The Sacrifice of the Overman as an Expression of the Will to Power: Anti-Political Consequences and Contributions to Democracy

In the last few years, the compatibility of Nietzsche’s thought with democracy has become a subject of dispute. Two positions seem to be the most popular. Some interpreters use Nietzsche for theories of agonistic egalitarian democracy. Others think that this use of Nietzsche is inconsistent with his thought and stress its incompatibility with democratic commitments, such as human rights. In what follows, I examine a notion that has not been sufficiently investigated within Nietzsche’s thought, that is, the notion of sacrifice. I will identify three meanings of the notion of sacrifice that respectively relate to master morality, slave morality and active nihilism. Then, I will examine the political implications of each of these meanings and will demonstrate how the notion of sacrifice is linked both to Nietzsche’s dismissal of modern democracy as an expression of ‘passive nihilism’, and to the role of the overman. I will then show that Nietzsche’s active nihilistic conception of sacrifice oscillates between two approaches to the notion of sacrifice, which have been articulated by two different interpretations of Nietzsche’s thought. If the postmodern approach of authors such as Pierre Klossowski is adopted, sacrifice becomes above all ‘sacrifice of the self’ and coincides with the suppression of the principium individuationis, with the consequent risk of a linguistic and rational aphasia. If the post-Kantian approach of authors such as Will Dudley is adopted, the capacity to sacrifice others has to be considered regulatively as a fundamental feature of the overman. If the latter approach is adopted, I will argue, the regulative notion of sacrifice can present a constructive criticism of contemporary democracy.