EUGENE GOODHEART
403
a thing of the past? The "revolution" has not been successful on its
own terms. Like all revolutionary triumphs, this one is not what its
proponents meant at all. It has been first a triumph of discourse, as
Foucault has demonstrated. Such a triumph enables new attitudes,
permits new feelings, creates new expectations, new power concen–
trations. But what the "success" has revealed is the vacuity of libera–
tionist talk about desire. The refusal or incapacity of the revolu–
tionaries of desire to acknowledge their "victory" is their refusal or in–
capacity to acknowledge its bitter fruits. The idea of uncensored
desire has infected the various institutions of social life: family,
school, workplace, and as with every new "successful" revolution, the
revolution of desire has produced its discontents.
Nietzsche perhaps more than any modern philosopher tried to
imagine the conditions of a life free of the coercions of all the univer–
salizing institutional forms of life: politics, morality, religion. The
alternative for Nietzsche was aesthetic consciousness, which pro–
duced its own kind of tyrannical order. Nietzsche does not object to
the orderings of art. On the contrary, he rejects "the assumption that
human nature is best expressed in perfect freedom," arguing instead
that "all that there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety,
boldness, dance, masterly sureness, whether in thought itself or in
government, or in rhetoric and persuasion, in the arts just as in
ethics, has developed only owing to 'the tyranny of such capricious
laws.'"
What Nietzsche objects to in Christianity, for example, is not
its "tyranny," but its dogmatism, its concealment of "the fact that its
direction is only one direction among many others." He does not
mean to promote the kind of rapid changes of fashion that character–
ize our postmodernity . In fact, he advocates
"obedience
over a long
period of time and in
a single
direction; given that, something always
develops, and has developed, for whose sake it is worthwhile to live
on earth, for example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality."
The tyranny that Nietzsche repudiates is not the aesthetic order that
constitutes one's personality, an order that is subject to change ac–
cording to the necessities of one's nature, but the alien imposition of
an external order that dogmatically declares itself universal and eter–
nal. Is it now the case that Desire, reified and abstract, has become
such an alien order, or should we say, disorder?
