Zarathustra’s Nietzsche
A rough sketch
James
Luchte
Contents
Zarathustra’s Nietzsche: From
Guilt to Innocence
The Death of God: The Seeds of Its
Own Destruction
Novelty under the Sun: Two Notions
of the Will and Will to Power
Overman: Beyond Dionysus and
Apollo in Tragedy and Comedy
Revaluation of All Values: The
Lifeworld of the Overman
Zarathustra’s Children
Despite the fact that Nietzsche and his
family considered his magnum opus to
be blasphemous, and feared a backlash from the religious establishment, Thus Spoke Zarathustra was not banned.[1] Indeed, not much notice was taken of it until
well after Nietzsche’s collapse.[2] In our era, this idiosyncratic work seems to
stand in a paradoxical place, all its own.
On the one hand, it is a work that is very well known and referenced
with respect to some of its most famous phrases and words, such as ‘God is
dead’, the ‘Last Man’, ‘Overman’ and ‘eternal recurrence of the same.’ On the other hand, it is a work that is
little studied, either in literary, theological or philosophical contexts. The present essay seeks to redress this
neglect by building on the efforts of those, such as Lampert, Higgins, and others,
who have sought to engage Thus Spoke
Zarathustra as a serious philosophical work.[3] In the present context, I will pursue this
engagement through an examination of the relationship between Nietzsche and the
religions which trace their genealogy to Abraham in the Torah. Such a focus will allow an intersection of
literary, theological and philosophical perspectives in a broader
interpretation of the significance of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra as a challenge to traditional religious orthodoxy.
It could be suggested that Nietzsche appropriates the name
of Zarathustra in a vain
attempt to subvert and go beyond
Zoroaster, the inventor of good and
evil.[4] This meta-historical attempt at
self-overcoming is vain, in a mocking challenge to the philosopher of Ecclesiastes, as it asserts that there
is something new under the sun, or at least that this something –
novelty - is at least possible – beyond a metaphysics of an
eschaton. For Nietzsche, the
eschaton unfolds as a self-same suppression of Life, as the latest eradication
of the moment of becoming. In this way,
Nietzsche will not only risk this vanity in an attempt to think differently,[5]
but will also affirm the possibility of a transfigured existence of radical
innocence. It is an affirmation of
innocence which displaces a disciplinary regime of radical guilt. Across the following pages, I would like to
lay out the intimations in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra of a
pathway from a regime of guilt to a topos[6]
for an innocence of becoming.
As an example of a novel transgression of the monotheistic
orthodoxy, and as a guide for our interpretation, Zarathustra evokes a new
truth (given in his dream by Apollo) that a deeper, hidden bind ties life together
(the Dionysian). In response to the
common currency of ‘truth’ as either the mere systemization, of clarity and
distinctness, or the truth of the revealed religions, Zarathustra sings in ‘The
Other Dancing Song”,
One!
Oh man, take care!
Two!
What does the deep
midnight declare!
Three!
I was asleep ---
Four!
From a deep dream I
woke and swear:
Five!
The world is deep,
Six!
Deeper than day had
been aware.
Seven!
Deep is its woe;
Eight!
Joy --- deeper yet
than agony:
Nine!
Woe implores: Go!
Ten!
But all joy wants
eternity ---
Eleven!
Wants deep, wants deep
eternity.
Twelve![7]
This is an instance of one of Zarathustra’s many
evocations and gestures of reversal and revaluation: that the ‘unity’ of existence
– if there is to be such a ‘unity’ – must be intimated in the hidden recesses
of life. Such an excavation and
conjuring of the depths is not greatly served by either a systematic
interrogation and logical analysis, or the dogmas of revealed monotheism. The depths when brought to the surface become
disfigured by the procedure of disclosure, by the production of the theoretical
object of analysis. In other words, the
intimacy of the singular and its self-interpretation and expression is
displaced by the regime of subsumption of the particular by the universal. And, we find this logical procedure mirrored
in the theistic devaluation not only of the depths as obscure, evil, but also
of life and embodied existence. Or, for
those with “listening eyes”[8],
the inventor of new values or the revolution which comes on the wings of a dove
is effectively silenced by the hegemonic discourses of Reason (science) and
Faith (revealed religion), due to the very grammar of their expression. Intimate, indigenous, expression is
displaced, crowded out by “realist” information, constructed facts,
propositions, noise. For Nietzsche, on
the contrary, the most difficult task is the attempt to go under into
the depths. If truth loves to hide, we
would destroy her if we forced her to stand naked in the panopticon[9]
of our inspection regime. If we do
indeed love the truth, we must travel into the hidden – forbidden - so as to
find her there – in her truth. She
must speak for herself.
For Nietzsche, and later for Bataille[10]
and Iriguray,[11]
it is poetry, music and ‘detours’ which facilitate a descent into the depths,
giving glimpses of truth in her own domain.[12] It is poetry which can go under into
the depths, and it is thus poetry which will be the hidden tie that
binds together the ‘unity’ of Nietzsche’s attempt to go under, into the depths. Poetry attempts to bring truth into the Open
without turning her into ashes, or as a lacerated corpse. With the implosion of the antithetical regime
of consciousness and existence, of subject and object, of concept and intuition
(and of God and Creation), we find that poetry, even if conceived as a type of
conceptuality, is, for Nietzsche, a self-expression of the phenomenon of
life.[13] It is an evocation from the depths, from the
nether realms into the marriage of light and darkness. It is the in-between and root of a radical
imagination, of language, of a surreal temporality. Poetry
intimates, for Nietzsche, chaos at this heart of existence, its expression
seeks to give birth to a dancing star – it is this giving
birth. The poets were removed from the
Light of the polis in that they
implored the people to remember the song of the earth resonating below
the regimentation of the polis. Plato charged that poets lie too much
– that they spoke in ways which made the true false and the false true – that
poetry itself was merely the idle chatter of the ephemeral realm, a logos of untruth. However, Nietzsche reminds Plato in the
Preface to Beyond Good and Evil that his attempt to create a ‘Good in
itself’ would be a self-negating attempt to deny perspective, to refuse
Life – in other words, that his lust for an Otherworld is a weary attempt of
escape, of nihilism. Zarathustra laughs,
agreeing that the poets do lie too much – but he tells the troubled youth on
the mountainside, “Zarathustra too is a poet.”[14] It is perhaps in his use of poetry, of an
art, a lie, which is uniquely suited to tell the truth, that Nietzsche’s
challenge to philosophy and theology is at its most subversive. For, not only does he throw off the protocols
of science and logic, but writing in a style that resembles each of the three
monotheistic texts, Nietzsche not only intimates the all-too-human creative
root of each of the texts, but also sets forth an alternative teaching of its
own, a doctrine which seeks, by returning to the roots of the trajectory of our
own era in Zarathustra and Abraham, to counsel human being in their
self-overcoming of the monotheistic genealogy.
Taking seriously Nietzsche’s
“choice” of Zarathustra, the following pages will be oriented by the tapestry
of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a poetic topos for Nietzsche’s philosophy.
I will begin in section one, Zarathustra and Abraham: The Destination
of the One, with an exploration of the originary event and milieu of the
regime of guilt, of nihilism and the Last Man.
I will disclose the relationship of the Zoroastrian telos of the One and
the assertion, in Genesis, of the one god by Abraham. Continuing this discussion, I will show, in The
Death of God: The Seeds of Its Own Destruction that the violent origin of
monotheism and later of the Christian virtue of ‘truth” will disseminate a
repetition of a violent origin to which one is held hostage, condemned to
surrender to this serial logic of self-destruction. Amidst this impasse and apocalypse, I will
lay out, in Novelty under the Sun: Two Notions of the Will and Will to Power
a scenario of creation and affirmation of novelty divested of nostalgia and nihilism,
of a will to power oriented toward the future and toward the transfigured
possibilities of life. The One God dies
in that he is exposed as one will to power among many, his claim to ultimate
truth is an eradication of all novelty under the sun, of any new
truth and new value erupting amidst this play of Life. I will next attempt to sketch the event of
such a will to power in Overman: Beyond Dionysus and Apollo in Tragedy and
Comedy in which I will contend not only that the poetic topoi of Ancient Greek
tragedy and comedy are only a beginning in an understanding of Dionysian
existence and but also that Nietzsche’s vision of the Overman transcends
the pessimistic individualism of the tragic age of the Greeks. In Eternal Recurrence of the Same: The Affirmation
of the Overman, I will explore the meaning of the eternal return and of the
affirmation of amor fati in the context of a singular affirmation of
existence. In light of the affirmation
of the eternal return, I will consider the morphos of the Overman amidst
his event of creation in Revaluation of All Values: The Lifeworld of the
Overman. I will close with an
exploration of the radical implications of the sacred affirmation of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra in Zarathustra’s Children.
Zarathustra and Abraham: The Destination of the One
The historical Zarathustra, or that personage of whom
we attempt to catch a glimpse as a historical figure, stands at the beginning
of a long line of quite familiar religious assertions. Zarathustra is reputed to be the “first” to
not only posit the distinction betwixt good and evil, but also to describe the
creation, cosmogony, of the world as a moral event. The specific horizons of his assertion, and
of his remembrance of an originary unity, describe a world constituted
not only by an “ethical”, but also a “metaphysical” opposition of differing
principles of existence. It is the
regime of good and evil that constitutes the ultimate reality and raison
d’etre of the world. However, such
an assertion is not merely an endless Heraclitean opposition – or a happy
marriage. For Zarathustra, or Zoroaster
as he is likewise known (and still finds hundreds of thousands of supporters to
this day), the specific metaphysical opposition is not stagnant. It is a war of attrition, but, with a
difference. This battle between good and
evil is not the battleground of Metaphysics, conceived by Kant as the queen of
the sciences in his Critique of Pure Reason. For Zoroaster, on the contrary, amid the heat
of battle, ground, territory, is gained and lost.[15] Yet, this war comprised of many battles must
exhibit a singular destiny. This ethical
battle possesses a trajectory which seeks to, and necessarily so, transcend any
metaphysical entanglement. The destiny
of his war exhibits an irreversible trajectory, which is an eschatological
overcoming of evil by good – but a purely ethical good would have no need any
longer with the ladder of metaphysics.
In this manner, the ultimate destiny of the world, made manifest by
Zoroaster, is a mystical transcendence of the world as such, and of the
metaphysical antithesis of which it was constituted. This antithesis, and the world it inhabits,
must, moreover, be overcome by man himself as he affirms the necessary
trajectory of his destiny. For Zoroaster,
this destiny achieves its eschatological and post-historical fulfillment by
means of an explicit affirmation of one principle over another, good over evil,
as counseled in the Avesta[16] in the
prescription of “Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds”. For Zoroaster, the meaning and destining of
the world is accomplished by a retrieval of the original state of Ahura
Mazda.
Islamic thinkers have questioned Zoroaster ostensibly
over the number of ultimate principles of the world. As is affirmed repeatedly throughout the
Qurān, there is only one ultimate principle in the world and that
principle is Allah, a god who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent
(merciful). From this perspective, the
dichotomist schema posited by Zoroaster, even though this state is not
originary, not only constitutes a blasphemy against the power and singularity
of God, as is the case with the Christian trinity (a monstrous blasphemy),
but also raises the implicit possibility that an alternative principle of
ultimate “reality” is at least possible, that is evil. Zoroaster may rejoin that while he begins
with such a metaphysical opposition on the level of aesthetic or phenomenal
existence, the eschatology of this conflict would be similar to that of the
standard monotheistic equation. And this
very conflict has arisen in an original diremption of an originary archic
deity, Ahura Mazda into Vohu Manō and Angrō Mainyush. Amidst this discord of the self, Zoroaster
seeks a mystical transcendence of the world as a retrieval of an originary
no-thingness of the Good, of the One.
Indeed, considered from the perspective of the Neoplatonist philosopher
Plotinus, for a moment, it could be argued that evil is such a state of indeterminacy
that it can never properly be designated a principle, and can never therefore be
an alternative to the Good or the One.
Zoroaster himself would be shoulder to shoulder with the Islamists,
especially in the context of the question of evil, an assessment, in the
context of the fundamental decision of one principle over the other, of the
remembrance of the one over the other.
Zoroaster seeks the re-integration of Ahura Mazda in a transcendence of
the world. All things will return to
Allah.
For the Islamist, however, Zoroaster gives too much
metaphysical significance/independence to evil in the constitution of the
world, and to created, temporal beings in the fulfillment of the eschatological
destiny and fulfillment of the world.
Why should this fulfillment be conceived as a war, for instance? Indeed, one gains the surreal impression, in
the Qurān (and in the Hebrew testament), that Allah (or God) has not only
created evil - or is deploying something created even before him - as a weapon
and a test, and as a dissimulation. The
angels of Allah (or God), who refer to themselves as ‘We’, close the ears and
seal the eyes of the unbelievers – hardening their hearts, thus assuring their
doom. In their response to the one who
does not believe, who does not obey, evil, hardly an independent or
threatening force, simply a temporal worldly phenomenon, is deployed against
the unbeliever and even encouraged for those who are beyond hope and
mercy. The angels taunt the unbeliever –
go ahead and enjoy your unbelief – run riot in this time you have left, in
ignorance and blindness – for, in the end, everything and everyone, shall
return to Allah/God – and then be consigned to the fires.
