Proving Grounds: On Nietzsche and the Test Drive

Authors(s): Avital Ronell

Source: MLN, Vol. 118, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 2003), pp. 653-669
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Proving Grounds:

On Nietzsche and the Test Drive

Avital Ronell

.01: On the evening of 9/11, W, after hours of hiding,

came out to say, "This was a test."

In an interview that bears the title "Nietzsche and the Machine,"

Derrida addresses the hyper-ethical procedure of genealogy.1 Linking

singularities that exceed the structure of the nation-state, he observes

that, for Nietzsche, "the trial of democracy is also a trial

of... technicization."2 Following the cartographies of political utter-

ances drawn up by the last philosopher, Derrida, for his part, suggests

that "the name of Nietzsche could serve as an 'index' to a series of

questions that have become all the more pressing since the end of the

Cold War."3 Concerned with the stakes of a democracy to come-also

the title for a recent colloquium in Cerisy-la-Salle (2002) organized

around the political thought of Jacques Derrida-he offers: "Today

the acceleration of technicization concerns the border of the nation-

state."4 This issue needs "to be completely reconsidered, not in order

to sound the death-knell of democracy, but to rethink democracy

from within these conditions."5 His tone, if not altogether apocalyptic,

Jacques Derrida, Negotations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2000, Elizabeth

Rottenberg, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2002).

2 Ibid., 245.

3 Ibid., 253.

4 Ibid., 251.

5 Ibid.

MLN 118 (2003): 653-669 ? 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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AVITAL RONELL

remains emphatic about the task at hand: "this rethinking. . . must

not be postponed, it is immediate and urgent."6 When the master says

immediate and urgent, I pick up the call. No less deluded than

Kafka's Abraham, I stand here as if the call were meant for me.7

Answering the call, I want to link what he calls the trial of

democracy to the name of Nietzsche-another name for an indefi-

nitely unsatisfied justice-and to the timing of the democracy for

which he calls: "this democracy to come is marked in the movement

that always carries the present beyond itself, makes it inadequate to

itself."8 For Nietzsche, or for one or two of the signatories in

Nietzsche, that which exemplarily carries the present beyond itself is

science. In short, Nietzsche makes us ask about the relationship

between science and contemporary formations of power-more

specifically, about the suspicious partnership of so-called advanced

democracies and high technology. What makes these forces match up

with each other? What allows these structures mutually to hold up?

Let us bring our focus to an aspect of science that Nietzsche more

or less discovered, implemented, posited, and which he links to an

affirmable democracy. I am referring to the experimental culture

from which his work takes off. Thus, even though Nietzsche can be

considered an anti-democrat, a largely unprobed dimension of his

thought provides a rigorous grid for evaluating political formations

and exigencies. The conduit for establishing a progressive political

science in Nietzsche is circuited through his understanding of

scientific structures and their material implications. Nietzsche sets up

a lab in Beyond Good & Evil rather explicitly. A number of his other

works pivot around the "experimental disposition" and treat them-

selves as experimental efforts. Nietzsche's text incorporates the

history of lab culture, which is linked to political innovation. Ever

since the Earl of Cork spent his allowance in 1660 to build the first

lab, an anxiety over the democratic implications of a new natural

philosophy was felt. Even women were invited to try out and repeat

6 Ibid.

7 The reference here is to Kafka's parable, "Abraham," about which I have written in

Stupidity (University of Illinois Press 2002). Kafka multiplies Abraham into a number of

hypothetical characters, one of whom is the dumbest kid in the class. Stuck in the back

row-academic death row-he thinks he hears his name called out on Commence-

ment Day, when the prize for the smartest pupil is about to be handed out. Hearing his

name called, he rises to accept the prize. Well, if he thinks it's meant for him, maybe it

is. Thus Kafka, taking down the urpatriarch.

