SEMIOTEXT(E) INTERVENTION SERIES

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Speech delivered on the occasion of the I OOth anniversar of
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Thanks to John Ebert.
Design: Hedi El Kholti
ISBN: 978-1-58435-099-6
Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
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\O \O

Translated by Steven Corcoran
semiotext(e)
intervention
series a 16
Contents
Introduction 7
Gospels-Redactions 13
The Fifth 29
Total Sponsoring 47
Of Suns and Humans 65
Notes 85
Introduction
Today, in the year 2000, on the hundredth
anniversary of his physical death at the dawn of the
frst of the millennia he said would have to be dated
afer him, how are we to speak about Friedrich
Nietzsche? Ought we to say that he stands befre us
sufering and great, like the century to which he
belonged with all his existence and out of which
he erupted into the eternity of authorial renown?
Ought we to adopt his own j udgment that he was
not a man but dynamite? Ought we to emphasize,
once again, the peculiarity of his "efective history":
the fact that never befre has an author insisted so
much on distinction and yet attracted such vul
garity? Ought we to diagnose that it was with him
that the era of narcissism began, frst in evidence as
the "insurrection of the masses," then as collectivist
"great politics," and fnally as the dictatorship of the
7
global market? Ought we to accept the claim that
the history of academic philosophy ends with him
and then history of the art of thinking begins? Or
ought we to refain fom making commentaries
and read Nietzsche and reread him?
I would like to describe the Nietzsche-event
as a catastrophe in the history of language and put
the argument that his intervention as a literary new
evangelist constitutes an incision in old Europe's
conditions of understanding. With Marshall Mc
Luhan, I presuppose that understanding between
people in societies-above all, what they are and
achieve in general-has an autoplastic meaning.
These conditions of communication provide groups
with a redundancy in which they can vibrate. They
imprint on such groups the rhythms and models by
which they are able to recognize themselves and by
which they repeat themselves as almost the same.
They produce a consensus in which they perfrm
the eternal return of the same in the frm of a
spoken song. Languages are instruments of group
narcissism, played so as to tune and retune the
player; they make their speakers ring in singular
tonalities of self-excitation. They are systems of
melodies fr recognition, which nearly always
delineate the whole program as well. Languages are
not primarily used fr what is today called the
passing on of infrmation, but serve to frm
81
communicating group-bodies. People possess lan
guage so that they can speak of their own merits
[Vorzigen]-and not least of the unsurpassable
merit of being able to talk up these merits in their
own language. First, and fr the most part, people
are not concerned to draw each other's attention to
states of afirs, but aim instead to incorporate states
of affirs into a glory The diferent speaker-groups
of history-all the various tribes and peoples-are
self-praising entities that avail themselves of their
own inimitable idiom as part of a psychosocial
contest played to gain advantage fr themselves. In
this sense, befre it becomes technical, all speaking
serves to enhance and venerate the speaker; and
even technical discourses are committed, albeit
indirectly, to glorifing technicians. Languages of
self-criticism are also borne by a fnction of self
enhancement. And even masochism works to
announce the distinctiveness of the tortured indi
vidual. When used in accordance with its constitutive
fnction of primary narcissism, language says one
and the same thing over and again: that nothing
better could have happened to the speaker than,
precisely, to have been who he is, to have been who
he is at this place and in this language, and to bear
witness to the merit of his being in his own skin.
The fct that primary narcissism frst became
observable with ethnic groups and kingdoms befre
!nlTCUC l;o, l / 9
going on to become a feature of nations, bristling
with weapons and classics at the dawn of modern
times, is something I will consider fom a historical
viewpoint. As for the individual, the wait would be
lengthier befre self-afrmation could step out of
the shadows of sin. It did this in the frm of
amour-propre in the 1 8th century, that of holy self
interest [Selbstsucht] in the 1 9th, that of narcissism
in the 20th, and that of self-design in the 21 st.
Nietzsche was probably the only theoretician of
language of modern times to have had this fnda
mental relation in mind. For, in deriving prayer
fom a people's exhilaration at its own self-assertion,
he states: "it proj ects the pleasure it takes in itself
( ... )
into a being that it can thank fr all of this.
Man is gratefl fr himself: and this is why one
needs a god."1 And, in a more general way, we
can read in an earlier text: "It is a beautifl flly,
speaking: with it humans dance over all things."2
In the reconstruction of religious afects fom
self-referential gratitude, language comes to be
determined as a medium enabling those that speak
to say out loud the reasons why they are on top.
This is why the profession of fith in one's own
modus vivendi is the most distinguished speech-act.
It is the eulogistic gesture par excellence. With this
derivation of distinction, speech and silence are
defned as modes of exhilaration, which confess to
themselves. In both what is advanced is a voluntary
declaration of success in the pursuit of Being: in
speech as manifestation of right and power; and in
silence as an authorized quiet whose presuppositions
require no defending.
Quite clearly, this rudimentary reference to a lin
guistics of j ubilation or self-afrmation stands in
sharp contrast to all that has been said and con
ceived about languages by the theorizing communis
opinio of the last century, regardless of whether
this took the frm of ideology critique or analytic
philosophy, discourse theory or psychoanalysis, a
theory of the encounter or deconstruction. The frst
case set about unmasking all the misleading gener
alizations of the languages of the bourgeoisie; the
second gave priority to turns of ordinary lan
guage over metaphysical inversions; the third,
made a relation between the language games of
knowledge and the routines of power; the furth
undermined signs through the unconscious con
tents of expression; the penultimate case described
the language event as a response that is provoked or
refsed by the call to me of the other-in-need; while
the last case brought frward evidence to show that
we always fil in attempts to impose the flpresence
of meaning on what is said. In all these cases language
is understood as a medium of lack and distortion,
possibly also as the organ of over-sensitiveness and
compensati on, of settling claims and therapy.
Everywhere language and the spoken appear as
symptoms and problems. Hardly ever are they con
ceived of as vectors of afrmations and prophecies.
But when they are, it is to underscore the i nau
thentic and fawed character of all laudatory and
promise-making sorts of tunes. Whoever speaks in
the conditions permitted-whether fom a bour
geois, political, academic, legal, or psychological
perspective-will always be in the minus and run
around in vain seeking the means by which to pay
of and shif overdrawn assertions. Whoever speaks
incurs debt; whoever speaks frther, discourses in
order to pay back. The ear is educated in order so as
not to give away credit and to interpret its avarice as
critical consciousness. In what fllows I will
endeavor to reprise the Nietzschean idea of lan
guage, the beginnings of which Nietzsche only
sketched, and to extend them into the fture fom
a contemporary standpoint-whereby I hazard the
ramifcation that Nietzsche's maxim, according to
which "all our philosophy i s the correction of
linguistic usage," is charged with meanings that go
beyond all criticist conceptions.
1 2 I N::<ccln /pustlu
GOSPELS-REDACTI ONS
First we must take a step back and clarif the con
trast between the conditions of modern language
and those of pre-modern language. As cultures
reached the level of monarchy-I say this having
no particular belief in the dogmatic presupposi
tions of sociological evolution theory-it went
without s aying that l anguage's sel f-laudatory
energies could no longer be aimed directly at orators
who were specialized in fnction of public speech,
such as the elder, the priest, the rhapsodist.
Rather, they had to take a detour and praise the
lords, heroes, gods, powers, and frces of virtue,
fom which a refacting ray came to fll on the
orator. In fudal times, poets and rhetoricians
were schooled in the grammar of indirect eulogy;
their j ob was to be skilled at generating higher
feelings, in which the extolled stood in the center
1 3
and the singers on the sidelines. Their discretion
required them to be humbl e, to do what was
required fr the mood of their own royal space.
Precisely to the extent that high cultures in times
gone by outlawed an orator's direct expressions of
egotism, they showed, with the linguistic brio
of primary narcissism, ways whereby dutiflly
manifesting an enthusiasm fr the big other, one
could place oneself close to the recipient of praise.
This can scarcely be more legibly studied than
in Christian Evangelization and its encroachment
on European societies' conditions of understanding
in the early Middle Ages. Shown with particular
clarity here is the way in which Evangelist speech
acts-the preaching of salvation by God's son,
and the swearing-in of an ethnic commune fr a
participation in this sphere that is as unequivocal
as possible-put speakers and listeners alike into
an oscillating circuit which was about nothing
other than celebrating a shared privilege. In his
book of the Gospels, Otfid von WeiGenburg,
Rhine Franconian poet-priest of the 9th century,
j ustifed his vernacular adaptation of the New
Testament by arguing that the Franks, too, ought
at last to be allowed access , via a poeticized bible,
to the sweetness of the Good News , dulcedo
evangeliorum.
As many persons undertake to write in their lan
g
ua
g
e and as many strive with fervour to praise
what they hold dear-
why should the Franks be the only ones to
shrink fom the attempt to proclaim the praise
of God in the Franconian lan
g
ua
g
e ...
. . .let the praise of God be sweet to you,
then Franconian will also be determined by
metrical feet, quantity and metrical rules; better,
then God himself will speak throu
g
h you. (Liber
evan
g
elorium I, 1, V 31-34; 41-42)
The sense of these refections, unique fr their
time, lies in an ethno-narcissistic operation by
means of which the Franks were to be frmed, at
the level of the linguistic techniques of the time, as
a collective with higher feelings-with the claim
to being equal or even superior to those great
historical peoples, the Greeks and the Romans.
Gospel verse in the German language is presented
as an ofensive, the aim of which is to establish a
politico-religious system of boasting that, by
virtue of a catch-up lesson in rhyme and rhythm,
plugs into the art of the poetically possible. The
point thus being that, in fture, in the image of
the gloria Francorum, an efective link would no
longer be missing between the veneration of God
and the poetics of Empire. In the same spirit,
/1 5
Otfied attributes to Ludwig den Deutschen, in
his dedi cati on to him, a rank equal to King
David. Moreover, in this speech act two eulogistic
fnctions-praise of the King and glorifcation of
the people-come together to frm a single
enhancement-efect. Otfid was convinced he thus
complied with the essence of language, inasmuch
as language is per se an instrument of eulogy. This
may be most convincingly proven in the case of
praising God: "He, in efect ( God) , has given
them (the people) the instrument of language
(lectrum linguae) so that they cause him to sound
in their praise" ( Dedication to Luitberg) . One
who praises becomes worthy of praise insofr as he
or she also participates in the glory of the object of
eulogy. The poet expresses the same idea in his
introductory prayer to the Gospel epic.
