ONE

How Philosophical Truth
Finally Became a Fable

Philosophers have a practice of working out their thoughts in struggle with or commentary on their great predecessors. At the high tide of medieval scholasticism, Aristotle was “the philosopher,” the constant reference point of all thought. Descartes has sometimes played a similar role, especially for the French, and Hume has been the historical focus of the controversies concerning meaning, causality, and the connection between the “is” and the “ought” that have until recently occupied the almost exclusive attention of Angloanalytic philosophers in this century. It may be that Nietzsche is coming to play such a role in American and European philosophical discourse. Despite Jürgen Habermas’s announcement in 1968 that “Nietzsche is no longer infectious,”¹ it is fairly clear that the malady, if that is what it is, has become the subject of diagnosis among philosophical physicians from a number of different traditions. Those in the systematic wing of the German school sometimes refer to “the French disease,” in speaking of the fear of closure characterizing the poststructuralist thinkers for whom Nietzsche’s texts are exemplary: as with all epidemics, the attempt to place the responsibility for the disease elsewhere, on the one who is perceived as the other, is operative here. The French, on the other hand, tend to see the phenomenon not as a disease but as part of that great good health that Nietzsche, who described the philosopher as a physician of his culture, hoped to inaugurate. Anglophone philosophy has not been able to remain completely aloof from the problem; its senior physicians have been called in to diagnose the patient and have recommended either a healthy regime of Aristotelian virtue or a strict diet of semantic analysis, purged of aesthetic sweets.

Health and illness, to continue with a metaphor never absent from a Nietzschean text, are never simple matters in those texts. In Ecce Homo, for example, Nietzsche provides a complex self-diagnosis of himself as both sick and decadent, convalescent and healthy, portraying himself as a point of intersection of the contradictory tendencies of culture and life. The contemporary diagnosis of Nietzsche has achieved some areas of apparent consensus, even if the diagnoses differ widely, with some suggesting that the virus might be profitably disseminated as widely as possible while others engage in a serious search for an effective antibody or at least a quarantine of those who carry the infection. One of these apparent agreements, to which I want to devote some critical attention, has to do with Nietzsche’s supposed rejection of narrative thought and discourse. Let me begin, then, by citing two prominent diagnosticians, Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, who, despite their other differences, seem to agree on this much. Habermas has recently mounted a critique of postmodernism in philosophy and art; in this critique Nietzsche emerges as a “dark author” of the bourgeoisie, responsible not only for much of the current “French disease” but also for the deviations from rationality of some of Habermas’s own models of critical theory. In an article on Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas sees his predecessors as occupying a tenuous position between Hegelian historical rationalism and what he takes to be a Nietzschean historical aestheticism. In his Genealogy of Morals, said to have exercised a bad influence on Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas claims that Nietzsche “explained the assimilation of reason to power with a theory of power which, instead of truth claims, retains only the rhetorical claim of the aesthetic fragment.”² Habermas characterizes Nietzsche’s position as the first elaboration of aesthetic modernity, and central to that characterization is the idea of a revolt against temporality and history:

Since Habermas regards Nietzsche as having foreclosed the possibility of giving a rational account of why some values are better than others, he sees him as being forced to appeal to a principle of archaicism: “That which is more originary is considered more venerable, respectable, natural and pure. Ancestry and origin serve simultaneously as the criteria of rank in the social as well as in the logical sense.”⁴ I will be examining Habermas’s claims (and similar interpretations) at some length. At this point, however, it is worthwhile noting that the book which Habermas cites as a document of antitemporal, antihistorical aesthetic modernity—The Genealogy of Morals—is actually a narrative text, one that purports to trace a sequence of events in the rise, transformation, and dissolution of a set of complexly interrelated moral, religious, and philosophical values. Habermas perceives clearly that Nietzsche does not provide a foundationalist critique of these values by an appeal to rational principles. But is the only possible alternative to such foundationalist critique the method of aesthetic fragmentation that seeks a pure, atemporal presence? Habermas in fact qualifies that view by attributing to Nietzsche a fetishism of origins and beginnings, an approach that Nietzsche himself was to delineate in his account of “monumental history” in his second Untimely Meditation. And how are we to relate this oscillation as to whether Nietzsche’s text is primarily aesthetic or narrative to Habermas’s description of Nietzsche as wanting to “explode the continuum of history?” Perhaps Habermas means that Nietzsche himself oscillates, or speaks a double language. While Nietzsche does express, in both Ecce Homo and his last letters, the expectation that his work will “split the history of mankind into two parts,” it is not immediately clear that such a split is to be understood as the abolition of all narrative thought and discourse. On the contrary, to see the split as a split requires some form of narrative representation.

Yet it might be suggested that Habermas’s construction of an aestheticist Nietzsche whose text dissolves into fragments is confirmed by the parallel picture of a “new Nietzsche” that emerges in such French thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze.⁵ It may also be, however, that Habermas’s critique is simply an acceptance of the reading that such thinkers perform on Nietzsche, accompanied by a reversal of their valorization of the discontinuous, fragmentary, and irrational. This reading is paralleled in Anglo-American philosophy by Alasdair Macintyre’s view of Nietzsche as opposed to both virtue and narrative; this supposed double opposition makes him the anti-Aristotle. But if there are grounds to question Habermas’s characterization of Nietzsche’s texts as non-narrative, then there will be similar grounds to question some aspects of the French “new Nietzsche” construction. Consider Derrida’s analysis of Nietzsche in Spurs. The most general aim of Derrida’s reading there is to suggest the indeterminacy and undecidability of Nietzsche’s texts. Perhaps the most general strategy for accomplishing this goal consists in the interrogation of two narratives of vastly different scope: Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, on the one hand, which is in effect a tragic story of the whole of Western philosophy; and, on the other, the brief, unexplained and perhaps inexplicable entry in one of Nietzsche’s notebooks, “ ‘I have forgotten my umbrella.’ ”

By selecting his texts from the extremes of narrative practice Derrida seems to have loaded the dice. Even the most intrepid hermeneut, he suggests, will hesitate to offer an interpretation of “ ‘I have forgotten my umbrella’ ”; although on the surface its form suggests that it is a narrative statement, and its placement in quotation marks might even lead to our attributing it to a narrative voice, text and context are far too underdetermined to allow any coherent interpretation, even the minimal narrativist reading just sketched. At the other extreme, Derrida seeks to show that Heidegger’s metahistory or metanarrative of philosophy, from the Platonic quest for the presence of the ideas to Nietzsche’s ultimate working out of Western destiny in the doctrine of the will to power (Plato to NATO), supposes a more univocal and systematic reading of Nietzsche’s text and of philosophy’s history than can possibly be sustained. There is much to sympathize with in Derrida’s critique of Heidegger, including the suspicion he directs toward teleological, Hegelian views of history as the actualization of the potential, his demonstration that there is a plurality in Nietzsche’s text which escapes Heidegger’s reconstructive efforts, and his attempt to suggest how we might rethink and rewrite the traditional philosophemes of history, gender, and writing that have been developed in terms of identity and the proper by inscribing them in differential, non-totalistic terms. However, the plausibility of Derrida’s suggestion that Nietzsche’s text is radically plural and indeterminate rests on his juxtaposition or grammatological collage of the two furthest possible extremes that can be discovered in or evoked from that text: the underdetermined fragment and the tendentious, world-historical interpretation that sees Nietzsche’s career as a thinker as the emblem and realization of the West’s confusion of Being with beings. If one were, instead, to focus on what might be called the middle range of the Nietzschean text, that is, to read those books which he published under his signature, the appearance of radical indeterminacy would be more difficult to establish.

Although Nietzsche’s books take many forms, I want to suggest that a significant number of them are narratives. And by this I mean, first, to make the very general point that their overall structure and texture present features in many ways typical of narrative forms known and discussed by literary critics and other anatomists of the text; but I also want to propose that the narrative forms of these works (and I use the plural advisedly) have much to do with Nietzsche’s articulation of history, his presentation of the thoughts of will to power, eternal recurrence, and the Übermensch (“man beyond”), and with his representation of his own life. The very titles of The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals indicate that these texts offer something like a sequential, historical account of their subjects; Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a philosophical tale; The Antichrist is a critical study of the narrative foundations of Christianity combined with a proposal for rewriting the Christian story, and if one take seriously Nietzsche’s late identification of this book as the whole of his planned summa, The Transvaluation of Values, then that project could be said to be an essentially narrative one; Ecce Homo purports to tell “how one becomes what one is” and has obvious (if parodic) associations with the traditions of European autobiography.

Of course such classifications are initial and crude; perhaps they follow a “law of genre” which a close reading of the texts involved would subvert. Perhaps, for example, as Paul de Man claims in his reading of The Birth of Tragedy, the apparent dependence of that book on narrative notions of birth, growth, and death cannot be sustained once it is seen that the very statements in which such notions are deployed must be interrogated in the light of the book’s “conclusions” which would render suspect both these notions and the narrative voice that seems to invoke them.

Clearly Nietzsche must be read with such possibilities in mind. But before proceeding to such readings, let me suggest another approach that would begin by distinguishing the fact that Nietzsche does have what might be called a critical narratology from the view that he must be an anti-narrative thinker. Nietzsche is, of course, notoriously skeptical of the truth claims of a number of religious, philosophical, and mundane narratives. The Antichrist argues that both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian tradition are enormous historical falsifications; in Twilight of the Idols philosophy is portrayed as inconsistent: on the one hand it is opposed to the idea of process or becoming, and yet it relies on a narrative that tells how human life has fallen from its purer origins (in a Platonic world, for example). Then too, beginning with works like Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche elaborates a critical narratology that dissects or deconstructs the fabulous, dream-like quality of our everyday narrative consciousness. Just as the dream constructs a sequence of events to explain bodily sensations or unconscious desires during sleep, so the stories that we tell about ourselves and others are said to be the flimsiest ad hoc constructions, generated by the pressures of the moment.