8 Ibid., 252.

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experiments; results henceforth depended upon repeatability of

recorded events under any circumstances and by anyone. Science left

the alchemist's closet and Robert Boyle, the son of the Earl of Cork,

produced his controversial ethics of modesty.9 From now on scientific

utterances would be submitted to proof; they could be rescinded at

any time, by anyone. This type of scientific reformation recalls

Derrida's reading of Hermann Cohen, who put the protest back in

Protestantism by means of the hypothetical imperative;10 I want to put

the test back in Protestantism. The review process for which science

called had different life-forms in the alternate histories of democratic

instantiations. An analogous scandal to the opening for which Boyle

was responsible was prompted in the eighteenth century, by the

creation of the journal, Athendum. Suddenly anyone at all could

submit articles that would be reviewed for publication by a committee

including the Schlegel brothers, Fichte, Caroline, and the rest of

them. The democratic innovation of those who were practicing their

Lebensphilosophie stunned everyone. What? Anyone could submit an

article? It would be judged on its merits alone? Still today, the call for

papers instituted by the editorial board of the Athenduem has not lived

up to its political potential. But let us leave this matter of academic

policy aside for now and simply note that it belongs to a logic of

review in the form of testing, as Friedrich Schlegel explicitly stated.

The Athendum was open to experimentation; it was a test site.

When Nietzsche started thinking about science and the way it

would report itself, he opened an account that includes the relation

of science to pharmaceuticals, to medical and reproductive technolo-

gies, as well as to law. Arguably, Nietzsche opened the dossier that

contains Rheinberger's impressive write-up of Derrida and protein

synthesis-of test tube grammatology-and the file on legal review:

what constitutes evidentiary stability? How does DNA redescribe legal

decisions? Who is expert enough to judge? What are the complicities

or subversions involved in the relation of law and technology? When

Nietzsche started scripting tests as part of experimental culture (in

BG&E he offers an inventory of ten tests, an alternative ten com-

mandments including "the hardest test"), a mutation occurred in the

9 See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle,

and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985).

"?Jacques Derrida, "Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew the German" in Acts of

Religion, Gil Anidjar, ed. (New York: Routledge 2002).

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space in which we think and live, in which we mark political

adherences or dissociations. Given his multiple results and the many

valences that accrue to democratic formations, democracy itself

becomes a tremendously volatile test site that could be affirmed by

Nietzsche only to the extent that it sustained its character of test

site-as a permanent hypothesis, ever prone to fail, collapse, weaken,

break down.

.02: The Promiscuity of Testing

One could argue that, nowadays, since the fateful advent of the Gay

Science, but perhaps not solely because of it, there is nothing that is

not tested or subject to testing. We exist under its sway-so much so

that one could assert that technology has now transformed the world

into so many test sites. Among other things, this means that every-

thing we do is governed by a logic that includes as its necessary limit,

probability calculation, self-destruction, and interminable trial. A new

fold in metaphysics, testing-that is, the types of relatedness that fall

under this term-asserts another logic of truth.

The activities of testing are shown to be responsive to a need,

signaling the growth of a new instinct. What is the provenance of this

need? A kind of questioning, a structure of incessant research,

perhaps a modality of being, testing scans the walls of experience,

measuring, probing, determining the "what is" of the lived world. At

the same time, but more fundamentally still, the very structure of

testing tends to overtake the certainty that it establishes when obeying

the call of open finitude. Nietzsche marvels at a science that, like a

warrior, can go out and test itself repeatedly.

There is nothing as such altogether new about the desire bound up

in the test; yet, the expansive field of the sheer promiscuity of testing

poses novel problems and complicates the itinerary of claims we

make about the world and its contractions, the shards of immanence

and transcendence that it still bears. Even our contract with Yahweh,

whether piously observed or abominated, involves the multiplication

of test sites. Shortly after completing his Third Critique, Kant, in

response to a public questionnaire, examined the problem of testing

the faith of theology students. Can faith be tested or is it not the

essence of faith to refuse the test-to go along, precisely on blind

faith, without ground or grade? Or again, perhaps the Almighty

Himself has proven time and again to be addicted to the exigencies of

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testing. If God can be said to have a taste for anything, then it may

well be in the incontrovertible necessity of the test. No one is not

tested by God, at least by the God of the Old Testament who showed

a will to perpetual pursuit, perpetual rupture. Even the Satanic

beloved, who got away or was kicked out (depending on whether you

are reading the Satanic version of Goethe or God), became a

subsidiary testing device for the paradisiacal admissions policy. In

German, Versuch unites test with temptation-a semantic merger of

which Nietzsche makes good use. The devil is the visible mark of a

permanent testing apparatus. It is one name for an operation that

engages the subject in a radical way.

