for Nietzsche scholarship: one through which readers become more conscious of—and perhaps, then, less susceptible to—Nietzsche’s power over them. The first and last question to which this book responds is the very possibility of an equal relationship with Nietzsche; and a more creative, and critical, relation to Nietzsche’s corpus.
[1]. Dorothy Porter, “The Dead,” Crete (Melbourne: Hyland, 1996).
[2]. See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamilton, 1992).
[3]. See Daniel Conway’s “Ecce Caesar: Nietzsche’s Imperial Aspirations,” Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, (eds.) (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002).
[4]. See Rosalyn Diprose, “Nietzsche, Ethics and Sexual Difference,” Radical Philosophy (52), Summer (1989), 27–32.
[5]. See Rebecca Stringer, “‘A Nietzschean Breed’: Feminism, Vicitmology, Ressentiment,” Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Politics. Alan D. Schrift, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
[6]. Alfred Bäumler and Alfred Rosenberg are perhaps the most prominent Nietzsche scholars of the Nazi persuasion. For an excellent account of the National Socialist reception of Nietzsche’s thought, see Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 232–307. For contemporary reflections upon this aspect of Nietzschean scholarship, see the edited collection Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? See also the chapter in Mazzino Montinari, Reading Nietzsche. Trans. Greg Whitlock (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), entitled “Nietzsche between Alfred Bäumler and Georg Lukács,” 141–69.
[7]. In particular, see Paul-Laurent Assoun, Freud and Nietzsche. Trans. Richard L. Collier Jr. (London and New Brunswick, New Jersey: Athlone, 2000); Ronald Lehrer, Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought: The Origins of a Psychology of Dynamic Unconscious Mental Functioning (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995); and Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ronald L. Lehrer, (eds.), Nietzsche and Depth Psychology (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999).
[8]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), “Woman and Child,” §380, 150.
[9]. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1971). In this seminal essay, Althusser sets out to demonstrate a relation between relations of production, ideology (the way that material relations of production are “imagined,” or the meaning that we give to them), and subjection:
[I]deology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals . . . or “transforms” the individuals into subjects . . . by the very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey you there!” (162–63)
If ideology is supervenient upon the existence of subjects who (re)enact it, then, in terms of reading Nietzsche, his philosophy (ideology) is reproduced by means of the reader, who is subjected to his text, and so takes on a role in relation to it.
[10]. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image–Music–Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 142–48.
[11]. Michel Foucault “What Is an Author?,” Twentieth-century Literary Theory, Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller, (eds.) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 124–42.
[12]. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
[13]. Plato, Phaedrus, Trans. Tom Griffith (New York: Knopf, 2000).
CHAPTER 1
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Ontology for Philologists: Nietzsche, Body, Subject
Philologist 1648. 1. One devoted to learning or literature; a scholar, esp. a classical scholar. Now rare. 2. A person versed in the science of language; a student of language 1716.
—The Oxford English Dictionary
It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading:— in the end I also write slowly [. . .] For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento [. . .] this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers [. . .]
—Friedrich Nietzsche[1]
Everything Nietzsche published, he intended to be read. This may seem a banal observation, yet commentators frequently deem as extraneous and impertinent Nietzsche’s more “stylish” prose: whereby he sets a scene for his philosophy, or instructs his reader in the art of reading his books—as in the passage quoted above. As a philosopher who also self-identified as a philologist, Nietzsche was acutely aware of his dependence upon his readers: not only in terms of his reputation, but also the meaning of his philosophy. Nietzsche’s writings thus enact a grand seduction of his audience. If they are to be charged with responsibility for the meaning of his works, then they must love Nietzsche—the better to approximate a fidelity to his purpose.
But the reader’s love was not enough for Nietzsche: he wanted to possess them, body and soul. Nietzsche needed the reader to identify with his philosophy, in their very subjectivity. For this reason, he could not take the reader just as she or he is: Nietzsche’s texts demand of readers that they apply themselves to it—to the extent even of rearranging their “order of drives,” or constitution. Accordingly, a principal element of his writing is not only to communicate his ideas, but also to communicate a way of being through which his reader is subjected to, and subjected by, his thought. In this way, Nietzsche’s theory of the subject does more than simply explain how the subject comes into being: it also galvanizes a particular mode of subjectivity. Furthermore, other currents of his philosophy contribute to this experiment, whereby his writing exerts a formative force upon its readership. Let us, then, foreground Nietzsche’s account of the subject with a consideration of his appeal to the reader’s subjectivity, before turning to what are considered to be more “proper” components