Such criticism is consistent with the view that we neither can nor ought to escape altogether from a narrative perspective. Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, is sometimes taken to be a general indictment of historical consciousness. While it is true that Nietzsche calls there for a balance between the historical and the unhistorical in human life (surprisingly reminding us of the Aristotelian mean) he does not suggest that the quantity or intensity of either side of the balance is subject to any other limit than an individual’s power or strength. Although Nietzsche has not yet formulated his conception of the will to power, he comes close to articulating something like that notion in an attempt to demonstrate the power required by the historical sense:

In the same text Nietzsche tries to imagine what it would be like to have a completely affirmative and self-conscious monumental approach to history. That is, he asks how we might rejoice in the possibility of greatness that we see in some magnificent events of the past, without having to hide from ourselves a twofold realization: that those events depended on a specific context or concatenation of past circumstances and that there are vast stretches of history that do not by themselves strengthen the expectation that such possibilities are realizable. The only form of consciousness which could embrace the monumental without losing the sense of its historical limitations (and without lapsing into a form of ressentiment in which the monumental is used as a weapon against the present) would be that which saw events as eternally recurrent. But in the Untimely Meditations Nietzsche seems to believe that such a view is impossible. It would, he supposes, have to be based on a speculative astronomy like that of the Pythagoreans, and such a view will become available “only when the astronomers will have again become astrologers” (UM, 70; 1, 261). Once the thought of recurrence has become his own, however, Nietzsche presents it precisely as a way of redeeming the past, not as a result of arcane astronomy. Here Nietzsche offers the hypothesis that the person who wills eternal recurrence has the power to will all the narratives of history:

The greater a person’s or culture’s power, the more history can be comprehended; and the greatest comprehension of history is made possible by the conception of eternal recurrence. Neither the will to power nor eternal recurrence, then, should be hastily supposed to be an antihistorical or antinarrative thought.

Yet it might be said that Nietzsche is a postmodern thinker avant la lettre and that postmodernism is clearly an anti-narrativist form of thought and practice. Of course one might contest the identification of Nietzsche as a postmodernist or question whether, in fact, any clear conception of postmodernism is available to us. But I think that it is worth considering the conjunction of Nietzsche and postmodernism in order to clarify his relation to narrativity. If there is a postmodern philosophy, then, as the term suggests, we can understand it as what is both different from and later than another philosophical movement, modernism. And modernism also defines itself, in part, as later than and other than its predecessor. Similarly, that and other predecessor movements might be understood (either by us or by themselves) as different and later than their own predecessors. In looking at the career of Western philosophy in the largest sense, it is usual to identify three major phases or types: classical, medieval, and modern. To these we are now encouraged to add a postmodernist era or mode. If postmodernism is to be understood in its relation to narrativity, and if Nietzsche is seen as an exemplary postmodernist, then there may be a point in seeing how narrative thought enters into the larger array of philosophical movements, since each later movement is presumable internally related to its predecessors. Let me, then, give a brief narrative sketch that may help to situate Nietzsche in relation to a postmodern conception of narrativity.

Classical philosophy, as typified by Plato and Aristotle, is generally committed to a cyclical view of time that is expressed gnomically in Heraclitus and is eventually literalized in such views as the one that we have just seen Nietzsche attributing to the Pythagoreans. On the classical view the mythoi of the poets and the stories narrated by historians such as Thucydides or Polybius are exemplary patterns that will, in their formal aspect, be repeated indefinitely. Even the highest human achievements, political and philosophical, are destined to be destroyed in their present form, but will be restored and renewed as part of the cyclical “great year” of becoming that embraces all changeable things. Lying behind the “great year,” however, is an eternal stratum: the gods, the stars, and the objects of Platonic and Aristotelian nous. The philosophical significance of narrative, on this view, is that it can make us aware of the eternal and exemplary; but to the extent that narratives blind us to that level of reality by focussing on the particular and the changeable for their own sake, they ought, as Plato notoriously suggested, to be subjected to the strictest philosophical censorship.

A radical transvaluation of the significance of narrative appears in the traditions of Western religion, which contain a polemical moment directed against the cyclical views held by the Greeks, Romans, and various polytheistic religions of the Near East. Jews, Christians, and Muslims regard their bibles as sacred narratives that tell of first and last things and whatever there is of significance that might occur in the interval. While there are important senses in which the most important things are held to be eternal, there are also tendencies in all of these traditions to historicize or at least temporalize the divine, in so far as it acts in history. Wisdom becomes tied to the sacred stories as commentary and interpretation; because truth itself is conceived as narrative in form, the question of getting it right, of reading the privileged narrative in the way that it is meant to be read, becomes crucial. The sacred text is to be read not simply as a collection of loosely related stories (as it was for the Greeks and Romans) but as a single, all-embracing narrative. It is such comprehensive stories that Jean-François Lyotard has called metanarratives, in his attempt to define postmodernism as the rejection of metanarrative.

While modern philosophy, usually said to begin with Bacon or Descartes, has traditionally been conceived as a radical break with the medieval and religious traditions, it is possible to investigate that alleged break in a more analytical fashion. The critique of biblical or religious authority can be separated from the question of the legitimacy of the narrative or historical mode of consciousness and discourse. Modern philosophy is a return to the ancients in so far as it refuses to recognize any uniquely valid traditional story or set of stories; but in so far as it is tied to a vision of progressive scientific discovery and social enlightenment it introduces new forms of metanarrative. In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard suggests that these metanarratives, which are to be found in crucial thinkers of the modern period from Descartes through Hegel to Marx to Habermas, serve as legitimations for various forms of political projects and for the educational and scientific practices and institutions that are bound up with them. There may be some implicit or explicit tension between a legitimating metanarrative that focusses primarily on the achievement of knowledge and one that emphasizes social and political emancipation; that is, the story may vary “depending on whether it represents the subject of the narrative as cognitive or practical, as a hero of knowledge or a hero of liberty.”⁶ Hegel, of course, is responsible for the most ambitious and influential attempt to show that the two stories and the two heroes were ultimately identical. That is why Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida direct their critiques of modernism at Hegel’s attempt to produce a summa of the modernist metanarrative.⁷

One way of understanding the elusive, if not fundamentally ambiguous, conception of postmodernism, or at least the somewhat more determinate notion of a postmodern philosophy, would be to follow Lyotard in seeing it as a systematic and principled rejection of metanarrative. That is, postmodern philosophy could be understood as the project of attempting to understand knowledge, history, art, politics, and so on by extirpating that tendency toward metanarrative that would see each of these endeavors as having a meaningful, teleological history and also see those histories reinforcing one another in order to contribute a single larger story. Such skepticism about the possibility of metanarrative and the accompanying suspicion of the ways in which we might be led into fundamental errors by such a story might be thought to be a reversion to the classical point of view, for both are apparently able to be satisfied with a plurality of narratives; if Nietzsche is taken as a paradigm of the postmodern, then it may seem that there is also a recurrence of the thought of recurrence itself. So far as Nietzsche is concerned, however, such an identification will not work. Even a first, tentative understanding of his thought of eternal recurrence suggests that for him the cycle of events and experiences would never be described in Platonic terms as the “spume / That plays upon a ghostly paradigm of things” (Yeats). That is, there is nothing behind, under, above, or outside the moments that eternally recur. More generally, for the thinkers whom I am calling postmodernists, it could be said that just because they do not acknowledge any level of timeless or ahistorical reality, individual narratives become of greater consequence in their individuality; there is no tendency of the sort that surfaces in Neoplatonism or late classicism generally which would read the many myths allegorically or symbolically as ways of pointing toward the eternal. To put it somewhat schematically, it can be said that if philosophy always exists in some kind of relationship or tension with narrative, then postmodern philosophy aspires to a fully pluralistic narrativity, rejecting both metanarrative and the transhistorical; in some respects it repeats and is indebted to the medieval concern with commentary and interpretation, although those practices must now be reconceived and reconstituted in the absence of a sacred text. Perhaps it is necessary to add that pluralistic narrativity is not the same as the project, often attributed to both Nietzsche and the postmoderns, of seeing or constructing all texts as totally indeterminate in meaning. I am suggesting that Nietzsche believes that our awareness of history, ourselves, and the world is always mediated by narratives (or texts) and that no unique narrative (or text) takes precedence over or embraces all the others; this does not entail, however, that all narratives (or texts) are equally valuable or that there are no practices or principles at work in the production of narrative that would limit their variety or number.

Nietzsche’s postmodern narratives can be articulated in term of his rather explicit critique of Hegelian thought, including his autocritique of his own Hegelian tendencies. The current generation of French writing about Nietzsche, notably Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, has highlighted the decisive break with Hegel that characterizes his thought. Where Hegel sees contradictions that are dialectically resoluble and patterns of development that culminate in increasingly comprehensive visions of their earlier stages, Nietzsche sees differences as differences, as a multiplicity of rather loosely related genealogies. Deleuze’s powerful reading of Nietzsche proceeds by elaborating the contrast between the accounts given by Hegel and Nietzsche of the relation between master and slave. For Hegel, the driving force of that relation is the desire to be a free, self-conscious being; and the road to freedom and self-consciousness turns out to coincide with a process of mutual recognition. Hegel sees the master-slave relationship as inherently unstable, and so yielding something like a typical pattern of development through conflict to higher and higher forms of recognition. It is the schematic narratology of domination, struggle, and the recognition of the other as one’s own other that has haunted French philosophy for almost fifty years. It is elaborated paradigmatically in the lectures of Alexander Kojéve; Sartre gives his own ahistorical version of it, without the happy ending, in Being and Nothingness, and a more historical and less unhappy (because open-ended) account in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. There are indeed some serious questions concerning the validity and limits of Kojéve’s reading, which makes the chapter on lordship and bondage central to Hegel’s Phenomenology and then makes that work alone the real expression of Hegel’s thought. But aside from such questions, it is fairly clear that Hegel does propose a kind of absolute narratology, a “master plot,” that will embrace all human stories, both real and fictional.

