CHAPTER ONE

Ariadne

ACCORDING TO KARL REINHARDT, Nietzsche’s Dionysos Dithyrambs are songs of inner destiny: they express the tragic conflict of opposing forces in Nietzsche.¹ These “voices” come to speak in Nietzsche’s poetry after the mid-1880s “pluralistically, dialogically”; they are multivalent, equivocal, and contradictory (312). Yet the only one of the Dionysos Dithyrambs (sketched for the most part in the autumn of 1884, collected and published during the last days of Nietzsche’s wakeful life²) that is truly Dionysian in content is “The Plaint of Ariadne,” Klage der Ariadne. And even here the Dionysian symbolism is imposed on an older poem only in the last days of 1888 or the first days of 1889. The first public appearance of the poem is as the song of “The Magician” (or “Sorcerer” or “Wizard”: der Zauberer) in the fourth and final part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (4, 313–17).

As Reinhardt begins to compare the two published texts (313) the preposterous facts of the case emerge: Nietzsche has changed the sex of the singer, altered the gender of the narrative or incantatory voice of the poem. This change, along with a number of alterations in the prosody (the length of the lines and rhetorical periods is dramatically reduced), totally transforms the impact of the poem. (An important further alteration is the addition of a coda in which the god Dionysos himself appears on the scene.) The magician is—and sounds like—a yammering ham actor, a half-Christian, half-Romantic God-seeker, who implores his “unknown God.” Moreover, his histrionics are—and sound as though they are—faked and contrived: the wizard turns out to be one of those poets who lie too much. When the magician’s whining is finally over, Zarathustra employs the techniques of our best literary critics: he pummels him with a stick.³

Reinhardt’s question is how Nietzsche in 1888 could have placed the wizard’s undignified hue and cry in the mouth of Ariadne, to whom no one would ever dare take a stick, and he surmises that this bewildering event—unparalleled, he insists, in the history of literature—betrays something of enormous importance. “The change of name would seem enigmatic, bizarre, nonsensical, if it were not possible to trace it back to a more general process, a metamorphosis, a destiny in Nietzsche’s entire philosophy of the later period, the period after Zarathustra” (315).

Before proceeding, we might try to hear the difference in impact between these two all but identical poems. We will forgo a close comparison of “The Magician’s Song” and the “Plaint of Ariadne,” which vary only slightly in their appearance on the page. We shall try something else instead: we shall try to put the following words in the mouths, first, of a doddering male histrion, and second, of a beautiful, abandoned woman:

A wizard blasted by lightning is a mere parody of Hölderlin’s destiny; a woman so struck is Hölderlin’s august and tragic Semele. A toothless sorcerer writhing on the ground is sheer burlesque; a breathtaking heroine, twisting, tortured, is no laughing matter.

Yet one magnificent woman is not another, and it is time to complicate the picture still further. Although Reinhardt is unaware of it, the fact is that the transformation of wizard to woman is the second change the poem underwent. In its original form the plaint was sung by a woman, a woman in childbirth; so that the change from magician to maid is actually a restoration of sorts. Not surprisingly, the poetic fragments in question (see especially 28 [9, 12, and 27] 1884; 11, 301–03; 310) manifest a split in point-of-view. “Who are you waiting for . . . you despairing one . . . ah, how you lament!” says one fragment (my emphases). But then: “Oh, warm me! love me . . . .”

In the twelfth fragment we read the phrase Qual des Schaffens, “the travail of creation.” We then arrive at a poem given the number 6 and entitled, “The Poet—The Creator’s Travail.” The poet (the proper identity of the charlatan wizard) and the creator suffer in the way indicated by the poem’s original title (14, 711), Die Qual der Gebärerin, “The Travail of the Woman in Childbirth.” The number 6 designates the poem’s place in a projected collection of “Hymns to Medusa.” Medusa, who will rear her head on several occasions during these postponements, making matters congeal.

