Passing By: Zarathustra’s Other Response to Revenge

• Published date: 01 October 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917241247681
• Author: Shalini Satkunanandan
• Date: 01 October 2024

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917241247681

Political Theory

2024, Vol. 52(5) 834 –862

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917241247681

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Article

Passing By: Zarathustra’s

Other Response to

Revenge

Shalini Satkunanandan1

Abstract

Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality warns that revenge’s reactiveness can

jeopardize salutary change in shared values. I identify an overlooked revenge-

mitigating praxis in the spatial movements of Nietzsche’s fictional prophet

Zarathustra, who seeks collaborators to overcome Christian morality and

create new world-affirming values. Zarathustra’s well-known response to

revenge, specifically the revenge against time undergirding interpersonal

revenge, is willing the eternal return of the same. But he also exemplifies

a more available response. “Passing by” is a coming close to, followed by

a veering away from, the most insistent embodiments of reigning values.

Although Nietzsche inspires agonistic political theory, Zarathustra avoids

direct contest in the usual late modern milieux, which he finds constitutively

vulnerable to revenge. When revenge floods the communal passional

reservoir, it forestalls recovery—essential to new-values creation—of

passions effaced by reigning values. Zarathustra still approaches the usual

milieux to know the present-past as the raw material of the future. But by

then veering away he practices relaxing his value-creative will and not raging

against the present-past. Repeated passing by helps him accept and thus

better take up the raw material of the future and accept value change’s slow

temporality. Since passing by’s concern is the value horizon, not the political

sphere, and since it minimizes direct resistance, it may be less reactive to the

political sphere than directly contestatory versions of “refusal.” Analysis of

1Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Shalini Satkunanandan, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of

California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA.

Email: ssatkunanandan@ucdavis.edu

1247681PTXXXX10.1177/00905917241247681Political TheorySatkunanandan

research-article2024

Satkunanandan 835

Gandhi’s value-praxis confirms passing by as a tactic for less reactive value-

creation and as a lens on the reactiveness of different value-praxes.

Keywords

Nietzsche, Zarathustra, eternal return, revenge, passing by, refusal

For those seeking radical change, vengefulness presents a dilemma. The

“legitimate desire for revenge” can constitute “flashes of consciousness” and

mobilize the oppressed. Yet revenge’s reactivity can impede the creation of

new values and long-term struggle for such values (Coulthard 2014, 105–15;

Fanon 2004, 89). Those driven by revenge tend to focus on past injury and

redress, on harming or usurping extant power holders (perhaps thereby per-

petuating the systems and values that wrought harm), and sometimes define

themselves in opposition to those who have harmed them rather than devel-

oping positive, plausible, and significantly different visions for the future.

Those seeking to express unease about revenge often look to Nietzsche’s On

the Genealogy of Morality (1887) (Brown 1995, 52–76; Coulthard 2014, 108,

111, 115, 169). There Nietzsche offers an account of Christian morality’s

origins, or perhaps a provocative fabulation (Porter 2019, 66); marginalized

priestly classes driven by “ressentiment,” the revenge of the weak, reactively

define new values in opposition to the “noble” values of aristocratic warrior

classes and birth a “slave morality,” which demonizes strength and valorizes

meekness (Nietzsche 1998, 14–28).1

The problem of revenge poses a question the Genealogy raises but does

not answer: What widely available practices support creating novel rather

than reactively inverted value regimes?2 For answers, theorists often look

past Nietzsche, preferring to keep him as a “diagnostician.” His apparent

1. Unless otherwise indicated, in-text citations are to Parkes’s translation of Thus

Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche 2005b). For clarity and consistency, I occasion-

ally amend the translation based on the German original (Nietzsche 1999).

Sometimes I rely on Del Caro’s (2006) translation.

2. Nietzsche may give less attention to less reactive value-creative stances in the

Genealogy because it follows Beyond Good and Evil (1886), which Nietzsche later

calls his “critique of modernity” and the beginning of his “no-saying” after he had

“solved” the “yes-saying part of [his] task” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche

2005a, 134–35).