As Deleuze and others suggest, it is instructive to understand Nietzsche in terms of his own later critique of what he came to call the “offensively Hegelian” smell of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. Part of what Nietzsche meant by accusing himself of Hegelian tendencies in this earlier work is fairly clear. The Birth of Tragedy employs a polar opposition between an original or primitive unity and the principle of individuation; these are expressed in the activities of intoxication (Rausch) in which we are at one with the world and in the dream in which we experience well-defined, visual forms. In art the two tendencies are the well known pair of the Dionysian and the Apollinian. The question of The Birth of Tragedy is how to reconcile these pairs of contrasting terms in a culturally viable form that will justify life and redeem suffering. How can we see the world both as a living unity and as an array of individuated forms? How can we be ecstatically orgiastic while enjoying dream visions of perfected images separate from ourselves? How can we surrender to a powerful Dionysiac music while contemplating the luminous figures of an Apollinian painting or sculpture? The all-too-pat Hegelian answer is given in Nietzsche’s construal of tragedy as the identity in difference of the contradictory modes. That account is of great interest and it surely contains much in addition to the invocation of an abstract Hegelian schema of contradiction and resolution. If we look carefully at Nietzsche’s later account of this book in Ecce Homo we will see that it is not only Hegelian metaphysics and logic that are at stake but also Hegelian history. In the first of his sketches “Why I Write Such Good Books,” Nietzsche writes:

Part of what “smells offensively Hegelian” in The Birth of Tragedy, then, is that it sees “history itself as the development of this ‘idea’ ”. As a Hegelian narrative, Nietzsche’s text exhibits a familiar structure: a conflict or contradiction is identified, an initial resolution is described, that resolution is then unravelled, and a new resolution at a higher level is analyzed or projected. The original contradiction of unity and individuation is resolved for a while by Greek tragedy; Euripidean and Socratic rationalism initiate that long downward spiral that we call Western culture; and Wagnerian music drama promises to renew the earlier achievement. That renewal will be more than a simple repetition since the myths and materials of Wagner’s operas incorporate a kind of encyclopedia of the exemplary cultural motifs that have emerged since the Greeks: romantic love, the destructive quest for wealth, and the institutionalization of art. As Nietzsche points out, the form of this work is reminiscent of a time fifty years before its publication; one assumes that he means the time of Hegel and his followers.

Following an earlier suggestion, it is not difficult to see this late self-criticism as emblematic of Nietzsche’s general attack on metanarratives of any sort. We know, in relation to this particular story, that Nietzsche soon lost his veneration for Wagner and his extravagant expectations for a German cultural renaissance with its capital at Bayreuth. The duality of the Apollinian and Dionysian, with its susceptibility to dialectical thought, disappears in order to be replaced by a more nuanced genealogical analysis. In fact, the whole nineteenth-century “religion of art,” of which The Birth of Tragedy is one of the finest expressions, is subjected to a merciless critique in Nietzsche’s first aphoristic (and so very anti-Hegelian) book, Human, All Too Human. The individual work of art, or even the oeuvre of the great artist, are no longer seen as possible instantiations of a Hegelian absolute knowledge. One might quibble about whether The Birth of Tragedy stands under the influence of Schiller rather than Hegel; Schiller is cited more frequently than any other modern theorist of the arts (excepting Wagner) and the structural foundation of Nietzsche’s argument—there are antithetical drives that can, in the best circumstances, find a fruitful harmony—is reminiscent of the kind of argument that Schiller makes in his Letters on Aesthetic Education where the two drives are formal and material with a possible reconciliation in play. Yet here Schiller is, we might say, at his most Hegelian, so that the question of Nietzsche’s specific use of these sources ought not to detract from the general validity of his later diagnosis of the text’s aroma.⁸

Following Nietzsche’s self-critique I want to suggest that there is something like an “epistemological break” in his thought and writing that marks the interval between The Birth of Tragedy and his next published works, The Untimely Meditations and the aphoristic books that follow them. The break has to do, among other things, with the theory and practice of narrative. It would be a mistake, I think, to see Nietzsche’s later writings as poetic productions that carry out the aesthetic program of The Birth of Tragedy; this is a line of interpretation that has frequently been suggested by Nietzsche’s critics. Interpretations of Nietzsche’s project as essentially aesthetic often rely on a supposed periodization of his work, according to which early glorification of art (as in The Birth of Tragedy) is followed by a scientific reaction which is followed in turn by a return to the aesthetic or the mythical. Such a periodization displays an unconscious irony, since it invokes the very pattern of Hegelian history against which Nietzsche so often polemicizes.⁹

The tendency to use “aesthetic” or “artistic” in an undifferentiated way is bound to be misleading here because there is no universal sense of these terms in Nietzsche’s writings, and in many ways he could be said to be an enemy of the aesthetic and artistic. When Nietzsche says of the “voice” of his first book, “It should have sung, this ‘new soul’—and not spoken!” (BT, A 3; 1, 15), he may seem to endorse such an aestheticizing view. Nietzsche did write songs, and poems, but he also wrote stories that have more in common with the genres of history, the novel, and autobiography than they do with that of the lyric. What may have obscured this realization is that Nietzsche is well known for deploying a critical narratology, which seems to direct a radical hermeneutics of suspicion at a wide range of narrative forms and practices. But it is possible to deploy such a critical narratology while continuing to produce narrative texts; and this need not be understood as the basis of some quasi-Derridian model, according to which we continue to work with a philosopheme that has been thrown into question only because of our inability to imagine how things might be done otherwise. It may very well be that narrative is an inevitable feature of thought and discourse, and it may also be possible to combine some narratives with a critical narratology without falling into simple self-referential contradiction. In order to see the specific configuration that these possibilities assume in the Nietzschean text, it is necessary to situate Nietzsche’s epistemological break regarding narrative in relation to what could be called a pedagogical break having to do with the modalities of writing and speaking; that is, with what Derrida has called the question of logocentrism. And from the beginning Nietzsche’s pedagogical break with logocentrism touches on the nature of narrativity.

Here let me invoke the name of one of Nietzsche’s most significant others, the paradigmatically logocentric historian Jacob Burckhardt. It was Burckhardt whom the young Nietzsche revered more than any of his other colleagues at the University of Basel, and it was Burckhardt’s lectures, Welthistorische Betrachtungen, that Nietzsche heard with the conviction that he was the only member of the audience who understood them. It was also Burckhardt to whom Nietzsche wrote shortly after his “collapse” in Turin, in 1889:

Burckhardt’s receipt of this letter sent him to Nietzsche’s friend Franz Overbeck; Overbeck left soon to bring Nietzsche back by train and so delivered him into the care of various psychiatric clinics, whence he entered the even more regressive, infantilized condition of being in the custody of his mother and his sister.

I do not mean to psychologize the Nietzschean texts that I am about to discuss, nor to suggest that Burckhardt is a more significant other than the other Others—living, historical, or imaginary, not to mention his own “shadows” or internal Doppelgängers—with whom Nietzsche engages in a constant play of identification and distantiation. But it is Burckhardt, the lecturer and historian to whom Nietzsche wrote toward the end of the letter already quoted, “What is disagreeable and offends my modesty is that at bottom I am every name in history.”¹⁰ Burckhardt came to Basel after publishing The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, The Age of Constantine the Great, and his art-historical guidebook, Cicerone. But once he was installed in the Basel Lehrstuhl, he wrote no more for publication but devoted himself exclusively to lecturing. As Werner Kaegi documents in his massive biography of Burckhardt, he saw his vocation as a professor or teacher of history for the people of Basel, not as a scholar writing books that might be read by people at other times or places.¹¹ Also afflicted with a certain hypochondria not unusual among German professors, Burckhardt came to believe that writing for publication was bad for his health.

The background for Burckhardt’s commitment to teaching and his abstinence from writing seem to be twofold, based both on a cultural analysis and on a general philosophy of education. His pessimism and cultural conservatism led him to suppose that any possibility of keeping alive some sparks of the great European tradition depended on a direct communication between a wise judge and connoisseur of that tradition and an audience; the danger of historical scholarship was that of degeneration into the minutiae of the professional monograph, which was itself a symptom of the cultural crisis that he diagnosed. Moreover, he seems to have seen the requirements of the moment coinciding with a general principle of all education. As his reservations about the healthfulness of writing suggest, he shared the suspicions of the Platonic Socrates who warns us in the Phaedrus that writing is a dangerous drug, distracting both writer and reader from the enterprise of thinking. Burckhardt, then, is a fine example of logocentrism; he is the brilliant lecturer, firing up his students with a passion for the subject and by his living presence always guiding them away from inappropriate interpretations or judgments. “You had to hear him to get the point,” we say about such teachers. This historian tells a single great narrative history, one that is made living again in each lecture by his personal presence through the tone, gesture, and anecdote that make each performance both an immediate communication in the context of the day and a part of a “worldhistorical reflection.” And the young Nietzsche was impressed, as were many of the solid burghers of Basel. In 1870 Nietzsche wrote to a friend, Erwin Rohde, of his three great joys; one of them is that “Jacob Burckhardt is giving a weekly lecture on the study of history—in the spirit of Schopenhauer—a lovely but rare refrain. I am attending the lectures.” Nietzsche’s description of the lectures as both Schopenhauerian and musical suggests Schopenhauer’s own melocentrism; Burckhardt would then be the lyric voice expressing the endurance and survival of the will that struggles to sing while beset by the great inertial mass of what has been and the knowledge that things are getting worse.

