SEMIOTEXT(E) INTERVENTION SERIES

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Speech delivered on the occasion of the I OOth anniversary of

Friedrich Nietzsche Death, Weimar, 25 August 2000.
Thanks to John Ebert.

Design: Hedi El Kholti

ISBN: 978-1-58435-099-6
Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
and London, England
Printed in the United States of America

Peter Sloterdijk

Nietzsche Apostle

Translated by Steven Corcoran

semiotext(e)
intervention
series a 16

Contents

Introduction
Gospels-Redactions

13

The Fifth

29

Total Sp onsoring

47

O f Suns and Humans

65

Notes

85

Introduction

Today, in the year 2 0 0 0 , on the hundredth

anniversary of his physical death at the dawn of the
first of the millennia he said would have to be dated
after him, how are we to speak about Friedrich
Nietzsche? Ought we to say that he stands before us
suffering and great, like the century to which he
belonged with all his existence and out of which
he erupted into the eternity of authorial renown?
Ought we to adopt his own j udgment that he was
not a man but dynamite? Ought we to emphasize,
once again, the peculiarity of his "effective history":
the fact that never before has an author insisted so
much on distinction and yet attracted such vul
garity? Ought we to diagnose that it was with him
that the era of narcissism began, first in evidence as
the "insurrection of the masses," then as collectivist
"great politics," and finally as the dictatorship of the

global market? Ought we to accept the claim that

the history of academic philosophy ends with him
and then history of the art of thinking begins? Or
ought we to refrain from making commentaries
and read Nietzsche and reread him?
I would like to describe the Nietzsche-event
as a catastrophe in the history of language and put
the argument that his intervention as a literary new
evangelist constitutes an incision in old Europe's
conditions of understanding. With Marshall Mc
Luhan, I presuppose that understanding between
people in societies-above all, what they are and
achieve in general-has an autoplastic meaning.
These conditions of communication provide groups
with a redundancy in which they can vibrate. They
imprint on such groups the rhythms and models by
which they are able to recognize themselves and by
which they repeat themselves as almost the same.
They produce a consensus in which they perform
the eternal return of the same in the form of a
spoken song. Languages are instruments of group
narcissism, played so as to tune and retune the
player; they make their speakers ring in singular
tonalities of self-excitation. They are systems of
melodies for recognition, which nearly always
delineate the whole program as well. Languages are
not primarily used for what is today called the
passing on of information, but serve to form

81

communicating group-bodies. People possess lan

guage so that they can speak of their own merits
[Vorziigen]-and not least of the unsurpassable
merit of being able to talk up these merits in their
own language. First, and for the most part, people
are not concerned to draw each other's attention to
states of affairs, but aim instead to incorporate states
of affairs into a glory. The different speaker-groups
of history-all the various tribes and peoples-are
self-praising entities that avail themselves of their
own inimitable idiom as part of a psychosocial
contest played to gain advantage for themselves. In
this sense, before it becomes technical, all speaking
serves to enhance and venerate the speaker; and
even technical discourses are committed, albeit
indirectly, to glorifying technicians. Languages of
self-criticism are also borne by a function of self
enhancement. And even masochism works to
announce the distinctiveness of the tortured indi
vidual. When used in accordance with its constitutive
function of primary narcissism, language says one
and the same thing over and again: that nothing
better could have happened to the speaker than,
precisely, to have been who he is, to have been who
he is at this place and in this language, and to bear
witness to the merit of his being in his own skin.
The fact that primary narcissism first became
observable with ethnic groups and kingdoms before

!nlTJCUC l;o, l / 9

going on to become a feature of nations, bristling

with weapons and classics at the dawn of modern
times, is something I will consider from a historical
viewpoint. As for the individual, the wait would be
lengthier before self-affirmation could step out of
the shadows of sin. It did this in the form of
amour-propre in the 1 8th century, that of holy self
interest [Selbstsucht] in the 1 9th, that of narcissism
in the 20th, and that of self-design in the 2 1 st.
Nietzsche was probably the only theoretician of
language of modern times to have had this funda
mental relation in mind. For, in deriving prayer
from a people's exhilaration at its own self-assertion,
he states: "it projects the pleasure it takes in itself
( ...) into a being that it can thank for all of this.
Man is grateful for himself: and this is why one
needs a god." 1 And, in a more general way, we
can read in an earlier text: "It is a beautiful folly,
speaking: with it humans dance over all things."2
In the reconstruction of religious affects from
self-referential gratitude, language comes to be
determined as a medium enabling those that speak
to say out loud the reasons why they are on top.
This is why the profession of faith in one's own
modus vivendi is the most distinguished speech-act.
It is the eulogistic gesture par excellence. With this
derivation of distinction, speech and silence are
defined as modes of exhilaration, which confess to

themselves. In both what is advanced is a voluntary

declaration of success in the pursuit of Being: in
speech as manifestation of right and power; and in
silence as an authorized quiet whose presuppositions
require no defending.
Quite clearly, this rudimentary reference to a lin
guistics of jubilation or self-affirmation stands in
sharp contrast to all that has been said and con
ceived about languages by the theorizing communis
opinio of the last century, regardless of whether
this took the form of ideology critique or analytic
philosophy, discourse theory or psychoanalysis, a
theory of the encounter or deconstruction. The first
case set about unmasking all the misleading gener
alizations of the languages of the bourgeoisie; the
second gave priority to turns of ordinary lan
guage over metaphysical inversions; the third,
made a relation between the language games of
knowledge and the routines of power; the fourth
undermined signs through the unconscious con
tents of expression; the penultimate case described
the language event as a response that is provoked or
refused by the call to me of the other-in-need; while
the last case brought forward evidence to show that
we always fail in attempts to impose the full presence
of meaning on what is said. In all these cases language
is understood as a medium of lack and distortion,

possibly also as the organ of over-sensitiveness and

compensation, of settling claims and therapy.

Everywhere language and the spoken appear as
symptoms and problems. Hardly ever are they con
ceived of as vectors of affirmations and prophecies.
But when they are, it is to underscore the inau
thentic and flawed character of all laudatory and
promise-making sorts of tunes. Whoever speaks in
the conditions permitted-whether from a bour
geois, political, academic, legal, or psychological
perspective-will always be in the minus and run
around in vain seeking the means by which to pay
off and shift overdrawn assertions. Whoever speaks
incurs debt; whoever speaks further, discourses in
order to pay back. The ear is educated in order so as
not to give away credit and to interpret its avarice as
critical consciousness. In what follows I will
endeavor to reprise the Nietzschean idea of lan
guage, the beginnings of which Nietzsche only
sketched, and to extend them into the future from
a contemporary standpoint-whereby I hazard the
ramification that Nietzsche's maxim, according to
which "all our philosophy is the correction of
linguistic usage," is charged with meanings that go
beyond all criticist conceptions.

12I

N::<c:cln /\.pustlu

GO SPELS-REDACT I O NS

First we must take a step back and clarify the con

trast between the conditions of modern language
and those of pre-modern language. As cultures
reached the level of monarchy-I say this having
no particular belief in the dogmatic presupposi
tions of sociological evolution theory-it went
without s aying that language's self-laudatory
energies could no longer be aimed directly at orators
who were specialized in function of public speech,
such as the elder, the priest, the rhapsodist.
Rather, they had to take a detour and praise the
lords, heroes, gods, powers, and forces of virtue,
from which a refracting ray came to fall on the
orator. In feudal times, poets and rhetoricians
were schooled in the grammar of indirect eulogy;
their job was to be skilled at generating higher
feelings, in which the extolled stood in the center

13

and the singers on the sidelines. Their discretion

required them to b e humble, to do what was

required for the mood of their own royal space.
Precisely to the extent that high cultures in times
gone by outlawed an orator's direct expressions of
egotism, they showed, with the linguistic brio
of primary narcissism, ways whereby dutifully
manifesting an enthusiasm for the big other, one
could place oneself close to the recipient of praise.
This can scarcely be more legibly studied than
in Christian Evangelization and its encroachment
on European societies' conditions of understanding
in the early Middle Ages. Shown with particular
clarity here is the way in which Evangelist speech
acts-the preaching of salvation by God's son,
and the swearing-in of an ethnic commune for a
participation in this sphere that is as unequivocal
as possible-put speakers and listeners alike into
an oscillating circuit which was about nothing
other than celebrating a shared privilege. In his
book of the Gospels, Otfrid von WeiGenburg,
Rhine Franconian poet-priest of the 9th century,
justified his vernacular adaptation of the New
Testament by arguing that the Franks, too, ought
at last to be allowed access , via a poeticized bible,
to the sweetness of the Good News, dulcedo

evangeliorum.