In the end, Zoroaster shares with the Muslim the
belief in the end of the world, the logos
of judgment, of apocalypse, and the envelopment of the visible by the
invisible. In this way, Zoroaster, as
the father of the vision and riddle, of the conquest of evil by the good, of
the world of many by the eternal return to God, stands in a remarkable
situation of resemblance to Abraham, who remains the official patron of faith
of the One God by each of the monotheistic assertions, Judaism, Christianity
and Islam, each portrayed by Nietzsche as typologies of nihilism. Indeed, he shares much ambiguity with Abraham
in that each is a transitional figure who had to enact violence in order to
create a place for his new assertion.
And, while other spiritual formations such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and
modern day Zorostrianism do not regard Abraham as their point of departure, from
the perspective of Nietzsche’s genealogy of religious nihilism, there is a deep
metaphysical kinship between these assertions, one which constitutes more than
a family resemblance. Indeed, it is
Abraham who may serve as an archetype for any metaphysics of nihilism.
Abraham, as the name given to Abram in the wake of his
unambiguous demonstration of faith, stands or could stand implicitly, as I have
suggested, as the exemplar of faith for any eschatology that sees its
fulfillment in the overcoming and annihilation of the world and earth. Indeed, this trajectory is exhibited in the
practical metaphysics of Abram in his unquestioning submission and commitment
to the will of the One God. As the
narrative of Genesis unfolds, one that is explicitly shared by each of
the monotheist assertions (and implicitly by the other nihilist positions),
Abram is exposed as having a longstanding and direct relationship with the
divine. A significant encounter occurs
when he is told that his aged wife would bear him a son, a claim that arouses
an incredulous laughter in Abram and his wife Sarah. However, the seemingly impossible happens
through the logos of god, amid an
event which plants the seed of faith in Abram.
Such a faith is sufficient even in its incipience for Abram to deny the
traditional polytheistic faith of his ancestors. Abram is willing to confront his father and
mother and deny his religion - indeed, to break with all that has come before
and to begin a new genealogy. Yet, such
an advocacy, although important for the latter day adherents of monotheism,
does not in itself constitute the act which is sufficient to merit the change
of name to not only found a new genealogy, but also to enact a new covenant for
the progeny of the initiator of this genealogy. The act which serves as the exemplar of faith
for the monotheistic assertions is thus not spiritual patricide, but the
willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac on the altar of his god. Kierkegaard speculates in his Fear and
Trembling on the various scenarios which could explicate the meaning of
such a divine command for Abram, but the latter himself does not say a word in
response to the demand for a holocaust of the son he loves. He simply hears and seeks to obey. Abram makes ready for the sacrifice and sleeps
one last night in the knowledge, pre-monition, that with the daybreak he will
sacrifice his only son to his god. With
the return of the dawn, he departs with Isaac to the altar on the mountaintop
without a word to his son or to his wife Sarah.
In response to a question from Isaac as to the location of the
sacrificial lamb, Abram responds reticently that god will provide. As the narrative is fulfilled, Abram places
Isaac on the altar and raises his knife above his son – Isaac witnesses the
terrible truth - but at this moment beyond decision, the angel Gabriel
intercedes telling Abram that he need not act – he is let off the hook, a
comedy. Abram has passed the test of
faith, and with his new name, Abraham, is promised progeny who will outnumber
even the stars. Through his
demonstration of faith, Abraham has allowed a new world destiny to be
born. The same story is retold, but at a
higher level, when God sends his own son into the world as a sacrificial
lamb. Through the death of Jesus, God
undertakes that which he does not even demand of Abraham.
But, what is the metaphysical
significance of such an eschatology, this destiny? As diagnosed by Nietzsche, such a destiny is
that of nihilism, or in other words, a destiny of the world, which seeks at
once the annihilation of the world, an eschatology toward nothingness. Amid the certain knowledge of the existence
of God, and with the relative valuation of the ephemerality of temporal
existence, Abraham would willingly sacrifice his only son for this god – none
of this is sufficiently real to matter, Abraham would perhaps whisper. In that God exists, we should gladly give up
our lives of suffering and torment to join the perfection of the Father. Yet, for Nietzsche, God is dead – he
dies with Abraham’s whisper - God is stillborn, in not only his
admission that the creation itself is meaningless – it is nothing at all – but
also in the violent implications such inescapably earthly speech. In a similarly unsuccessful scenario in
Ancient Greek mythos, the presumptive One God Saturn attempts to swallow his
children, but, with a trick from his wife Rhea, coughs them all up. Zarathustra jests in “On Apostates” that the
old gods died a long time ago, not in a twilight (as with the liar Wagner), but
in a good godlike way:
…one day they laughed themselves to death. That happened when the most godless word
issued from one of the gods themselves – the word: “There is one god. Thou shalt have no other god before me!...
then all the gods laughed and rocked on their chairs and cried, “Is not just
this godlike that there are gods but no God?”[17]
Such a transference of the seat of value into the
negation of the teeming myriadity of the world of temporal existence is, for
Zarathustra, a flight into the Otherworld, but a denial of the earth that still
seeks to hang around – it is a will to power that pretends not to see the world
and earth as the only topos of
affirmation, as the place of the artwork and of lived existence, of Life… It denies perspective as to command and
control all perspectives.
But, the adherent of such a destiny and eschatology of
the world will question Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism. He will respond to Nietzsche, this physician
of culture, with the demand for a second opinion. How, he will ask, is such a reversal possible
by which our exemplar of faith is turned into its opposite, into the very
annihilation of all affirmations of value, by which a faith in the invisible,
in the transcendent, in God, is transformed into nihilism, an inner void of
mere nothing? Or, on the contrary, was
not Abram’s seminal submission and commitment to god not in fact the extreme
opposite of nihilism or any seduction to the powers of nothingness? Indeed, is not the divine itself the fount of
all being, value, of all meaning, radically other to this fallen world of
fragmentation and decay? Who could
suggest otherwise? Why is the hope for a
If we consider the obverse perspective of Abram as the
archetype of faith amidst a logic of the One, we are struck by another Abraham,
one who is a radical exemplar of the annihilation of a longstanding terrestrial
expression and effusion of a sense and intimacy with the sacred. Indeed, the use of the term historical to
describe the mosaic of Pagan religious practice would not only nullify this
phenomena of the sacred amidst the mythological tapestry of the holy, of
affirmation, in the Pagan world, but would also erase the inauguration of
history itself in the destruction of the heritage of polytheistic apprehensions
of the Sacred by an incipient monotheistic cultural insurgency. From this perspective, Abram is the great
destroyer, similar in a sense to the description by Plotinus of the violent
and disruptive methods of the early Christian activists throughout the Roman
domain, or, perhaps, Mendelssohn’s horror in the facelessness of Kant. But Abraham is the first, or, a first – he is
an initiator of a discursive formation,[19] a
beginner, an Adam. He abides in-between,
holding this undecidability within himself - even in his decision for the
One. This openness of ambiguity,
ambivalence of a truth event remains traced in his decision. Abraham is privy to the mystical foundations
of authority, his declaration of independence[20] from
the Pagan world is simultaneously an unambiguous assault on the world and
religion of his father and mother. He
destroys so as to found a new beginning, a new world order. However, just as he looks into the abyss,
amidst his decision, he covers over and supplants, with his artwork and seizure
of the origin, of the principle amidst the undecidable,[21] this
Openness amid temporal possibility. His mystical
foundation for authority[22] is
orchestrated as an event of retrospective and prospective transfiguration in
the guise of spectacles, events, and histories.
He, as with both Zarathustras, enters into the agon of a re-valuation of
values.
If a beginning in violence cannot completely and
intensively eradicate this trace of violence in its genealogy of hegemony, such
an attempt at complete and intensive eradication will merely legislate a
repetition of this trace. This trace, as
with the shadow, is inescapable - the irrepressible repetition of the project
of eradication does not serve the ostensible program of erasure, but of a
repetition of this situation of conflict, through which this program and
project are reproduced and augmented.
The trace becomes an alibi, one that is cultivated for its own sake. The ostensible program for legitimacy is a
mask for, as Zarathustra suggests in “The Pale Criminal”, a desire for blood -
the killer fresh with blood on his hands steals from the corpse in order to
serve his conscience and his pride. He
becomes a robber who has killed.[23] It is not at the foremost significant that a
cycle of violence becomes repeated and maintained for the good, but that
a repetition of violence is itself this metabolism of a violent ‘good’. A beginning in violence must live violently
if it is to live at all - it must ceaselessly repeat this ‘event’ of its
catastrophic [origin].
This trauma of the violent destruction by Abraham of
the gods of his ancestors, the idols of his father and mother, becomes repeated
not only in his own willingness to sacrifice his late-born son Isaac, but also
in the trajectory of his offspring, who in this covenant, countless as the
stars, exist in the repetition and perverse fulfillment of that original
trauma. More deeply considered, this
event of trauma in the midst of Abraham is itself only a repetition of that more
original trauma of the expulsion of Adam [and Eve] from the garden of
immortality and delight. Miranda has
suggested that the creation myth of Adam and Eve was a redaction which served
as the founding myth and genealogy for Abraham himself.[24] In this sense, Abraham symbolizes his
experience of transgression and power as a founding myth. Indeed, this pattern of trauma and repetition
intimates a deep structural logic not only for the entire narrative of Genesis,
and on throughout the Hebrew Torah and the Christian Old Testament, the
Christian New Testament and the Muslim Qūran. But, it is the triune of transgression,
punishment, and atonement, established in Genesis, which lays out the modus
operandi of the fragmented monotheistic dispensations. In this way, the transgression by Abraham
against the gods of his family is provided a mythical alibi and re-inscription
in the narrative of the Fall. This event
of transgression by the Adam and Eve inaugurates the passage from innocence to
guilt, from grace to punitive expulsion, and thus, erects an archetype, which
serves to define the essential character of ‘human nature’. How could Abraham have acted otherwise?
Amid the
perspective of this reversal, the polytheistic religion of the father and
mother of Abraham is re-branded as a condition of idolatry and transgression
against the one true God of Abraham.
Moreover, the seed of transgression, although facing the onslaught of
Divine wrath, remains alive as the trace or taint of original sin. One has sinned and has been punished, but due
to the basic existential character of the human being after the Fall, one will
sin again in the fulfillment of human nature. History is composed of the anecdotes of
sin. Indeed, this feature of the divine
ordination of sin emerged with an erotic twist with the Heresy of the Free
Spirit who incorporated sexual acts into their remembrance of the Last
Supper, their symposium, a celebration of the God of Love. Of course, in keeping with the strategy of
trauma, these heretics were burned at the stake. It is the Fall and its inexorable repetition,
which implicates a naive self-interpretation of the phenomenon of human
existence within a regime of guilt.
Before the Fall, there were no humans.
There was no before…
The taint of original sin, this seed of transgression,
plays itself out throughout Genesis in myriad ways. There is the overwhelming question, in the
first instance, of incest in the augmentation and perpetuation of the line of
Adam. While some would productively wish
to give deeper esoteric meanings to the fables in Genesis – or to
de-mythologize these texts – it is instructive to read off the implications of
a text in situ – which, we will recall, still serves as a fundamental
source in the very constitution of world-time, world history, political
history. While there is explicit
reference to incest in the case of Lot’s daughters after the destruction of
The supplantation of polytheism by Abraham et al.
is suppressed within and by the genealogy of Adam, through a displacement of
the hubristic act in an act of concealment. Terrorism dwells in a narrative of original
Fallenness. One can blame oneself, one
can detect in oneself an original sin and capacity for transgression, but the
root of this original evil, after Abraham, is located not in the supplantation
of the gods, but in the narrative of disobedience to the One God. In other words, the act of supplantation of
the holy, of the gods does not touch, implicate the One God - the guilt of
transgression is instead projected upon his enemy, upon creation, but in a way
that falsifies and shreds this founding act.
From the perspective of the ancestors of Abraham, this event is the
death of the gods. Abraham has
committed religious patricide, matricide, fratricide, deicide. Abraham gives birth to evil. But, simultaneous with this child of evil, is
the distortion and re-presentation of its origin – it is re-branded as its
opposite – it is hidden in the counter-offensive of accusations of primordial
guilt, original sin. God becomes the
good. From this perspective, Abraham’s
God is an event of truth, beauty, and good.
One will recall the diatribe of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
that the old gods laughed themselves to death in the face of this God
who claimed that he was the only god.
However, with all bad comedy, it has initiated a historicity of bad
tragedy. It is this pathos that is the destination of the monotheistic assertions,
which still persist as hegemonic and conflictual narratives of the sacred
amidst this terrestrial opening. For
Nietzsche, it is laughter that will free us from the unlimited bondage of a
“sacred” which is an imposture and mask for nihilism, a barbaric will to power,
will to nothingness. Yet, such laughter
is most difficult amidst the lacerations of the whip, shackle and the
stake. One will remain a convalescent or
aspire to exist in such a state of convalescence. These wounds run deep, the scars of the
surface remain burned upon this soul.
