Abstract

Friedrich Nietzsche and the desire to obey This chapter provides a new interpretation of the relationship between subjectivity and power in Nietzsche’s philosophy. I argue that the nexus Nietzsche poses between the birth of the subject and the “will to life” represents one of the seminal loci in which philosophy approaches the question of voluntary servitude. I locate the passages in Nietzsche’s thought in which the critique of democracy, passivity, and conformism cannot be read as the “simple” resurgence of reactionary ideas, but testify to the extremely ambivalent role played by the “will to life”. I then focus on the continuity between Christianity and the modern world to emphasize the complexity with which Nietzsche describes the process of subjectification that made the human animal docile and obedient, producing one of the most powerful investigations into the link between subjectivity and “pastoral power”.