As many persons undertake to write in their lan

guage and as many strive with fervour to praise
what they hold dearwhy should the Franks be the only ones to
shrink from the attempt to proclaim the praise
of God in the Franconian lan guage ...
...let the praise of God be sweet to you,
then Franconian will also b e determined by
metrical feet, quantity and metrical rules; better,
then God himself will speak throu gh you.

evangelorium

(Liber

I, 1, V 31-34; 41-42)

The sense of these reflections, unique for their

time, lies in an ethno-narcissistic operation by
means of which the Franks were to be formed, at
the level of the linguistic techniques of the time, as
a collective with higher feelings-with the claim
to being equal or even superior to those great
historical peoples, the Greeks and the Romans.
Gospel verse in the German language is presented
as an offensive, the aim of which is to establish a
politico-religious system of boasting that, by
virtue of a catch-up lesson in rhyme and rhythm,
plugs into the art of the poetically possible. The
point thus being that, in future, in the image of
the gloria Francorum, an effective link would no
longer be missing between the veneration of God
and the poetics of Empire. In the same spirit,

/1 5

Otfried attributes to Ludwig den Deutschen, in

his dedication to him, a rank equal to King
David. Moreover, in this speech act two eulogistic
functions-praise of the King and glorification of
the people-come together to form a single
enhancement-effect. Otfrid was convinced he thus
complied with the essence of language, inasmuch
as language is per se an instrument of eulogy. This
may be most convincingly proven in the case of
praising God: "He, in effect (God) , has given
them (the p eople) the instrument of language
(plectrum linguae) so that they cause him to sound
in their praise" (Dedication to Luitberg) . One
who praises becomes worthy of praise insofar as he
or she also participates in the glory of the object of
eulogy. The poet expresses the same idea in his
introductory prayer to the Gospel epic.
You alone are the master of all the languages that
exist. Your power has conferred language to all
and they have come-o salvation!-to form
words in their languages to recall Your memory
for always, to praise You for eternity, recognize You
and serve You. (Liber evangeliorum, I, 2,

V33-38)1

Remarkable in this appeal is not only the fact that

knowledge is also put at the service of the eulo
gistic function; but also that the languages of

humanity as a whole are defined as media of

God's narcissism, which passes via the detour of
human idiom back to God himself in unending
self-celebration. With God self-praise is a perfume.
The meaning of language is to celebrate, and any
language that might forget to celebrate would
have taken leave of its senses.2 The only awkward
thing about this theo-linguistic arrangement is
precisely that God must b e celebrated in Old
High German, in a lingua agrestis or p easant
idiom that did not wholly conform to the gram
matical and melodic norms of divine relations
to themselves. Otfrid had to muster all his
Franconian pride to find the courage to praise
God in the South Rhine Franconian dialect. Even
though it did not occur to him to improve the
Gospel as such, he thus saw all the more clearly
the need to render the teotisk3 vernacular compa
tible with the Gospel through poetic amendment
an idea from which would come one of the main
linguistic creations prior to Luther's translation of
the Bible. Let's note that in taking up the proj ect
Otfrid felt no need for j ustification in forming a
continuous linear narrative of the canonical
Gospels. In his time, in which a lay reading of
the Holy Writings was not something open to
debate, syncretistic-didactical forms such as the
so-called Gospel harmonies were well introduced

and sufficiently legitimated as a sacred genre.

What was appropriate for Tatian the Assyrian was

also apt fo r a noble Franc. What the author
instead seemed to deem worthy of justification was
the articulation of his Gospel epic in five books:
These five of which I j ust spoke, if I have divided
them thus, even though there are only four books
of the Gospel, this is because the holy rectitude of
their numbering four sanctifies the irrectitude of
our five senses and, transformin g all that is
immoderate in us . . . carries it off toward heaven.
Whatever it is that we miss via si ght, odour,
touch, taste, and hearin g : via the remembrance of
the texts of the Gospels
we purify ourselves

(eorum lectionis memoria),

of our corruption. 4

Here again, what seemed to require improvement

was naturally not the Gospel itself, but rather the
readership and the listeners who approach the
beatifying text as Franks and humans with their
natural quintuplet sensuality, and who-if we are
to believe the poet-thus require five books of
Gospel poetry in German rather than the four
original Gospels.
This episode in the history of the German language
played out about 1 0 1 0 years before Nietzsche's

own self-decl aration, while the next example

from the history of self-praise relations in western
tradition refers to a case that is separated by a
mere seventy or eighty years from the intervention
of the teacher of the eternal return. The issue here
still has to do with improving the Gospel-but
this time the mode is considerably more compli
cated, since what now enters the fo reground, at
the same time as collective self-praise, are concerns
about individual self-enhancement. The scene of
the experiment is the United States of America
around 1 8 1 0 , and the Gospel redactor is none
other than the redactor o f the American
Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson,
who at this time was able to look back on several
terms of office as minister to France and as vice
president of the USA, as well as on two mandates as
president. After his years of service in Washington,
he returned home to his manor in Monticello,
V irginia, and devoted himself to rounding out the
image of himself he intended to leave to posterity.
These indications are enough to support the
notion that what we bear witness to here is an
eminent case of national-religious linguistic
pragmatism, especially as we know that to this
day the United States represents the most fertile
collective of self-celebration of all the current
political entities in the "concert of nations"; it

could also be said that it is the society whose

founding conditions included dismantling as far
as possible all cultural inhibitions against the use
of enhancing superlatives in a democratic self
reference. What is the USA if not the product of a
Declaration of Independence-from humility
(and doubtless not only from the British Crown)?
There can be little wonder, then, about the effi
cacy with which, as we shall see, the Christian
message is adapted to the needs of American glory.
Already during his first presidential mandate in
Washington, Jefferson would busy himself on his
spare nights, using scissors to cut out extracts
from a series of editions of the New Testament in
Greek, Latin, French, and English, which he then
pasted together into a scrap book to make a new
arrangement of the Gospels. The aim was one he'd
held for some time, and first emerged during his
correspondence with Unitarian theologian and
writer Joseph Priestly, in 1 795. In all likelihood,
however, the task was not completed until around
1 820, after many years of interruption. The product
of this cut-and-paste work, which Jefferson com
pleted twice-over, was given the title The Life and
Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, and has become
known as The Jefferson Bible. I n his scissor
work, the redactor must have been convinced that
he possessed the criteria by which to distinguish

20 I

f\J1etzschc Apostc

the utilizable from the non-utilizable in the

bequeathed text. As a representative of the
American Enlightenment thinkers , with their
decorative monotheism and Philadelphian exu
berance, Jefferson testifies to the state of the Gospel
problem at the apex of this current of thought.
With this Christian-humanist gentleman, it becomes
clear that the need for a self-enhancement using
the classic reservoirs of meaning was as alive as
ever, but could only be satisfied by expunging vast
passages of the historical Gospels. In the wake of
the American and French Revolutions, anyone
wanting still to play the language game of the
Gospels to advantage had above all to be able to
omit. This is the meaning of neo-humanism: to be
able to eliminate in the old Gospel that which has
become incompatible with one's own glorification
as a humanist and citizen. For this operation, no
image is more impressive than that of an
American head of state in his office at night, who,
with scissors, cuts out pages from six copies of the
New Testament in four different languages and
pastes the extracts into a private copy of the Good
News that is designed to conform to the demands
of contemporary rationality and sentimentality
for a citable, excerpted version of the Bible. It is
characteristic of Jefferson's philosophical ambi
tions that he did not feel that this redaction of

Gospels-Redactions

I 21

the Gospel-or as he put it, this formulation of

an abstract or syllab us-was a heresy in the original
meaning of the term, insofar as hairesis refers to
a choosy insolence applied to a totality of dogmas
and traditions. Rather, he presented himself as the
curator of the writings' true content, as re-establishing
a pure text against the fu dging performed by
later additions . With energetic naivety, the
enlightened redactor went about separating Jesus'
unacceptable words from those that Jesus must
have said, had he wanted to be approvingly cited
by Jefferson; even better, from those that Jesus
would have said had he foreseen the transforma
tion of believers into sympathizers. In fact, the
modern sympathizer ofJesus can be defined as the
bearer of Euro-American Enlightenment, as one
who places value, despite all the connections to
the Christian tradition, on remaining within the
continuum of worldly possibilities of self
enhancement that were developed since the
Renaissance. And this is precisely what Jefferson
had in mind when he endeavored to cut out the
valid residue, that which is citable even among
humanists, from the embarrassing mass of New
Testament phrases. As such, in October 1 8 1 3 ,
Jefferson felt h e could send to John Adams the
following report of success:

There will be found remaining the most sublime

and benevolent code of morals which has ever
been offered to man. I have performed this
operation for my own use, by cutting verse by
verse out of the printed book, and arranging, the
matter which is evidently his, and which is as
easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.
The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure
and unsophisticated doctrines . . . 5

In a letter addressed to the erudite religious and

Dutch Unitarian, Francis Adrian van der Kemp,
Jefferson explained himself in a more detailed
manner about his relationship with Jesus the man:
I t i s the innocence of His character, the purity
and sublimity of His moral precepts, the elo
quence of His inculcations, the beauty of the
apologues in which He conveys them, that I so
much

admire;

sometimes, indeed,

needing

indulgence to eastern hyperbolism. My eulogies,

too, may be founded on a postulate which all
may not be ready to grant. Among the sayings
and discourses imputed to Him by His biogra
phers, I find many passages of fine imagination ,
correct morality, a n d of the loveliest benevo
lence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, so
much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism

I 23

and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible

that such contradictions should have proceeded
from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the
gold from the dross; restore to Him the former,
and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and
roguery of others of His disciples . 6

In view of this declaration it makes little sense to

maintain, along with The Jefferson Bible's editor
Forrester Church, that the wise man of Monticello
merely sought the intelligible Jesus and necessarily
missed the historical one. Jefferson was after nei
ther an historical nor an intelligible Jesus but
rather an obj ect of eulogy, which, by giving praise
to it and thus having recourse to shared moral
values, would enable the speaker to come out a
sure-fire winner. Jefferson was after a spiritual
master who could be cited to guarantee advantage,
and who would permit the laudator to become a
prestige shareholder by drawing on the holy
source of values. After the mental caesura of the
Enlightenment, an unabridged version of the New
Testament could deliver no such expectations of
symbolic profits, and for this reason any rational
redactor had to expunge from the corpus of stories
and words of evangelical authority all that would
compromise him in front of other rational beings
and land him in the mire of sectarianism, or,

