labor than in enjoyment? Difference is the object of a practical
affirmation inseparable from essence and constitutive of existence.
Nietzsche’s ‘yes’ is opposed to the dialectical ‘no’; affirmation to
dialectical negation; difference to dialectical contradiction; joy,
enjoyment to dialectical labor; lightness, dance, to dialectical heavi-
ness; beautiful irresponsibility to dialectical responsibilities. (Nietzsche
and Philosophy, 9, translation modified and corrected)Effectively, the fortune of Nietzschean thought in the course of our
century is closely linked to a process of internal crisis, to the gradual
crumbling of dialectical thought. The renaissance of Nietzschean
thought during the 1970s and 1980s is linked to the abandonment of a
teleological perspective that in the course of the century had been asso-
ciated with the historical realization of the Idea through revolutionary
political movements.
The teleological perspective assumes that following the existing
totality of capitalism there must be a higher totality. The fragmented
totality of alienation, of contradictions, extended out toward an over-
coming, toward a collapsed totality that recombines what is now pre-
sented as separate.
The real process, the becoming of men and things, is weighted down
by a finalistic burden: the Idea has to be realized through work, war,
and suffering. All of this is the dialectic.
Deleuze saw Nietzsche as the thinker that conceived the autonomy,
the lightness of the event, the happening of the singular event at the
outside of any teleological perspective in which duty and guilt posit
themselves above the path of the singular.
The dialectic establishes historical finality as a tribunal to judge
the truth of actions and words: values are founded in the dialectic as
moments of the becoming true, of the realization of the Spirit.
Nietzsche abolished any criterion for the foundation of values,
any spiritual or historical possibility of becoming true. The problem is
the creation of values, and their truth is established in relation to the
mutations and becomings of interpretation.
In this sense, Nietzsche substitutes genealogy for realization: the
value of values is defined according to the possibility of the will that
wants it, of the imagination that imagines it.
‘The philosopher is a genealogist rather than a Kantian tribunal
judge or a utilitarian mechanic’ (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 2).
A genealogical thought does not pretend to abolish singularity in the
name of historical truth, but instead conceives of history as a deploy-52 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_08_cha07.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 52