Jurgen Habermas’ 1982 article entitled “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment” is a “Re-Reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment.” Why turn back now to re-read this dated article? Why do I find re-reading this text important? During my intellectual development in the 1990’s, Habermas was a key figure, not because I thought he was right, but his work provided a way for me to practice a mode of poststructuralist negation that was compelling at the time. Today, I’m sitting in on a graduate level class on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, which has lead me back to Habermas. I’ve re-read sections of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which includes his reading of Kant’s short essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” which I’ve also found myself pouring over (re-reading) once again.

From this later vantage point, I see different arguments and values. To be sure, there is so much for a poststructuralist to cringe at in Habermas’ 1982 article, especially the characterization of Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida as nihilists. Yet his critique has some interesting aspects that I want to follow up on, especially with respect to negation. At bottom, Habermas reclaims the Enlightenment from what he sees as Nietzsche’s totalizing negation, which Adorno and Horkheimer aligned with in Dialectic of Enlightenment. By the end of the article, Habermas points out that if we see the Enlightenment as collapsing reason into only an expression of coercive power, we end up with two possible responses that are, using the term that I am interested in, practices of time. First is Nietzsche’s: we go backwards looking for a time before the emergence of ressentiment as an historical force to find valid values that we should re-embrace in our re-reading of history. For Habermas, this is a reversible victory: “Although decisive for the fate of modernity, Nietzsche considered this a contingent and reversible victory of the lower and the reactive powers. The latter, as is well known, are supposed to have emerged out of the Ressentiment, ‘from the protective instinct of a degenerating life’” (28). This is a more positive alternative than that of Adorno and Horkheimer, who turned to “ad hoc determinate negation” of anything that smacks of reason (now reduced only to instrumental reason) and embraced an aesthetics of existence that can neither look forward nor backward. It is, in other words, nihilistically stuck in an abyss:

At the level of reflexion achieved by Horkheimer and Adorno, every attempt to set up a theory was bound to lead into an abyss: as a result, they abandoned any theoretical approach and practiced ad hoc determinate negation, thereby opposing that fusion of reason and power which fills in all the cracks. The praxis of negation is what remains of the “spirit of... unrelenting theory.” And this praxis is like a vow to “turn back even as it reaches its goal" (DoE, p.42; trans. modified), the demon of merciless progress. (29)

This abyss of praxis-as-negation can be read as an argument about the configuration and practice of time. We should not lose sight of how many re words and concepts have proliferated so far in my re-reading of Habermas’ re-reading of DoE: “reversible victory of the lower and the reactive powers,” “reflexion achieved by Horkheimer and Adorno,” “the spirit of unrelenting theory,” “a vow ‘to turn back even as it reaches it goal.’” We are involved in multiple temporal dimensions of re — returning, re-reading, responding, reflexion, ressentiment.

Nietzsche’s reversible victory is more promising because it looks back to (re-reads) the past to make contemporary once again values that the Enlightenment negated. In doing so, it admits that the method of genealogy — as the look back — contains within it not only polemics and negation but an implicit “validity claim” that noble morality is better than slave morality. Habermas seizes this moment in his re-reading of Nietzsche when he finds in the definition of ressentiment validity claims that can be extracted and debated. Ressentiment, in other words, offers a communicative ethics as soon as it publicly makes the claim that noble morality is better than slave morality. This is Habermas’ debt to Kant’s political philosophy and his vision of Enlightenment as the public use of reason: when these claims are made in public about the public good, whether implicitly or explicitly, they can and should be subject to public debate and deliberation. Habermas’ contention was that Nietzsche looked back too far for his positive claims about true values. He should have looked back only so far as the 17th and 18th centuries in Western Europe to find the model of publicity and validity claims.

As indicated by Habermas’ use of abyss, Adorno and Horkheimer offer a version of Critique (as a practice of time) that jettisons the positive look back that he found in the Genealogy. Negation for its own sake becomes the purpose and method of Critique. This nihilistic re-assessment has always seemed to me a false choice, or a false problem to put it in Bergson’s terms. But Habermas’ concerns were not wrong about what was happening in the late-twentieth century as Nietzschean genealogy made its resurgence. Many of us who were discovering poststructuralism during our intellectual development embraced an enthusiasm for negative and polemical modes of argument that passed for Critique. We were trying to break old habits and find something to sink our intellectual teeth into. This created significant contention within academic circles as those on the Habermas side of the equation sought a way out of Critique-as-negation by re-establishing a relationship between Critique, Norm, and Utopia to borrow Seyla Benhabib’s title. Again, they weren’t wrong to do so in the face of aggressive poststructuralist negation that felt a lot more like Negative Dialectics than Nietzschean genealogy.

Negation, Critique, and the Ascetic Ideal

Where I think this went awry is assuming that all of this should have played out in the same sandbox. More specifically, it played out as who should control the sandbox of Critique as if there could and should be only be one winner. If we pose our theoretical problem in terms of finding the single best method for understanding human liberation, then we’ll go nuts. The false problem occurs when we put Nietzsche on the same continuum as Habermas and think that they were both addressing the same problems at different times, and are thus competing to be the right method of Critique. We tend to flatten out and homogenize space and time to make it possible to see Nietzsche and Habermas as somehow re-playing competing games across a homogeneous time (i.e., playing in the same sandbox). This sandbox was always “Critique” as justification of norms and utopian formulations for the Frankfurt School — re-reading will always be an attempt to discover the validity claims embedded in the speech acts of the documents. Nietzschean Critique, on the contrary, was less concerned with justification than with “how did we come to have the values that we have?” The two are not incompatible, but they seemed to treated as so in the later part of the twentieth century.