24 I r\Jietzsche Apostle

what amounts to the same thing, of cognitive

loserdom. For absolutely similar motives, and
with similar means, Leo Tolstoy would later put
together a private version of the New Testament
and present it as a sort of " Fifth Gospel": the
Russian path toward the coexistence of evangelism
and the Enlightenment.7 The Moderns no longer
know of evangelists; they know only of the classics.
Citing a classic guarantees a sure, albeit modest,
return; on the contrary, if, in society, you invoke
the Redeemer, your credit will shrink. The
Enlightenment is really a l anguage game for
cognitive winners, who continually deposit the
premiums of knowledge and critique in their
accounts, and exhibit their cultural funds, while
faith gets increasingly hidden behind a barrier of
embarrassment, to be crossed only when one is
among like-minded others, and, moreover, is
ready to give up the advanced boasting potential
of the Enlightenment. But Jefferson was not a
man to burden himself with embarrassment or
with language games for losers. As a result, in his
redaction of the Holy S criptures for Enlighten
ment winners, all the threatening and apocalyptic
discourses of Jesus are forcibly absent, as are most
of the stories about miraculous cures and resurrec
tion-his purged Gospel ends when a few of
Jesus's friends roll away the stone in front of the

tomb and go off on their way. As text-composer,

Jefferson performs the literary imperative of
Modernity: Where legend existed, the news must
come! At stake now is to swap all sacred agents for
terrestrial heroes. Jesus can only be the hero of a
novel or a participant in discourse.
In a general way, the modern tribute to heroes
necessarily faces a complicating factor, namely
that eulogistic functions are increasingly dependent
on scientific premises and must satisfy the dictates
of political correctness. Nowadays you always have
to have in view the side-effects of each tribute
and to calculate the angle of refraction of indirect
self-enhancement. But the main rule is that all
eulogistic remarks have to be ontologically correct,
and that no claims are made of actual interventions
from transcendence into immanence. The leeway
for boasting shrinks; the strategy of indirect self
celebration in high culture hits the investor with
ever greater costs and diminishing narcissistic
returns. Summing up this state of affairs is the
term humanism, such as ethicists use it today: to
all speakers, it suggests the return to a carefully
considered sort of self-affirmation that is only
barely distinguishable from medium-level depres
sion. Twentieth-century mass culture would first
designate a way out of this quandary by discon
necting self-praise from remarkable performance

26 I

and other things, admiration of which was based

on superior criteria. This disconnection thus
enabled primitive feelings of exhilaration to step
onto the forestage where a public of accomplices
in disinhibition awaited, intent on cheering. For
Jefferson, these kinds of relief were not yet in
sight. He had to continue to tie his eulogistic brio
to the holy texts, and, by means of redemptive
abstracts, to revert to elevated examples of the
tradition in order to satisfy cultural demands for
discourses about higher feelings. He could thus
write to one of his correspondents: "I am a
Christian, in the only sense He wished any one to
be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference
to all others; ascribing to himself every human
excellence ...."8 What speaks for Jefferson is that
his hypocrisy is spontaneous and coherent. His
grasping at the diamonds in the dunghill of tradition
illustrates a growing American selectiveness as
regards the heritage of old Europe. The importation
of meaning from Jerusalem, Rome, Geneva, and
Wittenberg also had to clear American customs.
Jefferson's redaction of the Gospels teaches us
that the preconditions for winning avowable posi
tions of privilege stemming from Christian tradition
already became problematic nearly a century prior
to Nietzsche's own intervention. What, in western
culture for over one and a half millennia, had

Gospeis-Redactions ! 27

been the pure and simple, and often also profitable,

Good News-the creed for admitting people
into the other-worldly God's system of likeness
increasingly proved to be a losing game for the
messenger: the conditions of transmission for
messages of this type had been transformed; the
speaker of such news appeared too clearly as
someone who had not yet properly learned the
procedures of modernity to be able to take up the
word to advantage.

T HE F I F T H

O n February 1 3 , 1 883 in Rapall o , Friedrich

Nietzsche, then aged 38, composed a tactically stylized
letter to his editor, Ernst Schmeitzner in Chemnitz:
Dearest Herr Veleger,
. . . Today I have something good to announce:
I have made a decisive step-and I mean by the
way, such a step as should also be useful to you. It
is a matter of a small work (barely a hundred
p rinted pages) , the title of which is
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A Book for All and None
It is a "poem," or a fifth " Gospel" or some
thing or other for which there is not yet a name:
by far the most serious but also the most cheerful
of my productions, and accessible to everyone. So
I think that it will have an "immediate effect" . . . 1

29

On April 20 of the same year, Nietzsche wrote to

Malvida von Meysenbug in Rome:
. . . it is a beautiful story: I have challenged all the
religions and made a new "holy book" ! And, said
in all seriousness, it is as serious as any other, even
though it incorporates laughter into religion.2

On May 24 in a letter to Karl Hillebrand Nietzsche

made the following remark about the first part of

Zarathustra:
Everything that I had thought, suffered, and
hoped for is in it and in a way that my life wants
now to appear to me as j ustified. And then again
I feel ashamed before myself: since I have hereby
stretched out my hand for the highest garlands
ever awarded to humanity . . . 3

A year later Nietzsche's ears were still ringing

with this expression of reaching fo r the "highest
garlands," which is henceforth attributed to the
"use the foolish and false language of the ambitiosi."4
All his correspondence from the Zarathustra period
is shot through with micro-evangelic news about
his concluding a work that had weighed heavily
on the mind of its author as something o f
incomparable value. A t this t i m e , it was the

Italian and the Swiss Postal Services that under

took to the " Good News."
Nietzsche's break with the old-European evan
gelic tradition makes discernible how, from a certain
degree of enlightenment, speech's functions of
indirect eulogy can no longer be secured with the
compromises of deism or cultivated Protestantism.
Anyone seeking a language that secures the speaker
the attribution of "every human excellence,'' or at
least the guarantee of indirect participation in
supreme advantages, has to develop strategies of
expression that surpass the eclecticism of a
Jefferson. As in communication among "the
moderns" embarrassment is hardly avoided simply
by cutting out compromising reports of miracles, it
is no longer done. It is no longer enough to bypass
all the maledicent apocalypses and prophetic com
minations, the pronouncing of which will unmask
absolutely anyone speaking before a secular or
humanist-influenced public. Would anyone be
able to refer, in society, to an authority such as the
Jesus of Mark 9.42, who thought it right to say:
"Whoever causes one of these little ones who
believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a
great millstone were hung around his neck and he
were thrown into the sea." A commentator writing
in the year of 1 888 contented himself with saying:
"How evangelical!"5 Scissors can no longer save a

Tho

I 31

speaker's self-esteem when spreading the good

news-all in all, gospel residue proves unable to
withstand serious scrutiny. Not even the process of
demythologization can set one straight on one's
feet. Too dim, too suspect, too inferior are the
sources from which the beautiful discourses issue.
Expressions of discontent with its glowering uni
versalism and its menace-laden benevolence can no
longer be disguised in the long term. So, if "good
news" remained possible and the conditions of
spreading through a chain of winners could be
realized, then it would have to be reconstituted. It
would have to be new enough to avoid embarrassing
similarities with texts that had become unacceptable,
but similar enough so that it could be perceived at
least as a formal extension of the stock-standard
gospel. This is the reason why the new redaction of
a discourse, one able to be proclaimed, and in
which the speaker could bank on making a profit,
could be first obtained only through the subver
sion of earlier forms: the man who can promise
anew is one who says something unheard-of with
new words. But Nietzsche did not want to be a
mere Gospel parodist; he did not want merely to
synthesize Luther wirh rhe dirhyramb and swap
Mosaic tablets for Zarathustrian ones. Rather, for
him the point was that the conditions pertaining
to professions of faith and the chains of citations

32 .1

i\lj,='tzsc:--1e

be given an entirely new order; better, that the

distinction between a profession of faith and a
citation be revised. The author of Zarathustra
wanted to lay bare the eulogistic force of language
from the ground up, and to free it from the inhi
bitions with which resentment, itself coded by
metaphysics, had stamped it. This intention
resonates in Nietzsche's seeking to assure his friend
Franz Overbeck that "with this book I have over
come everything that has been said in words." And it
is presupposed when he states, still addressing the
same addressee: "I am now, very probably, the most

independent man in Europe."6

The height-or better: the operating theater
of this independence is the result of an insight
that Nietzsche, ever since the days of Human, All
too Human, had made during an aggressive spiri
tual exercise that he carried out on himself The
author of The Gay Science was convinced that
resentment is a mode of production of world,
indeed one that is to date the most powerful and
most harmful. The more keenly this discerning
author contemplated the matter of this fact, the
more comprehensively and monstrously it came
into profile: in everything that had borne the
name of high culture, religion, and morality, the
resentment mode of world-building had pre
vailed. Everything that for an epoch had been able

T'.lc

/ 33

to present itself as the moral world order bore its

handwriting. All that had in his era claimed to be
making a contribution to world improvement had
drunk of its poison. Whence the catastrophic
conclusion, which hit its thinker as a millenary
insight: that all languages formed by metaphysics
gravitate around a misological core. The classic
teachings of wisdom, together with their modern
connector-theories, are systems for maligning
beings in their entirety. They serve those who have
yet become fed up with defaming the world,
power, and human beings, and have as their goal
the abasement of the happy and powerful, and of
self-praising attitudes. When all is said and done,
all high cultures between Asia and Europe have
consistently spoken the language of people who
are out to take advantage of life itself What has
hitherto been called morality is the universalism
of vengeance. And whatever metaphysical dis
course might carry by way of valid wisdom, science,
and worldly sophistication: it is the first impulse
toward maligning reality in the name of an over
world or an anti-world, which has been specifically
approved for the sake of humiliating its contrary.
Along with this, it is simultaneously to talk up
the need for vengeance, with which the weak
and the foolish vaunt their weakness and their
fo olishness. In metaphysical-religious discourse,

contemptuousness becomes an insidiously twisted

self-praising force.
That, along with Socrates and Plato, Nietzsche
above all identified Saint Paul as the genius of
reversal needs no further elucidating; neither does
the fact that from the numerous consequences of
the Pauline intervention Nietzsche derives the
criterion by which to define his amendment to the
Good News as the axis for a history of the future.
Against this background, the author of Zarathustra
sets out to formulate the first link of a message
chain designed to disenable all metaphysical falsetto.
It is a manoeuvre by which he feels sure of his
epochal stance; he knows that decoupling future
linguistic currents from resentment and that
rechanneling eulogistic energies is a "world histori
cal" act. But he also understands that operations of
such magnitude require a lot of time. He considers
his being unable to observe the consequences of his
keynote part of his martyrdom: "I require so much
of myself," he wrote from Venice in May 1 884 to
Overbeck, with faint self-irony, "that I am ungrate
ful vis-a-vis the best work that I have done till now;
and if I do not go to such an extreme that whole
millennia will make their loftiest vows in my
name, then in my own eyes I shall have achieved
nothing." In September of the same year, he made

