Gilles Deleuze: Ressentiment, Bad Conscience & Becoming-Active (Nietzsche & Philosophy, Part 2 of 2)

We began this season with an examination of the phenomenon of memory and Nietzsche's peculiar approach to this question of the origins of memory. Nietzsche contends, somewhat counterintuitively, that forgetting is an active and positive force, and memory is that which he finds questionable. For Nietzsche to explore the origins of memory means to explore the origins of consciousness, because unconsciousness is the state in which life normally exists. We find the possibility of duration, and thus of a self, within a continuity of sense impressions. Sentience, conscious self-reflection, these presuppose that one retain their past sense impressions with the ability to compare them and contrast them in order to even have the possibility of possessing a notion of time, and thus a notion of the self, that I am a thing that existed in the past, exists now in the present, and continues to exist into the future.

Deleuze begins the second section of Part 4 of his book on Nietzsche by bringing Sigmund Freud into the picture and Freud's topological theory of the human psyche. Freud, as it is widely known, was deeply influenced by Nietzsche and hypothesized the following: "an external system of the apparatus receives the perceptible excitations but retains nothing of them and thus has has no memory and that lying behind the system there is another which transforms the momentary expectations of the first into lasting traces."

When Freud refers to the system or the apparatus, he's talking about a system employed by the psyche. Here, Freud hypothesizes two systems which correspond to the conscious and the unconscious. This was perhaps one of Freud's greatest contributions to psychology: the fact that the mind is not entirely comprised by that which is in our conscious awareness, that there's this vast subterranean realm, a subconscious side of man, of which we are little aware, but which motivates the lion's share of our behaviors. That to look to a person's conscious explanations of who and what they are or why they do the things that they do is, in some sense, folly. The larger share of these intentions are, in fact, the motivations of unconscious impulses within the individual. These unconscious instincts are, by Freud's account, shaped and molded by childhood, affected by traumatic experiences, and, in so many words, an inheritance of our nature and nurture. The unconscious had not yet been recognized because our conscious rational system tries to ignore it. The unconscious self represents an affront to human dignity in the minds of many because it undermines the supremacy of our ego consciousness, which means undermining the power of human reason. In fact, Freud argues, "our memories are by nature unconscious," and further, "Consciousness is born at the point where the mnemonic trace stops."

Such insights of Freud's may seem to contradict Nietzsche's account of things. That to be a conscious being is to be a historical being, a being with memory. How could this be if our memories are actually stored in the unconsciousness? How can Freud possibly assert that consciousness starts where our remembering stops? This is, in fact, not a contradiction with Nietzsche's view if we recall Nietzsche's assertion that there is no present at all without forgetfulness. The person who was unable to forget anything, unable to "have done with anything," would be unable to truly live in the present, to truly experience the present moment. That moment would always be overwhelmed by a vast catalog of past sense experience, which will always be far greater in some sense than the singular experience of the present. And thus, Deleuze argues that this is the role where forgetfulness enters. This is precisely why it is an active and positive force.

"Nietzsche distinguishes two systems within the reactive apparatus: the conscious and the unconscious. The reactive unconscious is defined by mnemonic traces, by lasting imprints. It is a digestive, vegetative, and ruminative system which expresses 'the purely passive impossibility of escaping from the impression once it is received.' Of course, even in this endless digestion, reactive forces have a job to do: attaching themselves to the indelible imprint, investing the trace. But the inadequacy of this first kind of reactive force is obvious. Adaptation would never be possible if the reactive apparatus did not have another system of forces at its disposal. Another system is necessary: a system in which reaction is not a reaction to traces, but becomes a reaction to the present excitation or to the direct image of the object. The second kind of reactive forces is inseparable from consciousness, that constantly renewed skin surrounding an ever-fresh receptivity, a milieu where there is 'always room for new things.' It will be remembered that Nietzsche wished to remind consciousness of its need for modesty: its origin, nature, and function are wholly reactive, but consciousness can nevertheless claim a relative nobility. The second kind of reactive forces show us in what form and under what conditions reaction can be acted. When reactive forces take conscious excitation as their object, then the corresponding reaction is itself acted."

So, there are several key takeaways from this passage. First, unconsciousness and the way that we talk about unconscious drives or impulses and the work of Nietzsche is distinct from the reactive unconscious as Deleuze names it here. And this may seem a bit complicated, but Deleuze helps untangle this in a footnote: "It will be noted that there are several kinds of unconscious." And then he goes on to say, of the unconscious drives more generally, "His unconscious must not be confused with that of reactive forces." So, we have to make a distinction. There is that which is not conscious, as in not consciously decided. So, hunger, thirst, the sexual impulse, fight-or-flight impulse, etc., because these are physiological in origin. But then there is that which is not conscious because it is a retained trace of a past sense impression, a past experience that is then pushed below the surface of consciousness, but nevertheless retained by the mind. That is the reactive unconscious that Nietzsche discusses primarily in the second essay of *The Genealogy*, which includes all that which the conscious awareness does not hold in its field of perception, but that the mind continues to digest, to ruminate on, to chew upon, as the cow chews its cud. You might consider something like post-traumatic stress disorder as an example. It's not as if the source of trauma is always in the conscious awareness of the subject. Rather, the traces of the trauma remain unconscious, but from time to time motivate conscious decision-making, or from time to time even break into the conscious awareness. That's the sense in which Deleuze is talking about the unconscious here, not the physiologically rooted impulses of the body, but the suppressed contents of the psyche.

Another key takeaway is that, in this sense, both consciousness and unconsciousness are reactive. The unconscious, in the sense that it is part of the system that's tasked with processing the excitations (the Freudian term used here for sense impressions is "excitations"), but this is not active; it's subordinate. In the same way that the reactive consciousness is. This doesn't make both or either of these systems bad, adds Deleuze, when reactivity is acted. The reactive system exists in this normal or healthy relationship with the active forces. When the reactive consciousness is allowed to solely concern itself with the perception of the moment, that reactivity is acted in the service of the organism. Deleuze explains a section earlier, this is at the beginning of Part 4, of a bridge in a couple of places: "In the normal or healthy state, the role of reactive forces is always to limit action; they divide, delay, or hinder it by means of another action whose effects we feel. But, conversely, active forces produce a burst of creativity; they set it off at a chosen instant, at a favorable moment, in a given direction, in order to carry out a quick and precise piece of adjustment. In this way, a repost is formed. This is why Nietzsche can say, 'the true reaction is that of action' (*The Genealogy of Morality*, Essay 1, Section 10). The active type, in this sense, is not a type that only contains active forces; it expresses the normal relation between a reaction that delays action and an action that precipitates reaction. The master is said to react precisely because he acts; his reactions. The active type, therefore, includes reactive forces, but ones that are defined by a capacity for obeying or being acted. We can see, therefore, that a reaction alone cannot constitute *ressentiment*. *Ressentiment* designates a type in which reactive forces prevail over active forces, but they can only prevail in one way: by ceasing to be acted. Above all, we must not define *ressentiment* in terms of the strength of the reaction. If we ask, 'What is the man of *ressentiment*?', we must not forget this principle: he does not react. And the word *ressentiment* gives a definite clue: reaction ceases to be acted in order to become something felt."

