The “Páthos of Distance” or the Political Difference

Abstract

As early as Human, All Too Human,
I, § 472, Nietzsche predicts “the death
of the State” as the inevitable consequence of “the death of God”. Having caught the last glimmers of the dying God,
the State will in turn disappear. What
we have here is an aggravated nihilism
characterised by the exclusive hegemony
of exchange value in a world entirely
absorbed and levelled by internationalised capitalism. But on the other side of
this gloomy diagnosis lies the possibility
of “an invention even more appropriate
than the State”. After abandoning, in
1876, the micro-political perspective he
had developed with Wagner, the dangers of which Wagnerism had revealed
to him, Nietzsche spent almost ten years
— right up to Beyond Good and Evil —
developing a new perspective, this time
macro-political. This led him to analyse
in depth the nature of what is known
as the “social bond”, which he replaced
with a keen sense of the irreducible difference between political subjects, whose equality is only valid if it safeguards
the non-determination of identities. The
“pathos of distance” is the oxymoron
that Nietzsche invents to think the “inter-” of the inter-relation of equal, but
not identical, political subjects. And this
invention may well open up a new horizon for political reflection today.