Book Review by Joseph Nechvatal
The Three Stigmata of
Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism by Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 157pp.,
$85.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780230282551
The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche:
Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism is a terribly expensive but mesmerizing
book of contemporary interdisciplinary theory that
comes across as a chaotic-black velvety luxury item of immense merit. I read it
in a dense desolate pocket in a beautiful mountain valley in Corsica this June
and the setting was perfect, as Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence was fleshed out from
top to bottom in some wonderfully dense language. While some of her political
physiology left me uninfected, there is a strong affect to this work that can
pierce.
For this book the author, Nandita Biswas
Mellamphy, drew deeply from the French, German and Anglo-American threads of
Nietzsche scholarship to connect the eternal recurrence to Nietzsche's great
politics
(most problematic) and his philosopher of the future (highly unlikely). This
trilogy of three separate but connected idea-works-of-art, make up the three
stigmata under discussion. Like art, none are given overly explicit or
systematic definitions (though each stigmata is both a poison and a cure). But
Mellamphy makes this puncture triptych bleed and blur even further; indeed she
satisfactorily mashes-up these three concepts together in one wounded flow of
psycho-physiology - which I liked. It is for this reason that I thought more
about art than about philosophy or politics while enjoyably reading this thin
but intense book.
MellamphyÕs emphasis on the sharp-witted French
artist Pierre KlossowskiÕs book on Nietzsche - Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle
- was
sheer thrill for me. As was her deep treatment of ideas from Gilles DeleuzeÕs
book Nietzsche and Philosophy along with dashes of Michel Foucault's Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History
and lighter glazes of Arthur C. DantoÕs Nietzsche as Philosopher highlighted with
touches of Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the
Contradictions of His Philosophy by Wolfgang MŸller-Lauter. If it sounds like I
think of this book more as a delicately stroked painted portrait than an
exegesis, that would be correct.
More specifically, I did
find riveting her general materialist treatment of nihilismÕs unvarying no as a viral-like pathology and her suggestion that
nihilismÕs illness - if it goes far enough - transforms a metamorphosis into an
all embracing yes via the eternal
return. For Mellamphy, Nietzsche reveals a surreptitious journey to the renewed
wellbeing of our ever-ailing species that depends on playing nihilism out by
intensifying its forces. For her, NietzscheÕs thought is thus "the
greatest example of nihilismÓ - not the passive and thus incomplete nihilism of
the forms of life Nietzsche attacks, but the Òvirulent and curative nihilismÓ
that unleashes forces of life to emerge.
While some might read this
book as a struggle to place Nietzsche in the realm of politics, my main
interest lay in its texture of emerging claims of art-as-politics - with its
emphasis on the production of individuality. This is examined through
NietzscheÕs idea of a person with philosophic-artistic-political attributes
(Zarathustra). It is in this framework that Mellamphy's hypothesis of a political physiology
(a political function of living
systems) kicks in, with a strong proposition of emergence as the key aspect.
Mellamphy points out that Òfor Nietzsche, the philosopher is the physiological
process and generative formation of an unprecedented kind of being, a being
that, like all manifestations of physis (ÔgrowthÕ), is subject to the formative
forces of emergence.Ó (In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of
a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the
theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.) Here she follows
Bernard Stiegler on the question of the ÔpoliticalÕ as the ÔviralÕ - that the
political Òmust necessarily proceed via a pharmacological perspective: we must
look for the signs of health in the very illnesses of the human condition, as
well as be able to recognize signs of illness in what may be considered by the
majority as signs of ÔhealthÕ.Ó
On culture at large,
Mellamphy pierces deep via Klossowski, warning that the Òconcept of ÔcultureÕ
becomes implicated in the very type of problematic instability that the ÔselfÕ
undergoes in NietzscheÕs thought: the cohesiveness of the culture/state
distinction, like the cohesiveness of the Ôself/otherÕ distinction
disintegrates with the ontological instability produced by the annihilation of
the ÔrealÕ as distinguishable from the ÔillusoryÕ.Ó To bolster her argument,
Mellamphy points us towards some of Nietzsche's favorite pre-Socratic
philosophers like Heraclitus (the so-called obscure and weeping philosopher)
and his emphasis on flow. Indeed there is a lot of Dionysian multiplicity
exhibited in the writing of this book and that, for me, worked well when
stressing Nietzsche's fluxing flowing eternal return (Dionysian nature).
In that Philip K. DickÕs
fictional book The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is woven deftly into the title, the beginning and the
end of her book - yes, speculative imaginative art seems to me the dominant
measure here when contemplating NietzscheÕs account of the completion and
overcoming of nihilism. The small fact that a key question (what kind of
political thinker was Nietzsche? - political, anti-political or over-political)
goes unanswered does no harm to the artistic beauty of this thoughtful ride.