The question can be raised: did Horkheimer and Adorno jump into Nietzsche’s sandbox or did they pull Nietzsche into the sandbox of Critique? For Habermas in the early 1980’s, DoE jumped into Nietzsche’s sandbox and took the normative and utopian mission of Critique with it. The nihilistic effect was to turn the genealogy of values into the negation of any assertion of values, which is to have profoundly missed Nietzsche’s point. That appears clearly to me now in my re-reading of Nietzsche. Once Critique’s mission of seeking legitimate, normative bases for human liberation was absorbed into poststructuralism’s polemical sandbox, Critique’s only methodological options was to become a praxis of negation. This is why Habermas’ re-reading of DoE had to be a reclamation and rehabilitation of the Enlightenment from a mode of Critique that had been consumed by practices of negation.

What Habermas does not explicitly point out in the re-reading of DoE and Nietzsche’s Genealogy, but must have been clear to him, is that the praxis of negation is exactly the apotheosis of ressentiment and the ascetic ideal that Nietzsche argued was the cause of European Nihilism. Negation became an end in itself rather than a way of correcting any given formulation of human liberation. Negation as end, not means, is exactly what Nietzsche was polemicizing, and it is what Habermas found in DoE. Decadence as an end (not a means) in some strange way becomes the outcome of Critique when Adorno and Horkheimer stepped into Nietzsche’s sandbox, at least according to Habermas. In other words, negation becomes its own norm as the unrelenting destruction of all norms. This is exactly what Nietzsche feared would come of the ascetic ideal as the atheists replace God with their own (more intolerant) Truth that there is no God. The ascetic ideal jettisons the will to truth, but not the will to power even if it ends up willing nothingness: “And to say once more at the end what I said at the beginning: humanity would rather will nothingness than not will” (GM 3.28).

Nietzsche’s problem with decadence and ressentiment was not that they were fundamentally bad, but that they create their nihilistic effects when they are pursued as ends rather than as means. The latter can be a powerful temporal practice of negation that suspends one from accepting given social norms, laws and customs. This practice of time need not be dialectical in the sense that it opposes the given with something else that is equally given. As a means, it can be a productive power of response and resistance that says, “I don’t want to accept what is being given to me.” This response and resistance need not be in the name of something else, but it can be. To repeat: ressentiment becomes dangerously nihilistic when it becomes an end in itself — dialectical negation as an unrelenting praxis.

Nietzsche eventually found value in Jesus and Buddhism in Anti-Christ in demonstrating that this resistance and response need not be driven by ressentiment. To put it briefly, both practice time as suspension of the given without calling on dialectical oppositions or ressentiment: the culturally given simply doesn’t take hold in the first place. The problem of European Nihilism is quite different than what Nietzsche found in Jesus and Buddhism. The nihilism of his time is a diagnosis of how ressentiment became the permanent embracing of a will to nothingness through relentless practices of dialectical negation. In other words, when the liberating and powerful act of initial negation becomes the end in itself, nihilism as a mass psychology is the result. (The power of the initial negation of ressentiment as a means, not an end, is substantially Nietzsche’s appreciation of Judaism in Anti-Christ 25.)

In so far as Nietzsche’s ressentiment and ascetic ideal became bludgeoning tools against Modernity and Enlightenment in the hands of Horkheimer and Adorno as well as many of us jumping into poststructuralism for the first time, Habermas’ criticism was justified. We could have found a rapprochement between Critique’s concern with methodical approaches to human liberation and poststructuralism’s concern with pointing out the limits of Critique’s ability to provide definitive answers. The false problem occurs when we treated poststructuralism as a one-for-one replacement of normative Critique. This is what, in retrospect, I believe Habermas was getting at in re-reading DoE. In this sense, we can see that there should have been an agonistic collaboration that doesn’t try to settle on a single method of Critique.

I would like to explore this latter direction in what remains of this essay, but I will do so by taking a closer look at denial and negation through Nietzsche’s few chapters on the positive examples of Jesus and Buddhism in Anti-Christ. To be sure, late twentieth-century Nietzschean poststructuralism overindexed on the polemical side, especially the Genealogy. I’ve found much more value in the middle aphorisms of the Anti-Christ as I’ve re-engaged my intellectual legacy. In this later work, I’ve found Nietzsche to have been much more subtle in his understanding of ressentiment and its relationship to decadence, despite this work typically being categorized into his madness phase. The shift that I have to make is via Bergson, who warned that we get ourselves into trouble when we spatialize time. The polemical nature of the Genealogy easily leads to a reading of ressentiment and Christianity as an essential — and therefore spatial — relationship. Ressentiment as weakened vengeance is institutional Christianity’s essence for Nietzsche, and European Nihilism of the late nineteenth century is just the working out of the consequences of that essence. This is exactly how Bergson thought we reduce time to space. Time has no real part to play in the drama because the essence is the ultimate determinant. Time is merely the neutral backdrop for the unfolding of the essence and its natural consequences.

