The Riddling Between Oedipus and the Sphinx by Yuan Yuan;

Author:Yuan, Yuan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: University Press of America, Incorporated
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

III. The Ascetic ideal and Nihilistic Desire:

The Disembodied Subject and Bad Conscience

in Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals

Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophy states: “we will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsche’s work if we do not see ‘against whom’ its principal concepts are directed. Hegelian themes are present in this work as the enemy against which it fights. Nietzsche never stops attacking the theological and Christian character of German philosophy.”[53] Particularly in The Genealogy of Morals and The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche is engaged in an “unholy” war against the theological telos of the Hegelian subject and the Christian God. In Genealogy, Nietzsche pointedly alerts, without calling names: “Let us, from now on, be on our guard against the hallowed philosophers’ myth of a pure, will-less, painless, timeless knower.”[54] In The Anti-Christ, he also warns: “Among German one will understand immediately when I say that philosophy has been corrupted by theologian blood. . . . German philosophy is at bottom—a cunning theology.”[55] Nietzsche relentlessly critiques the theological exorcism by metaphysicians, possibly more at Hegel himself than anyone else, when he says: “These have spun their web around him so long that . . . he himself became a spider, a metaphysician. Thence forward . . . he transformed himself into something ever pale and less substantial, became an ‘ideal,’ became ‘pure spirit.’”[56] To Nietzsche, those metaphysicians who spin metaphysical webs appear to have lost their minds in their labyrinthine speculations and eventually their hallucinated subject itself gradually evaporates when transcending into an ontological locale of pure being or pure nothingness.

In Genealogy, Nietzsche tactfully translates Hegel’s incorporeal subject into a physical body and moves it from an onto-theological site to a concrete social space. Hegel’s hypothetical subject lodged in a metaphysical locale, in this case, takes the form of a material body, in fact, a disembodied body, of the morbid priest. Specifically, Nietzsche uses the self-denouncing priest figure spellbound by the ascetic ideal to parody the Hegelian subject entrapped in the so-called dialectics of infinite self-reflexive consciousness and eternal negative signification. More or less, so it seems, Nietzsche sort of rewrites, in a parodic mode, an unauthorized account of the Hegelian subject postulated in his Phenomenology of Spirit in terms of hauntology of priests. In other words, the priest in Nietzsche’s Genealogy figures as a dis-embodied typological Hegelian character that is obsessed with the grotesque subject of singularity under the spell of a negative will to being or nothing.

In contrast to Hegel’s delusional projection of the subject’s blissful salvation or happy transcendence into Spirit by submerging itself in a Divine Being, Nietzsche sees the opposite: the soul is terribly sickened and horrifically plagued precisely due to the fact that it is excessively satiated with Spirit or Divinity. For Nietzsche, Christianity provides neither promised transcendence nor foretold redemption of the self; on the contrary, it is exposed as the very “original” cause of prevalent psychological anxiety and ontological disease that transforms the modern subject into a grotesque one. By uncovering the hauntological exorcism in terms of

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