Remembering / Forgetting
A specific active force must be given the job of supporting consciousness and renewing its freshness, fluidity and mobile, agile chemistry at every moment. This active super-conscious faculty is the faculty of forgetting.
Psychology's mistake was to treat forgetting as a negative determination, not to discover its active and positive character.
Nietzsche defines the faculty of forgetting as "no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression", "an apparatus of absorption", "a plastic, regenerative and curative force."
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.113
[...] there are two simultaneous processes: reaction becomes something acted because it takes conscious excitation as its object and reaction to traces remains in the unconscious, imperceptible.
Let us suppose that there is a lapse in the faculty of forgetting: it is as if the wax of consciousness were hardened, excitation tends to get confused with its trace in the unconscious and conversely, reaction to traces rises into consciousness and overruns it.
We can thus finally see in what way reactive forces prevail over active forces: when the trace takes the place of the excitation in the reactive apparatus, reaction itself takes the place of action, reaction prevails over action.
Even the functional decay of the faculty of forgetting derives from the fact that it no longer finds in one kind of reactive forces the energy necessary to repress the other kind and to renew consciousness.
We rediscover the definition of ressentiment: ressentiment is a reaction which simultaneously becomes perceptible and ceases to be acted: a formula which defines sickness in general. Nietzsche is not simply saying that ressentiment is a sickness, but rather that sickness as such is a form of ressentiment.
The man of ressentiment is characterised by the invasion of consciousness by mnemonic traces, the ascent of memory into consciousness itself.
[...] when reactive forces prevail over active forces in this way they themselves form a type. We can see that the principal symptom of this type is a prodigious memory. Nietzsche stresses this incapacity to forget anything, this faculty of forgetting nothing and its profoundly reactive nature [...]
As a result of his type the man of ressentiment does not "react": his reaction is endless, it is felt instead of being acted.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.113-15
The type of the master (the active type) is defined in terms of the faculty of forgetting and the power of acting reactions.
The type of slave (the reactive type) is defined by a prodigious memory, by the power of ressentiment; several characteristics which determine this second type follow from this.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.117
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