You alone are the master of all the lan
g
ua
g
es that
exist. Your power has conferred lan
g
ua
g
e to all
and they have come-o salvation!-to frm
words in their lan
g
ua
g
es to recall Your memory
fr always, to praise You fr eternity, reco
g
nize You
and serve You. (Liber evan
g
eliorum, I, 2, V33-38)1
Remarkable in this appeal is not only the fct that
knowledge is also put at the service of the eulo
gistic fncti on; but also that the languages of
humanity as a whol e are defned as media of
God's narcissism, which passes via the detour of
human idiom back to God himself in unending
self-celebration. With God self-praise is a perfme.
The meaning of language is to celebrate, and any
language that might frget to celebrate would
have taken leave of its senses. 2 The only awkward
thing about this theo-linguistic arrangement is
precisely that God must be celebrated in Old
High German, i n a lingua agrestis or peasant
idiom that did not wholly confrm to the gram
matical and melodic norms of divine relations
to themselves. Otfi d had to muster all hi s
Franconian pri de to fnd the courage to praise
God in the South Rine Franconian dialect. Even
though it did not occur to him to improve the
Gospel as such, he thus saw all the more clearly
the need to render the teotisk3 vernacular compa
tible with the Gospel through poetic amendment
an idea fom which would come one of the main
linguistic creations prior to Luther's translation of
the Bible. Let's note that in taking up the proj ect
Otfid felt no need fr j ustifcation in frming a
continuous linear narrative of the canoni cal
Gospels. In his time, in which a l ay reading of
the Holy Writings was not something open to
debate, syncretistic-didactical frms such as the
so-called Gospel harmonies were well introduced
and sufciently legitimated as a sacred genre.
What was appropriate fr Tatian the Assyrian was
also apt fr a nobl e Franc. What the author
instead seemed to deem worthy of j ustifcation was
the articulation of his Gospel epic in fve books:
These fve of which I j ust spoke, if I have divided
them thus, even thou
g
h there are only fur books
of the Gospel, this is because the holy rectitude of
their numberin
g
fur sanctifes the irrectitude of
our fve senses and, transfrmin
g
all that is
immoderate in us . . . carries it of toward heaven.
Whatever it is that we miss via si
g
ht, odour,
touch, taste, and hearin
g
: via the remembrance of
the texts of the Gospels (eorum lectionis memoria),
we purif ourselves of our corruption. 4
Here again, what seemed to require improvement
was naturally not the Gospel itself, but rather the
readership and the listeners who approach the
beatifing text as Franks and humans with their
natural quintuplet sensuality, and who-if we are
to believe the poet-thus require fve books of
Gospel poetry in German rather than the fur
original Gospels.
This episode in the history of the German language
played out about 1 0 1 0 years befre Nietzsche's
own sel f-decl arati on, while the next exampl e
fom the history of self-praise relations in western
tradition refers to a case that is separated by a
mere seventy or eighty years fom the intervention
of the teacher of the eternal return. The issue here
still has to do with improving the Gospel-but
this time the mode is considerably more compli
cated, since what now enters the freground, at
the same time as collective self-praise, are concerns
about individual self-enhancement. The scene of
the experiment is the United States of America
around 1 81 0 , and the Gospel redactor is none
other than the redactor of the American
Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jeferson,
who at this time was able to look back on several
terms of ofce as minister to France and as vice
president of the USA, as well as on two mandates as
president. After his years of service in Washington,
he returned home to his manor in Monticell o,
Virginia, and devoted himself to rounding out the
image of himself he intended to leave to posterity.
These i ndi cati ons are enough to support the
notion that what we bear witness to here is an
emi nent case of national- religious l i ngui sti c
pragmatism, especially as we know that to this
day the United States represents the most frtile
collective of self-celebration of all the current
pol itical entities in the "concert of nations"; it
could also be said that it is the society whose
funding conditions included dismantling as fr
as possible al l cultural inhibitions against the use
of enhancing superlatives in a democratic self
reference. What is the USA if not the product of a
Declaration of Independence-fom humility
(and doubtless not only fom the British Crown)?
There can be li ttle wonder, then, about the ef
cacy with which, as we shall see, the Christian
message is adapted to the needs of American glory.
Already during his frst presidential mandate in
Washington, Jeferson would busy himself on his
spare nights, using sci ssors to cut out extracts
fom a series of editions of the New Testament in
Greek, Latin, French, and English, which he then
pasted together into a scrap book to make a new
arrangement of the Gospels. The aim was one he'd
held fr some time, and frst emerged during his
correspondence with Unitarian theologian and
writer Joseph Priestly, in 1 795. In all likelihood,
however, the task was not completed until around
1 820, afer many years of interruption. The product
of this cut-and-paste work, which Jeferson com
pleted twice-over, was given the title The Ljand
Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, and has become
known as The Jeferson Bible. I n hi s s ci s s or
work, the redactor must have been convinced that
he possessed the criteria by which to distinguish
20 I f\1etzschc Apostc
the utilizable fom the non-utilizabl e in the
bequeathed text. As a representative of the
American Enlightenment thinkers , with their
decorative monotheism and Philadelphian exu
berance, Jeferson testifes to the state of the Gospel
problem at the apex of this current of thought.
With this Christian-humanist gentleman, it becomes
clear that the need fr a self-enhancement using
the classic reservoirs of meaning was as alive as
ever, but could only be satisfed by expunging vast
passages of the historical Gospels. In the wake of
the American and French Revolutions, anyone
wanting still to play the language game of the
Gospels to advantage had above all to be able to
omit. This is the meaning of neo-humanism: to be
able to eliminate in the old Gospel that which has
become incompatibl e with one's own glorifcation
as a humanist and citizen. For this operation, no
image is more impressive than that of an
American head of state in his ofce at night, who,
with scissors, cuts out pages fom six copies of the
New Testament in fur diferent languages and
pastes the extracts into a private copy of the Good
News that is designed to confrm to the demands
of contemporary rationality and sentimentality
fr a citable, excerpted version of the Bible. It is
characteristic of Jeferson's philosophical ambi
tions that he did not fel that this redaction of
Gospels-Redactions I 21
the Gospel-or as he put it, this frmul ation of
an abstract or syllabus-was a heresy in the original
meaning of the term, insofr as hairesis refers to
a choosy insolence applied to a totality of dogmas
and traditions. Rather, he presented himself as the
curator of the writings' true content, a re-establishing
a pure text against the fdging perfrmed by
later additions . With energetic naivety, the
enlightened redactor went about separating Jesus'
unacceptable words fom those that Jesus must
have said, had he wanted to be approvingly cited
by Jeferson; even better, fom those that Jesus
would have said had he freseen the transfrma
tion of believers into sympathizers. In fct, the
modern sympathizer ofJesus can be defned as the
bearer of Euro-American Enlightenment, as one
who places value, despite all the connections to
the Christian tradition, on remaining within the
continuum of worldly possibilities of self
enhancement that were devel oped since the
Renaissance. And this is precisely what Jeferson
had in mind when he endeavored to cut out the
valid residue, that which is citable even among
humanists, fom the embarrassing mass of New
Testament phrases. As such, in October 1 81 3 ,
Jeferson felt he could send to John Adams the
fllowing report of success:
There will be fund remaining the most sublime
and benevolent code of morals which has ever
been ofered to man. I have perfrmed this
operation fr my own use, by cutting verse by
verse out of the printed book, and arranging, the
matter which is evidently his, and which is as
easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.
The result is an octavo of frty-six pages, of pure
and unsophisticated doctrines . . . 5
In a letter addressed to the erudite religious and
Dutch Unitarian, Francis Adrian van der Kemp,
Jeferson explained himself in a more detailed
manner about his relationship with Jesus the man:
It i s the innocence of His character, the purity
and sublimity of His moral precepts, the elo
quence of His inculcations, the beauty of the
apologues in which He conveys them, that I so
much admire; sometimes, indeed, needing
indulgence to eastern hyperbolism. My eulogies,
too, may be funded on a postulate which all
may not be ready to grant. Among the sayings
and discourses imputed to Him by His biogra
phers, I fnd many passages of fne imagination,
correct morality, and of the loveliest benevo
lence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, so
much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism
I 23
and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible
that such contradictions should have proceeded
fom the same Being. I separate, therefre, the
gold fom the dross; restore to Him the frmer,
and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and
roguery of others of His disciples. 6
In view of this declaration it makes little sense to
maintain, along with The Jerson Bible's editor
Forrester Church, that the wise man of Monticello
merely sought the intelligible Jesus and necessarily
missed the historical one. Jeferson was after nei
ther an historical nor an intelligible Jesus but
rather an obj ect of eulogy, which, by giving praise
to it and thus having recourse to shared moral
values, would enable the speaker to come out a
sure-fre winner. Jeferson was after a spiritual
master who could be cited to guarantee advantage,
and who would permit the laudator to become a
prestige shareholder by drawing on the holy
source of values. Aer the mental caesura of the
Enlightenment, an unabridged version of the New
Testament could deliver no such expectations of
symbolic profts, and fr this reason any rational
redactor had to expunge fom the corpus of stories
and words of evangelical authority all that would
compromise him in font of other rational beings
and land him in the mire of s ectarianism, or,
24 I rietzsche Apostle
what amounts to the same thing, of cogni tive
l oserdom. For absol utely similar motives, and
with similar means, Leo Tolstoy would later put
together a private version of the New Testament
and present it as a sort of "Fifth Gospel": the
Russian path toward the coexistence of evangelism
and the Enlightenment.7 The Moderns no longer
know of evangelists; they know only of the classics.
Citing a classic guarantees a sure, albeit modest,
return; on the contrary, if, in society, you invoke
the Redeemer, your credit will shrink. The
Enl i ghtenment i s really a l anguage game fr
cognitive winners, who continually deposit the
premiums of knowl edge and critique in their
accounts, and exhibit their cultural fnds, while
fith gets increasingly hidden behind a barrier of
embarrassment, to be crossed only when one is
among like-minded others, and, moreover, is
ready to give up the advanced boasting potential
of the Enlightenment. But Jeferson was not a
man to burden himself with embarrassment or
with language games fr losers. As a result, in his
redaction of the Holy Scriptures fr Enlighten
ment winners, all the threatening and apocalyptic
discourses of Jesus are frcibly absent, as are most
of the stories about miraculous cures and resurrec
tion-his purged Gospel ends when a few of
Jesus's fiends roll away the stone in font of the
tomb and go of on their way. As text-composer,
Jeferson perfrms the l i terary i mperative of
Modernity: Where legend existed, the news must
come! At stake now is to swap all sacred agents fr
terrestrial heroes. Jesus can only be the hero of a
novel or a participant in discourse.