Psyche[25]
sits in her own excrement in a dark cavern, amid the tunnels and chambers of an
old, dark castle and dungeon – her visitors decipher tattooed narratives and
symbols sliced across her skin. We are
condemned to read these inscriptions as well – but, upon our own souls, to
decipher not only our own inscription by the logic of the One, but also to
fathom the trace, genealogy, of the other beginning that hovers menacingly as
that destruction of not only the Pagan ethos, but also, especially with
phenomena such as the Inquisition, of which even Giordano Bruno was another
victim, of the ongoing (though tragically flawed) attempts to erase any
remembrance of the intimacy of Life.
In the face of the All stands an imposture, a mask,
the One God who is other. The sins of
the father become replayed, re-activated -- repeated -- in the children as they
seek to carry out, on, this regime of discipline and surveillance –
purification, cleansing, power - which is the heritage and legacy of their
ancestors. Abraham supplants his own
ancestors, his mother and father, but with his displacement and
re-presentation, he re-appropriates the Law of the Ancestors - however, with
the proviso that he himself is the First of a New Covenant. One must learn from the Sin of Adam, the
father, but one must also understand that through this artwork, and these labor
pains of Abraham, humanity is born again. While this supplantation resembles in a
superficial way the recurrence of overthrow in the Mycenean tapestry, with the
overthrow of Ouranos by Kronos, and the latter by Zeus, the destruction of
Abraham stands at a radical distance from the threads of kinship of dynastic
succession exhibited in the mythological genealogy of the Pagan gods. This radical distance is constituted by the
assertion of Truth by Abraham in his dispute and eventual destruction of the
gods of his father and mother. This
assertion of truth supplants any indigenous criteria or scenario of
transfiguration of an existing muqoV. “Truth”
brings Abraham and his monotheistic genealogy onto the tenuous ground of
historicity. “God” resembles
Saturn. Yet, it is not clear if he will
vomit up the other gods and goddesses.
History begins amid a radical breach with
traditional mythological narrative. This
breach need not however imply that such a position escapes from the domain of muthos but will and must, from the
standpoint of its own rhetorical assertion, proclaim the death and irrelevance
of myth. As Bataille suggests in his
collection of essays on surrealism, The Absence of Myth,[26] such
a historicity, which feeds on the death of myth is indeed the greatest
myth. At the same time, while history
may be merely muthos in drag, the
logic of the One and rhetoric of Truth that abide in its origin and genealogy,
disrupt the evolving tapestry of traditional mythology and inaugurate a
strategy of displacement and substitution.
Even if the breach has for its raison d’etre the establishment of
another mythical principle and narrative, it deploys a strategy and rhetoric of
Truth which ostensibly defines itself as non-mythical or even
anti-mythical. Such a radical
positioning is often touted as the intellectual advance of an “ethical
monotheism”. However, such a denial and
suppression of the play of mythical existence abides in a metaphysics of
nothingness, of a desire to transcend the double bind of the world and
earth[27] – the noumenon dies as it is cut off
from its life in the phenomena.
One could extend, it this light, Nietzsche’s contention that
Christianity is platonism for the people to the entire Abrahamic
genealogy in its ultimate valuation of a domain that is other than the visible
and fallen existence of the All. With
Plato and Augustine, Abraham seeks via his New Covenant, to establish his own polis, a City of
However, despite the relative success of the
genealogies of Abraham, from a terrestrial-political perspective, it is the
very strategy and rhetoric of the One Truth, which, simultaneous to the
founding Act of the monotheistic conjectures, plants the seeds of its own
destruction. Indeed, the mere
possibility of its success would at once sound its own death knell. This Will to Truth that had been inaugurated,
abiding deep within its foundations a primordial will to power, will be, in its
victory, compelled to turn this will to Truth onto its own existence. In times of peace, the warlike man turns
against himself. Not only has the
death of the old gods set a precedent for the death of that which has been
esteemed as immortal, but also the very logic of supplantation as a will to
Truth already and inescapably sets out the primal scenario for the death of
God. From this perspective, Abraham
himself becomes the ugliest man.
His very assertion of the primacy and exclusivity of his God was at once
the murderous blow against divinity. If
you wish to destroy a cause, become its most excessive advocate. The monotheistic assertion, in its
objectification - of God and in its proclamation that God is Truth,
provokes the flood of oblivion that will return this god to its own primal
fate, into the sacred well, back amidst the gods who laughed themselves to
death. Not only is the trace of this
original breach disseminated as the ceaseless and inexorable fragmentation of
the tragic assertion of the One, in the narrative and congregational differance
of the progeny, but also as the very tools of the trade associated with this
Will to Truth become targeted on this assertion of the One, but only in the
auspicious Moment of its triumph. That
which is exposed in light of the execution of Socrates’ maxim that the unexamined
life is not worth living is that the assertion of the One itself rests upon
a muthos, one which stands, as
Nietzsche contends, opposed to life.
The razor of historical criticism begins the self-lacerating project of
digging for and unearthing its own roots in its enactment of its inherited Will
to Truth… a god of tragic death… another Dionysian tragic hero departs from the
Apollonian dreamworld into the primal oneness of being.
Reiner Schürmann suggested that the death of an idea
always seems to take much longer than its birth.[28] It took almost two millennia for the God of
History to be subjected to the procedures of historicism, methodologies, which
were born alongside itself as its spear and shield. We have killed God. We are the Ugliest
Novelty under the Sun: Two Notions
of the Will and Will to Power
The
Preacher of Ecclesiastes would have us believe that a creative life is
lived in vain, that there is nothing new under the sun. Indeed, any assertion of novelty in this
world of finitude is vanity in light of the homeless fate of such expression
and exertion. Both the Master and Slave
are fated to Death -- the one is no more significant than the other -- each
meets this Other in his End. All works
perish or are appropriated by the latecomers.
All is vanity. There is
nothing left to do but drink a little wine and pass the time with one’s fellows
as this is one’s God-given portion.
Amidst this double bind of finitude and hope, one need, and can only
wait - for Death… for God. As Heidegger
himself eventually sighed, “Only a god can save us now”,[29] and in
his own turn toward piousness, re-inaugurates the metaphysics of the preacher,
another ass festival.
At the
end of the day, the ‘metaphysics’ of this Preacher are the same as that of
Abraham. That same dichotomy persists
between this visible world of decay and fragmentation and that eternal,
invisible Otherworld. For both of these
figures, it is the latter, which holds all value and abides all hope. The willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his
late-born son Isaac is, as I have suggested, merely a repetition of his own
fateful supplantation of these earthly gods of his father and mother. His faith is given to a god that is out of
this world, in the facelessness of which this world is without
value, the only significance of which is its own insignificance. Yet, even as this world is, with Zarathustra,
something that is to be overcome, it remains, as with the barren
This
Will of God that is the a-topos for the expression of a logos, however, explicitly asserts that it is the only True
Will. It further asserts that It is not
only Truth, but also Good, Beauty, Sublime, and Moral. It is further asserted that these virtues
reside elsewhere, beyond this fallen world, there in that
No-thing. In light of his resistance to
a trajectory of the One, the One God, Nietzsche proclaims that this other world
is a laughable and a nihilistic falsification of Life. He juxtaposes another narrative in the Birth
of Tragedy, that of the Will in Schopenhauer, as an incessant primal power,
which while it is singular and alone, is explicitly conceived as the raging
heart of the world, as the non-conscious striving of Life. For his Schopenhauer, it was not the clarity of the
concept or the light of another world, but in music and poetry that the Will
could be intimated, disclosed. In its
insatiable emanations, this Will seeks to express itself – to hear and see
itself - to satisfy its futile desire for self knowing and repose. While Schopenhauer will, in his tragic
pessimism, expose himself as a nihilist, closely aligned with Abraham and the
Preacher as to the ultimate value of an earthly Will, he has disclosed
the existence of an alternative conception of Will, as a will to existence, as
a liberating will to expression and self-understanding. Even if Schopenhauer prescribes a pessimistic
negation of this Will, and therefore, to existence, this Will, or that which is
indicated with this nomos, exhibits a
will none the less, even is as a Will to Nothing. Just as the persistence of the trace, memory,
of the subjugations of the Pagan ethos and gods by Abraham and the other
monotheist auto-genitors germinates the seeds of the destruction of the upstart
God, the antithesis to Nothingness and mere Existence explodes the pretension
that there is only One Will. Kant seems
to have been aware of these gods when he contrasted unconditional duty and self-love
in his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
Each of
these notions of the Will projects a great longing, one as a will for that
which is beyond itself, a desire for the nouminous. The other, an insatiable desire for
self-comprehension, communication, existence in an all too fleeting temporal
opening. In the former case, the
Nothing that is sought is beyond where the horizon lies, but such a withdrawal
is meant to simultaneously be the ground for all things. In the latter case, the longing consists in
the impossibility, in the finite emanation, of self-subsistent compact
repose. All will return to the source,
but that source is inside, in an eternal willing. Yet, even in their apparent opposition with
respect to the seat of all meaning and reference, both of these positions imply
a radical rejection of the possibility of an affirmation of Life – despite the
insurmountable horizons of finitude and mortality. For Abraham, this world is not
properly Real - its actuality, he would emphasize, discloses that everything
solid melts into air. One can be
clear and certain only in God and his New Covenant. For Schopenhauer, the very futility of the
bad infinite disclosed in the Will to Survival and Expression, while an
adequate description of existence in specific respects, serves to refute
life and the world. The system of
needs and the radical absence of satisfaction of the needs of a striving Will
(certainly no omnipotent and omniscient God), the pointless exertion and
expression seeking only the persistence of this selfsame state of inexorable
striving, always unsatisfied, always seeking more of the same – the futility of
life might be better served in the self-negation of the Will. But, even this reprieve is forbidden.
The world of the ego, as with Buddhism, is a world
that is not properly Real, it persists as a house of cards of borrowed thoughts
and vague self-awareness. The ego, which
is the mask of the Will, must be broken apart in order for the Will to be
silenced. The striving and suffering of
the Will must be denied, if there is to be oneness and repose. Both of these doctrines, each in its own way,
set out a temporary metaphysic of duality, as with Zoroaster, that, in its
strategic polarity, reveals an eschatology of the One, and in both cases the eschaton
lies elsewhere from the World, this topos
of illusion, futility, and an impossible insurrection against nothingness. The One need only acknowledge the Other as
long as the creation remains alienated as Other. In and of itself, the World has no meaning,
it is as the skin shed by a snake, of no consequence, not left behind – but,
secretly assimilated, eaten as forbidden fruit.
However,
a voice of distress calls out in the Night about the Earth, our fair
Sister. This voice declares, in
opposition to the previous assertions of will, that We must remain true to
the earth. The voice of yet another
Other, of this impossible insurrection against not only the regime and
aroma of Nothingness, but also against mere Survival, insatiable,
frustrated expression, indicates a [will] that is alterior to the incestuous
wills of negation and repetition. In the
face of this will to annihilation sounds the voice of impossible striving,
which although subjected and suppressed, still ceaselessly exists, inexorably
creates beyond itself, playing out this dice game of chance. Yet, with this consideration, we sense that
we must step back from this notion of [will] as it is itself merely a veil that
has been cast over all things, it is a fiction that dances over myriad events,
tying, suturing them together, in order to fashion a single Reality, Actuality,
Existence - this world. It has
chased the poets away with its edifice of truth, but it is itself exposed as
‘only a fool, only a poet’.[30] If these wills collapse into the same, it is
the striving amidst the earth that remains for Nietzsche, that which exceeds and explodes the bridges
and fences stretched across her skin and her rivers. The persistence of the trace of resistance to
the grand narrative of either conception of the will shatters the aura of a
substantial and monocratic explanation of Ultimate Reality. Indeed, an ultimate reality may be another
construction – that which exists is an earthly actuality that always trails off
into perspective and is appropriated and transfigured amid this situation of
personal being. With this utter
fragmentation and deconstruction of the nomenclature of the Will as a
substantial Unity – whether God, primal surge or ding an sich – there
emerges the other event(s) that indicate an alterity, an impossible
insurrection against Nothingness and Survival, a willing that is Other than
Will. Or, in other words, the genealogy
of the Will, and its re-presented phantasmogorical triumph, that Great Lie that
almost fooled everyone, becomes traced to a deeper origin in a more primal
event of willing, a will to power, of creation and transfiguration. Zarathustra exclaims in On Self-Overcoming,
Indeed,
the truth was not hit by him who shot at the word of the ‘will to existence’:
that does not exist. For, what does not
exist cannot will; but what is in existence, how could that still want
existence? Only where there is life is
there also will: not will to life but – thus I teach you – will to power.[31]
This will to power, as a phrase, differs from the hard
and fast nomenclature of a metaphysics of substance, of permanence. In this way, Schopenhauer’s emphasis on
changes of states in his early writings, which after all are makeshifts for the rest, discloses a continual flux of
creativity which must resist to survive and grow another place to build
its own will to creation, even if it is born out of the birth canal of the
totalistic hegemony of a single God or arce.
