On the Genealogy of Morals,
II 17. Nietzsche’s original, 1887:
Ihr Werk ist ein
instinktives Formen-schaffen, Formen-aufdrücken, es sind die unfreiwilligsten,
unbewusstesten Künstler, die es giebt:—in Kürze steht etwas Neues da, wo sie
erscheinen, ein Herrschafts-Gebilde,
das lebt, in dem Theile und
Funktionen abgegrenzt und bezüglich gemacht sind, in dem Nichts überhaupt Platz
findet, dem nicht erst ein „Sinn“ in Hinsicht auf das Ganze eingelegt ist.
Their work is an instinctive creating and impressing of
forms, they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists that there are:—their
appearance produces instantaneously a
scheme of sovereignty which is live,
in which the functions are partitioned and apportioned, in which above all no
part is received or finds a place, until pregnant with a “meaning” in regard to
the whole.
And transl. Carol Diethe, 1994:
What they do is to create and imprint forms instinctively,
they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are:—where they
appear, soon something new arises, a
structure of domination that lives, in which parts and functions are
differentiated and related to one another, in which there is absolutely no room
for anything that does not first acquire “meaning” with regard to the whole.
Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche
and Political Thought, p. 98, offers “complex of mastery.” Others include “ruling
structure” and “domination-formation.”
“[T]he German word Herrschafts-Gebilde,”
explains Franz Graf zu Solms-Laubach, “‘forms of domination,’ means both abstract
as well as concrete forms of domination” (Nietzsche
and Early German and Austrian Sociology [2007], p. 26).
“Structure of domination,” to the modern ear, has a
moralistic, condemnatory overtone. Samuel’s “sovereignty” captures more of the
rich resonances of the original “Herrschaft.”
“Mastery” would do it better, though: Herrschaft
and mastery suggests also the craft and virtù
of the master or dominus.
Maudemarie Clark in Nietzsche
on Ethics and Politics (Oxford, 2015): “As the result of brutish, forcible interaction,
the interaction among these primitive humans is no longer simply brute and forced:
it has become political” (p. 279). “To the extent that there is a ‘whole,’ there is
a foothold for judgments that can be made about […] what is just or fair” (ibid.).
And re. the emergence of unity, Nietzsche, quoted in
Ansell-Pearson, p. 97:
All unity is only as organisation and interplay unity: not otherwise than how a human
community is a unity: so, opposite of
atomistic anarchy; therewith a complex of
rule, which signifies One, but is not one.
