Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

The key words are those translated by Kaufmann as “mind” (Sinne) and “show” (aufführen). The common are restricted in their understanding of “greatness” (das Grosse) to what remains a presentation of sense or pure sensibility (Sinn). They rely on showmen and “performers” (Schauspieler), literally those who “play” (spielen) with what we see, who are the wonderworkers of the visible. Their experience of greatness is limited by what is masterfully manipulated in the magic theater of representation. Little do they know that true “greatness” is not in the manifest, but in the force of manifestation, in creativity itself (das Schaffende). To present or perform something is a kind of “leading up” (Auf-führen) onto the stage or in a context that is at a distance from us, as something to behold; it is a putting out there, the crafting of a “spectacle” as opposed to an intimate view. In the Hegelian dialectic, the fostering of the spectacle is necessary for self-reflection, for the cycle of Geist, for the event that we call the speculative.

But, as we have seen, what drives this circulation is a force that emerges in pure sense-representation, while remaining anterior to all sense-representation, and that continues to be exerted through the spiraling circulation of Spirit on its way to absolute knowledge. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is saying it is the creative force that serves as the key to all thought, all “mind,” all sense. The creative force Nietzsche quite elliptically named the will to power (Wille zur Macht), following the nineteenth-century German convention that begins with Kant of identifying the protological impulse of all consciousness as “will.” It is evident in Nietzsche’s later writings that he considered the will to power a kind of cryptogram for most of his thought. In Zarathustra Nietzsche closely associates the “will” with self-conscious, self-motivated, and self-disciplined affirmative determination of what is. “The will is a creator.” The will is the creative force that has been harnessed and orchestrated by the power of the “creator” himself.

But the will to art as the force of art has nothing to do with the iteration of artistic indicators, artistic signifiers, artistic figurations, and, of course, artistic representations. Art is not about what is produced in art. Art is not about “pictures,” or representations, in any sense of the word. Art is about the artist, about creation itself and its expression through the creator. “I feel only my will’s joy in begetting and becoming,” Zarathustra rhapsodizes.³ In one of his most important posthumously published aphorisms, all of which are collected in the volume The Will to Power, Nietzsche directly tags die Wille zur Macht with the idea of force. “The victorious concept ‘force,’ by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as ‘will to power,’ i.e., as an insatiable desire to manifest power; or as the employment and the exercise of power, as a creative drive.” Nietzsche goes on to say that “one is obliged to understand all motion, all ‘appearances,’ all ‘laws,’ only as symptoms of an inner event and to employ man as an analogy to this end.” Nietzsche’s continues in the following aphorism with a polemic against the Newtonian—and Kantian—account of force as the phenomenal correlation of cause and effect. “Has a force ever been demonstrated? No, only effects translated into a completely foreign language.”⁴

This particular set of passages proved to be a turnkey one for Deleuze, with his epochal introduction during the early 1960s in France of the “new Nietzsche” who would later become the former’s own éminence grise. In the second chapter of Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze appropriated this “symptological” reading of the effects of force. “The will to power,” Deleuze insists, “is thus ascribed to force, but in a very special way: it is both a complement of force and something internal to it. It is not ascribed to it as a predicate.”⁵ Each force, according to Deleuze, “has an essential relation to other forces.” Furthermore, “the essence of force is its quantitative difference from other forces,” and “this difference is expressed as the force’s quality.”

The will to power, therefore, “is the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the quality that devolves into each force in this relation.” Deleuze adds that the will to power is “the genealogical element of force, both differential and genetic.”⁶ Deleuze of course is here laying the groundwork for his understanding of Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” as a key to his mature conception of a noncircular “dialectic” of differentiation, which applies to all modes of semiology—what he, writing with Guattari, will dub a “difference engine.”