The title Qual der Gebärerin emerges four years later in Twilight of the Idols (1888; 6, 159). The context there is the tradition of orgiastic ritual in ancient Greece. (It is a tradition we will confront in chapter two, “Corinna,” during our discussion of The Birth of Tragedy, even though Nietzsche himself postponed discussion of it until the late 1880s.) Such rituals reenact “the eternal recurrence of life” and thus form the core of the Dionysian and Eleusinian mysteries. The enigmas of sexuality harbor the symbols of Greek piety as such, whether these be the phallus or any other “particulars” of procreation, pregnancy, and birth:

Karl Reinhardt now pursues (316–18) the multiple figures and voices of the sundry Dionysos Dithyrambs, especially the voices of overcoming and submission. In and after Thus Spoke Zarathustra these voices achieve supreme consonance, whatever conflicts there may be. For both the genealogist and the “Dionysian philosopher” alike, overcoming is always a self-overcoming; the domain of the hunt is always the home of the hunter himself; the measure of the prize is always in pounds of the hunter’s own flesh. Reinhardt thus resists the temptation to trace the conflicts of Nietzsche’s “inner drama” or the “riddle of the duplicity in him” back to some doctrine of “split personality” or to Nietzsche’s “Protestant legacy” (320–21). He tries to understand instead how Nietzsche is able actually to speak with the voice of woman, the voice in the throat of woman. And he tries to understand why this should be necessary.

For Reinhardt, the crucial text is Nietzsche’s “Philosophy of the Future,” that is to say, Beyond Good and Evil, and particularly its concluding sections. Here Dionysos is no longer the passive victim of joy and suffering but the active “tempter-god.” Here, according to Reinhardt, a new world is in the making. Not the world of Welt-Spiel but the “primal tragedy-pluscomedy” of the god Dionysos. Not that the innocence and joy of Becoming are abandoned for the sake of Being: Nietzsche’s “hymn of invocation” to Dionysos (JGB, 295) radiates golden laughter. Dionysos is “a tempter-god and born Pied Piper of the conscience,” a god of “allurement” whose generosity causes his followers to become “richer in themselves, newer than before, freshly opened, warmed by a thawing wind that harkens to every word,” more fragile than ever before “yet full of hopes that as yet have no name, full of new will and flow, turnings-away and eddyings” (5, 237). Precisely in the years 1885–86, after the sunburst of Zarathustra, Nietzsche envisages a return to his own Dionysian origins. To a list of his published works drawn up early in 1885 (11, 351) he adds the title, “Dionysos, or: The Sacred Orgies.” At the same time he begins to ruminate on his first-born, The Birth of Tragedy, a book possessed of “an intellectuality that works on the senses” (11, 357). These ruminations will of course culminate in the famous “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” of 1886. “In the meantime,” notes Nietzsche, referring to the years 1872 to 1885, the crucial period for these postponements, “I have learned a great deal, really too much, about this god’s philosophy; and, as I said, from mouth to mouth [N.B.: not from mouth to ear]—I, the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysos” (5, 238). Reinhardt makes much of this new role for the god, Dionysos philosophos, a role Nietzsche himself celebrates as something “secret, new, alien, marvelous, uncanny” (5, 238):

Holding forth in the same style, Nietzsche informs us that he has had conversations with the god, troublesome conversations, inasmuch as Dionysos flaunts his glory in unaccustomed ways, feeling no need to clothe his nakedness.

