526
PARTISAN REVIEW
In the film
Reds,
O'Neill is played by Jack Nicholson, John Reed by
Warren Beatty, and Louise Bryant by Diane Keaton. I saw the film in
Orange County, California, the most conservative suburb in America.
One scene has Louise Bryant going to O'Neill's apartment to borrow
money for a trip to the Soviet Union. She's doing it for romantic rea–
sons, to be with Reed, but she cannot tell that to O'Neill, because he is
in love with her. "What purposes? " O'Neill asks. "I want to bring back
the message of Bolshevism," Bryant answers. Then the camera zooms in
on O'Neill sitting on a chair; as he looks up into the camera he asks:
"Do you really think there's going to be a revolution in America?" At
that, the entire theatre broke into applause. But it was believed during
the sixties that there would be a revolution in America.
It
is not difficult to understand Nietzsche's appeal to academic intel–
lectuals, or perhaps to people who feel they were brought up wrongly.
To discover that what you had been taught is contingent and arbitrary
can be liberating. Christianity, which preaches meekness, submission,
and the virtues of suffering while instilling guilt and fear of punishment
is, as Nietzsche put it, "a hangman's metaphysics." Truth, too, is noth–
ing more than a belief that had its origins in illusion and need. All
knowledge is embedded in perspectives conditioned by time and place,
all thought more history than philosophy. Finally, the only reality is
power, not necessarily something that one possesses and wields, but
some kind of force and energy that runs through us and lodges in sys–
tems and structures or even in an act of interpretation, which is little
more than an attempt to impose our views, that is the will to power. In
a thinker like Foucault, power is domination by representation orga–
nized in institutions like prisons or school systems. We do not know
where power comes from; it's just there, having neither an agency nor a
cause. Foucault was obsessed with oppression, but he gave us oppres–
sion without an oppressor.
In the older
Partisan Review
outlook, political thought involved the
question of freedom and the conditions of its possibility. Today the catch–
words are power, domination, oppression, manipulation, control, closure,
subjugation, and any expression that implies the absence of freedom. But
despite all this negativity, I doubt if Nietzsche himself could find a posi–
tion in the academic world today. He loved the Greeks because they saw
life as conflict, the rivalry between Apollo and Dionysus, between calm
and reflection, action and passion. To Nietzsche, the highest human
beings are those who can cope with opposites and make efforts to unite
the most antagonistic traits. "In truth," he wrote,
"antagonism
belongs in
