Nietzsche wants a therapeutic thinking. A truly alien idea to our world of Ritalin and self-medication. A developed country with developed illnesses. Nietzsche says that thought itself is therapy, and an irreplaceable one, because one of the most insidious illnesses is the illness of ressentiment. The illness of the sheep who decides that the bird of prey is evil, that the bird of prey eats the sheep out of malice, and begins to say it is unjust that the bird of prey eats the sheep.
Ressentiment - the re-sentiment, the apparation of a sentiment when it is no longer needed. The compulsion to repeat, and a simultaneous inability to cope with repetition. The shock at the return of the sentiment, a shock which repeats itself.
Bataille, in the next century, thought that the thinking of waste might be the most therapeutic thinking. But therapeutic might not be the right word any longer, embroiled as it is in the politics of risk-management (Cf. the films of Adam Curtis). The thinking of waste brings life about, allows for life and virility to bloom in the way Nietzsche argued for. It is the ressentiment of this blooming that, in Altizer, makes the Christian church Satanic: the church has turned in on itself, or turned against the teachings of Jesus, in trying to prevent life from flowering, in trying to shut down effervescence through self-punishment. The church does this for profit.
So the thinking of waste is at once against the church and against the state, although it is not necessarily atheistic. It asks what it could mean to believe after the death of God. To be religious without the church.
The thinking of waste can release us from ressentiment. In a state of peace, there is no more common crime than spousal abuse. A man feels as if his attention, and his affection, toward his beloved has been a waste. She, let's say she's a woman, does not merit his affections, because these affections do not appreciate into currency. This currency is whatever the man has been seeking, and the woman may be unable to give it, or the man may be unable to accept it. It could be that she gives it freely, and he does not recognize its worth, or it could be that she cannot give it. If he does not recognize its worth he does not recognize her, nor does he recognize the relational character of their relationship.
The relational lives in the excessive. That is to say, there is no relationship--between peoples, between nations, between organisms--without the unnecessary or accidental exchange. This encompasses the gift and the tragedy at once. You hear about the natives, the 'savages,' giving gifts to the Europeans, and you hear about the Europeans trading with the natives to receive more. This is the difference between a relationship and a conquest: giving and trading. Relation and extraction, exuberance and privation.
Men are told that women are to be conquered. But part of us knows that if we approach them in this way that it will end up like colonialism ends up. We must reject the logic of equal exchange, even as we accept the logic of equal rights with women. If women are our equals, that still does not mean that a relationship will consist of even, rational transactions. It cannot. If I give a woman something: a compliment, a favor, a gift, and my intention is, directly, to get something from her, to acquire her sex, I'm sabotaging myself, because the sex is deprived of its value. It is deprived of value as it is assigned a value: the price of a bouquet of flowers, the price of a thoughtful compliment. For if this banality is its value it is inadequate: rationally, I ought to find another woman who will not sleep with me until I buy her a Prada bag. And then she, again, is inferior to the woman who will not sleep with me until I buy her a Rolls Royce. And so on...
This logic of banal escalation is a motor of capitalism. The reduction of men to objects of money is just as integral to its functioning as the reduction of women to body parts on billboards, although it reduces them to utility just as easily.