In a general way, the modern tribute to heroes
necessarily fces a complicating fctor, namely
that eulogistic fnctions are increasingly dependent
on scientifc premises and must satisf the dictates
of political correctness. Nowadays you always have
to have in view the side-efects of each tribute
and to calculate the angle of refaction of indirect
self-enhancement. But the main rule is that all
eulogistic remarks have to be ontologically correct,
and that no claims are made of actual interventions
fom transcendence into immanence. The leeway
fr boasting shrinks; the strategy of indirect self
celebration in high culture hits the investor with
ever greater costs and diminishing narcissistic
returns. Summing up this state of afairs is the
term humanism, such as ethicists use it today: to
all speakers, it suggests the return to a careflly
considered sort of self-afrmation that is only
barely distinguishable fom medium-level depres
sion. Twentieth-century mass culture would frst
designate a way out of this quandary by discon
necting selfpraise fom remarkable perfrmance
26 I
and other things, admiration of which was based
on superior criteria. This disconnection thus
enabled primitive felings of exhilaration to step
onto the frestage where a public of accomplices
in disinhibition awaited, intent on cheering. For
Jeferson, these kinds of relief were not yet in
sight. He had to continue to tie his eulogistic brio
to the holy texts, and, by means of redemptive
abstracts, to revert to elevated examples of the
tradition in order to satisf cultural demands fr
discourses about higher feelings. He could thus
write to one of his correspondents: "I am a
Christian, in the only sense He wished any one to
be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference
to all others; ascribing to himself every human
excellence .... "8 What speaks fr Jeferson is that
his hypocrisy is spontaneous and coherent. His
grasping at the diamonds in the dunghill of tradition
illustrates a growing American selectiveness as
regards the heritage of old Europe. The importation
of meaning fom Jerusalem, Rome, Geneva, and
Wittenberg also had to clear American customs.
Jeferson's redaction of the Gospels teaches us
that the preconditions fr winning avowable posi
tions of privilege stemming fom Christian tradition
already became problematic nearly a century prior
to Nietzsche's own intervention. What, in western
culture fr over one and a half millennia, had
Gospeis-Redactions ! 27
been the pure and simple, and ofen also proftable,
Good News-the creed fr admitting people
into the other-worldly God's system of likeness
increasingly proved to be a losing game fr the
messenger: the conditions of transmission fr
messages of this type had been transfrmed; the
speaker of such news appeared too clearly as
someone who had not yet properly learned the
procedures of modernity to be able to take up the
word to advantage.
2
THE FI FTH
On February 1 3, 1 883 i n Rapall o, Friedrich
Nietzsche, then aged 38, composed a tactically stylized
letter to his editor, Ernst Schmeitzner in Chemnitz:
Dearest Herr Veleger,
. . . Today I have something good to announce:
I have made a decisive step-and I mean by the
way, such a step as should also be usefl to you. I
is a matter of a small work (barely a hundred
printed pages) , the title of which is
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A Book fr All and None
It is a "poem, " or a ffh " Gospel" or some
thing or other fr which there is not yet a name:
by fr the most serious but also the most cheerfl
of my productions, and accessible to everyone. So
I think that it will have an "immediate efect" . . . 1
29
On April 20 of the same year, Nietzsche wrote to
Malvida von Meysenbug in Rome:
. . . it is a beautifl story: I have challenged all the
religions and made a new "holy book"! And, said
in all seriousness, it is as serious as any other, even
though it incorporates laughter into religion. 2
On May 24 in a letter to Karl Hillebrand Nietzsche
made the fllowing remark about the frst part of
Zarathustra:
Everything that I had thought, sufered, and
hoped fr is in it and in a way that my lif wants
now to appear to me as j ustifed. And then again
I feel ashamed befre myself: since I have hereby
stretched out my hand fr the highest garlands
ever awarded to humanity . . . 3
A year later Nietzsche's ears were still ringing
with this expression of reaching fr the "highest
garlands, " which is hencefrth attributed to the
"use the folish and flse language of the ambitiosi."4
All his correspondence fom the Zarathustra period
i s shot through with micro-evangelic news about
his concluding a work that had weighed heavily
on the mi nd of its author as s omethi ng of
i ncomparabl e value. At this t i me, i t was the
Italian and the Swiss Postal Services that under
took to the " Good News."
Nietzsche's break with the old-European evan
gelic tradition makes discernible how, fom a certain
degree of enlightenment, speech's fnctions of
indirect eulogy can no longer be secured with the
compromises of deism or cultivated Protestantism.
Anyone seeking a language that secures the speaker
the attribution of "every human excellence,'' or at
least the guarantee of indirect participation in
supreme advantages , has to develop strategies of
expressi on that surpass the eclecticism of a
Jeferson. As in communication among "the
moderns" embarrassment is hardly avoided simply
by cutting out compromising reports of miracles, it
is no longer done. It is no longer enough to bypass
all the maledicent apocalypses and prophetic com
minations, the pronouncing of which will unmask
absolutely anyone speaking befre a secular or
humanist-infuenced public. Would anyone be
able to refer, in society, to an authority such as the
Jesus of Mark 9.42, who thought it right to say:
"Whoever causes one of these little ones who
believe in me to sin, it would be better fr him if a
great millstone were hung around his neck and he
were thrown into the sea." A commentator writing
in the year of 1 888 contented himself with saying:
"How evangelical ! "5 Scissors can no longer save a
Tho I 31
speaker's self-esteem when spreading the good
news-all in all , gospel residue proves unable to
withstand serious scrutiny. Not even the process of
demythologization can set one straight on one's
fet. Too dim, too suspect, too inferior are the
sources fom which the beautifl discourses issue.
Expressions of discontent with its glowering uni
versalism and its menace-laden benevolence can no
longer be disguised in the long term. So, if "good
news" remained possible and the conditions of
spreading through a chain of winners could be
realized, then it would have to be reconstituted. It
would have to be new enough to avoid embarrassing
similarities with texts that had become unacceptable,
but similar enough so that it could be perceived at
least as a frmal extension of the stock-standard
gospel. This is the reason why the new redaction of
a discourse, one able to be proclaimed, and in
which the speaker could bank on making a proft,
could be frst obtained only through the subver
sion of earlier frms: the man who can promise
anew is one who says something unheard-of with
new words. But Nietzsche did not want to be a
mere Gospel parodist; he did not want merely to
synthesize Luther wirh rhe dirhyramb and swap
Mosaic tablets fr Zarathustrian ones. Rather, fr
him the point was that the conditions pertaining
to professions of fith and the chains of citations
32 . ilj,=tzsc:e
be given an entirely new order; better, that the
distinction between a profession of fith and a
citation be revised. The author of Zarathustra
wanted to lay bare the eulogistic frce of language
fom the ground up, and to fee it fom the inhi
bitions with which resentment, itself coded by
metaphysics, had stamped it. This intention
resonates in Nietzsche's seeking to assure his fiend
Franz Overbeck that "with this book I have over
come everything that has been said in words." And it
is presupposed when he states, still addressing the
same addressee: "I am now, very probably, the most
independent man in Europe."6
The height-or better: the operating theater
of this independence is the result of an insight
that Nietzsche, ever since the days of Human, All
too Human, had made during an aggressive spiri
tual exercise that he carried out on himself The
author of The Ga
y
Science was convinced that
resentment is a mode of production of world,
indeed one that is to date the most powerfl and
most harmfl. The more keenly this discerning
author contemplated the matter of this fct, the
more comprehensively and monstrously it came
into profile: in everything that had borne the
name of high culture, religion, and morality, the
resentment mode of world-building had pre
vailed. Everything that fr an epoch had been able
T'c / 33
to present itself as the moral world order bore its
handwriting. Al that had in his era claimed to be
making a contribution to world improvement had
drunk of its poison. Whence the catastrophic
conclusion, which hit its thinker as a millenary
insight: that all languages frmed by metaphysics
gravitate around a misological core. The classic
teachings of wisdom, together with their modern
connector-theories, are systems fr maligning
beings in their entirety. They serve those who have
yet become fed up with defming the world,
power, and human beings, and have as their goal
the abasement of the happy and powerfl, and of
self-praising attitudes. When all is said and done,
all high cultures between Asia and Europe have
consistently spoken the language of people who
are out to take advantage of life itself What has
hitherto been called morality is the universalism
of vengeance. And whatever metaphysical dis
course might carry by way of valid wisdom, science,
and worldly sophistication: it is the frst impulse
toward maligning reality in the name of an over
world or an anti-world, which has been specifcally
approved fr the sake of humiliating its contrary.
Along with this, it is simultaneously to talk up
the need fr vengeance, with which the weak
and the folish vaunt their weakness and their
folishness. In metaphysical-religious discourse,
contemptuousness becomes an insidiously twisted
self-praising frce.
That, along with Socrates and Plato, Nietzsche
above all identifed Saint Paul as the genius of
reversal needs no frther elucidating; neither does
the fct that fom the numerous consequences of
the Pauline intervention Nietzsche derives the
criterion by which to defne his amendment to the
Good News as the axis fr a history of the fture.
Against this background, the author of Zarathustra
sets out to frmulate the frst link of a message
chain designed to disenable all metaphysical flsetto.
It is a manoeuvre by which he fels sure of his
epochal stance; he knows that decoupling fture
linguistic currents fom resentment and that
rechanneling eulogistic energies is a "world histori
cal" act. But he also understands that operations of
such magnitude require a lot of time. He considers
his being unable to observe the consequences of his
keynote part of his martyrdom: "I require so much
of myself," he wrote fom Venice in May 1 884 to
Overbeck, with fint selfirony, "that I am ungrate
fl vis-a-vis the best work that I have done till now;
and if I do not go to such an extreme that whole
millennia will make their lofiest vows in my
name, then in my own eyes I shall have achieved
nothing." In September of the same year, he made
lhe / 35
this confession to Heinrich Koselitz: "Zarathustra
has meanwhile only the wholly personal sense of
being my book of devotion and encourage
ment-otherwise dark and veiled, and grotesque
fr everyone."
A "devotional book, " a "holy book, " a book
of independence and overcoming, a "genuine
mountain air book, " a "testament, " a " 'ffh'
Gospel ": Nietzsche's labels fr his literary "son
Zarathustra" draw, like the text itself, fom a fnd
of religico-linguistic lore, which is converted fr
the new occasion. The essential reason fr reprising
this type of expression, however, is to be fund
beyond the sphere of rhetoric and parody.