Whether we will want to read these ironic and disingenuous accounts of Nietzsche’s chats with the insolent, lascivious godhead in the way Reinhardt does (321–23), namely, as Nietzsche’s farewell to Zarathustra-the-godless and embrace of a new theology and mystery religion, is surely questionable, whatever Reinhardt’s own assurances. “There is no doubt about it,” Reinhardt insists: “Dionysos-as-philosopher is a preliminary taste of a new myth, one that replaces, cancels, and surpasses Zarathustra’s ‘overman’ ” (323). Reinhardt’s principal grounds for his thesis concerning the radical change in Nietzsche’s thinking after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, grounds we shall have to test in chapter three, “Pana,” are the plans surrounding that very book. According to Reinhardt, these plans betray the fact that whereas Zarathustra was originally conceived of as one who goes down tragically and ineluctably, he eventually becomes one “who contentedly goes over,” and perhaps even upward, into an open future. Zarathustra is ultimately no Untergehender, says Reinhardt, but a Hinübergehender.⁴ After 1885 Nietzsche therefore requires another, more tragic avatar. Hence the “Plaint of Ariadne.”

Alas, the epiphany of Dionysos in that poem turns out to be boundlessly disappointing. For after establishing the pathos of Ariadne’s torment the poem ushers in a dandyish Dionysos who contents himself with a few sententious remarks. Even though Ariadne has the god’s ear, Dionysos dispenses his unsolicited advice and appropriates her Labyrinth. What he lacks is not shame but style.

Reinhardt rightly invokes the “Ass Festival” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part IV, and the adventavit asinus of Beyond Good and Evil (aphorism 8). He might also have mentioned Nietzsche’s own pirating of the lines “Ask for a lot . . . /and say little” for one of his cheeky “Seven Little Maxims on Woman” (JGB 237; 5, 174): “It says a lot, yet is quite still—that’s thin ice for an ass named Jill.” Yet no such “scholarly” references rescue the “Plaint.” Quite the reverse. When Dionysos arrogates the Labyrinth to himself, leaving Ariadne with a clever word stuck in her ear, all is displaced in a satyr-play which for all its forced jollity is woefully out of place, meager, and embarrassing. Whatever Nietzsche’s vision of Dionysos and Ariadne may be, concedes Reinhardt (331), all communication of it fails: Die Sprache versagt sich, the language refuses to speak, botches its own telling, squanders its powers. By 1888 Nietzsche has stopped writing poetry and begun to legislate, hammer, and annihilate. Reinhardt comments on Nietzsche’s use of language in the late 1880s as follows:

Nevertheless, it is not the failure that Reinhardt wishes to stress. For Nietzsche’s effort remains astonishing, the effort Reinhardt throughout his article calls die Umtaufe, “the rechristening” of the magician—which of course is his dechristening and radical transmutation into Ariadne. If Dionysos disappoints, Ariadne enthralls. For what engages our attention is not simply the fact that “a feminine is inserted in place of a masculine” (326) but the possibility that a metamorphosis is occurring in Nietzsche’s thinking as a whole. That the butterfly withers in the chrysalis no one would deny. Yet precisely why that development is thwarted, why the transition to Ariadne in agony is postponed again and again, is the question we must sustain. If we now allow the most famous passages on Dionysos and Ariadne in Nietzsche’s works to pass in review, and then turn to the less familiar jottings in the notebooks, we may be able to deepen that question as well.

Immensely important for this question are Nietzsche’s remarks—to which I can do no justice here—on the psychology and physiology of Dionysian rapture, Rausch.⁵ Nietzsche contrasts Apollinian “rapture of the eye” with Dionysian ecstasy; the latter is total rapture, “metamorphosis” whole and entire. Mimicry, dramatic involvement, histrionics, and something at least resembling hysterics are its earmarks. To the observations made earlier on the “travail of the woman in childbirth” Nietzsche adds that the psychology of orgiastic experience provides “the key to the concept of tragic feeling” (6, 160). Not the catharsis of fear and pity typifies tragedy, but a feeling by which one becomes oneself “the eternal joy of Becoming” as well as the joy of “annihilation.”⁶

The same cluster of themes emerges in EcceHomo. In the book’s Preface Nietzsche introduces himself as “a disciple of the philosopher Dionysos” and states his preference for satyrhood over sainthood (6, 258). In his account of The Birth of Tragedy he proclaims himself “the first tragic philosopher,” one whose tragic wisdom (the wisdom of Heraclitus or, we might add, of Empedocles) enables him “to transpose the Dionysian into a philosophical pathos” (6, 312). Perhaps such pathos resembles the pathos of distance, inasmuch as the Dionysian unites joy in birth and in annihilation, thus going the distance between these opposites.

