Nietzsche and Embodiment: Discerning Bodies and Non-dualism

CHAPTER 2: Opening Nietzsche’s Genealogy to “Feminine” Body

CHAPTER 2 Opening Nietzsche’s Genealogy to “Feminine” Body A Story of Dynamic Non-dualism and Relation Among tellers of stories about Nietzsche’s texts, a common story is that the identity of the self and the concept break down in Nietzsche’s writings. Yet few versions of this story have focused on Nietzsche’s view of the formation of the self1 in the “Second Essay” from On the Genealogy of Morals to tell of a dynamic non-dualism2 that can be said to emerge. In the “Second Essay” (1887/1989), Nietzsche traces a transformation of the subject3 from its early character, which I will call the “legal subject” (Rechtssubjekt)4 to a subsequent formulation that can be referred to as the unified subject.5 My reading of the “Second Essay” shows that, for Nietzsche, human beings produce a concept of what it means to be a human being at any given time in Western history according to a reciprocal shaping that occurs among the concept of the subject and the developing constitutions6 of conscience and punishment. I choose these three constitutions—subjectivity, conscience, and punishment—for two reasons. First, they are prominent themes in On the Genealogy of Morals. Second, they include the extremes and center of a continuum that I call Nietzsche’s dynamic nondualism .7 My rendering of Nietzsche’s story provisionally categorizes subjectivity as ideational (the immaterial extreme) conscience as psychosomatic (the center ) and corporeal punishment as socio-physical (the material extreme). The borders of these categories are fluid and overlapping. 27 In this chapter, I show that the emergence of the supposed unified subject coincides for Nietzsche, with an understanding of subjectivity that denies a dynamic non-dualism constituting the subject’s formation. In so doing my view of Nietzsche’s implicitly enters a current debate among Continental feminist philosophers. This debate begins to open Western philosophy “to something other than traditional Enlightenment rationality” (Oliver 1995, xii). For the purposes of this chapter, other means “body”—especially feminine body. Body can be viewed as other because Enlightenment philosophers tend to adopt the realm of immaterial mind as a first principle, and the realm of material body as appendage. In Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, Moira Gatens appeals to a Spinozist monism to introduce “a good deal of dynamism into the categories ‘sex’ and ‘gender’” (Gatens 1996, 149).8 Indeed, Nietzsche’s non-dualism might also be useful for developing a conception of feminine body. Kelly Oliver suggests , however, that although Nietzsche begins to open philosophy to the other, the body, he opens it to only a masculine body (Oliver 1995, 17–25).9 “It doesn ’t seem that Nietzsche imagines that wisdom’s beloved—this warrior who writes and reads with blood—could be Athena” (24). Some philosophers, such as Elizabeth Grosz, have proposed ways to continue opening Western Continental philosophy to an other and especially a feminine other. According to Grosz, Nietzsche, Foucault, Freud, and Lacan assume the corporeality of knowledge production, but the “corporeality invoked is itself not concrete or tangible, but ironically, ‘philosophical’” (Grosz 1996, 37–38). Traditionally, men have adopted the realm of mind for themselves, writes Grosz. By retreating to the spiritual and “philosophical” to explain the corporeal, Nietzsche embalms the bodily, and eliminates the feminine other who, symbolically, is the body (38). Unfortunately, Grosz too quickly glosses over the meaning of concrete corporeality , especially in the context of Nietzsche, whose non-dualism makes problematic the identities of abstract and concrete. This problem of identification recalls Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient: “In Asian gardens you could look at rock and imagine water, you could gaze at a still pool and believe it had the hardness of rock” (Ondaatje 1992, 170). Ondaatje intimates the trickiness of identities like stone and water. Nietzsche’s dynamic non-dualism also registers the nuanced deceptiveness of identities, virtually dissolving Cartesian dualism albeit non-reductively. The mental and corporeal become not substantially different in this regard, but neither is one reducible to the other. So perhaps the complaint should not be that Nietzsche’s corporeality lacks tangibility, as Grosz writes, but that his simultaneously tangible and intangible corporeality is as Oliver suggests. It is laden with symbolism traditionally linked with masculine body—the blood of a warrior and not a menstruator, the instru28 Nietzsche and Embodiment ments of an administrator of torture and not those of, for instance, a domestic or a...