Introduction: “It’s the Women!”

1. Jacques Derrida, Éperons: Les styles de Nietzsche (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1978), p. 82. The French text and an English translation by Barbara Harlow appear en face in Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). I shall cite both editions in my text, as follows: (82/100).

2. Nietzsche had planned (see 12, 82–86) to devote an entire section of Beyond Good and Evil to “Woman in Itself,” Das Weib an sich. The section was jettisoned in favor of “Maxims and Entr’actes” and aphorisms 231–39 of “Our Virtues.” See Nietzsche’s letter to C. Heymons of April 12, 1886; see also 11, 229.

3. Derrida’s fascination with Nietzsche’s sails may have been stimulated by Jacques Lacan’s “L’instance de la lettre”; see Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 505–06. See also Bernard Pautrat, Versions du soleil: Figures et système de Nietzsche (Paris: Seuil, 1971), pp. 48–122.

4. See Spurs, pp. 32 and 103 ff. (pp. 40 and 122 ff.); the reference in Nietzsche is to 12 [62] 1881 (9, 587). What hermeneutics could never do, however, René Magritte has done: see Krell, “The End of Metaphysics: Hegel and Nietzsche on Holiday,” in Research in Phenomenology, XIII (1983), pp. 175–82. See also Nietzsche’s diagram in 22 [17] 1877; 8, 382· For a more detailed account of Derrida’s Spurs, see Krell, “A Hermeneutics of Discretion,” Research in Phenomenology, XV (1985), pp. 1–27.

5. Derrida’s aversion to the in-itself gains support from Nietzsche’s own remarks in “The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life” (UB II, 5; 1, 279–85). Here Nietzsche’s prevailing metaphor for the historian is the eunuch who has been charged with the task of keeping in order the harem of world history. “To the eunuch, one woman is like another, merely a woman, das Weib an sich, eternally unapproachable” (1, 284). To the historian, polymorphously anaesthetized, the “candid, naked goddess Philosophy” is of no interest. The literary critic fares slightly better in Nietzsche’s account, inasmuch as his castration is purely symbolic: his is the general debility of the modern personality—his “critical ejaculations” are ceaseless; he lacks self-control; his vast superfluity is a sign of impotentia.

6. In addition to Derrida’s remarks on pp. 32–33 (p. 42) of Spurs, see Jacques Derrida, L’oreille de l’autre, eds. Claude Lévesque and Christie V. McDonald (Montreal: VLB Éditeur, 1982), esp. pp. 11–56, “Otobiographie de Nietzsche,” keeping in the mind’s ear these words from the Oxford English Dictionary:“Oto-, . . . ear, an element of medical and other scientific words [such as] Otography, description of the ear. “Not to mention Fundamental Otology, study of the unifold invagination of Dasein, site of the ultimate vulnerability: Claudius’ poison, according to Hamlet père, was poured “in the porches of mine ears,” and by the deceptions of Claudius, that incestuous and adulterous beast, “the whole ear of Denmark/Is . . . rankly abus’d” (1, 5). See also “tympan,” in Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), esp. pp. iv-xiii. See now also Derrida, Otobiographies (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1984).

7. Derrida would have been intrigued to find an earlier use of the image inmitten einer Brandung, in Daybreak (3, 239); here it communicates the experience of shame, an experience made famous by Sartre’s description of le regard. Nietzsche writes: “Center. The feeling that ‘I am the midpoint of the world!’ rises very strongly in us whenever we are suddenly overcome by shame; we stand there as though anaesthetized in the midst of a surf; we feel ourselves to be dazzled by an enormous eye that gazes on us, through us, from all sides.” For another use of the surf image, see 10, 497.

8. See esp. JGB, 257 (5, 205); ZGM I, 2 (5, 259); and ZGM III, 14 (5, 371).

9. On “space” in Plato, see Krell, “Female Parts in Timaeus,” in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics (New Series, No. 2, 1975), 400–21, esp. 412–14. On “undistancing,” Ent-fernung, see Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 12th ed. (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1972), section 23. Being as Entzug and Ereignis/Enteignis are discussed in many places. See esp. Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1969), pp. 44, 53, and 58. Note Derrida’s discussion in Spurs, pp. 38–39 and 95–102 (pp. 48–50 and 114–22).