Yet it is in his retrospect on Thus Spoke Zarathustra that Nietzsche has a great deal to say about Dionysos. The Dionysian “here became supreme deed,” because Zarathustra was not only about Dionysos but, as Nietzsche’s analysis of inspiration indicates (6, 339–42), of Dionysos. As a conjunction of radical opposites, Zarathustra feels himself to be “the supreme form of all being.”

It is difficult to demur from Reinhardt’s judgment—indeed a kind of consensus rules here in Nietzsche interpretation, where consensus is exceedingly rare—that Nietzsche’s performance of the “no” began to consume more and more of him after Zarathustra, began to smother the “yes.” Later in Ecce Homo (6, 366) we find Nietzsche portraying his “Dionysian nature” strictly in terms of “the joy in annihilation,” in a style whose bravado is reminiscent of no one so much as Pentheus. Pentheus quitting Thebes, under way to his own peculiar rechristening. The bravado goes hand-in-hand with facetiousness concerning woman, woman-in-itself, “eternal” woman.

Passages like this one impale us on the horns of a dilemma, one that Nietzsche himself, lest he be adjudged “medi-cynical,” never confronts directly, never elucidates. The incomplete woman, the “botched” (verunglückte) female who cannot be made pregnant and thus defused and domesticated, the castrating woman, Nietzsche abhors; yet the “complete” or “perfect” woman, das vollkommene Weib, who is eminently eligible and who has what it takes, tears apart and devours. Whether she is publicist or tigress, Maud Gonne behind either of her faces, the outcome is the same. Hence the terrific recoil of the word Maenad here: Nietzsche celebrates a Dionysian philosophy that would banish the flute girls and persecute the Maenad worshipers! The facetiousness and forced jollity of the style perhaps betray the fact that Nietzsche perceives the redoubtable double jeopardy of his own situation. In the very passage that disperses the Maenads Nietzsche reveals the goal and essence of the philosophical idealism he opposes as the “poisoning” of the “good conscience and the naturalness in sexual love,” the same naturalness that instigated horror in “us artificers.” He refers his reader to Article Four of his “Proscription of Christianity” (6, 254; 307):

Yet Nietzsche’s most candid and lucid statement concerning woman and sensual love—to pretend for a moment that candor and lucidity might ever suffice here—brings him as close to the Christ as he ever came. Beyond Good and Evil, number 269 (5, 224–25):

Martyrdom is the refrain that echoes in the mouths of both the sorcererpoet and Ariadne. Here Nietzsche’s writing on love—human love, womanly love, sensual love—brings him closer to death, the emblem of the Crucified, than to Dionysian life. Here no bravado, nothing for show. “Such painful things,” set off by caesurae, in distantiation and displacement, are the very stuff of postponements.

In the final two sections of the retrospect on Zarathustra in Ecce Homo we find an equally insightful yet more affirmative Nietzsche. It is not surprising that the leading figure of these passages is neither the Crucified nor Dionysos but Ariadne. During the winter of 1882–83 Nietzsche had jotted the following note (10, 125):

And we know that the manuscript of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, had as the title of the episode now called “On the Great Longing” (which begins, “O my soul . . . ”) the name Ariadne. We also know that preceding the words of the title “The Other Dance Song” appeared the rubric Vita femina (14, 324). By autumn of 1888, when Nietzsche composes Ecce Homo, Ariadne is omnipresent. “In the midst of martyrdoms,” Mitten in Martern, writes Nietzsche in “Why I Am So Wise” (6, 265), applying to the story of his own illness the vocabulary of Ariadne’s lament. In the sections immediately following his description of the Zarathustra-type Nietzsche brings forward Zarathustra’s “Nightsong” as an exemplum of Dionysian dithyramb. He calls it a plaint or lament, eine Klage, indeed of one who is “condemned not to love” (6, 345). The lament emanates a “divine tenderness” and incandesces with the very hue of Dionysos-Ariadne: Nietzsche refers to the dithyramb’s “emerald felicity.” The opening lines of “The Nightsong”:

“Nothing like this was ever poetized, felt, or suffered before: thus suffers agod, a Dionysos” (6, 348), Nietzsche exclaims. Yet we recall that in “Plaint of Ariadne” Dionysos does not suffer at all; the travail is Ariadne’s, and in response to it the god dispenses clever maxims. The cleverest of words, “I am your Labyrinth,” is cleverest because it hides what the labyrinthine human being seeks always and everywhere, cleverest because it almost convinces us that the god answers his own question and is without need. “The Nightsong” is not so clever. “The answer to such a dithyramb of solar solitude, of loneliness in light, would be Ariadne. . . . Who apart from me knows what Ariadne is!”

The answer to Dionysian suffering is not at all the smug Dionysos of the coda but mortal Ariadne herself. When the retrospect on Zarathustra closes with the command “Become hard!” (the very command that comes to dominate the plans for Thus Spoke Zarathustra, discussed in chapter three, “Pana,” below), we do not know whether Ariadne smiles or frowns. Yet even if she smiles, it will have been the rueful smile of compassion tinged with contempt.

Karl Reinhardt invites us to consider two very different kinds of failure in Nietzsche’s Ariadnic project. On the one hand, he asserts that Nietzsche’s notion of a Dionysian philosophy is reminiscent not so much of Heraclitus and Empedocles as of their “speculative, even Stoic, then Neo-Platonic transformations” (325). On the other hand, “the enigma ofthat rechristening” by which the wizard becomes Ariadne peters out in satyr-play. Dionysian philosophy remains intellectualistic, “reflexive,” and the Ariadnic mystery is “something displaced” (331). Yet these two are in fact one: displacement seeks sanctuary in reflexive interiority.

Such displacement is what these postponements are about—except that here there is no sanctuary, but only the Labyrinth. The plans for an Empedoclean drama and Zarathustran play, whether Trauerspiel or satyr-play, are themselves displacements. Displacements that keep Nietzsche on track, following the thread. In spite of himself. For the dismemberment of Dionysos Zagreus in some mysterious way leads to the travail of Ariadne.

Reinhardt adjures us not to underestimate the difficulty we will have in following this thread. We might therefore at the end of our reading of his article pause to consider one case of such underestimation—in a writer of unusual perspicacity: Gilles Deleuze, in Nietzsche et la philosophie.⁷ For Deleuze would want to reply to Reinhardt, would want to insist that Nietzsche’s philosophy of Dionysos is a resounding success, that it ably integrates the figure of Ariadne into its project.

For Deleuze, as for Reinhardt, the introduction of Ariadne into the Dionysian philosophy is of crucial importance. Deleuze argues that The Birth of Tragedy remains trapped in a “Christian-dialectical” mode of thinking, a thinking in terms of “justification, redemption, and reconciliation” (13). Nietzsche breaks free of such thought, according to Deleuze, when he replaces the dialectical pair Apollo-Dionysos with a twofold opposition, namely, Dionysos versus the Crucified, and Dionysos plus Ariadne. Deleuze is able to define the first opposition straightforwardly, since the Crucified is identified with reaction, no-saying, vengeance, and passive nihilism. The second pair, the Ariadnic complement, proves to be more recalcitrant.

