arguably, anticipates psychoanalysis, and so for this reason his text is particularly amenable to its perspective. Yet more than this, the tools psychoanalysis provides are well honed for the kind of relation Nietzsche’s text establishes with its reader. For this reason, I ask my readers to put aside reservations about psychoanalytic theory, at least provisionally, for the purpose of what I feel to be a particularly fruitful interrogation of Nietzsche’s relation to his commentators. Above all, the book seeks to show that Nietzsche’s philosophy incites “the split” (between the ideal and its excess) through which, according to psychoanalysis, subjectivity is constituted. This split is achieved by Nietzsche’s constant references to his good and bad readers: to those who fall within his philosophy’s sphere of reference, and those whose “bad” interpretations of his writings exclude them from this sphere. Nietzsche’s text, it will be argued, thus also presents itself as a place in which the abandoned (or repressed) part of the reader’s self is kept hidden, only to be revealed in those most disorienting, uncanny passages of the text with which the reader cannot identify (that are even felt to be dangerous in their ambiguity since they appear to open out to something completely “other”). Particularly the “Nazi” interpretation of Nietzsche exemplifies for his readers this dark and excluded identification: an identification that they both recognize and deny.
The book will proceed first by outlining the relation between Nietzsche’s philosophy and its claim upon the reader, in chapters 1 and 2. Perhaps more than other philosophers, Nietzsche requires a readership to take responsibility for his project. The purpose of his text was thus in part to recruit the reader to his program of the revaluation of values. Nietzsche’s philosophy performs this recruitment—or “interpellation” of the reader—immanently, by the dual means of both its structure and its content. On the one hand, Nietzsche’s critique of the mediocrity and nihilism of modern culture is substantial, and continues to resonate with many intellectuals today. These concerns alone apparently motivate his readers’ allegiance to him. On the other hand, however, it will be argued that this connection to Nietzsche is also structurally overdetermined, the reader’s place already having been written into his philosophy. In effect, the text interpellates the reader in relation to various “figures of excess”: identifications that are either impossibly ideal or abject, such as “the philosopher of the future,” “the blond beast,” “we wise ones,” or else the slavish “last man.” To this extent, readers are initiated into Nietzsche’s philosophy by means of its own ideological apparatus, which they internalize through reading his books. In chapter 1, this idea will be elucidated with regard to Nietzsche’s account of the subject. More than provide a simple explanation of the genesis of subjectivity, by means of the excess remainder, the account of subjectivity also furnishes a specifically “Nietzschean” subject, produced in the relation between the reader and Nietzsche’s philosophy. The purpose of chapter 1 is thus to demonstrate the connection between what Nietzsche says of his philosophy and how he says it: a relation that is not always straightforward, but is ultimately guided by the concern for why he says it. For Nietzsche writes his message strategically, in order to subjugate the reader to his own ends. The recruitment of readers, as agents of his philosophy, is pivotal to the realization of his philosophical project.
Chapter 2 continues to elaborate the rhetorical effects of Nietzsche’s texts with reference to Lacanian theory. In his seminars and écrits, Jacques Lacan shows the extent to which the self is already riven by the existence of others: that the subject is not self-contained, but is, rather, dispersed in the world that they inhabit, and through those with whom they live. This living with others that determines subjectivity is, according to Lacan, characterized by a sense of loss—or lack—and a disposition of mourning. Chapter 2, then, develops further our understanding of the interdependency of Nietzsche and his reader in terms of the anxiety and nothingness that characterizes relations to others in general, and is already figured within Nietzsche’s writings.
The possibility of failure to live up to Nietzsche’s demands, and the anxiety such failure provokes, abides within the relation to his philosophy. Chapter 3 considers the impossibility of the position of “the good reader” with respect to Nietzsche’s philosophy. I argue that this impossibility, far from limiting the text’s appeal for the reader, however, is what attracts and binds the reader to Nietzsche. This claim is developed through an engagement with two “esoteric” readings of his philosophy furnished by Stanley Rosen and Laurence Lampert. Rosen and Lampert emphasize the selective conceit of Nietzsche’s writing: that many would misunderstand and become false prophets of his message, as the price of its reaching only the very few “higher types” for which it was intended. However, it will be argued, because the identification with Nietzsche is always in excess of itself—producing “the bad reader” along with “the ideal reader”—the higher position to which these commentators lay claim is untenable: “the bad reader” merely embodying “the good reader’s” projected bad conscience.
In chapter 4 the terrain shifts from a concern for the interpellation of the reader, in (Lacanian) paternal terms, to a preoccupation, and identification, with the abject or excluded (maternal) register of Nietzsche. Here I perform a Kleinian analysis of two interpretations of Nietzsche that circulate about the figure of madness: David Farrell Krell’s Nietzsche: A Novel, and Georges Bataille’s On Nietzsche. The psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein refigures anxiety about loss in terms of the psychic violence the preoedipal infant displays toward its mother. The mother plays the role for the infant of “the container” into which it can project “the bad parts” of itself: those aspects of its experience felt as distressing, or painful. Accordingly, I interpret these readers’ relations to Nietzsche in terms of his philosophy’s capacity for “containing” readers’ “excess,” which they can experience comfortably only when encountered in the guise of another. In chapter 4, I argue that by contemplating Nietzsche’s insanity and subsequent death, Bataille and Krell displace upon Nietzsche discomfort regarding the possibility of their own madness and mortality. Nietzsche thus “contains” for them these most profound anxieties.
Likewise, in chapter 5 I turn to Sarah Kofman’s own psychoanalytic engagement with Nietzsche—her interpretation of his corpus in terms of “the family romance”—by subjecting to a Kleinian analysis the relation she enacts to him. In this instance the focal point of her engagement with his text is not madness, so much as the threat of anti-Semitism. I argue that Kofman’s own manifest ambivalence about her Jewish identity is modified by the relation to Nietzsche, and especially through her defense of the rectitude of his position toward the Jews. According to my analysis, each commentary outlined above involves a blind spot respecting an abject piece of the self that has been invested in Nietzsche’s text, and the attendant negative affect to which the relation with Nietzsche gives rise. Indeed, the intensity of the relation with him is due to this blindness to one’s ambivalence regarding such material, and its subsequent displacement onto Nietzsche. Denial motivates the identification with Nietzsche through which the reader is interpellated within his philosophical project.
In the sixth and final chapter, by contrast, I examine a commentary that specifically takes account of the constitutive ambivalence of the relation to Nietzsche, and moreover, demonstrates how his text generates this ambivalence in the reader. In Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Pierre Klossowski characterizes Nietzsche’s writing in corporeal terms, as self-consciously contagious: that is, as purposefully infecting the reader with his own perspective, through a transmission of bodily impulses. However, the centerpiece of Klossowski’s text on Nietzsche is his interpretation of eternal recurrence as a simulacrum, through which readers encounter their own negativity in Nietzsche’s writing. This simulacrum corresponds to the abject mother of Klein’s account, and, as discussed in chapter 2, Lacan’s anamorphic death head—a voracious nothingness that threatens, and so also motivates, subjectivity. By demonstrating the centrality of this ambiguity to the doctrine of recurrence, Klossowski reveals what is at stake for Nietzsche’s philosophy, and his cooption of the reader: because the destabilization of the reader’s subjectivity is Nietzsche’s manner of committing them to him, and thus of securing the longevity (if not immortality) of his project. By exposing the figure of recurrence as Nietzsche’s apparatus of recruitment, does Klossowski thereby slip its