10. See Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1967), “Vom Wesender Wahrheit,” sections 6–7.

11. Spurs, pp. 47 ff. (pp. 60 ff.). See also La carte postale (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1980), pp. 439–524, along with the earlier Derridean texts cited there on p. 448 n.2. An excellent source for Lacanian theory is Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, Feminine Sexuality, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982). Derrida’s reply to Lacan in La carte postale, so unsatisfying as regards the crucial question of desire, requires a careful reading of Lacan, Écrits, esp. pp. 11–61; 493–528; and 855–77.

12. See Spurs, p. 75 n. 1 (pp. 148–50) and p. 89 (p. 108). The themes introduced here are pursued in Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht: Différence sexuelle, différence ontologique,” in Heidegger, ed. Michel Haar (Paris: Cahiers de L’Herne, 1983), pp. 419–30. An English translation appears in Research in Phenomenology, XIII (1983), pp. 65–83. See also Christie V. McDonald’s interview with Derrida, “Choreographies,” in Diacritics, XII (Summer 1982), pp. 66–76, and Verena Andermatt Conley’s correspondence with him in Boundary 2, XII, 2 (Winter 1984), 68–93. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest that a number of Derrida’s remarks here are responses to a remarkable book (recommended to me by a reader for Indiana University Press, to whom I here express my gratitude): Luce Irigaray’s Amante marine: de Friedrich Nietzsche (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980). In the second part of her book, “Lèvres voilées,” Irigaray (see esp. pp. 110–18) reproduces those Nietzschean texts taken up into Derrida’s Spurs that I have been considering here. While appearing to make use of Derrida’s deconstruction of (male) “essentializing fetishes,” Irigaray nonetheless insists on maintaining the definite article(s): l’homme, bearer of the rigid, cadaverous phallus, veiler/violator of woman, congenitally incapable as such of embrace; la femme, sea lover, tongue and lips embracing without penetration, enjoying the most intense and innocent of pleasures outside all dismal economies of desire. Profound pleasure belongs to the “sub-sisters” alone who, disburdened of the phallus, combine in and for themselves (through “auto-affection”) “prime matter” and pure “form” (91–92). Which leaves only the question as to why such bliss must express itself in the phallogocentric language and rigid binary oppositions of metaphysics.

Chapter One: Ariadne

1. Karl Reinhardt, “Nietzsches Klage der Ariadne” has been reprinted in several collections in Germany, though I am aware of no English translation as yet. I cite the text as reproduced in Karl Reinhardt, Vermächtnis der Antike: Gesammelte Essays zur Philosophie und Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Carl Becker (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1960), pp. 310–33. See also Reinhardt’s less well-known but equally thought-provoking lecture, “Nietzsche und die Geschichte,” pp. 296–309.

2. See the notebooks collected under Mette-no. 28 (11, 297–332; cf. 14, 708–16). The Dithyrambs themselves appear in 6, 375–445; cf. 14, 513–18.

3. The definitive remark on this beating is Nietzsche’s own (JGB, 40; 5, 57–58): “There are occurrences of so delicate a kind that one does well to cover them over and disguise them behind something coarse; there are deeds of love and extravagant generosity after which nothing is more advisable than to take a stick and pummel the witness: that way you becloud his memory.“

4. It is precisely here that Heidegger’s 1937 lecture course (“Eternal Recurrence of the Same”) makes reply. See esp. sections 4, 8, and 9 of M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 28–31 and 49–69.

5. See, for example, Twilight of the Idols, 6, 117–18.

6. Compare to 6, 160 the much earlier statement, 8 [14] 1883, at 10, 334–35.

7. Published in Paris by the Presses Universitaires de France in 1962. I shall cite this edition by page number in my text. An English translation by Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983) is now available.

8. Recall the “aria” sung by the earthshaker in The Gay Science (see pp. 6–7, above). It is just as well that Deleuze refuses to play, inasmuch as the aria of Ari-ane would be entertainment fit for a king—at the “Ass Festival” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part IV. On the origins of the name Ariadne-Ariagne, see W. F. Otto, Dionysos: Mythos und Kultus (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1933), p. 166.

9. On the “spider,” see Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la métaphore (Paris: Payot, 1972), pp. 101–06 which however does not take up the arachnoid thread of Ariadne. On the questions of woman, sensuality, and death in Nietzsche, see chapter 8 of Kofman, Nietzsche et la scène philosophique (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 10/18, 1979), pp. 265, 269–70, and 285–99.

