Tom Minor
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celebratory tone—subscribed in his earlier days of thought. The passage from a later work ‘D’22, is quoted at length and an “unspeakable happiness at the sight of torment” is seen as an ironic distanciation “from the type of self-enjoyment that transforms pain into pleasure”23, which could be construed as a psychological hedonistic conception, and we already know that Nietzsche opposes this view. Later still, when we get to the ‘Genealogy’: “this ironic distance has split into a condemnation of ascetic masochism and a celebration of barbarian cruelty” 24. Nietzsche’s formula thus becomes: self-enjoyment qua the feeling of power and power qua cruelty without masochism. This ascendant cruelty somewhat contradicts Nietzsche’s earlier “glorification of Dionysian martyrdom” 25. Staten understands the Nietzschean notion of ‘self-enjoyment’—which includes the ascetic-masochistic enjoyment of self-directed cruelty—as a description of a ‘primitive form of affect’ within the will to power. This is identical with the feeling of power itself: “thus whenever we see power, we know there must be selfenjoyment…[and] we learn something new about the nature of power, and…the nature of self-enjoyment, by the collocation of the two.” 26 Furthermore, Staten conceives of “the inward turn of the ascetic [as]…a type of will to power [even though]…it seems to be a perversion or pathology…self-overcoming…selfdomination”.27 Nietzsche thus constructs a pre-Freudian: “profound analysis of sadomasochistic subjectivity and transcendental ressentiment.” 28
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“The striving of distinction is the striving for domination over the next man…There is a long scale of degrees of this secretly desired domination, and a complete catalogue of them would be almost the same thing as a history of culture, from the earliest…barbarism up to the grotesqueries of overrefinement and morbid idealism…At the end of the ladder stands the ascetic…who feels the highest enjoyment by himself enduring, as a consequence of his drive for distinction, precisely that which, on the first step of the ladder, his counterpart the barbarian imposes on others on whom and before whom he wants to distinguish himself. The triumph of the ascetic over himself, his glance turned inward which beholds man split asunder into a sufferer and a spectator…this final tragedy of the drive for distinction in which there is only one character burning and consuming himself—this is a worthy conclusion…in both cases an unspeakable happiness at the sight of torment!” D, (1881) Translated by Clark, M. & Leiter, B. (1997) Cambridge UP. (§113, pp. 13-14) 23 Staten H. (1990). p. 101 24 Ibid 25 Ibid, p. 102 26 Ibid, p. 90 27 Ibid, p. 91 28 Ibid, p. 92