Priestly Power and Damaged Life in Nietzsche and Adorno

Résumé En

Nietzsche's account of priestly power in the Genealogy of Morals continues to be a relevant model for examining ideological elites, especially in light of Adorno's critical social theory and contemporary trauma theory. This paper examines the role that pain, suffering, trauma, and the damaged in contrast to the good life--in Adorno's sense--plays in the constitution and reproduction of power. Nietzsche explored through the figure of the priest how the traumatic results of violence are concealed and deepened through a repetition that never realizes its purpose of healing the original wound. The pain is not only unhealed, it worsens in being left unencountered. Nietzsche's Genealogy can be read as a genealogy of the traumatic origins of the damaged life, aiming at the present by tracing the transformations of suffering and the damaged sublimations affecting human practices and institutions. Whereas trauma is sublimated such that it is repeated and heightened, genealogy is a destructuring repetition challenging compulsive repetition. The exemplar of priestly power remains a suggestive "critical model" given the conflict of competing fundamentalisms, the violence involved in the "return to the sacred" and pure arbitrary authority of divine commands, and the manipulation of ethnic, ideological, and religious sentiments that partly characterize contemporary politics.