Yet although Burckhardt too was a disciple of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s praise may be read as inconsistent with Burckhardt’s own philosophy of education. For if what is sung is “a lovely but rare refrain,” that suggests that the spoken word may not—at least in these circumstances, in this context, and in connection with the great topoi of history—attain its end of communication. Burckhardt sought to speak but sang despite himself; we remember here Nietzsche’s later introduction to The Birth of Tragedy: “it should have sung, this ‘new soul’—and not spoken!” The problem Nietzsche implicitly raises here is that of whether one should try to speak to everyone or sing a rare refrain for “the happy few.” That Burckhardt had not fully addressed this question, or at least that Nietzsche understood him as not having addressed it, can be inferred from the latter’s report of the lecture series Worldhistorical Reflections; Nietzsche writes that he believed himself to be “the only one among his sixty listeners [Zuhörer] [who understood] the deep movements of his thought with its strange breaks and bends, just where the subject is most delicate [wo die Sache an das Bedenkliche streift]” (BW 2:1, 155). Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra claims to address the problem by describing itself as “a book for all and none.” If we accept Charles Jencks’s characterization of postmodern art as double-coded, simultaneously and in different ways addressing both an audience of specialists and a more general public, then we might have some grounds for describing Nietzsche’s writing as postmodern.

I want to explore the possibility that Nietzsche’s practice of writing, including in particular the writing of narratives, can be construed as a response to another way of doing things that Burckardt exemplifies. I do not mean to suggest that Nietzsche was obsessed with Burckhardt but rather that the teaching and writing connected with these names exhibit a significant set of relationships that revolve around questions of meaning, interpretation, history, speech, and writing. One place where we might begin to trace out some of these themes is in Nietzsche’s own writing and teaching concerning the two apparently diverse themes of rhetoric and the nature of the university in the period 1872–73, and it is here that I would locate the “epistemological break” that follows the appearance of The Birth of Tragedy. In his lectures on rhetoric, which were probably heavily indebted to the oral teachings of his own mentor, Ritschl, Nietzsche’s most extravagant language is reserved for his account of the transition from an oral to a written style in the ancient world:

This paean to the pleasure of the text is paralleled by Nietzsche’s denunciation of logocentric education in his series of lectures On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. Jacques Derrida has recently drawn attention to these remarkable lectures in which Nietzsche attacks the lecture method itself. In the essay “Otobiography” included in the book The Ear of the Other, Derrida asks us to listen to (or read) what “Nietzsche’s fictitious philosopher” of the fifth lecture has to say about the independence of mind said to be the goal of the German university system:

Elaborating on Nietzsche’s text Derrida shows that this image contains the kernel of a far-reaching critique of acroamatic or phonocentric teaching, the institution to which it is the key, and the political state that stands in the background. The old philosopher continues:

The status of this Nietzschean text is, of course, problematic. There is an inversion of the paradox of Plato’s Phaedrus: there a written philosophical text is the instrument for the condemnation of writing, while Nietzsche’s lectures are directed against the lecture method itself. Although delivered as a set of lectures and never published by its author the text was provided with a brief Vorrede. This Vorrede, he says, is to be read before the lectures “although it really has nothing to do with them.” In this anomalous text Nietzsche imagines a careful, slow, patient reader closely resembling the ideal reader described in his lectures on rhetoric. In the lectures themselves, which depict the merely listening student (Hörer) as hanging on the umbilical cord of the university, Nietzsche constantly reminds his audience of their own status, addressing them even in the midst of the lecture as meine verehrte Zuhörer (“my distinguished listeners”). Perhaps the appropriate listener’s response would be to leave the lecture at such a point, thus breaking the umbilical cord. But the text is perhaps complex enough to preclude that as the only responsible option. In the introduction (which was read to his audience), Nietzsche says that the lectures were not composed with any thought of Basel University where both he and his auditors are; he does not wish to draw any inferences concerning Basel nor does he wish to be responsible for any such inferences that might be drawn.

The structure of displacement is further intensified by the nature of the narrative or fiction that Nietzsche constructs about the German (not the Swiss) university (German institutions are both ours and not ours, Nietzsche seems to be saying). Because the story is unfinished its genre is uncertain. The last lecture, although announced, was not delivered and was apparently never written. But the lectures might be seen as an incomplete comedy. The story concerns two students, one of them said to be Nietzsche (so the lecturing professor appears before students as a student), who are part of a cultural club or association. They encounter a venerable but gruff old philosopher and his companion in the mountains. A ludicrous struggle over turf ensues, for both parties claim the same site for a prearranged meeting. After an accommodation is reached the students become eavesdroppers (Zuhörer), listening while the old philosopher details his critique of the Gymnasium and university system. Toward the end of the extant lecture course there is some indication that the rest of the students’ companions have joined with the philosopher’s friend(s) in the valley below where there is singing and torchlight. The comedic expectation then is that students and professors have reached some community of understanding about their cultural institution, despite the emeritus philosopher’s abhorrence of students in groups. One is tempted to read the break in the story in the light of another of the lecturer’s introductory remarks:

In other words, Nietzsche eludes the comic resolution by giving us an incomplete narrative that leaves us, teachers and students, in a somewhat indeterminate situation, like the characters in his fiction. As with some Nietzschean aphorisms we are left to fill in the space that the text opens out by ourselves. The renunciation of prophecy contrasts sharply with both the tone and the structure of The Birth of Tragedy which is concerned at the end with plotting the course of Zukunftsmusik, Wagner’s music of the future. The lack of closure in the lectures On the Future of Our Educational Institutions can be construed as a break with Hegelian narrative. Despite Hegel’s renunciation of prophecy, as in his saying that “the owl of Minerva takes flight only when the shades of night are falling,” it is only a minor alteration in the program of Hegelian history to place the comedic resolution which he saw in the present (that is, his own present) in a future that is already dawning. Nietzsche rejects Hegelian absolute narrative and its master plot; but to leave the narrative open, as he does in these lectures, is not to avoid narrative altogether. In Derrida’s two discussions of Nietzsche the question of narrative is hardly touched. Spurs proceeds by taking what might be a micronarrative (“I forgot my umbrella”) and arguing that it is too indeterminate for any interpretation, narrative or otherwise. In his essay on “Otobiography” Derrida calls our attention to Nietzsche’s figure of the ear in its many modalities and relations, but omits pointing out either the conventional narrative structure of the text or the effect produced by its breaking off.

If we take “Burckhardt” to be the name of the historian, the professional historian who speaks rather than writing, then we can see that Nietzsche’s narrative production is rigorously other than Burckhardt in two ways. If Nietzsche lectures he will call into question the lecturing institution itself as well as the larger institution, the state, which lies in the background. And if Nietzsche tells stories, they will not be the kind that invite us to be listeners only, but stories that might provoke us to reflect on the narrative activity itself. Above all, he will tell a variety of stories, not just in the way that “Burckhardt” might lecture now on Greece, now on the Renaissance, and now on Dutch art of the seventeenth century. The pluralization of narrative ranges from the comic book history of logocentrism entitled “How the True World Finally Became a Fable,” to Thus Spoke Zarathustra which might serve as a libretto for a truly philosophical opera (perhaps the only one), to the displaced and striated history of The Genealogy of Morals.

As Derrida argues, there is a dangerous temptation in the logocentric tradition to suppose that only the spoken word (spoken by the wise man, the teacher) can be a really determinate form of discourse. In the Phaedrus Socrates develops that claim by portraying writing or the text as a fatherless child without a parent to come to its defense, at the mercy of any and all readers. It is not a living word, as Socrates and the logocentric tradition would have it, but an artifact or machine. The wise teacher (Socrates) knowingly plants seeds of wisdom in the souls of his students; the machine of the text, so it seems, produces indeterminate effects through a law or economy overseen by no conscious mind. But Nietzsche’s fictional professor uses the figure of the machine to suggest that speech is no better off than writing:

Let us not suppose the contrary view which can be associated with the American New Critics, namely the notion that there are at least some texts—poems, or successful ones—which are so perfectly structured, so organic, so living that they have no machine-like characteristics. But let us be aware of how often the denial of the machine-like characteristics of a practice in which we are engaged means that we will exhibit such characteristics in uncontrollable ways. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow report Michel Foucault saying “People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”¹³

Writing notoriously leaves itself open to interpretation and Nietzsche’s writings are one of the best examples of this openness. In The Ear of the Other Derrida acknowledges that there is no way in which Nietzsche’s text could be said to exclude categorically the use that the Nazis made of it.¹⁴ For the old professor in Nietzsche’s narrative also says

We cannot simply seek the “true” Nietzsche who did not mean to say what the Nazis had him say. For undoubtedly part of that “true” Nietzsche would be the thinker who affirms that language is not the instrument of non-linguistic intentions and that “facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations.” If I will be proposing a reading of some Nietzschean narratives it will be not so much to solve the hermeneutic mystery of who the “true” Mr. Nietzsche is or even what his texts are finally saying; the point of such a reading is rather to articulate one production of the text machine that converges with our apparently inevitable interest in hearing and telling stories. In any case Nietzsche’s “other,” Burckhardt, can be seen to have had an effective history that is also diverse, if not as spectacular as that of the writer who abandoned the university cultural machine. Burckhardt’s students are not known for revitalizing European culture; the most famous, such as Heinrich Wölfflin, achieved a kind of academic success by regularizing and thereby narrowing branches of study (the history of art, in Wölfflin’s case) that Burckhardt thought should remain part of a common culture.

