrated 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 contâmination 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^ân, 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 fflôn 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 colonîng the entire k n o ^ and ûnknown 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 ^^îng 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 siîtuation would we expect to find ourselves in at the end of the
^milenni^m? — in w hi^ cyber-celebrations of the ^ûh^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^ûe
the ^ûties 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 intereîng ânimal, an ânimal 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^îng and si^gnifi^nce, so that the ^ment of the loss of
meaning in postmodernity boils down to mo^îng 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^îng is over. Little did Lyotard k n ^ at the time of his -writing that the grand
nâtive 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 lên^ting, and lamentable, crisis-reflections on the end of history, the
end of politics, the end of time, and so on. A genuine o f ‘critical theory’ âs
perceived as place, since if the subject of critique was dead (the prole^riat,
man as the pûrpose of ^histry, and a seif-^^ôrmative 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
qûasi-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
âmalg^ 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. be culti
vated in a number of ways. Firstly, one reco^m e that from its ‘origins’ the
h^ân 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 cerîn of are
monstrous ones characterized by perpetual mutation and morp^ng. The ‘meaning’
of ‘tecûcs’ 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: tecûcs/techniques are simply tools and devices employed
as means to the furtherance of h^man ends. However, an anti-humanist reading of
their meâning 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 agâinSt 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 fundêntal preoccupations — searc^ng the mêaning 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 anthio-
pocentrism. I see the ‘aitical’ task of excessive ^^îng, 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^îng 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 ^âite movements and from a deare to master
and tame the ^âite speeds of time and the future which what we are. The
illusions of ‘transcendence’, of ‘universals’, and of ‘eternal verities’ a l be
explained in this way. The problem that remains is how to transhumanly the
future, a mode of 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 seriousness. To
‘access’ such a mode of 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 ^^îng 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 phase-
space 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 T H E P O I S O N
T h e m 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 Law-
Tables’ section 28)? Is not the future our un-naâtural 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^ân as they relate ’to Nietesche, including the foUoôwing:
• 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 Nietzsê 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 têchnique ou 1’enjeu du siecle’ in
very Nietasêan 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 Nietzsê 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 wiân 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
plurâlization 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 forgeîng’ and
festivals of cruelty s^trike us as merely g^^âl 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, subjeîng it to a reading of te^mology
byit to a ‘future master of the ^^&* who wields to higher pûrposes
and powers wwhatt ‘falls’ to the h^rnan of the future with the da^îng of the
2 The opening sections of Human, A//Too Human strike me as offering a post-Da^^man conception
of philosophical culê, 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’ (Nietasê
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^ûl collision. —The isolation of the individual
ought not to deceive us: something flows on underneath individuals’ (Nietasche
1968: section 686).
• The question of N ietasê’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
eûust 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 selection by biologists (Dawkins
1976) and philosophers (Dennett 1995b) 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
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 chânging (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 hânity <canbe saved from
its fallen, selfish state). See Goodwin 1995: 29-30. Dênett’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 ûniverse’ (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^âtion 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^ân is bound up in ways yet barely explored, and
in ways little understood, with the memory of the h^ân. 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^înd is the breeding of an ânimal which has the capacity or
abftty to make promises, and this requires a certain trâining 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^în).
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).
animal, a strange animal, and that he calls upon us always to aim our vision ând
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 non-
equilibrial 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-trânsparency, is displaced
at the outset of the book. ‘We’ h ^ ^ ^ must remain strângers to ourselves ‘out of
necessity’ ; we ^ ^ o t be knowers, especially when it comes to ourselves. Eqûaly
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^êr of dangers’ morality is ^rnda-
mentally ^biguous: it has led to the poisoning of ^man, to the darkening of
the skies over ^^înating 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 Nietzsê critique of the highest values hitherto
‘properly means illînation 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 Nietoê 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).
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 wiîn 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-to-
decipher 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 Sênsatiom, on this
point. Although Ree had read D ^^ro, Nietzsche contends that he had produced
a merely ‘enter^îng’ 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 ûnfolds 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
forgeîng which plagues ‘modem man’ , namely, a forgeîng of the ‘art of
reading’ . Until this art — an art involving a cer^tain of memory — is
relearned, it 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 supra-
moral 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. '^île
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 blood-
poisoning (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 dôwn 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-^^êr’ and an honest
ânimal. It is the speech of someone who has to Nietzsche ‘up to a cerîn
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 internîzed 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^âl state
—his genetic make-up bestows little —that he had to create for himself a torture-
c^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^êaking of the prospect of an ânimal 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 speâking of the ^^âl ‘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 beîng 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.
‘Fundêntally’ , 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 overhân. 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 only be conceived in terms of an essential
^diference and a being that 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^^mâtion
and increase o f forces’ so as to know ‘what might yet be made cfm an' and to lêarn
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 hiôry. The most promising po&ibilities
10 One of the earliest, and still few, attempts to approach Nietzsche in the te^ra of this âpter
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 Nietzsê’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).
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 non-
calculable ‘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 âlectical 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 mâking a
^înction 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
^^înating in a will-to-power that only ‘no^thingness*, that is, a passive
in which the process of the internâlization of the ^wil-to-power has gone
so far that culture produces an that is no longer able to produce an^îng
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^îng’ 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 , but we have also lost our
love and respect for ^ m , our hope in , and ‘even our to be man’ (ibid.:
12). We no longer digest (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 ânimal. 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 êxperimenter with ^m self
and insatiable struggler for control over ‘ânimals, 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 self-
vivisector 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
Guattari oppose ‘becoming’ to ‘memory’ in their attempt to construct a non-

genealogical 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 rêality 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 possibly
be, ever been and ever be is the history of man (although it should be
noted 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 molârization 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* throûgh‘^rcomings’ are utilized in 1988: âpter 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 maînic 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^îng 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? ân 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^êd by Deleuze in his study of Leibniz and the baroque (Dele^ 1993:
23-4).
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
mânkind. 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 fôcus is on the likes
of Butler, Thomas Hardy, Wallace.
15 As Stephen Jay Gould has ârgued, 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^^ân, cultural evolution is ‘direct', ^translineeal, and ^Lamârckian. See
‘The Panda’s Th^b in Tînology' 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 mâking 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^îs 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’.
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 ‘fundêntal 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 (forgeîng 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 âracter 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 ^êring: ‘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 ânimal 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
âracteristics. See also, in this regard, Diderot 1963: 55.
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 ‘lêarned 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^în 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 Nietasê; 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 ânimal -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 tecûcal
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 maûnes 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 ârtificial 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
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
inteênsification 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^înd 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
hânism . 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). "^ât is &^^îng
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'îng 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^îng’, recent reports on the transhân condition ironic^y amomt to an
ânulmnent 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).
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 ^^îng 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 superfiâl 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 domêsticated not only themselves but the entire planet —
perspicaciously of ‘our quad-re^û 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
fouÛ 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 mânkind 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^ân evolution has always enjoyed an originary involution (^w is the meâning
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 conâry, 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
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 îngs 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 '^ên 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^înd
is not to ^mounce the ‘end of ^^ ^ ind ’ but to re^turn us to the ‘real problem’
regarding m^înd, 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 ârtificial 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 teAnolôgy (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 T H E O V E R H U M A N
O n t h e a r t a n d a r t i f i c e o f
N i e t z s c h e ’s 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 ^Zarathûstra as his companion in order to te a ^ that
God is dead and the ove^^m should now be the sole m^êaning and pûrpose 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. Nietzsê’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 hâlarks 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^îng and creating beyond the m ^^ffe o f iân (Nie^^foe 1974: section 335)
(Ansell Pearson 1992 : 309-33). “^ên 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),
oîng eve^^ûg 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^âcter 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 dêscribed at ■various ^mes as the ‘^ ^ roers’ , as the ‘self-overcomers of
morality’, as the Europêans’, 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
speâking 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 ^^îng that it has gone beyond
the question. No wonder NietasAe tells us that all his ^^îng may not only be
a consolation but also a ‘deception’. ’This, he says, is to speak ‘u n m o r a l extra-
morally, "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
convalênce are undergone in which the free spirit comes to see himself for
the firrt ^me (ibid.: 4 and 5). The oveûrûg 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^âing 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.
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 ê, life itself as conditioned by the sense of perspective and injustice.
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 never atîn (death). In invi^ting us to make
the selection, to be for or the perspective of eternal re^turn, to be ^ ^ g e d
or ^^shed by it, N ietzsê 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 lêarned 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 âkes cen ta l to an active, A m a tiv e , anti-
Hegelian 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 ârtifice 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
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 ârtificed.
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^îmg 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 fasâtion with the reactive, even noting that there is someîng
admirable and dangerous about the ‘becoming-reactive of forces’ (ibid.: 66). Thus,
while reactive forces do not take us to the but insist on separating us from
what we 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.
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). Nietzsê’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 consûcted 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
^^îng 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^âtions that restra'tify eve^ûng, 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 freely accede
to, providing a burden or a weight one make joyous. 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 ietesê argues that the
imperative of the free spirit, the spirit that has unlêarned 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.
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’.
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
ârathustra, ‘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 -^îng 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 hân ity. Emancipation,
however, is implicated in the injustice of perspectivism, and so it is necessary to
one’s ôwn 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 AND S IC K N E S S :

