Nietzsche’s Creative Superpolitics: Towards a Politics Beyond Antagonistic Legal Power Público
Palmer, Jacob (Spring 2024)
Abstract
The law is often exercised with violence, demanding retribution in ways that are intentionally painful. This thesis thus hopes to challenge and question the basis for such antagonistic exertions of legal power. Ultimately, I find that antagonistic modes of legal power are not only violent in their punishments but inflict grave harm on the existential state of humanity in the form of bad conscience. I begin with a genealogy of legal power that uncovers the origins of legal power in the creditor-debtor relationship, while also finding connections between the divine authority of God and the power of the state. After exposing the cruel nature of antagonistic legal power, I then turn to visions for politics that are more conducive to creative individuality and becoming. I analyze Lawrence J. Hatab’s attempt at constructing a postmodern agonist democracy and find it insufficient in its attempt to move beyond antagonistic forms of legal power. I then construct my own vision for a postmodern politics with the hope of forwarding a more creative and affirmative form of sociality that liberates us from bestowed systems of power, enforced through antagonistic governance. To construct this politics, I read Nietzsche’s Übermensch and new philosopher-commander as political charges to affirmatively take up modes of politics that are continually generative of something beyond themselves and beyond hierarchal modes of legal authority. I argue that such a politics would begin with the transvaluation of transcendental values, recognizing that a prior question to what our politics looks like in a substantive sense is what tropes shape our politics and how we historicize systems of power.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Embarking on Nietzschean Political Philosophy Today 1
Chapter 1: The Antagonism of Legal Power 7
1.1 A Genealogy of Legal Power 9
1.2 Legal Power and Divine Power 19
1.3 Conclusion: Towards a Politics Beyond Antagonistic Legal Power 28
Chapter 2: Democracy and Antagonistic Legal Power 30
2.1 Hatab’s Nietzschean Democracy 32
2.2 Democracy as an Antagonistic Legal Regime 40
2.3 Conclusion: Democracy as a Politics of Antagonistic Power 48
Chapter 3: A Nietzschean Politics of Becoming 51
3.1 Nietzschean Politics as a Revaluation of Politics 53
3.2 Nietzschean Politics as Superpolitical 61
3.3 Conclusion: A Politics Beyond Antagonistic Power 67
Conclusion: Creative Politics 70
Bibliography 73
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