In this context, framed by the logocentric practices of the German university and Burckhardt’s vision of history, we might imagine the question of philosophical communication appearing to Nietzsche in something like the following way: How can meaningful stories be told that escape the encroachments of the “university culture machine” and that offer a significant alternative to the debilitating forms of historical consciousness that the same culture machine was celebrating as the highest manifestations of the Western tradition? One step, taken in the essay On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, is to tell an alternative story about the rise of historical consciousness itself. That story will at least raise suspicions about the claims which that historical consciousness and the formal enterprise of historical scholarship make about the inevitability of their attempt to establish history as a “pure sovereign science” that “would be for mankind a sort of conclusion of life and a settling of accounts with it” (UM, 67; 1, 257). Another step is to explain how other ways of narrating—the monumental antiquarian, and critical modes of history—may be deployed “in the service of life,” that is, they may tell stories that are an ongoing part of cultural life rather than serving either as Hegelian legitimization for the state or Burckhardtian elegy for the decline of Europe into a world of factories and democracy. But Nietzsche’s most dramatic alternative to these forms of historical consciousness is to reconstitute his own activity as a writer of narratives. He will be a writer, rather than a lecturer, because he is aware of the illusions of immediacy and community that are fostered by the university and its enabling philosophy of logocentrism. The written text is avowedly material rather than ideal. It does not create the illusion that language is a diaphanous medium between a knowing mind and an intelligible object. Nietzsche’s texts, especially his aphoristic ones, often seem designed to frustrate such logocentric prejudices and expectations. The numbered aphorism, physically distinct from others in a sequence and depending on such material features of language as punning and multiple meaning, defeats the idea that in reading we are identifying with a single continuous thought process.¹⁵ Of these very material Nietzschean texts, I want to direct attention to those that are also narratives. As written narratives they participate in Nietzsche’s general critique of idealism, and as narratives they offer alternatives to idealistic history.

But did Nietzsche really write narrative discourses? The view of Nietzsche as an exclusively anti-narrative thinker may seem to gain support from the fact that he deploys a critical narratology in a number of texts. Nietzsche, that is, has a narratology in so far as he attempts to identify some of the typical classes of narratives and some of the typical devices or patterns of narrative construction. Yet it is a critical narratology because it addresses not only the obviously fictional narratives of literature and the dream, but also those narratives that are commonly supposed to possess the possibility of being true. In Nietzsche’s analysis this important class of narratives ranges from the accounts we give of our daily life to the historian’s account of the meaning of longer or shorter durées, to the attempts of religion and philosophy to offer accounts of ends and origins. A little reflection quickly suggests that a critical narratology addressed specifically to those problematic narratives claiming a questionable truthfulness is not incompatible with a very large degree of acceptance of narratives not making such claims, or even of narratives of the questionable sort if they can be read independently of those misleading claims.

The anti-narrativist reading may find another support in the stylistic context of Nietzsche’s critical narratology. For most of Nietzsche’s remarks on this subject are in his aphoristic works, in particular in Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science. Such books are series of horizons (“aphorism” is related to the Greek horismos, boundary or horizon) rather than continuous narratives or conventional philosophical arguments. If we should make a mistake in this respect and sit down to read one of Nietzsche’s aphoristic books from beginning to end, we are likely to be brought up short by a passage such as this one, about threequarters of the way though Daybreak (454):

Now while the aphoristic books are not large-scale narratives, and while they do contain a critical narratology, it would be a mistake to suppose that all of Nietzsche’s works are aphoristic, or that individual aphorisms themselves cannot have a narrative form. The first assumption will lead to a drastically reduced reading as I hope the following essays on some Nietzschean texts will demonstrate. The second assumption is more easily challenged by pointing out a few of the many aphorisms or sketches that do have an explicit narrative form; we might begin a partial list of the latter with some of the many aphorisms in which Nietzsche aims to narrate the “natural history” of a custom, religion, moral code, passion or belief (e.g., Daybreak 29, 31, 42, 49, 68, 71, 102, 112). It could be and has been argued that the narrative form of such works is only apparent, that they deconstruct the narrative form by reason of a number of gaps, inconsistencies, and double codings. This is no doubt true to some extent; and to the extent that it is true the texts in question might be described as self-critical, open, or indeterminate narratives. Certainly something of this sort could be said even of Nietzsche’s longer and more complex texts such as Zarathustra; but recent modes of reading have suggested that some of the same things could with equal justice be said about reputedly classical texts of literature and history. Whether there is still some value in considering any given text as a narrative will depend on the reading of the text that the approach enables. So the suggestion that none of Nietzsche’s texts are really narratives might have to rely on an argument that would deny the narrative status of any writing whatsoever.

When we begin to examine the critical narratology embedded in Nietzsche’s aphoristic texts we may immediately note that it is often associated with a call for the introduction of a historical approach into philosophy. The first part of Human, All Too Human bears the ironic title “Of First and Last Things,” suggesting a critical relation to all conceptions of an absolute origin or end. But opposition to eschatology does not entail opposition to narrative. And in the first entry of that section Nietzsche decries the fact that philosophy as practiced at the time that he is writing tells the same old stories, formally speaking, that it has told for two thousand years. It asks such questions as:

The questions then begin from the experienced nature of change, process, or transformation. That is, they assume something like a mundane narrative standpoint in which a development or event is noted and some kind of account is sought for it. Metaphysics, however, responds to this request for a story by offering a reductionistic account, a story in which it is demonstrated that there are no real events:

Philosophy’s story, we might say, is no story at all, for it tells us that nothing has really happened and that all change is merely a surface phenomenon. The alternative to such metaphysical philosophy is “historical philosophy”:

“Historical philosophizing,” a recurring term in Human, All Too Human, can be understood as historia, or inquiry into particulars, as natural history which examines things in the light of their coming to be, and as narrative history which traces the course of a thing’s rise and transformations through all variations of its career. All of these senses of history are present in Nietzsche’s suggestion of an historical antidote to the (traditional) philosopher’s view that man has an eternal nature: “Everything the philosopher asserts about man is basically no more than a statement about man within a very limited time span. A lack of historical sense is the congenital defect of all philosophers” (HAH, 2; 2, 24). The scope of Nietzschean narrative will include, then, what historians of the Annales school call the longue durée as well as the moments of existence (Augenblicke) celebrated in Zarathustra.

Does Nietzsche have a single narrative paradigm or a favored model either for the understanding of narrative discourse in general or for the construction of his own narratives? Alexander Nehamas seems to suggest that in both cases Nietzsche’s model is the unified literary work as it might be construed by Aristotle, or Hegel, or an American New Critic.¹⁶ And Nehamas points out that Nietzsche advertises his own multiplicity of styles: “I have many stylistic possibilities—the most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man” (EH, “Books” 4; 6, 304). Nietzsche does have many styles of his own and a good number of them are variations of narrative, although not necessarily of the well-formed novel of the nineteenth century. The bulk of this book will be concerned with exploring some of those narrative forms.

As a narratologist and particularly as a critical narratologist, Nietzsche has some suspicions concerning the narratives that we construct through or use to characterize our dreams. Dream narratives are typical, for Nietzsche, of the stories that people tell both about themselves and the world. Moreover, to the extent that dreams can be seen as a model for understanding narrative practice, we ought to be able to indicate how some of Nietzsche’s own story-telling can be construed in terms of the logic of the dream (I will explore this particularly in reading Ecce Homo, but the perspective could be brought to bear on any of Nietzsche’s writings).

What dreams share with many other narratives is that they seek and offer explanations for experiences and sensations that are not understood. Nietzsche mentions such things as processes of digestion, movements, and changes in temperature or position as phenomena that impinge on the dreamer.

The general form of reasoning that lies behind the construction of dream-narratives is what Charles Peirce called abduction: a surprising fact is noted and an inquiry is launched to find a likely cause of the fact to be explained. The facts or experiences to be explained are such things as “I am waking up to a noise” or “my feet feel constricted” and the dream-explanations are “the church bells are ringing” or “there are snakes wrapped around my feet.” As a critical narratologist Nietzsche points out the obvious: such confused and arbitrary forms of reasoning depend upon the weakening of memory consequent upon sleep. What is not so obvious is the extrapolation from the confusions of dream-narrative to the typical thought processes of early humans. He suggests that “man still draws conclusions in his dreams as mankind once did, in a waking state, through many thousands of years”; in each case the principle is simply to explain the unexpected by “the first cause which occurred to the mind.”

Nietzsche’s account both of the dream and of “primitive” thought in these texts is extremely schematic and simple, falling short of his rich appreciation of the texture of the dream in the analyses of The Birth of Tragedy or the dream narratives of Zarathustra. What I mean to highlight here is both the abductive pattern Nietzsche sees as the essential constructive principle of certain narratives and the extrapolation of that pattern to domains beyond the dream proper; he concludes the aphorism from which I have been quoting by suggesting that the poet and the artist proceed in the same fashion to attribute moods and states “to causes that are in no way the true ones.”

So far one might take Nietzsche’s analysis of dreams to be a variety of a standard form of enlightenment criticism and might associate it with the scientism that is sometimes held to characterize the so-called “middle period” of his thought. The analogy between dreaming and primitive thought processes certainly seems to exemplify an enlightenment metanarrative that would read human history as a progressive emancipation from confusion and superstition, while noting both the residues of earlier states in the present and the similarities between savage thought and exceptional states. The enlightenment view depends, however, on having a clear comprehension of causes and effects, such that all properly constructed narratives would attribute events only to true causes. Nietzsche, of course, cannot be identified with such an enlightenment perspective. It is clear that he sees the dream as much more than a residue of an earlier state or as a tolerable interruption of a more rational life; and he also suggests that it is not only the mundane narratives of savage life that are analogous to the dream but also those waking narratives that we relate about ourselves as well as the culturally central narratives of history, religion, and philosophy. So Nietzsche can write:

Given this view, there is no possibility that the narrative logic of the dream can be altogether expunged from waking life. We are always already in the position of producing a narrative commentary on the unknown text, or, we might say, we are always already narrative beings.