lhe

/ 35

this confession to Heinrich Koselitz: "Zarathustra

has meanwhile only the wholly personal sense of
b eing my book of devotion and encourage
ment-otherwise dark and veiled, and grotesque
for everyone."
A "devotional book," a "holy book," a book
of independence and overcoming, a "genuine
mountain air book," a "testament," a " 'fifth'
Gospel": Nietzsche's labels for his literary "son
Zarathustra" draw, like the text itself, from a fund
of religico-linguistic lore, which is converted for
the new occasion. The essential reason for reprising
this type of expression, however, is to be found
beyond the sphere of rhetoric and parody.
Nietzsche informs us that the term " Gospel" as
such had been filled with false examples only,
since in the Christian tradition what was issued
as The Good News could, given its value and
attitude in the pragmatics of language, achieve no
more than a triumph of misology. In his view, the
old Gospel in all its fourness is merely a handbook
for maligning the world in order to benefit
avengers and the indolent, a book drafted and
interpreted by the power-hungry caste par excellence
of the metaphysical ages, the priest-theologians,
the advocates of nothingness, and their modern
successors-journalists and idealist philosophers;
its texts are resentment propaganda, rewriting

defeats as successes and revelling in inhibited

vengeance as a way of subtly and disdainfully
floating above texts and facts. Nietzsche's self
awareness hangs on the conviction that the role he
has been left with involves interrupting the age-old
continuum of misological propaganda. A remark
from Ecce homo should be applied to the entire
complex of metaphysical distortions:
All the "dark impulses" are at an end, "good peo
ple" had even less of an idea than anyone else of
the right way . . . And in all seriousness, nobody
before me knew the right way, the way up : only
starting with me did hopes, tasks, prescribed
paths for culture exist again-I am the bearer of
these glad tidings. 7

Nietzsche's evangelism thus means: know oneself;

take a stand against the millenaries-old forces of
reversal, against everything that has been called
Gospel to date. He saw his destiny in being a
necessarily j oyous messenger, such "as there has
never been before." His mission was to destroy the
communicative competences of the venomous.
The fifth "gospel"-Nietzsche only puts the noun
and not the numeral in inverted commas, and
places the expressions "poetry" or "something for
which there is no name" as variants next to it-

Trcc

I 37

thus aims to be contrastive, its content being not

negation as liberation from reality, but affirmation
as liberation of the wholeness of life. It is a Gospel
fo r those no-longer-needing-to-lie, a gospel of
negentropy or of creativity and consequently-on
the presupposition that few individuals would be
creative and able to be improved-a minority
gospel, further still: a gospel "for no one," a delivery
to unidentifiable addressees, since there exists no
minority regardless of how small that could accept
it as a message addressed directly to it. Not for
nothing did Nietzsche, in the months and years
after the publication of the first three parts of
Zarathustra, continuously point out, with the
melancholy of a simultaneously fictive and authentic
character, that he had not a single "disciple."
This statement is only seemingly contradicted
by the fact that Nietzsche achieved his "vitalist''
turn of thought in a temporal milieu that all too
willingly declared itself ready to assimilate the new
languages of life affirmation; even the observation
from "effective history" according to which
Nietzsche's death was immediately followed by a
wave of demands that began turning Zarathustra
into a fashionable prophet and the "will to power"
into a password for social climbers, does not repu
diate the thesis that there was not and could not be
any adequate addressee for this "gospel." The reason

38 I

for this is to be sought in the internal economy of

the new message, which demands a disproportionate
price for access to its privilege of proclamation,
indeed an unpayable one. Recipients of the fifth
"gospel" incur such high costs that, after a look at
the balance sheet, it can be perceived only as bad
news. It is no coincidence, then, that its first herald
was already pushed to break away from past and
present humanity. It demands of every potential
disciple such radical abstinence with regard to tra
ditional forms of life-serving illusion and bourgeois
facilitation that, should this disciple seriously partake
in the new message, the disciple would find himself
alone with an unliveable disillusionment. The
odd renewal of eulogistic energies in an alternative
linguistic current first opens onto a proposition
designed to transmit via speech an evangel
propped up on a "dis-evangel"-the expression
dates from Nietzsche himself, who thus denotes St
Paul's "actual" teaching. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
also adopts this term to characterize the major
interpreters of reality in the 1 9th century-Marx,
Gobineau, Nietzsche and Freud-as the first "dis
evangelists" of modern dumbfoundedness: we will
speak somewhat more soberly of them as the
founders of discursive games about the real.
The fifth "gospel" sets out from a work of illu
sion-destruction for which there is no parallel. It is

oriented around the norm of the Gay Science,

which, in truth, is the most desperate science ever
to have been launched, since it presupposes a level
of disenchantment that plunges to almost suicidal
depths. It virtually corresponds to vagus death
caused by disappointment. Nietzsche never
doubted that there was an indissoluble relation of
production between his chronic illness and his
lucidity about things psychological and metaphysi
cal. His own life was for him the "experiment of
the discerning"; his suffering he understood as
redemption for his cognitions. And the more he
paid off, the further he was carried away by his
thinking and states from existing human commu
nities. He drifted further and further toward an
inexorable exteriority with regard to the menda
cious conditions of societies. He looked upon the
idols of the tribe, the market, and the cave from a
distance that did not cease to grow. His private
mythos of the Hyperboreans was a way of
describing his soj ourn in the cold as a gay and
voluntary exile. He had no right to believe that he
possessed in this any shared point of departure
with contemporary readers; still less could he
permit himself the supposition that he might find
followers wanting to learn their lessons in similar
conditions. Hence the persistent reference to his
fateful loneliness; hence his view of the world as "a

40 !

door to a thousand deserts, empty and cold."

Hence, also, the mistrust he displayed toward
anyone who might have dared to tap the author
approvingly on the shoulder. In the chapter called
"The Convalescent," Zarathustra illustrates the
price of the new message when in encountering his
"most abyssal thought" of disgust and disappoint
ment he faints and, upon waking, hangs between
life and death for seven days. The truth has "in
truth" the form of an illness leading to death: it is
an attack on the aletheiological immune system,
which leaves people hanging at the geometrical
place of lies and health. Whoever wants to resist
the disruption of the hitherto known economy of
illusions, has to be something other than what had
been known as known human to date-a surviver
vaccinated against the madness of the truth. The
economic paradox of Nietzsche's good news consists
in the indication that the primary, immeasurably
bad news must be recompensed by an as yet
unproven mobilization of creative counter-energies.
The overman concept is a wager on the distant
possibility of such compensation: "We have art so
that we do not go to ground on the truth"-this
means: we have the prospect of the overman in
order that unbearable insights into the unveiled
human condition may be endured. Such an offer
appears as an advertisement for that which inspires

FiM1

I 41

terror. This is why the whole of Zarathustra had to

t ake the form of an extended prelude: in its narra
tive parts, it deals with nothing other than the
hesitation of the herald before the announcing of
his own message.
However, if one wants to have cheaper access
to the new privileges of the herald, regardless of
effects of terror and experimental reservations
and this is the formula that practically charac
terizes the whole history of Nietzsche redaction
in the anti-democratic movement, including its
later revisions in democratic ideology critique
then one has to split the newly won eulogistic
functions from the necessary enlightenment
prior to it and its work of destruction, and lift
the quotation marks from the password "gospel,"
that is, erase its newness and its irony. Nietzsche
was aware of the absurd costs of his undertaking
and doubted often enough whether recovering
an evangelic-eulogistic stance from p erfect
nihilism remained, existentially speaking, a sen
sible reckoning. In 1 884, he wrote to Malvida
von Meysenbug:
I have things on my soul that are one hundred
times heavier to bear than

la betise humaine.

It is

possible that I am a doom, the doom for all

future people-and it is henceforth very possible

42 /

that one day I will become mute, out of love for

humanity! ! !

Let's register the three exclamation marks after the

suggested possibility of his falling silent. Every
explanation of the Nietzschean message has above
all to answer the question of how it is possible that
the announcement won out over its internal inhi
bitions. This would be tantamount to explaining
how the dis-angelic factors could prevail against
the eulogistic motifs in the process of offsetting
them. And in this revision it would be necessary to
examine the calculation as such in its immanent
correctness. Does not everything point to the idea
that according to Nietzsche the bad news possesses
an edge over the good news that cannot be com
pensated for, whereas all attempts to give primacy
to the latter are based only on momentary vigor
and temporary self-hypnosis? Yes, isn't Nietzsche
thereby exactly the paradigmatic thinker of moder
nity insofar as it is defined by the impossibility of
catching up with the real through counter-factual
corrections? Is modernity not defined by a con
sciousness that runs ahead of the monstrousness of
facts, for which discourses about art and human
rights only ever consist in compensation and first
aid. And for this reason is the contemporary
world, fo rced to admit the superiority of the

dreadful, not precisely incapable of uttering high

praise from then on.
As far as Nietzsche is concerned, he knew very
well that he would, for the time being, be the sole
reader of Zarathustra to be seized by it; his fifth
" Gospel" is, as he almost rightly says, "dark and
buried and grotesque for everyone," and this is so
not only on account of its prematurity. It cannot
be predicted how such a document, which neces
sarily renders anyone trying to spread it grotesque,
could become the point of departure for a new
eulogistic chain in which the spokesperson would
stand to win. As, for the time being, anyone pro
fessing to want to cite a passage from the fifth
"gospel," renders himself even more infeasible
from a bourgeois and academic standpoint than
would someone attempting to do so with the
unabridged form of the first four. This can in no
way be altered by the conspiracy of the infeasible,
who improvised their " braggart empire" by
appealing to a few heavily distorted and cut up
fragments of Nietzsche, translated into banal and
national-populist language. No pair of scissors can
save the chants of Zarathustra for the language
games of the stock-standard enlightenment.
Nietzsche-uncut only opens up to those who are
lost enough to be able to reinvent the notion of
redemption for themselves. Assuming that Nietzsche

himself had known this from the start-and the

biographical and literary evidence speaks in favor
of this-what could still make him believe that a
new era of discourse would begin with him? How
did he propose to go from the ridiculous to the
sublime, from the sublime to freedom-and who
could have done it after him? To solve this enigma,
we will have to examine in more detail Nietzsche's
sketches for an ethics of generosity.

