Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political

Chapter Four. Equality

CHAPTER FOUR Equality The great modern critic of equality is Friedrich Nietzsche. Because Nietzsche locates value in separation, he views equality as the erasure of all value. One creates value by separating oneself from the masses and by going alone, and the idea of equality always brings one back to the level of the masses. As an equal among many, the subject loses the value that would distinguish it as an individual, and value exists only in this act of distinguishing, not in the collective. To see different individuals as equal even in terms of right or law is to commit a crime against them in the name of law. As he puts it in Beyond Good and Evil, "What is right for someone absolutely cannot be right for someone else."! Equating people not only suggests that their difference doesn't matter but also destroys the value that the act of separation creates. Value gives life significance beyond mere survival, but no value is eternal . Life, for Nietzsche, acquires a value through the distinction that a rupture creates, and the idea of equality threatens this value by denying the existence of the rupture. Nietzsche warns so often against modern nihilism because he sees the possibility that modernity's promulgation of the idea of equality will produce a world completely bereft of value, in which survival will be the only way that anyone will be capable of relating to the world. It would not require an apocalyptic event, as in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, to reduce humanity to a collection of survivalists. Though mass cannibalism has not yet ensued (as it does in The Road), equality has succeeded, as Nietzsche sees it, in producing a world dominated by the last man, characterized by the absence of any value other than that of survival. Rather than risk his life for the sake of some value like honor, the last man abandons the will to power and preaches equality in order to ensure his safety. Nietzsche's rejection of Christianity and socialism (which he sees as simply a derivative of the former) stems from his defense of value against 109 110 Chapter Four its destruction. By proposing that all are equal in Christ or as citizens of a socialist society, these doctrines render existence worthless and leave no value to guide living. In Nietzsche's philosophy, the proponents of equality want to impose their lack of value onto others, but this imposition does not occur in the form of a break or rupture. Equality is a degeneration rather than a rupture, and it cannot be a value in itself because it is the erasure of all value. Value requires separation, and equality eliminates its possibility.2 In this sense, Nietzsche is the philosopher of the aristocratic rupture (while Hegel is the philosopher of the democratic rupture). Interestingly, for Nietzsche, the villain in the drama of equality is not simply the radical democrat or the socialist. It is just as much a capitalist economy that imposes the law of the exchange on everything. Within this economy, all objects-and all subjects-have a price that can be calculated in terms of the market. Not only does capitalism reduce everything to an exchange value that allows it to be compared with everything else, but capitalism also constantly expands its reach. It abhors an outside, and this is where Nietzsche wants to reside.3 Just as vehemently as he denounces the moralists who want to create a society of equals, Nietzsche declaims against this economic egalitarianism of capitalist society. This two-pronged critique allows for a Rightist and a Leftist deviation, and both develop in the twentieth century. Ayn Rand embodies the former, while Gilles Deleuze is the representative figure of the latter, though it is widespread throughout the philosophical world. Rand attacks the idea of equality for submitting the productive few to the control of those who live off this productivity. In Atlas Shrugged (1957), she even envisions the productive few going on strike and isolating themselves from the rest of the population that would enforce equality on them. According to the novel, the productive few are the economic and intellectual elites, not those who actually perform productive labor.4 Rand's inegalitarianism, like Nietzsche's, has its basis in an understanding of the violence that moral claims for equality ostensibly do to the individua1 .s In the name of morality, egalitarians destroy the engine of social production and thereby threaten to impoverish the...