Soul as Subject-Multiplicity

Nietzsche's constructive critique of the subject in Beyond Good and Evil: the "I" of "I think" is a grammatical fiction, but the right response is not to abolish the soul — it is to re-engineer it as a plurality. §12 is decisive: the Christian "soul-atomism" (the soul as indivisible monad) should be banished from science, "but… it is not necessary in the least to get rid of 'the soul' itself"; rather, "concepts like 'mortal soul' and 'soul as subject-multiplicity' and 'soul as social structure of drives and affects' want henceforth to have their citizens' rights in science." The will, correspondingly, is "a unity only in word" — in every act of willing there is "a plurality of sensations," a "commanding thought," and "above all an affect… that affect of command"; "our body is after all only a society constructed of many souls" (§19).

Key Points

The "I think" is not immediate (§16): dissecting "I think" yields "a series of audacious claims whose proof is difficult, perhaps even impossible" — that it is I, that a something thinks, that thinking is the activity of a being taken as cause. "immediate certainty," "absolute knowledge," and "thing in itself" are each a contradictio in adjecto.
"It thinks," not "I think" (§17): "a thought comes when 'it' wants, and not when 'I' want"; even the "it" is "an interpretation of the process." The "I" is supplied "according to grammatical habit."
The soul as a society of drives (§12, §19): not a monad but a "social structure of drives and affects," a "society constructed of many souls" in which commanding and obeying go on; "L'effet c'est moi" — the ruling drive identifies with the whole's success.
Will is plural (§19, §117): "the will to overcome an affect is still in the end only the will of another or of several different affects" (§117).
The grammatical critique (§54): "we believed in 'the soul' as we believed in grammar"; modern philosophy's "assassination attempt… against the old concept of the soul" proceeds "under the pretext of a critique of the concept of subject and predicate." Kant "wanted… to prove that the subject could not be proven from the standpoint of the subject."
Refinement, not elimination (§12): the program is to refine the soul-hypothesis — the opposite of the eliminativism often attributed to Nietzsche.
The Genealogy gives the fiction a history (1887): GM I.13 sharpens the critique — "there is no 'being' behind the doing… the 'doer' is merely tacked on as a fiction to the doing" — and turns it moral (the subject-fiction lets the weak hold the strong "accountable" and relabel weakness as a freely-chosen "merit"); GM II.16 supplies the soul's genesis — it is what grows when blocked instincts "turn inward" (internalization). BGE diagnoses the subject-fiction grammatically; GM narrates how it came to be.

What the Concept Does

The concept relocates selfhood from substance to organization. By dissolving the indivisible "I" into a commanding/obeying plurality (§19), Nietzsche makes the self a political structure rather than a metaphysical given — which is why the same vocabulary (commanding, obeying, rank) runs unbroken from the cogito-critique (§§16–19) to the politics of the herd (§199, the obedience-bred "formal conscience") to the philosopher-legislator (§211, "thus it shall be!"). The "society of souls" is the micro-image of which the herd and the order of rank are the macro-images. It is also the psychological ground of the-mask (a multiple self presents multiple faces) and of perspectivism (the grammatical critique: "rise above faith in grammar," §34).

What It Rejects

Soul-atomism (§12) — the soul as indivisible, eternal monad (the "more disastrous atomism that Christianity has taught best").
The Cartesian cogito (§16) and Schopenhauer's "I will" (§19) — "immediate certainty."
The grammatical subject (§17, §54) — the inference "thinking is an activity, to every activity belongs a doer, therefore an 'I'."
Free will and unfree will (§21) — both rest on causa sui, "the best self-contradiction thought of to date"; "in real life it is a matter of strong and weak wills."

Stakes

If the self is a society of drives, then agency, responsibility, and "freedom of the will" are interpretations the ruling drive places on the whole's activity (§19) — and the door opens to a "doctrine of the power relations under which the phenomenon 'life' emerges" (§19), i.e., to reading the self through will-to-power. The constructive caveat matters: Nietzsche keeps "the soul," so the position is not a reductive eliminativism but a re-description — which is what allows Chouraqui to read Nietzsche as placing intentionality/relation prior to the subject (the subject as "a fiction added on, tucked behind") without making the self vanish. (confidence: medium for the cross-author synthesis.)

Connections

is the psychological form of will-to-power — the "society of souls" commanding and obeying (§19) is will to power at the scale of the self; "morality… as a doctrine of the power relations under which… 'life' emerges."
grounds the grammatical critique of perspectivism — "rise above faith in grammar" (§34) follows from the "I think"/"it thinks" analysis (§17).
is expressed by the-mask — a self that is many drives (§230) wears many masks.
scales up to herd-morality — the obedience-bred "formal conscience" (§199) is the society-of-souls structure at the level of peoples.
has cross-tradition cousin the agent (*suppôt*) (Klossowski) — Klossowski's "agent" is exactly this: a grammatical fiction imposed on "the moving chaos of the impulses," consciousness as a falsifying code of everyday signs. The closest reading of BGE §12/§17 in the corpus; same grounding register (the self as imposed unity over a plurality).
receives its genealogy from bad-conscience — GM II.16's internalization ("now for the first time human beings grow what later is called the 'soul'") narrates how the subject-multiplicity came to be; GM I.13's doer-deed critique is its moral weaponization.
parallels MP's and Husserl's critiques of the constituting subject — the subject as derivative of the relation rather than its source; cross-tradition, with the registral difference that Nietzsche's plurality is drives/affects where MP's is flesh/intercorporeity. (Flag for weave; do not assert identity.)
underwrites Chouraqui's reading of Nietzsche on intentionality-before-subject (see self-differentiation).

Open Questions

What unifies the "society of souls"? If the self is a plurality, what makes it one society rather than many? Nietzsche gestures at a "ruling class" of drives (§19) and at the granite of fate (§231), but the principle of unity is left underdetermined — the same gap Chouraqui flags between the de-substantialized self and the granite's apparent self-identity.
The relation to the Genealogy is now drawn (GM ingest, 2026-06-28): GM I.13's doer-deed critique is the moral edge of BGE's grammatical critique, and GM II.16's internalization gives the soul's genesis. Successor question: is the synchronic "society of souls" (§19) consistent with the diachronic "soul as scar of internalization" (GM II.16) — one structure or two?
The MP/Husserl parallel (subject as derivative) is a candidate latent-adjacent relation — verify register before typing it.

Sources

nietzsche-1886-beyond-good-and-evil — §12 (soul-atomism rejected; "soul as subject-multiplicity"/"social structure of drives and affects"); §16 (the "I think" dissected; contradictio in adjecto); §17 ("it thinks"; the grammatical "it"); §19 (the will as plural command-structure; "society of many souls"; "L'effet c'est moi"); §20 (the prejudice of grammar; the "spell of grammatical functions"); §21 (causa sui; strong vs. weak wills); §54 (the soul believed "as we believed in grammar"; the critique of subject/predicate); §117 (the will to overcome an affect as the will of another affect).