Nietzsche infrms us that the term "Gospel" as
such had been flled with flse examples only,
since in the Christian tradition what was issued
as The Good News could, given its value and
attitude in the pragmatics of language, achieve no
more than a triumph of misology. In his view, the
old Gospel in all its furness is merely a handbook
fr maligning the world in order to beneft
avengers and the indolent, a book drafted and
interpreted by the power-hungry caste par excellence
of the metaphysical ages, the priest-theologians,
the advocates of nothingness, and their modern
successors-j ournalists and idealist philosophers;
its texts are resentment propaganda, rewriting
defeats as successes and revelling in inhibited
vengeance as a way of subtly and disdainflly
foating above texts and fcts. Nietzsche's self
awareness hangs on the conviction that the role he
has been lef with involves interrupting the age-old
continuum of misological propaganda. A remark
fom Ecce homo should be applied to the entire
complex of metaphysical distortions:
All the "dark impulses" are at an end, "good peo
ple" had even less of an idea than anyone else of
the right way . . . And in all seriousness, nobody
befre me knew the right way, the way up: only
starting with me did hopes, tasks, prescribed
paths fr culture exist again-I am the bearer of
these glad tidings. 7
Nietzsche's evangelism thus means: know oneself;
take a stand against the millenaries-old frces of
reversal, against everything that has been called
Gospel to date. He saw his destiny i n being a
necessarily j oyous messenger, such "as there has
never been befre." His mission was to destroy the
communicative competences of the venomous.
The ffh "gospel"-Nietzsche only puts the noun
and not the numeral in inverted commas, and
places the expressions "poetry" or "something fr
which there is no name" as variants next to it-
Trc I 37
thus aims to be contrastive, its content being not
negation as liberation fom reality, but afrmation
as liberation of the wholeness of lif. It is a Gospel
fr those no-longer-needing-to-lie, a gospel of
negentropy or of creativity and consequently-on
the presupposition that few individuals would be
creative and able to be improved-a minority
gospel, frther still: a gospel "fr no one," a delivery
to unidentifable addressees, since there exists no
minority regardless of how small that could accept
it as a message addressed directly to it. Not fr
nothing did Nietzsche, in the months and years
afer the publication of the frst three parts of
Zarathustra, continuously point out, with the
melancholy of a simultaneously fctive and authentic
character, that he had not a single "disciple."
This statement is only seemingly contradicted
by the fct that Nietzsche achieved his "vitalist''
turn of thought in a temporal milieu that a too
willingly declared itself ready to assimilate the new
languages of life afrmation; even the observation
fom "efective history" according to which
Nietzsche's death was immediately fllowed by a
wave of demands that began turning Zarathustra
into a fshionable prophet and the "will to power"
into a password fr social climbers, does not repu
diate the thesis that there was not and could not be
any adequate addressee fr this "gospel." The reason
38 I
fr this is to be sought in the internal economy of
the new message, which demands a disproportionate
price fr access to its privilege of proclamation,
indeed an unpayable one. Recipients of the ffh
"gospel" incur such high costs that, afer a look at
the balance sheet, it can be perceived onl as bad
news. It is no coincidence, then, that its frst herald
was already pushed to break away fom past and
present humanity. It demands of every potential
disciple such radical abstinence with regard to tra
ditional frms of lif-serving illusion and bourgeois
fcilitation that, should this disciple seriously partake
in the new message, the disciple would fnd himself
alone with an unliveable disillusionment. The
odd renewal of eulogistic energies in an alternative
linguistic current frst opens onto a proposition
designed to transmit via speech an evangel
propped up on a "dis-evangel"-the expression
dates fom Nietzsche himself who thus denotes St
Paul's "actual" teaching. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
also adopts this term to characterize the maj or
interpreters of reality i n the 1 9th century-Marx,
Gobineau, Nietzsche and Freud-as the frst "dis
evangelists" of modern dumbfundedness: we will
speak somewhat more soberly of them as the
funders of discursive games about the real.
The ffh "gospel" sets out fom a work of illu
sion-destruction fr which there is no parallel. It is
oriented around the norm of the Gay Science,
which, in truth, is the most desperate science ever
to have been launched, since it presupposes a level
of disenchantment that plunges to almost suicidal
depths. It virtually corresponds to vagus death
caused by disappointment. Nietzsche never
doubted that there was an indissoluble relation of
production between his chronic illness and his
lucidity about things psychological and metaphysi
cal. His own life was fr him the "experiment of
the discerning"; his sufering he understood as
redemption fr his cognitions. And the more he
paid of, the frther he was carried away by his
thinking and states fom existing human commu
nities. He drifed frther and frther toward an
inexorable exteriority with regard to the menda
cious conditions of societies. He looked upon the
idols of the tribe, the market, and the cave fom a
distance that did not cease to grow. His private
mythos of the Hyperboreans was a way of
describing his soj ourn in the col d as a gay and
voluntary exile. He had no right to believe that he
possessed in this any shared point of departure
with contemporary readers; still less could he
permit himself the supposition that he might fnd
fllowers wanting to learn their lessons in similar
conditions. Hence the persistent refrence to his
ftefl loneliness; hence his view of the world as "a
40 !
door to a thousand deserts, empty and cold."
Hence, also, the mistrust he displayed toward
anyone who might have dared to tap the author
approvingly on the shoulder. In the chapter called
"The Convalescent," Zarathustra illustrates the
price of the new message when in encountering his
"most abyssal thought" of disgust and disappoint
ment he fints and, upon waking, hangs between
lif and death fr seven days. The truth has "in
truth" the frm of an illness leading to death: it is
an attack on the aletheiological immune system,
which leaves people hanging at the geometrical
place of lies and health. Whoever wants to resist
the disruption of the hitherto known economy of
illusions, has to be something other than what had
been known as known human to date-a surviver
vaccinated against the madness of the truth. The
economic paradox of Nietzsche's good news consists
in the indication that the primary, immeasurably
bad news must be recompensed by an as yet
unproven mobilization of creative counter-energies.
The overman concept is a wager on the distant
possibility of such compensation: "We have art so
that we do not go to ground on the truth"-this
means : we have the prospect of the overman in
order that unbearable insights into the unveiled
human condition may be endured. Such an ofer
appears as an advertisement fr that which inspires
FiM1 I 41
terror. This is why the whole of Zarathustra had to
take the frm of an extended prelude: in its narra
tive parts, it deals with nothing other than the
hesitation of the herald befre the announcing of
his own message.
However, if one wants to have cheaper access
to the new privileges of the herald, regardless of
efects of terror and experimental reservations
and this is the frmula that practically charac
terizes the whole history of Nietzsche redaction
in the anti-democratic movement, including its
later revisions in democratic ideology critique
then one has to split the newly won eulogistic
fnctions fom the necessary enlightenment
prior to it and its work of destruction, and lift
the quotation marks fom the password "gospel, "
that is, erase its newness and its irony. Nietzsche
was aware of the absurd costs of his undertaking
and doubted ofen enough whether recovering
an evangelic-eul ogistic stance fom perfect
nihilism remained, existentially speaking, a sen
sible reckoning. In 1 884, he wrote to Malvida
von Meysenbug:
42 /
I have things on my soul that are one hundred
times heavier to bear than la betise humaine. It is
possible that I am a doom, the doom fr all
fture people-and it is hencefrth very possible
that one day I will become mute, out of love fr
humanity! ! !
Let's register the three exclamation marks afer the
suggested possibility of his flling silent. Every
explanation of the Nietzschean message has above
all to answer the question of how it is possible that
the announcement won out over its internal inhi
bitions. This would be tantamount to explaining
how the dis-angelic fctors could prevail against
the eulogistic motifs in the process of ofsetting
them. And in this revision it would be necessary to
examine the calculation as such in its immanent
correctness. Does not everything point to the idea
that according to Nietzsche the bad news possesses
an edge over the good news that cannot be com
pensated fr, whereas all attempts to give primacy
to the latter are based only on momentary vigor
and temporary self-hypnosis? Yes, isn't Nietzsche
thereby exactly the paradigmatic thinker of moder
nity insofr as it is defned by the impossibility of
catching up with the real through counter-fctual
corrections? Is modernity not defned by a con
sciousness that runs ahead of the monstrousness of
fcts, fr which discourses about art and human
rights only ever consist in compensation and frst
aid. And fr this reason is the contemporary
world, frced to admit the superiority of the
dreadfl, not precisely incapable of uttering high
praise fom then on.
As fr as Nietzsche is concerned, he knew very
well that he would, fr the time being, be the sole
reader of Zarathustra to be seized by it; his ffh
"Gospel" is, as he almost rightly says, "dark and
buried and grotesque fr everyone, " and this is so
not only on account of its prematurity. It cannot
be predicted how such a document, which neces
sarily renders anyone trying to spread it grotesque,
could become the point of departure fr a new
eulogistic chain in which the spokesperson would
stand to win. As, fr the time being, anyone pro
fssing to want to cite a passage fom the fifh
"gospel," renders himself even more infeasible
fom a bourgeois and academic standpoint than
would someone attempting to do so with the
unabridged frm of the frst fur. This can in no
way be altered by the conspiracy of the infeasible,
who improvi sed their " braggart empire" by
appealing to a few heavily distorted and cut up
fagments of Nietzsche, translated into banal and
national-populist language. No pair of scissors can
save the chants of Zarathustra fr the language
games of the stock-standard enlightenment.
Nietzsche-uncut only opens up to those who are
lost enough to be able to reinvent the notion of
redemption fr themselves. Assuming that Nietzsche
himself had known this fom the start-and the
biographical and literary evidence speaks in fvor
of this-what could still make him believe that a
new era of discourse would begin with him? How
did he propose to go fom the ridiculous to the
sublime, fom the sublime to feedom-and who
could have done it afer him? To solve this enigma,
we will have to examine in more detail Nietzsche's
sketches fr an ethics of generosity.
3
TOTAL SPONSORI NG
To learn more about Nietzsche's theory and praxis
of generosity, it is also-or above all-necessary to
address his "megalomania, " supposing this an
appropriate designation fr this author's extraordi
nary talent to speak about himself, his mission,
and his writings in the highest of tones. Perhaps
this issue here is one fr which the expression
addressed to the publisher about the "good news, ' '
"something for which there is yet no name, " is
once again appropriate. The alternative designa
tions used to encompass the frst parts of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, "Poem" and "Gospel," should
also be kept in reserve as a way of qualifing
Nietzsche's megalomaniacal remarks.