So, we return to Nietzsche's conception of drives as operating based on command and obedience, or forces, as Deleuze puts it here, rather than drives. This argument appeals to something perhaps more universal than mere physiological drives. So, I think that's why Deleuze uses the term "forces." But in the case of the physiology, when it is operating as "normal," a reactive force is obedient to the active; it serves a function which facilitates the active. Deleuze emphasizes that "normal" here does not mean frequent, but on the contrary, normative and rare. And that points to something incredibly important: Nietzsche aims for what he calls health, but this health is by no means the ordinary state of individuals as we perceive them around us. What is far more normal to perceive is somebody in which the reactive forces have triumphed. That's what we more often encounter. We more often encounter individuals ruled by *ressentiment*. And normally, I simply render the term in English as "resentment," since that is the meaning, and it's perfectly adequate in English to use this term. But Deleuze brings up something important about theological parts of the word that are key to his interpretation of it here, especially when we look at the word in French: *ressentiment* contains *sentir* (to feel), and it is a key distinction that reactivity is something felt and not acted. Resentment, or *ressentiment*, is essentially a state, therefore, of inaction and a predominance of feeling, and those two things go hand in hand.

Finally, as we went over last week, reactive forces triumph without becoming stronger. They triumph, in fact, by not acting in greater force, but by ceasing to be acted at all. They attack that which is active, not by acting against it, but by making the active reactive. The reactive forces operate not like an army, but like a virus, turning active into reactive rather than aggregating together to overcome the active. So, to return to this model of the psyche that Deleuze sees in Nietzsche's writing, forgetfulness enters into the picture. We might recall what Nietzsche said about forgetfulness: it is, in every sense, an active and positive force. And Deleuze writes, "The two systems or the two kinds of reactive forces must still be separated. The traces must not invade consciousness. A specific active force must be given the job of supporting consciousness and renewing its freshness, fluidity, and mobile, agile chemistry at every moment. This active superconscious faculty is the faculty of forgetting. Psychology's mistake was to treat forgetfulness as a negative determination, not to discover its active and positive character."

And further down, Deleuze continues, "This faculty is in a very special situation. Although it is an active force, it is delegated by activity to work with reactive forces. It serves as a guard or supervisor, preventing the two systems of the reactive apparatus from becoming confused. It comes from activity, but is abstracted from it." Deleuze goes on to say that forgetfulness, in this guard or supervisory role, and remember, that's what Nietzsche calls forgetting, the watchman standing vigilant at the temple of human dignity, that's one of the metaphors that he uses. Forgetfulness has to draw its power from the reactive forces of the psyche. Forgetting is abstracted from the activity of the body. It is not a purely physiological drive that exists independently, or we might say exists in its peculiarity. Rather, it exists as the manifestation of activity within the consciousness in a special situation, a dependent role. It is the force of the body's drive to activity, but it exists within the domain of consciousness, which is reactive. And so, Nietzsche describes forgetting as key to action, since knowledge, in Nietzsche's words, "kills action." Forgetfulness, however, is not opposed to consciousness, but the prerequisite of it, just as much as memory is, because it is like the culling blade that cuts down all those traces that could invade consciousness and make the present moment impossible. The present moment exists in so far as we are acting within the present excitations of consciousness. Forgetfulness draws upon the power of consciousness for fuel, which means it requires an essentially reactive apparatus to facilitate its activity. It is an active force dependent upon the energy of the reactive. And that's why Deleuze says the faculty of forgetting is in this special situation where it is most prone, among all the physiological active drives of the body, to flaws, failures, degeneration, disturbances."

Skipping down again to finish out our reading from this same section: "Let us suppose there is a lapse in the faculty of forgetting. It is as if the wax of consciousness were hardened. Excitation tends to get confused with its trace in the unconscious, and conversely, reaction to traces rises into consciousness and overruns it. Thus, at the same time as reaction to traces becomes perceptible, reaction ceases to be acted. The consequences of this are immense. No longer being able to act, a reaction, active forces are deprived of the material conditions of their functioning. They no longer have the opportunity to do their job; they are separated from what they can do. We can thus finally see in what way reactive forces prevail over active forces: when the trace takes the place of the excitation in the reactive apparatus, reaction itself takes the place of action. Reaction prevails over action. Now, it is striking that when victory is won in this way, the real struggles are only between reactive forces. Even the functional decay of the faculty of forgetting derives from the fact that it no longer finds in one kind of reactive forces the energy necessary to repress the other kind and to renew consciousness. Everything takes place between reactive forces; some prevent others from being acted, some destroy others. This is a strange subterranean struggle which takes place entirely inside the reactive apparatus, but which nevertheless has consequences for the whole of activity. *Ressentiment* is a reaction which simultaneously becomes perceptible and ceases to be acted—a formula which defines sickness in general. Nietzsche is not simply saying that *ressentiment* is a sickness, but rather that sickness as such is a form of *ressentiment*."

I think one of the best examples we might use for explaining this in concrete terms is that one only becomes aware of, say, their internal organs when they cease to act in a healthy manner and begin acting in a deranged or unhealthy manner. The physiology commands, and the drive or faculty or force or organ, whatever we want to call it, some part of the body fails to obey the command; it doesn't act, but is felt. On the psychological level, this is the reality of *ressentiment* in a moral and historical sense. These aspects of a type are completely analogous and interchangeable to Deleuze, following from Nietzsche's typology, in which a type is something psychological, biological, historical, social, political, so on and so forth. Deleuze writes that "the man of *ressentiment* is characterized by the invasion of consciousness by mnemonic traces, the ascent of memory into consciousness itself."

Deleuze clarifies, of course, consciousness may well be capable of constructing a memory that is acted, an active rather than reactive memory. And Deleuze makes a very interesting argument later on in this part of the book that the kind of memory which is fostered by culture, which Nietzsche describes as having that sorted and bloody history, is actually not the memory of traces. That the tortures and executions that early civilizations used to expand the memory of mankind were intended not to cultivate a memory of the past, but a memory of the future. That the goal was not to traumatize the audience such that the horrifying spectacle of torture would never leave their consciousness, so that they always remembered this past event as if it were happening right there in the moment. The point was, on the contrary, to make the spectators remember the future. Whenever they were in the moment of being able to act in such a way that they might act against the good of the community, they could remember the future of what will happen to them if they did so. They could remember the promises that they had made and therefore keep their promises. This was the operation of culture: to create the promising animal. The enculturation of man, consisting of giving human beings this ability to make promises, is entirely future-oriented in terms of its valuations. And Deleuze would argue it's not because of this bloody process of expanding man's memory that the resentful man is created. Rather, as this process of enculturation proceeded, those with the reactive form of memory, those who experience *ressentiment*, this fault in the faculty of forgetting, would primarily experience these spectacles of cruelty as painful traces. Such that we can imagine an active form of memory which battles and has to suppress forgetfulness, like two active forces doing battle, and a reactive form of memory which is resentful and dominated by traces. Deleuze says, "But in so far as we remain at the level of the first memory, we remain within the limits of the pure principle of *ressentiment*. The man of *ressentiment* is like a dog, a kind of dog that only reacts to traces, a bloodhound. He only invests traces. For him, excitation is locally confused with the trace. The man of *ressentiment* can no longer act his reaction."

And Deleuze goes on to say, since he does not act this reaction, the man of *ressentiment* lives in a state of uninterrupted or endless reaction, we might say a feeling of reaction, but without any discharge or punctuation of this feeling. There's no actual expression through action of this feeling. It's a permanent delay between what one wills and what one does, a permanent state of unfulfilled desire or unrealized drives, a permanent suspension, a permanent tension. This person of resentment lives in this constant feeling which fosters the spirit of revenge because he lives in this uninterrupted feeling of discomfort, which blames the external as the object of this discomfort. And as such, Deleuze says, it is not even required that the man of resentment have some past trauma or some such excessive state of negative excitation. He doesn't have to have a past experience of extreme pain or humiliation in order to enter this vindictive psychical state of uninterrupted restimulation. Deleuze stresses it's not the quantity of the excitation that produces the state. What matters is the separation of the power of forgetting from what it can do, the entrance or invasion of traces into the conscious mind. This is, once again, the reactive systems separating the active system from its expression. And so, Deleuze writes that the resentful man perceives the source of his feeling in the external object, the source of the excitation which he himself cannot react to, that he doesn't have the power to react against.

