The Test Drive

Part 3. On Passing the Test

 On Passing the Test Part 3 On Passing the Test     Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks. – Friedrich Nietzsche There’s no guarantee yet I’ll pass the test. – Georges Bataille

 On Passing the Test   In a book that was supposed to wrap it all up for him following the extravagance he had permitted himself with Zarathustra, Nietzsche speaks of physics as just another interpretation of the world:“It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds,”he calculates,“that physics, too,is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us,if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.”1 By no means intending to underwrite a mere dismissal, Nietzsche sets physics close to religion, which he understands as another, if unquestionably neurotic, interpretation of the world.In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche in fact situates science close to conscience, effecting a linguistic parentage for which both German and English allow. Until now science has been the bad conscience of our era, winning out over other, often more decadent but possibly more replenishing interpretive behaviors. The philosophy of the future, Nietzsche projects,belongs to the testers and attempters,to those who are willing to risk themselves on the Versuch:“A new species of philosophers is coming up: I venture to baptize them with a name that is not free of danger. As I unriddle them, insofar as they allow themselves to be unriddled – for it belongs to their nature to want to remain riddles at some point – these philosophers of the future may have a right – it might also be a wrong – to be called attempters [Versucher: tempters, testers, experimenters]. This name itself is in the end a mere attempt and, if you will, a temptation.”2 The very act of conjuring and naming the future philosopher belongs to the species of which Nietzsche speaks, for he has ventured to take the risk of positing, of futurity. Inviting danger, he tests the name and brings on the future by means of an experiment in positing,“a mere attempt”that, constructed as a test, is vulnerable to its own destruction.The future philosophers that Nietzsche calls forth in this passage have a right that “mightalsobe awrong,”whichistosaythat,asheestablishesthem,giving them rights and existence, Nietzsche equally inserts the code authorizing their refutability. Nietzsche once again returns to the essential qualities with which he identifies the philosophers of the future by means of what Jules Michelet calls“cet esprit fataliste, ironique, méphistophélique.”3 The philosophers  

    of the future, Nietzsche asserts in the section “We Scholars,” “will be men of experiments” (Menschen der Experimente).4 He repeats the presumptive daring involved in naming the experimenters:“With the name in which I dared baptize them I have already stressed expressly their attempts and delight in attempts: was this done because as critics in body and soul they like to employ experiments in a new, perhaps wider, perhaps more dangerous sense?”5 The implications of the new epoch of experimentation squeeze one’s politically correct shoes,but that should not inhibit us because we need to go where Nietzschean indecency takes us and makes us wince. Otherwise we might as well be in our slippers and not at the tryouts, stumbling and staggering, participating in the Olympiad of the Nietzschean stammer. Nietzsche asks, concerning the bold experimenters: “Does their passion for knowledge force them to go further with audacious and painful experiments than the softhearted and effeminate taste of a democratic century could approve?”6 There is something about the experimental cast of the future that threatens the democratic century with pain and disruption.According to this engagement with democracy, which has Nietzsche dissociating from the Greeks, there are many hiding places where one can exploit fragile political structures or duck and decay into one or another form of accepting complacency. It is worth our while to focus on the way democratic formations – despite the rants – belong to the experimental exigency of which Nietzsche writes,lending it an ethical stamp.In a text that bears the title “Nietzsche and the Machine,” Derrida addresses the hyper-ethical procedure of genealogy.7 He proposes a thought of political singularities that exceed the structure of the nation-state, observing that, for Nietzsche ,“the trial of democracy is also a trial of . . . technicization.”8 Following the...