T OTAL SPO NSO R I NG

To learn more about Nietzsche's theory and praxis

of generosity, it is also-or above all-necessary to
address his "megalomania," supposing this an
appropriate designation for this author's extraordi
nary talent to speak about himself, his mission,
and his writings in the highest of tones. Perhaps
this issue here is one fo r which the expression
addressed to the publisher about the "good news,''
"something for which there is yet no name," is
once again appropriate. The alternative designa
tions used to encompass the first parts of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, "Poem" and "Gospel," should
also be kept in reserve as a way of qualifying
Nietzsche's megalomaniacal remarks.
Megalomania, then, or poetry, or something
for which there is yet no name: what follows is
advisably approached with a provision of alternative

41

expressions, to avoid getting stuck with a designa

tion reflex that is first best. The exposure value of
Nietzsche's most conspicuous statements about
himself are so excessive that even the most favorable,
the most free-spirited reader, yes even those who
are willingly dazed, will look away from these
passages as though not wanting to have perceived,
to have countersigned, what has been committed
to paper and put into print. It is possible to stare
fixedly neither at the sun nor at the self-praise of
the mad-for this reason we read these unbearable
outbursts of self-awareness with self-praise pro
tective eye-wear. We tone down that which cannot
penetrate unfiltered into a reader's eyes without
his having to look away out of a sense of shame
for the unbridled other, or else out of one of tact,
which advises us not to use the moments in
which an excited person bares himself against
him. Among Nietzsche lovers it is a mark of
decency not to cite this sort of thing, is it not?
Today, however, we must deviate from the norm of
the amateur.
The fact that a psychologist without equal is
speaking in my works, this is perhaps the first
thing a good reader will realize-the sort of reader
I deserve, who reads me as good old philologists
read their Horace. 1

Does anyone at the end of the nineteenth cen

tury have a dear idea of what poets in strong ages
called inspiration? If not, I will describe it . . . . This is
my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that
you would need to go back thousands of years to
find anyone who would say: "it is mine

as

well."2

My Zarathustra has a special place for me in

my writings . With it, I have given humanity the
greatest gift it has ever received. 3
Leaving aside the poets: perhaps nothing has
ever been done with such an excess of energy.
Here, my concept of the " Dionysian" became the
highest deed; all the rest of human activity looks
poor and limited in comparison. The fact that a
Goethe, a Shakespeare, would not know how to
breathe for a second in this incredible passion
and height . . . all this is the least that can be said,
and does not give you any real idea of the dis
tance, of the azure solitude this work lives in . . .
The collective spirit and goodness of all great
souls would not be capable of producing a single
one of Zarathustra's speeches . . . . Until then, you
do not know what height, what depth really is;
you know even less what truth is . . . . Wisdom,
investigations of the soul, the art of speaking
none of this existed before Zarathustra.4
. . . an old friend has j ust written to say that
she is laughing at me . . . And this at a moment

Totai

Sponsoring

I 49

wh e n an un s p e akabl e res p o n s ibili ty rests o n

me-when no word can be t o o gentle, no look
respectful enough for me. Because I am carrying
the destiny of humanity on my shoulders . 5
When I measure myself by what I can do . . .
I have better claims to the word "great" than any
other mortal.6
My lot would have it that I am the first
decent human being, that I know myself to be
opposing the hypocrisy of millennia . . . I was the

first

to discover the truth because I was the first

to see-to smell-lies fo r what they are . . . I am

a bearer of glad tidings as no one ever was
before . . . Starting with me, the earth will know
great politics . . . 7

I would like t o suggest that w e dwell a little

longer on these unbearable phrases and slowly
remove the protective eye-wear that has for a cen
tury spared readers the need to engage with this
eruptive, obscene profusion of self-praise and
self-obj ectivization. I make this suggestion on the
assumption that we are dealing not with some
subjective disinhibition in the usual sense, or with
a morbid way of letting oneself go, or even with
traces of puerility, as commentators like Thomas
Mann and Karl Jaspers have discerned in Nietzsche.
Against the aforementioned background oflanguage

50 !

philosophy, it seems plausible to assume here that

the dam behind which the self-eulogistic discursive
energies had been accumulating in the most
advanced civilizations finally burst, in a single indi
vidual. Today we enj oy a safe distance of one
hundred years that enables us to see these detona
tions of self-awareness from sufficient distance.
Added to this, we benefit from a large shift in men
tality, a shift that traverses the 20th century toward
a greater permissiveness in the expression of narcis
sistic affects. And, finally, Nietzsche's description
of himself in Ecce Homo as a "buffoon" suggests the
prospect of considering his Dionysian exaggerations
from the aspect of voluntary grotesqueness. All this
makes it easier to bracket the embarrassment and
muster up a bit more courage.
I would also like to contend that Nietzsche's
"narcissism" is less pertinent a phenomenon from
the point of individual psychology than the marker
of a cut in the linguistic history of old Europe. At
bottom, it signifies the disclosure of the nature of
authorship and literary discourse. The discursive event
which bears the name Nietzsche is characterized
by the infringement, within him, of the high
culture separation between the Good News and
self-celebration-which in addition unveils what
it is that a modern author does: he posits the text

for himself The economy of eulogistic and miso

logical discourse and its foundation in the taboo
weighing on self-praise are simultaneously opened
up to debate. The legitimization of this turn can be
gleaned from Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics
and morality. In it the order of lies, that in which
indirect eulogy is grounded, becomes altogether
transparent, laying bare the mechanisms of contor
tion that have materialized in phrases such as " One
who is humble will be elevated," or servir et dis
paraitre. If it is true that this separation of praise
from self is nothing other than a deferment effected
through resentment, an everlasting adjournment
of the moment in which an orator could say to his
own existence, "linger a while so that I can praise
you," one may thus understand Nietzsche's attacks
against discretion as acts of revision that contradict
the traditional morality of self-dispossession in
an almost furious way. We must go back to late
middle-age mysticism to be able, at least from afar,
to encounter comparable phenomena. Spectacular
and embarrassing as they are, they serve to restore
the possibility of forging the most direct link
between self and praise. What Nietzsche has in
mind is not indistinctly to rejoice over oneself as
bare existence: he deaves with all his might to the
idea that existence must earn its exultation, or
better: that it has to grow into its exultation. As no

other modern thinker, Nietzsche espouses the

adaequatio iubilationis et intellectus. If there is any

correspondence between its existence and good
reputation, an existence must become enhanced to
such an extent that the best may be said about it.
Existence may well be an a priori chance for self
praise; however, self-eulogistic discourse can only
become legitimate a posteriori at the level of culture.
Between the chance and its realization, the bridge
is created by "egocentrism"-this long maligned
dimension in which the best possibilities of
humankind were arrested incognito. It is the selfish
impulses, insofar as they are also work-obsessed,
upon which Nietzsche bestows with a philosophical
consecration. B elated self-praise condenses the
premonition of one's own becoming and the con
summation of egocentrism together in the image
of self: how it is that one becomes what one is,
grasping the randomness of being "me." The "full"
self-image is "realized," perhaps, in a moment,
when the most ambitious anticipations of one's
own ability to become are confirmed with a
review of life lived. This is the type of moment
spoken of on the single page inserted at the start
of Ecce Homo:
On this perfect day, when everything i s ripening
and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of

/ 53

the sun just fell u po n

my

life;

I l oo ked back, I

looked forward, and never saw so many and such

good things at once.

(. . . ) How could I fail to be

ratef
ul
to
my
whole
lifa?
8
g

If a life's elevated possibilities increase, self-praise

can unfold in analogue fashion: once again the
work praises the master, who is poised to disappear
into the work. And it is precisely this correspon
dence that creates the scandal-this limitless
talking up of manifest and squandered wealth, this
j ubilatory self-review after the deed done, this
complete dissolution of life in luminous positings,
which remain as works of language: they form the
counter-offence to the offence of the cross,
exclaimed by St Paul, with which the blockade
against the connection between self and praise
was solidified.
That Nietzsche fittingly assessed the implica
tions for the politics of language of his belated
embarrassment and interpreted them on a grand
historical scale can in fact be seen in the vocabulary
of his late texts, in which the expression "cynicism"
comes conspicuously to the surface. Nietzsche, the
philologist, was attentive to the fact that his philo
sophical battle-cry, the "re-evaluation of all values,"
harked back to a kynical fragment that describes
the protest strategy of Diogenes of Sinope: "recoin

54

the money''; he was cognizant of the fact that the

appearance he emitted in the texts of 1 888 could
necessarily seem to be a reemergence of "Socrates
gone mad." But this is exactly what mattered to
him: he pursued the reevaluation of all the source
value of embarrassment, the revision of misological
manners, the abolition of borders, which, for a
whole age, had been drawn between creative life
and its self-eulogizing force. So, on the 20th of
November, 1 888, Nietzsche felt able to write to
the Danish critic Brandes that:
I have talked about myself with a cynicism that
will become world historical. The book is called

Ecce Homo. . .
In the section of this book called Why I write

such good books

Nietzsche makes the following

remarks about his works:

they sometimes reach the highest elevation
you will find anywhere on earth, cynicism.9

The expression "cynicism" used in these passages

indicates two directions: the first is the elevation of
questions of diet and health to a level that is quasi
evangelical-a turn which sums up a good part of
the 1 9th and 20th centuries and already sketches
the direction of the 2 1 st in its generality; and
the second is the merging of the Good News

with self-eulo g izin g ener g ies. That's why the

meaning of the words "cynical" and "evangelical"
is henceforth in this specific case the same. At the
point where their meanings intersect they signify
exactly what it is that a modern author does :
exhibit oneself, transform oneself in writing, ren
der oneself "infeasible." Nietzsche: "I have never
taken a step in public that did not compromise
me: that is my criterion for acting right."1 0
Singing-one's-own praise of a life which affirms
and realizes itself as artistic composition is right
ly seen as the only authentic discursive form still
able to merit the qualification evangelical. As
message this form is simply good, when and if it
comprises the self-communication of the success
ful-and a sympathizing with it. It speaks the
language of a life that not only has the right to
make a promise but can also endorse it-and the
bigger the resistance provoked by the affirmation,
the more authentic its occurrence. One might call
the language-traces of such a life Spinozist since
they are "expressions" in the sense that they serve
to announce a force of being. They breach the
constraints of traditional bivalent logic, which
had required for the speaker always to choose
between one of two things-either vouch fo r
god, which was unavoidably connected with the
refusal of the hateful ego , or vouch fo r the Ego ,