Deleuze's understanding of *ressentiment* goes far beyond this hypothetical power relationship in which power is quantified in an abstract way and one person is said to be in more power than another person, making the inferior person resentful. We might say that's the normal retelling of Nietzsche's story as to how *ressentiment* arises. Deleuze argues instead: *ressentiment* is a qualitative difference in the way this kind of reactive person engages with the entire world. That *ressentiment* springs from that person's own disturbances or failures within their psychic makeup. It's not created by happenstance or by external circumstances. And that to blame the external circumstances for creating *ressentiment* is in itself a reactive explanation. "The man of *ressentiment* experiences every being and object as an offense in exact proportion to its effect on him. Beauty and goodness are him necessarily as outrageous as any pain or misfortune that he experiences."

And I'm going to skip further down in the passage: "The man of *ressentiment* in himself is a being full of pain. The sclerosis or hardening of his consciousness, the rapidity with which every excitation sets and freezes within him, the weight of the traces that invade him are so many cruel sufferings. And more deeply, the memory of traces is full of hatred in itself and by itself; it is venomous and depreciative because it blames the object in order to compensate for its own inability to escape from the traces of the corresponding excitation. This is why *ressentiment* revenge, even when it is realized, remains spiritual and imaginary and symbolic in principle."

So, Deleuze clarifies, the spirit of revenge is not a designation of the ends, but rather the means. *Ressentiment* does not express the desire or intention of revenge. *Ressentiment* is the means by which revenge is affected. *Ressentiment* describes the way in which the slaves triumph, but remain slaves. Consciousness, remember, was described earlier by Freud as this skin which has become incredibly supple from all its excitations and thus has acquired characteristics making it suitable for taking in excitations, for being affected. That's the view of the healthy consciousness, reactive as it is, but not something hardened and sclerotic. The skin in the healthy state is something shifting, living, dynamic. It's like a magma flow, we might imagine the magmatic surface of the Earth before the surface had hardened and cooled. When the skin of consciousness becomes paralyzed by *ressentiment*, it is no longer in movement from moment to moment, willing to take in new excitations. It hardens and, as Deleuze says, it tends to freeze new excitations, new sense impressions, new affects, and hold on to them. The traces of past moments become hardened and permanent. This inability to escape from traces, that's the real thing that the resentful consciousness hates and wishes to take revenge for. It's what the resentful consciousness blames on the external being or object. The man of resentment is unable to love or to admire. While Nietzsche describes the noble Trojans as able to appreciate and even respect the cause of their own doom, the resentful man hates the cause of his own misfortune. He distributes blame and recrimination for his misfortunes. The resentful man, even in his modesty, is somewhat nasty. "We must beware of those who condemn themselves before that which is good and beautiful, claiming not to understand, not to be worthy. Their modesty is frightening. What hatred of beauty is hidden beneath their declarations of inferiority!"

The person of *ressentiment* is also essentially passive. His definition of happiness, his entire conception of it, is rest, repose, final salvation, the Sabbath of Sabbaths. Their version of happiness, which we might call contentment, is characterized by a final and ultimate passivity. And the man of resentment is, above all, an accuser. Deleuze describes their state of being as a kind of endless accusation. Deleuze says, "Considering it a right to profit from actions that he does not perform, the man of *ressentiment* breaks out in bitter approaches as soon as his expectations are disappointed." The man of *ressentiment* does not know how to love. He doesn't really want to love, but he does want to be loved. This is, in effect, a desire to be cared for: "to be fed, watered, caressed, and put to sleep." This is, for Deleuze, almost an archetypal description of the mindset of the reactive person, and therefore the resentful person.

Deleuze goes on to give a description that follows from the first essay of Nietzsche's *Genealogy of Morality*, in which Nietzsche explains the self-directed or self-centered moral assessment of the master morality. Their form of evaluation says, "I am good, and therefore whatever you are is no good." And "no good" does not indicate evil in the sense that we would talk about it today, but more like contemptible, worthless, something that can be dismissed. To the master, the good is primary, and what is good comes out of their own perspective, in accord with their form of activity. The bad is an afterthought; it's not something to be contested with. So, this is the master's syllogism, in Deleuze's terms: First, "I am good" or "we are good, we aristocrats are the beautiful, the true, and the happy." Then, as a second premise, as Nietzsche says in *Genealogy of Morals*, "the noble spirit 'only looks for its antithesis in order to affirm itself with more joy.'" For the master, it's not essential to his premises to negate the slave; he simply produces a negation as a result of what Deleuze calls a double affirmation, the premises of both action and affirmation, and through these, an acknowledgment of the other, the antithesis, not as a worthy enemy to be combatted, but simply as a means of contrast in order to more clearly affirm what one is.

For the slave morality, however, Deleuze says that the operative state of consciousness is in the form of a paralogism. A paralogism is like a syllogism, but unlike the syllogism, is based upon a fallacy as its foundation. A paralogism is a false, deceptive, fictitious imitation of the syllogism. So, the slave's paralogism is: "You are evil, therefore I am good." The evaluating glance is reversed, and the outside is regarded as the primary concern. The accusation is the primary concern. We've talked about the bird of prey versus the little lamb example many times. This is the illustrative example Nietzsche uses in *Genealogy of Morals*. It's very important for understanding both his critique of freedom of the will and moral responsibility. But here we see how this entire mode of evaluating, of the way the little lamb regards the bird of prey, is only comprehensible within this framework of the resentful consciousness. And Deleuze explains this beautifully in the following passage: "Let us suppose that we have a lamb who is a logician. The syllogism of the bleeding lamb is formulated as follows: Birds of prey are evil, that is, the birds of prey are the evil ones. The evil ones are birds of prey. But I am the opposite of a bird of prey; therefore, I am good. It is clear that in the minor premise, the bird of prey is taken for what it is: a force which does not separate itself from its effects or its manifestations. But it is assumed in the major premise that the bird of prey is able to not manifest its force, that it can hold back from its effects and separate itself from what it can do. It is evil because it does not hold itself back. It is therefore assumed that one and the same force is effectively held back in the virtuous lamb, but given free reign in the evil bird of prey. Since the strong could prevent themselves from acting, the weak could act if they did not prevent themselves. Here we have the fiction of the paralogism of *ressentiment*, the fiction of a force separated from what it can do. It is thanks to this fiction that reactive forces triumph. It is not sufficient for them to hold back from activity; they must also reverse the relation of forces. They must oppose themselves to active forces and represent themselves as superior. The process of accusation in *ressentiment* fulfills this task. Reactive forces project an abstract and neutralized image of force. Such a force, separated from its effects, will be blameworthy if it acts, deserving on the contrary if it does not. Moreover, it is thought that more abstract force is needed to hold back than is needed to act."