Descartes thought that at a certain stage of reflection we should take seriously the suggestion that all of our thought is a kind of dreaming, or at least that we might be dreaming right now, at the moment of reflecting on the question. In the process of reflection, however, we do (so he claims) discover good grounds for distinguishing our dreaming and our waking experiences. Descartes was indeed aware of the strange form of narrative productivity in dreams, in which a vaguely perceived condition is vaguely inferred to have an outlandish cause; we produce stories, for example, in which we are made of glass. If it is the dream-like logic that philosophy wishes to free us from, then Nietzsche’s claim is that no such procedure of emancipation is possible. The construction of the rational self or reflecting ego, Nietzsche suggests, is a kind of dream-like inference: we discover some kind of continuity or coherence in thought and so suppose that there is a soul or psychic atom that is responsible for that unity. The original edition of Human, All Too Human begins with a quotation from Descartes’s Discourse on Method, in which Descartes announces that he has systematically reviewed human occupations and has determined that the regular cultivation of reason is the best. Given his very anti-Cartesian sentiments concerning the ego, waking and dreaming, and many other issues (for example, mind-body dualism), what is it that Nietzsche wishes to retain of this Cartesian program? In part, he seem to have been citing Descartes’s great satisfaction in having achieved a method whose employment is accompanied by the greatest pleasure and which can be turned to a new area every day to yield useful and interesting discoveries. Such a method is at work in Nietzsche’s aphoristic texts, a method that yields pleasure and is constantly transferable to fresh fields of inquiry. Like Descartes, with his criticism of history and poetry, Nietzsche has adopted a critical narratology, but he had decoupled that method both from a Cartesian conception of analysis and from an ontology.

Nietzsche’s very unCartesian idea that we are, in principle, always dreaming may help us to understand how a critical narratology can be combined with a narrative practice that supposes the inevitability of the process of producing and commenting on stories. Nietzsche’s texts are full of extravagant praise for the dream or the dreamer and of frequent attempts to justify dreaming (in the narrower sense) as a vital component of our psychic economy. Surely part of the point of such praise and analysis is to suggest how foolish would be the project of eliminating the dream or minimizing its role. Accordingly there is a kind of paradigmatic first-person speech act that Nietzsche performs or cites repeatedly, although it is an utterance that would be nonsensical either for Cartesian rationalism or for contemporary speech act theory: “It is a dream—I will dream on!” The utterance is unintelligible if we presuppose that we are seeking certainty and that there is no certainty in dreams; or if we suppose that it is impossible for a sleeper or dreamer to make any intelligible utterance whatsoever (even if he should manage to produce some sounds that normally have an intelligible meaning). What Nietzsche dramatizes or narrates again and again, however, is the experience that we have of making just such an utterance. One might proceed some way in reading The Birth of Tragedy as a parody or reversal of Descartes’s Meditations, for it begins with just such an affirmation. Whereas Descartes says “I too have been deceived many times in sleep” Nietzsche proclaims:

Here the explicit purpose is to explain the delightfulness and necessity of dreaming alongside the other great psychic possibility of intoxication. Elsewhere, Nietzsche suggests that the entire enterprise of knowledge and the individuation of the knower as a singular being are means to “preserve the universality of dreaming and the mutual comprehension of all dreamers and thus also the continuation of the dream” (GS, 54; 3, 417). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a book replete with the relation and interpretation of dreams, Nietzsche’s hero dreams that he is struggling abjectly and dejectedly to climb a mountain path under the weight of a dwarf, the spirit of gravity. He recalls “I was like one sick whom his wicked torture makes weary, and who as he falls asleep is awakened by a still more wicked dream.” It is Zarathustra’s courage which allows him to confront the dwarf and which adumbrates the thought of eternal recurrence through affirming what, in this context, is the continuation and repetition of the dream; it is courage which says “ ‘Was that life? Well then! Once more!’ ”

It should be clear from all this that for Nietzsche no absolute distinction is to be made between dream narratives and other sorts of stories. Nietzsche’s most explicit examples of the extension of the principle of dream narratives to others come in his accounts of the way in which we compose mundane, short-term stories about our own lives and in the way a culture produces a stock of narrative adages, or parables, that postulate a cause-effect relationship between human actions and their consequences. Perhaps the most consecutive statement of Nietzsche’s critical narratology is in the section of Twilight of the Idols called “The Four Great Errors.” All of the errors are recognizable as specifications of the sort of thinking that Nietzsche attributes to the dream, and he sometimes illustrates them by reference to the dream. The first is “the error of confusing cause and effect”; it consists in noting a correlation of some kind between events but reversing their causal priority. In Nietzsche’s example, a famous diet of his time is said to be the cause of long life. But the diet, Nietzsche argues, is not good for everyone, but only for someone with a certain kind of metabolism; so one might say that the type of metabolism is the cause or perhaps the cause when reinforced by the appropriate diet. When religion and morality speak in hypothetical imperatives, promising happiness for the performance of certain actions and unhappiness or worse for others, then they typically engage in the same kind of error. The other typical errors consist of: “false causality,” in which our inner self, or will, is taken as model for all causality, when in fact there is no inner realm of will; “imaginary causes,” in which, as in typical dream examples, a narrative is provoked by that which comes at the end (a dream is composed almost instantly to account for a far-off cannon shot); and the “error of free will,” in which individuals are held to be responsible agents when in fact “the fatality of a person’s essence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be.” We must defer for a bit the question of whether a world characterized by such fatality would lend itself to any kind of narrative presentation whatsoever, that is, whether Nietzsche’s views allow for a truly awake, non-dreamlike awareness of the world.

In considering Nietzsche’s account of these four errors we might begin by noticing an apparent discrepancy between his sense of the fatality of all events in their interconnection and his critique (at least in the case of the first error of reversing cause and effect) of certain causal attributions. Clearly, if there is no unique cause of any event then the mere reversal of any supposed causal sequence, where the terms are less than the whole of what there is, cannot yield a correct causal account. The first step in saving Nietzsche’s critique would be to suggest that even if it is a very complex concatenation of events and states which is the causal condition of long life (where metabolism is of special interest because of its being a property of the individual concerned), still that set is the cause of another complex state that includes long life. The picture becomes even more complex, however, if we add the idea of eternal recurrence (one of whose versions Nietzsche seems to be invoking here). For on one interpretation of that thought the entire state of affairs at any moment of the world is both the cause and effect of all that will follow it and of all that preceded it; it is the latter because the specific nature of all that there is now is such as to bring about, eventually, the recurrence of everything that has been. Still it is possible to distinguish various sorts of causal accounts in so far as they approximate or deviate from this vision of the fatality of the whole.

Looked at systematically, Nietzsche’s four errors form a kind of catalogue raisonné of the forms of narrative discourse. They can perhaps be mapped on to some older rhetorical and linguistic categories that have become prominent again in some recent theories of discourse.¹⁷ The production of imaginary causes can be seen as the invention of a narrative metaphor for a “felt but unknown text.” The notion that narratives can be understood as causal sequences that are sometimes constructed by altering an original sequence points to the metonymic character of narrative in which events are connected only sequentially or by conjunction and not by internal bonds of similarity in meaning. When it is supposed that the will is the model of all causality, then a synecdochic mode of narrative construction is being employed in which one type of causality (here a “false” or nonexistent one) is seen as the principle of all narratives. The analysis of those narrative accounts that operate by means of free will suggests that the point of such stories lies in singling out one specific kind of agency that is to be contrasted with the regularity and inertia of everything else that might provide material for a story; this setting aside of an individual as a putative sole cause is structurally similar to the figure of irony, whose literary origins go back to the false claims of agency and importance made by a single pretentious figure. The errors, then, can also be regarded as principles of composition, especially if Nietzsche has no non-narrativist form of discourse or consciousness available to substitute for those that are familiar to us. What I am suggesting is that Nietzsche offers us no directly non-narrative discourse but rather a strategy of pluralistic narration and critical narratology that will provide an alternative to a fixation on any of those religious or metaphysical versions of the dream that tend to institutionalize the errors just discussed. Dreams, Nietzsche suggests, when interpreted in a certain way, lead the dreamer to suppose that his or her visions are sent from another, higher world (HAH, 5; 2, 27). But dreams need not be interpreted this way; an alternative philology of Traumdeutung (of the interpretation of dreams) is possible. And the nature of dreams (both in the narrow and in the extended sense) may vary.

Such principles may be applied to Nietzsche’s discussion of the various modalities of history in On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Dreams, Nietzsche suggests, are often nocturnal compensations for something that has been lacking during the day, or as Freud would put it, they are imaginative wish-fulfillments. Monumental history, by valorizing that which is great and noble in a traditional past, may serve as a compensatory and wish-fulfilling device in response to an unheroic present. If the present is heavy with threats of the disruption or fragmentation of a prized continuity, then the historian may resort to the antiquarian mode, in which all signs of continuity with the past, no matter how trivial, are highlighted. Critical history consists in “breaking up and dissolving the past”; Nietzsche suggests that it is a dangerous attempt to free oneself from one’s past by the mechanisms of denial and rewriting:

The thought of eternal recurrence can be seen as contributing to such a critical history because it allows us to think of the present (or the future, for that matter) as that which gives rise to all other moments of existence and therefore to our past as well.

It would be possible to produce a typology of other Nietzschean narratives that can only be briefly indicated here. One might begin by noting that myth is only one of these forms, reaching its fullest expression in Zarathustra. Contrary to the early rhapsodic and often proto-Nazi reception of Nietzsche in Germany typified by Ernst Bertram, and to such a Marxist reappropriation of that reading as we find in Georg Lukacs, there are other significant forms of narrative in Nietzsche’s work.¹⁸ Michel Foucault has found genealogy to be the most enabling and empowering of these and it would indeed be possible to work out a detailed account of the role that The Genealogy of Morals plays in the construction of such a Foucauldian narrative as Discipline and Punish. There is also a form of deconstructive analysis of narrative that can trace its credentials to Nietzsche if it wishes. The Antichrist, for example, is a sustained attempt to show that the central narratives of Christianity, including both biblical and later traditions, can be decentered by removing their false center, demonstrating Jesus to be merely a signifier or a blank page that has been overinscribed with interpretations. Ecce Homo is Nietzsche’s autobiography, we might say, but it is both more and less than that. For it challenges the integrity of the self, or of “autobios,” one’s own life, in order to suggest that Nietzsche is a Doppelgänger, a double constituted by a play of oppositions; since there is no external point from which that play can be controlled it tells the story of how one becomes what one is not just as much as it tells the story promised by its subtitle “how one becomes what one is.”

