Read an Excerpt
The Phantom of the Ego
MODERNISM AND THE MIMETIC UNCONSCIOUS
By Nidesh Lawtoo Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2013 Nidesh Lawtoo
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-096-2
CHAPTER 1
Nietzsche's Mimetic Patho(-)logy
From Antiquity to Modernity
I am still waiting for a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of that word.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
The Phantom
When Nietzsche claims that a phantom is haunting the modern ego, he is not only expressing a personal, mimetic anxiety; he is also diagnosing a wider cultural sickness that aff ects and infects modernity as a whole. This mimetic pathology condemns the modern ego to live in a world of phantoms where one is not oneself, but someone other instead. As Nietzsche diagnoses in Daybreak (1881):
Whatever they may think and say about their "egoism," the great majority nonetheless do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do is done for the phantom of their ego [Phantom von ego] which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated [mitgeteilt] to them;—as a consequence they all of them dwell in a fog of impersonal, semi-personal opinions, and arbitrary, as it were poetical evaluations, the one forever in the head of someone else, and the head of this someone else again in the head of others: a strange world of phantasms. (105)
This is a world where what is most intimate about oneself is indistinguishable from others, where one's opinions are someone else's opinions, one's head part of someone else's head. This is a strange world of phantoms, indeed. And since Nietzsche feels that the phantom of the ego has possessed the "great majority" of modern subjects, it is perhaps not surprising that, philosophical ghost-buster that he is, he will spend a good part of his career chasing this mimetic phantom. This chapter tells the story of Nietzsche's ghost hunt, a mimetic hunt where the hunter is himself haunted by the unconscious phantoms he sets forth to unmask.
Nietzsche is a self-proclaimed "philosophical physician" who frequently practices the art of psychological dissection. On his operating table one can find psychic phenomena as diverse as compassion, identification, theatrical impersonation, crowd behavior, hysteria, intoxication, emotional contagion, and mass opinion, to name but the most prominent mimetic pathologies. These phenomena are mimetic in the psychic sense that they create a confusion between self and other characteristic of the "phantom of the ego." Mimesis, for Nietzsche, is thus not simply understood as imitation or representation, but as a polymorphous phenomenon that troubles the boundaries of individuation. Indeed, mimesis is at the heart of Nietzsche's most insistent concerns with modernity. It not only informs his account of masters and slaves, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, compassion and will to power, but also occupies center stage with respect to his agonistic confrontation with his most significant models and rivals: that is, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Plato. Indeed, the problematic of affective mimesis, though rarely discussed, is not only at the heart of Nietzsche's most constant philosophical preoccupations; it also goes to the foundations of his thought and persona.
What does not remain constant, however, is Nietzsche's diagnostic evaluation of mimesis. Nietzsche's position oscillates, like a pendulum, between two opposed poles. Most oft en, as his account of the "phantom of the ego" already indicates, this "physician of the soul" (D 52) posits himself at a radical distance from the psychic phenomena that lie on his dissecting table. This distance, or as he oft en calls it, this "pathos of distance," splits his conception of the subject in two and sets up a sharp contrast between nonmimetic and mimetic subjects: the master contra the slave, the individual contra the herd, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and so on. Yet the primary characteristic of affective mimesis, as Nietzsche knows, is precisely to challenge the boundaries that divide and oppose subjects. Thus, not only the "great majority," but also the conceptual types Nietzsche consistently promotes—including "Herr Nietzsche" himself—will prove vulnerable to the contaminating power of contagious communication he so effectively diagnoses in others. Nietzsche, like Plato before him and other modernists after him, is deeply implicated in the modern forms of mimetic sickness he vehemently critiques. This is true with respect to that mimetic "pathos" (from Greek suffering, passion related to penthos, sorrow) par excellence which is compassion, but is equally true if we consider Nietzsche's confrontation with what he calls "Wagner's pathos" (CW 8) and the theatrical mimesis it entails. We can thus say that tacitly at work in the notion of "pathos of distance" is a fundamental structural oscillation towards / away from mimesis, a conjunctive-disjunction generated by the fact that Nietzsche's "distance" is constantly undermined by his own entanglement in (and, at times, even enthusiasm for) mimetic "pathos."