In place of the antithesis of Apollo-Dionysos, Deleuze invokes “the more mysterious complementarity of Dionysos-Ariadne” (16). The reason for the substitution is that “a woman, a fiancée, is needed whenever it is a matter of affirming life” (16). Yet who is Ariadne? Deleuze traces her cosmic imagery, the emblems of divinity that Dionysos confers on her: the jewels of her crown are the night stars, constellations formed by her mate’s toss of the dice, the single coup de dés of chance and necessity (21). It is Dionysos who casts the dice of eternal recurrence; yet the mystery of Ariadne is said to be “Nietzsche’s positive secret” (23).

Deleuze cites Nietzsche’s pejorative remarks concerning Eve in The Birth of Tragedy (we shall hear them in chapter two, “Corinna,” below), but he strives to banish Eve’s shadow. “There is no Nietzschean misogyny,” he insists. “Ariadne is Nietzsche’s uppermost secret, the premier feminine power, the Anima, the fiancée who is inseparable from Dionysian affirmation” (24). We will revert to this “premier power” in a moment. But Deleuze goes on to postulate a “second” feminine power, one that embodies the negation of the first (although he refrains from using this dialectical expression): it is the “infernal, negative, and moralizing feminine, the terrifying mother, mother of good and evil, who denigrates and negates life” (24). As though in anticipation of those recently discovered pages of Ecce Homo (mentioned in the Introduction, p. 3), Deleuze identifies the “second” feminine power as “our mothers and our sisters.” Deleuze’s deduction is curious, inasmuch as Eve (wearing the mask of Lilith) is Adam’s nefarious mate, not his mother or sister. As his mate, she is more subtly destructive than the Titans, to be sure, and she is certainly difficult to contain.

Deleuze does not play with the name Ariadne as Derrida and Nietzsche do.⁸ Yet something similar and even more disconcerting happens to Deleuze’s text. Precisely at the point where he is discussing the “toss of the dice,” trying to preserve the premier feminine power from the depredations of the second, Deleuze employs a signifier that refuses to stay in place. The French Ariane is mocked again and again by an araignée, the arachnid of reason and morality, the “universal spider” of ressentiment and reaction (see 29, 31, 34–35, and 42). Whereas Deleuze wishes to gaze on the “dancing star” of Ariadne’s tiara, the araignée of interiorized cruelty weaves its dark web across Deleuze’s text.⁹

The significance of this not entirely accidental signification (Ariane/araignée) is that “genealogical critique” and “affirmative thought” are not as easy to rescue from their Christian-dialectical matrix as Deleuze hopes. He begins by stressing the fact (or hope) that genealogy’s “natural aggressivity” prevails beyond all vengefulness or reaction of any kind (3); he eventually comes to recognize, if only fleetingly, the duplicitous parentage of genealogy itself (40). Nietzsche himself never lost sight of the forked genealogy of genealogy. When Deleuze exalts Nietzschean thought as thinking “that ultimately expels all negativity” (41), and when he identifies tragic thinking as unalloyed joy of affirmation, he suppresses the ambivalence of genealogical critique—suppresses the very quality that makes it nondialectical. In Nietzsche’s career of thought, the negative opposition (or contraposition) of Dionysos and the Crucified obtains; the positive complementarity of Dionysos and Ariadne, the “Dionysian dowry,” the agony of dismemberment, is displaced and postponed.

Thus the who? question of genealogy is the tragic question par excellence. Dionysos, god of metamorphosis, is always the answer, says Deleuze: “In Nietzsche’s literary production, the admirable poem ‘Plaint of Ariadne’ expresses this fundamental rapport between a manner of questioning and the divine personage who is present beneath all the questions—the rapport between the pluralist question and Dionysian or tragic affirmation” (88). Yet if this is so, how is Deleuze or anyone else to preserve the distinction between the first and second feminine powers? What about this “fiancée” and her starry diadem? If Ariadne is sheer affirmation, what has she to complain about? Why the thousand martyrdoms? Very strange things happen to genealogy when the answer to the who? question is Ariane.