10. See chapter 3, “Pana,” p. 55, below. Luce Irigaray is eloquent in her rejection of merely “mirrored” affirmation; see Amante marine, pp. 60—62, 79, 125, 201, and elsewhere.

11. Bernard Pautrat, Versions du soleil, pp. 325–26, finds the figure of Ariadne most resistant to philosophical interpretation: she is the guiding thread of embodiment, of the human body as such, of overdetermination, excess, unconscious drives, and desire. Note also the importance of Ariadne and the Labyrinth for Eckhard Heftrich, Nietzsches Philosophie: Identität von Welt und Nichts (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1962), esp. Part I.

Chapter Two: Corinna

1. Compare with what follows the remarks by Bernard Pautrat in Versions du soleil: on renouncing the search for “pure” parents of tragedy, p. 87; on tragedy itself as the fold orpleat (pli) of bisexuality, pp. 118–20; and on Dionysos himself(?) as the mother of tragedy, passim.

2. The classic source for all such questions is of course Otto’s Dionysos: Mythos und Kultus. On the question of Dionysos and woman, see esp. chapters 15 and 16. Yet Otto is so anxious to deny an assertive, aggressive sexuality of Dionysos that he winds up in a curiously inverted phallocentrism: he celebrates as the “genuinely female” nature the maternal traits of nurture—mothercare—and deprives woman of intense erotic desire (161–62). On the question of Dionysos’ “oriental” character, see Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 56–57. Said says unfortunately all too little about this particular kind of orientalism.

3. Consider M, 75 (3, 72–73): “There is something female in Christianity, betrayed in the thought that “whom God loves, He chastises’.” In JGB, 46 (5, 66–67) Nietzsche refers to the “cruelty and religious Phoenicianism” of the Christian faith, rem iniscent of the “Sekaean orgies” of GT. When God is nailed to the Cross, “It is the Orient, the deep Orient, it is the Oriental slave taking vengeance on Rome and its aristocratic, frivolous tolerance, on the Roman ‘catholicity’ of belief. “See also JGB, 50 (5, 70–71) for an account of Oriental ecstasy and the sexual nature of Christian mysticism.

4. See I. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, on “the sensible imagination of affinity” (Akademie Ausgabe, pp. 177–78n.):

A question one might trace with advantage through the Enlightenment, Romanticism-Idealism, and Nietzsche (who calls Kant’s “obscurity” an “abyss of thought”), into the groping twentieth century.

5. Nietzsche’s early autobiographical materials do not appear in the ColliMontinari critical edition. See the edition by KarlSchlechta (Munich: C. Hanser, 1956), III, 96. Curt Paul Janz (Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie [Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981], I, 78–80), is right to acknowledge how rare and perceptive such admiration of Hölderlin is prior to World War I; he cites the teacher’s response to Nietzsche’s essay: “I would like to offer the author some friendly advice: stick to a healthier, more lucid, and more German poet. “Yet Janz is mistaken when he says that no trace of an influence can be ascertained in the case of Hölderlin’s and Nietzsche’s respective Empedocles fragments. The word Wiederkehr, a persistent refrain in Hölderlin’s text, should make us more cautious. It is nonetheless true that whereas Hölderlin reduces the role of woman with each successive draft, Nietzsche enhances it: Corinna will become what Panthea never was.

6. Hölderlin composed the “Frankfurt Plan” in the summer of 1797. See Hölderlin Werke und Briefe, ed. Friedrich Beissner and Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1969), 11, 567. I have been unable to discover any indication that Nietzsche knew of Matthew Arnold’s magnificent Empedocles on Etna, first published in 1852, then suppressed by the author in the 1853 edition of his Poems. Arnold suppressed the play because of its dispiriting quality, the failure of its suffering to find a “vent in action.” Arnold’s retrospect on the play is highly reminiscent of Hölderlin’s “Plan” and foreshadows much in Nietzsche’s treatment of the same subject. In the Preface to the 1853 Poems Arnold writes: “I intended to delineate the feelings of one of the last of the Greek religious philosophers, one of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus, having survived his fellows, living on into a time when the habits of Greek thought and feeling had begun fast to change, character to dwindle, the influence of the Sophists to prevail. Into the feelings of a man so situated there entered much that we are accustomed to consider as exclusively modern; how much, the fragments of Empedocles himself which remain to us are sufficient at least to indicate. What those who are familiar only with the great monuments of early Greek genius suppose to be its exclusive characteristics, have disappeared; the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared: the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.” Arnold thus confirms the modernity, and perhaps even the futurity, of the ancient physician of culture. See The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1979), p. 654.—I am grateful to Gabriel Pearson for giving me Arnold to read.