It is dubious how much of Nietzsche himself can be ascertained in Deleuze’s Nietzsche, but that is not really the point. Deleuze recognized in Nietzsche, as Derrida would in Hegel, that impelling the forward mobility of all critical thinking, from dialectics to structural linguistics to cultural semiotics, is a unique, inward configuration of force, or forces, that are not apparent in their phenomenalized or representational interconnections. What is force for Deleuze is the force of art for Nietzsche. And art has its own privileged interiority because it is the pure expression of the will to power. What music was to the metaphysical will for Nietzsche’s own “educator,” Schopenhauer, art, in its multidimensional exhibition, is to the will to power in Nietzsche. And whatever we understand by the “apparent” world, the world we experience in its raw and beguiling phenomenality, according to Nietzsche, amounts to this exfoliation of the will to power. Even science is subservient to it. “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides.”⁷

These “concluding” lines of Nietzsche in the published version of this literary remains have major significance. Another more idiomatic way, according to Kaufmann, of translating the words und nichts außerdem (“and nothing besides”) would be “and nothing plus.” Hence, what Nietzsche could very well be saying is, as Schopenhauer himself did, that “world” and “will” are inwardly one and the same. But Nietzsche is not really a metaphysician, despite Heidegger’s attempt to typecast him as the figure who precipitates the “end” of metaphysics.⁸ The “inner” will, world, event, etc. that constitutes the will to power in all its dynamism and ambiguity is sufficient to account for any philosophy, metaphysics, morality, natural science, or religion, as far as Nietzsche is concerned. In the preceding sentences Nietzsche talks about this “world” as follows: it is, he says, “my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my ‘beyond good and evil,’ without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself—do you want a name for this world?”⁹ The name, of course, is der Wille zur Macht.

Like Derrida’s “name,” which can paradoxically be both God and khora, and therefore has to be “saved” in the space of an “exception” (sauf le nom), Nietzsche is naming a singularity that does not admit of generality, iteration, or repeatability. It is not pure difference so much as the singular force of creative differentiality. This name too is exceptional, for “beside” it there is “nothing” (nichts). That is what the word Dionysus means—the pure divine (dios) force of penetration. The original Greek word nyssos, whence the name Dionyssos, has the connotation of “to pierce or penetrate.” It implied the fertile marsh waters in which life teemed and from which both fecundity and death seemed to emanate. It has some of the sense of Plato’s—if not exactly Derrida’s—khora, though the two come from entirely different contexts.

It has often been asserted that Nietzsche was trying to “reduce” everything to what the Germans in the nineteenth century habitually termed Lebenskraft, or “life force,” from which everything from certain benign mystical philosophies of “vitalism” to the sinister politics of Nazism can be said to stem. Yet this thoroughly inner force that is within but independent of appearances is central to Nietzsche’s thought of the will to power. What makes Nietzsche entirely different from the vitalists and the fascists, however, is his adulation not so much of creativity as the creator, the one who through the creative act performs a “transvaluation” (Umwertung). Indeed, the German subtitle of the Will to Power is Versuch einer Umwertung aller Werte (“An Experiment in a Transvaluation of All Value”). This “experiment,” “essay,” or “attempt” (Versuch) is itself an act of will, a tour de force where the undisciplined Dionysian force of life is transformed into a creative artistic exhibition. It is force mastered as art, as will, as power, as the force of art.

Art is not expression so much as it is “value creation.” The role of the creator is “to create new value” (schafft neue Werte).¹⁰ This creation of values is in itself a transformation, or “transvaluing,” of those values supplied to us as the representations (the “old tablets”), the givenness (Vorstellungen) of a moral legacy; it takes us “to the other side of” (jenseits) values and amounts to their “overcoming,” as the “overman” overcomes man himself, what Nietzsche characterizes metonymically as “beyond good and evil.” This kind of art itself is “experimental.” Philosophy in Nietzsche becomes an experimental art of the impossible.

Michel Henry has traced the emergence of virtually the same project in the abstractionist painting of Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky (1866–1944), who was one of the great architects, enablers, and theoreticians of modernism in painting, lived a life that spans the great antirepresentational revolution of the previous century and a half. One of the distinctive features of Kandinsky’s work was his radical effort to synthesize the musical and visual planes of artistic expression. Influenced heavily by Wagner and his towering concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total artwork”), Kandinsky sought to reveal what he called the “inner necessity” of the aesthetic event. As Henry emphasizes, what historians and art critics conventionally designated as “abstract art” is not what Kandinsky, who sketched the intellectual framework for the reception of such art, undertook with his program of pure abstractionism. Abstractionism is more than the “disappearance of the object.” Cubism as practiced by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris pioneered geometric abstraction in painting as a way of penetrating, as Husserl did with his phenomenological reduction, to the “essence” of the object. Piet Mondrian, taking a cue from Kandinsky, did the same with lines and color. But abstractionism, according to Henry, is the opposite of any kind of painterly essentialism.