And it is reminded ceaselessly that it is not alone. Yet, doctrines of the One break down in that
they are not able to suppress the trace of their own will to power, of their
own ‘origin’ in the exceptional amidst this play of chance. The irrepressible affirmation of this event
of Life resists Not only the otherworldly stratagems which seek to contain,
harness and discipline this predicament of unfathomable chance amid a telos of the otherworldly. It also resists the Will to Survival, which
is subverted by an awakening to its own uncertain emergence in Chance, amidst
the uncertain flux, this will to power/creation. The Will was yesterday’s art, insatiable,
seeking, but without ultimate success - to be Art itself, and in this way, to
abolish all art and all future artists.
Amid the will to power, any question of a One becomes deferred into an
impossible future as it is concerned with the temporary eruption of many ones
and twos.
Nietzsche poses the question in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra: Who will be the one who will grasp hold of chance, in the
moment, and exclaim, ‘Thus I willed it’?
If this is not to be the faceless repetition of the arce that we have
already excavated, and if it is to be an opening which gives, makes or takes
space for new creation, it must be the creator, the Child, who is that
one who grasps hold of this legacy of accidents and witnesses these amid an
innocence of becoming. With the event of
lightning, light that shatters the old law tablets, the creator erupts into the
aura of this creative event. With this Opening amidst this No-where of
freedom, in the destructive resistance to the Laws and destination of the One,
in the inauguration of this play-space of chance, novelty erupts under the
sun. That which is new is to be
understood amid the contours of that place of [origin], inextricably tied up
amidst the regional jurisdictions of the arche,
whether that be religion, the state, or the marketplace. That which has characterized the operation of
this religious assertion is, in tandem with the state and the market, the suppression
of all that is Other. For the former, it
is the other gods, specifically female goddesses, its violent exclusion and
repression of nature, body, sex, life, joy.
Monotheism, in other words, has attained the aspirations of its will to
power, a will that is couched in the rhetoric of Otherworldly desires, in an
ultimacy that is elsewhere. It
has fulfilled its longing at the cost of sacrifice – of life, and of
affirmation of all gathers together as World and Earth. It denies new creation in its lust to be the last
of all creations – it is the black snake in your throat. It even denies its own responsibility and
capacity for creation as its laws and its very historicity are attributed to
Revelation. It camouflages its own will
to power as the negation of all will to power, and thus, forbids all will to
creation. Yet, its hatred for the world
and flesh reveals its desire for the Same (although it always awaits the End,
in one form of the other). It
substitutes Repetition for Creation. The
monotheist assertion seeks to maintain its hegemony via the destruction and
suppression of all that is Other than itself.
It seeks to put a halt to the possibility of new creation as any novelty
would stand as a question mark over its claims to ultimacy. Novelty screams as an exception to its
privileged status.
The
truth of the monotheist assertion is dragged within the final sentences of
Nietzsche’s posthumously edited and published fragments, The Will to Power,
“This world is will to power -- and nothing else besides? And you
yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing else besides.”[32] In its nihilistic hypocrisy, the monotheist
will to power postures as being a will to no-thingness, a will which seeks to
transcend power, to annihilate will, to return to a God who is beyond the world
and earth. Yet, as it does not act
quickly to vacate itself from the face of the earth, or let a new world be
born, to die at the right time,
it becomes clear that this rhetoric of beneficence is merely a masque for a
specific type of will to power that seeks merely to perpetuate itself as
long as it can. However, as
intimated, the cost of such a perpetuation of its own will to power, especially
in its bad faith, is the sacrifice of any new will to creation, of any
differing will to power, and more specifically that which is an eruption of
this innocence of becoming, this Dionysian power of life, death and
rebirth. The power of life is the power
of creation, a power of creative effervescence that gives forth novelty
under the sun. Zarathustra exhorts
the crowd in the marketplace - he is a madman shouting:
I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give
birth to a dancing star. I say unto you:
you still have that chaos in yourselves.
Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a
star. Alas, the time of the most
despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.[33]
It is precisely this chaos that the monological assertion
seeks to suppress, to eradicate, annihilate – the rattle of this dice throw of
chance must be silenced, the very possibility of creation in this realm must be
destroyed. But, as every act of
destruction is also one of creation, that which is created via the destruction
of the Dionysian power of life is the Last Man, the nihilist, the impotent
consumer incapable of new creation or self-overcoming, much less
self-sufficiency – this last man is suppressed, contained, and anonymous
amid its belonging in the herd – he forgets just as soon as he thinks, chewing
his cud in blissful ignorance. But, this
is ignorance, sculpted via burned flesh - not simply a tabula rasa, but
a complex construction of a simulacrum – via the fire the Last Man learned to
say ‘I will’ – but not as a will that is an affirmation of will to power, to
new creation, but as a submission to a will that is other, to a stratagem of
torture, indoctrination and regimentation – he wills in that he is willed,
in that he should, in his obligation – for after all, he is woman,
he is guilty. That which in a
previous epoch was worshipped as the irrepressible power of the fertility of
life in a ceaseless dance of novelty is given a new status, a new value,
devalued, destroyed via the violence of a radically other repository of
significance. The Otherworld is the
latest fashionable delicacy of the Last Man.
New creation becomes at best a mere vanity amid an expendable world of
(f)utility - at its worst, new creation is heresy, evil… New creation is a
threat to the regime of monocratic assertion.
New creation, and the very physiological possibility of such new
creation, must be annihilated.
Possible creators of the future must be made sick, so that they will be
able only to serve these legacies of the past.
Their innocence must be turned to guilt, their health to disease, their
strength to weakness. Order and form
suppress the Dionysian power of life and inaugurate the conditions of weakness,
which will be expressed as a will to nothingness, as a will that has been made
weary by its own regime of suppression.
The suppression of this chaos in one’s soul in the monotheist assertion
sings the same tune as the excess of order and of morality not only Plato’s
Otherworldly hypothesis, but also, as a microcosm, via the discipline,
regimentation and surveillance in The Republic. It is bad enough that those who sought to
articulate this power of life, the poets, were excluded from the city – on the
grounds that they lied too much – but it is worse that this entire
arrangement of the polis rests upon the precipice of a Noble Lie --- the Big
Lie. The order of the polis is to be maintained at all costs,
the unity of the One is to be pre-eminent to any of its many parts or of
anything that should be excluded in the limit situation of its founding
arch. Music and song become suspect – poiesis is only cultural, never having
the status of praxis.
Nietzsche
claims that it is precisely this obsession upon ‘unity’ – or what could be
described as an attempted annihilation of the Dionysian by the Apollonian –
that sets the stage for the incessant weakening and eventual self-annihilation
of the so-called Greek world – and of the Christian world, as the latter is
merely ‘Platonism for “the people”’.[34] For Nietzsche, this obsession is itself
already a symptom of weakness, a weariness of life. It longs for that which is radically other as
it cannot stand this life. Yet,
even its will to no-thing is still an expression of its will to power - its
perverse and repressed ‘affirmation’ of this life. The Dionysian power of chaos that tears
through life, shattering the household in the tragic event, will no longer be
allowed to run amok amid the polis.
It will be rooted out in a realm of a pure Good in itself,
one in which this perspectival character of life, innocent, before good
and evil, will be annihilated. From the
enforced, and thus universalized, perspective, tied inside the panopsis of the Good - the Dionysian
power of life, the chaos at the heart of the creative act, is renamed
“Evil”. But with Schelling, Nietzsche
warns that such an uprooting will serve ironically as the death-knell of
such a project of purification and unification.
Zarathustra awakens the youth on the mountainside,
But it is with man as it is with the tree. The more he aspires to the height and light,
the more strongly do his roots strive earthward, downward, into the dark, the
deep – into evil.[35]
In the masquerade, the
weak soul denies its will to power, it suppresses its Dionysian power, it
represses and erases the truth of itself in a regime of forgetfulness,
of disciplinary containment amid this cheerfulness of its own nihilistic
solipsism. Life itself is poisoned,
postponed - any trace of this power of life slowly suffocates under the weight
of Repetition, this ceaseless re-assertion of that logic of the One. It is the Overman who will bite the head off
the snake which eats its own tail.
If it
is the last man, the spectator who consents to the Euripidean denial of
the Dionysian power of life, of the terrible truth of existence, it is
the Overman (Übermensch) who is that one that can affirm this chaos of
being in the world and give birth to novelty under the sun. Yet, the Overman is not the Tragic
Hero in the sense of Euripides. It is
even doubtful that Nietzsche’s Overman is tragic at all, much
less in the sense of Sophocles or Aeschylus.
We have forgotten that devastating myriadity of this power of life in
the wake of the suppression of the Dionysian in Late Tragedy. The ‘tragic’ becomes an epochal indifference
and unwillingness to confront and master the rage and chaos of the Dionysian
power of life. Indeed, this power is
erased and conscientiously ignored, suppressed in Late Tragedy. In the early tragedies of Sophocles and
Aeschylus, narratives that preserve an explicit reference to Homer, the tragic
hero, emerging from the Dionysian musical ecstasy of the Chorus, is transported
into a rapture of self-annihilation. In
the context of this Festival of the power of life, it is the Apollonian dream
image that makes manifest the power that loves to hide. The devastating tension and chaos of the
Dionysian apotheosis, while made manifest in the dream image, is not
suppressed or even sublimated, but is allowed to play itself out in the
destruction of the tragic sacrifice. In
the dramatic identification and implication into the topos of the Greek amphitheatre, in which the audience becomes the
symmetrical complement to the Chorus, the partition of the audience and
performer is effaced, and thus, unmasqued, the audience becomes part of
the gathering of the Chorus - the power of life and the annihilation of death
is witnessed and imbibed as an event of disclosure of the terrible truth. Oedipus senses his destiny, but inexorably
seeks to flee in the face of his own truth.
He does not love his truth.
Orestes thinks that he knows the truth, but in his matricide,
unleashes his own destinal flight from the truth. He kills truth. Antigone seeks to retrieve and affirm this
truth in her wish to bury her brother in her earth. Yet, she is banished from the polis. Her act uncovers and retrieves an attempt
at the truth. The riddle of the Sphinx, Apollo
in drag, mistakenly assumed to be answered by the Tragic Hero, will play
itself out in the final destruction of the household of Oedipus. Apollo allows his half-brother Dionysus to
be annihilated amidst his excessiveness… for he knows he will be inexorably
reborn.
Euripides,
a friend of Plato, that failed tragic dramatist turned dialogist, takes a
different tact with respect to the ‘tragic’.
He no longer wishes to celebrate this self-annihilating and
self-creating power of life - he parts company with Dionysus, who is thrown into
humiliation and ridicule, as for instance, in The Bacchantes. Apollo, in his filial isolation, forced to
strip naked in the wilderness, becomes mere form, eidos, nomos, over
against will. The frenzy of the
bacchantes, which leads them to tear apart Pentheus-Dionysus, is re-valued as
evil, excess, from the arche of eradication of the Dionysian from the
polis. In that Dionysus incites his own
annihilation, which is the destruction of the household, he becomes the personification
of “Evil”. The tension of the bow, this
rage of the power of life, is suppressed, quarantined, and dispersed in a
directive and destiny of the polis.
Euripides is, at best, a moralist.
At worst, he is a propagandist.
He seeks to let the audience off the hook, seduce these to forget this terrible
truth of existence. He utilizes
the situation and structure of the drama in order to disseminate his own moral
agenda, his own deus ex machina.
This struggle for the birth of a new idol, a polis of God,
Jehovah, Allah is waged at the cost of sacrifice of this power of life,
of that suppression, and thus, fulfillment of the Dionysian. The madman seethes in the marketplace of
eidos: God is dead. Yet, as a madman, he will eventually realize that he
must go voluntarily into the madhouse.
The Overman
is not the tragic hero, in any of its possible variations. The Dionysian annihilates himself and
destroys the household which contains his destiny. The Christian seeks to destroy this power of life
in a routine operation which conserves his local despotism. However, this suppression eradicates the
Dionysian aspects of these teachings of the Nazarene prophet Jesus, who, to a
great extent, is the latest exemplar of the half-mortal god Dionysus. The Christian cannot handle, much less
affirm, the Dionysian implications of Jesus, this man who sought to do that
which is most difficult, the camel that attempted what he feared most,
to become a lion. The Grand
Inquisitor, in The Brothers Karamozov of Dostoevesky, will seek to root
out and re-crucify any trace of the Dionysian power of life. He returns, but is again put to death, a
repetition of the trauma which conserves the Realm. In order to preserve the integrity of the
herd, this
The Overman is to be an alternative existence, alterity,
to that faceless ‘system of extremes’ - that are, is, in the end, the Same,
each a seeking after the nothing, nihilism. The death of Jesus, as told by the Christian,
is the ultimate fulfillment of the Abrahamic eschatology in that the Son of God
becomes the sacrificial lamb. The son,
unlike Isaac, is sacrificed. Jesus is
killed. No angel saves Jesus in the
end. The metaphysics of the invisible is
re-affirmed and completed, as the Father willingly sacrifices His
son. The death of Jesus, as told by a
Bacchante, is that of the Dionysian dismemberment of the power of life in the
dramatic exposition of these excessive desires of the god of wine, song and
dance. It is a sacrifice that will be
repaid as this gift of the rebirth. This
will to destruction is creative in the sense of a first-born attempt –
this affirmation, participation amid these overwhelming powers of life, which,
with Origen, are independent of meaning.
