Philosophizing the Double-Bind

Abstract

I say unto you: one must still have in to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have in yourselves. N ietzsche, Zarathustra's Prologue Much has been made of the failure of the critique of metaphysics. Jurgen Habermas and others have argued that this critique presupposes concepts and argumentative strategies that are at the core of the tradition of metaphysics itself, and thus the critique fails to overcome this tradition.(1) This criticism is not new. It was Heidegger's criticism of Nietzsche's inversion and reversal of Platonism, and it is commonly found in the Platonic dialogues when Socrates' interlocutors end up contradicting their initial position, thereby revealing that they ultimately affirm the very position they had been criticizing (e.g., Thrasymachus, Republic 349b350c). Although the critique of metaphysics, at least with Nietzsche, does claim to be reversing the tradition of metaphysics since Plato, what is being criticized or reversed is, I shall show, the notion of reversal itself. What is therefore being criticized is the very premise upon which Habermas's critical strategy acquires its force-in particular, the faith in oppositions, or the logic of either/or, whereby either one opposes and reverses the tradition completely, or one remains stuck in this tradition. What I want further to show is that a critique need not presuppose or utilize the logic of either/or; consequently, a critique need not be a reversal, inversion, or opposition to that which is critiqued, nor need it be a Kantian-styled critique that reveals conditions of possibility. I shall sketch, rather, an understanding of critique as that which neither transcends nor resolves binary oppositions (a la Hegel), nor attempts to reveal and restore a pre-existing order and realm of ideas (6 la Plato and Kant); in short, I will set forth the notion of a critique without redemption. To address this issue I shall discuss, in the first section, the manner in which Gilles Deleuze reads Nietzsche's reversal of the tradition; more particularly, I will analyze Deleuze's understanding of will to power as the non-identifiable differential element. In the second section I shall trace the consequences of this reading by placing Nietzsche and Deleuze's writings in the context of the concept of a double-bind. This concept, as developed by Gregory Bateson, was to have a profound influence on Deleuze and Guattari's work. More importantly, however, this theme can already be seen in the work of Nietzsche, for in Nietzsche one finds a critique which does not depend upon the logic of either/or, but instead resists this logic. In resisting this logic, this critique affirms the both/and that eludes the logic of either/or, and hence eludes the double bind which presupposes it.(2) In the final section I shall compare my reading of Deleuze's Nietzschean critique with the work of Jacques Derrida and Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe. This should show that whereas Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe leave largely unanswered the question of how interpretive critique ought to proceed, we will see that Deleuze and Guattari are very specific and straightforward in answering this question. In short, they set forth a protocol that calls for a critique that affirms and orders the chaos in oneself in a way that prevents this from dying. The chaos in oneself, Nietzsche argues, needs to be ordered: Not `to know' but to schematize--- to impose upon as much regularity and form as our practical needs require. And what our practical needs require is that the strange and unfamiliar be reduced to what is familiar and the same: only when we see things coarsely and made equal do they become calculable and usable to us [i.e., conform to our `practical needs']. The predictable, regular, and ordered is therefore for life. Nietzsche will again stress this same point in The Gay Science, arguing that our need for knowledge is more than a need for the familiar, for the same,(4) but since he also believes that nothing is really equal,(5) is really the same, the schematism thus comes to be viewed as more than the imposition of a useful fiction (or, as Nietzsche will often refer to it, a necessary lie). …