Having suggested the essential plurality of Nietzschean narrative I want to look more closely at two examples of story-telling, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and a rather brief but pregnant sketch in The Twilight of the Idols called “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable: History of an Error.” This last purports to distil the entire history of philosophy into six theses on a single page; at first it appears to be almost a comic-strip reduction of its theme. Yet Martin Heidegger and subsequently Jacques Derrida have devoted extensive efforts of interpretation to it. Beginning with Plato’s conception of the wise man as living in the truth, it concludes with Nietzsche’s announcement that the entire opposition between the true and apparent worlds has been overcome.

Should we read this text as a metanarrative that purports to tell us of first and last things? Certainly it is something of a parody of Hegel’s metahistory of philosophy, although Heidegger has appropriated it with an inspired seriousness for his own account of our forgetting of Being (as Derrida points out). It is not the story of progressive realization of truth, but the history of an error. And the final position that would be occupied in the biblical metanarrative tradition by apocalyptic revelation or in the philosophical one by a Hegelian or Marxist transformation of that into the realization of freedom and knowledge is here filled by the inscription “INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.” That is, just where we might expect a conclusion of the story that would comprehend and make clear all its earlier stages, we get a reference to another story and (to anticipate just a bit) that story will not complete a metanarrative. Nietzsche’s story about philosophy follows quickly upon his account of the philosophers’ idiosyncracies. These consist in their Egyptianism, their belief in an unchanging world and also in their production of stories that purport to show that once we lived in an eternal world from which we have somehow fallen into the world of appearance. At this point the idiosyncracies of philosophers display what Freud called “kettle logic.” On the one hand, if the true world is eternal there should be no need for narrative, and any narrative must distort the truth of that eternal world; but, on the other, philosophers must tell narratives in order to account for our fallen status. In Freud’s anecdote the man to whom we have lent the kettle replies to our request for its return “(a) you never lent me a kettle; (b) I already returned it to you; (c) the kettle was worthless and full of holes.” The philosopher says: “the world is timeless and I will tell you a story about how it becomes other than that.” But perhaps not all philosophers do this, Nietzsche seems to say in the “True World” sketch. Consider the first stage of this history:

To take Nietzsche’s understanding of Plato seriously involves seeing the latter as freed from the Platonism that is introduced only with the second stage in which the idea “becomes woman, Christian.”

The “history of an error” proceeds on two levels, which are marked in Nietzsche’s text by a division between “straight” statements of the position in question and the parenthetical stage directions or narrative contextualization that follows these. For this Plato, who is the truth, no stories are yet necessary to explain the fall from the truth; this way of looking at Plato suggests the need for a radically revised reading of the narrative form of his dialogues, and especially of those myths that become the mainstay of Platonism and Christianity. As Derrida notes, it is only with the second stage, in which the true world is “unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the virtuous man (‘for the sinner who repents’)” that narratives become an essential defensive mechanism of philosophy: “At this moment history begins. Now the stories start.”¹⁹ It is these narratives that are in Nietzsche’s view the Heideggerean “unthought” of subsequent philosophy, and the rest of the sketch consists in juxtaposing the shifting tenses and modalities of these philosophical stories with the story that Nietzsche tells, taking us through the cycle of the day. The idea’s becoming “more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible” is its darkening, followed by the sun’s appearing dimly through Kantian fog, then beginning a new day with positivism’s demotion of the unknown “true world” from its place of honor, and concluding—at least for the time being—with the bright day of its abolition. Let us look more closely at the double stories constituting this history of error. When Nietzsche writes that the view of truth as accessible now to the wise man is an Umschreibung (transcription) of “I, Plato, am the truth” we might ask who it is who utters that sentence. Nietzsche does not say that Plato explicitly makes this claim; in fact the sentence would seem to be much too solipsistic and egoistic to be identified simply as equivalent to the more impersonal version that allows the truth to be accessible to wise men generally. And looking at the parallel with the other parenthetical comments or stage directions in the sketch, it becomes clear that the latter are not the ways in which the various philosophical positions think of themselves. The parenthetical remarks could be described as the dreams that are then translated or reinscribed in the more sober language of philosophy. The dream “I, Plato, am the truth” is the expression of a fully imaginary stance (in Lacan’s sense of the imaginary), representing the subject as simply and presently identical with the highest object. The reinscription of the dream is the more symbolic, linguistic version of this fantastic conception of the self. The Platonic dialogues, we might say, show that we can be in the truth just to the extent that we actively practice dialectics and so in their own narrative form they give a richly symbolic version of being in the truth which is socially acceptable just because that position is open to all (to Socrates, to his younger auditors as they mature, to those anonymous place-holders like the “Athenian stranger,” and then finally to the reader who reproduces the dialectical movement of the dialogues).

Each successive stage in Nietzsche’s sequence is constituted by a new dream and its corresponding reinscription in the symbolic mode. But as Derrida notes the tenses of both dream and reinscription alter, as the truth is displaced to a mythical past, deferred to the future, or placed behind a veil or barrier of some sort. The second state in which truth “becomes woman, becomes Christian” is also a kind of collective dream, an imaginative vision that challenged (in some ways) the patriarchy of the Greek and Roman world. This dream of truth as a woman renders possible the narrativization of philosophy in the succeeding stages, although philosophy finds it difficult to acknowledge either the dream or its own turn to narrative. Similarly, the subsequent dreams or stages of a great collective cultural cycle of dreams are expressed in terms of a mood, a setting, an atmosphere that are then reinscribed as symbolic narratives offering explanations of the circumstances of truth’s deferral. The Kantian stage exhibits such a linkage of dream and reinscribed narrative:

The dream of truth as an elusive Nordic woman sometimes appearing through or behind a veil of mist inspired Kant’s play with the dualities of present imperative and (possible) future fulfillment, between our limited understanding and the categorical imperative of morality on the one hand and the demand of reason for a fuller, systematic cognitive and moral totality on the other.

It is not only the absence of Hegel’s name and of his particular way of reinscribing a dream as symbolic narrative that renders Nietzsche’s history of an error so very unHegelian. It is rather the doubled structure of the narrative, the absence of a comfortable collective narrator (a “we” with whom the reader can identify), and the fact that this story is not a history of truth but the history of an error that leads to the production of a text that would offer an alternative to philosophical metanarrative. Here Nietzsche is deploying the sun of our “White Mythology” in a way that reverses the classical mode of philosophical narrative. Unlike the Hegelian story that ends with the setting of the sun and the flight of Minerva’s owl, Nietzsche’s account suggests there is life at the end of this story. After all, it is just an error and there is always a new day. Or we might say, with Derrida, that as the philosophical idea becomes woman it learns the art of story-telling and perfects the art to such a point that it no longer needs the support of a “true world.” It learns to tell stories without taking revenge against these stories; that is, it produces narratives without having to reduce them to a single metanarrative. For such reduction, in which for example the metanarrative tells the unique Christian or Hegelian story, is generated by a ressentiment against the pluralistic tendencies of story-telling as monotheism is generated by the jealousy of one god toward all the other gods. As Nietzsche never tires of pointing out, a god who would be unique must be a very jealous god indeed; there is perhaps a common principle then in polytheism and in pluralistic narrativity. The “true world” here is demoted to the level of just a fable, a story that no longer has any special force, one which can perhaps be included in the set available to our culture but without its earlier pretensions.

The sixth and last stage of Nietzsche’s sketch, then, makes no claims to finality:

What emerges at the end of this sequence is not an apparent world that would occupy the place once held by the “true world.” Such an apparent world might be construed, for example, on empirical lines as a set of relatively discrete sensory experiences or, in a phenomenological perspective, as consisting of a rich network of intentions and contents. But the point of Nietzsche’s story is to show that since such conceptions of the apparent world are constructed only as the “others,” alternatives to the true world, they will consequently lose their claims to plausibility once their contrast-terms have been eliminated. The apparent world as conceived by the positivists, for example, is one in which changing appearances are governed by unchanging natural laws; but aren’t these eternal laws a ghostly residue of the “true world” and mustn’t their status become questionable once the “true world” is eliminated? So there is no philosophical telos at the end of this story. In contrast to the story Hegel tells we have not the ultimate identity-in-difference of the apparent and true worlds, where we would be both object and knower, but the disappearance of both. Perhaps this is like waking from a dream as in a Shakespearean scene and finding that a conflict we had taken very seriously has simply vanished with the disappearance or transformation of both sides. On one level this discovery of the mutual implication and mutual vanishing of apparent and true can be articulated by the deconstructive or genealogical philosopher who explores the tangled affiliations of these concepts. On the dream level Nietzsche’s narrative says that the stories are not over yet (they never will be). If the dream side of deconstruction and genealogy is the high noon dream of Zarathustra, then the “true world” has not only turned into a (mere) fable but has been displaced by a tale. In other words (of Nietzsche’s) we might say that deconstruction and genealogy are the reinscription of “It is a dream! I will dream on!” In thus being led from one fictive story or dream to another we should beware of the hermeneutic fallacy of supposing that somewhere at the end of the sequence, in the heart of the labyrinth, is a story that will finally yield up the “true world” of the Nietzschean text. The elimination of the true world and its double, the apparent world, should, then, be a governing principle of the reading and interpretation of texts as well as of the book of the world.

Heidegger takes Nietzsche’s last parenthetical comments as having a finalistic or teleological reference within the development of Nietzsche’s own philosophy; he reads the parenthesis as “Thus the onset of the final stage of his own philosophy.”²⁰ For Heidegger, who still reads Nietzsche logocentrically, that final stage is understood as based on the doctrine of the will to power, where will to power is conceived as the last, doomed expression of Western philosophy’s hubristic fixation on the metaphysics of presence. “INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA” is not for Heidegger a way of leading us from one narrative to another, but a signal that helps us sort Nietzsche’s philosophy out into stages. What this means is that Heidegger will not see Nietzsche as a story-teller, or at least that he will rank a final stage of Nietzsche’s thought as more important than a narrative or aphoristic form in which it happens to be cast. Although Heidegger praises Nietzsche for his deeply informed wrestling with history, he will not acknowledge that Nietzsche is almost always constructing histories or narratives; he must be the one to tell the last story of philosophy in which Nietzsche is the tragic hero.