This is what Nietzsche is indeed talking about when he describes the ego consciousness as a sort of fictitious, neutral substrate between the will and the ability to act. Freedom of the will exists between what one desires and what one actually does, as this neutral arbiter which can decide to act or not to act. And that is where we locate the self and say that we have the capacity to act morally or immorally. In this whole causal relationship, we have inevitably split the force that is one into two forces. We have said that the manifestation of the force, its effect, is separate from the cause, which is referred back to the "force" itself. Once again, this is like saying the lightning flashes, but in reality, the lightning is the flash. There's no lightning without flashing, just as there's no bird of prey without preying. The metaphor of the little lamb as logician is an analogy to the way that the resentful consciousness invents this fiction, a paralogism, in which the bird of prey can choose. It becomes a cause which is cleaved away from the effect. And Deleuze really emphasizes in the sections that follow this to say that this is fictional. This should not be understood lightly. This is not a sort of Yeatsian designation of something as fiction, and that it, you know, a myth or a dream might not be the literal truth, but is nevertheless, it should be regarded with a kind of respect or awe, treated as though it reveals some symbolic or metaphorical truth. That's not the sense in which Deleuze invokes fiction here. Instead, he argues Nietzsche's assessment of this paralogism is that it's fictitious in the sense of being a lie. This is the mendaciously created world, as he calls it, of the resentful masses, a world of moral responsibility premised on this vicious carving away of the cause from the effect. And look at the form that this separation takes. It's the reactive way of approaching the world and contesting within the world. You triumph by separating the force from what it can do. You triumph by accusation, by depreciation. You triumph by reversing the healthy relation of forces. This perspective is the way that we view the self. Unfortunately, the ego consciousness, this arbitrary, neutral substrate between the body and the actions it takes, that, that is a being separated from what it can do. And it's only within a kind of resentful perspective that we would view the self that way. And yet, that is the "normal" way to view the self. That's what is in the modern intuition about the self. Deleuze writes, "Nietzsche constantly exposes the subject as a fiction or a grammatical function. All subjects—the Epicurean atom, Descartes' substance, Kant's thing-in-itself—are the projection of little imaginary incubuses."

That "little imaginary incubuses" is from *The Genealogy* as well. Deleuze insists the real triumph of Nietzsche's genealogy is not that he ties *ressentiment* to the bad conscience, but rather that he makes a distinction between them. *Ressentiment* itself is not the full story. The full triumph of reactive forces is not realized until *ressentiment* progresses to the point of turning inward and becoming creative. When *ressentiment* gives rise to the bad conscience, as this is a creative act, it requires a kind of genius. And Nietzsche explicitly designates the priest, the aesthetic, as the genius of *ressentiment*. He is the answer to the question as to how this reversal takes place, how this moral fiction is created. The raw material of *ressentiment* is used by the aesthetic and given form by the aesthetic, just as a master of the plastic arts works with marble or clay. Deleuze says of the priest, "It is he, the master of dialectics, who gives the slave the idea of the reactive syllogism. It is he who forges the negative premises. It is he who conceives of love, a new love that the Christians take up as the conclusion, the crowning glory, the venomous flower of an unbelievable hatred." The priest reverses the valuations of the noble spirit and says, as Christ preached in the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the meek. The wretched alone are good. The suffering, deprived, sick, and ugly alone are good." That is Deleuze's summation of the priest's message. And this is the spirit of revenge when given spiritual, moral, and aesthetic voice. It's the declaration of war against all that is beautiful and respectable and praiseworthy, strong, healthy, alive—all of that is called evil.

And this leads Deleuze to raise the question, "What does active force really become?" Nietzsche's answer is extremely precise: "The reason that an active force is falsified, deprived of its conditions of operation, and separated from what it can do is it is turned back inside, turned back against itself. Being interiorized, being turned back against itself, this is the way in which active forces become truly reactive." Deleuze then quotes Nietzsche here: "All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward—that is what I call the internalization of man—that is the origin of the bad conscience." And Deleuze continues in the passage, "It is in this sense that bad conscience takes over the job of *ressentiment* as it has appeared to us. *Ressentiment* is inseparable from a ghastly invitation, from a temptation, and from a will to spread an infection. It hides its hatred under tempting love: 'I who accuse you, it is for your own good. I love you in order that you will join me, until you are joined with me, until you yourself become a painful, sick, reactive being, a good being.'"

And following this, Deleuze turns to the third essay of *The Genealogy*, which he uses as a sort of definition for the bad conscience. This is found in Section 14, where Nietzsche writes, "When would men of *ressentiment* achieve the ultimate, subtlest, sublimest triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly if they succeeded in poisoning the consciences of the fortunate with their own misery, with all misery, so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed of their own good fortune, perhaps said to one another, 'It is disgraceful to be fortunate; there is too much misery.'" This is really the inner meaning of Nietzsche's critique of pity, and this is what is ultimately required for the complete reversal of the relation of forces, what we might call the emasculation of the active. The active is separated from what it can do by this fiction of the freedom of the will and of one's moral responsibility, and is now paralyzed by the thought of the suffering of the world, the weaponization of pity. But the active force doesn't simply vanish into thin air. The active force still remains; it simply can no longer express or manifest itself. Force separated from what it can do, but still driven by activity, interiorizes. Deleuze calls this the "diabolical workshop of the psyche." What the active forces now undertake in the individual, driven by *ressentiment*, is to multiply and increase pain within the individual. That is what we call the bad conscience, and it is the form given by the priest, who reshapes *ressentiment*. The priest recognizes that the will requires a direction and takes it upon himself to guide that direction. He gives the active forces something to do. The ghastly temptation of this fully reactive way of being is that such a person, divided against himself, can make himself suffer "out of a joy in making suffer." This is the pleasure of self-flagellation, self-mortification, voluntary deprivation. Pain is then spiritualized. And there's an infamous passage in *The Genealogy* where Nietzsche describes how the priest gives depth and meaning to the pain that the man of bad conscience experiences. Deleuze explains this: "The man of *ressentiment*, who is by nature full of pain, is looking for a cause for his suffering. He accuses; he accuses everything that is active in life. The priest appears in an initial form here; he presides over the accusation. He organizes it. 'Look at these men who call themselves good! I tell you, these are the evil ones!' The power of *ressentiment* is therefore completely directed towards the other, against others. But *ressentiment* is an explosive substance; it makes active forces become reactive. *Ressentiment* must then adapt itself to these new conditions; it must change direction. The reactive man must now find the cause of his suffering in himself. Bad conscience suggests to him that he must look for this cause 'in himself and some guilt, in a piece of the past. He must understand his suffering as punishment.' And the priest appears a second time in order to preside over this change of direction. 'Quite so, my sheep,' someone must be to blame for it; 'you alone are to blame for yourself.'"

And Deleuze is quoting from *The Genealogy of Morality* again there. And so, we have the priest as a kind of director of the course of these reactive feelings, the artist of pain and guilt and resentment. And the result of this refinement into the bad conscience is the creation of sin. That's the term within the Christian lexicon for the specific historic form that the bad conscience takes in European history. And Nietzsche writes that the creation of sin is perhaps the single greatest historical event in the history of what he calls the "sick soul." Suffering is no longer a fault of existence in the sense that we might say something is faulty, but in neutral terms, the way that an engineer would understand fault. We might talk about a faulty object, not about something with free will or perceived responsibility. We might say, "This machine has a fault," right? But you're not saying the machine did something morally wrong when it breaks. Rather, under the viewpoint of sin, suffering is a fault of existence, but now with a new sense to the word "fault," in the sense that we say, "It is your fault." And so, we see how the bad conscience is a consequence of the resentful type's whole mode of being. Bad conscience is the neutering of activity in the redirection of it inward, in which one just multiplies their own pain forever. Pain becomes a form of repentance for their faults. Their sin becomes a form of payment for the debt of sin. And this may seem similar to the early form of debt that we discussed in the first episode of this season, how early legal codes like the Twelve Tables of Rome allowed debt to be paid by the creditor causing pain to the debtor. And yet, as Deleuze will go on to argue, the priest completely reevaluates debt. He gives it a new meaning which takes it far beyond this type of function or understanding of debt. Deleuze says, "It is no longer a matter of discharge from debt, but of a deepening of debt. It is no longer a matter of a suffering through which debt is paid, but of a suffering through which one is shackled to it, through which one becomes a debtor forever. Suffering now only pays the interest on the debt. Suffering is internalized responsibility. Debt becomes responsibility, guilt."