N IETZ SC H E ‘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 distinguiâng 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^îng not so m ud to inîncts as to their beco^^g,

to their incorporation, and intem^ration with a process of cultural selection
and trâining. 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
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 modêrns 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^ânated by
deep sicknesses. One only go ‘beyond’ romanticism by adopting an attitude
of mistrust towards oneself, so that one is able to take sides oneself,
become one’s greatest enemy as one’s deepest friend, and in 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 Âates
individual personal existence into ‘universal judgement’ , and into condemnations
of the world. He then âsks inqûiringly:
Shall my experience — history of an illness and recovery . . . have been my personal experience
alone? And only my hân, all too-human?
Nietesche seeks to universalize his experience, but in terms that not not
simply înflate 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 Nietesê’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.
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^ânated 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 THE R E T U R N OF

A SC E T IC 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 autûmn 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^û-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 spêaks 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 âsks, 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 philoso-
p ^ ^ 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 ‘ûth’ 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 trânsfi^guration’ whiA is defined by Nietzsche
as the capacity for traversing for many kinds of health, inclu^ding the health of
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?
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^êaning,
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 sickneês ‘n w b o ra ’ (ibid.: section 4).
Our has been shed; we have flôwn 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.
(Nietzsê 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 spêaks 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 ^ûnlikly places: in science in general, and in the positivist sciences in
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 misûst (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 at results that
serve to belittle (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 heat up the universe and render it conducive for
the 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
undêath them.
3
D E A D O R A L I V E
O n t h 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 diînction
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 ^înction 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 ^ ^îng (zermalen)
or a ^^ôrm 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.
"^ât 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 ânimals 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 death-
drive. Deleuze criticizes Freud for restri^cting death, conceived as the qualitative
and quantitative return of the living to ^ ^^nate matter, to an ‘exînsic, scientific
and objective’ definition. Althoûgh 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^îng 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 problemaâing (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 pre-
suppositionless organon of ‘^^îng’). '^Wht makes the unconscious productive
and positive is that it is driven by the ^^nôwn, the ^ im ^ ^ rable, the alogical, and
so on. It is not restricted either by lâltation 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 afâtion 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 mêans that in setting out to ^think
the ‘beyond’ peculiar to the pleasure principle Freud is ^^îng 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
rêality 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 pleûre
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
spêak of a ^nge of elements and pr^^ês that âke up its complicated
application. If the pleûre 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 someâng which ‘fals outride’ and ‘is not homogeneous’ with the pleûre
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 desexuîzation 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 prevîs. 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 pleâsure 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 fundêntal 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^ûl 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 ^^în 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 ^^îng 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 ^^îng 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 thermodynâmical 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 thermodynâmical conceptions and calculations of the energy of
the universe. A positive, dynâmical and processual conception of death, which
would release it from an anthropomorphic desire for death (for stasis, for being),
speâking 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 ^Ûsm.
To use the ianûge 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). is to post the world as
a ‘monster mêral without be^^ûg 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 maînic operations and
functio^ttgs? It is necês 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-^^îne, 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 ^^ôn of a ^^êndent 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 throûgh 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 oveâken 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 inver-
aon 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 Sôpenhauer’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 Nietzsê see âpter 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 assûming 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 wiân 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^âing (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^^îng’ 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 în, 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 ^^îng 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 '^îng and
desîng of repetition, ‘resembles’ the ^ l y a s presented in section 354 of The
G'!Y Science. In this section Nietzsche spêaks 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
ronîned the *wiêd 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 diînction 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 Guaâri
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 not do
or ‘you 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, hêver, the order-word
con^tains a w^ârning 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^âl re^turn —enunciates at one and the s ^ e
^me negation (death) and ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ t io n (flight). The words of the prophet spêak
of both a lounging for death and a longing for flight. Death heralds ^transformation.
As Deleuze and Guaâri 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 ^ûns, 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 brîng
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^âtion 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 flight act and
create’ (ibid.). Or, as Zarathustra sings it:
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
conâst 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 joûl 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^ê, the
difficulty resides in deter^ûng whether his d r e ^ of ^^âlation represents the
h^^rn pushed to its limit, and ^^crushed under the weight of it, as a kind of ^âite
trtragedy of the h^ân, 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 spêak 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^ttûstion 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 imâgines 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 thoûght death in relation to the aporetic ^stru^cture
of truth and pôwer, see^king a way of beyond, or acro& ,1the line’. ‘How
^ we cross the not re-^tabU^ the ‘truth of pôwer* 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^^îng 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 ^îs, as final end, as entropic
becoming), since such a desire is nothing more ^than life ^âing againrt life,
and is a phenomenon which is h^ân, a l too h^nan. The positing o f a death-drive
is nothing less ^than a reification of death, pla^cing it wiân 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-wêary and eûusted: one would rather
engage in uncreative destruction ân embark upon radical transformation.
One recalls in context ^âthustra’s speech to the ‘beyondworlders’
(Hinterweltlmi), in which he spêaks 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 ânts even to
■ânt’ . It is the sufe^ring of the weary and impotent whiA lies behind the creation
of a l ‘beyond worlds’. Deleuze and Guaâri 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 rêactive, 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 expânsion
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’
(Nietzsê 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 -^înêss 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 foûlated 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 ûious drive
c o u n t s to n o ^ ^ ^ less ^than the di^scovery of ineû 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 maînic 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 diveîng 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
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 ‘plêasure principle’ is only a ‘psyôlogical’
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 ^îng up of the death-drive
and repetition, Deleuze contends, is his real^tion that a negative schema, such
as amnesia, is insufficient for exp^îng 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 be seen to repetition only in the form of disguise. The
disguises, which 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 âfty 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^âing
to a previous, initial state of inorganic life, but is now that which gives repetition
its ‘disguising power’ and its âmanent 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 ^ênsese power of repetition remora
highly formalist. But what it succeeds in shôwing 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 only begin to show how a
utilization of Deleuzian-inspired thought make novel sense of the complex,
acentred narrative struûre 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 ^^îng 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 aâre 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^Ûiche 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 dôctrines, or thought-experiments, has
been overlooked and downplayed by the great majority of readers of Zarrathustr’a, including the
most diligent and âstute, sûch as Maurice Blanchot. See, for example, Blanôt 1993: 148-9,
where Blanchot con^^te 'the categorical Clarity with whichârathustra announces the overman
with the anxious and hesitant announcement of the external re^turn, sûgestingg 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 atîned ‘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 ârs 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 ^âthustra'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 âos
of the world; on the contrary, the eternal re^turn is the internal identity of the world and of âos,
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 be no
more a paswge to an ‘over-death’, a creative tr ^ fo ^ a tio n of the ûos
whiA gives b^th to a dancingg âr. 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 âd the repetitive figure, and symbol of
Zarathustra in terms of a 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 thoûsand 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 lêarn 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 ietesê’s
philosophy, be read as a monstrous fire-machine. The machine of ûnce — 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^ înspired 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 trâining in life and death
that requires cultivation, the cultivation of an ânimal capable of living even beyond
the 'beyond’ . From Zarathûstra’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 unequivôca ^^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 mêan to ^sugest that
the eternal re^turn lacks completenes or ^wholeness; on the con^^y, conceiving the eternal
re^turn as a positive ^^ûtive 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 ^ûite 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^ân, 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 desîng-
machines 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 ^ âge 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 dêath 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 ânxiety, 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, ^ôozinggolden,
for a girl's rounded mouth,
but for more girlish,
ice-cold, snow-white, cutting
teeth: for do
the hêarts of all hot dates lust. Selah . . .
The desert grows: woe to him who harbours deserts!
Stone grates on rtone, the desert swallows down.
monstrous dêath glowing bro^
and êws - . 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.