56 /

which traditionally could be understood only as

the satanic renunciation of god.
In the new language position Nietzsche presents
himself not as a poetic redeemer, but instead as an
enricher of a new type. One could label Nietzsche
the first real sponsor, on the condition that we
devote some time to explaining his art of giving
gifts that exceed the common discourse of gifts and
poisons. Nietzsche's sponsorship of humanity
starts out with the assumption that, by giving indi
viduals ordinary gifts, one implicates them in a
base economy: in this economy, the enhancement
of the giver inevitably goes hand-in-hand with the
offence of the receiver. If anyone seeks to give a
more distinguished gift, it can only involve the
giving of an unreciprocable gift with no strings
attached. The only gift measuring up to this ambi
tion is the bestowal of a title of nobility, which
excuses the new bearer from the obligation to refer
to the bestower. With this in view, Nietzsche
invents some take-and-run gifts that take the form of
aphorisms, poems and arguments. After Nietzsche
it is possible for anyone to become noble if he rises
to the sponsor's challenge. But this discourse about
titles of nobility is itself provocative: what the
sponsor bestows is the opposite of a title that one
could "bear." The nobility in question here cannot

be gleaned from any of the historical forms of aris

tocracy. This is Nietzsche's decision thesis, namely
the idea that the history of humanity is yet to know
real nobility-except perhaps in the mild idiocy of
the figure of Jesus and the sovereign hygiene of
Buddha. However, in his view the latter incarnate
deficient fo rms of generosity, since both are
grounded in a retreat from the vita activa. They are
waiting to be outdone by world-affirming, creative
attitudes toward life-whence arises the ethical
mandate of art, for the entire dimension of future
history. From then on, historical nobleness pos
sessed as a good has no value, because what could
be designated as noble in feudal times was scarcely
anything other than power-protected meanness.
"The rabble above, the rabble below"-the words
by the voluntary beggars about the rich and power
ful of the present moment, to be found in the
fourth part of Zarathustra, apply retroactively to
historical evidence. The qualifier noble can no
longer be defended through convention, to the
extent noble should be the title for the birth of a
deed or a thought based on an unresentful, far
aiming force. Nobility is a position with respect to
the future. Nietzsche's innovative gift consists in
p rovoking one to engage in a way of bein g in
which the receiver would take up an active force as
sponsor, that is to say, in the ability to open up

richer futures. Nietzsche is a teacher of generosity

in the sense that he infects the recipients of his gifts
with the idea of wealth, which is necessarily not
worth acquiring unless with a view to being able to
squander it.
Whoever gives the provocation of gift-giving
has the right to consider himself as being at the
start of a new moral functional chain. Thereby is
time in its entirety newly interpreted: as a delay in
the future proliferation of generosity, "history"
acquires content in excess of the causality that had
reigned till then. The future of humanity is a test
of whether it is possible to supersede resentment as
the foremost historical force. In the ascending line
of gift-giving virtues, life praises itself as an
immeasurable proliferation of chances to be given.
It finds the reason for its thankful praise in its
participation in events of generosity. History splits
into the time of the economy of debt and the time
of generosity. Whereas the former thinks of repay
ment and retaliation, the latter is interested only in
forwards-donating. Wittingly or otherwise, every
life will in future be dated in accordance with
this criterion: " One lives before him, one lives
after him ..."
It pays to take a closer look at the original act of
the generosity-chain inaugurated by Nietzsche,
since conditions of bonding can be seen in it, from

Tota! Sponsor-!nq

I 59

which it is alone possible to draw the sole valid

criterion for enabling us to divide legitimate from
illegitimate references to Nietzsche. It is decisive
that the new "loose" chain begins with an uncon
ditional gesture of expenditure, since the giver can
only breach the circle of a savings-rationality
through pure self-expenditure. Only unbilled
expenditure has sufficient spontaneity and cen
trifugal force to escape the gravitational field of
avarice and its calculus. Savers and capitalists
always expect to get more back than they stake,
while the sponsor gets his satisfaction without any
regard for "revenue." This applies to sentences as
much as to donations. What Nietzsche calls the
innocence of becoming is essentially the innocence
of expenditure and eo ipso the innocence of enrich
ment, sought for the sake of the possibility to
expend. The leap into generosity transpires
through affirming the prosperity of oneself and
others, since this is the necessary p remise of
generosity. If there is a leap [ Ursprung] into
generosity, then it resides in the challenge that
open generosity makes to concealed generosity.
Part of Nietzsche's idea of the art of giving is that
the giver-if he cannot remain concealed, which is
a priori impossible for an author-cannot present
himself in a false perfection, since he would thereby
lie his way out of the world and continue simply

to fool the receiver, which is tantamount to a

humiliation. Rather, when encouraging the receiver
to accept the donation, he should also disclose his
infirmities and idiosyncrasies, however without
denying the level of the gift. Only this yields the
"master-art of kindness."11 A little vanity, a little
turning in the narcissistic circle must come into
play. Integral self-affirmation encompasses the
everyday things that the regime of metaphysical
misology had talked down, and stands in gratitude
to them for the gift of being able to give. In this
exercise, Nietzsche, the enlightener, can abide by
the 1 9th-century custom of explaining authors on
the basis of their milieus. If the author is immortal,
his tics will also be. If Zarathustra emerges with his
language of self- and world-affirmation, this lan
guage must convey the pressure of provocation
through its radically self-eulogistic and "wanton"
form. The impact of Nietzsche's sayings and
arrows, which take the form of pure dictates,
become for easily provoked readers a therapeutic
insult eliciting an immune reaction. This corre
sponds to a vaccination procedure at the moral
level. Anyone who has become a sponsor some
other way will perhaps know that it is possible to
become one without Nietzsche. Those who are not
yet sponsors, however, can experience how he
infects them with the memory of the possibility of

Total Sponsoring I 6 1

generosity-a memory that the receiver cannot let

sit, to the extent he is ready and able to enter into
the noble space of resonance. That the non
receivers pursue other dealings is, on another level,
certainly also perfectly fine.
Erupting from the motive of "virtuous giving"
is a spring of pluralism leading beyond all expecta
tions of unity. The nature of provocative generosity
is such that it is unable to be alone and wants even
less to be so. The sponsor's generosity as such aims
to generate dissensus, which is to say competition.
It would consider itself to have failed were it to be
said it had obtained a monopoly. To be as it would
like to be, it must posit competition. It would
prefer to lay itself open to rejection, than it would
to subordinate imitations. The generous, then,
stand in opposition to the good, who for Nietzsche
are rightly called decadents, since they-as we have
known since the Genealogy ofMoratS-pursue the
dream of monopolizing merely good sentiments.
For them, bad is anything that expects that they
prove their goodness; while anything which
belabors their consensus with questions and exits
their circle of blackmail strikes them as immediately
devilish. In Nietzsche, decadence represents the
epitome of conditions in which resentment is
guaranteed it will always hit upon its ideal lan
guage situation. The relations bearing witness to

62 I

Nietzsche Apcs1le

decadence are those in which "the yes-man

[Mucker] is in charge"-to put it in Nietzsche's
words. If the good are so good, it is only faute de
mieux. The decadence ideal holds power only so
long as, and because, "it has not had any competi-
tion."12 That is why if one wants to oppose the
better to the good in questions of gospel, one must
resolve to count to five.

O F SU NS A ND HU M A NS

If, today, one hundred years after Nietzsche's

death, we look back at this author for authors and
non-authors and grasp his place in his time, we
become aware that Nietzsche-for all his claims to
originality and despite his pride at being the first in
essential things-was in many respects actually
only a privileged medium for the execution of
tendencies that in one way or another would have
fo rged ahead without him. His achievement
consists in knowing how to transform an accident
of the name Friedrich Nietzsche into an event,
provided that we understand by event the poten
tiation of the accidental into the destinal. Destiny
might also be spoken of in the case where a designer
latches onto that something that is going to
h ap p e n in any event, impelling it further, and
stamping his name on it. In this sense Nietzsche is

65

a destiny-or, as one would say today, a trend

designer. The trend which he embodied and gave
form to was the individualist wave, which, since
the Industrial Revolution and its cultural projec
tions in romanticism, had proceeded inexorably
through modern civil society and has not ceased
doing so. Individualism, then, is to be understood
not as an accidental or avoidable current in the
history of mentalities, but rather as an anthropo
logical break which first made possible the emer
gence of a type of human being surrounded by
enough media and means of discharge to be able to
individualize counter to its "societal precondi
tions." In individualism is articulated the third
post-historical insulation of "human beings"
after the first, prehistorical in nature, led to its
emancipation from nature, and the second, his
torical one, led to the "reign of man over man." 1
I ndividualism constantly fo rges changing
alliances with all that has made up the modern
world: with progress and reaction, with left-wing
and right-wing political programs, with national
and transnational motives, with masculinist, femi
nist and infantilist projects, with technophile and
technophobe sentiments, with ascetic and hedo
nist moralities, with avant-gardist and conservative
conceptions of art, with analytical and cathartic
therapies, with sporty and non-sporty lifestyles,

with performance readiness and refusal of per

formance, with belief in success as well as unbelief
in it, with still Christian as well as no-longer
Christian forms of life, with ecumenical openings
and local closings, with humanist and p o s t
humanist ethics, with the ego necessarily able to
accompany all my representations, as well as with
the dissolved self, which exists only as the hall of
mirrors of its masks. Individualism is capable of
alliances with all sides, and Nietzsche is its designer,
its prophet.
Nietzsche's pretention to be an artist and much
more than an artist is grounded in his radical,
modern concept of success : for him, at stake is not
only to throw products on today's market, but
instead to create the market wave itself, by which
the work is belatedly carried to success. In this way
he anticipated the strategies of the avant-garde,
which Boris Groys has described in his already
classic work on The Total Art of Stalinism. If one
wants to be a market leader, one must first operate
as a market maker. And to be successful as a mar
ket maker, one must anticipate and endorse what
many will choose once they learn they are allowed to
want. Nietzsche had understood that the phenome
non that would emerge irresistibly in tomorrow's
culture was the need to distinguish oneself from
the mass. It was immediately present to him that