Megalomania, then, or poetry, or something
fr which there is yet no name: what fllows is
advisably approached with a provision of alternative
41
expressions, to avoid getting stuck with a designa
tion refex that is frst best. The exposure value of
Nietzsche's most conspicuous statements about
himself are so excessive that even the most fvorable,
the most fee-spirited reader, yes even those who
are willingly dazed, will look away fom these
passages as though not wanting to have perceived,
to have countersigned, what has been committed
to paper and put into print. It is possible to stare
fxedly neither at the sun nor at the self-praise of
the mad-fr this reason we read these unbearable
outbursts of self-awareness with self-praise pro
tective eye-wear. We tone down that which cannot
penetrate unfltered into a reader's eyes without
his having to look away out of a sense of shame
fr the unbridled other, or else out of one of tact,
which advises us not to use the moments in
which an excited person bares himself against
him. Among Nietzsche lovers it is a mark of
decency not to cite this sort of thing, is it not?
Today, however, we must deviate fom the norm of
the amateur.
The fct that a psychologist without equal is
speaking in my works, this is perhaps the frst
thing a good reader will realize-the sort of reader
I deserve, who reads me as good old philologists
read their Horace. 1
Does anyone at the end of the nineteenth cen
tury have a dear idea of what poets in strong ages
called inspiration? If not, I will describe it . . . . This is
my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that
you would need to go back thousands of years to
fnd anyone who would say: "it is mine a well."2
My Zarathustra has a special place fr me in
my writings. With it, I have given humanity the
greatest gif it has ever received. 3
Leaving aside the poets: perhaps nothing has
ever been done with such an excess of energy.
Here, my concept of the "Dionysian" became the
highest deed; all the rest of human activity looks
poor and limited in comparison. The fact that a
Goethe, a Shakespeare, would not know how to
breathe fr a second in this incredible passion
and height . . . all this is the least that can be said,
and does not give you any real idea of the dis
tance, of the azure solitude this work lives in . . .
The collective spirit and goodness of all great
souls would not be capable of producing a single
one of Zarathustras speeches . . . . Until then, you
do not know what height, what depth really is;
you know even less what truth is . . . . Wisdom,
investigations of the soul, the art of speaking
none of this existed befre Zarathustra. 4
. . . an ol d fiend has j ust written to say that
she is laughing at me . . . And this at a moment
T otai Sponsori ng I 49
when an unspeakable responsibility rests on
me-when no word can be too gentle, no look
respectfl enough fr me. Because I am carrying
the destiny of humanity on my shoulders. 5
When I measure myself by what I can do . . .
I have better claims to the word "great" than any
other mortal . 6
My lot would have it that I am the frst
decent human being, that I know myself to be
opposing the hypocrisy of millennia . . . I was the
frst to discover the truth because I was the frst
to see-to smell-lies fr what they are . . . I am
a bearer of glad tidings as no one ever was
before . . . Starting with me, the earth will know
great politics . . . 7
I would l i ke t o suggest that we dwell a little
l onger on these unbearable phrases and slowly
remove the protective eye-wear that has fr a cen
tury spared readers the need to engage with this
eruptive, obscene profusion of self-praise and
self-obj ectivization. I make this suggestion on the
assumption that we are dealing not with some
subjective disinhibition in the usual sense, or with
a morbid way of letting oneself go, or even with
traces of puerility, as commentators like Thomas
Mann and Karl Jaspers have discerned in Nietzsche.
Against the afrementioned background oflanguage
50 !
philosophy, it seems plausible to assume here that
the dam behind which the self-eulogistic discursive
energies had been accumulating in the most
advanced civilizations fnally burst, in a single indi
vidual. Today we enj oy a safe distance of one
hundred years that enables us to see these detona
tions of self-awareness fom suffcient distance.
Added to this, we beneft fom a large shif in men
tality, a shift that traverses the 20th century toward
a greater permissiveness in the expression of narcis
sistic afects. And, fnally, Nietzsche's description
of himself in Ecce Homo as a "buffon" suggests the
prospect of considering his Dionysian exaggerations
fom the aspect of voluntary grotesqueness. All this
makes it easier to bracket the embarrassment and
muster up a bit more courage.
I would also like to contend that Nietzsche's
"narcissism" is less pertinent a phenomenon fom
the point of individual psychology than the marker
of a cut in the linguistic history of old Europe. At
bottom, it signifes the disclosure of the nature of
authorship and literary discourse. The discursive event
which bears the name Nietzsche is characterized
by the infingement, within him, of the high
culture separation between the Good News and
self-celebration-which in addition unveils what
it is that a modern author does : he posits the text
f himself The economy of eulogistic and miso
logical discourse and its fundation in the taboo
weighing on self-praise are simultaneously opened
up to debate. The legitimization of this turn can be
gleaned fom Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics
and morality. In it the order of lies, that in which
indirect eulogy is grounded, becomes altogether
transparent, laying bare the mechanisms of contor
tion that have materialized in phrases such as "One
who is humble will be elevated," or servir et dis
paraitre. If it is true that this separation of praise
fom self is nothing other than a defrment efected
through resentment, an everlasting adj ournment
of the moment in which an orator could say to his
own existence, "linger a while so that I can praise
you," one may thus understand Nietzsche's attacks
against discretion as acts of revision that contradict
the traditional morality of self-dispossession in
an almost frious way. We must go back to late
middle-age mysticism to be able, at least fom afr,
to encounter comparable phenomena. Spectacular
and embarrassing as they are, they serve to restore
the possibility of frging the most direct link
between self and praise. What Nietzsche has in
mind is not indistinctly to rej oice over oneself as
bare existence: he deaves with all his might to the
idea that existence must earn its exultation, or
better: that it has to grow into its exultation. As no
other modern thinker, Nietzsche espouses the
adaequatio iubilationis et intellectus. If there is any
correspondence between its existence and good
reputation, an existence must become enhanced to
such an extent that the best may be said about it.
Existence may well be an a priori chance fr self
praise; however, self-eulogistic discourse can only
become legitimate a posteriori at the level of culture.
Between the chance and its realization, the bridge
is created by "egocentrism" -this long maligned
dimension in which the best possibilities of
humankind were arrested incognito. It is the selfsh
impulses, insofr as they are also work-obsessed,
upon which Nietzsche bestows with a philosophical
consecration. Belated self-praise condenses the
premonition of one's own becoming and the con
summation of egocentrism together in the image
of self: how it is that one becomes what one is,
grasping the randomness of being "me." The "fll"
self-image is "realized, " perhaps, in a moment,
when the most ambitious anticipations of one's
own ability to become are confi rmed with a
review of lif lived. This is the type of moment
spoken of on the single page inserted at the start
of Ecce Homo:
On this perfect day, when everything i s ripening
and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of
/ 53
the sun j ust fell upon my life; I looked back, I
looked frward, and never saw so many and such
good things at once. (. . . ) How could I fail to be
g
rateul to my whole li? 8
If a life's elevated possibilities increase, self-praise
can unfld in analogue fshion: once again the
work praises the master, who is poised to disappear
into the work. And it is precisely this correspon
dence that creates the scandal-thi s l i mi tl ess
talking up of manifest and squandered wealth, this
j ubilatory self-review after the deed done, this
complete dissolution of life in luminous positings,
which remain as works of language: they frm the
counter-ofence to the ofence of the cross,
exclaimed by St Paul, with which the blockade
against the connection between self and praise
was solidifed.
That Nietzsche fttingly assessed the implica
tions fr the politics of language of his belated
embarrassment and interpreted them on a grand
historical scale can in fct be seen in the vocabulary
of his late texts, in which the expression "cynicism"
comes conspicuously to the surfce. Nietzsche, the
philologist, was attentive to the fact that his philo
sophical battle-cry, the "re-evaluation of all values,"
harked back to a kynical fagment that describes
the protest strategy of Diogenes of Sinope: "recoin
54 /
the money'' ; he was cognizant of the fct that the
appearance he emitted in the texts of 1 888 could
necessarily seem to be a reemergence of "Socrates
gone mad." But this is exactly what mattered to
him: he pursued the reevaluation of all the source
value of embarrassment, the revision of misological
manners, the abolition of borders, which, fr a
whole age, had been drawn between creative life
and its self-eulogizing frce. So, on the 20th of
November, 1 888, Nietzsche felt able to write to
the Danish critic Brandes that:
I have talked about myself with a cynicism that
will become world historical. The book is called
Ecce Homo . . .
In the section of this book called Why I write
such
g
ood books Nietzsche makes the fllowing
remarks about his works:
they sometimes reach the highest elevation
you will fnd anyhere on earth, cynicism. 9
The expression "cynicism" used in these passages
indicates two directions: the frst is the elevation of
questions of diet and health to a level that is quasi
evangelical-a turn which sums up a good part of
the 1 9th and 20th centuries and already sketches
the direction of the 2 1 st in its generality; and
the second is the merging of the Good News
with sel f-eul o
g
i zi n
g
ener
g
i es. That's why the
meaning of the words "cynical" and "evangelical"
is hencefrth in this specific case the same. At the
point where their meanings intersect they signif
exactly what it is that a modern author does :
exhibit oneself, transfrm oneself in writing, ren
der oneself "infasible." Nietzsche: "I have never
taken a step in public that did not compromise
me: that is my criterion fr acting right."1 0
Singing-one's-own praise of a lif which afrms
and realizes itself as artistic composition is right
ly seen as the only authentic discursive frm still
able to merit the qual i fcation evangelical. As
message this frm is simply good, when and if it
comprises the self-communication of the success
fl-and a sympathizing with it. It speaks the
language of a lif that not only has the right to
make a promise but can also endorse it-and the
bigger the resistance provoked by the afrmation,
the more authentic its occurrence. One might call
the language-traces of such a lif Spinozist since
they are "expressions" in the sense that they serve
to announce a frce of being. They breach the
constraints of traditional bivalent logic, which
had required fr the speaker always to choose
between one of two things-either vouch fr
god, which was unavoidably connected with the
refsal of the hatefl ego, or vouch fr the Ego,
56 /
which traditionally could be understood only as
the satanic renunciation of god.
