“Nietzschean Narratives”
I.HOW PHILOSOPHICAL TRUTH
FINALLY BECAME A FABLE
1. Jürgen Habermas, “Nachwort,” in Nietzsche, Erkentnisstheoretische Schriften (Frankfurt, 1968), p. 237.
2. Jürgen Habermas, “Critical Theory and Modernity,” New German Critique 26 (Spring/Summer 1982):22.
3. Ibid., p. 25.
4. Ibid., p. 27.
5. See Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, tr. Barbara Harlow (Chicago, 1979) and Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York, 1983); essays by a number of recent French and German writers on Nietzsche are included in The New Nietzsche, ed. David Allison (New York, 1977).
6. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), p. 31.
7. Vincent Descombes analyzes the French revolt against Hegel in Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge, 1980).
8. On Nietzsche and Schiller see Benjamin Bennett, “Nietzsche’s Idea of Myth: The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Eighteenth Century Aesthetics,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 94 (1979).
9. Such periodization is a commonplace in the literature on Nietzsche. A recent example is in Alan Megill’s Prophets of Extremity (Berkeley, 1985); despite the fact that Megill’s study is concerned with Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, all of whom are antagonists of Hegelian history, he continues to employ developmental and synthesizing patterns in attempting to articulate their thought.
10. Letter to Jacob Burckhardt, dated January 6, 1889 (postmarked January 5), in Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (Chicago, 1969), p. 346.
11. Werner Kaegi, Jacob Burckhardt: Eine Biographie (Basel, 1967).
12. Nietzsche, Werke (Kroner edition, 1912), XVIII, p. 248 (my translation). Cf. also Paul de Man, “Nietzsche’s Theory of Rhetoric,” in Symposium, Spring 1974: 33–51.
13. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1983), p. 187.
14. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie McDonald (New York, 1985), pp. 29–32.
15. Cf. my paper “Nietzschean Aphorism as Art and Act,” in Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, ed. J. N. Mohanty (The Hague, 1985), pp. 159–190.
16. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
17. Cf. Kenneth Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” in his A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, 1969), pp. 503–517, and Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore, 1973), pp. 31–39.
18. Georg Lukacs, “Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalism in the Imperialist Period,” in his The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London, 1980).
19. Derrida, Spurs, p. 87.
20. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche I: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York, 1979), p. 208.
21. Derrida, Spurs, p. 99.
2.METAPHORICAL OVERCOMING / METONYMICAL
STRIFE (ZARATHUSTRA I AND II)
1. References are first to the pages of R. J. Hollingdale’s translation (which I have used with some modifications), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Baltimore, 1969), and second to the pages of the Kritische Studienausgabe.
2. Harold Alderman, Nietzsche’s Gift (Athens, Ohio, 1977), pp. 18–19. See my review in Philosophy and Literature, Fall 1978: 272–274.
3. Alderman, Nietzsche’s Gift, p. 173.
4. This is the general argument of Hegel’s Aesthetics, in which poetry is the highest (most philosophical) of the arts, and drama the highest (most philosophical) form of poetry.
5. Such works are Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la métaphore (Paris, 1972); Bernard Pautrat, Versions du soleil (Paris, 1971); and Jacques Derrida, Spurs. There are a number of important essays in The New Nietzsche, ed. David Allison. There is a useful review of recent French studies of Nietzsche by Rudolf Kuenzli, “Nietzsche und die Semiologie,” in Nietzsche-Studien 1976: 263–288.
6. “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970), p. 69).
7. For a good example of such doubts about the fourth part of Zarathustra, see Eugen Fink’s Heideggerian study, Nietzsches Philosophie (Stuttgart, 1960), pp. 114–118.
8. See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor (Toronto, 1977), for a philosophical view of the rise and fall of tropology, the attempt to distinguish and define a variety of figures of speech. For a contemporary attempt to define metaphor using the techniques of transformational grammar, see Samuel Levin, The Semantics of Metaphor (Baltimore, 1977).
9. Aristotle, in considering the linguistic powers of the poet or rhetorician, says that the greatest thing is to be metaphorical. This cannot be learnt; it is a sign of genius, for it implies an intuitive perception of similarities in dissimilars. See Poetics 1459a 3–8 and Rhetoric 1412a 10.
10. Rhetoric 1407a 10; see also 1411a-b.
11. For example, see Hegel’s analysis of the transfer of bodily qualities to spiritual things (and the reverse), in Hegel’s Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (London, 1975), pp. 405–406.
12. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology,” trans. F. C. T. Moore, New Literary History 6 (Autumn 1974): 5–74.
