Acknowledgments

As Nietzsche suggests, the roots of any intellectual project are likely to be complex, entangled, and not easily accessible to that person whom we call the author. Yet such obscurities do not lessen the sense of indebtedness that the latter feels toward the people and institutions that support or provoke his work. My own debts with regard to Nietzsche go back some way and could, without excessive punning, be called genealogical. I recall with gratitude my discovery, around the age of fifteen, of The Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil in the small but significant library that my grandfather, Leon Gleckman, had passed on to my mother, Florence Shapiro. Although I never knew that grandfather, it has been instructive to speculate on what Nietzsche might have thought about the seeds of his “wild wisdom” sprouting in a soil so different from that of “old Europe” and in a picaresque life far from the academy.

The University of Kansas supported my work with several research grants, including a sabbatical leave in 1985. The Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities invited me to spend that leave as a senior research fellow and I’m indebted to Richard Vann, the Center’s director, to the other fellows of the Center, and to others at Wesleyan for a semester of significant discussion and for responses to a draft of chapter 1. I owe much of what I’ve learned about contemporary literary and cultural theory to the stimulus of a much earlier year (1976–77) spent as a fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine. Murray Krieger and Hazard Adams were excellent hosts, Hayden White alerted me to the resources of rhetorical and tropological analysis, and Ralph Freedman offered valuable suggestions on my first attempt at a commentary on the language and action of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Since then many colleagues and students have responded to various stages of my thought and writing on Nietzsche; I’m particularly grateful to Benjamin C. Sax and Ronna Burger for critical readings. Harold Alderman read the manuscript for Indiana University Press and made thoughtful suggestions about matters of style and substance. The text has benefited from the editorial suggestions of Mary Jane Gormley at Indiana University Press.

Cindi Hodges, Janice Criss, Pam Le Row, and Beth Ridenour transformed scrawls into clean typed copy with patience and good humor at the University of Kansas; I’m also indebted to the genial work of Pat Camden and Shirley Lawrence at Wesleyan in providing the same invaluable service. My thanks to Ted Vaggalis for timely help with the index.

My wife, Lynne Margolies Shapiro, and my children Marya, David, and Rachel have been as tolerant and supportive a family as anyone who chooses to write on such topics as this could possibly expect or desire.

Earlier versions of some of this book have appeared in article form:

Chapter 5 is substantially the same as “Nietzsche’s Graffito: A Reading of the Antichrist,” in boundary 2, Spring/Fall 1981 and in Why Nietzsche Now?, Daniel O’Hara, editor (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1984).

I’m grateful to those journals and publishers for permission to use the materials here.