Transvaluation as Subversion

In Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill, the protagonist, Edmund, exists in a constant state of flux between depressive lethargy and meek rebellion that sets the tone for the entire play. Dissatisfied with his home life, he wishes to do something to change it, but, at the same time, he is too weak due to his sickness and disillusioned by his experiences in life to actually assert himself and stand up for his own dignity, and is thus subject to his chaotic homelife and the unpredictability of his parents behavior. The family could be seen as a representation of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who is completely taken up in the will of his superiors, and never even takes one step to be his own person. It could also be said that they are a representation of us, modern, domesticated humans - we who merely act as cogs, and nothing more, we who are completely disillusioned and disempowered, whose Will to Power has been crushed by the reactionary forces of the modern world. 

Mary, the mother, who is an aging and miserable drug addict who has been torn from her ideal family live and forced to live as a modern nomad in the developing hellscape that is American capitalism; “I’m so sick and tired of pretending this is a home! You won’t help me! You won’t put yourself out the least bit! You don’t know how to act in a home! You don’t really want one! You never wanted one - never since the day we were married! You should have remained a bachelor and lived in second rate hotels and entertained your friends in barrooms!” (69). Tyrone, who is desperately attempting to cling to an old world way of doing things that just doesn’t cut it anymore, while simultaneously trying to succeed in the cut throat world of modern commerce, and who blames all his family’s problems on their lack of faith; “You’ve both flouted the faith you were born and brought up in - the one true faith of the Catholic Church - and your denial has brought you nothing but self destruction!” (79)

Edmund, however… he is different. He does not fall victim to pessimism and alienation, but rather, he sublimates it, and utilizes them in his favor. He, in a sense, represents the Nietzschean transvaluation of all values. He takes what is seen as bad, seizes it for himself, and makes it good.

This sublimation of the bad, subversion of morality, and transvaluation of the moral order, is a common theme in much of American literature, from Edgar Allen Poe to H.P. Lovecraft to Thomas Ligotti. However, what is unique in all three of these writers is also what is unique to the character of Edmund, for Edmund possesses what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls jouissance, which, in his book The Weird and the Eerie, the late socialist theorist and philosopher Mark Fisher defines as being “an enjoyment that entails the inextricability of pleasure and pain.” (17). Take, for example, this passage from Long Day’s Journey Into Night, where Edmund is delivering a monologue to his father, Tyrone, about his experience walking home that night; “the fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself… I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.” (133). 

Is this not a perfect example of Jouissance? “An excessive preoccupation with objects that are ‘officially’ negative always indicates the work of jouissance.” (17). Ghosts, fog, loneliness, unreality becoming-ghost (if one is to look at it from a Deluzian perspective); are these not all traditionally negative signs that are used by Edmund in a way that is, in the Spinozist sense (that of increasing the power to act), good? However, there also can be seen elements of what Fisher calls the Eerie; “The eerie... entails a disengagement from our current attachments. But, with the eerie, this disengagement does not usually have the quality of shock that is typically associated with the weird. The serenity associated with the eerie - think of the phrase eerie calm - has to do with detachment from the urgencies of the everyday… it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether.” (13).

 This is exactly what Nietzsche was trying to attempt with the transvaluation of all values; Edmund is, in a way, what Nietzsche would call a higher man (one that is, granted, still maturing, and has yet to completely realize himself); “...someday, in a stronger age than this rotting and introspective present, must he in soothe come to us, even the redeemer of great love and scorn, the creative spirit, rebounding by the impetus of his own force back again away from every transcendental plain and dimension, he whose solitude is misunderstood of the people, as though it were a flight from reality; while actually it is only his diving, burrowing, and penetrating into reality, so that when he comes again to the light he can at once bring about by these means the redemption of reality; its redemption from the curse which the old reality has laid upon it.” (Nietzsche, on the Genealogy of Morals, 65).

Edmund, though he is growing, has not yet breached the surface of reality; he is, to put it in Nietzsche’s terms, still burrowing. He remains a man of thought, and has yet to become a man of action. He sees suffering; more than that, he knows suffering, he feels suffering; like a shadow, it follows him everywhere it goes. He sees it, and begins the process of making it his own, a process which he has yet to complete. For Nietzsche, thought must be accompanied by action, or it means very little, for the world as it exists is entirely separate from how we think it should be. Not only that, but Nietzsche has on many occasions traced the origin of intellectualism back to weakness; “species do not evolve towards perfection: the weak always prevail over the strong - simply because they are the majority, and because they are also the more crafty. Darwin forgot the intellect…; the weak have more intellect. In order to acquire intellect, one must be in need of it… he who possesses strength tosses intellect to the deuce.” (Twilight of the Idols, 52).

Do not be mistaken; Nietzsche is not deriding or condemning the intellect. Nietzsche is one who rarely points fingers, for to do so would be to judge, and judge based on what? Rather, Nietzsche is, in characteristic fashion, merely making an observation of a recurring theme (which is certainly true regarding himself, seeing how poor his physical health was).

Thus, it is important to understand that Nietzsche is not making a call for the higher men and women of society to rise and reveal themselves; he does not say that they should rise, but rather, that they will. Nor does he believe that these individuals are great or exceptional because of their own efforts, or because of any human undertaking. Rather, he flat out rejects the existence of free will, and falls back on a purely historical explanation for their existence, writing, for example, in the Twilight of the Idols, that “Great men, like great ages, are explosive material, in which a stupendous amount of power is accumulated; the first conditions of their existence are always historical and physiological; they are the outcome of the fact that for long ages energy has been collected, hoarded up, saved up, and preserved for their use, and that no explosion has taken place,” (72).

We must understand Nietzsche’s higher man not as a product of his fellow human beings (humanism), nor as the product of himself (existentialism, which, by all intents and purposes, is just another form of humanism. Rather, we must understand him as a product of the inhuman forces that exist within the world and that were created by man to serve him, but to who man now pays tribute to and serves. These inhuman, now functionally separate and autonomous forces and beings, such as morality, law, history, God, spirit and democracy, which were conceived of in order to aid man in his conquest of nature, have turned themselves against us, waged war on us, made us servants of abstract ideals and alien interests; in other words, these forces which forged our reality and enslaved us - this is where the higher man emerges. “The finished product of species activity,” writes the French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his book Nietzsche and Philosophy, “is not the responsible man himself or the moral man, but the autonomous and supramoral man, that is to say the one who actually acts his reactive forces and in whom all reactive forces are active… the sovereign and legislative individual who defines himself by power over himself, over destiny, over the law… the morality of customs, the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law. This is why Nietzsche speaks of a self destruction of justice. Culture is man’s species activity; but, since the activity is selective, it produces the individual as its final goal, where species is itself suppressed.” (137).

It is here that we see the true meaning of the phrase “transvaluation of all values.” To transvalue is to take something and change its value. It must be kept in mind that it is different from the word “transmute,” for to transmute something is to change its physical makeup, such as transmuting lead into gold, whereas to transvalue something is merely to change how it is used, and thus how it is valued. It is this act, this transvaluation, that we see growing in the character of Edmund. He takes things that are traditionally seen as negative - loneliness, alienation, unreality - and he makes them good, i.e., he makes them serve his own purposes, so that rather than them being what controls him, he becomes what controls them. It is this that is meant when one speaks of the inhuman forces that lord over us. Edmund too is lorded over by inhuman forces. But rather than submitting to them, he subverts them, and from them a new man is born, a man that is independent; “the free, the lightfoot, the careless,” (Deleuze 137).