This fundamental tension at the heart of Nietzsche's thought has largely gone unnoticed, yet it has not escaped René Girard's reading of Nietzsche. In a series of essays that open up Nietzsche studies to mimetic theory, Girard has shown that a fundamental "contradiction" is at the heart of Nietzsche's take on compassion. And in a characteristically provocative gesture, he invites future readers of Nietzsche "who do not praise contradiction only in the abstract" to address this point. To my knowledge, Girard's challenge has not been directly addressed, and, as a consequence, it has not received the attention it deserves. In this chapter, I pick up this thought-provoking line of inquiry in an attempt to further Girard's insights into Nietzsche's contradictory stance on mimetic affects. Building on the work of two major figures in Nietzsche studies and mimetic theory aligned with rigorous forms of deconstruction, the American critic and theorist Henry Staten and the French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, I shall argue that such a "contradiction" traverses the entirety of Nietzsche's corpus, from his early account of the Dionysian to his late critique of the mimetic crowd, passing via his paradoxical take on compassion, poetic enthusiasm, and massive outbreaks of hypnotic depersonalization. Or, if you prefer Nietzsche's diagnostic language, the problematic of mimesis informs his Schopenhauerian, Platonic, and Wagnerian sicknesses.
A mimetic approach suggests that Nietzsche's most valuable insights into the workings of affective mimesis progressively emerge if we closely consider this contradictory push-pull as it surfaces throughout his work of the early, middle, and, especially, later period. If distance from mimesis is obviously necessary for the development of a critical practice that leads him to evaluate contagious affects in pathological terms (i.e., as a "sickness"), Nietzsche's own mimetic pathology should not be dismissed as a mere contradiction; nor should it be celebrated as an aporia. Rather, following Nietzsche's insight that "sickness is instructive ... even more instructive than health" (GM III, 9; 92), I will argue that his "mimetic disease" furnishes him with the affective raw material necessary for the development of a mimetic patho-logy (i.e., a critical discourse, or logos, on mimetic pathos). Out of this oscillation between "distance" from and affective proximity to mimetic "pathos," the spiraling motor of Nietzsche's "patho(-)logy"—now understood in the dual sense of both disease and diagnosis—is set in motion. Both infected and critical aspects of Nietzsche's thought will be instrumental in taking hold of the process of unconscious communication responsible for the formation of that "strange world of phantoms" in which the modern subject, volens nolens, is condemned to find his or her way.
The Logos of Sympathy
Nietzsche's considerations on the "phantom of the ego" are part of his disturbing aristocratic radicalism that violently splits his conception of the subject in two; and this Spaltung is tacitly predicated on the question of mimesis. On the one hand, we are told, there is the "great majority" whose moral opinions are "adopted" (i.e., mimetic subjects) and, on the other, the "free spirits" whose opinions are "original" (i.e., nonmimetic subjects) (D 104). This moral distinction between individuals functions as a leitmotif in Nietzsche's conception of morality and anticipates the much-debated typology he posits in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). If the master/slave distinction introduces new criteria to evaluate human types (such as "activeness" and "reactiveness," "life affirmation" and "life negation," "strength" and "weakness," "health" and "sickness"), the fundamental distinction between imitative and nonimitative subjects remains firmly in place. In fact, Nietzsche defines the noble as an "autonomous" subject who creates his own values and "resembles no one but himself" (GM II, 2; 41). And, as is well known, he repeatedly defines slavery in terms of passive submission to moral conventions, dismissing such a psychic docility via the telling image of the mimetic "herd." The "pathos of distance" Nietzsche posits between these two types of men at the opening of Genealogy of Morals allows him to "contrast," as he puts it, the "noble, the powerful, the superior and the high-minded" to "everything low, low-minded, common and plebeian" (GM I, 2; 12). In short, this notion guarantees the stability of what David Krell aptly calls a "disjunctive typology."
Mimetic Infections
Nietzsche's critique of the mimetic status of the "herd" is predicated on a physiological/medical terminology that leads him to conflate slavery with "sickness." Nietzsche's insistence on the diagnostic notion of sickness to denounce slavery pervades his later work, but is especially apparent in the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, devoted to a critique of "ascetic ideals." There he speaks of the "sickliness of the type of man which has existed so far" (GM III, 13; 99) as well as of the "sick herd" (15; 105). This theoretical gesture is most oft en read as a direct expression of Nietzsche's "aggressive pathos" (EH 7; 47): that is, a sovereign, philosophical attack explicitly directed against Christianity, but which also encompasses the sphere of morality or, as he dismissively calls it, "the herd instinct in the individual" (GS 116). From this perspective, Nietzsche's critique of slavery in terms of sickness is launched from a superior position based on what he calls a scornful "looking down on subjects" (BGE 257) and can be read as just one of the many derogatory attributes he refers to in order to define "herd morality." The sick human being, Nietzsche repeatedly affirms, is a "life-negating" subject characterized by "weakness," the "Wille zum Ende," "ressentiment," and the inability to affirm, enjoy, and celebrate life here and now. Needless to say that at such textual moments the pathos of distance that divides the master's (healthy) life affirmation from the slaves' (sick) life negation is at its sharpest. As Nietzsche puts it, there is an "abyss between the healthy and the sick" (GM III, 16; 107). This romantic story is oft en told, well known, and oft en passes as the only version of Nietzsche's thoughts on morality.