The figure of the test-as something that permeates modern

existence but still lacks determination-belongs to what Nietzsche

saw as our age of experimentation. Science itself invites us to read the

scene of experimentation, its fractured promises and articulated

procedures, the historical renewals, stalls or question marks, which

the experimental disposition has generated. Often we are encour-

aged to seek answers, provisional or regulative, in terms that have

been traditionally reserved for literary theory or a theory of significa-

tion. But there are also conceptual tendencies, largely unchallenged,

that seek hermeneutic prodding. Whether we are canvassing the

internal seams of scientific grammars or scanning effects of decisive

drafts that describe an outer domain of signification, the way science

produces hierarchical schemas affects every walk, or stumble, of life.

What is it that links the recondite behaviors of lab culture to drug

experimentation, experimental theater, thought experiments, politi-

cal acts, or what Nietzsche floats as the pervasiveness of an experi-

mental disposition? Is the imbricated fate of the shared signifier a

mere coincidence or does it betoken a more serious aggravation of

contaminative and communicative adaptations?

The way we observe science tilts the field of inquiry but also the

assignation of values. Nietzsche's work can be seen to swivel around

different appropriations of testing, and it is for this reason that I want

to look at it more closely while tracking the phenomenon that

appears to have flown beneath philosophical radars. Even where

testing is mentioned, it does not become an object of inquiry or a

field of discovery, a signal of anxious discrepancy. Husserl steps on

the brakes at a moment when the question of testing emerges in his

reflections on science; in any case, he swerves around Nietzsche,

nearly hitting him but leaving him unmarked in the Crisis. Nietzsche,

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658

for his part, introduces the experimental turn in the most personal of

his books, the Gay Science. Still, the last philosopher at once an-

nounces and denounces this emergence. We must never lose sight of

the Nietzschean ambivalence toward experimentation. With his fu-

ture-seeing night goggles and his sensitive little radar ears he sensed

that test sites would make the wasteland grow and foresaw the

concentration camp as the most unrestricted experimental labora-

tory in modern history, a part of the will to scientific knowledge.

At the same time, though time has stood still, life as knowledge,

Nietzsche hoped, would not be at best a bed to rest on or a form of

leisure but would embrace dangers, victories, heroic feelings. Nietzsche

noted science's capacity for making immense galaxies of joy flare up.

"So far, however, science deprived man of hisjoys, making him colder,

more like a statue, a stoic."" Nietzsche addresses his most pressing

demands to the science of the future. He asks that it account for its

peculiar production of meaning, for its place and pace in human

existence. In a sense, Nietzsche set out to find a structure of

possibility that reaches beyond life's "what is" while maintaining his

irrefragable investment in the world. It is important to remember that

Nietzsche had no getaway car that would take him to a mystified

Elsewhere, though he reverted to the daring and dashing rhythm of

mortal existence first scanned by the Greeks. Still, he did not establish

the rights of a world-beyond or appeal for credit to a transcendental

loan shark. Whatever his faults, he did not shirk his sense of

responsibility to this world, here and now, which invited trouble on

many levels and in different areas. Like Husserl after him, though

they by no means formed a partnership, the urgency he sought to

address concerns "not the scientific character of the sciences but

rather what they, or what science in general, had meant and could

mean for human existence (menschliches Dasein)."12 In order to think

the world rigorously one can no longer turn one's face from the

pressure points of science, no matter how invisible, recondite or

elusive their impressions are. Reading and contesting Heidegger's

I Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann, trans. (New York: Random

House 1974). (Translation of: Diefrohliche Wissenschaft, Karl Schlechta, ed. Frankfurt am

Main, Berlin: Ullstein Verlag 1979).

12 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis in European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1970), Chapter five, ?2: "The positivistic

reduction of the idea of science. The 'crisis' of science as the loss of its meaning for

life."

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statement that science falls short of thinking ("die Wissenschaft denkt

nicht"), Derrida links science to mourning and memory.13 Lacan

builds his Ethics of Psychoanalysis under the horizon of scientific

encroachment: it is always there, ready to erupt, amaze or blow you

away. It holds sway but often in the mode of denial, as if one could

walk or turn away from the sway of the scientific pre-givenness of our

modernity. Yet, where is it? What is it? How does Nietzsche construe

the possibility of a science that also bears the force of interminable

resistance?