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])
HânkiHnd 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?
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’ in Nietzsche-reception, since at the very heart of Nie^^he’s outline
of his concerns in his major text, On the GenealOOJ' o f M oîtj, we find
a critical eâgement with the D ^ ^ ^ a n paradiigm of evolution. The GenealO[J is a
1 The connêction be^ren Nie^tzsche and Dârwin is touched upon by Heidegger in his 1930s
le^ctures on Ni^^ê, but the treatment of Dârwin is perfunctory and cavalier. See Heidêger
1961, vol^ne I: 72; 1979: 60. Heidegger’s reading of Nie^tzsche's ‘biologism' and Heidegger’s
o ^ e^êment 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’ Dârwin, he is, in fact, frequently
writing 'p ro ' Da^rwin and refuting only an erroneous image o f Dârwin 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 Dârwin’s ideas on evolution, and thus b e construed in some
crucial sense as a ^ ^ i e r who is indeed ‘contra Dârwin’ . 3 I shall endeavour to show
that N ietzsche’s position 'co n tra’ Dârwin 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
Dârwn's ^ ^ ^ in g on natural selection brings to bear on Niet7.<sche's Lebens-
p 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 Nietzsê 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 Empedoclâ 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^ûlans 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 Dârwin 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 be found in the final section o f S c h o p e n h a u e r
a s E d u c a to r). It 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
diînrt from its Lamarîan heritage. Haeêl, 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 inncoîrates 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 dôctrine of the inheritê 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 Êng^^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 ‘^ânation'. The Noch/os makes it d ^ " that the text Nietzsê
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: sêction 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-în 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 atîn a position of do^minance. Natûra 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 Natûra 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 selêction 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 psyêdelic 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^^âl 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 fundêntal 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 Daînian 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 meAîsm, whi^ gives the apârance 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 selêction is a continuing
process). See Eigen 1992: 121-7, ‘Resê: 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 illûminate, 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 frulûl exchange between philosophy,
phySiology, and medicine, Nietzsche’s overriding is to expand the horizon of
value, so that the fundêntal question, ‘what is the value of this or that table
of values and morals?’, be exâmined with the benefit of a wide array of
perspectives. Nietzsche advocates such a pluralism in order to prevent any ample-
minded reductionism conce^rning the fundêntal 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^foê) 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 Sîes 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 êxterminate unfavourable ones. See Paul 1988:
411-24.
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 de-
territorialization, 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 meâning 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^înd’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 atîned, ‘m^înd be able to find its best meâning as a machine in the
service of 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 piûre 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-soâl machine represents a high point in the
exploitation of ^man. Nevêrtheless, he insists, higher evolution ‘presupposes
those on whose account this exploitation has meâning’ . 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 regârds as the ‘leve^lling tendencies’ of modem sôcial 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 (gêstaltenden Kriê) 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^ân 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 Kaufmân 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 ‘will-
to-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 înfluence 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, volê 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
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 naturwis-
sensch<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^^Â. 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.'
dêrent 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 coûrse, Nieêtzsche 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 rêactive, principle of life. The only criterion of usefulnes or fit-
^nes is the process of naâtural selection itself, namely, the outcome of selêction. 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 âpter 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^^ân 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
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 geological-
historical 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^ûng), 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.’ Nietoê'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 ês.
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 Zwecclunassig-
keitslehre, 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. . . nêly, 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 ^^ôn (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 ârtiacts
are officially represented' (270).
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 dynâmics. 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 ‘ûsive’ model of evolution is moved into the
foreground, throûgh a notion o f‘adaptation’ , the ‘essence of life’ , n ^ ely , its ^wil-
to-power conceived as the of the reinterpeting, redirec^ting ‘formative
powers’, is lost sight of. Nietzsche politicizes this conflict wiîn the ‘natural
sciences’ by d^îng 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^ûte 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 sûrplus of overpowering and architectural excess, that
we make sense of his attempted critique of D^în (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^^ân-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 only account for such a perverse
history of the ‘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^^ân-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
mainîns, ‘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 Nieêtzsche
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
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 wêak (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 Nietesê’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^ês 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 mêan ‘the richest and most
complex forms’ (Nie^tzsche 1968: section 684) —takes place only rarely, and once
atîned 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. Nietzsê does not ^ ^ ^ , however, that one manufa^cture
the genius. Rather, a culture 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^^ûsm, however, is awkward and ambiguous. While
the thrust of his ^^îng 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^âtion 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^âtion 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 equilibâl 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 breedîng and an
advocate of artificial selection. Nietesche lâtes 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 natûra 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 self-
preservation: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 sêction 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 wêak because he left out
of his account the mind or spirit (Gein). lbe weak dominate the strong though large numbers
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 ‘panorâmic 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 hân survival. In 1982: section 26 he îtes: ‘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’.
Hênce 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 selêction’ in the opening chapter of the book
entitled ‘Variation sunder Domestication' ( ^ 93-5 ^^raally). Another example is Nie^tzsche’s
êrnêous 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 interêsting
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 Anti-
Oedipus. 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 ûnification and to^ûtion
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 ^^îng 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 molêcular/
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.
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 anthro-
p 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 anthro-
pomorphi^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 mechanism looks decidedly aw ^ ard and
31 Nietzsê points out that a 'species’ as such 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 negleîng to attend to these critical questions Nietzsche has
forgotten the earlier trenânt critique he had developed of David Strauss, in
which he argued that any na^tural scientist or philosopher who soûght to assert
an^îng 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 Dârwin’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.
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 îng 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 inînsic 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. Dârwin
was well aware of the danger of ‘perso^^rog nature’, and sought to clârify 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 be explained as adaptations, natural
selection 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-to-
power’. But what is to prevent us from regarding this conception, in conâst to
the mechanism of na^tural selection, as ênmeshed in a highiy anthropomorphic
model of p^ôsive, active evolution or becoming? It would appear that
Nietzsche, in upholding his ‘contra Dârwin’ position, is fatally propelled back
into that hangman’s metaphyaCS — of intentionality, of of teleological
p^posiveness —that he âs 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 bêing a d<^îne
of the ‘innocence of ^than Nietzsê’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 ^^û 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 be
construed as one that attempts to 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 wêak. ‘once and for a l ’ at a moment in history, that his ^^îng failss
in its ^task.
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 non-
anthropomorphic 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 ^^îng
to something like the ‘physiological’ and the “biological’. Such reductions might
yield interesting insights into his ^^îng, but they fail to realize the extent to
which Nietesche is first and foremost a ‘metaphysical’ thinker; indeed, for
Heidegger he is ‘the last metaphysiân’. This means for Heidegger that Nietesche’s
project of ^^îng the will-to-power only makes sense and becomes meîm^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 ^^îng (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 ^^îng 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 sûe 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 beîngness 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 mainîn that on a fundamental level
there exists no essential ^fference between them since both D ^ ^ ^ s m
and Nietzscheanism are trapped wiîn 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 ^^îng 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 lêast 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 conâry, 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 breeûg
and cultivation, which o^ns up to the artificial c^ffacter of its o^n arâl
tec^ q u es of selection, reveals its ôwn 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 eâordinary h^nan beîng
^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^tfdîng the future of man . . . anyone who fathoms the calâmity
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^^ân-
Europ^rn morality — suffers from an moiety that is past a l comparisons’
(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
^ûals’ (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
ârtificialized (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 mânkind —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^âr aacount of the theory of evolution, maintained that mânkind
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^înd finds itself ^fulfilling the role not of a shepherd of Being
but rather of a 'bûsine^ manager for the co^hic process of evolution’ (Huxley
1953: 132).
Accor^ding to Heidegger, the m^mer in whiA Nietzsche the problem of
man is 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’
^^îng 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^âcter 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 (Dârwin t 985: 132-3). It is well k n o ^
that began the Origin i f Species with a d is^sion of ânimal breeders
(‘breeding' being a paramount technological notion) and sought to estab^& the
laws of na^âl selection by mâking analogies with ânimal 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
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’ — pûrposively — 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 far-
higher workmanship’ (D ^^ in 1985: 133). '^êre humans simply select for their
o-wn îmediate 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^ân’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^^âl 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 ârtifice — 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. is a matter, however, that I want to leave
open for exploration in the next chapters.
A revea^ling and ‘indecisive’ moment in Heidegger’s r e a ^ g of Nietesche takes
place when he argues that although Nietesê relates eve^^mg to ‘life’, he
does not life ‘biologically’ . His reading then undergoes a twist in which the
desiûtions 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 pâsge 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 Nietesê stuck
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 ^rndêntal thought’ (1961, volume 1: 519 ; 1987: 41);
and (b) that the charge o f ‘anthropomorphism’ in no way constitutes a criticism
of Nietesche’s ^^îng, 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^îng
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^ûnic’
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 molecâr 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 andnon-
organic 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 pêw 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 grâsped’ (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
things. The animal is thus both ‘taken away' frompossibility and and‘^êlated 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^ânic 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 ‘thisffundêntal conceptionof captivation’ whichshould
form‘theprior basisuponwhichanyconcretebiological question<can. first come to
rest' (ibid.: 260).
^ât is most interes^ting about Heidegger’s ‘privileging’ of captivation/
motilityis the wayinwhichit challenges the D^^ûan 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^^îng ofthe ‘beco^^^’ of
lifeHeidegger’s comes close to Deleuze's emp^hasisonethology, although
Deleuze’sanalysis placeonamud more molecularand^^ânic 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 dynâmical 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^înctions of species and
genus. ^ât 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^ês, 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 ‘aîng’ 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
âpter 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 âracteristic of latching on: the ti^ climbs a
branch and drops onto a passing m^mal it has rôecogni^zedby smell, then lathes onto its s^n.
Active and perceptive âracteristics are themselves some^^^ of a double pincer, a double ârti-
ulation’ (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^wcôdings’ 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 conâst, 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).
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^îng — 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 it know in advance which
liaisons 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
ânimal worlds (for ^ m , however, it was solely a matter of empirical researd).
Deleuze and Guaâri 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 hylo-