These first attempts of an affirmation of the extraordinary powers of
life lay the ground, clear the space, for the birth of the creator, for the Overman. Yet, the Overman, with such an
imposing designation is simply the Child.
The Child affirms the play of Life without sacrifice, as a gift.
Since
the tragic hero is articulated as the Apollonian sublimation, this emergence of
the dream image, of the Dionysian power of life, of the surge of musical
existence, the Holy Trinity of excession, suppression and sublimation is
exposed as a playspace of nihilism. It is the Higher Man who merely sublimates
his passions amid a will to creation. He
can bear much, as the camel who can sublimate his passions for a
utilitarian end, i.e., the catharsis of the people. The Christian, this politician of the soul,
seeks to suppress these passions and affirmations amidst mortal existence. The
Dionysian is built up as a straw man – he is that tragic one who is annihilated
by these passions – he no longer laughs.
He becomes a devil who has been trained as a camel. It is no wonder that the Priests destroyed
the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics on Comedy. Yet, the Comic Hero, the laughing lion, as
the second metamorphosis of the Spirit, cannot be the Overman in that he
still shoots arrows at princes. The Overman is not the Comic Hero,
although he is this voice in the wilderness who prepares the ground for the
birth of the Child. He is the Child who
gives birth to himself in each moment.
The Comedian, the great redeemer, who can suddenly turn Beethoven’s Moonlight
Sonatas into cartoon Farce, evades this Holy Trinity, he laughs and plays
amidst this eruption of Chance. He plays
with Diogenes, but he is not yet a Child.
Lysistrata castrates the old values, but merely in an attempt to
achieve mere peace, neither to affirm the raging power of life, nor to create
new values. Socrates is a fool who
seduces rich families to surrender their young boys to his terrorist training
camp. Pisistratas merely repeats the
traumas of the world and earth in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. Aristophanes stands laughing, but his destruction
does not give a meaning to existence, it does not create novelty under the
sun - he merely laughs, scoffs at ‘the new’.
The Overman is
the one who finds joy, overcomes himself, creates himself as an affirmation of life,
irrespective of project. That Goal which
is set by the Overman is the love of fate, an affirmation of situation without
purpose, a situation that is given purpose, meaning, in the act of creation
itself. The Overman is the child,
the creator. Creation is joy, an
affirmation of the power of life amid this powerful existence - purpose,
meaning, without project. The Overman
apprehends this singular chance, is this chance, he plays this fate. The Overman is not the Janus-faced god
of tragedy or comedy. He is neither the
camel, who can bear much, nor the lion who laughs as he destroys. The Overman transcends any dramatic or
“religious representation” of the Sacred in the polis amid the singularity of
his own creation. He neither suppresses
the Dionysian outright as Apollo, nor does he merely sublimate this power into
tragedy or comedy, as a scenario of reconciliation of that which is merely the
Same. He is an affirmation of this paradoxical
power of life in innocence, irrespective of these late-born half-gods. There is no need of transgression,
suppression, or sublimation as this excession of innocence creates novelty
under the sun. The Overman,
as the creator, is indeed that which is new –Zarathustra’s children[36].
Eternal Recurrence of the Same: The Affirmation of the
Overman
If the
willingness of Abram to sacrifice his son Isaac indicates a metaphysics of
nothingness, nihilism, the innocent creation of the Dionysian power of
life, of the Overman, intimates an affirmation of the eternal
recurrence of the Same. The Child is
the one who can be laughed at without any provocation of shame. It spurs him or her on. Laughter is the echo of an excessive
affirmation. It is alleged to be
important to take the monotheistic allegory seriously – and this seriousness is
enforced throughout the terrestrial hegemony of the cults of the One God. Yet, the Overman, the children of
Zarathustra, can be a fool – idiots amidst this event of affirmation. He provokes laughter without intention.
This is the No-where, [where] his excessive power seethes, this
un-self-conscious creator innocently destroys that which is amidst his
creation, in that it persists as a hegemonic annihilation of his own
creativity. [God] no longer
has a patent on creativity. Although
He was a variant of an eternal Sameness, a version, he, as with Saturn, is
killed by his spawn. Jewish, Christian
and Islamic traditions emphasize truth as the criterion for their overthrow of
the polytheism of their fathers and mothers.
Yet, truth becomes a hydra, its many mouths biting into the supplanter. Not only does “science” subvert and displace
its myths, but its own methods, such as hermeneutics, are turned on the creator
– upon religion and its historicity. It
is not that belief in one god – or many gods for that matter – becomes
impossible, but that we come to see this representation as a myth, as untrue,
in a positivist sense. A sterile realism
reigns. Myth becomes forbidden. Yet, the myth holds an august fascination for
us. But, there is not merely one myth,
there are many. With the displacement of
the hegemony of the One, there opens a topos for a self-expression of many
voices. If truth is no longer to be
conceived in a positivist, but in a symbolic, phenomenological sense, the
meaning of affirmation after the death of [God] exhibits its specificity
in the letting be of this Dionysian power of life. It is this power of life that is eternal recurrence
of the Same, and this is the umwelt of the affirmation of the Overman.
While Nietzsche attempts, in the posthumous
fragments, The Will to Power, to lay out a cosmological, even
physicalistic, possibility of eternal recurrence, there is the necessity to
interpret this notion from the perspective of distinction between the exoteric
and the esoteric. Indeed, the
cosmological defense, while of interest in terms of the incessant re-writing of
cosmology, remains an exoteric articulation of the eternal recurrence. The esoteric meaning of the eternal
recurrence, on the other hand, a meaning which remained unsaid in
Nietzsche’s writings (perhaps it was whispered to the woman Life in “The Other
Dancing Song” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) implodes the entire edifice of
the exoteric interpretation of a temporality of the return. Such an emphasis upon the esoteric dimension
of the eternal return plays out as a counterpoise to such higher men as
Blanchot,[37]
who remain fixated upon a thought, one that is inexorably repeated in his
language. “As if death, through him,
distracted itself.”[38] Eternal recurrence as the unhistorical
opens as a playspace for the singularity of the free, very free
spirit. The notion of eternal recurrence,
in its exoteric interpretation, is another of Nietzsche’s jokes. Zarathustra is the spider who has woven an
exquisite web, a game, his cave, to ensnare the Higher Man. Yet, once they are there in his cave,
Zarathustra wishes nothing better than to get some good air. He steps beyond the cave – outside - among
his animals and the earth and sky -- into the open air of a starry night, to become
what he is. Time itself is imploded
in this affirmation of a singularity of be-ing here, of an innocence of becoming
– becoming this dice throw of chance.
Zarathustra is not yet the Overman - he is the voice in the
wilderness who beckons the Coming. We
must first traverse the pathway to this event, to this final act of
affirmation. We must descend through the
exoteric masque into the abyss of esoteric singularity.
Nietzsche makes much
of the physical, cosmological possibility of eternal recurrence. If there is a finite Kosmos, and if
an eternity of time has already elapsed, and if there is another eternity
beckoning from the future, and if the gateway of the Moment indicates a
mere Circle, a gathering into a Same of bad infinities, then how
could this specific event of my life not have been repeated
eternally? On the face of it, this story
presents a seduction to the lonely one in that it gives a cosmological raison
d’etre for its destiny in the framework of a purposive auto-teleology. However absurd, the lonely one is given
meaning in the enigmatic, though seemingly logical, proposition of eternal
return. If we think along with this conditional, syllogistic,
reasoning, and if we accept its premises, then, perhaps, we could regard
this proposition, this conjecture, as a real possibility. It is entirely possible that even the most
intimate and intricate simplicities of our lives have been eternally
repeated. Yet, such a logical,
physicalistic system, as with the clock on the wall, is merely one
interpretation, variant of the eternal recurrence, an assertion of a specific
will to power. The question still hovers
as to that which is absent, erased via this purposive teleology of eternal
repetition. Indeed, following Otto, we
can affirm eternal recurrence as a possibility of dysteleology, ‘in’ the
moment.
Nietzsche seems to
have given quite a bit of time to this “scientific” theory, and wished to couch
it as such. Yet, it may be possible that
the scientific rhetoric of some of Nietzsche’s formulations masque that which
may be pointed to as philosophical questions.
Zarathustra is lost in a Will to Repetition. Indeed, such a metaphysical-physical
proposition denies the possibility of a metamorphosis of the spirit from the
camel, through the Lion, to the Child.
The metamorphosis of the spirit feeds itself upon the singularity of
existence, of the possibility of decision amidst this topology of chance
operations. The Camel bears its all -
she is the masochist of accidents. The
Lion rebels against this situation of chance in that it is a creature of
chance. Amidst the effervescence of a
myriad will to power, the Lion declares that Nothing has meaning, that which
has been is futile, radically false – the goddess truth is
gagged, bound, raped and tortured - humiliated - via that metaphysics
of the One. Contrary to this
scenario of tragic resignation, of sacrifice, there is posited by the Lion
the possibility of a transfiguration of existence into laughter, into the good
fight of rebellion. There is
projected the possibility of a merely happy ending, or in the case of
the historical Zarathustra, Zoroaster, an eschatological overcoming of
Evil by Good. But, this latter is merely
One Will to power, and the Lion knows this fact as it subsists in its
facticity. There are myriad wills to
power. There are other Lions. The Lion affirms its own will to power via
the destruction of that which has been, of that which, beyond the grave, seeks
to suppress and contain the spirits of novel creation. Yet, the Lion cannot exist in innocence as it
seeks to destroy that which is – without a vision of new creation. The destruction of the Lion merely creates
this space for new creation. Yet, its
destructive creation is implicated in a metaphysics of return, in an
“against”, which discloses its limitations and specific status as a redeemer
of values. The Lion still exists
amid the immanent battles of liberation.
Its version of eternal recurrence is advocated merely in juxtaposition
to other conjectures of ultimacy.
Indeed, it understands itself as the negative of those various
doctrines of escape. The Lion
cannot see its liberation beyond the parameters of its strategic destruction.
Yet,
for Nietzsche, this moment of destruction is after all necessary if
there is to be opened a topos for new
creation. If the Lion did not erupt, the
Camel would have become a Cow, and if the Lion does not become a Child, it will
itself become Zarathustra’s Ape. The
destruction of the infrastructure of nihilism via the Lion clears
the ground for the Child who will create novelty under the sun, a
self-propelled wheel, a dice throw that is eternal. The Camel bears the burden of eternal
recurrence without question. It is
the unexamined life. The Lion rages
to destroy the complacency of the Camel in its eternal repetition of escape,
its myriad wills to nothingness.
Socrates posed as the Lion amid his incessant questioning, but, in the
end, he surrenders himself to the Law and becomes a Camel with his first sip of
Hemlock. He becomes the pack animal, the
ass that bears the burden of nomos.
He protects the laws as if they were his city walls. Zarathustra exhorts us to smash the old law
tablets. The new tablets are
half-written, and cannot be completed without the destruction of the old
tablets. For the Lion, the possibility
of recurrence erupts as the negative affirmation of this impossible
possibility, against the various doctrines of Otherworldly escapes. The Lion seeks to celebrate this Dionysian
power of life, irrespective of any consequences. He fights for this playspace of a cultivation
of that power of creation - against those who would merely suppress or
annihilate new creation. The
assertion of the Lion is that of negative freedom, and thus, although he
clears the space for novelty, he himself remains in a metaphysical
predicament - he remains a nihilist, though active. It is the Child in its singularity who
affirms the Dionysian general economy of life as it ‘is’. Ostensibly, this is the meaning of the
eternal recurrence of the Same.
Yet, as
alluded, the teaching of the eternal recurrence of the same exhibits not a
Janus face, but a continuum of layers and threads. It is in this way where we distinguish the
exoteric expression from the esoteric meaning of the teaching. Indeed, with the fulfillment of the esoteric
singularity of existence, the exoteric snakeskin will be shed, left behind as
an artifact of a self-overcoming or as food for the birth of this innocence of
becoming of the Child. Amid the surface
of the teaching, and beyond the merely cosmological formulation, the eternal
recurrence places great demands upon Zarathustra. The great weight of the idea shatters
Zarathustra, crushes him in his own attempt to make the greatest affirmation of
existence. He sits as a convalescent,
waiting for the sign which will beckon him to not merely articulate, but effectuate,
the teaching of the eternal recurrence.
Zarathustra laughs and calls his animals fools as they chatter on about
his destiny as the Teacher of the eternal recurrence of the Same. Zarathustra laughs as he knows that his fate
is not to be a mere teacher of an exoteric doctrine, but must seek to be the
birth of novelty under the sun, that he must become the Child. He must attempt that which is most
difficult. His great longing will become
a funeral pyre. He will give birth to
himself.