.03: Proving Ground

I write from a philosophical need-such needs still exist-to respond

to the question of testing. The problem is that the test has not yet

become a question, though it belongs to an ever-mutating form of

questioning. As that which legitimates and corroborates or, con-

versely, as that which carries the considerable burden of delegitimating

assumed forms of knowledge or legal, pharmaceutical, screen, and

other decisive claims of an epistemological or projective order, the

test at once affirms and deprives the world of confidence; it belongs

to a specific sequence of forces that not so much annihilates as it

disqualifies. This constitutes an often invisible border in the land of

negation. Still, in one of its forms the test manifests the luxury of

destruction. Let me hold off on that for now; we'll get there soon

enough. Until then, think of the test as that which advances the

technological gaze as if nothing were.

According to Nietzsche, science alone is forbidden by God: the

Almighty manifested time and again His mortal terror of science.

Faith is a veto against science.

At one point Nietzsche sees the experiment as a freedom from the

constraints of referential truth. Science amazes him, though a reac-

tive tendency to reduce itself to calculative efficacy lands it squarely in

his repertoire of illusions, dissembling interpretations, and masks. He

redirects science to art, ligaturing an ancient complicity.

For my part I am neither averse to nor obsessed by science-

options that seem useless. I feel the weight that presses upon our

bodies, our embarrassed sense of promise and emptiness and

13 In Memories for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press 1986), and

elsewhere.

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connection to world, the tests to which I am put and others have to

endure-tests by which that being, still tagged as human, nowadays

receives definition. One has every right, in fact it is a duty, to ask of

science if it is capable of devoting itself to securing the conditions for

thinkingjoyousness and the affirmation of life. (Those conditions are

not to be construed as simplistic or regressive-utopian, as anyone who

has been circuited through psychoanalysis realizes.) Or is science

really only able in the end to promote the glacialization, the steriliza-

tions, the steely calculative grid of the technological dominion, allied

as it is with the persistent menace of world loss and money-eating

privilege? One does not have to be a Marxist to see that there are all

too few scientific activists in our midst, not enough care around its

effusions. Yet, science amazes me.

For a long while I contemplated as subtitle to this essay "The Price

We Are Paying for Science"-along the lines of Nietzsche's statement,

"the price we are paying for Wagner." I have to assume that the price

tags are still showing as I drive through the backroads of scientific

experimentation and diverse cartographies of rupture. As some of

these inflections and folds indicate, testing must be put in communi-

cation with the rhetorical figure of irony. I have not found much in

the philosophies of science or in scientific discourse on irony as a

decisive rhetorical calibration for the fate of the test. Even though

testing is dead serious, its performance can be understood to rely on

advanced theories of ironic velocities, whose fissional burnouts are

every bit as deadly. It is no mere coincidence that Nietzsche, supreme

ironist, leads the investigation into our experimental culture-or that

Romantic ironists gathered around the Schlegel brothers tested taste

and democracy when launching their journal, the Athendum. Both

irony and testing involve a certain tolerance for risk-taking and fuel

the warping edges of temporal instigation. Both produce novel

experiences of breakdown and disruption. One can try to pull the

brakes and recuperate irony's unpredictable consequences, shrinking

back from an awareness of its destructive propensities-this is what

Paul de Man warns against in the cases of Peter Szondi and Wayne

Booth'4-or one can try to ride it like a rodeo beast, until one is

thrown off, dashed, kaputt. It is necessary to retain the hypothesis

that in the end irony, like testing, blows us away.

14 Paul de Man, "The Concept of Irony" in The Aesthetic Ideology, Andrzej Warminiski,

ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1998).