In the new language position Nietzsche presents
himself not as a poetic redeemer, but instead as an
enricher of a new type. One could label Nietzsche
the frst real sponsor, on the condition that we
devote some time to explaining his art of giving
gifs that exceed the common discourse of gifs and
poisons. Nietzsche's sponsorship of humanity
starts out with the assumption that, by giving indi
viduals ordinary gifs, one implicates them in a
base economy: in this economy, the enhancement
of the giver inevitably goes hand-in-hand with the
ofence of the receiver. If anyone seeks to give a
more distinguished gif, it can only involve the
giving of an unreciprocable gif with no strings
attached. The only gif measuring up to this ambi
tion is the bestowal of a title of nobility, which
excuses the new bearer fom the obligation to refer
to the bestower. With this in view, Nietzsche
invents some take-and-run gifs that take the form of
aphorisms, poems and arguments. Afer Nietzsche
it is possible fr anyone to become noble if he rises
to the sponsor's challenge. But this discourse about
titles of nobility is itself provocative: what the
sponsor bestows is the opposite of a title that one
could "bear." The nobility in question here cannot
be
g
leaned fom any of the historical frms of aris
tocracy. This is Nietzsche's decision thesis, namely
the idea that the history of humanity is yet to know
real nobility-except perhaps in the mild idiocy of
the fgure of Jesus and the sovereign hygiene of
Buddha. However, in his view the latter incarnate
defcient frms of generosity, since both are
g
rounded in a retreat fom the vita activa. They are
waiting to be outdone by world-afrming, creative
attitudes toward lif-whence arises the ethical
mandate of art, fr the entire dimension of fture
history. From then on, historical nobleness pos
sessed as a good has no value, because what could
be designated as noble in fudal times was scarcely
anything other than power-protected meanness .
"The rabble above, the rabble below"-the words
by the voluntary beggars about the rich and power
fl of the present moment, to be fund in the
furth part of Zarathustra, apply retroactively to
historical evidence. The qualifer noble can no
longer be defnded through convention, to the
extent noble should be the title fr the birth of a
deed or a thought based on an unresentfl, fr
aiming frce. Nobility is a position with respect to
the fture. Nietzsche's innovative gif consists in
provoking one to engage in a way of bein
g
in
which the receiver would take up an active frce as
sponsor, that is to say, in the ability to open up
richer ftures. Nietzsche is a teacher of generosity
in the sense that he infects the recipients of his gifs
with the idea of wealth, which is necessarily not
worth acquiring unless with a view to being able to
squander it.
Whoever gives the provocation of gif-giving
has the right to consider himself as being at the
start of a new moral fnctional chain. Thereby is
time in its entirety newly interpreted: as a delay in
the fture proliferation of generosity, "history"
acquires content in excess of the causality that had
reigned till then. The fture of humanity is a test
of whether it is possible to supersede resentment as
the fremost historical frce. In the ascending line
of gif-giving virtues, life praises itself as an
immeasurable proliferation of chances to be given.
It fnds the reason fr its thankfl praise in its
participation in events of generosity. History splits
into the time of the economy of debt and the time
of generosity. Whereas the frmer thinks of repay
ment and retaliation, the latter is interested only in
frwards-donating. Wittingly or otherwise, every
life will in fture be dated in accordance with
this criteri on: " One lives befre him, one lives
after him ... "
It pays to take a closer look at the original act of
the generosity-chain inaugurated by Nietzsche,
since conditions of bonding can be seen in it, fom
Tota! Sponsor! nq I 59
which it is alone possible to draw the sole valid
criterion fr enabling us to divide legitimate fom
illegitimate references to Nietzsche. It is decisive
that the new "loose" chain begins with an uncon
ditional gesture of expenditure, since the giver can
only breach the circle of a savings-rationality
through pure self-expenditure. Only unbilled
expenditure has suffcient spontaneity and cen
trifgal frce to escape the gravitational feld of
avarice and its calculus. Savers and capitalists
always expect to get more back than they stake,
while the sponsor gets his satisfction without any
regard fr "revenue." This applies to sentences as
much as to donations. What Nietzsche calls the
innocence of becoming is essentially the innocence
of expenditure and eo ipso the innocence of enrich
ment, sought fr the sake of the possibility to
expend. The leap into generosity transpires
through afrming the prosperity of oneself and
others, since this is the necessary premise of
generosity. If there is a l eap [ Ursprung] into
generosity, then it resides in the challenge that
open generosity makes to concealed generosity.
Part of Nietzsche's idea of the art of giving is that
the giver-if he cannot remain concealed, which is
a priori impossible fr an author-cannot present
himself in a flse perfection, since he would thereby
lie his way out of the world and continue simply
to fol the receiver, which is tantamount to a
humiliation. Rather, when encouraging the receiver
to accept the donation, he should also disclose his
infrmities and idiosyncrasies, however without
denying the level of the gif. Only this yields the
"master-art of kindness."11 A little vanity, a little
turning in the narcissistic circle must come into
play. Integral self-afrmation encompasses the
everyday things that the regime of metaphysical
misology had talked down, and stands in gratitude
to them fr the gif of being able to give. In this
exercise, Nietzsche, the enlightener, can abide by
the 1 9th-century custom of explaining authors on
the basis of their milieus. If the author is immortal,
his tics will also be. If Zarathustra emerges with his
language of self- and world-afrmation, this lan
guage must convey the pressure of provocation
through its radically self-eulogistic and "wanton"
frm. The impact of Nietzsche's sayings and
arrows, which take the frm of pure dictates,
become fr easily provoked readers a therapeutic
insult eliciting an immune reaction. This corre
sponds to a vaccination procedure at the moral
level. Anyone who has become a sponsor some
other way will perhaps know that it is possible to
become one without Nietzsche. Those who are not
yet sponsors, however, can experience how he
infects them with the memory of the possibility of
Total Sponsori ng I 61
g
enerosity-a memory that the receiver cannot let
sit, to the extent he is ready and able to enter into
the noble space of resonance. That the non
receivers pursue other dealings is, on another level,
certainly also perfctly fine.
Erupting fom the motive of "virtuous giving"
is a spring of pluralism leading beyond all expecta
tions of unity. The nature of provocative generosity
is such that it is unable to be alone and wants even
less to be so. The sponsor's generosity as such aims
to generate dissensus, which is to say competition.
It would consider itself to have filed were it to be
said it had obtained a monopoly. To be as it would
like to be, it must posit competition. It would
prefer to lay itself open to rejection, than it would
to subordinate imitations. The generous, then,
stand in opposition to the good, who fr Nietzsche
are rightly called decadents, since they-as we have
known since the Genealo
g
of Morat-pursue the
dream of monopolizing merely good sentiments.
For them, bad is anything that expects that they
prove their goodness; while anything which
belabors their consensus with questions and exits
their circle of blackmail strikes them as immediately
devilish. In Nietzsche, decadence represents the
epitome of conditions in which resentment is
guaranteed it will always hit upon its ideal lan
guage situation. The relations bearing witness to
62 I Ni etzsche Apcs1l e
decadence are those in which "the yes-man
[Mucker] is in charge"-to put it in Nietzsche's
words. If the good are so good, it is only fute de
mieux. The decadence ideal holds power only so
long as, and because, "it has not had any competi-
tion."1 2 That is why if one wants to oppose the
better to the good in questions of gospel, one must
resolve to count to fve.
4
OF SUNS AND HUMANS
If, today, one hundred years afer Nietzsche's
death, we look back at this author fr authors and
non-authors and grasp his place in his time, we
become aware that Nietzsche-fr all his claims to
originality and despite his pride at being the frst in
essential things-was in many respects actually
only a privileged medium fr the execution of
tendencies that in one way or another would have
frged ahead wi thout hi m. Hi s achi evement
consists in knowing how to transfrm an accident
of the name Friedrich Nietzsche into an event,
provided that we understand by event the poten
tiation of the accidental into the destinal. Destiny
might aso be spoken of in the case where a designer
latches onto that somethi ng that is goi ng to
happen in any event, impelling it frther, and
stamping his name on it. In this sense Nietzsche is
65
a destiny-or, as one would say today, a trend
designer. The trend which he embodied and gave
frm to was the individualist wave, which, since
the Industrial Revolution and its cultural proj ec
tions in romanticism, had proceeded inexorably
through modern civil society and has not ceased
doing so. Individualism, then, is to be understood
not as an accidental or avoidable current in the
history of mentalities, but rather as an anthropo
logical break which frst made possible the emer
gence of a type of human being surrounded by
enough media and means of discharge to be able to
individualize counter to its "societal precondi
tions." In individualism is articulated the third
post-historical insulation of "human beings"
afer the frst, prehistorical in nature, led to its
emancipation fom nature, and the second, his
torical one, led to the "reign of man over man."1
I ndividualism constantly frges changing
alliances with all that has made up the modern
world: with progress and reaction, with lef-wing
and right-wing political programs, with national
and transnational motives, with masculinist, femi
nist and infntilist proj ects, with technophile and
technophobe sentiments, with ascetic and hedo
nist moralities, with avant-gardist and conservative
conceptions of art, with analytical and cathartic
therapies, with sporty and non-sporty lifestyles,
with perfrmance readiness and refsal of per
frmance, with belief in success as well as unbelief
in it, with still Christian as well as no-l onger
Christian frms of lif, with ecumenical openings
and l ocal closi ngs, with humani st and pos t
humanist ethics, with the ego necessarily able to
accompany all my representations, as well as with
the dissolved self, which exists only as the hall of
mirrors of its masks. Individualism is capable of
alliances with all sides, and Nietzsche is its designer,
its prophet.
Nietzsche's pretention to be an artist and much
more than an artist is grounded in his radical,
modern concept of success : fr him, at stake is not
only to throw products on today's market, but
instead to create the market wave itself, by which
the work is belatedly carried to success. In this way
he anticipated the strategies of the avant-garde,
which Boris Groys has described in his already
classic work on The Total Art of Stalinism. If one
wants to be a market leader, one must frst operate
as a market maker. And to be successfl as a mar
ket maker, one must anticipate and endorse what
many will choose once they learn they are allowed to
want. Nietzsche had understood that the phenome
non that would emerge irresistibly in tomorrow's
culture was the need to distinguish oneself fom
the mass. It was immediately present to him that
Ct Suns
the stuf out of which the fture would be made,
could be fund in individuals' demands to be better
and other than the rest, and thereby precisely better
than all others. The theme of the 20th century is
self-refrentiality, in the systemic as well as the
psychological senses. Only: self-referential systems
are autological and self-eulogistic systems. The
author Nietzsche still has this knowledge in
advance over contemporary theory. On his under
standing, or rather intuition, he created, in his
lifetime, the conditions fr his twofld posthu
mous success: he inscribed his name in the list of
classics, which throughout culture are handed
down as reference points of approval and critique.
This is what he described as his flflled need fr
immortality; in addition, however, through the
detour of his frst interpreters and intermediaries,
he above all imposed his name as a brand name fr
a successfl immaterial product, fr a literary
lifestyle-drug or an elevated way-of-lif. This is the
Nietzschean design of individualism: We fee spirits!