And the Christian story is the apotheosis of this entire form of moral evaluation. No man can ever settle the moral debt, the debt of moral responsibility that one owes to God. He is forever responsible and forever unable to pay off his debt. This requires, therefore, that God make payment to himself, as God is the only one who can settle the debt and redeem man from an irredeemable state, meaning that man is still forever indebted, forever must be thankful, grateful, supplicated to the God who did this for him. Debt towards the divinity is always a kind of debt that one can never escape from. And this means that one must constantly experience the feeling of guilt as the priest continues to direct these reactive forces. The crowning achievement of the bad conscience is when we come to the valuation that the guiltier one feels, the better person he is. Deleuze argues, "Just as *ressentiment* is not the origin of justice, so bad conscience is not the product of punishment."

Deleuze points out in the same essay of *The Genealogy* in which Nietzsche describes the use of punishment to expand human memory and consciousness, that there are almost countless potential meanings or significations to punishment. There are so many, in fact, that it is almost impossible to infer the meaning of a given punishment based on a system or formula, drawing on, for example, the origin of punishment, since the function it serves is not obvious or clear in any given case without concretely evaluating the situation. Nevertheless, there is a function that we can definitively say punishment does not fulfill. Deleuze writes, "Punishment cannot awaken a feeling of guilt in the culprit." And he quotes Nietzsche here, who argues in that essay, "The men in the penitentiaries, the hardened criminals, they're perhaps the people who feel the least guilt on this planet. They are, ironically, not penitent." What punishment tends to do is to produce this cold hardening effect. And that, therefore, the types of cruel punishments that early civilizations engaged in probably did more to prevent the development of a feeling of guilt within mankind than anything else. Speaking here of a feeling of moral guilt. Deleuze's point here is again to stress it's not merely because of a past power relationship that *ressentiment* or the bad conscience arose. It was truly something internal, etal to the resentful person, to the resentful mode of being, which has become what he calls the species activity of humankind. The sense of debt that past societies placed upon those who transgressed, this debt that could be paid by extracting flesh or causing pain, was in truth the active work of culture to keep their reactive forces within man in check, and thus making man responsible for them. Deleuze says that this was true culture, putting reactive forces into a relation where they are acted.

Deleuze argues that the final product of this civilizing activity is not the morally responsible and guilty individual, but the supramoral person, the man with a "right to promise," precisely because he's not held responsible for his promises to any tribunal of any sort. Deleuze says, "The product of culture is not the man that obeys the law, but the sovereign and legislative individual who defines himself by power over himself." And further down, Deleuze concludes the section, "Culture is man's species activity, but since this activity is selective, it produces the individual as its final goal, where the species itself is suppressed." This is why Deleuze says that culture goes straight from prehistory to posthistory. But history, the entire existence of man as a conscious, historical animal, that has been a history of resentment and bad conscience. Deleuze says, "Species activity in history is inseparable from a movement which perverts it and its product." As we mentioned at the end of the previous episode, the whole of human history appears as this giant becoming reactive, the movement which becomes falsified by the paralogism of *ressentiment*. It doesn't produce this supermoral individual, but it moves toward what Nietzsche calls "the sublime abortion," "the gregarious animal, docile, sickly, mediocre—the European of today."

The species activity, when it's directed by resentment, forms collectivities or herds, in the terminology of Nietzsche. Deleuze describes these as "societies which have no wish to perish and which cannot imagine anything superior to their own laws." In true culture, the process of selection has as its objective the supermoral individual, the man who is so responsible to himself that he becomes, from another sense, morally irresponsible. He is just in terms of a clear-eyed, practical fairness, truthful in the sense of being honest, and active, unified in word and deed, and self-legislative and creative. But because of the bad conscience, we get instead of culture, which has as its end the goal of creating such a person, instead we get what states, churches, races, peoples, classes, artificially created institutions and estates, social organizations, community associations. And in Deleuze's view, this is all community with an intensely reactive character. All of these herish structures represent a desire to preserve oneself through identifying with the herd. And the herd is persistent throughout time. It posits these laws and principles above oneself that are given to the individual from the herd. And the individual can have some sort of illusion of immortality by again self-identifying with the herd that exists beyond any one individual. Deleuze writes, "All the procedures of training are employed, but inside out, twisted, inverted. A morality, a church, a state are still enterprises of selection, of hierarchy. The most stupid laws, the most limited communities still want to train man and make use of his reactive forces. But to make use of them for what? To carry out what training, what selection? Training procedures are used, but in order to turn man into a gregarious, docile, and domesticated animal. Training procedures are used, but in order to break the strong, to sort out the weak, the suffering, or the slaves. Selection and hierarchy are put the wrong way around. Selection becomes the opposite of what it was from the standpoint of activity; it is now only a means of preserving, organizing, and propagating the reactive life. History thus appears as the act by which reactive forces take possession of culture and divert its course in their favor. The triumph of reactive forces is not an accident in history, but the principle and meaning of universal history." This idea of a historical degeneration of culture occupies a prominent place in Nietzsche's work. It is an argument in Nietzsche's struggle against the philosophy of history and the dialectic. It is the source of Nietzsche's disappointment. Culture begins Greek, but becomes German.

In the final part of the book, Deleuze gives a fascinating exegesis of what we might call all of Nietzsche's history of nihilism. And Deleuze does this by distinguishing several types of nihilism. And he does this with a schema that's not strictly found in Nietzsche, but which could be justifiably extrapolated from Nietzsche, in my view. In order to understand the starting point of this process, we have to first understand something that Deleuze holds to be of critical importance.

That the will to nothingness is still a will. This is stated outright by near the end of *The Genealogy* in his essay on the aesthetic ideal. The aesthetic ideal for Deleuze is characterized as a negative nihilism. He points out that this first type of nihilism takes the form of a valuation to set the value of the world as nil, zero. Even if the aesthetic eye is apparently aimed on an otherworldly goal, Deleuze picks up on Nietzsche's fundamental critique that this evaluation is itself a depreciation of existence.

Deleuze will say that this form of nihilism expresses negation as a function and operation of the will to power. It is a will to the fiction of higher values than those which can be sought in the world, which has the effect of devaluing the world and negating the world. This is what Nietzsche calls the will to nothingness, and he sees it as standing behind the aesthetic ideal just as much so as it stands behind the work of, for example, Schopenhauer. So negative nihilism, we have to say, even though it is aimed at nothingness, is a form of action. The aesthetes and their artistic genius, their molding of the resentment of the populace, shows us that there is a will at work from the very start. But in their shaping and molding of the species into this resentful animal, they create a nihilistic mode of being which is distinct from their own initial form of nihilism. The nihilism that they create is not the same negative nihilism, which is this expression of the will to nothingness. Rather, this is nihilism in perhaps a more colloquial sense. It is a further development that Deleuze designates as reactive nihilism.

"This is no longer the devaluation of life in the name of higher values, but rather the devaluation of higher values themselves. Devaluation no longer signifies life taking on the value of nil, the null value, but the nullity of values, of higher values."

So this is the transition from the nihilism of Christianity to the nihilism of the death of God. This is a concept which, in my view, is scarcely understood in Nietzsche, that both Christianity and the death of God signify a kind of nihilism. And then further from that premise, that there is a distinction to be made between the two. The first sense of nihilism is a value that devalues what is. The second sense of nihilism is that values are devalued in themselves. And what we're seeing in this process, therefore, is this continual turning inward, a continual immolation or neutering of activity by this process of the triumph of reactivity.