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.04: Uchronia

There was a time when philosophy and science were into each other,

about and on each other. The one could not do (or be) without the

other: a passionate affair of fusional desire. There are still communi-

cations, custody battles, visitations, shared holidays in artworks and

on academic panels. But the solid commitment has been broken in

ways that intrude upon the course of "serious living" as Husserl often

says. The youngest son of the remembered union, Husserl was

perhaps the one most freaked out by the historical split. For his part,

Husserl urged caution when it came to advocating a rapprochement

of the severed pair. "It is a mistake," he wrote, "for the humanistic

disciplines to struggle with the natural sciences for equal rights. As

soon as they concede to the latter their objectivity as self-sufficiency,

they themselves fall prey to objectivism."15 Literary and philosophical

studies, art and art criticism, risk getting sucked in by the ruling

scientific claims, the alienating authority of what Husserl calls "objec-

tivism." The attitude that science gives us, this Einstellung, is life-

depleting and aura-sapping. It has left a toxic residue of uninterrogated

policies, now become decisive. The delusion of self-sufficiency, a

mark of the self-evisceration of the sciences detached from their

reflective ground and abysses, is dangerous for us all, blocking vision

and eclipsing futurity. So Husserl, more or less. Upgraded by historic-

ity. The other one, Nietzsche, cried: "The wasteland grows."16

Here is the question mark that I bring to the table: Why has the test

throughout history, but perhaps most pervasively today, come to

define our relation to questions of truth, knowledge, and even

reality? It is not a matter of choosing between a science of fact and a

science of essence-between an account of why things are actual

rather than possible. Nor is it simply a matter of technological self-

understanding, as if the scientific reflection on its own procedures

and premises could satisfy a philosophical hunger. The term "subject

position" would not cover the calamity of the field that encompasses

the will to test. At times my said subject position seems reduced to

that of a shivering rabbit, or less glamorously fragile, of a rat, prodded

and probed, sectionized and cornered by the technological feeler. As

15 Husserl, The Crisis in European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Chapter

five, ?2.

16 See especially Heidegger's discussion of the technological implications of this

utterance in What is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row 1968).

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a receptor to the invasive demand my little rabbit ears are shaking-

a figure conjured by Heidegger to state exemplary listening. I do not

know if my listening device is exemplary, nor do I insist on sustaining

the pathos that propels the images gathered in this place. Like a good

Nietzschean receptor, I am attuned to the conflicting valuations of

the phenomena under consideration, I am not insensitive to the

liberatory potential of testing one's ground, which is to say, of

recanting one's certainties, throwing off the security blankets of time

and history. There is something about the relationship to truth that

depends on the test. Why is it, for example, that the most pressing

ethical and political issues of our day increasingly seem to have more

to do with testing than with other names for questioning, hesitation

or even certainty?

The test drive covers a lot of ground and splits off into different,

though related, semantic fields. Yet often there are moments of local

or functional reduplication, overlap and support. One side of testing

is as assertive in its findings as the other is vulnerable when counting

its losses. There is the test that stands its ground, standardized, and

equipped with irrefutable results. So it claims and so it stands. There

is the other test that crashes against walls, collapses certitudes, and

lives by failure-lives by dying or, at least destroying. All sorts of issues

come to the fore, including those that deal with norms, that is,

establishing boundaries in normativity and those that rely on exper-

tise, even, in a court of law, on expert witnesses. The one register of

testing offers results-certitudes-by which to calculate and count on

the other. Another register consistently detaches from its rootedness

in truth: self-dissolving and ever probing, it depends on boundary-

crossing feats and the collapse of horizon. It implicates a politics of

risk that Nietzsche has shown, on one page, to be linked to a concept

of freedom. On the next page, he characteristically contradicts

himself, pointing to the gravest risks ascribable to the culture of the

Versuch, the test or trial. The two principal registers are multiplied by

other inscriptions and imply one another at several crucial junctures.

Suppose we take the simple question of experimental testing-

which touches everything from warfare to urban planning, military

strategy and national security, space, medical, and reproductive

technologies, the aporias of ethics, drug and polygraph testing, the

steroidal tests of Olympic Games, and all the various means of

measuring and testing that support, among so many others, political,

religious, and educational institutions. It is not difficult to see that

this mode of testing involves a thoroughgoing reconstitution and

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reconceptualization of the subject. The test has everything to do not

only with the way the policing of political sites and bodies takes place

in our modernity but also with our experience of reality in general,

especially since the elliptical circuit that now has been established

between testing and the real often works to cancel the difference

between these two domains.

