Nietzschean Core: Incorporation as Will to Power
Nietzsche reframes Schopenhauer’s blind, suffering “will to life” as Wille zur Macht. Life is not primarily self-preservation (a secondary, defensive result) but the discharge and increase of power. The simplest expression appears in nourishment:
The protoplasm extends its pseudopodia in search of something that resists it—not from hunger but from will to power… Appropriation and assimilation are above all a desire to overwhelm, a forming, shaping and reshaping, until at length that which has been overwhelmed has entirely gone over into the power domain of the aggressor and has increased the same.
Eating is the prototype. The organism does not merely survive; it seeks resistance in order to incorporate it, grow stronger, and feel the increase of power. Spirit itself operates like a stomach: it appropriates the foreign, simplifies the manifold, retouches and falsifies the external world to suit itself, files new experiences into old categories. “The spirit is a stomach.” Interpretation, knowledge, and value-creation are higher forms of the same digestive process—selection, forcing, omission, and assimilation in service of mastery and the feeling of growth.
Life “is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is foreign and weaker… imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation.” This is not optional or corrupt; it is the organic function itself. The strong will does not merely endure resistance; it seeks it as the condition of its own expansion. The weak will turns the same drive inward or downward into ressentiment, self-denial, or petty accumulation without overflow.
Schopenhauerian Shadow and the Manufactured Will to Consume
Schopenhauer’s Will is the metaphysical ground: restless, objectless striving that never finds lasting satisfaction. Every fulfilled desire immediately generates a new lack. Pleasure is largely negative (the temporary cessation of pain). Modern consumer society, as Ryan Gunderson argues, historicizes and socializes this structure. Estranged labor produces suffering; consumption is offered as the escape route. Capital manufactures an apparently limitless series of desires whose only socially approved affirmation is purchase and use. The result is not Freud’s civilization-and-its-discontents (repression of instinct) but its inversion: aimless striving, perpetual minor pain, boredom, and disappointment generated by the very abundance of administered wants. The will is no longer primarily the will to live; it becomes the will to consume—a commodified, administered form of the old restless striving.
Capitalist Subsumption: The Systemic Form
Marx and later Marxist traditions name the socio-economic version subsumption. Capital does not merely exploit labor; it progressively brings production, then consumption, social reproduction, culture, and subjectivity under the value-form. Formal subsumption (taking pre-existing processes under the wage relation) intensifies into real subsumption (reconstituting the processes themselves according to capital’s logic—machinery, scientific management, advertising, preference-shaping). Later autonomist and critical theorists extend this to the “social factory”: communication, affect, knowledge, leisure, and even the formation of the subject become moments of valorization. The tendency is totalizing: everything must become commodity or input. Consumption itself is reorganized so that desire is no longer autonomous but continuously stimulated and channeled toward accumulation.
This is the same expansive logic Nietzsche describes at the organic and psychological levels, now operating at the scale of an impersonal social machine. Capital seeks what resists it (non-commodified life, free time, traditional forms, natural limits) in order to incorporate and reorganize it. The drive is not pure will to power in the affirmative sense; it is often a quantitative, abstract hunger that never finds qualitative satisfaction—echoing the Schopenhauerian treadmill.
Bataillean Excess and the Necessity of Expenditure
Georges Bataille radicalizes the other side. Living systems produce more energy than they can productively absorb. The surplus must be spent—gloriously (festival, sacrifice, erotic excess, art) or catastrophically (war, waste, self-destruction). “Everything that exists exists to be consumed.” Accumulation without expenditure becomes pathological. The will to consume, when blocked from glorious loss, turns destructive or self-devouring. Consumer society often produces the worst of both worlds: endless productive accumulation and joyless, numbing expenditure that never achieves genuine expenditure’s intensity or communication.
Synthesis and Contemporary Resonance
The will to consume and subsume everything is therefore multi-layered:
- Biological/organic: metabolism, growth through incorporation of resistance.
- Psychological/spiritual: the self as digestive process that expands by making the foreign its own.
- Metaphysical: the restless ground of striving (Schopenhauer) inverted into affirmative power (Nietzsche).
- Socio-economic: capital’s real subsumption of production, consumption, and subjectivity.
- Energetic: the necessity of excess and expenditure (Bataille).
In practice it appears as empire-building, knowledge accumulation, technological acceleration, market expansion, artistic capture of the world, physical training that metabolizes heavier loads, and the stacking of scarce assets that absorb value from the broader system. It can be life-affirming (creative self-overcoming, productive incorporation that increases capacity and joy) or life-denying (endless treadmill of manufactured lack, totalizing domination that leaves no outside, self-consumption).
The critical question is never whether the drive exists—it is constitutive—but its form, quality, and direction. Does incorporation produce greater power, higher complexity, and affirmative overflow? Or does it produce quantitative inflation, subjective exhaustion, and a world in which everything is already pre-digested and still leaves one hungry? The strongest expression of the will is not the one that consumes the most, but the one that can metabolize the greatest resistance into a more intense, more ordered, more overflowing form of life.