“Abstract” painting in this regard does not amount to a break with classical standards of art, which focuses ultimately on the formality of the visible, the perfection of what we see. Abstract art remains object dependent. In cubism even “the object dictates the rules of its deconstruction as well as its reconstruction to the artist.”¹¹ But Kandinsky’s abstraction consists not in a vanishing but in a “sudden failure of the object.” Its content turns out to be indefinable. It “no longer refers to what is derived from the world at the end of a process,” but to “what was prior to the world and does not need the world in order to exist.”¹² What Kandinsky “painted” was akin in many ways to Nietzsche’s Dionysian, prephilosophical, and ultimately nonphilosophical, universe—one that, of course, we realize in reading Nietzsche’s early works, especially The Birth of Tragedy as an exploration of Geist in early Greek poetry and music.

Both Kandinsky’s and Nietzsche’s pictures of the universe entail a shocking form of alternate reality; they comprise accounts that aim to penetrate profoundly beyond what is coded in our languages as well as our recognizable thought patterns and images. What they push us to accept is a pure arepresentational universe that can be summed up as an indivisible, pure temporality. A genuine vision of this universe has the capacity utterly to transfigure art and thought as a whole. If Nietzsche discovered the force of art in philosophy, Kandinsky located it in art itself.

In his 1911 manifesto Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst), Kandinsky described what he called a “new harmony” and a “new art” in the realm of painting. The new harmony is something quite unprecedented because it breaks with the classical canon of unity of form, representation, line, and color. “The new harmony demands that the inner value of a picture should remain unified whatever the variations or contrasts of outward form and color. The elements of the new art are to be found, therefore, in the inner and not the outer qualities of nature.”¹³ Kandinsky’s new harmony was a thesis he transplanted to painting from music. Not only was art to be made musical and therefore interiorized, in keeping with the the metaphysics of Schopenhauer, the aesthetics of Wagner, and the philosophical “musicology” of the early Nietzsche, it was designed to function as a kind of painted vibration; ultimately it was not to be seen but “heard.” Only in this sense can Kandinsky’s work be considered an act of making the invisible “visible” on the canvas. The “harmony” to be manifested through painting was not to be associated with what is “pleasant,” as it was in Kant’s aesthetics, but with what grates, jars, and thereby pushes itself into our frame of attention, creating a “force field.”¹⁴

The force field that is the painting creates a coherence of what we see that remains independent of form and the abstract recognizability of pictorial representation. Kandinsky compares viewing a painting to the act of listening to an interesting personality. “We do not bother about the words he uses, nor the spelling of those words…. We realize that these things, though interesting and important, are not the main things of the moment, but that the meaning and idea is what concerns us.” It is not what makes words, but the force of the words that impress upon us an “idea and meaning.” The same holds with the components of a painting, including its pictorial representations and resemblances. They do not count; it is the consonance of internal force and impact on us that matters. When art is recognized as the impact of its internal force field rather than the associations it produces in our mind with certain familiar experiences, memories, and explanations, “the artist will be able to dispense with natural form and colour and speak in purely artistic language.”¹⁵

The thoroughly interior art of Kandinsky can be considered, like poststructuralism itself, an early declaration of independence from the tyranny of representation and an acknowledgment that an understanding of the “force” behind phenomenality, as opposed to the presence of the phenomenon, is where the future of both art and thought lies. Art, as Plato and the Greeks understood it, is a pure presentation of the phenomenon. The phenomenon is what appears. It is what crystallizes as what Kant understood as a “synthesis” via the imagination of the field of sensible data in tandem with a second-order assemblage through the “power of judgment” (Urteilskraft) of the structure of thought.

In order to grasp what Kandinsky is advancing, we must nevertheless reference Kant. In Kant the completely empty abstraction of the noumenal is contrasted with the layered and interstitched “manifoldness” of both sense experience and conceptual understanding, which yields “objective” knowledge. But Kandinsky wants to propose a different sort of “synthesis” that leads to a higher manifoldness of experience in the production and contemplation of paintings themselves. This synthesis is not contingent on perception per se. Its “abstractness” is fully concrete to the extent that it generates an intuition of the forces necessary to the creation of art.