Ever since Freud introduced the crucial concept of reality-testing,

the authority of reality has not only been undermined, but its status

has been submitted to various testing apparatuses whose constitution

and significance still need to be investigated. (Freud actually worked

on two tests, one of which was lost to us: the Realitdtsprifung and the

Aktualititspriifung, which appear to distinguish between reality and

immediacy. These psychic test kits provided the basis for the elabora-

tion of Verneinung and were crucial in his thinking on mourning.)

Lacan has linked testing to the subject's creation of a first "outside"-

a space that is no longer the same as "reality."

To a large degree motivated by ethical considerations, my concern

with the compulsion or drive to test moreover explores the ways in

which the test comes to require an unprecedented colloquy of

witnesses, evidence, iterability, and an entire network of apparatuses

meant to enforce the test and its findings.17 Whether clearly stated or

largely disavowed, models of testing inform diverse types of social

organization, legitimating crucial and often irreversible discursive

tendencies and mandating decisions. In terms of the political implica-

tions of testing, one need only consider the way wars are waged on

material sites and objects, and the way the state takes possession of

the body presumptively on drugs. Testing means, among other things,

that your pee belongs to the state or to any institution or apparatus

that thrives on the new civic readability. It is my duty to bring us back

to the more original illegibility of your urine sample, or, at least, if I

am unable to restore your pee to its proper place, to trace the

contours of the complicated hegemony of testing.

.05 Prototype: The Gay Science

The meaning of scientificity that concerns Nietzsche embraces the

qualities both of destructive and artistic modes of production. Our

17 For the theoretical status of evidence, cf. Riidiger Campe, "Bella Evidentia. Begriff

und Figur von Evidenz in Baumgartens Asthetik" in Deutsche Zeitschriftfiir Philosophie 49

(2001), 243-255.

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being has been modalized by the various technologies in ways that

have begun fairly recently to receive serious attention in the domains

of ontology, ethics, political theory, cybernetics, critical thought and

artificial intelligence. Yet, what concerns Nietzsche belongs neither

literally inside nor outside any of these domains but has nonetheless

infiltrated their very core-something, indeed, that Nietzsche's Gay

Sci was first to articulate succinctly before, for instance, Popper,

Hempel, Carnap and others took it up. Nietzsche variously motivates

the scientific premise of his work by terms that indicate the activities

of testing, which for him include experimentation, trial, hypothetical

positing, retrial, and more testing. If anything, Gay Sci signals to us

today the extent to which our rapport to the world has undergone

considerable mutation by means of our adherence to the imperatives

of testing. The consequences of this grid are considerable, involving,

to say the least, our relation to explanatory and descriptive language,

truth, conclusiveness, result, probability calculation, process, and

identity. Testing, moreover, implies for Nietzsche very specific tempo-

ral inflections. Henceforth everything will have to stand the test of

time, which is to say that, ever provisional, things as well as concepts

must be tried and proven, and structurally regulated by the destruc-

tion of the hypotheses that hold them together.

What, finally, is the nature of the test? Does it have an essence? Is it

pure relationality? How does it participate in Nietzsche's great

destabilizations or prompt the nihilistic slide of values? Why is today

our sense of security-whether or not we are prepared to admit this-

based on testability? We want everyone and everything tested (I am

not unaware of the sinister resonance of this observation. But since

when has a desire signaled by humanity not been pulled by a sinister

undertow?) Testing, which our Daseins encounter every day in the

multiplicity of forms-ranging from IQ to cosmetics, engines, stress,

and arms testing 1-2-3- broadcast systems, not to mention testing

your love, testing your friendship, testing my patience, in a word,

testing the brakes-was located by Nietzsche mainly in the eternal joy

of becoming. Becoming involves the affirmation of passing away and

destroying-the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy. In the

first place, testing marks an ever new relation among forces. Ceasing

to raise to infinity or finitude, or to monitor time according to the

pulse of German Idealism, it imposes the course of unlimited

finiteness. This is the temporality we now commonly associate with

third-generation machines, cybernetics, and information technology.

In a way, technology ensures its evolving perpetuation by quietly

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positing as its sole purpose an infinite series of testing events severed

from any empirical function. Thus an elliptical circuit has been

established between testing and the real: a circuit so radically

installed-it is irreversible-cancels the essential difference between

the test and what was assumed to be real. At this point-somewhere

between Freud and Nietzsche-it is not so much the case that reality

is being tested but that testing is constitutive of what can be

designated, with the proper precautions, as real, actual, materially

enabled. The test is what allows for the emergence of a reality to

assert itself. This relation of test to reality may have stood its ground

since Parsifal. But it is only since Nietzsche that we ask whether, as

activity or object, the test discovers, exposes, establishes, or perhaps

even invents the ground on which we walk the walk.