7. See, for example, 7, 43. In “Schopenhauer as Educator” (UB III; 1, 361) Nietzsche argues that “for ages hence it will be important to know what Empedocles asserted of existence,” namely, his total affirmation of it. Empedocles is the “masterful, creative man.” He bears the attributes that will later be ascribed to Zarathustra: he is the “advocate” and “redeemer” of existence. Yet Empedocles’ answer to the question of existence, his total affirmation, is irremediably tragic. It echoes in the crater of Etna. In Human, All-Too-Human (no. 141; 2, 135) Nietzsche stresses the erotic nature of Empedoclean advocacy. “In all pessimistic religions the act of procreation is felt to be base in itself; yet this feeling is by no means universal among human beings. Not even the judgment of all pessimists is the same in this regard. Empedocles, for example, recognizes nothing shameful, demonic, or sinful in any erotic matters. In the vast meadow of misery he sees but one medicinal, hope-dispensing appearance: Aphrodite. She alone serves as guarantor of the fact that conflict does not prevail eternally, that the scepter is finally handed on to a milder daimon.” Finally, compare Nietzsche’s account of Parmenidean Aphrodite (as cited in Fr. 12) in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, section 9 (1, 838–39).

8. As philological fate would have it, the Colli-Montinari Kritische Gesamtausgabe does not contain such lecture material, inasmuch as it pertains to Nietzsche’s philologica. See the Grossoktavausgabe (Leipzig: A. Kröner, 1913), XIX, 189–201.

9. Gaston Bachelard comments on this passage: “So why did Nietzsche report that ‘Empedocles remembered being . . . boy and girl’? Does this astonish Nietzsche? Doesn’t he see in this Empedoclean memory a token of the depth of meditation of one of the heroes of thought? . . . Does this text help us descend into the unfathomable depths of the human? . . . Is it by reliving the times when the philosopher was ‘boy-girl’ that we shall discover a line of inquiry for ‘analyzing’ the virility of the super-human? Ah! really what are philosophers dreaming of?” See The Poetics of Reverie, tr. Daniel Russell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 59.

10. For the first group of plans see 5 [116–18] 1870–71; 7, 125–26. For the second group see 8 [30–37] 1871–72; 7, 233–37. For the third, 9 [4] 1871; 7, 269–71. Perhaps the only interesting feature of the third plan is the fact that “Corinna” there becomes an aged noblewoman—who has a daughter called “Lesbia.“

11. Nietzsche himself had access to S. Karsten, Philosophorum Graecorum Veterum . . . Operum Reliquiae (1835), as did Matthew Arnold. (Nietzsche cites Karsten, for example, in his lecture notes: Grossoktavausgabe, XIX, 193–94.) Karsten (ii 24–25) reports as follows: “So there is said to have been a woman of Acragas, whose name they also record—Hermippus reported that she was called Pantheia—who had stayed several continuous days . . . without breath or heartbeat, differing from a corpse only in that some heat remained around the middle of her body. Empedocles restored the life, breath and health of this woman, who had been given up by doctors and mourned for dead. “Cited in Poems of Matthew Arnold, pp. 160—61.

12. Hölderlin himself uses the word Wiederkehr, “recurrence,” as well as Wiedergeburt, “rebirth.” (See the Insel edition, II, 500, 536–37, and 560.) Empedoclean rebirth will not become eternal recurrence until a decade has elapsed; but woman, as nature, will have been abiding all the while. Reverting to the earlier point: the Faustian character of this note becomes apparent when we read a sketch that appears several pages before the Empedocles plans (7, 118): “Empedocles is the purely tragic human being. His leap into Etna occurs because of—the drive to knowledge! He longed for art, yet found only knowledge. But knowledge makes Fausts. “The last phrase suggests both that the drive to knowledge is Faustian and that it is threatening: jemandem Fäuste machen means to threaten with fists. And Dionysian excess? The next three lines of the note read: “The festival and the tragic worldview./The tragic woman./Sexual love in tragedy.”

