Politics Research Seminar: Dr Nathan Widder

Abstract: This paper challenges the idea that individual and collective agency require centred, fixed identities to be efficacious and meaningful. In post-foundational political thought, this idea frequently underpins an understanding of subjectivity being temporarily consolidated through constitutive exclusions and a claim that political and ethical thought must negotiate the necessity and inevitable failure of these exclusions. Against this thesis, this paper presents a reading of Nietzsche's analysis of the drives and their relation to the ego, holding that for Nietzsche drives are synthesized into a complex but still dispersed assemblage that generates the illusion of unity in the form of an ego or "I." For Nietzsche, the paper argues, concrete agency is located in this assemblage of differences, the semblance of a centre being important in the coordination of these differences, but having no causal efficacy itself. The paper concludes by examining whether Nietzsche falls into a variant of the "homunculus problem" before turning to the doctrine of eternal return and showing how Nietzsche links his ethics to using the semblance of identity in order to overcome the need to link subjectivity to identity.