morphic 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 ^^îng 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 ^^îng 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 throûgh 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 geûre,
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
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 eânces 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 ^^îng 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 îmages 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, Nietzsê insists, whether one
is h^^m or ûnial. 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 ânimal 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 attention in the next two
chapters. My is to êxplore the possibilities of a new ‘ma^ûc’
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 L I F E
O n m a c h i n e s , t e c h n i c s , a n d
e v o 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-ârtificial foundation. We are the
îldren of the consequences of this mistake. Instead of technical practices, we înherited 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).
^êweleit 1992: 260)
C^ênt continental philosophy contends that the h^ân is necessarily bound up

with an orginary technicity: technology is a constitutive prosthetic of the h^m ^
ânimal, a dangerous supplement that enjoys an originary status. 1 ^ a t is, the origin
of the ‘h^rnan’ as a species and a Dêin 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 collêctive 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 eqûly, 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 sûgesting 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 aûisition, not of inherited ^âcteristics 4 la
^Lamarck’s model of evolution, but of inherited bacterial symbionts, in which
‘âmid 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
prâxis (Reuleaux 1876/1963: introduction) — is to produce no^^^ but reitica-
tion. As Bergson pointed out in his ^^îng 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 Guaâri’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 fundêntal element upon which ev e^ ^ ^ ^ else depends. Deleuze
and Guaâri 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 Guaâri’s mapping
of the ‘creativity’ of machinic hfe provides a fundêntal 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 ûsedto account for the emergence of matter in terms of an
emergent symbiosis between living matter and h^rnan te^nology. For Vemaâdskythe 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 ^^îng 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 Guaâri’s joint work and their u^tilization of population
^^îng 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^âry 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 nomad-
ology, 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 Guaâri
make the identical point, speâking 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 ^ânteeing the survival of the most
divergent (Deleuze 1994: 248). In this work Deleuze conveniently ignores
Nietasche’s critique of Dârwin where the critical focus is on the reified notion of
‘fitness’ . On Nietasê’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 sôol 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 Auseinanderûung 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^îval of the fittest' app^êd 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^^ân 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 ânimal 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 selêction acts solely for the good of each being, ûleavoûring to strike a ‘fair
balance' betw^m the ^go and evil ca^d by êach 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 differen-