3.HOMECOMING, PRIVATE LANGUAGE, AND
THE FATE OF THE SELF (ZARATHUSTRA III)
1. Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin’s ‘Homecoming,’ ” in Existence and Being, trans. Werner Brock (London, 1949).
2. For suggestive accounts of a distinction between identity and “being own” or belonging, see Heidegger’s Identity and Difference (New York, 1969) and Albert Hofstadter’s essay “Being: The Act of Belonging” in Agony and Epitaph (New York, 1970).
3. Heidegger discusses some of the complexity involved in accepting the animals’ account of Zarathustra as the teacher of eternal recurrence; cf. Martin Heidegger, “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” in David Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche, pp. 65–66.
4. For a concise statement and some references to the literature, cf. Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative (Bloomington, 1978), ch. 4, pp. 89–110.
5. Ibid., pp. 98–110.
6. Hegel, “Sense-Certainty: or the ‘This’ and ‘Meaning’ ” in The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York, 1977).
7. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 164.
8. Ibid., p. 165.
9. Ibid., p. 166.
10. Ibid., p. 163.
11. Ibid., p. 168.
12. Cf. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse (Ithaca, 1980). Paul de Man’s suggestion that there is a substantial but largely neglected Nietzschean thematic in Proust is relevant here; cf. his Allegories of Reading (New Haven, 1979), p. 15.
13. Cf. Pierre Klossowski, “Nietzsche’s Experience of the Eternal Recurrence,” in David Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche, pp. 107–120.
14. Republic, 586a.
15. Jacques Derrida, Spurs; cf. also my review of this book in Man and World, 1981: 428–437.
16. Eugen Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie, p. 114.
17. Martin Heidegger, “What are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1971), pp. 91–142.
4.FESTIVAL, CARNIVAL, AND PARODY
(ZARATHUSTRA IV)
1. Eugen Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie, pp. 114–115 and 118. Two significant exceptions to judgments such as Fink’s are Harold Alderman’s Nietzsche’s Gift and James Ogilvy, Many-Dimensional Man (New York, 1977). Both offer penetrating interpretations of the characters of some of the higher men in part four and of the development of its story.
2. Cf. Alderman:
“Both Zarathustra and his disciples have grown in their sense of play and so there is often in their encounters much deliberate comic dissembling. Part IV often seems a Shakespearean comedy requiring not only its own brilliance of language, but also the backdrops, the masks and the movement of a performed play. Part IV is, at bottom, a Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Nietzsche’s Gift, p. 115. While recognizing these dramatic aspects of part four, the reading in this chapter suggests that they are qualified by the diegetic (narrative) context; a genuine drama, as Plato noted, must be performed (it must be mimetic).
3. I am in disagreement, then, with Harold Alderman who although he points out that the Nietzschean self ought not to be conceived as a constant and substantial ego, still claims that “Part IV emphasizes the egocentric character of experience and understanding. Zarathustra teaches only himself: his rightful children are his own future self-creations,” Nietzsche’s Gift, p. 134. On the other hand James Ogilvy in Many-Dimensional Man has shown that part four can be read as a decentering, pluralistic allegory on both the psychological and political levels.
4. Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature IX. 13; quoted in Walter Kaufmann’s note to his translation of Beyond Good and Evil, paragraph 294. In representing Zarathustra IV as simply a satiric comparison of Zarathustra with the many higher men, none of whom can measure up to him, Fink seems to have read this part through the Hobbesian form of laughter and to have missed the other comic carnivalesque dimensions of the text. This is ironic, given Fink’s interest in play as an ontological category; cf. Eugen Fink, Spiel als Weltsymbol (Stuttgart, 1960).
5. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translation edited by Garret Barden and John Cumming (New York, 1975), pp. 110. Cf. also my essay “Gadamer, Habermas, and the Death of Art,” The British Journal of Aesthetics, Winter 1986: 39–47.
6. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 203.
7. See Jacques Derrida’s commentary on Nietzsche’s note “I have forgotten my umbrella” in Spurs, esp. pp. 123–42.
8. Cf. also The Gay Science, 89:
Now and Formerly.—What good is all the art of our works of art if we lose that higher art, the art of festivals? Formerly, all works of art adorned the great festival road of humanity, to commemorate high and happy moments. Now one uses works of art to lure aside from the great via dolorosa of humanity those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick, and to offer them a brief lustful moment—a little intoxication and madness.
The Gay Science, as its title suggests, is a carnivalesque work containing Nietzsche’s headiest mixture of prose and poetry; the latter is usually satiric or parodic. Cf. the many discussions of the transition from tragedy to comedy (e.g., 1, 153, 382–383).
9. Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s exploration of this theme (and its background in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit) in his book Hegel’s Dialectic.
10. See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, especially ch. 6. Consider Bakhtin’s description of the carnivalesque banquet and its discourse:
Free play with the sacred—this is the basic content of the symposium of the Middle Ages. This does not represent nihilism, nor the primitive enjoyment of debasing the higher level. We will not understand the spirit of grotesque feasting if we do not take into account the deeply positive element, the victorious truimph inherent in every banquet image of folklore origin. The awareness of a purely human material bodily power fills this genre. Man is not afraid of the world, he has defeated it and eats of it. In the atmosphere of this victorious meal the world acquires a different aspect; it becomes an abundant harvest, a superabundant increase. All mystical fears are dissipated. . . . The banquet speech is universal and materialistic at the same time. This is why the grotesque symposium travesties and debases the purely idealistic, mystic and ascetic victory over the world (that is, the victory of the abstract spirit). In the comic banquet there are nearly always elements parodying and travestying the Last Supper. (Rabelais and His World, p. 296)
If this account seems couched in surprisingly Nietzschean language (“nihilism,” “abstract spirit,” etc.), it may be because Bakhtin, who was originally a student of German philosophy, knew both Nietzsche and the tradition of German thought on which he so often draws.
11. Quoted in Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 69.
12. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), pp. 256–257.
13. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth, trans. Daniel Brezeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1979), p. 84.
14. The figure in motley is a Possenreiser, a jester or tomfool, and is thus distinguished from Zarathustra who plays the Hanswurst; he refers with some affection to his animals as Schalks-Narren, scamps or rogues, when he ridicules their response to his wrestling with the thought of eternal recurrence.
15. Cf. Alderman, Nietzsche’s Gift, ch. VI, “The Comedy of Affirmation.”
16. See Karl-Heinz Volkmann-Schluck, Nietzsches Gedicht “Die Wüste wächst, weh dem, der Wüsten birgt . . . ,” (Frankfurt am Main, 1958) and Walter Kaufmann’s brief discussion in Nietzsche, 4th ed. (Princeton, 1974), p. 429.
17. For a persuasive and detailed account of Nietzsche’s lyric parodies, see Sander Gilman, Nietzschean Parody (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1976). On the background of the song, see C. A. Miller, “Nietzsche’s ‘Daughters of the Desert’: A Reconsideration” in Nietzsche-Studien 2(1973): 157–195.
18. Thomas Mann, Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events (Washington, D.C., 1947), p. 7.
19. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 233–234.
The basic artistic purpose of the parodic and travestied prophecies and riddles is to uncrown gloomy eschatological time, that is, the medieval concept of the world. The parodies renew time on the material bodily level, transforming it into a propitious and merry notion. (p. 238)
5.THE TEXT AS GRAFFITO:
HISTORICAL SEMIOTICS (THE ANTICHRIST)
1. Eugen Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie, p. 34.
2. The Antichrist and Ecce Homo are often treated together in this respect. According to Kaufmann “The ending of The Antichrist and much of Ecce Homo show so strange a lack of inhibition and contain such extraordinary claims concerning Nietzsche’s own importance that, knowing of his later insanity, one cannot help finding here the first signs of it.” Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 4th ed., p. 66. Arthur Danto’s judgment is a measured one: “The Antichrist is unrelievedly vituperative and would indeed sound insane were it not informed in its polemic by a structure of analysis and a theory of morality and religion worked out elsewhere and accessible even here to the informed reader.” Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York, 1965), p. 182. Even in Danto’s view the structure of thought which saves the Antichrist is one worked out elsewhere; he would apparently agree with Fink that the book offers nothing new.
3. Ecce Homo, page following preface; 5, 263.
4. Nietzsche calls Renan his “antipodes” (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 48); the sense of opposition was made more precise a year later in a polemic on modern historiography in The Genealogy of Morals (III, 26):
I know of nothing that excites such a disgust as this kind of ‘objective’ armchair scholar, this kind of scented voluptuary of history, half person, half satyr, perfume by Renan, who betrays immediately with the high falsetto of his applause what he lacks, where he lacks it, where in this case the Fates have applied their cruel shears with, also, such surgical skill!
Renan, then, is Nietzsche’s anti-historian; it is notable that both The Genealogy of Morals and Renan’s Origins of Christianity are philosophical histories which focus on the transition from Greek and Roman culture to Christianity. Nietzsche not only narrates the events differently but does so, to speak more precisely, in a genealogical rather than a historical manner. For an anarcho-marxist assessment by a writer sometimes considered a Nietzschean, see Georges Sorel, Le Système Historique de Renan (Paris, 1905). Cf. also my essay “Nietzsche contra Renan,” History and Theory 1982: 193–222.
5. Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (New York, 1957).
6. Georg Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche (New York, n.d.), p. 85.
7. Nietzsche’s admiring references to Bauer (e.g., Ecce Homo, V 2) indicate that he may have known Bauer’s works on the history of Christianity. Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, tr. W. Montgomery (New York, 1961) is the most accessible account of Bauer’s writing and of other nineteenth-century works of this character.
8. Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus (New York, 1927), p. 45–54.
9. Ibid., pp. 62–63.
10. Ibid., p. 64.
11. Letter to Overbeck, February 23, 1887; Selected Letters, p. 261.
12. For a scholarly account of Nietzsche’s knowledge of Dostoyevsky, see the articles by C. A. Miller in Nietzsche-Studien 1973, 1975, and 1978.
13. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore, 1974), and other writings. In saying that for Derrida all writing refers back to an earlier writing, the notion of “referring back” must not be understood as implying a linear temporal sequence but as suggesting that writing always occurs within an infinitely dense texture of writing. Derrida associates his view of writing with the Nietzschean and Heideggerian critique of the linear conception of time (Of Grammatology, pp. 86–87).
14. In his classical exposition of the theory of signs in 1868 Peirce argues for the impossibility of a “first sign.” See Collected Papers (Cambridge, Mass.), vol. 5, paragraphs 213–317, and especially 259–263. Cf. also my paper “Peirce and Derrida on First and Last Things,” University of Dayton Review 17 (1984) 1: 33–38.
15. For Derrida’s celebration of undecidability see Spurs; for the understanding of such celebrations as sacrificial religious rites see “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference. There are discussions of Spurs by David Allison and David Hoy in boundary 2. For Peirce on Zeno in a semiotic context, see Collected Papers, vol. 5, pars. 333–334.
16. For Peirce’s claim that logic requires faith, hope, and charity, see Collected Papers, vol. 2, pars. 264–265, and Josiah Royce’s Hegelian extension of Peirce in The Problem of Christianity, vol. 2 (New York, 1913).
17. Derrida explains the asymptotic conception of the deconstructive process in “Structure, Science, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, pp. 278–293.
6.HOW ONE BECOMES WHAT ONE IS NOT
(ECCE HOMO)
1. The best account of the history of Ecce Homo is to be found in the Colli and Montinari, eds., Kritische-Studienausgabe (14, 454–470); see also Mazzino Montinari, “Ein neuer Abschnitt in Nietzsches Ecce Homo,” Nietzsche Lesen (Berlin, 1982), pp. 120–168.
2. For Nietzsche’s early autobiographical writings see Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in Drie Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munchen, 1956), pp. 7–154. The best collection of letters in English is Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Christopher Middleton.
3. See Montinari, “Ein neuer Abschnitt in Nietzsches Ecce Homo, pp. 145–147.
4. Jacques Derrida, Spurs, p. 99.
5. I have used Tracy Strong’s translation from his article “Oedipus as Hero: Family and Family Metaphors in Nietzsche,” boundary 2, spring/fall 1981: 327.
6. Montinari, “Ein neuer Abschnitt in Nietzsches Ecce Homo,” pp. 148–149.
7. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, pp. 170–199.
8. Ibid., p. 188.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., pp. 189–190.
11. Ibid., p. 195. Nehamas quotes a passage from Nietzsche (WS, 198) in which biographers are admonished to look for unsuspected continuities at the places where there are the greatest apparent breaks in their subjects’ careers. But looking for such continuities, one at a time, does not suggest that the emerging product is a continually more integrated one, for it is compatible with there being a series of transitions such that each one exhibits some kind of immediate before and after continuity, based on certain themes, but that each transition exhibits such continuities by developing themes not prominent in the other transitions.
12. Cf. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1974).
13. Cf. George Steiner, Antigones (New York, 1984).
14. Ernest Jones, reporting on the discussion at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on October 28, 1908, says that Freud “several times said of Nietzsche that he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was likely to live.” Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (London, 1955), vol. 2, p. 385.
15. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pp. 103–104.
16. Montinari, “Ein neuer Abschnitt in Nietzsche Ecce Homo,” p. 149.
17. For an account of Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s career see H. F. Peters, Zarathustra’ s Sister (New York, 1977).
18. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze gives a full analysis of Nietzsche as an anti-dialectical thinker.
19. Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” in The Structuralists, ed. Richard and Fernande De George (New York, 1972), pp. 169–194.
20. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 196.
21. Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI, 11. 741–748 (trans. Horace Gregory).
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