Perception synthesizes elements of a painting—color, shading, line, form, plane, brushstrokes, etc.—in what art pedagogy terms the “composition” of a canvas. Yet, in Kandinsky, according to Henry, “the unity of the elements is nothing besides the unity of the painting. It is the unity of the composition, or more precisely, it is this composition.”¹⁶ From the standpoint of the painting, unity is always a singularity. Each painting has its own “order and spatiality.” But this order is not the order of elaboration, but the order of creative genesis. “Art is the becoming of life,” Henry says, “the way in which this becoming is carried out.”¹⁷ That sentiment, of course, encapsulates Nietzsche’s own Dionysian philosophy.

But Kandinsky is not doing philosophy under the cover of art theory. The unique property of authentic art is its pathos, its capacity to compel feeling and emotion. Such pathos cannot itself be theorized; it can only be revealed. And what drives the revelation that is art is the force of art. “Force is affective not due to the vicissitudes of its history, its failures or successes, but due to its experience of itself in the embrace in which it grows from its own power … it is the hyper-power through which force takes hold of itself in order to be what it is and to do what it does.”¹⁸

In a significant respect Henry seems to be describing with his trope of hyperpower Nietzsche’s will to power. Every force empowers its own “form”—the triangle, the circle, the color blue, etc. And the compositional unity of these forces adds up to the force of the singular painting. Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”), the cryptic painting of the young Kandinsky after which a very important transitional movement in modern art was named, embodies this particular principle. The painting of 1903 centers on a mysterious dark blue horseman without much detail engaged in an odd gallop across a green landscape. Although there has been much debate over the meaning of the painting and why it was chosen as the actual name for an influential movement that included other celebrated German modernists such as Franz Marc and Paul Klee, an interpretation is not that difficult to come by. Kandinsky, in his writings and teachings, singled out blue as the primary “spiritual” color. Marc was infatuated with horses, but these noble animals were always a symbol in modern art and literature of untamed force. Indeed, form follows force.¹⁹

Again, we have an aesthetic resonance in Kandinsky of Nietzsche’s notion of the Umwertung. Both art and philosophy are manifestations of the creative force itself. But this creative force requires a creator to materialize it, at which point it becomes a “valuation.” The role of the creator, or artist, in creation lies in the principle of composition, which is an outgrowth of the visible materials and elements of a painting.²⁰ Composition signifies the strategic creation of values in painting, which are not merely “aesthetic values,” but ultimate spiritual values, values per se.

Neither philosophers such as Nietzsche or Derrida are able to directly “name” what poses a mystery from the standpoint of discourse itself in the manifestation of the forces that bisect the plane of writing and being. Only tentative sorts of trace labelings, such as “specter” or “will to power,” and mnemonic associations—for example, “mourning,” “gift,” etc.—become possible. But the artist or, more concretely, the painter is endowed with the ability to see and to limn with brush-strokes, colorations, textures, and so forth what words can only leave as an open question. Art can make visible what simply appears an ineffable void in posing the question of the question. Paintings are not only signs of force, but the force of signs themselves.

Kandinsky had a major influence on Dadaism, which is not necessarily obvious to conventional students of art history. He had a profound impact, for example, on the German artist and poet Hugo Ball, who in his relatively short life came to be recognized largely for having originated the name Dada. Giving a radical spin to the symbolist dictum that all aesthetic productions must articulate a visual idiom of interiority, Ball considered the fusion of poetry and painting to be a form of modernist incarnationalism. “Poetry and composing poetry belong together. Christ is image and word. The word and image are crucified.” The word itself as poetry in the new Dadaist expressionism has “developed a plasticity” that “can hardly be surpassed. The result was achieved at the price of the logically constructed.”