ciation (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 valuespûliar 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 throÂ 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 ^^îng
of difference and repetition, in terms of a ^^îng 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 ‘individuâ.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^^êimer 1959 and, more recently, Lovtrup 1987: 150-65, who g ^ so far as to
contend that to ôose 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 sinârities 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). explains why it
becomes necessary. to about machines, about the reality of parts ând
wholes, about m ac^&c modes of ‘evolution’, and about a ‘machinic s’^ plrn-
value’ that produces an excess which ^canot be located wiîn 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 suêstion that the work of D^win and his so-called ‘pre-Dârwinian’ 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 arêd 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 throûgh 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
‘meânosphere’, must be seen as being, in ^part, directed at the overly spiritualist and cosmicist
interpretation of ‘evolution’ and ‘involution’ advâted 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^înd 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 ‘hân 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^înd, nature
has created a machine that ^^c^cends mere m^^^m: the hân 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 tecôlogy, 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^^rniîng 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 clâims upon life (and death). The
detailed structure of the organelles in eûkaryotic 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 âe 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 ^ûes (‘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 ^^îng 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 enterîn 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 be
used to explain how novel phenotypic straits come about through the ^ ^ ^ u ti on
of o r^ ^ ^ r a of Afferent species. One ^^mple given of a ^^îotic 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 becoming-
baboon 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 ânimals’ (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 ânalysis 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 ceêrtain 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 ‘disê-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^îng 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 Grnâri 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 Graâri 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
bêhind 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 môdification', whiA is genealogical identity in
difference. The dis<^ôn of matttters of embryolôgy and morphology in the final chapter of the
^rok, before the ‘re^capitulation andconclusion', takes place in the context of an ex^^âtion of
‘classification': ‘communityin embryonic structure reveals community ofdescent’ (Da^rwin 1985:
427). Dârwin 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). Dârwin 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^^âted prior to the
^^m g they undergo in hybridism. The difference is ûcial 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 ^înction 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^ânian
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^âing. 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 iîn philosophy the machine has been c^&ically defined in contradistinction
to the or^^^m along the foll^ôwing lines: an or^ ^ ^ R is a self-organized being in
w h id the pârts 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^ôsiveness), 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^ânic 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^ûng 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
ânimal whose existence in the visible order of things appears as ‘arbiâry,
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 trûhuman 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 Guaâri point out, an ab^ract machiIie is dêstratified
and deterritorialized vvith no f o ^ o f its o ^ . An abstract machine in itself, that
is, viewed from inside accorûg 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 sprûng 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^ân 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^îm (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
trûfoâtion 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 dêsignis 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 defoâtion 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. ‘Orgânization’ 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 orgânization is the org^âtion 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 orgânization. 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 ^^înes in physical space, a l of them
are organized in such a way that any ‘interference’ with their operation outside
their domain of compensations result in their disintegration. Maturana and
Varela 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 ^înction between
machine (automaton) and living (spontaneous) becomes untenable and must break
dôwn. The classic view is that ^ ^ tin e s are ^man-made a r ^ a ^ with completely
d e te ^ ^ ^ ^ c properties and perfectly predictable. Conâriwise, living syrtems
are deemed to be a priori autonomous, unpredi^ctable system. The prejudice is
that man could not manufaûre a li^ng system but ‘only’ a macchine. As a rêsult of
these redefinitions, however, certain distinctions begin to break dôwn and certain
prejudices get supplanted.
In spite of the progresave of the last ^ ^ ^ t , a fundamental meta
physical opposition operates deep wiîn the so-scaled machinic ^^îng of the
s^ o o l of autopoiesis. Maturana and Varela’s conception of the ^^chine as a self-
referential, 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 molar-
organized 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
mainîn that if new components endowed with new functions come into existence
in a system, then the org^âtion 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 ^înct 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 ^îng 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 ^înction
between motive and formative powers. In Deleuze and Guaâri’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^^âg 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 Guaâri’s formulation
‘de^âg-machines’ , in w hiA the machine passes to the hêart 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 throûgh ^rational mis^âgs; that is, formation
reqûires defoâtion, and what ^m.alc:es evolution a machinic procere is the fact
that it takes place throûgh curings, breakages, slippages, brêakd^û, and so on.
S tru ^ ^ ^ unities and phenomena (such as molar a^^gates) conceal the
VIROID LI FE I 144
intrinsic direction of 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 Zweên. 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 ssusîn 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 âked 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 ûsage, 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 is the ox w hich draws
the plough. D eleuze and Gua^ttari 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 ârtificially 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^âtion.
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^îmg is p e ^ it-
ted’ 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 by the king: 'if there e^xists a
completely automated factory, it 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 alrêady 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 unlêashed by the ^^^w-tendencies of capitalism.
■^While capital melts down eve^^M g that is solid and profanes all that is holy,
bourgeois ■Society guârantees 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’ fâshionby Habe^nnas (1987: 57ff.), who argues that ‘têchnology’ —conceived as sci-
en^fc^y rati^^^^ control of objêctifiod 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 têchnology and technics. As Habermas notes,
one of the ways in w^hichadvanrcd capi^talist ^society ‘îmuni?^’ itself against the deterritorial-
impact 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^^îng 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 ^înctly 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 deîny 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 complexi-
fication, only provide simple options that are not options at aU, s u ^ as
a retreat into a new ethical purism (mo^îng 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 ÛTent
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^rch-
ing' 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 ûninteresting, 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 con-
tempo^rary hyper-colonistic capi^^rn —Kelly’s identification of speed with ^m-
ple a lte r a tio n illûstrates this — ^back into the meûnics of the biosphere,
resulting in a biological jûstification of entropic mode^âtion in its most
guise (speed is ireastible). X1There are other reactive forces at play
in recent paêans 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 dôwnload 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 êsy ‘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 succêedman 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^êcognition 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 mâdUneintelênce 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
selêction is on the fact that it takes time, time he d ^ not have, he tells us. ‘Who ^
wait a million yêars?’ 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^îng, 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 ‘reintrûce a fatal into the virâl immortality of the transpolitical’
(Baudrillard 1994: 51). Po^ modeernity (h^ân, a l too h^ân) 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 (lêarn to growl, burrow, and distort yourself).
6
T I M E L Y M E D I T A T I O N S O N T H E
T R A N S H U M A N C O N D I T I O N
N i h i l i s m , 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 ^ hân, al too human folly.
(Nietzsê 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 hân 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 ^êm 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 îmedidiacy 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^ârd 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 ûnhappy 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 material-
forces. 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^înd 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, aûûed 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 mânkind 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 âbandoned
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 mânkind and teAnology, whiA rests on the supposition that mânkind 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 oûght to be ûsed, and let them alone as something whiA d ^ not afect our
inner and real core' (Hei^^^r 1966: 54).
VIROID LI FE / 154
embracement of our current inhumanization 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 ^^êrs 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 open-
ended 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 ûngoîness 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^êst 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 conîns a hidden plan, and reason
ass^nes a ^^îng 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^îng 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 ô^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 ^ânation —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 ^^îng on nature’s
design for mânkind, 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^êment 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 pûrposes, including ones, with an ‘âimless, 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^âtion 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^nlciânt 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 ^ôry 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 naê âcts prudently and ^^^y,
doing ‘no^^g uun^ssarily’ and never being 'extravâgant in the mêans 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 so-
called 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^ân 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 unequivôcal
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^âing to re-experience and revalue some ‘plain truths of the ^ânt past’ . îs
nostakâ 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 âcpted as
history’ . His commitment to hârmony and static eqîbrium 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 markeûtion 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.
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 Traôrmations 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^îmg 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 Mârxs
^^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 appeârance, 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 objêcts 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 ‘prôcess 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^înd 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
ûnmediated, 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^ûg 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 êconomy 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 ûnfolding of economic time
mêans that mânkind is subjected to the ‘time of ^ ^ ^ ’, the prûction
of objects produced accor^ding to the 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’ ^ôrical time, in whieh the non-alienated self-co^nstitution and p r ^ a l
^^ôrmation of the worker are pitted a ^ ^ ^ the alienated and automatic
objêctification of the commodity form (don’t you reco^^re yourself in your
alienation, you miserable co^nsciousness?). The subject of history nnames a living
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
assûming its rightful ownership of, and control over, it.
8. This ^^îng 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^^âble 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 îmediate and transparent to the
subject who makes history. Debord writes poetically of the prospects for a
new prole^ân 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^îng 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 ânalysis 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^îng pâliels betweeen Debord’s depiction of the sp^êctacl
and Feuerbach’s critique of religious illusion in his Essence i f Chritiianity of 1841,
that, other ^than for the detail of p^^âg, the ^^»urse of Situationism
foUows word for word a Hegêlian of alienation, objectification, negation,
and ^ ^ s a l , in a reveâl 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 bâck dôwn 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^ûng 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 wiân
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 ânalysis is offered w h i^ disclaims a l mediation, whether
‘political’ mediation in the form o f the stru^^ting ^ântiation 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 drêam
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 âcm 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 every-
since, 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 mânkind 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-
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 waârning 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^ûng ^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 unhumânized and mânkind 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 be reco^tized as the
vir^tual truth of a l h ^ a n history to date. It is fo r reason that N ie^ ^ h e clâims
that the causes o f 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^êaning and mêasure 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^êaning had been wiwiped away, with
the eârth unchained from itsthe so-called p ^ a c le o f life on finds its
world gro'^wing colder by the moôving 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 since their adaptive
capacities are severely terted by it. Their and so^âre 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 non-
anthropocentric 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 sinâlarity 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 ^ûnderstanding
of the processes of life. It is this reWed logic of life that explain all •
human philosophies of pessimism and such as that which we find in
^ôpenhauer, where the denial of life is posited as the of evolution. If life does
not conform to the 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 meâsured by aspects of copiousness. In this the
means of inhuman life are made to ândthe wished-for human end.
The miâke is that ^^cad of a purpose being identified which might explain such
a means, a goal that a^ûly 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 coâin
means as a norm —^namely, p le a ^ t, rational, and virtuous ones —on the baas of
which is then poated the general pûrpose 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 the e^ ten co
of God is the e^xistence of God. liberation from about the h^^m
condition and lot is po^ ble once the total co ^ cio ^ eM that poats mêans 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^ôse, then belongs among comical ^things. There is no ‘in-itself’
behind evolution (evolution is not ‘spirit’) (ibid.: section 709). The world is not
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 êach 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^,,), eteêmaly!’.
7 I owe wonderful to Baudrillard (1994: 97), who, unnec^^^y and somewhat
myopically, restricts its to the genetic ^transmutation ^êntly 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^ând’s anthropocentric