Denial as “Entirely Impossible”

In the middle sections of Anti-Christ, Nietzsche complicates the Genealogy’s view of Christianity’s relationship to ressentiment-driven negation. These sections in particular emphasize a temporal gap between the historical Jesus and what “the Church” eventually taught about sin, decadence, and asceticism. We must understand Nietzsche’s connection between “the psychological type of the Redeemer” and non-dialectical negation. Above all, we must understand these statements about Jesus Christ, whose “symbolism par excellence stands apart from all religion, all concepts of culture, all history, all natural science, all experience of the world, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art —”

his “knowledge” is simply pure foolishness of the notion that these sorts of things exist. Culture is unknown to him even through hearsay, he has no need to fight it — he does not deny it . . . The same goes for the state, for the whole civic order and society, for work, for war — he never had reason to deny “the world” . . . Denial is the one thing entirely impossible for him. — Likewise dialectics are lacking, the notion is lacking that a faith, a “truth,” could be proved through reasons (— his proofs are inner “lights,” inner feelings of pleasure and self-affirmations, nothing but “proofs of strength” —). Such a doctrine cannot contradict either, it does not grasp that there are or can be other doctrines, it does not know in the least how to imagine a contradictory judgment . . . Where it encounters one, it will mourn about “blindness” with sincere sympathy — for it sees “light” — but will raise no objection . . . (33)

We must be clear about the relationship between two constellations of terms in this citation. On the one hand is the constellation of contradiction, denial, and dialectics. On the other is the constellation of self-affirmation, inner feelings, sympathy, and light. The terms of the first constellation are always preceded by “not” or “impossible” or “lacking” and represent terms that cannot apply to Jesus. These are not the terms on which redemption can occur. They are also the reactive forces of ressentiment, which always start as a desire for revenge that wants to negate that which it deplores.

The second constellation contains alternatives to the first; they are not dialectical oppositions. We should read them through what Nietzsche means when he writes, “Denial is the one thing entirely impossible for him.” Everything about the psychology of the Redeemer hinges upon why denial is entirely impossible. Nietzsche does not say that the Redeemer denies denial. He does not take up a relationship to the world and all of its baggage through denial. Rather, denial is entirely impossible to the Redeemer because he exists before “all concepts of culture, all history, all natural science, all experience of the world, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art.” It is impossible because the Redeemer remains a child and is pure foolishness (clarified as “complete and utter ignorance” from the printer’s manuscript). In 32, Nietzsche writes of the Redeemer, “it lives, it resists formulas.” Read consistently, to resist is not to deny, but to exist in such a way that the formulas have no purchase on one’s way of being. This is not an active resistance as denial and ressentiment, but a resistance that is simply not conducive to acceptance of the categories. Like oil and water, they don’t actively deny each other; they simply don’t receive each other and therefore don’t mix and dissolve into one another. Nietzsche will refer repeatedly to this way of being as evangelical practice. “It is his practice that he bequeathed to humanity; his conduct before the judges, before the bailiffs, before the accusers and all kinds of slander and scorn — his behavior on the cross.” (35). In 34, he clarifies the practice as itself God: “evangelical practice alone leads to God, it is in fact God” (33). God, in other words, is nothing other than a practiced mode of conduct.

There are at least two possible points of confusion that we must avoid in understanding what Nietzsche is getting at with this evangelical practice that makes dialectical denial entirely impossible. First, it is not a Gnostic denigration of this world that seeks an exit. It is not an “instinctive hatred of every reality, as flight into the ‘inconceivable,’ the ‘incomprehensible,’ as aversion to every formula, to every concept of time and space…” (29). Second, as much as Nietzsche associates Jesus with eternity, this eternity is not outside of this world but in the flow of time. It signals how Jesus was living a time out of joint within the time as given by culture. “The concept of ‘the Son of Man’ is not a concrete person that belongs within history, something individual and unique, but an ‘eternal’ factuality, a psychological symbol freed of the concept of time.” We could too easily take this out of context as a Gnostic exit from time. A more consistent reading would see “eternity” (intentionally in quotes) as a different way of being in the flow of time — a way of being that exists before the imposition of categories can take hold and all the cultural baggage and expectations that come with the categories: “the Christian acts, he is distinguished by a different way of acting” (33). The category of “the Son of Man” does not take hold on Jesus in the way that it was expected.

Eternity here is a practice of time that is before the cultural imposition of categories that come with their own configurations of time. This is what it means to be “a child” for Nietzsche: the ability to tap into a “free spirit” as a way of living that is ignorant of categories. If one lives this way, then denial is entirely impossible because the categories haven’t taken hold in the personality and are therefore not deniable in the first place. Nietzsche clearly believed that is was possible to live this way again. He makes this absolutely clear in 39, where he famously says, “there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.” He immediately follows up with perhaps his most important message in Anti-Christ:

It is false to the point of nonsense to see the mark of a Christian in a “faith,” as perhaps in the faith in a redemption through Christ: only Christian practice, a life like the one lived by him who died on the cross, is Christian . . . Even today, a life such as this is possible, even essential for certain humans: genuine, original Christianity is possible at all times . . . Not a faith, but a doing, above all a not-doing many things, a different being. (39)

What could it mean to live “a life such as this” once again — a life that can only be a re-activation through a re-reading of this example? In other words, if the “psychological type of the Redeemer” comes before the imposition of cultural categories, how are we who come after the demonstration of this evangelical practice to re-activate it from within the cultural categories that already inhabit us? Must the imitation of Christ entail a dialectical negation of the present? Must the evangelical practice, which is possible today, come from opposing categories taking their revenge on the given ones? Must it be fueled by ressentiment? How are we to live this life that is “above all a not-doing many things, a different being” if we are not to initiate the practice with dialectical negation and ressentiment?