Affirming that expressionism and Dadaism provide a pure voice for Kandinsky’s inner necessity, Ball writes: “we have changed the word with forces and energies which make it possible for us to rediscover the evangelical concept of the ‘word’ logos as a magical complex of images.” In the “age of total disruption” that was time of war, “the new art … has conserved the will-to-the-image, because it is inclined to force the image, even though the means and part be antagonistic.”²¹

German expressionism as an artistic movement had several different vectors, of which Der Blaue Reiter was only one trajectory. The other influence, of course, was the group formed in Dresden in 1905 known as Die Brücke (“The Bridge”), consisting mainly of Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Kirchner, Karl Schmitt-Rottluff, Otto Mueller, and Emil Nolde. The history of art has sometimes treated Die Brücke as a transitional movement between traditional German art and modernism as well as a Bohemian variant on the aesthetic German nationalism that played into both the popularization of Nietzsche’s work and the later rise of the National Socialist movement. But this portrayal is seriously misleading. Heavily influenced by the thought of Nietzsche, Die Brücke saw itself as the new “philosophy of the future,” a kind of messianic future shaped by the impulse of the arts themselves.²² For the sake of public consumption, the group supposedly named itself as the putative “bridge” between old and “new” German culture and spirit that would play a decisive role in contemporary European history. But its more esoteric vision drew from the famous line in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra concerning the Übermensch, or “overman.”²³

The Nietzschean emphasis on overcoming was at the core of the expressionist project. The primary theme was the demand to outstrip what had already been affirmed and established, a psycho-esthesis of the excessive. “Not your sin but your thrift [Genügsamkeit] cries to heaven; your meanness [Geiz] even in your sin cries to heaven. Where is the lightning,” Nietzsche asked, “to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which you should be inoculated? Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this lightning, he is this frenzy.”²⁴ The vision of the overman is “frenzy,” literally “madness” (Wahnsinn). It is the visionary madness of the madman who announces God’s death, the end of predicative thought, the rule-boundedness of inferential as well as speculative reasoning and metaphysical grandiosity. The “lightning” signifies the deep, interior, and eruptive energy of thinking itself, which such a vision both summons and arouses. Just as the strength of a lightning flash requires a transient, but extreme, polarity, so the “frenzy” of the overman requires the radical disjunction of the “all too human” and the Übermensch. The lightning is that ultimate force inscribed as art.

Deleuze’s own reconsideration of Nietzsche in the early 1960s should give us an indication of what is critically at stake here. Deleuze argued quite extensively that what the Nietzschean oracular and aphoristic style succeeds in “overcoming” is the Platonic concept of the “essence” of the thing. In pioneering what Deleuze named “the new image of thought,” Nietzsche redescribed the Aristotelian to ti on, the specificity or “whatness” of something, as a convergence of forces. “Essence is determined by the forces with affinity for the thing and by the will with affinity for these forces.”²⁵ Deleuze himself renders Nietzsche’s key concept of “valuation” as the instrumentality for making something ontologically determinate as a “logic of sense.” Sense, as opposed to essence, is what brings these forces to bear in a given situation, in a particular site of active valuation or meaning.²⁶

Deleuze has grasped the implications for philosophical thinking in Nietzsche’s experimentation, yet the real drive of Nietzsche “frenzy” was in the direction of art. The highest subjective valuation is that of the pure creator. Hence in certain respects we can regard Nietzsche’s vision as a radical semiotics of force in its crystallization as a moment of experienced immediacy, as plasticity. This plasticity applies as much to tangible and visual signs as to a verbal semiotics. If art is the expression of force, then the signifying praxis of those who are “overcomers,” bridge performers, consists in making such an expressivity intelligible in countless circumstances and media contexts. Hence both philosophy and art consist, according to Nietzsche, not in construction, but in genealogy. Genealogy is not a laborious process of tracing back historical connections from a present vantage point so much as it is an intuition of the generative force of the event itself. “Genealogy,” as Deleuze says, “means both the value of origin and the origin of values.”²⁷

The difference between these two expressions—“value of origin” and “origin of value”—is what philosophy as genealogy seeks to discern and in the process opens up an interval at a site of experience that is neither conceptual nor purely “aesthetic.” We may call this interval the space of the experience of art, which allows us to intuit both the force that gives rise to the experience and the event of its formation that illumines in its plasticity. Holding together in tension the force and its visual articulation as its expressive moment is the job of the philosopher as genealogist. The creative act in Nietzsche of “valuing” remains inseparable from this moment, thereby necessitating a conflation of the meanings of valuation (Bewertung) and origin (Ursprung). But in recognizing this moment of valuation, genealogy goes even one step further. It arrives at the threshold of establishing how force sets in motion the kind of complex value structures and value assemblages that inform the collective life of humanity. In short, it seeks to ascertain the force that constitutes the political.