ABSTRACT
Nietzsche had embraced the word “power” as a way of articulating how attempts at asserting dominance in an interpersonal context are based on an essential powerlessness or “weakness.” Nietzsche provides a model for working with, rather than being hardened and immiserated by, this tendency. Nietzsche demonstrates that this directive is common to the institutions of academic philosophy, religious monotheism, and modern technological science. To make promises always entails asserting that one has the right to do so, and as Nietzsche argued there is no ultimate ground upon which one might justify such an assertion. The ability to resist indifference is essential to the ability to make promises, to create future possibility. To promise a future is always to take a risk: those things might work out otherwise, that all efforts have been in vain, that domination and control repeat themselves in the very gesture that calls out in the name of the desire for difference.
