The Overcoming of Physiology

Abstract

Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power has provoked a large number of commentaries and still remains one of his most strange, provoca tive, and disturbing contributions to the ongoing attempt at the overcoming of metaphysical Schemas of thought. The strangeness of will to power is in no way alleviated by its intimate proximity to Nietzsche's thoughts about physiology. In fact, one of the central assumptions this article will attempt to substantiate is that, in Nietzsche's oeuvre, will to power and physiology belong together as virtual synonyms for each other, and that any distinction between them is a matter of emphasis rather than due to a strong conceptual separation. Both the thought of will to power and its articulation in terms of physiology are here understood as strategies that permit the substitution of unitary phenomena, assumed to be pregiven in representational modes of thought, by complex economies of forces and values, or multiplicities. One of the typical ways in which the thought of will to power is subsumed back into the order of representation?although that is what it most obvi ously seeks to undermine?is to render it as a unified subject or substance (will) that seeks to make good a lack or absence (power) by an exertion of its will. This putative subject is furthermore individualized, anthropomor phized, and taken as self-determining so that will to power ends up as some thing like the autonomous intentionality of a human being who seeks to extend his [sic] domination over others. But the chief import of will to power is pre cisely to steer thinking away from such macro-conceptions and to attune it to a more subtle world of flux and becoming, to a microcosm of impersonal forces that is incessantly at play in the interstices of the world of agents and their acts, of substance, subject and all the rest of an exhausted and finally unproductive metaphysical conceptuality. Why then, we might ask, does Nietzsche permit himself the use of such heavily invested terms, will and power, when he precisely seeks to under mine their accepted, traditional philosophical usage, the common conceptual fields in which they appear? A more extended response to this question will be carried out in the course of the discussion that follows in the main part of this article. For the moment the following, preliminary remarks must suffice.