To answer these questions, we have to take up the problem of following, which is central to both the Gospels and Nietzsche’s understanding of Jesus. We will find that following Jesus, as the psychological type of the Redeemer, is the heart of the evangelical practice of time that Nietzsche equally saw as Buddhist. At the heart of this practice of time, we will find the problem of sequencing and reversals:

Once can see what was ended with the death on the cross: a new, a completely original start [my emphasis] to a Buddhistic peace movement, to an actual, not merely promised, happiness on earth. For this remains — as I have already stressed — the fundamental difference between both decadence-religions: Buddhism does not promise, but keeps; Christianity promises everything, but it keeps nothing. (42)

How does Jesus follow the Buddha as a restart, which always entails reversals of time? How does this restart get re-reversed into ressentiment, which is already its own re-sentiment as a re-experiencing of a feeling, as a promising of everything but a keeping of nothing? How can we recover the “glad tidings” hidden in plain sight in the Gospels by reading through them to retroactively find the Redeemer? How are we to activate this practice ourselves if we live within a Christianity that has left behind its Buddhism? Won’t this require a power of negation, denial, and contradiction — in short, the powers of ressentiment? Nietzsche’s answer is clearly No, but accessing this evangelical practice will require us to read the Gospels in reverse so that we are able to follow the evangelical practice once again. But this following, as we’ll see, will require us to follow a practice of time that was sequentially different than Nietzsche’s Buddhist Jesus: the Redeemer himself was not in need of redemption because he lives before the imposition of cultural categories on his identity. The re words that activate hard denials (redemption, reversal, ressentiment) are entirely impossible for him. However, his disciples, and by extension all who have come after, do not live this sequence. We who come after require some practice of these re words, including a practice of ressentiment. To be a follower is to have to reverse this temporal sequence to activate the evangelical practice.

Following and Re-Reading

Nietzsche’s reading of the Gospels is complex and must be understood if we are to appreciate the practice that he finds valuable in these middle sections of Anti-Christ, and if we are to find an alternative to nihilistic negation in Nietzsche’s work. He looks through the Gospels to find the evangelical practice lurking in the text. To follow the trace so that one can follow the way of life of the Redeemer is a problem of reading: “I confess that I read few books with such difficulty as the Gospels” (28).

What concerns me is the psychological type of the Redeemer. For the latter could still be included in the Gospels in spite of the Gospels, however mutilated or burdened with foreign traits they might be: as Francis of Assisi’s is included in his legends in spite of the legends. Not the truth about what he did, what he said, how he actually died: instead, the question whether this type can still be imagined at all, whether the tradition has preserved it? (29)

The Gospels contain a trace of the Redeemer, but only “in a strongly distorted form” (31). To read carefully is to read “with such difficulty” as we attempt to read through the distortions to find the traces of a valuable model to follow. We are already in the reversal that does not apply to the original. The ability to practice this reversal on oneself is, as we’ll see, redemption, which requires the re-reading of the tradition against itself to activate that which may have preserved.

We have to understand how the distortions were applied in the subsequent practices of time as Christianity imposed new categories on the original “glad tidings” that hid them as it attempted to clarify them for a larger audience: “From now on, step by step, new things enter into the type of the Redeemer: the doctrine of judgment and of the Second Coming, the doctrine of death as sacrificial death, the doctrine of resurrection, with which the whole concept of ‘blessedness,’ the whole and single reality of the Gospel is conjured away…” (41). This practice of reading is a practice of time that seeks to reverse and read through these other practices that were imposed “step by step” as a reversal of the values of the original. The non-ressentiment figure of Jesus somehow was reversed to become the founder of a religion that has ressentiment baked in. This mode of reading reverses this reversal to look for the evangelical practice still contained in the traces of the Gospels rather than the commandments of a doctrine that are imposed after the fact. This difficulty of reading the Gospels implies that Nietzsche’s reading is always a re-reading that is reversing a reversal to find the trace of the evangelical practice.

We should not assume, however, that what we seek is a neutrality that lets through a Cartesian “natural light” as the stillness of an unshakeable certainty arrived at through methodical rationality. Rather, this mode of reading requires a “presupposition” as St. Ignatius used that term to frame the mindset one should adopt to undertake his Spiritual Exercises: “it should be presupposed that every good Christian ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor’s statement than to condemn it” (Spiritual Exercises [22], my emphasis). Ignatius’ presupposition is a key preparatory practice for undertaking his meditations. It is a technical term that prepares one to drop a ressentiment-fueled approach to prayer, which is itself an act of re-reading and reflecting on biblical passages. Applied to Nietzsche’s reading of the Gospels, we can find the practices of the Redeemer if we presuppose that they are there and that we don’t need dialectics and ressentiment to find them. To presuppose a good interpretation rather than a condemnation is how one should read the Gospels in order to follow the trace of the Redeemer. Therefore, to presuppose is to bring prior content with us in our reading — we look for something within the text that wouldn’t be clear without the presupposition. Nietzsche’s positive reading of Jesus and Buddhism provides the presupposition. He says as much when he tells his readers that “Even today . . . a life such as this is possible.” This is a call to re-read the Gospels with this presupposition.

