“Postponements”
Big books are big sins, but big books about Nietzsche are a far more pernicious affair: they are breaches of good taste. I have tried above all else to make this a little book, to be read in one or two evenings.
The book gathers together some perplexing and rarely discussed materials from Nietzsche’s literary remains and comments briefly on them. These materials surround a drama that Nietzsche early in his career planned to write but then perpetually postponed, a drama that turns on questions of woman, sensual love, and tragic death. The plans extend over the period 1870–1886, and perhaps even beyond. It is a period that embraces almost all of Nietzsche’s major publications and spawns all his principal ideas: eternal recurrence of the same, overman, will to power, genealogy, and the revaluation of all values. If I am right, Postponements focuses on the single most persistent theme in Nietzsche’s oeuvres, from the tragic thinking of his Basel period to the Dionysos philosophos of his final years. Most persistent yet never fully developed, never formulated explicitly as a doctrine or envisaged clearly as an idea. As though confrontation with the convergence of sensuality and death in the figure of woman had to be postponed for essential reasons, reasons that resisted even Nietzsche’s incomparable gifts of language and intelligence.
In order to keep my book small I have avoided all but the most meager attempts to integrate the materials on Nietzsche’s proposed drama into an interpretation of his published work, even though I hold such integration to be both possible and necessary. It might be essential to see whether and how Nietzsche’s postponements—woman, sensuality, and death—pervade his ideas and his styles. I am painfully aware of how little I have done to indicate the ways this may be so. And I have tried to be mindful throughout of the dangers involved in trespassing onto the terrain of the Nietzschean Nachlass, even if the “old hermit” himself tries to bolster the interpreter’s flagging confidence:
The hermit does not believe that there ever was a philosopher—assuming that every philosopher was at one time a hermit—who expressed his proper and ultimate opinions in books: does not one write precisely books in order to conceal what one shelters within? Yes, the hermit will doubt whether the philosopher ever could have had “ultimate and authentic” opinions at all, will wonder whether in the case of the philosopher every cavern does not have to open onto an even deeper cavern—a vaster, richer, more alien world beyond the superficies, an abyss behind all the grounds and beneath all the “foundations.” Every philosophy is a foreground-philosophy—that is a hermit’s verdict: “There is something arbitrary about the fact that precisely here he dug no deeper and set his spade aside—there is also something suspicious about it.” Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a cache, every word also a mask.
In the main body of my text I cite Nietzsche’s works from the Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), by volume and page numbers, e.g.: (7, 622). I also cite the titles of the works according to the following abbreviations, so that readers who are using other editions may also locate the relevant passages:
GT | Die Geburt der Tragödie, 1872 |
UBI-IV | Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 1873–76 |
MA | Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 1878–80 |
M | Morgenröte, 1881 |
FW | Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882 |
ASZI-IV | Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883–85 |
JGB | Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886 |
ZGMI-III | Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887 |
GD | Götzen-Dämmerung, [1888] 1889 |
AC | Der Antichrist, [1888] 1895 |
EH | Ecce Homo, [1888] 1908 |
DD | Dionysos-Dithyramben, [1888–89] 1891. |
Particularly significant fragments from the notebooks are cited by the Mette-number, followed by the aphorism number [in square brackets] and the year of composition, e.g.: (29 [5] 1873). Because reading Nietzsche’s plans and sketches in the notebooks (and translating them) is so problematic an undertaking, I have prepared an Appendix of some of the most important Nachlass texts. A dagger (†) after a reference indicates that the German text appears in this Appendix.
The graphics, which came to my attention while I was writing, are by Edvard Munch (1863–1944). I am grateful to The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Oslo Kommunes Kunstsamlinger for permission to reproduce them here.
Warm thanks to Barbara Latham, Tina Chanter, Robert Bernasconi, Helm Breinig, David Wood, John Sallis, Will McNeill, Nick Land, M. Salomé, Salomé M., Elena Sophia—and Calina.
Wivenhoe, Essex
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