We who live dangerously! When the author iden
tifes himself as author, the self-eulogistic melody
appears; when the market-maker launches the
brand, the advertisement appears . Nietzsche libe
rated modern language in associating eulogies
with publicity. Only a j ester, only a poet, only a
copywriter. This connection alone enables us to
understand how that most resolute proponent of
high culture could have yielded efects on mass
culture. It is undeniable that Nietzsche's second
success, his seduction as brand, or as ethos and
attitude, in the feld of individualism, by fr con
stitutes his greatest efect-and also contains his
more distant fture possibilities. Indeed, it is pre
cisely because the Nietzsche life-style-brand, fr
more than the name of the author, still radiates an
almost irresistible attraction, that, over the course
of the last third of the 20th century, with the onset
of the overtly individualist conj uncture of the
post-May ' 68 period, it could recover fom the
incursions of fascist redactors and their copies.
Doubtless, the author Nietzsche, even given the
then dire state of editing, was unacceptable to
national-socialist collectivism and that the brand
Nietzsche alone-and indeed only in rare and par
ticular aspects-suggested itself fr reproduction
in national pop culture. To understand this point,
we have to fctor in the fct that, procedurall,
fscism is nothing other than the incursion of pop
and kitsch-procedures into politics. As Clement
Greenberg already showed in 1 939-confonting
the critical case-kitsch is the world l anguage of
triumphant mass culture. It depends on the
mechanized frgery of success. Pop and kitsch are,
culturally as politically, short-cut procedures to get
Of Suns and Humans I 69
to the apparent taste of the masses. With this they
content themselves with copying success and, with
copies of the successfl in hand, with triumphing
once again. Hitler's success strategy as pop and
kitsch politician consisted in tying a pop-nationalism
with an event-militarism, as the simplest way to
have the narcissism of the masses efervesce. In
doing so, radiophone acquisition techniques and
open-air paramilitary liturgies played the key roles.
Through them, the population learned that it shall
be a people and that it had to listen to the rabble
rousing voices of its projected self. In this sense, all
fscism is an efect of redaction. It is deutero
fscistic fom the start, since it has no original; if a
derivative can be insurrectionary, it is precisely by
way of an insurrection of scissors, which always
know what they must cut, how, and to what ends.
From the energetic aspect, fscism is the event
culture of resentment-a defnition, incidentally,
which renders intelligible the shocking convertibility
of lefwing afects into rightwing ones, and vice
versa. So long as publicness fnctions as a director's
theater of resentment, the ability to rape texts and
to seduce the public as a "mass" is presupposed.
Brand Nietzsche could play a role in the semantic
advertising drives of the NS-Movement insofr as
their imitations omitted his basic assessments, as
implacably individualistic and avant-gardist as
they are, and retained only the "fst climber" atti
tudes, along with a martial decor of the dictum.
Hitler's clique edited Nietzsche with scissors and
pasted him into a collectivist gospel-shortly
befre, moreover, Nietzsche's sister had employed
her scissors to prepare a ready-made of brand
Nietzsche. To the shame of German academic phi
losophy afer 1 933, one is frced to remark that it
did exactly the same thing on its level, as did the
anti-Nietzscheans, who are still today unable to
do more than merely compile their self-pasted
incrimination fles-but how fr must one reach
back to fnd university philosophers who do not
philosophize with scissors? The National Socialists,
resolute editors of everything that guaranteed social
and national success, were able to retain fr less of
Nietzsche than Jeferson could of Jesus-most of
his writings were too inappropriate fr their kitsch
system, too anti-nationalist, too anti-German, too
anti-philistine, too anti-revanchist, too anti-collec
tivist, too anti-militarist, too anti-antirationalist, too
disdainfl of every concept of "national selfinterest"
[ Volker-Selbstsucht] , 2 and, finally, to mention the
decisive barrier, too incompatible with any politics
of resentment, regardless of whether this presents
itself as nationalist or socialist or as a multi-purpose
frm of vengeance politics; national/socialist. That
there is no path leading fom Nietzsche to the
German's posing as masters must be obvious to
anyone who's come into contact with his writings
too incisive was Nietzsche's insight that Germans,
whether they have graduated or not, have as their
temptation not to feel good if they cannot belittle
others-but what else is Nietzsche's moral philo
sophical oeuvre if not a single exercise in overcoming
the need to disparage others ? That nationalist
politics rests on the pathetic propensity to humiliate
freigners-who has brought this into sharper
fcus than Nietzsche, and who was able to trace
hooliganism to Wilhelmina? Nietzsche, to be sure,
is anti-egalitarian, but this is not in order to make
common cause with revenge-hungry populists, as
German moral philosophers, whose diferences
can no longer impress, avidly continue to assert in
the wisdom of their years. Instead, it is in order to
defnd the feedom of selfenhancement against
the consumerdom of the last men. From one per
spective only is a concession to be made to those
who disparage Nietzsche and attempt to guard
against his infuence. It is correct that Nietzsche, as
the designer of a brand of "destiny," was obliged to
ask himself whether his products should not have
been endowed with better copy protection and
whether the brand should even have been allowed
to appear next to the authorial name. Could he
not have known that fom the rif-raf he repelled,
l2 I
his most tenacious clientele could emerge? Proof
that these questions did not escape Nietzsche's
consideration can be seen-that is, apart fom
Zarathustras prophetic sayings, more or less criti
cal of the Church, about the parasites of the noble
soul3-in certain letters and work notes in which
he pondered, in dread of the monstrousness of his
insights, whether to abdicate fom his authorship.
However, even if he had done this, it would have
been imperative to disclose why he gave up being
an author-and the result would have been nearly
the same. Perhaps Nietzsche knew the answer to
such obj ections in advance, as he did fr nearly
everything else: "I am not on my guard fr
deceivers, I have to be without caution-my fte
wants it so."4
In order to gauge what was unique in
Nietzsche's great success as individualism's trend
designer, a comparison with alternative designs
suggests itself There are only a fw strong versions
of his epoch-making expression "become what you
are" and the corresponding "do what you will. "
Ultimately the work of one single author can serve
as a rival proj ect and fil to Nietzsche's own, one
who the author of The Ga
y
Science himself inci
dentally named "a glorious, great nature," not
without adding that to date the most ingenious
philosophical writer of the 1 9th century had been
/ 73
an American, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson. If
Nietzsche's design of lif in selfcreating individu
ality is presented under the title "Free spirits,"
Emerson brings his product on the market under
the brand name "non-confrmism." It is to this
that the greatest of Emerson's early essays are
devoted; the beacon with whom American philoso
phy yielded to its frst astonished witnesses the
proof of its existence. Not coincidentally, this was
under the heading SelReliance, a prose piece of
barely thirty pages, incomparable in its a-systemic
density, the declaration of independence of the
American essay and the revocation of American
servitude to the European canon, and to every
canon in general. What takes shape in him is an
anti-humility program which, over the course of
the next one hundred and ffty years, would reveal
itself as the specifc timbre of American feedom
a color that dominated until the '70s of last century,
befre US academia dedicated itself to the import
of European maso-theories. But in the year of
1 84 1 , the inundation of critical theo
r
was still a
ways of:
To believe your own thought, to believe that
what is true fr you in your private heart is true
fr all men-that is genius. Speak your latent
conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; fr
the inmost in due time becomes the outmost
and our frst thought is rendered back to us by
the trumpets of the Last Judgment. ( . . . ) Great
works of art have no more afecting lesson fr
us than thi s. They teach us to abide by our
spontaneous impression with good-humored
infexibility than most when the whole cry of
voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a
stranger will say ( . . . ) precisely what we have
thought and felt all the time, and we shall be
frced to take with shame our own opinion
fom another.
( . . . ) but God will not have his work made
manifest by cowards. ( . . . ) Trust thyself: every
heart vibrates to that iron string.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against
the manhood of every one of its members.
Society is a j oint-stock company, in which
the members agree, fr the better securing of
his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the
liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in
most request is confrmity. Self-reliance is its
aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but
names and customs.
Whoso would be a man must be a noncon
frmist. He who would gather immortal palms
must not be hindered by the name of goodness,
but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at
last sacred but the inte
g
rity of your own mind.
Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the
sufrage of the world
Your goodness must have some edge to it
else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be
preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of
love when that pules and whines. ( . . . ) I would
write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. ( . . . )
we cannot spend the day in explanation.
Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the
hand of the harlot, and fee.
To be great is to be misunderstood. ( . . . )
Your confrmity explains nothing. Act singly,
and what you have already done singly will j ustif
you now.
The centuries are conspirators against the
sanity and authority of the soul . . . history is an
impertinence and an inj ury, if it be any thing
more than a cheerfl apologue or parable of my
bein
g
and becomin
g
.
"To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster,
"the blessed Immortals are swif. "5
Emerson possesses a temporal advance over
Nietzsche, in addition to a psycho-political one.
Since while Emerson's non-confrmism seems as if
it were made to unfld, against a certain resistance,
toward an ambivalent narcissism of the mass, one
still balanced by democracy at the end of the day,
Nietzsche's fee spirit brand ran a greater risk of
being imitated by a success-hungry movement of
losers. Fascisms, past and fture, are politically
nothing other than insurrectons of ener
g
-charged
losers, who, fr a time of exception, change the
rules in order to appear as victors. The Nietzsche
brand was recuperated by losers and loser-redactors,
because it promised to be the brand of winners. As
this horrifc episode did not and could not last,
Emerson's proj ect won out over Nietzsche's on the
brand font. That's why most of us today are non
confrmists, not fee spirits. Our average thoughts
and felings are all made in the USA, not made in
Sil-Mara.
The signifcance of this diference can be seen
by returning again to Nietzsche, the author.
When, in the euphoric productions of the frst
parts of Zarathuta, he undertook the most radical
short circuit between self-praising discourse and
evangelical discourse, his concept of "Di onysian"
had necessarily according to the author, become the
"highest fct." In these colorfl episodes of writing,
Nietzsche, as never befre or afer, amended lan
guage use by producing a discourse that was a pure
self-advert of creative ecstasy. Even so, he was not
exactly correct in exclusively reserving the predi
cate "Di onysian" fr his "highest deed." What
Of Suns and Humans I 77
came to light in these expression-eruptions, rather
were more Apollonian irradiations, in which
Dionysian fagmentations appeared to have been
overcome. It is not by chance that, in the gospel
according to Zarathustra, the sun-the star of
Apollo-plays the role of the exemplary Being,
and it falls to the new prophet to perfct himself in
imitation of the sun. ''ll that I touch becomes
light"-only suns can talk in this way about them
selves. This applies above ato their most important
gestures and talents-the readiness to over-expend
themselves unconditionally and the ability to set
without regret. In both respects the teachings of
the late Nietzsche point to an imitation solis. The
sun alone is heroic right to the moment of setting
and remains generous until it goes down.