Negative nihilism, which was above all still a will to something, even if that something is nothing, is replaced by a pessimism of weakness. And, uh, we may be familiar with Nietzsche's concept, the pessimism of weakness in contrast to the pessimism of strength. The pessimism of weakness is what Deleuze associates with reactive nihilism. Deleuze says that it "finds its principle in the reactive life, completely solitary and naked, in reactive forces reduced to themselves."

So one might wonder at this point, what the nature of the relation between the will to nothingness and the reactive forces truly is. If the will to nothingness, the aesthetic ideal of the priest, who's this kind of active genius, albeit active in a negative way, in a way that is destructive, if the will to nothingness is married with the reactive forces and cultivates and shapes the reactive forces, wouldn't this ultimately cause a kind of conflict? Well, yes. And Deleuze describes this in the following passage:

"The fundamental complicity of the will to nothingness and reactive forces is due to the fact that it is the will to nothingness that allows reactive forces to triumph. When under the influence of the will to nothingness, universal life becomes unreal, life as particular life becomes reactive. Life becomes simultaneously unreal as a whole and reactive in particular. In its enterprise of denying life, the will to nothingness on the one hand merely tolerates reactive life, but on the other hand has need of it. It tolerates the reactive life as a state of life close to zero. It has need of it as a means by which life is led to deny and contradict itself. In this way, victorious reactive forces have a witness, or worse, a leader. But what happens is that the triumphant reactive forces are less and less tolerant of the leader and witness. They want to triumph alone. They no longer want to owe their triumph to anyone else. Perhaps they dread the obscure goal of its own that this will to power attains through their victory. Perhaps they fear that this will to power will turn against them and destroy them in turn. The real active life breaks its alliance with the negative will. It wants to rule alone. It is better to have no will at all than this over-powerful, over-lively will. It is better to have stagnant herds than the shepherd who proceeds in leading us too far. It is better to fade away passively."

Reactive nihilism, in a way, prolongs negative nihilism. Triumphant reactive forces take the place of the power of denying which led them to their triumph. But passive nihilism is the final outcome of reactive nihilism, fading away passively rather than being led from outside.

So we have negative nihilism, which is the will to power expressed as a negation. Then we have reactive nihilism, the negation of even having a goal, even if that goal is nothingness, perhaps even especially if that goal is nothingness. And then what the reactive forces push us towards is to exist passively and to go on existing, which is why they form these self-preservative social structures and collectivities, the herd. But this precipitates the reactive forces entering into a kind of rebellion against the will to nothingness. Following from this rebellion, moving from willing nothingness to not willing at all, the final conclusion is what Deleuze here calls passive nihilism. The passive nihilistic desire is to peacefully exist, to peacefully go extinct. Uh, we don't will anything at all except the absence of activity, the absence of movement, the absence of suffering. It's a state of stagnation and at best contentment, a state of living death.

Deleuze will argue that this is what is indicated by the last man. The last man, therefore, is distinct from the priest or the aesthetic, and he's distinct from the Romantic pessimists like Schopenhauer or Wagner, those pessimists of weakness as Nietzsche accused them of being. The aesthetic is the initial form. The Schopenhauerian is the development of the form. But if we continue down this road, the last man is the form that will emerge, that will genealogically come out of this in the future. The last man is pure passivity, the completion of the overthrow of the priest and the total ascendance of inactivity. No longer any goals, no longer any aims, no demands, no distant stars to shoot for, no commanding and obeying, no struggle. The last man is the passive nihilist, and he's the final product of this great diversion of human history. When seized by reactive forces, we move from negative to reactive to passive.

This is the difference, for example, between Christianity and Buddhism. And explains why Nietzsche would write in the unpublished notes found in *Will to Power* that a new European Buddhism was coming. If Buddhism and Christianity are both nihilistic religions in Nietzsche's view, then why does Nietzsche say that Buddhism is a thing to come? Isn't nihilism already inculcated into Europe by the dominance of Christian thinking? Well, Deleuze would argue, no. Christianity is a religion of aesthetes driven by the will to nothingness. Deleuze says that Christ came to teach a lesson to the reactive man, to teach how to die. He's this supreme negative nihilist, teaching reactive nihilists. Christ is strikingly free from resentment and free from the spirit of revenge. He's starkly different from the reactive nihilists who would follow in his footsteps as the early Christian church. And meanwhile, Buddha's doctrine is a passive doctrine. Buddha was a great physiologist, in Nietzsche's words. He came to teach the freedom from suffering to a world gripped by passive nihilism. He is an exemplary figure who transmutes the passive nihilism into something nobler. Passive nihilism is at the end of this historical process of becoming reactive. Whereas Christianity is at an earlier stage, perhaps even at the beginning. This is why Nietzsche writes in *The Antichrist*:

"Buddhism is a religion for the end and fatigue of a civilization. Christianity does not even find civilization in existence; it establishes civilization, if need be."

I love, I love that aphorism. So again, we return to our great problem. This seems to be the story of human history, this becoming reactive. The end product is a passive nihilism that is likened to a sort of, uh, abortion of the species, we might say, complete sabotage of our species activity, the eventual dead end of our existence. For Deleuze, this great tragedy is seen in the way that Zarathustra handles the so-called higher men. We might recall Nietzsche's numerous passages about the near certainty that any so-called great human being will probably, uh, not turn out well. He will end up botched or will fail in some way. Deleuze argues that therefore, the higher men have these two aspects, but that this doesn't indicate two types of higher men, but rather that Nietzsche's higher man is both a representative of reactive forces and of the product of species activity.

Deleuze writes: "Zarathustra treats the higher man in two ways: sometimes as the enemy who will consider any trap, any infamy, in order to divert Zarathustra from his path, and sometimes as a host, almost as a companion, who is engaged in an enterprise close to that of Zarathustra himself."

And then in the next section, Deleuze elaborates on this problem:

"Rancor and bad conscience are constitutive of the humanity of man. Nihilism is the a priori concept of human history. This is why conquering nihilism, liberating thought from bad conscience and rancor, means the overcoming and destruction of even the best men. Nietzsche's critique is not directed against an accidental property of man, but against his very essence. It is in his essence that man is called the skin disease of the earth. Yet, on the other hand, Nietzsche speaks of the masters as a type of human being that the slave has merely conquered, diverted from its course, of the free and sovereign individual as the human product of this activity that the reactive man has only deformed. Zarathustra sometimes evokes his true men and announces that his reign is also the reign of men."

So again, Nietzsche restates for us this eternal problem, the recursion of weakness and the self-undermining of strength. And to use his coinage, a man can oppose weakness, but not his own becoming weak. We can feel that we ought to oppose reactive forces, and yet the dominant type of the species is the man who becomes reactive. This is the reason for the repetition that we see throughout history of the slave revolt in morality, ever recurring, albeit in different forms.

Deleuze argues: "Each time that Nietzsche speaks of active men, he does so with the sadness of seeing the destiny to which they are predetermined as their essential becoming: the Greek world overthrown by the theoretical man, Rome overthrown by Judea, the Renaissance and the Reformation..."

It's here that Deleuze's all-important critique of Hegel comes into play once again, and he reiterates the point that he made about the dialectic that we discussed last time. The dialectic is reactive through and through, and the dialectical interpretation of history simply represents and yet misunderstands this becoming reactive of man. The unhappy consciousness that the dialectician attempts to reconcile is never reconciled. There does not exist a positive goal for our species activity. Rather, it's an activity which is essentially abortive. It proceeds further and further into reactivity at every turn. Even our best specimens exist as failures.