claim on history. Why, Nietesche asks, is it necessary to ascribe to eve^îmg that
happens in na^ê 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 trêndous 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 ôwn 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 pâve 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^âr 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 thoûsand 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
mânkind enjoys no ul^mate purpose in the evolution oflife the inference is
that there is no m^îng at all. As such, ^nihilism ^ûnes 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 ‘ûninvited guest' that
signals death, decay, and degeneration. A great deal of and cultûral 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 —^ôming must be explained
without recode to final intentions . . . ' (Nietzsche 1968: section 708).
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 jûstice to its complexity. The notion of the ‘rhizome’ , for example,
serves to demonstrate that there is no cental controlâg 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 indûstry, 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 ^&orical time, both heralding the future
(which 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 prêsent we are witu^âg in a wide grange of di^»urses, including ^cyber-

theory, 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 brâins. 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 anthro-
pocratri^^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 ârtificial evolution
is also that which compels them to en^rnce their arartifiâlity 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 thermodynâmic instability, tr ^ fo ^ ^ n g stable systems into
ûnsable 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 ânimal, 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 mêans to atîn its ends, homo sapiens ‘is persistently
assailed by v ^ p r a h objects and agencies whose coUective negativity be
designated as the predatory enemy of rationality, the of reason’ (ibid.:
22).This is where speculation on the coaming of the mac^nes enters the pi^^re. It
is machines that 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 self-
reprodu^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 neg-
entropic 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 so escaping the moment
of death.
17. If -vision of the future sounds like a horrible concoction of science, science
fiction and highly dubious theology, it is even more ^û 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 ^^îng 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 ôuld 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 selêction’
(ibid.: 310).
VIROID LI FE / 1 68
display of fireworks. At the moment the earth is just a little beyond the halây
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 exo-
colonistic 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 âs, and
it was - is that of time, or rather to be more precise, the fact that the universe is
^âing 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 ûnfor^mtely o^Mpy, energy is cheap but there is no
time to waste. A l life-forms, Lyotard sûgests, 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^ân 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^âing and control of info^ration, such as its
m e m o ^ tio n , less and less dependent on eârth-bound conditions. The h^ân
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. ’
process of complexification. n Cybernetics appears as the (in)human science of

control and communication which freely places itself in the service of the neg-
entropic 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-^^ârency 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 hânoids, it is the ‘p ro g r^ m e’ that is proving
better able to meet the cchallenges th r o ^ dôwn 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
mêans 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 biolôgy’.
12 See Lyotard 1989, where he ^ês: ‘^ is is what the postmodern world is all about. Most
people have lost the no^lâ 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 înh^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, orgânization, 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 ^ ôncal 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 (^ûn
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 ryêm
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 ^^îng 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 prôces of na^tural selection seleîng 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
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 ûde 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^âmsm 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 ^^îng 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 Lamarân schema of evolution. For
more onsee Bur^rodt 1995: 15 Iff.
14 ‘The i^îng of reason in human for Hegel and the ^^îng 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 / 1 72
As Deleuze and Guattari argue, capitalism be treated as an ‘îom 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 diêdited. Grand
nârtives 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 ^êrnetic drêam 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-reâla^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. Ceâin power interests are nicely served by such
16 The difference Deleuze and Gua^ttari are refeîng 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
mbsêd by a higher formal unity except by means of ^^^^ênce (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.
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^âtion 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 ârd 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^ûng techniques of these local cultures already contain their o^n highly
sophisticated and intellênt mec^misms and systems of feedback in which lêarn-
ing 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 ceâin produ^, sueh as from
cows, seed from gâin, and so on. This is not an ar^rnent 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^îman models of survival of the fitt^ :, but in sueh âcunts 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 appênt univer^ t r i^ p h of
c a p i^ ^ development by app^âg 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 Massûmi has argued, capital
operates virtually in the sense that it ^ ^ fo ^ n s production into futural process
suality in which activity is ^m dêntaly energetic rather ^than object-oriented. It"
is not, for e x ^ p le , isimply a question of late-modern society capi^^ting on life-
forms 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^îne 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 lêarned
how to moleculûe 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
deterritoriaâtion, becoming little more than the effectuation of a pro^^^me
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 egâchine) (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 subjêction: ‘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 ^înction be^reen the
or^rac com âtion 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 thînction (compare Mar^we 1968: 2 7 -3 7 ).17
17 For ^further into the development of hân and maînic surplus value see the impoânt
analysis in ^de^% and Gua^ttari 1984: 232ff. & they note, the flows of <ê liberated in science
and by the capitalist mode of production engender a maînic 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 Guaâri 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 continûaly re-create
unexpected possibilities for ‘counterattack, ûnforeseen initiatives dete^^îng
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 ânimal —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 ^^îng 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).
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 îmediate interests conflict with their
long-term interests. As a result, soâl 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 syêm, 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 ^êm such as late cap i^ sm serve to explain ’-.hy
the of has become so endemic to the on every level from the
^»nomic to the moral, political, and cul^tural. On the economic level, the
is generated by, firstly, the secular ênd of complete co^môdification (now
widely âcpted 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 âbly on the
level of a cul^tural politics. As Wallerrtein notes, the worldwide assemblage of anti-
sysymic movements has, from 1% 8 on-^^ds, Wronger, bolder, and
more d iv ^ e and ^difcult to conîn and m^wge. The sense of ^îs ^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 Guaâri 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 orgânized 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 ^^ôrmations
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
oôsite direction? To go stiU ^further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and
deterritorialization?’ ^ eleu ze and Gua^ttar 1984: 239)
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 ÔTket 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 expreîon 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 , diÔTmony, 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
eqîbrium of a l the p^te’, ev o l^ g in terms of the ‘alienation of opposites’,
with ‘êachpart a Spirit at home in whole’ (Hegel 1980: sectioro 462 and 486).
On model a l ‘negativity’ (what is alien or outside) only exists to confirm
the immense self-recuperative powers of Reason, which even look into ‘the
e n ^ ^ of and open every vein in them’ and 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 dynâmical 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 ^
^ôry (the ôry 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 out
work on 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. '^ât 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^îng 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 ^cdoûess 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 ^înction between the two models by de^ribing me^^nical
systems as ‘statutes’ that are based on ^rity and eqîbrium, 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 begin to conceive
the dyn^nics of multi-temporal living systems, including the 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^^îng 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 aûnt 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 enoûgh for its terms to be
reversed so that it could be used to build a reêrator. 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 piîc ‘abs^^
marines’ see ^wgton 1988: 11.
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 explâing 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 thermo-
dyn^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 ôwn 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 ‘^îm al n e t^ r k of components that is able to
maintain its o'wn o^^^ration andto ^ûform an u n o r^ ^ ^ d system into
one of or^ ^ ^ ôn ’ ( 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 ^êm s.
28. ^What are the implications of para^^n-^^: in the na^tural sciences, away
from static and eqrfibâl models to non-linear and dynâmical ones, for an under-
ânding of soâl 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).
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 exângers and
connectors of energy and information. It is these complex adaptive systems that
have shaped h^ân 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-orgûzation. 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
chânge is viewed in te^ra of fixed and meânistic processes ^fcng place in a
closed universe. In its concreteness and dmplicity evolution by selection of the
‘fittest’ is âlogous 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 ^^ônnation 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 path-
dependency 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 ûlysis 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 main-
that 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
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 is A ^ c t e r i z e d
by long periods o f foUowed by abrupt periods o f êxploave 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
ând non-adaptive. The efectss in embryology o f the macro-m utations ^ to be
und^^ôod as *^ ^ »d in g ’ . A p ^ ^ e l be found in the philosophy o f te^m ology
in a g ra d ^ ^ ^ model has dominated until quite recently. Even thoûgh
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 of cumulative inventions
into the law of 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
ryêm, 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^^ êd tectonic change as ^^ng place ^^dûly 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’
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
fundêntally ‘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^êrm 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 sîken.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 mîne 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 naâtural selection, and no
doubt orthodox D^îmsts 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 selêctionworks
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
^înction between ‘extra-tOT^^Î' ‘terrestrial' would be an îâry one,, it ^ be
^gued that even on the level of development the geography of the is subject to
constant and dramatic <^^ê on âcunt 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 cê 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^ôund of constant change. It is within suA an ‘environment'
of geological Aange that ultra-Darwinists (non-progressivists) see natural selêction 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 fuê 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.
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^îng 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 Bagehot, W. 87