And yet a closer look at Genealogy shows that at work in Nietzsche's notion of "sickness" is also a more insidious, less transparent, early-modernist level of thought that tends to complicate the violent hierarchical disjunction between mimetic and antimimetic types. In fact, at times, Nietzsche loses his self-assurance in the stability of his hierarchical typology and admits, for instance, that "the sick represent the greatest danger [grösste Gefahr] for the healthy" (14; 100). In this section of the essay the notion of "pathos of distance" surfaces for the second time, but now this notion is no longer introduced to guarantee the distinction between the "high-minded" and the "low-minded," the "healthy" and the "sick," and the tone of aristocratic superiority has left space for an anxiety concerning the dangers of mimetic infection:
That the sick should not infect the healthy with their sickness ... this ought to be the prime concern on earth [der oberste Gesichtspunkt auf Erden]—but that requires above all that the healthy should remain segregated from the sick, protected even from the sight of the sick, so that they do not mistake themselves for the sick.... the pathos of distance [Pathos der Distanz] should keep even their missions separate to all eternity! (14; 103)
The masters need to be protected "even from the sight of the sick, so that they do not mistake themselves for the sick." Such a claim casts serious doubts on the radical distinction Nietzsche had initially posited between human types and makes clear that inherent in his "pathos of distance" is not only an affirmative gesture, which posits a disjunction between noble and slave, but also a self-preservative move intended to protect the so-called "strong" from the "weak." As Henry Staten aptly recognized, "Nietzsche's text is pervaded by a fear of the power of the weak." Or, to put it in Nietzschean parlance, inherent in the pathos of distance is not only an "aggressive pathos" but also a "defensive ability"—not only "action" but also "reaction."
This is already the moment to pause in order to ask a series of questions concerning such a defensive/reactive movement in Nietzsche's text: How can a look be sufficient to turn the most aristocratic subject who "resembles no one but himself" into the despised mimetic other? Is the conceptual and the affective distance between noble and slave so thin? Or is the slave's power of contagion—what Nietzsche also calls "will to power of the weakest" (14; 102)—so strong? And if the latter, how is such contagion communicated (mitgeteilt)? In Genealogy, Nietzsche does not provide a direct answer to these clinical questions; yet he tells us where to look for it. In fact, a few lines after mentioning that "it is not the strongest but the weakest who spells disaster for the strong," Nietzsche attributes this "disastrous effect" to "great disgust at man; as well as great compassion [Mitleid] for man" (14; 101). Let us recall that elsewhere Nietzsche says that compassion "makes suff ering contagious" (A 7; 573), and he adds that Aristotle considered it "a pathological and dangerous condition" (7; 574)—dangerous, that is, for its power of infection, whereby pathos breaks down what he also calls "the delicate feeling for distance" (EH 4; 44). It is thus to this instinct that I now turn in order to define the precise modality of that affective, infective, or as we shall call it, mimetic pathology that threatens to bridge the so-called abyss that divides the healthy from the sick.
The purpose of this "detour" via the problematic of compassion is at least twofold. On the one hand, a focus on Mitleid, or if you want, sympathy (from Greek sym-pathos, suffering together) is instrumental in solving a fundamental contradiction in Nietzsche's text. And insofar as this shared pathos threatens to bridge the distance that Nietzsche posits within his "disjunctive" human typology, this side of the argument allows us to turn our diagnostic lenses inwards, to dissect the infections of his mimetic thought (or pathology). On the other hand, a focus on the problematic of compassion allows us to reconstruct Nietzsche's theoretical discourse on mimetic pathos (or patho-logy), to start an inquiry into the infectious nature of mimesis in the modern period, and to open up an alternative model of the unconscious. In short, this detour is the detour via mimesis, a detour instrumental in setting in motion the spiraling motor of Nietzsche's mimetic patho(-)logy that will guide us during our clinical investigation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Phantom of the Ego by Nidesh Lawtoo. Copyright © 2013 Nidesh Lawtoo. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