It is symptomatic of Heidegger’s stance that he wants to read all of Nietzsche’s published texts as a mere foreground philosophy and that he sees the notebooks, especially those of the last few years, as pointing to that genuine expression of his thought that Nietzsche never quite completed. Derrida radicalizes that approach by asking us to see the value in the notes as notes with all of their gaps, crudeness, and ambiguities. But suppose, differing from both, that we read Nietzsche’s notebooks as we do those of a novelist. Then we could read Nietzsche’s narratives for the stories that they tell without either reconstructing a secret unwritten philosophy (a true Nietzsche behind the apparent one) or committing ourselves to an infinite process of deconstructing whatever there was in his writings that seemed to constitute a meaningful expression. Such a narrativist reading might also be helpful in looking at Nietzsche’s published remarks about his own writing. In Ecce Homo, for example, Nietzsche begins his discussion of Zarathustra with a passage that is often cited by philosophers attempting to elucidate the idea of eternal recurrence:

Here, in a very writerly fashion, Nietzsche refers to eternal recurrence as the Grund-conception of his literary masterpiece. The German Concept is more like a sketch, outline, or draft (a notebook can be called a Konzeptbuch). So Nietzsche can be read here as saying something about the genesis of his philosophical tale by indicating how he came across what a novelist like Henry James would call “the germ of a story.” We might then be better prepared to read Zarathustra as a narrative.

What might Nietzsche be about, then in announcing Zarathustra as the dream-narrative that follows those of the Platonic tradition? Thus Spoke Zarathustra could easily tempt us toward a hermeneutic reading of its presumed secret or it could educate us to avoid that temptation. Derrida expresses the concern that a hermeneutic approach, believing that “Nietzsche’s mastery is infinite,” might “use parody or the simulacrum” as a weapon in the service of truth or castration “and this would be in fact to reconstitute religion, as a Nietzsche cult for example, in the interest of a priesthood of parody interpreters.”²¹ Keeping this warning in mind, it may still be possible to make a few suggestions about the kind of narrativity that is at work in Zarathustra. Marxists and critical theorists from Georg Lukacs to Jürgen Habermas have read Zarathustra as an exercise in archaicizing myth to serve the interests of imperialism and irrationalism. But I want to suggest instead that it can be seen as an exemplary postmodern philosophical tale in which are inscribed an encyclopedic variety of the narrative functions of the West. It is highly textual: as written it largely effaces the speaking attributed to its chief agent. Nietzsche’s later testimony to its inspired composition may be taken as his acknowledgment that it is in many ways a dream-narrative written in response to causes at best dimly understood. Its rhetorical structure involves a strategic decentering that can function as a critique of the many efforts such as Heidegger’s to discover the true Rangordnung (order of rank) of Nietzsche’s thought. Without desiring (and certainly without the power) to foreclose other readings of Nietzsche’s polyvalent text, let me suggest that Thus Spoke Zarathustra exhibits something like a reversal and reinscription of the “four great errors” that Nietzsche finds to be generative of most narratives. These reinscriptions tend to be identified with what are usually taken to be the chief philosophical ideas of the text; and although the operations traverse all of Zarathustra they can, to some extent, be localized as dominant strategies of its four marked parts.

If it is an error of thought to seek an imaginary cause for a felt or experienced condition, that is, to create an unconscious metaphor of that condition, then it becomes clear why Zarathustra calls on his listeners in part one (and Nietzsche on his readers) to create a fiction, to dream beyond themselves of the Übermensch (or “man beyond”) rather than indulging in retroactive visions fueled by envy or ressentiment. The error of reversing the causal sequence, an operation that empowers metonymic narrative, is highlighted in Zarathustra II by the announcement that the will to power is always operative; such will is at the beginning of any sequence and so conventional sequences—Zarathustra reviews those of poets, metaphysicians, priests, and historians—can be rewritten. But the great problem for the will to power then becomes the very fact of sequentiality itself, rather than the specific narratives that are constructed by the error of reversal. The second reinscriptive strategy comes perilously close to the “great error” that consists in identifying the will as the sole cause of everything; but this error is averted in Zarathustra by the impasse that arises when the will discovers that “it cannot will backwards.” How then can the will be prevented from backtracking and producing resentful, nostalgic narratives of religious creation or of an eternal world from which we are fallen? To the error that consists in making the will the cause of everything, Nietzsche juxtaposes an ambitious reinscription of such a synecdochic program with his “most abysmal thought” of eternal recurrence. Both are totalistic programs, but eternal recurrence requires our recognizing ourselves as “not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be.” But this thought, which is the hinge of part three of Zarathustra, is also a call to will that our experiences recur eternally since they will do so in any case. It is the paradox of willing our fate which replaces the error of voluntarism and, in doing so, points the way to a more pluralized narrativity. An allied error discussed by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols consists in hypostatizing the individual consciousness as center of activity. This error is opposed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and especially in its fourth part, by a thoroughgoing carnivalization and ironic pluralization of agents and voices. The higher men who come to Zarathustra’s cave are themselves often doubles (two kings, Zarathustra’s Shadow, the Enchanter who parodies both himself and Wagner). Zarathustra not only has a Shadow, but announces himself to be in principle his own double, declaring himself to be the Hanswurst or buffoon of his carnival. These doubling, reversing, pluralizing strategies, which have been so acutely described by Mikhail Bakhtin, render the identity of the individual self radically indeterminate and, along with the reinscriptions of the other errors, they counteract the philosophical obsession with establishing an order and hierarchy of concepts. In their public transformation of philosophers and their topoi they reduce these concepts to an economy of philosophemes.

It would be a mistake, I think, to assume that Nietzsche is always in conscious control of the narrative of Zarathustra, or even that we really know what we mean when we talk about a unitary author or self who could serve as a directing consciousness for texts that bear his name. This is the case not simply because Nietzsche was an odd person or mad or deliberately seeking to create a fascinating literary surface rather than undertaking what Hegel called the labor of the concept. Because of his crucial place at the fault-lines of a number of significant intellectual and cultural conjunctions we are able to see the various uses and abuses to which Nietzsche’s narratives and his other texts have been subjected. But the general situation of the philosophical text as a text, a piece of writing that can have no uniquely privileged meaning, if it is truly general, would have to have consequences for the reading and interpretation of the works of many writers and many traditions. This has been the burden of Derrida’s reading of texts from Plato to Heidegger and it could, I think, be extended to the classics of the British empiricist tradition which not only seem to resist such analysis, but to empower an apparently quite different conception of philosophy.

Nietzsche then cannot be represented as a founding father of postmodern philosophy (or even as its matriarch, as some Derrideans might suggest), if founding supposes self-knowledge. There is no equivalent in Nietzsche’s thought of the kind of inaugural act that Kant and Husserl, for example, attribute to originary thinkers in science and philosophy; such an act would open up a tradition and would have to be rethought by anyone who wanted to reactivate that tradition. There are, however, two possible candidates that might serve as the enabling foundation of a Nietzschean tradition and that might be the foundation of a Nietzschean metanarrative. The first would be the thought of eternal recurrence, a thought that never seems to be absent from any Nietzschean text. I want to discuss eternal recurrence within the narrative context of Zarathustra. But in a preliminary way it might be asked (this is in effect the question of the French Nietzscheans): why should we suppose that there is a single idea of eternal recurrence? To assume that we are dealing here with a unitary thought which is to be assimilated to other supposed unitary great thoughts of the philosophical tradition would beg almost all of the questions that Nietzsche raises. Even if we emphasize that what is important is thinking the eternal recurrence through for oneself, it is still not clear that such thinking could have an inaugural or foundational role. For the consequences of the thought are precisely to decenter the self who thinks it; unlike other great ideas, its own terms require us to value our ignorance of the idea as well as our knowledge of it, our forgetting it as well as remembering it. Yet if the thought of eternal recurrence could not inaugurate a tradition in this way, Nietzsche does at times contemplate a historical watershed, a new definitive marking of time that would be associated with this thought and his textualizations of it. This would be a second candidate for an inaugural role. So in his last year of writing and thinking Nietzsche comes to concentrate his attention increasingly on his project of the Transvaluation of All Values, a project which is sometimes described as the completion of a text with that title and sometimes as the world-historical epoch that the text was to usher in. The indications from Nietzsche’s notes and plans for the text are that it was to be a kind of metanarrative beginning with a critical deconstruction of Christianity (eventually published as The Antichrist), including a history of European nihilism, and ending with the philosophy of Dionysus or eternal recurrence. Yet, notoriously, Nietzsche did not complete this work, although in his last working months before his breakdown he called the one short book The Antichrist the whole of the Transvaluation; its text by the way includes a final page, only recently restored by the valiant editors Colli and Montinari, of a “Decree against Christianity,” suitable for reproduction as a wall-poster of the sort that might be used by an army of occupation. Signed “The Antichrist” and dated from “the first day of the year one (September 30, 1888 of the false system of reckoning time),” it displays that intention to “break the history of mankind into two” which forms the subject of Nietzsche’s last writings (6, 254). Nietzsche sometimes speaks with fervent anticipation of a great noon when humanity will finally reflect on itself and its purposes, a noon that will either coincide with or follow upon the transvaluation. These apocalyptic hints and promises are not the weakest of the seductive attractions that Nietzsche has exercised upon his readers. In the readings that I will be suggesting of Nietzsche’s narratives I do not want to deny the possibility of such apocalyptic themes, but I do want to put these themes in their place. That is, I want to guard against giving them the dominant status that they assume in Nietzsche’s own temptation to indulge in metanarrative in which so many readers have followed him.