The
exoteric formulation or doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, if
considered detached from any question of its cosmological significance,
discloses for the singular mortal being a topos
of decision – it stands as the Gateway of the Moment. Everything will return, each in its
singularity, exactly as it is and has been eternally. Beyond the cosmological aspect of this possibility,
there is revealed a perspective which suggests that a new look and a
new feeling must be given to existence, even if that novelty remains
forbidden. The dis-eschatology of
eternal recurrence does not repeat the suppression, annihilation of the
monotheistic conjecture, but in its affirmation of the Dionysian power of life,
it sets forth an ordeal which must be confronted and fulfilled by
Zarathustra. The implication of the
exoteric doctrine, when considered from the perspective of the one who is still
alive, is that a situation, topos,
of decision erupts, one which is best characterized by Kierkegaard’s
either/or. This moment erupts at the
crossroads, when we can still glimpse each possibility. Yet, contrary to the leap into the absurdity
of Christianity (and not Christendom), Zarathustra seeks the leap which
will be the flying from the peak of high mountains, to give birth to the star
which is the Overman. The moment
of decision of the exoteric doctrine is the gateway to the possibility of a
deeper affirmation of existence. It
provides the singular mortal being the possibility and actuality of free
choice, a situation of an aesthetic and ethical decision that seeks to
overcome the historical malady via a conjuring of the possibility of an
unhistorical transfiguration of life.
This is the moment of anticipatory resoluteness in Heidegger’s Being
and Time,[39]
the revolution of the heart, in Kant’s Religion, a decision is made for
the authenticity of existence - over against the inauthentic homogeneity of
everydayness. Authenticity, in this
interpretation of Heidegger, remains juxtaposed to its negative – authentic dasein
is merely the Lion in repetition.
Yet, for Nietzsche, such a moment of vision is a necessary prelude to
the deeper esoteric effectuation of an articulation of eternal
recurrence. The Augenblick, and
the decision that it provokes, however, is not sufficient for this affirmation
of the Child.
If that
which is has occurred eternally, and if it will recur eternally, then we will
seek to read off, listen for, a meaning.
Perhaps we have heard the call too late - but as we are still alive, we
will seek to give a meaning to existence, to resist the hegemony of nihilism
and tyranny throughout our own intimate ‘actuality’. But, we are still haunted by ghosts of
bygone-ness. We dread the repetition of
the Same in all of its specificity as we are burdened by that which has been,
and by that which is. Yet, Zarathustra
calls us to affirm all of this, each – otherwise, there will only be
nothingness, nihilism. If a single thing
is chanced, or if there is a wish for any single thing to be different,
then all is cast into question.
Conversely, if you ever affirmed any single thing, then you must affirm
everything – as All is caught in the Stoic web of continuum. But, where is Ariadne’s thread which will
lead us from this labyrinth of repetition?
For we must, in the exoteric scenario, affirm all that which is, seeking
to complete, to give meaning, to take responsibility for, all that which has
been, is, and will be. Yet, this negation
of the will - or of the suppression and punishment of the sinner, deviant,
terrorist - annihilates the possibility of an affirmation of the Child. That which is is to be affirmed in all
of its minutae. No escape, no
exit, will be permitted, no nirvana, no outside, no repetition of the same. The actively nihilistic intentionality
of this exoteric assertion plays itself out as a mockery of eschatological
doctrines of escape, sleep, death, The One.
This redemption by the comedian clears the space for the affirmation of
an innocence of becoming.
Yet,
the comic, exoteric shell, skin, of eternal return falls away as one ascertains
that the scenario of eternal repetition is absurd. Of course, one is exhorted to affirm the
absurd, but, implicit in this affirmation is the question of the esoteric
significance, meaning, of the possibility of eternal recurrence. Far from the farce of eternal repetition, and
the unexamined assertion of this repetition, is the disclosure that such
a fatalistic scenario of repetition implodes amid an topos of silence, into
this instant of chance. From a purely
logical perspective one could question an eternal Repetition in that, after
the death of God, there would be no external vantage point that could
determine the discrete identity of repeated lives. Indeed, this is the gist of the
farce. The Sisyphian gesture of
the exoteric interpretation of the eternal recurrence serves as a litmus test
for any metaphysical doctrine of transcendence. Despite this absurdity of his destiny, Sisyphus
does not paralyse himself in otherworldly hopes. He is guilty. However, with the implosion of a placeless
center of presencing, of the metaphysical arce of existence, there is disclosed
an esoteric significance to this doctrine of repetition. If it is impossible to distinguish one
life from another via the illusory vantage point of an abstract observer, then,
it is necessary to assert that there is only one life. While its is theoretically and mathematically
possible that there is an eternal repetition of the Same, and perhaps this
physical simulacrum may be detected in experiences of déjà vu – for us, from
this perspective of mortal singularity, we ascertain the eternity of the
moment. The most difficult thought
is not that of eternal repetition, but of the singularity of chance. The exoteric form of the doctrine is merely
an electuary, a spoonful of sugar, but one which turns bitter with the
disclosure of the terrible truth.
Sisyphus does not escape, he does not leap down the other side of the
mountain to freedom. He merely colors
and sweetens his style. He does not
rebel. But it is only the narrator who
says that he is unhappy, unjoyous.
The
possibility of an eternal recurrence, of singular existence, has been
prescribed as the medicine for the malady of nihilism, for the metaphysics of
nothingness diagnosed as an array of symptoms.
The Overman, who has undergone convalescence from this malady, is
prepared to affirm that most difficult thought.
As with the other metaphysical doctrines of escape, eternal repetition
removes the singular mortal from the hook – it gives meaning to existence in a
meaningless scenario of Repetition. Such
a possibility removes the singular mortal from this moment of risk, from the
tenuous space of self understanding. The
evocation of eternal recurrence, understood esoterically, however, is neither
merely a thought experiment, nor a new criteria for ethics – it is not an
enigmatic categorical - or anti-categorical - imperative. The evocation is a call to the singular
mortal to become what one is, to fathom itself out of its own genealogy
and life, and to liberate itself from its topos of origin amidst the ecstatic
innocence of new creation. The call
invokes the singular mortal to return to this truth of life, and to attempt the
unhistorical, to become untimely, to be a creator. With the dawn of an awakening to this
singular chance, the mortal begins to understand the urgency of a life on
death row. This is not a detached
speculation of a sculptor who hammers out his piece and then goes to sleep for
the night. The sculptor is able to
walk away. The task of
self-overcoming, an affirmation of all the which is, is a situation of
violent intimacy – affirmation is a task of wakefulness. This singular chance of existence erupts
amidst the not-yet of demise – we exist as free, very free spirits, awake to
the terrible truth of existence.
Yet, while we can bear this burden, we can laugh amidst its terror, we
can affirm our fate with the cry: ‘Thus I Willed It.’ Such an affirmation
celebrates a festival of free existence which, amidst an imperative of death,
is awake to its own dangerous possibilities. Zarathustra exhorts us to follow only
ourselves - while we are not compelled to accept every thing that is or will
be, we must affirm that which has made us what we are. As very free spirits, one task is
necessary - to overcome ourselves as mere convalescents of nihilism in
an excessive affirmation of life that creates novelty under the sun.
Revaluation of All Values: The Lifeworld of the
Overman
Zarathustra’s
children are not destined to be hermits or apes. The Overman is to be a creator amidst this
world. His creation is a work which will
conjure into existence novelty under the sun. In the playful intimacy of the Child, there
will awaken an innocence of becoming.
Yet, this innocence will be confronted by the empty shell, the enduring mask
of anarchy[40]
- of the Good, Just and True. As the
event of destruction is simultaneously this moment of creation, the task
of the Overman, as an event of self-creation, is a topos for and praxis
of a revaluation of values. It is
this creative event of the Child that invokes and disseminates new values
amidst the world. Yet, as this is to be
an event of self-overcoming, that which is to be created in the moment of
destruction is this self in metamorphosis. It is this great wheel of the body and the
All that is to be affirmed amidst its
transfigured world – not the higher soul of the Platonist in his suppression of
the body and the sensuous world. It is
neither that sub-ject of Descartes of which I am most clear and certain
– not an unexamined self, shining in the goodness of monotonotheism,
which has purged itself of sensuous error and uncertainty. In this event of transfiguration, Nietzsche
suggests a dangerous perhaps - a radical reversal of this trajectory of nihilism,
that destination of the One… A revaluation of values indicates this
specific engagement of this Overman - amidst his singular fate in the Lifeworld. This love of fate plays itself out amidst
that destination of the One – awakened inside the matrix of a
metaphysics of nothingness.
The
transfiguration of the world indicates the simultaneity of destruction and
creation amidst this intimate temporality of life. This unhistorical
will to power – a “will” that destroys amidst its creation - affirms, in
this event, an eternal recurrence of the Same.
In this way, the metamorphoses of the spirit shed new light upon the
three perspectives upon History in the Untimely Meditations. The Antiquarian is the Camel, that one
who bears the burden of the past, the bygone, in a repetition of durable
values, enduring images, idylls of the world no longer. The Lion is the critical historical
who seeks the radix, that root of Repetition - an engagement with
the disciplinary burden of received narrative.
Monumental history intimates this eruption of the innocence of
the Child, but as it orients itself to the past, even a higher past, it stands
outside of innocence. The Child is
creation amidst this awestruck innocence of blind playfulness. None of these perspectives upon History, in
light of a juxtaposition to this metamorphosis of the Spirit, exist independent
of the other modalities of historical perspective. These perspectives play with each other in a similar way as the three ecstasies of
temporality in Heidegger’s The Concept of Time, Being and Time,
and in the later lecture on Time and Being. The three perspectives find their root in the
unhistorical, the Child - just as Heidegger (and Kant) discloses the radix
in the moment of vision (Augenblick) of an anticipatory resoluteness. The metamorphoses of the Spirit play with
their fate amidst this singular life of a mortal being in the world. Amidst this predicament of finitude, there is
the affirmation of this fate of a great longing. There is a decision amidst this world of that
which will be – Zarathusta’s Children.
The Antiquarian, the camel, wishes only to
preserve the values of that which is in so far as it has been – the situation
of life is mystified by preservation – life is suppressed to fit the mold of a
domesticated, routine bygone. The
Lion, the critical historian seeks to destroy this array of received values in
an event of expenditure. Its destruction
erupts as the destroying of monuments.
Yet, this destruction builds its own monuments, legacies, curses. It is the Child, on the contrary, who
transcends each of these three perspectives – the Child, the transfigured fourth,
creates new values in this event of affirmation – this event of the unhistorical
situates these three projections, perspectives, amid this Lifeworld of an eternal
recurrence of the same. Although the
Child, in its innocent affirmation, does preserve the awesome wonder of life,
this is not a burden, but a situation of opening amidst this moment and the joy
in the intimation of mystery. The Child
also destroys innocently, not from the motive of an “against” but accidentally
in a “for” – the Child exists in freedom and innocence, and while he is given a
topos by the Lion, if he is to be the Child, he must, at the limit of his
creation, leave the Lion behind – the Child acts intuitively in her preservation, destruction, creation – but, does so in an untimely –
unhistorical - way.
Zarathustra intimates
the innocence of the Child in his awakening to new truths and values that come
to him throughout this play of fate. He
himself does not consciously create these truths and values – they seem to come
to him as gifts, artifacts of his own engagement in a lifeworld in
becoming, found and erected as totems and tables of overcoming. Yet, as these are gifts and artifacts, he has
not willed these new truths and values from the origin, as a conscious
execution of an a priori - but, neither does the Child, who in the
persuasive novelty of existence, is inexorably there in a state of
ceaseless discovery. The mood of the
child is that of wonder and awe. The
difference between Zarathustra and the Child consists for the most part in the facticity
of the severance of the former from childhood.
Zarathustra can only be becoming a child – he is not yet, and may
never be a Child. In this light,
Zarathustra, in much of the narrative of his fate, a camel and lion. Even though destruction is creation,
for the Lion, such a creation is never innocent of the spirit of revenge. Zarathustra is aware of his own distance from
the being of the Child as betrayed in his great longing for his own Children. Perhaps these Children for which he longs are
his own greater selves, his own becoming Children.
The Child does not
know the conditions for his own awakening into the Open. For the Child the past is not a concept of
absence, but is his received world. The
Child appropriates being in the event of awakening amidst the Open. As Brentano expresses, the primordial
associations of the past, present and future allow for the ceaseless bleeding
into the present and future of that which has been - but is. The engagement of Zarathustra, on the
contrary, in and out of his own lifeworld, implies an awareness of the
labyrinth of existence. As he is on his
way, Zarathustra descends into the world with a message to those with ears
to hear. He is compelled to express
the possibility of that which is farthest, just as the Sun overflows in
the morning to give light and warmth to the Earth. And, as with the Sun, he would be nothing
without for those for whom he shines. He
needs to communicate, he needs to engage the world with his call for an
affirmation of the Earth which not only gives the future meaning, but also to
all that which has been. At this moment,
he is a camel and lion who creates without an explicit understanding of the
fate of the artwork. His triumph is
retrospective – his task is to prepare the ground, build the dwelling for the
Child. He is to prepare a topos for the Child. Only a Child, amidst his unhistorical
gaze upon this random facticity of existence, can innocently cry out
“Thus I willed it”. The transfiguration
will be a vision of the meaning of existence from the innocent perspective of
the Child. But, the story does not end
until after the last lines of Zarathustra, whereupon one ab-breviates
the text into a picture of history.