"Heroism is the good will to absolute self-demise,"
the author had once written fr his young Russian
girlfiend. Only suns can be so profigate that they
can be placed under the guardianship of rational
heirs, when the economic ideas of the latter manage
to prevail. Only the sun has a giving virtue as
frst nature; only suns care nothing fr the sym
metry between giving and taking; only suns shine
sovereignly over proponents and opponents; and
only suns read no critiques. On this last point the
author Nietzsche did not totally succeed in his
becoming-sun. Moreover, there are also some other
78 I Ni etzsche Apostl e
respects that give ground fr suspIC10n that
Nietzsche's sun participates fr more in humanity
than the metaphor betrays. This begins with
Zarathustra's frst address to it: "You great star!
What would your happiness be if you had not
those fr whom you shine? ( . . . ) we . . . took your
overfow fom you and blessed you fr it."6 And it
culminates in Zarathustra's prayer to his will:
That I may one day be ready and ripe in the
g
reat noon;
-ready fr myself and fr my most hidden
will; a bow burnin
g
fr its arrow, an arrow
burnin
g
fr its star-
-a star ready and ripe in its noon,
g
lowin
g
,
skewered, blissfl with annihilatin
g
arrows
of the sun-
-a sun itself and an inexorable will of the
sun . . . 7
One sees in these phrases that the author sympa
thizes neither with philosophical hallucinations,
which proclaim the fight into identity in the name
of the "subj ect," nor with the philosophy of dia
logue, in which subj ects address each other fce to
fce or accuse each other of turning away fom
dialogue. Nietzsche's interests are directed at a
theory of the penetrated penetration, an ethics of
overfowing into and entering into others, a logic of
absorption and of new-radiation. He does not
know of symmetrical discussions, negotiation, of
the middle-value between banalities, but instead of
inter-solar relations, the trafc of rays fom start to
star, the penetration fom viscera to viscera, being
pregnant and making-pregnant. "In the belly of the
whale I become the herald oflif."8 His interest lies
not in opinions but in emanations. On an intellec
tual level he is a radical bisexual, a star which fevers
to be penetrated, and a sun which penetrates and
"prevails." I am penetrated, therefre I am; I radiate
in you, therefore you are. By sexualizing the sun, he
reverses the direction of imitation and compels the
sun to become the imitator of people, provided that
the individual is an author-that is, one who is
penetrated by language, by music, a voice, which
seeks ears and creates them.
From this point it is possible to give yet another
twist to the interpretation of Nietzsche's work
fom within the critique ofl anguage. If Nietzsche's
evangelical operation liberates self-praise, then a
transfrmed light flls on the self of this praise. In
noting that Nietzsche's poetics abolishes the rules
of indirect eulogy and substitutes praise of the
freigner with selfpraise, we see only the outer
layer of the turmoil created. On a deeper level ,
Nietzsche's affrmative language remains obliged to
80 I
praise the freigner-better, it praises the non-self
such as it has never been celebrated befre.
However, it devotes itself to a freignness that is
more than the otherness of another person. It
exposes itself to a freignness that traverses the
speaker as it would a reverberant corridor, a freign
ness that penetrates him and makes him possible
it is exposed to the freigner's culture, language,
educators, illnesses, contaminations, temptations,
fiends, indeed even the self which places paren
theses it ostensibly owns around phenomena. It
celebrates in itself a fllness of freignness called
the world. Whatever Nietzsche alleges about
these magnitudes is transfrmed into praise of
the freigner in itself: ''s my fther I am already
dead and as my mother I am still alive ... "9 Thus
Nietzsche's selfessness must be sought beneath the
level of apparent self-praise-in his opening to the
inner freignness, in his excessive mediality, in his
indulgent curiosity fr everything, and in his never
totally compensated imbecility. This is why the
author is no simple sun, but a resonance-body. As
my mother I still speak, as my fture fiends I am
still to be heard. Nietzsche could be described as
the discoverer of hetero-narcissism: what he ulti
mately afrms in himself are the othernesses which
gather in him and make him up like a composi
tion, which penetrate him, delight him, torture
I 81
him and surprise him. Without surprise life would
be a fllacy. There must be something in the world
that is faster than causes. What comes to be dis
cussed under the title of "the will to power" is the
prelude to a composition qua theory of pure
positings. The theory of the will was a detour on
the way to the unwritten, complete teaching, to
that critique of eulogistic reason which describes
the world as an obj ection and its overcoming.
Perhaps we ought to permit ourselves to remark
that, as an author of German language and
European synta, Nietzsche reached the pinnacle.
In his culminations as thinker-singer, he could fel
himself to be an organon of the universe, creating
sites of selfafrmation in individuals. As a
philosopher, he would have rej oiced too early, had
he assembled the sketches of his theory of will into
a work and published it himself But we know that
the exploiters, recyclers, and accelerators did this
fr him, using his authorial name as a brand. They
did this rather unbeknownst to the author, who
ofen came to the point in his research at which the
alleged system, the supposed fndamental theory,
cancelled itself out: there is no will, and therefre
no will to power. Will is only an idiom. There is
only a multiplicity of frces, speech, gestures, and
their being composed under the direction of an
ego, which gets affrmed, lost, and transfrmed.
On this precise point the author contradicts his
own brand, and his statements on this are explicit.
Perhaps we can do no better, then, on the hun
dredth anniversary of his death, than to repeat
these statements, in the hope that no fture redac
tion can excise them:
The whole surfce of consciousness-conscious
ness is a surfce-has to be kept fee fom all of
the
g
reat imperatives. Be carefl even of
g
reat
words,
g
reat attitudes . . . . I have no memory of
ever havin
g
made an efort-you will not detect
any trace of stru
gg
le in my life, I am the opposite
of a heroic nature. To "will" anythin
g
, to "strive"
afer anythin
g
, to have a "
g
oal," a "wish" in mind
I have never experienced this. Ri
g
ht now I am
still lookin
g
out over my fture-an immense
future! -as if it were a calm sea: there is not a
ripple of lon
g
in
g
. I do not have the sli
g
htest wish
fr anythin
g
to be diferent fom how it is; I do
not want to become anythin
g
other than what I
am. But this is how my life has always been. 1 0
This idyll of the author responds once again t o the
Zarathustra idyll of noon, the recumbent ovation
on the perfct earth. Here the earth seems to
answer in advance to the question of whom it takes
itself fr.
Like such a weary ship in the stillest bay, thus I
too rest now close to the earth, fithflly trusting,
waiting, bound to it with the lightest threads. Oh
happiness, oh happiness! Do you want to sin
g
, oh
my soul? You lie in the grass. But this is the secret
solemn hour when no shepherd plays his fute.
Stand back! Hot noon sleeps on the meadows.
Do not sin
g
! Still! The world is perfct. 1 1
Here the author himself is called upon to stop
being an author. Where the world has become
everything that may not be awakened, the writer is
no more. Let's leave him in his old noon. We must
picture the author who ceases a happy person.
NOTES
Introduction
1 . Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the
Idols, and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith
Norman, translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, No. 1 6, p. 1 3. [translation modified]
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "The Conva
lescent," edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin,
translated by Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006, p. 1 73.
1 . Gos
p
els-Redactions
1 . Otfied von Weissenburg, Evangelienbuch (extracts ) , ed. ,
translated into modern German and commented by Gisela
Vollmann-Profe, Stuttgart 1 987, p. 37.
2. Translator's note: in German "fiern," to celebrate, can also mean
"to take holidays." Cf. Wittgenstein's phrase "die Sprache fiert."
3. Translator's note: oldest known form of the word deutsch (i. e. ,
German) .
4. Dedication to Luitbert, Archbishop of Mainz, op. cit. , pp. 1 9-21 .
5 . The Jeferson Bible, with a n introduction by F Forrester
Church and an aferword by Jaroslav Pelikan, Boston: Beacon
Press, 1 989, p. 1 7.
85
6. Ibid. , p. 28.
7. Cf The Gospel According to Toltoy, translated and edited by
David Patterson, London and Tuscaloosa, 1 992.
8. Ibid. , p. 30.
2. The Fifh
1 . Friedrich Nietzsche, Sdmtliche Brie, Kritischen Studienausgabe,
Vol . 6, Munich, 1 986, p. 327.
2. Ibid. , p. 363.
3. Ibid. , p. 380.
4. Selected Letters o
f
Fiedrich Nietzsche, edited and translated by
Christopher Middleton, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis/Cambridge 1 996, p. 223 (German original, p. 497) .
5 . The Anti-Christ and Other Writings, op. cit., "The Antichrist, " 45,
p. 42.
6. Selected Letters, op. cit., p. 223 (German edition, p. 497).
7. The Anti-Christ and Other Writings, op. cit. , p. 1 37.
3. Tota Sponsoring
1 . Ece Homo, Cambridge, p. 1 05.
2. Ibid, pp. 1 26-7.
3. Ibid, p. 72.
4. Ibid, pp. 1 29-30.
5. Ibid, p. 1 43.
6. Ibid, p. 98.
7. Ibid, p. 1 44.
8. "Ecce Homo" in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, translated and
edited, with Commentaries by Walter Kaufmann, New York: The
Modern Library, 1 968, p. 677.
86 ! A<cst! o
9. Ibid. , p. 1 03.
1 0. Ibid. , p. 82.
1 1 . Thus Spoke Zarathustra, op. cit. , I V p. 21 8 .
1 2. Ece Homo, Cambridge, p. 1 36.
4. Of Suns and Humans
1 . On the concept of "insulation" as anthropological mecha
nism, see Dieter Classens, Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte.
Soziologische Skizzen zur Anthropologie, Frankfrt: Suhrkamp,
1 980, pp. 60-92.
2. The Antichrist, op. cit. , p. 3.
3. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, op. cit. , III, Of Ol d and New Tablets
1 9, p. 1 67f
4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, op. cit. , IV The Magician, 2, p. 207.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, Vol. One, "Self-Reliance, "
accessed online at www. rwe. org/ complete/ complete-works/ii
essays-i/ii-self-reliance. html.
6. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 3.
7. Ibid, p. 1 73.
8. Nachgelsene Schrien, Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. , 1 0, p. 428.
9. Ece Homo, p. 74.
1 0 . Ibid, p. 97.
1 1 . Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 224.
! Bl