Quoting from Deleuze here: "Reactive forces, for their part, were able to find the ally that had led them to victory: nihilism, the negative, the power of denying, the will to nothingness, which forms a universal becoming reactive. Separated from a power of affirming, active forces can, on their side, do nothing except become reactive or turn against themselves. Their activity, their goal, and their product are abortive for all time. They lack a will which goes beyond them, a quality capable of manifesting and bearing their superiority, an activity which does not raise itself to the powers of affirming. An activity which trusts only in the labor of the negative is destined to failure, and its very principle, it turns to its opposite."

So this is why when Zarathustra says he's surveyed all of the highest human beings and the lowest and found them all human, all too human. If human history is this great becoming reactive, then all of these attempts have always, uh, been defeated by this same reactivity that is the only thing that we know. And the core question then, that I think should come to everyone's mind at this point, is how do reactive forces become active? Is there any way to transform a species which is reactive, resentful, dominated by bad conscience, slipping into this passive nihilism which is a living death? Is there any way to transform that into a species which is active? Can that passivity be flipped? Can it be reversed?

Once again, the answer for Deleuze can be found mostly in Nietzsche's notes, where he discusses active versus passive nihilism. Nietzsche says that all nihilism up to this point has been in the form of an unfinished project, and that nihilism need not be an end state or a dead end, as we might refer to it. That there's a form of nihilism which is a preliminary and not a mere diversion. This is the transvaluation of all values, the transmutation of the passive into the active, and the regaining of the rights of activity and the health and strength of activity. But this all takes place within the kingdom of nihilism, so to speak.

Deleuze has a wonderful turn of phrase: "Nihilism is defeated, but defeated by itself." The Deleuzian explanation for how this works is rather brilliant. The reactive forces have broken off their alliance with the will to nothingness. They now seek to be the sole driver of human existence. But consequently, the will to nothingness has broken off its alliance with the reactive forces. The one possessed of this will is in fact nothing like the passive, uh, herd animal represented by the last man. He will instead engage in an active form of self-destruction. He will turn this will to nothingness, with this terrible power of negation, against all that is human in him, human in the sense of the becoming reactive which is characteristic of our entire species activity within history. One such as Nietzsche, somebody capable of this true biting critique, can turn such a will to negation against the power of the reactive forces themselves. That's why Nietzsche can say in *Ecce Homo*, "I have negated as no one has negated before, but without becoming a no-saying spirit." Or why he argues that cynicism, you know, the brute realism that dispenses with all idealistic or aspirational notions, can be a way for base souls to have a chance of touching honesty. You know, the kind of reactive people that we have all become, can, uh, have a chance at grasping or glimpsing the truth. And that this can be a path to this active nihilism.

And so, if one goes fully through with nihilism, one seeks after this act of nihilism. They engage in active destruction, active critique, but not with the aim of negation. It's a transmutation of this destruction into a form of affirmation.

"Destruction becomes active to the extent that the negative is transmuted and converted into affirmative power. The eternal joy of becoming, which is avowed in an instant. The joy of annihilation, the affirmation of annihilation and destruction. This is the decisive point of Dyonisian philosophy, the point at which negation expresses an affirmation of life, destroys reactive forces, and restores the rights of activity. The negative becomes the Thunderbolt and lightning of a power of affirming."

So this is the sense in which Zarathustra asks us to go under, make ourselves not into overmen, but the forerunners and ancestors of the Overman, to be willing to perish in the name of our goal, to create beyond ourselves without a care for preserving ourselves. This is, in Deleuze's interpretation, the reason behind these entries in Nietzsche to live dangerously, to build our temples on the slopes of Vesuvius.

"And the man who wants to perish, the man who wants to be overcome, negation changes senses: it becomes a power of affirming, a preliminary condition of the development of the affirmative."

All of the values that mankind has hitherto held to be the highest become now, in the aftermath of this great transmutation of value, worthless. We chime our hammers against them and hear hollow tones, recognizing these values as mere idols. We recognize that every precious value was once an act of will. Every one of them represented the thought, "I will." It was the reactive man that responded to that "I will" by treating it as a "thou shalt" and slavishly bowing before it. One who affirms themselves as sovereign, the one with the right to determine values, inevitably destroys those existing "thou shalt."

Finally: "Affirmation constitutes becoming active as the universal becoming of forces. Reactive forces are denied. All forces become active."

For Deleuze, importantly, this is the significance of the Overman and the promise, the faith in the Overman that guides Zarathustra and modifies his understanding of the eternal recurrence, such that it can be seen as a blessing and not a curse. And to Deleuze, as reading of Nietzsche, only differences what returns, which is to say, only that which becomes active is capable of returning. All which becomes reactive proceeds down this spiral of nihilism and eventually negates itself right out of existence. Even in this negation, the species activity is ultimately realized. The weak aspect, the aspect of the species in which the healthy relation of forces is reversed, the botched or the nihilistic aspect, we might call it, is selected out within these cycles of nature. Deleuze will say that all that is negative is destined not to return. Eternal return is not the return of the same. For Deleuze, his interpretation is as follows:

"The eternal return means that being is selection. The eternal return is the reproduction of becoming, but the reproduction of becoming is also the production of becoming active."

And further down in the same passage, he says: "The negative expires at the gates of being."

The Overman is the prospect of man becoming active within this going under. His recognition of the imminence of becoming and the reactive fiction that is being. He takes hold of the will to nothingness, now separated from the reactive forces, and marries it to active forces. He says, "May I go under so that a more joyful, active, happy form of life may come into being? I will use the negative power to destroy all that which is inimical to that new form of life coming into being." And this is a good thing because being is good, life is good. Life is that which justifies suffering, rather than life needing to be justified because of suffering. This is what it means to use the negative to affirm, to sear through the numbness of passivity into the affirmation of life.

Deleuze contrasts this kind of affirmation to the metaphor of the ass, the donkey, which Nietzsche uses from time to time, often in *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*. What sound does the donkey make? The donkey says "Yah." It's the animal that dumbly says "Yay," "Yes." It affirms because it's incapable of denying. This is not what the affirmation of Nietzsche looks like, and this is why he ridicules it. The donkey, not unlike the camel in the metaphor of the camel, lion, and child, is a pack animal, and it is an affirmative being because it simply takes on whatever is given to it, stupidly saying "yay" to every, every burden. This way of affirming, this kind of herd animal affirming, is passive affirmation. It may characterize the scholar or the theologian or the philosophical laborer, but not Nietzsche's Dionysian man.

Furthermore, Deleuze draws another important contrast with the various figures who stalk and antagonize Zarathustra, such as his ape or the spirit of gravity, who is occasionally depicted as a dwarf, as a demon. Deleuze writes:

"The demon is nihilism because he denies everything, despises everything. He also believes he is taking negation to its supreme degree, but living off negation as an independent power, having no other quality but the negative, he is merely a creature of rancor, hate, and revenge. Zarathustra says to him: 'I despise your contempt. My contempt and my bird of warning shall ascend from love alone, not from the swamp.'"

This means that it is only as a power of affirming love that the negative attains its highest degree, as the bird of warning that precedes and follows affirmation. Insofar as the negative is its own power or quality, it is in the swamp and is itself a swamp, reactive forces. It is only under the sway of affirmation that the negative is raised to its higher degree, at the same time as it defeats itself. It is no longer a power and quality, but the mode of being of the one who is powerful. Then, and only then, the negative is aggression. Negation becomes active, joyful destruction.