Zarathustra awakens to
his first truth after a long sleep – he understands that his clichéd mimicry of
a camel, a Preacher for mobs, corpses and flies, does not and cannot serve the
chaos in his heart and his great longing for affirmation and creation. He seeks companions. Zarathustra seeks to be the honey that does
not attract flies, but this one who will follow her own great longing. Zarathustra takes great pains to attract such
followers in his Speeches. He, as a
Lion, visciously attacks the pedestals of nihilism – complacent virtue and
authority, doctrines of sleep, death, or the otherworldly. Zarathustra attacks the state, this destroyer
of peoples, calling it the coldest of all cold monsters. It is an Idol, and the less of it the
better. Yet, just as the exiles from The
Birds of Aristophanes find that
Zarathustra is not
capable of the creation of new values as long as he is of this
timely circumstance. He lays the ground
for an affirmation free of a situation in which past hegemonic truths,
worlds, wounds were not only prime in their lives, but were also questioned and
broken, healed. He conjures an
innocence of becoming. Yet, Zarathustra
cannot partake of this festival, as he must descend again, go under, if
he is to hope for a transfiguration of existence as this innocence of becoming,
the Child. Yet, perhaps death itself
will become a festival, that destruction will be simultaneously a
creation. A mountain has been
ascended, but there is a higher mountain still to climb. Such a fate on the part of Zarathustra is
already intimated in his early speeches which were attempts to draw away
companions from the mob, from the mass.
Within the horizon of his injunction that we should remain true to
the Earth, the Lion, Zarathustra, attacks several prominent edifices of
religious, economic and political power.
These verbal attacks, diatribes, as they are not opposed by a
vocal antagonist, clear a topos, a playspace for that which came nearest to the
creation of a new value. Yet, many of
the “ideas” of these diatribes are nothing new.
They are reflections
of the margins and centers of current opinion.
Even the most extreme formulations, such as those concerning women,
intimated in the Old Woman and her recommendation of the Whip, can be found in
previous texts, one of the most notable being Justine by the Marquis de
Sade.[41] Where Zarathustra comes closest to the
creation of a new value is his advocacy of Free Death. Zarathustra seeks in this advocacy to
overcome the prevailing juri-political status and administration of the body
and of the so-called individual, administered by the Last Man at the End of
History. That which we do not legally
own, and thus, control is our own bodies, our own lives and destinies. It is in this place of life where our true
sub-jection is exposed – we do not have sovereignty over our own bodies, hearts
and minds, but, effectively speaking, rent or lease them from the State, this
great Idol. However, this is a rent
which in a quite specific sense need not be paid. The singular mortal, fated to death, can
bring this destiny to a close immediately. The implicit text of suicide is a sacred
sovereignty of the self in its singular Fate.
Though one would hope to live a free, very free life.
The Child must
transcend and affirm the spirit of its own topos
of creation. The suicide, at best,
hopes for a better world, while the Child lives in innocence. A corpse, even of a martyr imbued with the
spirit of revolt, is not the appropriate monument to the innocent act of the
Child in creation. Such an ultimate
gesture and gift is enacted by the Lion – it is the nearest the Lion will ever
come to true creation – it remains remote from the scenes of pregnancy and
birth, he lies low behind a mask.
However, it is a radical freedom behind the mask of ritual
self-sacrifice, of the Lion, which is the topos,
the dwelling for an infant creator.
Zarathustra must again descend, go under. He must still become a Child, a creator
amidst an innocence of becoming.
He is not to be merely dead bark floating upon the waters of distress – he
will grow wings and fly to that higher mountain.
Zarathustra’s
Children
Zarathustra
confronts his last temptation when he hears the cry of distress of the higher
man. He is tempted to pity, a “dwarf”
which masquerades as the higher man – in many ways, the nothing new which was
the content of Zarathustra’s speeches are the words of these higher men - the
philosophers, poets, mystics, magicians and priests, remembered as the official
history of that which we are.
Zarathustra laments that none of these Lions became a Child – he is
seduced to pity. He is tempted
with the idea that if none of these could have individually achieve the
innocence of the Child, then perhaps bringing these each together inside his
cave, or his philosophy, as suggested by Brandes, could bring about a situation
in which free creation could emerge.
Yet, once again Zarathustra is tempted to become the camel and the
shepherd for a flock – he is the great artist bringing these variants together
into volatile mixtures. Yet, as each of
these mortals is an existential singularity, Zarathustra is tempted to
prescribe a virtue of inauthenticity –
his pity flies in the face of the truth of the freedom of mortal
singularity – even a freedom to be foolish, ignorant, or willfully blind. Only a fool, only a poet. The Soothsayer, another agonal drive, tempts
Zarathustra to become merely a Higher Man – to be an ass that will bear
the latest festive bandwagon of the Mob – even a Mob of Higher Men. Zarathustra frequently exits his cave,
inhabited by these Higher Men, to get some good air under these myriad
Stars. Zarathustra does not seek to
become a Higher Man, as it seems to be physiologically impossible. Nor does he seek vulgarly to Repeat
that hier-archial hegemony of Authority and Power in a mon-arche
of a Superman over the Higher Men et al. Zarathustra beckons these Higher Men to come
out of the Cave into the Open of Midnight amidst these Stars – to witness
Eternity – to become Infants, Children - to fly.
Yet,
the prerequisite for an Infant, a Child, is, after all, the Mother –
truth, sophe, a-lethea, is a Woman.
Suppose truth be Woman, what then? Zarathustra never finds, or has not yet found
a Woman with whom he wishes to have Children.
Yet, he loves Eternity, a cosmic woman of great power. He longs for his Children, but laments his
inability to find the Woman with whom he could create the creator. Woman is an enigma, a riddle – she is also
Loyalty, Truth, Life, Virtue… She is Creation - the Source of the Milk of the
Stars of the Sky.
But, it seems for
Zarathustra, Woman is also an
Yet, in the moment of
vision in the Open of the Midnight amid the Stars, Zarathustra forgets his
great longing, his last temptation, and seeks to become what he is, to
stand amidst the singularity of eternity.
He is not concerned with physiological reproduction, but with the
creation of his own transfigured self amidst its world. Woman in the sense of a pot of dirt for the
de-positing of the Seed is merely a pathway to inauthenticity, of the
niche that merely defers creation to the future, to the next generation. Zarathustra laments that Woman, this power of
creation, has only been betrayed as Birds, Cats, and Cows. These Goddesses cannot marry
Zarathustra in order to produce a progeny of children, nor can they do
his work for him in his project of becoming a Child. As a creator, he must cultivate this womb
of being in himself – Zarathustra, like Dionysus and Apollo, must learn and
interpret these signs and crafts of Woman - Truth - of this utter enigma of
Fertility and Creation - of the Goddesses – as indications of this event of transfiguration
that is betrayed in this phenomenology of his own existence.
Zarathustra
says that women are birds and cats, or at best cows. As this pertains to the theme of truth as a
woman, and as this statement has been read by some as a repetition of
Schopenhouser’s misogeny, it is necessary to examine the topoi to which these
references point. Indeed, Zarathustra’s
characterization suggests a genealogy of these types. For instance, Isis and Maat, depicted as
birds were Ancient Egyptian Goddesses of Life, Justice and Thought – Woman as
Harmony. Moon, their Sister, is the
great practitioner of Balance for Life on the Earth. The Sphinx is Woman as Riddle – she is a Cat,
a question. She is the Questioner, the
Lion. Hathor, and Nut – the Cows – are
Woman as Surface – Givers of All that which is. Zarathustra wishes to become a Child. He sees in himself the Bird – Isis or Maat –
the mother of Horus or Maat, the goddess of philosophy… Minerva is also a Woman
- the camel that would bear much –– to the Lion, this Sphinx, who will place a
Question – the cat, the Sphinx, Apollo in Drag, a Riddle, over these protocols
of existence. Woman at her best
is the Cow, the Giver of All that which is – as She intimates the
Child. Her breasts give the milk for the
stars in the sky, for the mouths of the Children. Yet, even at her best, as the Cow which chews
its cud and pretends to instantly forget, modest in her awesome creation, she
is merely portrayed as that which serves – she is not credited with the
creation of the child. She is seen,
tasted, touched many-one-sided, held aloft on a pedestal, her legs in stirrups,
away from her untruth and ugliness – from existent interactions with men, from
sex, menstruation, the pain and filth of birth - a woman should be pretty.
Zarathustra would
suggest that compared to this, men, as they are, are insufficient enough
to dismiss as potential peers with whom to become equal. These men are Last Men. The happy, blinking last man nods his head at
the latest slaughter, genocide, omnicide - hidden beneath the skin of a
pale criminal, there is no blood. He
needs blood to live, this everlasting sacrifice at the
The Overwoman
is that which transcends Woman as servile, one-sided, surface,
flower-pot, pretty.
Zarathustra has never found a Woman with whom he loved enough to have
children – he loves Eternity.
Zarathustra will never give birth to the Overman in any kind of
biological manner. He does not have the
parts. Nor is he of the “normal”
age. He seeks the Child, but they
want to lock him up in an old folks home.
Zarathustra has a long gray beard – he is an old man of the mountain,
alarmed by the rising waters of despair which threaten his domain. He is afflicted by the creeping nausea and
suffocation from the bad air of the Higher Men.
Zarathustra, in the absence of a final act, could become an old man upon
the sea who consumes his highest desire, his great fish, to return to dry land
with only a broken skeleton to show for it.
Yet, it is not mere survival which Zarathustra attempts - he is not a
creature of lament , nostalgia, despair - of suicide. Zarathustra will cross over the bridge in
his attempt at the most difficult.
He (if he found a She) may never give birth to an Overman at
all.
Zarathustra is not a
midwife as was Socrates. The latter
wished to allow the traveler to overcome the sickness of this Life - death
being the antidote. Sacrifice a cock
before the dawn. One must choose death
in the face of the Laws – these are the repositories of the Divine in this
Life, they are our city walls. Life
itself is of no value. It is merely a
detour, an insurrection against nothingness – a revolt that has failed. For
Socrates, the insurrection has failed in that Life itself has been
exposed as untruth. [Jesus] and Mohammed, even Siddhartha, concur with Socrates
as the ultimate value of Life. Yet,
Zarathustra resists these Teachers. He
instead attempts the most difficult in his affirmation of Life – and calls the
bluff of the great Sages, these Higher Men by laughing at their scenarios of
escape and denial. Zarathustra will live
it all again – eternally to recur as the Same, but he seeks to complete the
ending. An affirmation, though tainted
by his own genealogy, involves a final act – an event of affirmation which
retrieves – discovers and invents a meaning for the haphazard and chance
operations of his own earthly – mortal – life.
As he stands beneath the firmament of stars, standing as his self amidst
Eternity, the bad air of the Higher Men, who have also been called, is blown
away by the Winds of the Open. The final
act of Zarathustra is a being lifted up and shown by eternity the abyss which
surges underneath. The goddess Alethea
infiltrates the soul of Zarathustra, inscribing the primal incantations for
Childbirth. Zarathustra dreads that
which he glimpses, he chokes with nausea upon the snake which eats its own
tail. He is not to be swept up in a
scenario of return which gives him a ready-made meaning of life. Truth is not to serve, to be servile. The truth, as with the goddess of Childbirth,
Alethea, must be dis-covered, earthed – it is a painful process, a
struggle to get out into the Open, into the Light. This moment of affirmation is intimated in
the final sentences of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He has left the cave and stands amidst those
whom he called into the Open – yet, he stands alone amidst Eternity. He has castigated the Higher man and his face
has turned to bronze. The time of pity
for the Higher Man has ended.
Zarathustra is not concerned with happiness, with the long life of the
Last Man – he is neither, therefore concerned with suffering. He declares that he is concerned only with
his work, with his creation. He affirms
all, without saying, “Yea!”
Well then! The lion came, my
children are near. Zarathustra has
ripened, my hour has come: this is my morning, my day is breaking: rise now,
rise, thou great noon![42]
In his dream at
Noon, the world becomes perfect - just now - Zarathustra is a grape, golden, bronze – ripe for the
festival of his strange soul. She – eternity - spins the web that will
tie together his great affirmation – Penelope’s Web which brings Odysseus back
home. She beckons his soul to lie amid
leaves of grass, overflowing with happiness, but chastened not to sing and
laugh at this Stillest Hour. The
world has become perfect. She drinks
from the ripe golden wine, Zarathustra becomes drunk, ensnared in the web of
Sleep, the goddess who put Zeus to sleep at the bidding of Hera during the
Trojan War. The last temptation of
Zarathustra is not his pity for the Higher Men, but of - his own falling
asleep amidst this event of affirmation.