Testing, which we read as one of the prevailing figures of our

modernity, still makes claims of absoluteness (something has been

tested and proved; we have test results), but only in terms of a

temporary solidity. It opens up the site that occurs, Nietzsche sug-

gests, after Christianity has fizzled, arriving together with a crisis in

the relationship of interpretation to experience. No longer is it a

question of interpreting one's own experience as pious people have

long enough interpreted theirs, namely, "as though it were providen-

tial, a hint, designed and ordained for the sake of the salvation of the

soul-all that is over now."18 Now we godless ones test, we rigorously

experiment. We are the Christian conscience translated and subli-

mated into a scientific conscience. Converted to scientificity, we still

however carry a trace of Christianity because what triumphed over

the Christian god was Christian morality itself, "the concept of

truthfulness that was understood ever more rigorously."19 As it be-

came more refined, Christianity forced intellectual cleanliness upon

us; it came clean by pushing science as the sublimation of its own

murkiness. Now man's conscience is set against Christianity; it is

"considered indecent and dishonest by every more refined con-

science."20 The Christian god in sum split off from Christian morality,

which necessarily went down a transvaluating path less traveled and

turned against its recalcitrant origin. The new truth serum required

Christian morality to give up the god. What interests me is the

additional twist of transvaluation that Nietzsche's shadow history

18 The Gay Science, 307.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

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AVITAL RONELL

sketches, namely when the value urging truth converts into the

currency of testing. Henceforth, in strictly Nietzschean terms, reac-

tive positings will have to stand up to the scrutiny of recursive testing.

The experimental disposition, and the provisional logic of testing

that is inscribed by it, occurs, in its technological sense, as an event,

after the death of God. It does not arrive on the scene as a barbarian

conqueror, but approaches modestly, for it is at once more modest

than anything Christianity had proposed-proceeding, namely, by

the modesty of hypotheses which are always overturnable-and more

decidedly daring. Thus this strain of modesty is shared by the spirit of

audacity, wielding a strength capable of risk-taking and tremendous

courage. It gathers its strength on mistrust. In the Gay Sci Nietzsche,

posing as the Dionysian philosopher, writes, "the more mistrust, the

more philosophy."21 A statement of mistrust is perfectly consistent

with the exigencies of testing to the extent that, as stance or

inscription, it inhibits the potency of constative sentences, which

merely respond to whether or not something is true or false.

Dionysian pessimism, as a statement of mistrust, is neither true nor

false: it is rather in the nature of a permanent hypothesis.

.06 Prototype: Literature and Torture

Testing, which could be seen as the thrownness of technology,

traverses many sectors of existence and does not begin explicitly as a

technological life form. Whether we are speaking of abandoned

being (abandoned in the desert, on the cross, at home, or on the

streets) or discursively bolstered being (socially pinned, legally in-

scribed, politically activated)-or where these formations meet and

intersect-these skid marks on the path of becoming tend to assume

the character of a test. Very often literature understands the dilemma

of tested-being on which it bases some of its most harrowing narra-

tions. Kafka constructed his test sites with a striking sense of urgency.

From his narrative "The Test" to the interminable Trial and the

"Penal Colony"-or even Gregor trying out his little legs, the hunger

artist weighing in, and K. testing the limits of intelligibility in the

Castle territory, to the contested medical gaze in "A Country Doctor,"

and the father's pop quiz at the end of "The Judgment"-Kafka

21 Ibid.

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submitted language to the test of its limits as his figures probed for

reference, often under torture. The trial of the man from the

country-the test "nur ffir dich bestimmt"-has been read by Derrida

in terms of suspended legal protocols and tortured entry exams.22

The link between testing and torture is given ample consideration in

Kafka's works, but it begins with the Greeks' notion of basanos,

relating truth to torture, a strictly constellated confluence of acts

equally troubling to Aristotle and Aristophanes. Let us remember,

too, that in the US torture has been reintroduced recently as a

legitimate means of eliciting truth by none other than left-leaning

legal advocate Alan Dershowitz. Artistotle questions the reigning

Greek assumption whether truth is in fact attained by torture or

whether the test fails because the tortured body will say anything just

to put an end to the trial.