Chapter Three: Pana

1. See Nietzsche (Pfullingen: G. Neske, 1961), I, 323; English translation, Volume II, p. 67.

2. Curt Paul Janz (II, 223–24) cites the influence of the Empedocles motif not only on the planned Zarathustran drama but also on the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra itself. “Even though Nietzsche did not choose Empedocles as the title of his work, this Presocratic figure and his legacy nonetheless hover over Nietzsche’s impressions: the intertwining of natural science, Ionian nature philosophy, and Pythagorean-Eleatic mysticism.” Janz stresses the importance of this early Greek influence on the form and style of Zarathustra as well. He records that the very first commentary on the book, that of Gustav Naumann, from the years 1899–1901, drew attention to these matters, “seeing in Nietzsche’s Empedocles fragment nothing less than the prototype of Zarathustra.” Finally, Janz elsewhere (II, 381–82) speculates that the plans we are about to examine reflect Nietzsche’s failure to achieve for Zarathustra a telos “such as Empedocles had found,” that is, a death that would express a particular doctrine and way of life.

3. See the final chapter of Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche: Seine Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätze seiner Philosophie (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1971), which distinguishes two very different kinds of Übermensch and eternal return.

4. See Krell, “Descensional Reflection,” in Philosophy and Archaic Experience: Essays in Honor of Edward G. Ballard, ed. John Sallis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1982), pp. 3–12; and “Der Maulwurf/The Mole,” in Why Nietzsche Now?, ed. Daniel O’Hara (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 155–85.

5. See Sein undZeit, p. 264. Note that Nietzsche himself employs the phrase Freiheit zum Tode in 1 [43] 1882 (10, 21).

6. The third section of this song bears the title Dionysos in the manuscript. In it occurs the “toss of the dice” that so captures the imagination of Gilles Deleuze. The sixth section too radiates the Dionysian hue, is all “emerald-gold” (4, 290).

7. Karl Reinhardt too knows her name. See the note on p. 327 of his “Nietzsches Klage der Ariadne,” at about mid-page.

8. See “The Convalescent,” 4, 272; see also M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, I, 307–10; English translation, Volume II, section 8.

9. Ironically, the pages from which Pana vanishes are riddled with a recurrent refrain: Das Weib im Weibe erlösen, or freigeben: redeem, or release, or liberate the woman in woman (see 10, 516, 519, 527, 599, 604). The last reference adds the following explanation: “And may woman crave man—but not the masculine. “In a less equivocal form the refrain emerges in the text of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, “On the Attenuating Virtue” (4, 213–14) : “There is not much that attests to the man here: they therefore make their women masculine. For only the one who is man enough will redeem in woman the woman.” Nietzsche nowhere specifies what it would mean to be man enough, or over-man enough. Enough. The possibilities of dissimulation and (self-) deception here are limitless. On Deleuze’s use of “the Attenuating Virtue,” see p. 30, above.

10. The Nachlass editors have not speculated on the meaning of the number 30 after each phrase of the plan.

11. Note that the above plan for Part IV originates in autumn, 1883, before Part III itself is composed. Hence the plans for Part III go on.

12. See Bernard Pautrat, “Nietzsche médusé,” in Nietzsche aujourd’hui? (Paris: UGE 10/18, 1973), 1, 9–30. The final three pages of Pautrat’s lecture would have to be rewritten in order to absorb an enormous range of distances and differences—some of them introduced by Rodolphe Gasché’s versatile “Archiloque,” Nietzsche aujourd’hui? I, 204–08.

Chapter Four: Calina

1. Reinhardt (332) is correct when he asserts that the poem “Venice,” in which these words appear (see Ecce Homo, 6, 291), is thus much older, at least in inspiration, than interpreters have often claimed.