Adams, H. 170 Bataille, G. 69-70
adaptation 4-5, 30, 33, 88, 9^92, 99, 107, Bateson, G. 88-9 n. 9
117, 130, 136, 149,174, 184-5, 187; and Baudrillard, J. 2, 29, 29 n. 21, 3^5, 147,
exaptation 88; gradualist 188 149, 152, 174; on the subjective illusion of
Adorno, T.W. 36, 154 technology 152
anthropocentrism 2, 6, 11, 13, 24 n. 12, becoming(s) 5-8, 11-12, 15-16, 19-20, 25,
115-17, 119, 124, 132, 137-8, 152-3, 27-8 , 43-5 , 4—51, 58, 61-3, 73, 77, 80,
159, 161-2, 164, 170; se ak 83,92-4, 99, 107-8, 111, 116-21,
de-anthropocentrization 125-6, 131, 135—6, 138, 150, 154 n. 3,
anthropomorphism 5, 7-8, 11, 29, 32, 59, 62, 156, 162-5, 183-4, 188; ofalien life 139;
86, 90, 105-7, 109-15, 122, 1-H, 149, of the animal 118, 120; anti-enttopic 170;
161, 170; and Darwin 127 n. 6; and block of 130, 135; and evolution 135; and
110; Deleuze and Guattari on history 23; and memory 14 n. 4, 23-4, 24
119; Nietoche 163; and n. 12, 28; -^minori^rian 178; -molecular
Nieteêanism 110 179; Somatic 134, 145; and technology
Apollonian 120 171
Arendt, H. 20 n. 10 ^mjâmin, W. 24, 26 n. 17, 28 n. 20
^to^^tic ra&calism 106 Bergson, H. 6-7, 27 n. 19, 62, 92-3 n. 13,
Artaud, A. 82-3, 189 117-18, 123 n. 1, 124—5, 125 n. 2, 131
ârtificial life (A-life) 4, 34, 148-9, 183 n. 9, 134, 142, 149-50
ascetic ideal 33, 37-9, 47, 5^5 b io l^ ^ 12, 1^-12, 114—15
âslage(s) 71, 120, 139, 145, 174; Bh^&^ro, R. 166, 170—1
theological 145; se a/so machinic Blanchot, M. 63, 66, 78 n. 10; on teAnology
auto-catalysis 182 160
autopoiesis 117, 122, 125 n. 2, 1^^2, 1^- fol^mann, L. 180
autopoietic m^^fte 1^^1 Braudel, F. 145
Bôks, D.R. 181
bacteria and origin of 132 B ^ o , G. 24
Baer, K.E. von 129-30 n. 8 Buder, S. 2, 139, 142-3, 149 n. 16, 171
INDEX / 200
Cambrian explosion 188 n. 20 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F.: 7, 14 n. 4, 23,

