In all these cases power is always the object of a representation, of a recognition which materially presupposes a comparison of consciousnesses. It is therefore necessary for the will to power to have a corresponding motive which would also serve as the motor of comparison: vanity, pride, self-love, display or even a feeling of inferiority. Nietzsche asks: who conceives of the will to power as a will to get oneself recognised? Who conceives of power itself as the object of a recognition? Who essentially wants to be represented as superior and even wants his inferiority to be represented as superiority? It is the sick who want "to represent superiority under any form whatsoever". "It is the slave who seeks to persuade us to have a good opinion of him; it is also the slave who then bends his knee before these opinions as if it wasn't him who produced them. And I repeat: vanity is an atavism [recurrence in an organism of a trait or character typical of an ancestral form and usually due to genetic recombination]". What we present to ourselves as power itself is merely the representation of power formed by the slave. What we present to ourselves as the master is the idea of him formed by the slave , the idea formed by the slave when he imagines himself in the master's place, it is the slave as he is when he actually triumphs, "this need for the noble is fundamentally different from the needs of the noble soul itself, and in fact an eloquent and dangerous sign of its lack". Why have philosophers accepted this false image of the master which resembles only the triumphant slave? Everything is ready for an eminently dialectical sleight of hand: having put the slave into the master, they realise that the truth of the master is in the slave . In fact everything has happened between slaves, conquering or conquered. The mania for representing [interpretosis], for being represented, for getting oneself represented; for having representatives and representeds: this is the mania that is common to all slaves, the only relation between themselves they can conceive of, the relation that they impose with their triumph. The notion of representation poisons philosophy: it is the direct product of the slave and of the relations between slaves, it constitutes the worst, most mediocre and most base interpretation of power.
Deleuze on Nietzsche



