2. See Krell, “Female Parts in Timaeus,” p. 401. Even the god Dionysos is so ravaged: Pentheus (The Bacchae, I.236) rebukes him for ὄσσοιϛ χάριτας ’Αφροδίτης ἔχων, “having in his two eyes the ravishments of Aphrodite.” On the “bitch sensuality,” die Hündin Sinnlichkeit, see also 10, 47: “The bitch sensuality, who craves a bite of flesh, knows how to beg very nicely for a bite of spirit. “The original passage in the ms. of ASZ, crossed out at some stage, read (14, 666): “Sensuality comes around like a dog that wants a bite of flesh—even in the most intellectual kinds of comportment between the 2 sexes.” In Eric Blondel’s “Nietzsche: Life as Metaphor, “an attempt is made to equate the body with “the father,” murdered and repressed. But is not precisely this—the mother? See David B. Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (New York: Delta, 1977), pp. 154–56. Nor will it do to allow this note to end without observing that the bitch sensuality hounds the Hellenic-Hebraic-Christian tradition from beginning to end, from Genesis to Apocalypse, from Timaeus, Paul (bonum est homini mulierem non tangere), Tertullian (mulier est templum super cloacam), and Augustine (tenaciter alligabar ex femina) to the famous case of Jean-Jacques—as discussed by Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), pp. 207–26. To such an extent that one is tempted to believe that the entire history of writing and reading hinges and unhinges on the question of sensuality, death, and woman.

3. The word Entsprungen encapsulates the entire ambiguity: “leapt away from” myself, but also “descended from” or “engendered by” myself.

4. See the famous Jules Bonnet photograph of Paul Rée, Nietzsche, and Lou (taken in Lucerne during May of 1882), discussed by janz at II, 130. R. Hinton Thomas discusses Nietzsche’s “whip” in the Appendix to his Nietzsche in German Politics and Society, 1890–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 132–40.

5. See p. 39 above. A far more earnest reading of “Daughters,” but one that leaves out of account the doubling I wish to emphasize, may be found in C. A. Miller, “Nietzsche’s ‘Daughters of the Desert’: A Reconsideration,” in Nietzsche-Studien, Bd. 2 (1973), pp. 157–95. See esp. pp. 175–78, 183, and 190.

6. Ariadne’s dream is reported at 10, 433: “Dionysos on a tiger: the skull of a goat: a panther. Ariadne dreaming: ‘Abandoned by the hero, I dream the over-hero.’ To say nothing of Dionysos.” See also Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, “On the Sublime,” which alludes throughout to the hero Theseus as the sublime one. At 4, 152 we read: “For this is the secret of the soul: only when the hero has abandoned her does another approach her in dreams—the over-hero.”

7. Although Nietzsche most often takes the part of Dionysos, to have the laugh of Ariadne, this is not always the case. The shameless god is not always Nietzsche’s peer. In the following note, from the years 1885–86 (12, 76 and 178), the narrator resembles Ariadne more than anyone else—an Ariadne not yet sardonic, not yet the doom of heroes:

8. As Pierre Klossowski has done, with great sensitivity. See the final three sections of Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969), pp. 251–367, “Consultation with the Paternal Shadow,” “The Convalescent’s Loveliest Invention,” and “Euphoria in Turin.”

Appendix: The Principal German Texts

1. Die Käfer may actually be beetles or lady-bugs; but I am supposing they are “young girls,” “pretty little things.”

2. An alternative translation:“. . . and, dissolving science, he turns it against itself.” The sich selbst is difficult to interpret. Geneviève Bianquis, in F. Nietzsche, La naissance de la philosophie à l’époche de la tragédie grecque (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), p. 150, reads: “. . . abolissant la science et se condamnant lui-même.”

3. Note the masculine form (“Ein Freund”), surprising in the present context.

4. Because of their central importance for my own work, all eight fragments, at 7, 233–37, should be examined. Here I reproduce only those portions cited in my text.

5. Gegen may of course mean either that Corinna walks toward Empedocles or that she now opposes him. Cf. “Dionysos gegen den Gekreuzigten. . . .”

6. Underscored several times—and utterly baffling!

7. The word ihre is difficult to interpret in the absence of any context: it may mean “their” soul and skin, if these be collective nouns; “your” is unlikely, because of both the lower-case i and the familiar form euch below. I therefore read it as “her” soul, “her” skin. But whose, hers?

8. The plan appears here unabridged, whereas in my text a number of sentences have been deleted.

9. Perhaps the best commentary on this equivocal exclamation is the fragment cited on p. 65, above: 16 [8] 1883; 10, 500.

10. Is it already clear to Nietzsche by the autumn of 1887 what form this Klage will take? Has he already an eye and ear on the “Magician’s Song”? And is the Ariadne of this Satyrspiel one who could lament? “Ich bin meines Mitleidens müde. . . .”