Near the end of the work, Deleuze then analyzes the three metamorphoses in more detail. The camel is the courageous spirit who desires to bear the heaviest burdens, who is patient with the chastiser. For Deleuze, the camel is the plain-faced affirmation of the real, to only regard as real that which you can affirm or carry on your back, we might say. And we could associate this kind of attitude with that of the scientific realist, the positivist. Duo says of this type of person that his affirming is nothing but bearing, carrying, according to what is real. But "the idea of the real in itself is an ass's idea." This is the real in the sense of the Christian or the Platonist, the real as found in the form of substance or thing-in-itself, or for that matter, in the material world. Deleuze also associates this attitude with that of the modern freethinker, so-called, like the Christian. He seems to wish to possess certainty and his interpretation of the forces that control the world by creating equations and so-called laws. We imagine that these forces that control the world belong to us, that we can carry them off on our backs. Most of them end up recapitulating to the existence of the state or the doctrines of the church, or to the common sense morality.

"He accepts himself in accepting the real. He accepts the real as accepting himself. With this frightening sense of responsibility, the whole of morality returns at a gallop."

Deleuze then brings up a wonderful passage from Zarathustra here, from the chapter on the Land of Culture:

"For thus you speak: 'We are complete realists and without belief or superstition.' Thus you thump your chests. Alas, without even having chests! But how should you be able to believe, you moldy-spotted men, you who are paintings of all that has ever been believed? Unworthy of belief, that is what I call you, you realists."

Deleuze then gives an exegesis of this passage a little further in the section where he says: "In this critique of affirmation as acceptance of responsibility, Nietzsche is not thinking simply nor distantly of Stoic conceptions. His enemy is closer at hand. Nietzsche is engaged in a critique of all conceptions of affirmation which see it as a simple function, a function of being or of what is. Philosophy since Hegel appears as a bizarre mixture of ontology and anthropology, metaphysics and humanism, theology and atheism, theology of bad conscience and atheism of being."

For in so far as affirmation is presented as a function of being, man himself appears as the functionary of affirmation. This functionary role of man, this functionary role of affirmation, Deleuze argues, is the key difference. This is affirmation as a means rather than an end. Affirmation in the dialectical sense only emerges from two negations, from the negation of both the self and other, or in the sense of Hegel's master and slave dialectic, the negation of both the master sense of self and the slave sense of self, and a double negation thereby creates an affirmation. In the dialectic, they recognize some new sense of the self which is only emerges from the negation of both the pre-existing ones. And that's why Deleuze often uses the phrase double affirmation, because that's the antithesis of Hegel, pun intended.

For Deleuze, Hegelian being is essentially nihilistic because it might as well be nothingness. Being is only affirmed in so far as a thing passes into its own opposite, whatever that might mean. Hegelian being is being as it exists in thought, in abstract conception, and concerns itself with how to articulate the ground of being as a product of the negative. It is in fact this very enemy, Hegel, that Deleuze, as Nietzsche, critiques and attacks. And thus we find once again the significance of the lion. The lion is the negative harnessed by one who is not Hegelian, but on the path to becoming active, one in the grips of reactive forces, who turns the Dionysian power of denial against these very notions of being, of the ideal, of the dialectic as a means of apprehending the truth, so that they can turn against their reactive forces and become active.

Many of us who seek knowledge within this great becoming reactive become permanently stuck in the camel-like phase, and that we say yes to everything, everything given to us, without being able to say no. The lion is that seizing of the will to nothingness, the negative will to attack the reactive forces, recognize the form of camel affirmation as a false affirmation. Deleuze says it's a caricature of affirmation to attack the "thou shalt" of the old values. But Nietzsche, of course, writes for the philosophers of the future, the coming free spirits who have not yet arrived. And while Nietzsche may be carrying out the work of the negative in service of this transmutation to an active mode of life, he says he's as yet without any companions, without any friends on this same journey.

Deleuze writes: "This task is not yet completed in man. Going as far as he can, man raises negation to a power of affirming, but affirming in its full power, affirming affirmation itself. This is beyond man's strength."

And to Deleuze then quotes from Nietzsche: "To create new values, even the lion is incapable of that. But to create itself freedom for new creation, that the lion can do."

Beyond the task of the lion is, of course, the self-forgetting child. The child, the one who plays, who throws the dice, for whom life is a game, the one for whom life is a dance, an adventure. That's the final symbol of affirmation, the true affirmation. Who is this child in concrete terms? The one who is a self-legislator. They are prodigiously forgetful. They are artistic and creative. This is a person born in the wake of the destruction of all of these abortive elements of mankind. This is a human who has become active and affirmative, the post-moral, super-historical, morally irresponsible way of being. That's what's signified by the child in Deleuze's estimation. The coming of that which finally overcomes the bad conscience. And the very idea may raise the question for us of whether such people have ever existed or are indeed yet to come. This is above all a joyful person, a person for whom the death of God has been seized and made into a joyful event, who has invested that event with the sense of affirmation. This is what Nietzsche calls the golden laughter, the person who is able to be conscious and self-reflective, but free of these reactive, uh, the triumph of reactive forces that have characterized and dominated consciousness and self-reflection thus far.

Nietzsche's great accomplishment in philosophy, as Deleuze formulates it near the end of the text, is as follows:

"Nietzsche exposes all the mystifications which disfigure philosophy: the apparatus of the bad conscience, the false marvels of the negative which turn multiplicity, becoming, chance, and difference itself into so many misfortunes of consciousness itself, and turn misfortunes of consciousness into so many moments of formation, reflection, or development. Nietzsche's practical teaching is that difference is happy, that multiplicity, becoming, chance are adequate objects of joy by themselves, and that only joy returns. Multiplicity, becoming, and chance are the properly philosophical joy in which unity rejoices in itself, and also in being and necessity. Nietzsche exposes rancor, bad conscience, and the power of the negative which serves as their principle. The untimeliness of a philosophy which has liberation as its object. There is no unhappy consciousness which is not also man's enslavement, a trap for the will and an opportunity for all beasts of thought."

And there you have it. Nietzsche, as read by Deleuze. I'm planning an episode in which I'll discuss with, uh, one of my friends some of the ways in which I might disagree with or critique Deleuze, but nevertheless, I find his reading of Nietzsche, uh, both confirms but also complements my own in many ways, and I find him commensurate with the spirit of Nietzsche. While his style of writing is a bit too French for my tastes, I think you can detect that same vigor, that same zeal that's of a kind with Nietzsche in his, the voice of Deleuze on the page. And Deleuze clearly also has that wish to turn the search for knowledge into that, to a quest, a danger, an adventure, an enterprise in which one, you know, chances everything, a game in which one throws the dice. And perhaps most usefully, I think Deleuze does something utterly blasphemous and heretical for us Nietzscheans: he puts Nietzsche into a workable, comprehensible system. Some Deleuzians might disagree with my characterization of this, but I would simply point out that Deleuze's project regarding Nietzsche is essentially to introduce a whole new set of distinctions and categories, a new set of terms for understanding Nietzsche's ideas, to give us a lexicon and arrange it into a comprehensive structure. And while it might be very easy to say we didn't need to mistrust all systematizers, I think it's easy to understate how helpful these categories can be. And I think I have learned a great deal from Deleuze. So, uh, at the conclusion here, let me know in the comments if and when I cover Deleuze again, which of his works do you think I should talk about? Um, hopefully next time we'll be able to cover something in Deleuze where that is not solely just an interpretation of Nietzsche, but it'll probably come next season.

Next time on The Nietzsche Podcast, we're going to remain in France but travel back in time a few hundred years. We are returning to the Renaissance, where we're going to consider the work of one of Nietzsche's favorite writers, Michel de Montaigne, the first essayist. Join me then for a look into the mind of the supreme skeptic and forerunner of the Enlightenment. See you next time, everyone. Signing off. If you enjoyed The Nietzsche Podcast or found it helpful, you can visit us and support the show at patreon.com/untimelyreflections. The link is in the description, or just share the show with any of your friends that you think might enjoy it or on social media. Thank you for your support.

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