Strange Freedom in Nietzsche and Beauvoir

This essay explores the surprising relationship between what Simone de Beauvoir calls the will to disclose being and what Friedrich Nietzsche calls the will to power. I argue that the will to disclose being is an appropriation of the will to power in Nietzsche. Both terms suggest an image of the ethical, the irreducible and unpredictable element of valuation necessary to all life, which does not require a concept of the human. Both the will to disclose being and the will to power affirm that bodies are subject to the power of non-volitional valuation, and this is what motivates the critique in both Beauvoir and Nietzsche of the will to morality as social critique. The essay proceeds in three parts. In the first part I demonstrate that it is unclear whether Beauvoir intended the will to disclose being as an appropriation of the will to power. The second part articulates the will to disclose being as the mutual disclosure of inherently relational singularities. The relational nature of the will to disclose being is a response to what Beauvoir calls the “bare will to power.” However, as I discuss in part three, this bare will to power in fact resembles what Nietzsche himself deplores. My conclusion is thus that Beauvoir’s will to disclose being forwards the relational nature of the will to disclose being/will to power but is too strongly an implicit appropriation of the will to power to be considered a rejection of the will to power itself.