However, this is not a practice that we can follow according to the same temporality of Nietzsche’s Jesus. We are involved in making time out of joint when we read this way, and it is messy. We have already seen how Nietzsche’s Jesus lives before his culture’s categories could take root in this utterly unique individual — a Buddhistic uniqueness yet “on a soil with scant resemblance to India” (31). He retained the pure foolishness of the child and the idiot because his culture’s categories never took hold, not because he was weak. He retained the “excessive sensitivity” of the Buddha, and like the Buddha didn’t shy away from it. He did not withdraw, like a Gnostic, from contact with the world: “The instinctive hatred of reality: the result of an extreme capacity for suffering and irritability that no longer wants to be ‘touched’ because it feels the touch to deeply” (30). This is why denial was the one thing entirely impossible for him. He is the Redeemer because he showed that living this way was possible.

There is a problem in this possibility that we must now take up. Being able to follow the example that one presupposes in this way of reading presents a problem of time as practice: the receivers of Jesus’ glad tidings do not live before the imposition of cultural categories on their selves. He chose people who were already inhabited by the culture but also on the margins. They come after him as his followers, but their following will require a reversal of their situations that was not required of Jesus. “Coming after me” cannot be a direct imitation of the original. It will require practices of time that presuppose the possibility that coming after can reverse the cultural imposition of categories without marshaling ressentiment as the driving force of a hard denial.

Following, “Coming After,” and Reversals

We are dealing with a difference of sequence: Jesus is before and the disciples live after the imposition of categories. This difference is the source of Jesus’ frustration with his disciples who rarely seem to understand what he is demonstrating: “How much longer must I endure you?” (Matthew 17:17). As readers looking for this trace of the Redeemer, we have to deactivate ressentiment and all of its baggage in order to presuppose this redemptive example buried in the distortions of doctrine. These distortions were already underway in the writing of the Gospels and Paul’s letters. The beauty of Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ is that it enacts this mode of reading and shows us how our reading practices can be redemptive by following the traces through the distortions.

Following these traces creates a confusing sense of time because we cannot purely access Jesus’ non-dialectical before cultural inheritance. We only encounter him after our culture’s have thoroughly made us, as well as after the doctrinal distortions have begun. Purely non-dialectical denial is not fully available to us who come after the glad tidings of Jesus. Yet Nietzsche wants us to presuppose that this Jesus is embedded and traceable in the Gospels. It will require, however, that we reverse our way through the texts of the Gospels to find the glad tidings that were obscured during the years that came after the death of Jesus. In fact, coming after is a major theme of the Gospels, which would have no enduring purpose unless they help us understand what it means to “become a follower” (Matthew 16:24). If we take Nietzsche’s presupposition into our reading practices, we see how the problem of the temporal sequence of Jesus and his disciples is central to Matthew’s Gospel. Coming after is a crucial term that defines a new practice of time that is required to follow Jesus’ example. Coming after Jesus cannot be a pure imitation because Jesus and the disciples inhabit time differently, as we’ve seen. This is why, in Matthew, coming after is always accompanied by metaphors of reversal that do not apply to the Messiah; they apply only to those who wish to come after him. The Redeemer does not need to be redeemed.

We must emphasize this crucial point about reversal: It does not apply to Jesus, but only to those who wish to come after him and be redeemed. Reversal is necessary because of the different temporal sequence of Jesus and the disciples. Jesus does not need to practice reversals because he comes before the categories that must be reversed. The disciples, and by extension us, need to learn the practices of reversal because our redemption must come after our cultures have inhabited us. This is why coming after is so difficult: it is not following as strict imitation but coming after as redemption that requires 1) deactivation of all that one has inherited from the culture that inhabits us so that we can 2) discover something new and potentially better that wasn’t present or visible before the deactivation.

Let’s take Matthew 16:24-5 as but one example of coming after and the required reversal. The NEB, NIV, and RSV translations all use “become my followers” as the translated phrase, but NEB notes that “to come after me” is an equally valid translation. To replace the former with the latter shifts the emphasis to a practice of time, whereas “follow” can easily focus on strict imitation and thus spatialize the message — to follow would mean to take over the same place as Jesus. As we’ll see, “become my followers” too easily pulls our understanding away from the practices of living to focus on matters of doctrine. Accordingly, I substitute “to come after me” for “become my followers” where the NEB notes the validity of this translation:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone wants to come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and come after me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will find it. (16:24-5)

