Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories by Jeffrey M. Jackson

Author:Jeffrey M. Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

For psychoanalysis, love is the irrational, largely unconscious, basis of sociality . The coupling of the bad conscience with love is the making social of the bad conscience—the sanctification of bad conscience with the implicit proclamation that to be social means to share in social ressentiment , which Freud links with the cultural superego. Thus, love—the most fundamental social bond—is infused with the fetishization of ressentiment. Nietzsche uses proto-psychoanalytic language , characterizing the problem of bad conscience as a problem of being fixated, of being cut off, “once and for all, from the way out.” Within this fixated culture, when we love our family, friends, partners, communities, ideals, symbols, or selves, we must do so in a way that arises from and perpetuates ressentiment , because only this is recognized as love within the cultural symbolic.

The crucifixion, the symbol of ultimate humiliation and rupture of our sociality , becomes the basis for all social life within which the traumatized are barred from all reparation, since that would entail exposure to the more or less traumatic negativity of history . Humiliation is the basis of the reification of exchange in the idea of an unpayable debt; such a fixated experience which bars exchange can be seen as a defense against relationality as an exchange. The bad conscience is the fixated vigilant defense against contending with socio-historical suffering . Unable to bear the temporal, suffered struggle for existence, the defense mechanism takes on the ultimate social sanctification by equating itself with love. Alternative forms of love are to be repressed, or obliterated at all costs. All of this comes to a culmination in Christianity’s “stroke of genius: none other than God sacrificing himself for man’s debt … God paying himself back … as the only one able to redeem man from what … has become irredeemable … out of love for his debtor! … ” (63). God’s love thus divinizes subjects who are unable to bear the suffered struggle of life—a struggle which requires us to owe others and to be owed by others, to suffer and inflict suffering on others, in ways that cannot always be paid off or redeemed. 28

The image of a god who is brutally, monstrously destroyed for me to be released from the weight of infinite debt represents the divinized reification of indebtedness—God gets obliterated in order to forgive eternal, unpayable debts; a magical, fantasied escape from the inescapable. This is not escaping into a new world, but an expression of the persistence of the status quo. Love is constituted as an eternalization of ressentiment , in the form of a consolation for irreparable loss. One might say that this religious artifact has taken on the form of a floating signifier which facilitates mass neurosis; the fetishized commodity is the contemporary form of Christian love in which exchange value takes on mystical social value, serving as a defense against abilities to bear the negativity of socio-historical existence. 29

One might say that conscience, which is neither good nor bad in itself, represents a moment in the dialectic of personhood.

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