Zarathustra resists drinking from the waters of Lethe. He invites the pain of his task of
wakefulness. But, he is tempted to
sleep.
Nietzsche exalts the dice throw of Chance. It is the Overman, the Child, who can
affirm this Chance, this intricate enigma of Life, beyond God and gods –
towards that which we all share. This
Child is born through the birth traumas of a Revaluation of All Values. Amidst the metamorphoses of the Camel into
the Lion, and the Lion into the Child, there is myriad unclarity and indistinctness. The camel is cast aside as the ring-bearer of
tradition, of the old law tablets. The
Lion, amidst the revaluation, destroys, but is not yet aware of his own
inadvertent creations, he will never be aware.
It is the Child who is born into the topos
which is the last gift of the Lion. The
Child picks up the blind creations of the Lion and meets these as found
objects, beings of wonder, of innocence.
The Child affirms new values in innocence, finally free of the “against”
of the Lion. Zarathustra is inseminated
by Eternity, by the Overwoman - he abides, struggles, endures with this
goddess of childbirth, alethea, his
midwife, in his final act of self-overcoming, giving birth to his
Children. In an alchemical sense,
Zarathustra, through his affirmation, gives birth to himself.
Eternity
rends this dread curtain, inaugurates this marriage of light and darkness. Zarathustra mates with Eternity. She shoots lightning out from a dark cloud -
flying off this edge of that precipice, off that cliff of the mountain. Zarathustra receives this lightning, he is
inseminated by it as a tree on the mountainside. She disseminates her truth into him,
and, with chaos in his heart, he gives birth to dancing stars. Zarathustra gives birth to himself. Eternity – Overwoman - is the Semen
for this new creation. She
flashes herself – her lightning casts this existence into relief – beckons this
pregnancy and childbirth of Zarathustra.
Children grow and dance amidst this All - laughter, sorrow, anguish,
joy, and more laughter… Zarathustra
plays with his Children…
[1] German Conservatives launched an unsuccessful
campaign in 1894-95 to ban the works of Nietzssche as subversive.
[2] Since its publication, the work itself has traveled a
rather crooked path, being a cult classic for the likes of Stephen George, the
‘Nietzscheans’ of the Dreyfus Affair, a companion to German soldiers, a
manifesto for post-structuralist philosophy, and a text of the death of god
movement in theology. To this day, the
work is still homeless as it sets in an uneasy relation to not only the
dominant philosophy of our era, but also to religious, theological, and literary studies. Indeed, it could be suggested that its style
and content exhibits an ambiguity that challenges our clear and distinct
divisions of intellectual labor.
[3] For a detailed investigation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a serious philosophy work, please see Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before
Sunrise, Ed. by James Luchte,
[4] It is well-known that Nietzsche chose Zarathustra, in one instance, since, as a historical and mythological figure, the latter is attributed with the original articulation of the severance of good and evil. For even though we can retrospectively witness the ossification and nihility of his progeny, his act was that of a creator – even if only a creator of nothingness. We can begin to understand the significance of his choice if we consider, for instance, Beyond Good and Evil[4] or of the ranting of the madman, in the Gay Science,[4] that “God is dead!” – these texts seek neither a mere repetition of the teachings of the “Old Wise Man”,[4] nor a project to resurrect or retrieve an originary oneness or unity prior to the beginning of duality.
[5] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes
What One Is, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 1979. The old sin against the regime of guilt is
pride, self-love – vanity. Yet, such
brings light, it discloses the terrible truth of innocence. “God is a crude
answer, a piece of indelicacy against us thinkers – fundamentally even a crude prohibition
to us: you shall not think!”
[6] This indication of topos is indebted to Reiner Schürmann’s statement, “[My philosophy
of] Anarchic Praxis: this is the topos where the man Martin Heidegger
undoubtedly would not so much have liked to see himself led.” Heidegger: On Being and Acting, From
Principles to Anarchy,
[7] Zarathustra,
Part Three, ‘The Other Dancing Song.”
[8] Levinas, Emmanuel.
Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso
Lingus, Duquesne University Press, 1998.
[9] Foucault, Michel.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by
Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1979.
[10] Bataille, Georges.
On Nietzsche, Paragon House, 1994.
[11] Iriguray, Luce.
Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Gillian C.
Gill, Columbia University Press, 1993.
[12] For an extended exploration of the philosophical
context for Nietzsche’s use of poetry, see Luchte, J. (2007) ‘Wreckage of Stars:
Nietzsche and the Ecstasy of Poetry’, Hyperion,
[13] There is a long development from Nietzsche’s earliest
writing to his latest which traces a poetic and artistic thread, that is, from
his earliest poems to his last “mad” (is it as mad as Hugo Ball?) scribbling –
and including all that emerged in-between.
We can trace this thread from one of his first poems (1858) “Birthday”,
through to “On Truth and Lying in the Extra-Moral Sense,” again through The
Birth of Tragedy, and in light of the period of reflection and
experimentation in Human all too human, Daybreak and the Gay Science, the
emergence of Zarathustra as a work of philosophical (and historiographical)
creativity in Zarathustra. Of
course, our thread continues into his subsequent works, but never in a similar
manner as Zarathustra, except, of course, in his poetry, but indeed, on
a lesser scale.
[14] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Zarathustra: A Book for All and None,
translated by Walter Kaufman, Penguin, p. 127.
It is well known that Nietzsche also – or primarily, as some may contend
– wrote poetry – and composed music.
Indeed, with a reading of his poetry, we find that it is indeed a hidden
garden, mountains and desert, of his entire work. While one could describe his aphoristic
writings, as they were etched into notebooks in the Alps during walking trips,
as a typology of poetic writing, Nietzsche has left a labial body of
poetic work which lies far beyond the domain of philosophy, both Ancient and
Modern – or, at least since Philolaus and Plato. Never abandoning the original kinship of
poetry and philosophy as offspring of poiesis,
Nietzsche includes poetry in most of his major works – never however disclosing
the wellspring of his hidden poetic enterprise.
Indeed, it is his poetry which may provide the clues to his broader
thematic directions and pre-occupations – his work is not organized according
to logical and analytical criteria – but, as indicated, by a poetic topology.
It
is noteworthy that Nietzsche to some extent seeks to hide the lowly origins
of his work – his selection procedure is well known – as is the constructed
character of his works. Nietzsche hides his own depth via a strategy of limited
revelation. He does include poetry in
his works – but not all of his poetry, some of which stands as a counterpoise
to Nietzsche’s self-portraiture as a hard man – a Radical Aristocrat. For instance, there are many instances of
grief and sadness, of tears and anguish, of suicidal despair, which rarely
surface in the published works – or at least, only in Zarathustra. His poem about his father’s death, The
Homecoming, while intimating the death of God, is far from the laughter and
dancing of a festival celebrating a marriage of light and darkness. It resembles more closely the rantings of the
Madman or the Soothsayer, of a passionate, anguished soul. At the same time, however, not all is hidden
– even Nietzsche’s musical composition and song writing have always been well
known – though seldom heard. Despite
Nietzsche’s secretiveness, it is simple to apprehend that his poems, such as
the Dionysian Dithyrambs and Wit, Tricks, and Revenge, provide
the lost horizons and contours – indeed - the birthplace, of Nietzsche’s
philosophy. For a complete English
translation of Nietzsche’s poetry, cf. The Peacock and the Buffalo: the
Poetry of Nietzsche.
[15] Cf. Mao Tse-Tung, On Protracted
War, Foreign Language Press,
[16]
Vendîdâd. (The Zend-Avesta, vol. 1 of 3), translated by James
Darmesteter, Sacred Books of the East, volume 4, Clarendon Press, 1880.
[17]
Zarathustra, “On Apostates”, p. 290.
[18]
Zarathustra, “On Apostates”, p. 290.
[19] Foucault, M. The Archeology of
Knowledge, Routledge, 1989.
[20] Derrida, J. “Declarations of
[21] Janicaud, Dominique, “Metamorphosis
of the Undecidable”, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1.
[22]
Derrida, J. “Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority.’” Cardozo
Law Review: Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, 11:5-6, 1990,
pp. 920-1045.
[23] Zarathustra, “The Pale
Criminal”.
[24] Miranda, José Porfirio. Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the
Philosophy of Oppression, translated by John Eagleson, Orbis Books,
1974.
[25] Savinio, Alberto. “Psyche”, The Lives of the Gods, Atlas
Books, 1995.
[26] Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth: Writings on
Surrealism, edited by Michael Richardson, Verso,
1994.
[27] Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of
the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row, 1975.
[28] Schürmann, Reiner. Heidegger on Being and Acting: From
Principles to Anarchy,
[29] Heidegger, Martin. Basic
Writings, revised edition, edited by David. Krell, Harper, 1993.
[30] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Zarathustra: A Book for All and None,
translated by Walter Kaufman, Penguin, p. 300.
[31] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Zarathustra: A Book for All and None,
translated by Walter Kaufman, Penguin, p. 115.
[32] Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power, translated by
Walter Kaufman, Vintage Books, 1967.
[33]
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Zarathustra:
A Book for All and None, translated by Walter Kaufman, Penguin, p. 17.
[34]
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond
Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, translated by R. J.
Hollingdale, Penguin, 1988, p. 14.
[35]
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Zarathustra:
A Book for All and None, translated by Walter Kaufman, Penguin, p. 42.
[36]
This refers to my conclusion to this essay.
[37]
Wagner is not the Overman.
Nor are any of his creatures.
Wagner may have promised the possibility of a higher man, or even
of a Lion, in his extravagant rebellions throughout the 1848 struggles and amid
the cultural war that was inaugurated by these events. Yet, in the end, he becomes, with Parsifal,
the camel, or perhaps, an ass who had once been a man, but who is
bewitched – in any case, a mere beast of burden in the project of
nihilism. Wagner fails to be a
laughing lion. He merely simulates
this primal trauma and repetition, only bears witness to that “catastrophic
event”. Wagner bears the burden of
the trauma. Wagner, in addition to
his official status as a musician, is also a practitioner of sound effects, a
soothsayer of the emotive soul, a king of sound scenarios, a magician of the
noise of the everyday, and a pope of the aesthetics of power. Yet, the Overman is a creator. His music is not a composition, representation
– it is not dramatic – it is a self-expression of life, an opening of
possibility, a song and dance upon the earth. It exhibits the intimacy and innocence of a
child at play. It is in this sense that
the Overman is not a dramatic hero, whether it be of tragedy or
comedy. Neither the camel, nor the
laughing lion can affirm the Dionysian power of life with the innocence of the
child. In each of these dramatic
expressions, we find traces of the timely, of either a suppression of the will
under the duty of obligatory self-immolation, or of a sublimation of the power
of life under the agenda of historical and cultural destruction, i.e.
“progress”, “enlightenment”, “New World Order”.
In both cases, the creative act becomes entangled within the strategic
directives of the timely. The
unhistorical, this playspace (spielraum) of creation, is dragged down,
back into the abyss of nihilism. For the
past is not just any past, not merely any historicity, but a specific history
characterized by the dual trajectory of the One, of either a will to
nothingness or a will to mere existence.
The past bleeds into the present, the future is our only hope. Nietzsche is intimating a possibility, which
is not merely a precursor to a Heideggerian retrieval of an authentic
historicity, but one which seeks to diagnose a malady, which afflicts the will
to power, this Dionysian power of life, which dissipates the possibility of new
creation oriented to the future. Unlike
Heidegger, who Nietzsche might call a Preacher of Death, this future is
that of the birth of Zarathustra’s children. Nietzsche, by the writing of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, has already jettisoned his own earlier fixation upon the
unique status of the Greeks as a counterpoise to the monotheistic assertion of
what Kierkegaard condemned as ‘Christendom’.
Yet, the Dionysian persists as Nietzsche’s chosen metaphor for the power
of life – but the totalitarian Apollo has been jettisoned - there is no
longer the necessity of project, in Bataille’s sense, of a harnessing or
immolation of life for a terrestrial or divine purpose. Zarathustra preaches that humanity is in need
of a goal, but this is not a goal of a world infatuated with the Otherworld. In such a world, the farthest becomes
a simple affirmation of that which truly is, of this earth. The
farthest becomes the nearest.
[38] Blanchot, Maurice, The Step Not Beyond, translated by Lycette Nelson, SUNY, 1992. There is much muddy water in The Step Not Beyond which clouds a rough sketch of the esoteric dimension of eternal recurrence as affirmation. It is precisely such a ‘temporality of return’, of repetition, that is unmasqued as a mere parody, simulacrum, ape, of the dominant narratives of the eschaton.
[39] Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, translated by John
Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, Harper & Row, 1962.
[40]
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Shelley’s
Poetry and Prose, W.W. Norton & Company, 2nd edition, 2002.
[41]
De Sade, Marquis. Justine, or
Good Conduct Well Chastised, translated by Richard Seaver & Austryn
Wainhouse, Grove Weidenfeld, 1965.
[42]
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Zarathustra:
A Book for All and None, translated by Walter Kaufman, Penguin, p. 327.