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Research Express@NCKU Volume 22 Issue 10 - December 14, 2012 [ http://research.ncku.edu.tw/re/articles/e/20121214/2.html ]
Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Nāgārjuna: Mapping the Dialectics of Will/Desire
Che-ming Yang
Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, College of Liberal Arts, National Cheng Kung University
[email protected] Vol. 1.6, November 2010
Journal of Language Teaching and Research
This paper aims to explore the correspondences between the dialectical analysis (the unique way of logical argumentation) of Nietzsche’s will and that of Deleuze’s desire—the discursive axis of two influential thinkers whose critiques of
representation dominate the formation of postmodern theory and beyond. In addition, I make a comparative study of their dialectics and that of Nāgārjuna. The major Nietzschean/Deleuzean texts explored in this paper are some of those which foreground the everlasting deterritorialized movement of will (and its related themes
—Overman and Eternal Recurrence) and desire : Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Will to Power; and Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition,
Nietzsche and Philosophy, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. As for Nāgārjuna’s work, I choose to focus on his masterpiece and mostly valued one—Mūlamadhyamakakārikās (中論). The focus of this study is to attempt a mapping (characteristic of rhizomatics) of how their special dialectics of will/desire (Nihilism), without ever attempting to create another Absolute Truth, sets forth the non-totalizable multiplicities that characterizes the world of becoming.
On the other hand, many Nietzsche/Deleuze scholars, though recognizing the ontological implication of willing/
desiring, just emphasize the positive forces of will and desire by which they call “politics” in the world of
becoming. They fail to further explore the correspondences between Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s special dialectical argumentation that is aimed at negating all reductive “philosophical trees” by employing ambiguous discourses that have multiple/contingent meanings, for reality is always becoming and multiple (e.g. Nietzsche’s nihilism). In other words, though recognizing both everyday existence and the categories by which humans comprehend it are self-contradictory and incoherent, paradoxically, Nietzsche and Deleuze adopt a dialectical analysis to challenge and highlight the absurdities of metaphysics and morality and all other Western modes of thinking. Yet, their dialectics—a philosophy of contradictions in which “opposing ideas are presented in agonistic competition with one another” (Martin 1991)—happens to create a dynamic form of philosophizing that serves to deconstruct both sides of every equation and to illuminate the arbitrary and mutable character of the concepts themselves.
Likewise, though Nāgārjuna (龍樹菩薩, an Indian philosopher and saint who founded the Buddhist school Mādhyamika 中道, which holds a middle view of existence as voidness—no such thing as an intrinsic nature of all things) often refutes the validity of logic, most Buddhist scholars still considers his theoretical analysis as
“dialectical” in a sense of “unique logical argumentation.” Above all, both the Nietzschean/Deleuzean nihilism and Nāgārjuna’s voidness/nihilism maintain that universal becoming is based on a principle of “relativity” (e.g.
Nietzsche’s power shows the relations of forces). In Buddhist terminology, it is called “Dependent Origination,”
which is functioning according to our volitional activities/willing (ignorance). In fact, both Nietzsche / Deleuze and Buddhism emphasize“the centrality of humans in a godless cosmos and neither looks to any external being or
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power for their respective solutions to the problems of existence” (Loy 1998).
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