We see the same reversals that follow the “come after me” statement in two places in Matthew 19. At 19:16-22, we have the young wealthy man who wants to know which commandments to keep. After providing a short list, Jesus says, “If you wish to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” To “come, follow me” requires the prior act of an intentional reversal of fortune and status: “Then come, follow me.” He is not asked to give away his possessions to anyone or to simply throw them into the trash pit of Ghenna, but give them to the poor. He is to move from rich to poor by making the poor a bit wealthier. For this man, this is a bridge too far. He is not capable of the reversal and the act of self-denial that is required. In 19:23-30, Matthew’s Jesus follows up this negative example with further statements about coming after me and the self-denying reversal that is required to do so: “But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”

Why does “come after me” require these acts of self-denying reversal that are so hard to execute? The Redeemer came without the cultural baggage, but we have the baggage. Our becoming followers is a coming after him that requires us to reverse ourselves back to the pure foolishness and ignorance of the child — to tap into the spirit of life that we had before the culture and its formulas took root in our personalities. While denial was entirely impossible for Jesus, it is absolutely required of us. This, it seems to me, is the fundamental problem of the Gospels as textual acts of coming after the one they represent. They can only come after as an attempt to make contemporary a sense of the past in the present. Consequently, this non-dialectical denial/reversal is only partially available to us who come after the Redeemer. Redemption cannot start with denial as the expression of ressentiment. Redemption starts with becoming conscious of the ways that our cultures have inhabited us so that we do not accept its categories and values as knee-jerk certainties. We see this in the final lines of Matthew 19. Self-denial is not undertaken solely as negation for its own sake. Rather, the reversal is executed in the name of a promise that is itself the promise of a reversal: “But many who are first will be last, and the last first.” This self-denial cannot be ascetic decadence as an end, but as a means to open up the transformative possibility of something else that is not fully understood at the moment of reversal. We have to remember the sequence: First, give up all your possessions — deny the certainties you are comfortable with — “Then come, follow me.” For the disciples who have asked, “Look, we have left everything and followed you! What then will there be for us?” the sequence is the same — first give up everything and “Then come, follow me”; then there will be something for you.

My connection between Nietzsche and Matthew is not illegitimate. It is the figure of the child that creates the rapprochement. We’ve already seen how Nietzsche likened Jesus to the child as the idiot — the temporality that comes before the full imposition of the law and culture on the self. We’ve read Matthew’s example of the rich man who won’t give away his possessions to attain perfection. Immediately before that story, Matthew gives us this:

Then little children were brought to him for him to lay his hands on them and pray. But the disciples scolded those who brought them. But Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not try to top them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” And he placed his hands on them and went on his way. (19:13-15)

The first thing that we should notice is that this is one of the few moments, if not the only one, when the laying on of hands does not heal. Jesus here does not reverse an existing situation, he stabilizes it. The little children are not in need of healing. We also should notice that there is no coming after on the part of the children, but only a coming to. Like Jesus, the children do not come after the impositions of the law and culture. In fact, Jesus explicitly says that they should be allowed to come to me, not come after me. We have, in this story that immediately precedes the failure of the wealthy man, an explicit demonstration of a temporal difference between Jesus and the disciples, which can only be understood through the figure of “little children” that do not need to be healed and do not need reversal: they come to me rather than come after me.

Ressentiment and Indifference

If we translate der Antichrist to be Anti-Christian (which as many have pointed out is an equally valid translation of the title), then the sections I’ve focused on could be read as seeking a vision of Jesus (and Buddhism) as a non-dialectical negation of the institution of Christianity in the attempt to make contemporary an obscured way of being (the evangelical practice) that is, as we’ve seen, eternal, contemporary, and temporal at the same time: “Even today, a life such as this is possible.” We are in the realm of Benjamin’s w e a k messianic power that reaches back not to memorialize the past but to make contemporary oppressions whose traces remain contemporary as remnants embedded in the present. The trick of genealogy (and historical materialism) is not to memorialize the past, but to activate the look back — our reversals and re-readings — as practices of time that pause and suspend the given so as to disjoint time just enough to make alternatives graspable. As der Antichrist makes clear, the boundary between the dialectical and non-dialectical modes of negation are thin for those of us who come after the w e a k messianic power was demonstrated.

At this point, I hope that it is clear that this genealogical practice of time is crucial to Critique without having to claim to be its essence. Instead of dialectical negation, a non-dialectical time-out-of-joint approach to Critique might look less like picking the right method than blending different approaches that push forward practices of liberation while simultaneously obsessing about the limits of any given blend. But this is far too easy a point to make, and it is not my emphasis. Rather, I’d like to emphasize a different relationship among Enlightenment, negation, ressentiment and progress.

This relationship can be created by mapping these terms onto sin and tragedy as a practice of time. Here I’m going to take my queue from Cynthia Fleury’s recent re-reading of Nietzsche’s ressentiment in Here Lies Bitterness: Healing and Resentment. Fleury writes as a practicing therapist who is deeply knowledgeable of the history of ressentiment. (She also uses Adorno as a key figure, but provides nearly the opposite reading from Habermas’, who lacks the thorough engagement with the sin of ressentiment that she finds at the heart of Adorno’s later work.) I will not try to summarize her arguments here, but there are a few points she makes that fit well with my recent attempts to treat ressentiment as a sin in the sense that Paul defined sin in Romans, especially chapter 7. To summarize my take on Paul: sin is a human condition, though not as it has come to mean for later Christianity — as the inherent vice and predilection for evil that is implanted in human nature. As a human condition, sin simply designates the inescapability of the ongoing need for self-reflection and self-correction as one lives with and among others. It was the purpose of the law to create this self-awareness: “Certainly, I would not have known sin except through the law. For indeed I would not have known what it means to desire something belonging to someone else if the law had not said, ‘Do not covet’” (7:7).

