of ambivalence often felt by his readers. Who has not cringed upon hearing his or her father or mother speak out of turn, and struggled to establish a distance from these first objects of love? There are, likewise, moments for many of Nietzsche’s readers when—notwithstanding their attraction to his writing—he strikes a sour note: through an unkind word about feminists or Jews or vegetarians, for instance. Furthermore, a foremost goal for Nietzsche is to give birth to philosophers in whom he engenders, like any good parent, a range of values, truths, and affects. Reading Nietzsche in terms of the parental role thus helps to explain how the relation to his text comes to be so abiding and formative for the reader, and particularly where they would seem to have good reason to be repelled by him. Curiously, Nietzsche’s philosophy especially attracts those whom it expressly excludes: women and feminists, Jewish scholars, and theorists of the political Left. I will argue that such exclusion is in fact key to how Nietzsche’s text is able to include (or “interpellate”)[9] the reader within its terms. Psychoanalytic theory of the kind elaborated after Freud by Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and, in recent years, Slavoj Žižek, is especially pertinent to examining the intersubjective dynamics of exclusion and interpellation. Drawing upon this theory, then, I will argue that the psychodynamics of inclusion and exclusion—constitutive of subjectivity, and first enacted within the family—is masterfully reiterated by Nietzsche in crafting his address to the reader.
The work of exclusion in Nietzsche’s philosophy participates in a broader dynamic between readers and texts, which we can figure as a relation of mourning. After Barthes,[10] Foucault,[11] Derrida,[12] and Plato,[13] it is understood that writing is experienced in the absence of its author; and the act of reading involves a necromantic art of resurrecting the author—the particular interpretation constructing a presence in lieu of them actually being able to speak for themselves. Nietzsche’s writing exploits this relation of reader to text, by amplifying this sense of loss. Stating that he was “born posthumously,” Nietzsche pronounces himself dead to the reader, so that reading his philosophy is tinged with an affect of grief. Hence the title Dead Letters to Nietzsche. The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary offers two explanations for the expression dead letters: the first refers to a law that “has lost its force or authority without being formally abolished.” This meaning, however, belies the real force of the dead letter, which is only apparently dead, but in fact lies in wait for the transgressor, continuing implicitly to check the actions of those whom it proscribes. As with, for instance, the sodomy laws, the dead letter is kept on the books as a reminder to some of their marginality with respect to the rest. Thus, it continues to exert the force of interpellation, and is by no means truly, but only nominally “dead.” The second sense of the term refers to “a letter that is undeliverable and unreturnable by the post office.” Not only does the dead letter fail to reach its destination, but it also cannot be returned to its sender: it has no place, and is able only to circulate aimlessly. Both definitions apply to the reader’s relation to Nietzsche, not only because his text is sown with ambiguously empowered permissions and penalties to subjugate its reader, but also, the reader’s address to Nietzsche must always miss its mark. Nietzsche has no fixed address, no position to which he can be brought to account. The best the commentator can do is to mark the address as poste restante, for there are fleeting moments when the interpretation appears “to reach” Nietzsche: to elucidate something of his meaning. Yet, as I will argue, the purpose of his text is principally to incite the reader’s attachment, and in order to achieve this it is the reader who, like the dead letter, is displaced: or moreover, must find her or his position in relation to Nietzsche by being in two places at once—both inside and outside, excluded by, his text.
In a second sense, the theme of death suffuses the reader’s relation to Nietzsche insofar as she or he invokes his name to her or his own ends, thus seeking “to raise him from the dead” in order to do one’s bidding. To this extent, again, reading philosophy can be seen as a variety of the necromantic arts. The reader does not simply address a text—a particular configuration of words on a page—but also the phantom author he or she believes to have preceded the text, and who equally is generated by an engagement with it. The reader conjures the author’s presence, but only “in spirit.” Reading philosophy is like a thought-experiment by means of which the specter of the philosopher, as a unitary will, is produced. The reader is thereby able to set into motion a kind of improvisation upon Nietzsche’s philosophy—utilizing it as a tool for thinking about Left politics, feminism, or their own identity, and thereby drawing from Nietzsche judgments that perhaps have only the barest relation to what he actually wrote. Yet by deploying the philosopher’s name in support of one’s own goal, the reader is still limited to the field in which this name is already received, and indeed, must carry the baggage of past interpretations and “misinterpretations” of his philosophy. Nietzsche’s final, immortal power over the reader is this invocation of his name. The “Nietzschean,” curiously devoted to overseeing the fate of that name, brings “Nietzsche” back to life, but only as a name, an authority, or the paternal law (which itself is only a dead letter).
Thirdly, this book sets out to show how the effect of “quickening” activated in the encounter with Nietzsche works also in reverse: that Nietzsche’s writing brings to life in its reader a certain kind of subjectivity, the purpose of which is to service his philosophical task. The rhetorical charge of Nietzsche’s writing is to provoke a variety of responses from his audience, each of which performs a different function for his cultural critique and eventual goal of revaluation. Significantly, Nietzsche’s readers often model themselves upon a particular ideal proffered by his philosophy, from the rugged philosopher or creative artist, to the noble legislator. And it is their ultimate failure adequately to embody this ideal that gives birth to the Nietzschean subject, in the split between the ideal and the specter of its botched approximation (“the higher type” and its ape “the last man”; “the philosopher of the future” and “the scholar,” and so forth). In his Nietzsche-inspired “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats writes:
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Nietzsche’s philosophy engenders many different responses and identifications not through simple carelessness, but for a reason. For, as Nietzsche saw things, to wake from the nightmare of nihilism indicated in Yeats’s poem, humanity’s various proclivities would need to have become radicalized. Some types would have to exhaust themselves and dissipate—experience a down-going, in Nietzsche’s parlance—and some would need to come into their own, hence experiencing a culmination of their forces, and “overcoming” the confines of modern subjectivity. Nietzsche attempts with his philosophy to perform the cultural function of precipitating this “rank ordering” of humanity, according to his own array of identifications: from noble to slave, philosopher–artist to last man. By means of its peculiar rhetorical features, Nietzsche’s text selects “the quick” from “the dead,” deploying its own mobile (zombie) army of commentators to wage his culture war.
Dead Letters to Nietzsche addresses itself to the manner in which Nietzsche’s texts affect readers in their subjectivity: producing in them a sense of belonging to his philosophical project, and thus investing them with a duty to it. In this book I argue that Nietzsche’s text avails itself to the reader as a place in which she sees her most ideal image reflected (as the ideal reader, for instance, or the philosopher of the future). But moreover, Nietzsche’s writing invokes in the reader a feeling of excess: of finding oneself outside the text’s range, and falling short of its ideal. In comprehending
