Daniel Conway

Nietzsche's Dangerous Game

He too attributes the onset of decadence to a wayward agency, alternately identified in his various etiologies as slave morality, the ascetic priest, or St. Paul. In fact, if we subject Nietzsche's critique of modernity to the rigors of his own account of decadence, then we must conclude that he has taken the measure not of his age, but only of the illness he apparently shares with it.

His discursive critique of modernity continues to attract sympathetic readers, but its enduring appeal may simply attest to the pervasiveness of the decay it manifests. Indeed, his own lapses testify to the enormous difficulties involved in resisting the moralization of decadence.

Nietzsche's unintended contributions to the moralization of decadence are most obviously displayed in the Genealogy, a book in which he both documents and exemplifies the twisted psychology of the slave revolt in morality. In fact, virtually everything he says about the ascetic priest applies eaually well to himself as a genealogist of morals. Like the ascetic priest, he 'alters the direction of ressentiment,' exciting in his readers an affective enmity for the institutions of slave morality. Like the ascetic priest, he aims to assuage the horror vacui of the human will by providing an interpretive context in which suffering is justified. Toward this end, he fashions a genealogical narrative that catapults the reader back to a point of historical rupture, the consequences of which define our current plight. His 'genealogy of morals' thus attributes our experience of decadence to the mischief of a dimly historical figure, the ascetic priest, who similarly locates the source of our current suffering in 'a piece of our past' (GM III:20).

Most important, Nietzsche figures the ascetic priest as an agent, thus availing himself of the intentionalist categories and vocabulary that the Genealogy ostensibly seeks to discredit. The victory of slave morality, he explains, is predicated on the currency of its enabling account of moral agency-namely, its successful transformation of sufferers into sinners. Inspired to creative genius by his consuming ressentiment, the ascetic priest presides over the birth of the will, a metaphysical construct to which the slaves appeal in order to blame the nobles for their besetting nobility. In a similar fashion, Nietzsche cleverly exhorts his readers to blame the ascetic priest for their current misery and to hold him responsible for the victory of slave morality. Nietzsche may concede, officially, that the ascetic priest only appears to be an 'enemy of Life' (GM III: 13), but he otherwise casts his rival as the consummate villain, whose assault on Life has very real consequences.

Throughout his account of the genesis and ascendancy of the ascetic ideal, he unwittingly presents himself as a Doppelgdnger of the ascetic priest. The Genealogy thus becomes its author's own priestly weapon, for it reproduces and exemplifies the precise interpretive strategy that he imputes to the ascetic priest. As a consequence of his own complicity in the moralization of decadence, Nietzsche's reckoning of the genealogy of morals is simultaneously an instance of the phenomenon he seeks to chronicle. He recapitulates the logic of the slave revolt even as he documents it.