There are two things to point out in this single verse. First, sin is not inherent vice. It is a practice of time that makes one aware of behaviors that should be questioned — not summarily condemned, but questioned. Certainly desiring something that belongs to someone else is not always a bad thing. It becomes bad when it leads to unproductive behaviors, which the law spelled out in the preceding commandments: don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t give false testimony. All that Paul is saying in 7:7 is that the law gave the sin of “coveting” a name to make us aware of it so that we can prevent its bad outcomes. René Girard pointed out many times that there is an important sequence to the commandments, and that ending with the sin of coveting sums up and recapitulates the preceding commandments as hard prohibitions against clearly bad actions. (See especially I See Satan Fall like Lightning.)

The second thing to point out is this: sin is a practice of discernment of one’s behavior that moves from the general to the particular. In other words, Paul will only ever describe specific sins in his advice to his ekklesiae. While he certainly describes sin as a general condition, the generality only serves the elucidation of specific sins such as coveting another’s belongings. All that can be said of the generality of sin is that we should never seek to free ourselves of the practices of self-discernment. This isn’t a condemnation. Rather it is a disposition to ourselves that says that the practices of discerning our desires and actions are never done. We never reach, or should wish to reach, a state of perfection, which would lead to further sins of vainglory and pride as Evagrius would teach a few centuries after Paul. This is substantially what Simone Weil captured in her reading of the Our Father as a daily practice of renewal: “…we should desire eternal life itself with renunciation. We must not even become attached to detachment” (Waiting for God, 159). We should not renounce the desire for salvation, but only renounce that salvation can be permanent. We have to keep working at it rather than desire it as a permanent accomplishment. The same goes for Paul’s use of sin as a general human condition: it is never fully and finally overcome but only recognizable in recurring and specific behaviors that we can and should name so that “sin . . . would be shown to be sin” and that “sin would become utterly sinful” (Romans 7:13).

To return to Fleury’s reading of ressentiment, renunciation of ressentiment is central to her therapeutic process. Counterintuitively, she does not mean that we should renounce ressentiment, but that we can’t renounce it permanently. We have to work through it. She calls this “The Necessary Confrontation”:

Resentment is a failure of the soul, the heart, and the mind, but let us recognize that a relationship to the world that has not passed through the trials of resentment is insufficiently tested. One must glimpse the specter of resentment to understand the risk of a subjectivation that would be completely delivered from it. I believe that this risk, within the analytic cure, is the most substantial of all. (31)

She has clearly described resentment as a sin — “a failure of the soul, the heart, and the mind.” She will go on to describe the confrontation in substantially the same terms as Paul described the confrontation with particular sins. We must embrace “entering into conflict with resentment itself and not with the object of resentment (which would mean a falsification of the combat)” (31).

This last statement is crucial to understanding ressentiment as a sin. If we concentrate on the object of ressentiment, we ignore ressentiment itself as the affective state deserving of our attention. This is what it would mean to treat ressentiment as a sin in Paul’s definition of sin. Unless we name it, we will never become aware of it. This awareness is what we are training, and we have to take our attention off the object of resentment in order to bring our own emotional response of resentment to our attention.

Yet, if we simply renounce ressentiment, then we easily end up in a neutral space of apathy and indifference that is just as nihilistic as the pursuit of ressentiment as an end state. For Fleury, cultivating this discernment that is not indifference requires embracing Nietzsche’s understanding of “the tragic” as the refusal of renunciation and resignation. The true power of ressentiment is not the inability to forget, but the inability to discern differences between “stimulus and reality” (43). “The man of resentment” (Fleury will complicate the gendering of this phrase) only forgets the initial confusion that mistakes the stimulus for the reality. We are in the realm of William James’ psychology and Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory where it is imperative that we prevent ourselves from investing physiological stimuli with inherent meaning.

We see in Seneca’s Stoicism the inherent nihilistic danger of indifference in this separation, which articulates clearly the need for this ability to separate the stimuli from the reality: “The cause of anger is a belief that one has been wronged, to which one ought not lightly give credence. One shouldn’t immediately assent even to what is clear and obvious, for some things are false that look like the truth. One must always take one’s time: the passage of time makes the truth plain (On Anger 2.22.2). In other words, when we think we are wronged, we have to turn our attention away from the person who perpetrated the act to put our attention on the belief that we have been wronged. As the final line quoted makes clear, this is a practice of time, but we must avoid the nihilistic danger lurking in this separation. For a Stoic such as Seneca, the separation can easily lead to apatheia — the indifference that negates granting any meaning at all to the offense. Yes, Seneca steps back from dialectical negation as a strong reaction to the offense, but he only does so by stripping the event itself of all meaning, which can lead to a cultivated indifference to any stimulus. This is the nihilistic danger of Stoic ethics.

