You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Every Angel is terror.
The first part of my title—l'effet c'est toi—is a slight play on a statement that Friedrich Nietzsche makes in the first book of Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. In discussing his concept of “will to power,” Nietzsche writes, “‘Freedom of the will’—that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order—who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his will that overcame them … L'effet c'est moi” (1886/1989, p. 26). I am the effect. A central philosophic “prejudice” that Nietzsche criticizes severely is “faith in opposite values” (p. 10, emphasis in original). One of the effects of that faith is a perceived opposition between free will and determinism: either we are free, or we are not. The overall strategy of Nietzsche's project is to subvert what makes these alternatives seem so natural in their apparent opposition by arguing that a concept of the will cannot be subordinated to the alleged freedom of a subject, but rather the reverse: the freedom of a subject is not to be measured by the effectiveness of its will; rather the freedom of the will is indexed by the effects of subjectivity that it is capable of producing.
The second part of my title names my intention to put contemporary Kleinian thought, via the concept of projective identification, into dialogue with Nietzsche's project. An encounter between Nietzsche and psychoanalysis would not seem anything new. The predominant tendency of efforts to stage such an encounter, however, has been to cast the relationship between Nietzsche and psychoanalysis in light of Nietzsche's proximity to Freud. More generally, when thinking about the