Can^lhem, G. 144 46, 67-8, 77, 82, 104, 118 n. 35, 119,
capitalism 2, 145-50, 171 —2, 174-8; see also 122, 126, 130, 13[ n. 9, 134-6, 138, 143,
late-modem capital 145-6, 165, 172, 172 n. 16, 174, 176,
Carnot, S. 179-80, 180 n. 19 178; Anti-Oedipus 104, 178; on the
categorical imperative 46, 66 death-drive 71; on mimicry 103 n. 26; on
Chardin, T. de 31, 125 n. 2, 131 n. 9, 167, non-organic life 120, 125, 130; on politics
167 n. 9 178; on social and technical machines 143,
Christianity 2 145-8, 174-5; A Thousand Plateaus 22, 67,
Clausius, R. 180, 185 71, 118 n. 35, 126; on undecidable
complexity theory 93, 122, 128, 179, 182-3, propositions 178-9; ôt is Philosophy! 7,
185, 187 23 n. 12
Conway, D.W. 38 Dennett, D.C. 133; on S.J. Gould 188 n. 20
Copernicus, 55 Demda, J. 11,48
Csanyi, V. 142, 181 desiring-ma^chines 143
cyberspace 2-3, 33 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
Darwinism 126; on natural selection 1W; native principle of selection 101; as
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 selêctive thought 44;
Nietzsche's superman 12; on reactive force and thêrmodynamics 62, 80
88 n. 8; on selection 43-5. 76. 127-9, ethology 117, 136; s& also Deleuze
147 eugenics 14, 34, 167 n. 9
INDEX / 20 1
feedback 15, 29, 62, 88-9, 97 n. 22, 102, Junger, E. 152, 159
134, 140, 147 n. 15, 148, 174, 179, 182,
184, 186 Kampis, G. 142
Feuerbach, L. von 159 Kant, I. 27 n. 18, 29, 32, 32 n. 23, 66, 86
Foucault, M. 16 n. 8 n. 2, 113, 115, 126, 133, 138, 143, 154;
Freud, S. 24, 26, 58-61, 63-4, 71-6, 83, on the organism I 36-7; on universal
160; and involution 130 history 155; see also Nietzsche
Kauffman, S.A. 128, 184
Galileo 24 Kelly, K. 32, 149, 149 n. 17
Geist 18, 99, 102-3 n. 26, 170; see also Klossowsd, P. 45 n. 2, 46 n. 3
technics
God 7, 41, 123, 160, 162, 179; death of 12, Lamarck, J.B. 4, 25, 28 n. 20, 61, 87, 124,
37, 68, 159, 168 148-9 ; see also neo-Lamarckism
Goldschmidt, R. 185 Lampert, L. 38
Goodwin, B.C. 13 n. 3 Laplace, Marquis Pierre Simon 182
Gould, S.J. 166, 184-5, 187, 188 n. 20 late-capital 5, 147, 174-5; and complexity 177
grand narratives 2-4, 124, 148, 165, 169, Lavoisier, A.L. 180
170, 172 Leroi-Gourhan, A. 29-31, 160
Guaâri, F. 6, 76 n. 9, 128, 144-5; on Lyell, C. 186
complexity 145; see also Deleuze Lyotard, J.F. 3, 124, 167-9, 169 n. 12,
170-4, 176 n. 17, 183
Habermas, J. 172; on te^mology 147 n. 15
Haeckel, E.87, 126, 129 n. 8, 131 n. 9 machinic 5, 114-17, 122, 130, 134, 136-7,
Hegel, G.W.F. 96 n. 21, 115-16, 137 n. 12, 139, 141-3, 176, 178; assemblages 125,
179 146, 175; becomings 134-5, 143, 176;
Heidegger, M. 11-12, 16 n. 8, 33, 38, death 82; enslavement 165, 175, 179;
114-15, 117, 118 n. 35, 119, 122, 157, heterogenesis 139, 145; hyper-text 145;
159, 169; on von Baer 130 n. 8; on philosophy of history 165; phylogenesis 6;
Nietzsche's biologism 109-12; on the phylum 175; surplus-value 130, 175,
organism 115-16; on technology 152-3, 175—6 n. 17; unconscious 74
153 n. 2 Malthus, T. 96, 96 n. 20, 96 n. 21, loo
Hering, E. 28 n. 20 Marcuse, H. 3-4, 28 n. 20. 74 n. 7, 159, 172
Hobta, T. 98, 127 n. 6 Margulis, L. 125 n. 2, 132 n. 10
Huxley, J. 111 Marx, K. 32, 127 n. 6, 145, 147, 157, 175.
Huxley, T.H. 87 186
hybridation 136 Massumi, B. 6, 174
hylomo^tasm 120 Matuâ, H. 1^^2
Mechanosphere 120, 125, 131 n. 9
involution 19, 34, 118, 130, 136; creative memes 1, 13
130, 131 n. 9; and evolution 126, 128, memory 14, 17, 20, 22, 24-8, 30-1, 36, 61,
131 n. 9; of 13 66, III, 121; organic 94 n. 15; te^mics of
23-4, 27-8
James, W. 87 Mendelian genetics 183
Jameson, F. 3, 157 n. 5, 170, 171 n. 15 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, 40, 82, 91, I l l , 161, 163; see also
142-3, 148, 174; politics 178 posthân and transhuman
molecular 5, 23, 102, 1W-, 104 n. 30, overman 14-15, 21, 37— 1, 50, 54, 56, 68,
116-17, 174 78-80, 91, 101; see also Ubermensch
Moravec, H. 33, 167-8
M ^ fo rd , L. 4, 157 perfect n^list 164
Penman extinction 187
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
180, 183; see also entropy machinic
neo-Darwinism 126, 129; se also Pippin, R.B. 38
ultra-D^^™sm plane of immanence 46, 120, 151
neo-Lamarckism J, 149; te^no-Lamarckism political, death of 150
166 political theory 146
N eôn, I. 182 politics of desire 146
Nietesche, F.: on the ânimal 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
19-20; Beyond Good and Evil 1 ^ ; The Birth ^transhuman
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 146
death of God 12; fcce Homo 15; ând 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, rhizomatic/rhizome 6, 14 n. 4, 24 n. 12, 124,
105, 108; Thus Spoke Zarathustra 38, 77, 1M, 1 3 4 - , 144-5, 165, 171
80; Twi/ight rfth e Idols 106; s e also 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, capital 7, 147; of entropy 7, 181; of
50-1, 73, 89, 108, 110, 165; Nietzsche's nihilism 7, 164, 164 n. 8
50-1; of the will to truth 138 transference 76
Serres, M. 179, 180 n. 19 transhuman 1-4, 6 -8 , 10, 32-3, 3 5 ^ , 39,
Simondon, G. 12 8 n. 7, 160, 183-4; on 105, 108, 122, 138, 154, 160-1, 163
ontogenesis 184 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 95 n. 18
spirit: se Geia 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; Wallace, A.R. 29 n. 21, 88 n. 9, 90 n. 12,
and theory 184 111-12
teAnology 4 -5 , IO n. 1, 11, 25, 31, 114, Wallerstein, I. 177-8, 182; on the crisis of
123, 132, 147-8, 152, 157, 160, 164-5, capitalism 177
168, 173-4, 176, 179, 184, 186; 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; naturals selection 1 12; as will-to-power 8, 12, 21, 90, 9 2 -4 , 97-8,
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; ^ t h u s t r a 37 -8 , 58, 67, 70-1, 76-7, TO,
sub^ctive illusion of 152 8 0 -1 ; becoming of 58; death of ^ ;
Tipler, F. 167 Zarathustra-Nachlass 77-8

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VI ROI D LI FE

K eith A nsell is Senior ^ ^ to e r and Director of Graduate ResearA at the University of

KEITH ANSELL PEARSON

LONDON AND NEW YORK

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

© 1997 Keith Ansell Pearson

Typeset in Perpetua by Keystroke, Jacaranda ^Lodge, Wolverhampton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library Congres Cataloging in Publication Data

N ietzsche co n tra D arw in 85

6 Tim ely M ed itations on th e T^ranshuman C ondition

Chapter 1 is an extended version of a chapter due to appear in John Uppitt (ed.),

Chapter 2 is a modified version of an essay that first app^eared as ‘Toward the

Chapter 3 is a modified and extended version of an essay entitled 'The Re^turn of

Chapter 4 appear in modified form in D. W. Conway (ed.), Ni^^Ae: Critical

‘All truth is simple’ —is that not a compound lie?

In volume of essays I question, problematize, over^turn, revalue, ^mounce,

one (neither of these are, in fact, simply ‘empirical’). Current teclmo-theorizing

today we see their return taking place within a variety of contemporary

• The fi^gurtion of the future in Nietesche, in which Nietesche portrays ^himself

‘teclmological transformation of the earth and of human activity’ (Heidegger

• The question of N ietas^e’s relation to modern biology and theories of

Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality is perhaps more apposite now than ever

4 It is misleading to refer to a ‘point' of origin since in ^^^mg out a complex rendition of

of arriving at a pessimistic suspicion in the face of man, which would be no

The phenomenon of memory is multiple: one speak: of molecular memories,

Guattari oppose ‘becoming’ to ‘memory’ in their attempt to construct a non-

It has to be noted that Nietoche will employ a reading of culture, of

As Deleuze maintains in his study of Proust, memory works as a ‘tool’ — one

If it is ‘habit’ that constitutes the ‘foundation’ of time (Deleuze follows Butler on

we see in commemorative rituals and social disciplines in which collective

22 Compare Derrida on the necessity of reinven^ting invention (1992 : 339).

in gross anthropomorphisms. Evolution, we are told, has been ‘searching’ the

23 In his critique of teleological judgement Kant seeks to legitimize a ‘te^nical’ understanding of

Nietzsche regarded as providing fertile soil for an immanent process of continual

vitalism, the rise of artificial life-forms and intelligences, and developments in

promise inhuman futures to the extent that a monstrous memory of humans is

It would seem abund^dy c l ^ that the notion of the ove^^m is a deeply

vacant residence of God? One solution to the problem, adopted by a number of

The identity of the ‘we’ in Nietzsche ^ ^ m es vvarious guises in the prefaces he

asceticism and suffering: it is also the excessive invention of an overflowing

The eni^rca of liberation involves a process of ‘self-mastery’ in which one

becomes an object of itself as an object o f affirmation, is not to ‘solve’ the riddle

O F R O M A N TIC ISM AND S IC K N E S S :

pessimism — a pessimism born out of the health of the recovery of invention

Here it is a question o f ap^^ing not so m ud to in^incts as to their beco^^g,

it is a question o f forces and their genealogical becoming. Like Rousseau,

GAV S C IE N C E AND THE R E T U R N OF

The paradox is that this is to judge sickness ‘beyond’ judgement, to ‘beyond’

Nietesche does not bind us to the history of morality. Morality is Wlable to go

principle — something ‘beyond’ (Jenseits) — explains why Freud is involved in a

merits o f Deleuze’s early reading of Nietzsche to show the extent to which

Deleuze’s reconfiguration of the death-drive be ill^wninated by considering the

resemblance, measurement, etc. Consciousness develops through the pressure for

The problem o f death as transformation (flight) or as a leap into a black hole

drives now reveal themselves to be the expression of the conservative nature

Ul^mately, one must reco^rae that infor^ming Freud's entropic model of

— and to interpret the passages and tunnels of death mechanistically and