For Nietzsche testing now clears a space that, after the Greeks, was

blocked by moral prejudice. He views moral prejudice against science

as the conspiracy against adventure and deregulated knowledge

imposed on us iconically by the couple, Faust and Mephistopheles-

true traitors to the cause of godless science. It turns out that Faust was

put on a short leash puppeteered in the end by God. Mephisto,

deflated and castrated by the divine veto, loses all bets as well as his

mortal lab. As it happens, God cannot tolerate the experiment or

proof. Double-crossed, Mephisto in sum was made to function as an

inhibitor to the scientific adventure, and his research on the creature,

man, was terminated without due process. Nietzsche blows the whistle

on the cosmic subterfuge. This thematic reproach represents one of

the very few swipes that Nietzsche takes at Goethe. In terms of the

aims he takes, it is somewhat of a strange moment, for Nietzsche

attacks the literary Goethe for a scientific error. At the same time, it

could be argued that the secret hero of Nietzsche's scientific investi-

gations is the Goethe of the Theory of Colors, whose bold experiments

put the experimenter on the line. Goethe pioneered the moment

when the body became the test site and not a secondary prop for a

transcendentalizing consciousness. This is the Goethe that Nietzsche

represses when he goes after the Goethe who produced the drama of

volte face, Faust's abrupt decathexis of science.

22 Franz Kafka, "Vor dem Gesetz," Avital Ronell trans., in Acts of Literature, Derek

Attridge, ed. (New York: Routledge 1992).

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668

.07: Justice

Until now the test site, linked to a kind of ghostless futurity, offers no

present shelter. This explains perhaps why Nietzsche names the gaya

scienza in the same breath that convokes "we who are homeless."23

Nietzsche knows how to affirm the unhinging of home as the

preparation for another future, one not rooted in ideologies of the

homefront. For Nietzsche there is a good homelessness-a deraci-

nation of abundance, as it were, and a bad homelessness-burdened,

destitute, chronically fatigued with the earth, a homelessness of

depletion. The logic of the test site that we have not yet understood

concerns precisely the relation of the site to life; we still know only

how to leave the test site uninhabitable, mapping ever more deserts as

eco wasteland, unexploded arsenal, littered terrain, detention cen-

ters, the so-called "third world." The question that Nietzsche presses

us on is therefore never merely one of affirming homelessness after

metaphysics, but of rendering spaces habitable, multiplying trajecto-

ries for life and the living, refiguring the site of experimentation in

such a way as to ensure that it is not already the entombed reserve of

the living dead. In other words: why have we not yet thought the test

site on the side of life? It is important to note that Nietzsche is not, in

this phase of his thought, the exuberant adolescent of old. The

Nietzsche who thinks the experiment has come back from the dead

several times over: he is formulating his theory of the great health; he

has returned once again to health and, like a great convalescent,

looks at life with a somewhat ghostly air that dissolves only gradually.

Still, he is on the move again, and homelessness becomes an

expression of renewed vitality, the overcoming of sterile destitution.

The homelessness that Nietzsche posits is never simply reactive,

therefore, but puts up a bold front as it looks toward the future.

Among its prominent features the abomination of racism, an aggra-

vated narcissism, ranks high. Resembling at moments the crew of Star

Trek, "we who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially ... We

are not tempted to participate in mendacious self-admiration and

racial indecency."24 Racial indecency is, Nietzsche suggests every-

where, the absence of test. It is the untested presumption par

23 Ibid., 338.

24 Ibid., 340.

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excellence, held together by pseudo-precepts that would never hold

scientific sway. Racial indecency and self-admiration go steadily

together, for one feeds the other while expunging otherness and

refusing the movement of self-overcoming, which is to say, ceaseless

self-correction. Nietzsche, however, is by no means setting up a

political correctional facility, an alternative space for human subjects

weighted down by punishing chains. Something has to give, liberating

the heaviness that paralyzes the movement of racial justice-racial

justice, which, for Nietzsche and for us, serves as the earth-toned

metonymy for all possible justice.

New York University

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