Later in his book Deleuze chastises the magician in the way Zarathustra himself does. The sorcerer is a counterfeit, a mountebank “who fabricates his suffering in order to arouse pity” (189). In a bizarre turnabout, Deleuze scolds the wizard-poet as a betrayer of Dionysos: “He seizes the song of Ariadne; he, the fake tragedian.” Whereas of course it is Ariadne who arrogates the wizard’s words. Yet Deleuze is more correct than he knows: we have seen that the earliest sketches of the sorcerer’s song attribute that plaint to a woman in childbirth. At all events, the matter at stake is a difference between two kinds of suffering, one ostentatious and complacent, the other ecstatic and creative. Ariadne’s is the “unknown joy” of the “unknown god”; her travail is wholly affirmative (199). In his eagerness to salvage affirmation from negation and nihilism, Deleuze is blithe about, and even blind to, Ariadne’s suffering. He is deaf to her keen.

The Deleuzean rhapsody of Ariane fiancée reaches its apotheosis in the last two sections of Nietzsche et la philosophie (213–22). Here Ariadne is identified as a full partner in the “double affirmation” of Dionysos-Ariadne, though surely not the senior partner. Dionysos affirms Becoming as Being; Ariadne affirms the god’s affirmation. The redoubling of affirmation is essential in Deleuze’s view. Yet the necessity of double affirmation remains as obscure as the mystery of mythic Ariadne herself. As the beloved of Theseus, the hero who represents the Higher Man, who takes up challenges and defeats monsters, Ariadne is less than her proper self (214–15):

The “second” feminine power, the monstrous power of the negative, now expands to include the role of spouse, the figure of Eve. The liberation of the woman in woman is to be something utterly new and unheard of: it is to be the very matrix of Übermensch. Yet the emancipated power of woman dons the motherliest and sisterliest of ancient masks—virgin Anima, Hagia Sophia, the “soul” with which Zarathustra, shunning his destiny, communes.¹⁰ As though Ariadne’s mate were unencumbered Geist. Deleuze calls Ariane-Anima “a second affirmation,” one that takes Dionysian affirmation as its “object.” Yet is the “second affirmation” entirely emancipated from the “second power” of woman? Merely to insist on their absolute segregation, simply to assert the affirmative power of Ariadne (“Ariadne is the fiancée, the loving feminine power,” 215), is to adopt a position hopelessly outside the Nietzschean problematic. Nietzsche could never have sustained such naiveté.

Deleuze abides by the subordination of Ariadne to Dionysos. The god teaches her his secret: “I am your Labyrinth.” Deleuze misconstrues the “Plaint of Ariadne” in such a way that it is Ariadne who puts an “appropriate word” in the god’s ear: “Having herself heard and understood Dionysian affirmation, she makes it the object of a second affirmation which Dionysos hears” (216). Thus, according to Deleuze, the play of the difference in affirmation is “elevated to the highest power” (217). However, with all negativity selected out, and with Ariadne’s purely affirmative power defined exclusively as a “mirror, fiancée, or reflection” of Dionysos, what becomes of Ariadne’s tortured and tortuous self? What of the Labyrinth, which the fragmented god too seeks and desires? How is Deleuze’s “double affirmation” to avoid the traps and trappings of dialectical thinking? When “all negativity is conquered or transmuted” (219), do we find ourselves outside dialectic or on its traditional trajectory toward reconciliation? Ariadne may well be “the unconditional fiancée of Dionysos” (220), yet is it not Nietzsche who inculcates in us suspicion concerning all things “unconditional”? And is not this fiancée a bride-to-be, a spouse, sister, and mother in the making?

The mystery of Ariadne is not so readily unraveled.¹¹ It will occasion a considerable variety of postponements, here given the names Corinna, Pana, Calina. Masks of the Ariadnic enigma. Writing of this mystery in the mid-1930s, Karl Reinhardt, as follows:

Nude Figure (Sin), 1901. Lithograph. Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of James Thrall Soby.