This is not Fleury’s point, nor is it an inevitable outcome of Stoic ethics. The Stoic moral psychology is a powerful practice of time, as I’ve covered in early essays, but it easily becomes indifference as the negation of all meaning. For Fleury, Nietzsche’s notion of the tragic is the corrective to Stoic indifference. She appreciates Nietzsche’s acceptance of the tragic as the ability to separate stimuli from reality while not neutralizing the separation as the permanent embrace of nihilistic indifference inherent in the reactive power of separating stimulus from reality:

In other words, the tragic must move in the direction of action, not the simple reaction that is the very opposite of action. Tragedy, for Nietzsche, does not teach resignation: “a preference for questionable and terrifying things is a symptom of strength; . . . It is the heroic spirits who say Yes to themselves in tragic cruelty: they are hard enough to experience suffering as a pleasure.” (44)

We cannot simply renounce ressentiment if we wish to hold onto a sense of justice as a belief that there are rights and wrongs. To do so requires holding onto the tragic as a fact but not to cultivate it or to seek our justification through embracing more and more of it. The latter is decadence as an end, and it is what Nietzsche found in institutional Christianity at the heart of European Nihilism in his era. To hold onto the tragic is to be fully present to the difficult situations we face without seeking their justification in ressentiment or their elimination in a cultivated indifference.

Enlightenment and Ressentiment: A Rapprochement

I can now return to the beginning of this essay and the problem of negation, Enlightenment, and re-reading. It should be clear from my own re-reading of Anti-Christ’s sections on Jesus and Buddhism that Nietzsche demonstrated a practice of time, in the form that genealogy took in these sections, that has a complex, non-dialectical relationship to negation. The genealogy follows a different practice of time than normative Critique. In fact, it could easily be argued that the sections I’ve read in this essay are different than the anti-Pauline screed that surrounds them. Certainly the tone is different, and I’m loathe to chalk this up to madness as has so often been done to dismiss the subtlety of this work.

To reclaim the Enlightenment from Horkheimer and Adorno’s unrelenting praxis of negation, Habermas sought his answer in the non-coercive coercion of communicative ethics, which he found at the heart of the Bourgeois Public Sphere of the Enlightenment. We must be careful of this becoming a normative ideal that can’t hear tragedy unless it expresses itself only in validity claims. Listening for validity claims can easily become Seneca’s indifference or Descartes’ belief in a “natural light” as unshakeable certainty. To enter into such a mode of discourse shouldn’t be thought of as a neutralization of time and experience. Rather, we need to activate Critique as practices of time that are always out of joint. I will finish this essay with a brief and non-exhaustive enumeration of the presuppositions necessary to enter into Critique as a practice of time.

First, we need a notion of sin, both general and particular, that helps us manage our interactions with ourselves and others. Sin is the eternal concept that allows us to hold onto a practice of time that keeps discernment active and continually renewable. We need not reify sins into a fixed list. With Paul, we should recognize sin as crucial to a practice of time and discernment that can only ever recognize particular sins. The inescapability of sin is not the inescapability of evil but the recognition that our salvation is not a one-and-done affair encapsulated in a moment in time — not in a Protestant’s ceremonial acceptance of Jesus Christ as a personal savior, nor in a Catholic’s Baptism, nor in the man of ressentiment’s desire for a complete vindication of all the perceived injustices that time has done to him. The presupposition of the general presence of sin keeps us from entering into any form of Critique — whether communicative ethics, genealogy, historical materialism, et cetera — that brings along a belief in our own unshakable certainties.

We also need Nietzsche’s notion of tragedy to keep our responses to reality from becoming fuel for ressentiment on the one hand or indifference on the other. Accepting reality as “the tragic” is to accept affirmation and Yes-saying to life, even if that Yes-saying requires pain. In this Nietzschean affirmation we find the modern term presence — the cultivated ability to deactivate prejudices to hear what is being said by another on its own terms. I say “its own terms” because this other can be human, but increasingly we need to hear non-humans — animals, the earth, and its climate. Presence cannot be indifferent, which is the opposite of being present.

We also need this notion of tragedy to keep sin from becoming ressentiment whenever sin becomes the only thing we look for in ourselves and others. This is when sin becomes nihilism and negation as ends, not means. To keep ressentiment at bay, sin must always operate in the service of creativity. This is the essence of the tragic, as Deleuze interpreted Nietzsche: “The tragic does not even fight against ressentiment, bad conscience or nihilism. According to Nietzsche it has never been understood that the tragic = the joyful. This is another way of putting the great equation: to will = to create. We have not understood that the tragic is pure and multiple positivity, dynamic gaiety . . . the dicethrow is tragic” (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 36).

All of this points to the need to recover practices of time as the unfolding of experience. Ressentiment is the ultimate spatializing value. It makes all things orient to myself and judges all things only in relation to how they matter to me. In the process I stabilize myself as an unchanged and unchanging “I” — a spatialized entity. For Fleury, this is a form of exile. We remove ourselves from experiencing joy, creativity, tragedy as the dice throw that opens us to the world and orients us to the result whatever that result may be. We have to throw the dice, but we also have to accept the results without either ressentiment or indifference. This is experience as the opening out of ourselves to the world. It is the opposite pole to exile, and is achieved through practices of time: “Getting back to experiencing things again seems so simple, and basically it is — but there is a price to pay. Because experiencing requires time — finding time that unfolds, and this unfolding of time plays out first of all in the mind, in the will to stretch out time” (71, my emphasis).