CJt Suns

the stuff out of which the future would be made,

could be found in individuals' demands to be better
and other than the rest, and thereby precisely better
than all others. The theme of the 20th century is
self-referentiality, in the systemic as well as the
psychological senses. Only: self-referential systems
are autological and self-eulogistic systems. The
author Nietzsche still has this knowledge in
advance over contemporary theory. On his under
standing, or rather intuition, he created, in his
lifetime, the conditions for his twofold posthu
mous success: he inscribed his name in the list of
classics, which throughout culture are handed
down as reference points of approval and critique.
This is what he described as his fulfilled need for
immortality; in addition, however, through the
detour of his first interpreters and intermediaries,
he above all imposed his name as a brand name for
a successful immaterial product, for a literary
lifestyle-drug or an elevated way-of-life. This is the
Nietzschean design of individualism: We free spirits!
We who live dangerously! When the author iden
tifies himself as author, the self-eulogistic melody
appears; when the market-maker launches the
brand, the advertisement appears. Nietzsche libe
rated modern language in associating eulogies
with publicity. Only a j ester, only a poet, only a
copywriter. This connection alone enables us to

understand how that most resolute proponent of

high culture could have yielded effects on mass
culture. It is undeniable that Nietzsche's second
success, his seduction as brand, or as ethos and
attitude, in the field of individualism, by far con
stitutes his greatest effect-and also contains his
more distant future possibilities. Indeed, it is pre
cisely because the Nietzsche life-style-brand, far
more than the name of the author, still radiates an
almost irresistible attraction, that, over the course
of the last third of the 20th century, with the onset
of the overtly individualist conjuncture of the
post-May ' 68 period, it could recover from the
incursions of fascist redactors and their copies.
Doubtless, the author Nietzsche, even given the
then dire state of editing, was unacceptable to
national-socialist collectivism and that the brand
Nietzsche alone-and indeed only in rare and par
ticular aspects-suggested itself for reproduction
in national pop culture. To understand this point,
we have to factor in the fact that, procedurally,
fascism is nothing other than the incursion of pop
and kitsch-procedures into politics. As Clement
Greenberg already showed in 1 939-confronting
the critical case-kitsch is the world language of
triumphant mass culture. It depends on the
mechanized forgery of success. Pop and kitsch are,
culturally as politically, short-cut procedures to get

Of Suns and Humans

I 69

to the apparent taste of the masses. With this they

content themselves with copying success and, with
copies of the successful in hand, with triumphing
once again. Hitler's success strategy as pop and
kitsch politician consisted in tying a pop-nationalism
with an event-militarism, as the simplest way to
have the narcissism of the masses effervesce. In
doing so, radiophone acquisition techniques and
open-air paramilitary liturgies played the key roles.
Through them, the population learned that it shall
be a people and that it had to listen to the rabble
rousing voices of its projected self. In this sense, all
fascism is an effect of redaction. It is deutero
fascistic from the start, since it has no original; if a
derivative can be insurrectionary, it is precisely by
way of an insurrection of scissors, which always
know what they must cut, how, and to what ends.
From the energetic aspect, fascism is the event
culture of resentment-a definition, incidentally,
which renders intelligible the shocking convertibility
of leftwing affects into rightwing ones, and vice
versa. So long as publicness functions as a director's
theater of resentment, the ability to rape texts and
to seduce the public as a "mass" is presupposed.
Brand Nietzsche could play a role in the semantic
advertising drives of the NS-Movement insofar as
their imitations omitted his basic assessments, as
implacably individualistic and avant-gardist as

they are, and retained only the "fast climber" atti

tudes, along with a martial decor of the dictum.
Hitler's clique edited Nietzsche with scissors and
pasted him into a collectivist gospel--shortly
before, moreover, Nietzsche's sister had employed
her scissors to prepare a ready-made of brand
Nietzsche. To the shame of German academic phi
losophy after 1 933, one is forced to remark that it
did exactly the same thing on its level, as did the
anti-Nietzscheans, who are still today unable to
do more than merely compile their self-pasted
incrimination files-but how far must one reach
back to find university philosophers who do not
philosophize with scissors? The National Socialists,
resolute editors of everything that guaranteed social
and national success, were able to retain far less of
Nietzsche than Jefferson could of Jesus-most of
his writings were too inappropriate for their kitsch
system, too anti-nationalist, too anti-German, too
anti-philistine, too anti-revanchist, too anti-collec
tivist, too anti-militarist, too anti-antirationalist, too
disdainful of every concept of "national self-interest"
[ Volker-Selbstsucht] , 2 and, finally, to mention the
decisive barrier, too incompatible with any politics
of resentment, regardless of whether this presents
itself as nationalist or socialist or as a multi-purpose
form of vengeance politics; national/socialist. That
there is no path leading from Nietzsche to the

German's posing as masters must be obvious to

anyone who's come into contact with his writings

too incisive was Nietzsche's insight that Germans,
whether they have graduated or not, have as their
temptation not to feel good if they cannot belittle
others-but what else is Nietzsche's moral philo
sophical oeuvre if not a single exercise in overcoming
the need to disparage others? That nationalist
politics rests on the pathetic propensity to humiliate
foreigners-who has brought this into sharper
focus than Nietzsche, and who was able to trace
hooliganism to Wilhelmina? Nietzsche, to be sure,
is anti-egalitarian, but this is not in order to make
common cause with revenge-hungry populists, as
German moral philosophers, whose differences
can no longer impress, avidly continue to assert in
the wisdom of their years. Instead, it is in order to
defend the freedom of self-enhancement against
the consumerdom of the last men. From one per
spective only is a concession to be made to those
who disparage Nietzsche and attempt to guard
against his influence. It is correct that Nietzsche, as
the designer of a brand of "destiny," was obliged to
ask himself whether his products should not have
been endowed with better copy protection and
whether the brand should even have been allowed
to appear next to the authorial name. Could he
not have known that from the riff-raff he repelled,

l2 I

his most tenacious clientele could emerge? Proof

that these questions did not escape Nietzsche's
consideration can be seen-that is, apart from
Zarathustra's prophetic sayings, more or less criti
cal of the Church, about the parasites of the noble
soul3-in certain letters and work notes in which
he pondered, in dread of the monstrousness of his
insights, whether to abdicate from his authorship.
However, even if he had done this, it would have
been imperative to disclose why he gave up being
an author-and the result would have been nearly
the same. Perhaps Nietzsche knew the answer to
such objections in advance, as he did for nearly
everything else: "I am not on my guard for
deceivers, I have to be without caution-my fate
wants it so."4
In order to gauge what was unique in
Nietzsche's great success as individualism's trend
designer, a comparison with alternative designs
suggests itself There are only a few strong versions
of his epoch-making expression "become what you
are" and the corresponding "do what you will."
Ultimately the work of one single author can serve
as a rival project and foil to Nietzsche's own, one
who the author of The Gay Science himself inci
dentally named "a glorious, great nature," not
without adding that to date the most ingenious
philosophical writer of the 1 9th century had been

/ 73

an American, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson. If

Nietzsche's design of life in self-creating individu
ality is presented under the title "Free spirits,"
Emerson brings his product on the market under
the brand name "non-conformism." It is to this
that the greatest of Emerson's early essays are
devoted; the beacon with whom American philoso
phy yielded to its first astonished witnesses the
proof of its existence. Not coincidentally, this was
under the heading Self-Reliance, a prose piece of
barely thirty pages, incomparable in its a-systemic
density, the declaration of independence of the
American essay and the revocation of American
servitude to the European canon, and to every
canon in general. What takes shape in him is an
anti-humility program which, over the course of
the next one hundred and fifty years, would reveal
itself as the specific timbre of American freedom
a color that dominated until the '70s of last century,
before US academia dedicated itself to the import
of European maso-theories. But in the year of
1 84 1 , the inundation of critical theo ry was still a
ways off:
To believe your own thought, to believe that
what is true for you in your private heart is true
for all men-that is genius. Speak your latent
conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for

the inmost in due time becomes the outmost

and our first thought is rendered b ack to us by
the trumpets of the Last Judgment. ( . . . ) Great
works of art have no more affecting lesson for
us than thi s . They teach us to abide by our
spontaneous impression with good-humored
inflexibility than most when the whole cry of
voices is o n the other side. Else, tomorrow a
s tranger will say ( . . . ) p recisely what we have
thought and felt all the time, and we shall b e
forced to take with shame our own opinion
from another.
( . . . ) but God will not have his work made
manifest by cowards. ( . . . ) Trust thyself: every
heart vibrates to that iron string.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against
the manhood of every one of its members.
Society is a j oint-stock company, in which
the members agree, for the better securing of
his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the
liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in
most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its
aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but
names and customs.
Whoso would be a man must be a noncon
formist. He who would gather immortal palms
must not be hindered by the name of goodness,
but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at

last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the
suffrage of the world
Your goodness must have some edge to it
else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be
preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of
love when that pules and whines. ( . . . ) I would
write on the lintels of the door-post,

Whim.

(. . .)

we cannot spend the day in explanation.

Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the
hand of the harlot, and flee.
To be great is to be misunderstood. ( . . . )
Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly,
and what you have already done singly will j ustify
you now.
The centuries are conspirators against the
sanity and authority of the soul . . . history is an
impertinence and an inj ury, if it be any thing
more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my
being and becoming .
"To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster,
"the blessed Immortals are swift."5

Emerson possesses a temporal advance over

Nietzsche, in addition to a psycho-political one.
Since while Emerson's non-conformism seems as if
it were made to unfold, against a certain resistance,
toward an ambivalent narcissism of the mass, one

still balanced by democracy at the end of the day,

Nietzsche's free spirit brand ran a greater risk of
being imitated by a success-hungry movement of
losers. Fascisms, past and future, are politically
nothing other than insurrections of energy-charged
losers, who, for a time of exception, change the
rules in order to appear as victors. The Nietzsche
brand was recuperated by losers and loser-redactors,
because it promised to be the brand of winners. As
this horrific episode did not and could not last,
Emerson's project won out over Nietzsche's on the
brand front. That's why most of us today are non
conformists, not free spirits. Our average thoughts
and feelings are all made in the USA, not made in
S ils-Ma ria.
The significance of this difference can be seen
by returning again to Nietzsche, the author.
When, in the euphoric productions of the first
parts of Zarathustra, he undertook the most radical
short circuit between self-praising discourse and
evangelical discourse, his concept of "Dionysian"
had necessarily; according to the author, become the
"highest fact." In these colorful episodes of writing,
Nietzsche, as never before or after, amended lan
guage use by producing a discourse that was a pure
self-advert of creative ecstasy. Even so, he was not
exactly correct in exclusively reserving the predi
cate "Dionysian" for his "highest deed." What

Of

Suns and Humans I 77

came to light in these expression-eruptions, rather

were more Apollonian irradiations, in which
Dionysian fragmentations appeared to have been
overcome. It is not by chance that, in the gospel
according to Zarathustra, the sun-the star of
Apollo-plays the role of the exemplary Being,
and it falls to the new prophet to perfect himself in
imitation of the sun. ''All that I touch becomes
light"-only suns can talk in this way about them
selves. This applies above all to their most important
gestures and talents-the readiness to over-expend
themselves unconditionally and the ability to set
without regret. In both respects the teachings of
the late Nietzsche point to an imitation solis. The
sun alone is heroic right to the moment of setting
and remains generous until it goes down.
"Heroism is the good will to absolute self-demise,"
the author had once written for his young Russian
girlfriend. Only suns can be so profligate that they
can be placed under the guardianship of rational
heirs, when the economic ideas of the latter manage
to prevail. Only the sun has a giving virtue as
first nature; only suns care nothing for the sym
metry between giving and taking; only suns shine
sovereignly over proponents and opponents; and
only suns read no critiques. On this last point the
author Nietzsche did not totally succeed in his
becoming-sun. Moreover, there are also some other

78

I Nietzsche Apostle

respects that give ground for suspIC10n that

Nietzsche's sun participates far more in humanity
than the metaphor betrays. This begins with
Zarathustra's first address to it: "You great star!
What would your happiness be if you had not
those for whom you shine? ( . . . ) we . . . took your
overflow from you and blessed you for it."6 And it
culminates in Zarathustra's prayer to his will:
That I may one day be ready and ripe in the
g reat noon;
-ready for myself and for my most hidden
will; a bow burnin g for its arrow, an arrow
burnin g for its star-a star ready and ripe in its noon, glowin g,
skewered, blissful with annihilating arrows
of the sun-a sun itself and an inexorable will of the
sun

. . .

One sees in these phrases that the author sympa

thizes neither with philosophical hallucinations,
which proclaim the flight into identity in the name
of the "subject," nor with the philosophy of dia
logue, in which subjects address each other face to
face or accuse each other of turning away from
dialogue. Nietzsche's interests are directed at a
theory of the penetrated penetration, an ethics of

overflowing into and entering into others, a l ogic of

absorption and of new-radiation. He does not

know of symmetrical discussions, negotiation, of
the middle-value between banalities, but instead of
inter-solar relations, the traffic of rays from start to
star, the penetration from viscera to viscera, being
pregnant and making-pregnant. "In the belly of the
whale I become the herald of life."8 His interest lies
not in opinions but in emanations. On an intellec
tual level he is a radical bisexual, a star which fevers
to be penetrated, and a sun which penetrates and
"prevails." I am penetrated, therefore I am; I radiate
in you, therefore you are. By sexualizing the sun, he
reverses the direction of imitation and compels the
sun to become the imitator of people, provided that
the individual is an author-that is, one who is
penetrated by language, by music, a voice, which
seeks ears and creates them.
From this point it is possible to give yet another
twist to the interpretation of Nietzsche's work
from within the critique oflanguage. If Nietzsche's
evangelical operation liberates self-praise, then a
transformed light falls on the self of this praise. In
noting that Nietzsche's poetics abolishes the rules
of indirect eulogy and substitutes praise of the
foreigner with self-praise, we see only the outer
layer of the turmoil created. On a deeper level,
Nietzsche's affirmative language remains obliged to

80 I

praise the foreigner-better, it praises the non-self

such as it has never been celebrated before.
However, it devotes itself to a foreignness that is
more than the otherness of another person. It
exposes itself to a foreignness that traverses the
speaker as it would a reverberant corridor, a foreign
ness that penetrates him and makes him possible
it is exposed to the foreigner's culture, language,
educators, illnesses, contaminations, temptations,
friends, indeed even the self which places paren
theses it ostensibly owns around phenomena. It
celebrates in itself a fullness of foreignness called
the world. Whatever Nietzsche alleges about
these magnitudes is transformed into praise of
the foreigner in itself: ''As my father I am already
dead and as my mother I am still alive ... "9 Thus
Nietzsche's selflessness must be sought beneath the
level of apparent self-praise-in his opening to the
inner foreignness, in his excessive mediality, in his
indulgent curiosity for everything, and in his never
totally compensated imbecility. This is why the
author is no simple sun, but a resonance-body. As
my mother I still speak, as my future friends I am
still to be heard. Nietzsche could be described as
the discoverer of hetero-narcissism: what he ulti
mately affirms in himself are the othernesses which
gather in him and make him up like a composi
tion, which penetrate him, delight him, torture

I 81

him and surprise him. Without surprise life would

be a fallacy. There must be something in the world

that is faster than causes. What comes to be dis
cussed under the title of "the will to power" is the
prelude to a composition qua theory of pure
positings. The theory of the will was a detour on
the way to the unwritten, complete teaching, to
that critique of eulogistic reason which describes
the world as an objection and its overcoming.
Perhaps we ought to permit ourselves to remark
that, as an author of German language and
European syntax:, Nietzsche reached the pinnacle.
In his culminations as thinker-singer, he could feel
himself to be an organon of the universe, creating
sites of self-affirmation in individuals. As a
philosopher, he would have rejoiced too early, had
he assembled the sketches of his theory of will into
a work and published it himself But we know that
the exploiters, recyclers, and accelerators did this
for him, using his authorial name as a brand. They
did this rather unbeknownst to the author, who
often came to the point in his research at which the
alleged system, the supposed fundamental theory,
cancelled itself out: there is no will, and therefore
no will to power. Will is only an idiom. There is
only a multiplicity of forces, speech, gestures, and
their being composed under the direction of an
ego, which gets affirmed, lost, and transformed.

On this precise point the author contradicts his

own brand, and his statements on this are explicit.
Perhaps we can do no better, then, on the hun
dredth anniversary of his death, than to repeat
these statements, in the hope that no future redac
tion can excise them:
The whole surface of consciousness-conscious
ness is a surface-has to be kept free from all of
the great imperatives. Be careful even of great
words, great attitudes . . . . I have no memory of
ever having made an effort-you will not detect
any trace of struggle in my life, I am the opposite
of a heroic nature. To "will" anythin g, to "strive"
after anything, to have a "goal," a "wish" in mind
I have never experienced this. Ri ght now I am
still lookin g out over my future-an immense
future!-as if it were a calm sea: there is not a
ripple of longin g . I do not have the sli ghtest wish
for anythin g to be different from how it is; I do
not want to become anything other than what I
am. But this is how my life has always been. 1 0

This idyll o f the author responds once again t o the

Zarathustra idyll of noon, the recumbent ovation
on the perfect earth. Here the earth seems to
answer in advance to the question of whom it takes
itself for.

Like such a weary ship in the stillest bay, thus I

too rest now close to the earth, faithfully, trusting,
waiting, bound to it with the lightest threads. Oh
happiness, oh happiness! Do you want to sin g, oh
my soul? You lie in the grass. But this is the secret
solemn hour when no shepherd plays his flute.
Stand back! Hot noon sleeps on the meadows.
Do not sin g! Still! The world is perfect. 1 1

Here the author himself is called upon to stop

being an author. Where the world has become
everything that may not be awakened, the writer is
no more. Let's leave him in his old noon. We must
picture the author who ceases a happy person.

N OT E S

Introduction

1 . Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight ofthe

Idols, and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith
Norman, translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, No.

2.

1 6, p. 1 3 .

Friedrich Nietzsche,

[translation modified]

Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

"The Conva

lescent," edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin,

translated by Adrian Del Caro , Cambridge:
University Press,

2006,

p.

Cambridge

1 73 .

1 . Gosp els-Redactions

1.

O tfried von Weissenburg,

Evangelienbuch

(extracts ) , ed. ,

translated into modern German and commented by Gisela

Vollmann-Profe, Stuttgart

2. Translator's note:

1 987,

p.

37.

in German "feiern," to celebrate, can also mean

"to take holidays." Cf. Wittgenstein's phrase

3.

"die Sprachefeiert."

Translator's note: oldest known form of the word

deutsch

(i.e.,

German) .

4.

Dedication to Luitbert, Archbishop of Mainz,

5 . The Jefferson Bible,

op. cit. , pp. 1 9-2 1 .

with a n introduction b y F. Forrester

Church and an afterword by Jaroslav Pelikan, Boston: Beacon

Press,

1 989,

p.

1 7.

85

6. Ibid.,
7. Cf.

28.

p.

The Gospel According to Tolstoy,

translated and edited by

David Patterson, London and Tuscaloosa,

8 . Ibid.,

1 992.

30.

p.

2. The Fifth

1.

Sdmtliche Briefe,
1 986, p. 327.

Friedrich Nietzsche,

Vol .

6,

Munich,

Kritischen Studienausgabe,

2. Ibid. , p. 363.

3. Ibid., p. 380.
4. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche,

edited and translated by

Christopher Middleton, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Indianapolis/Cambridge

1 996,

p.

223

(German original, p.

497) .

5 . The Anti-Christ and Other Writings, op. cit., "The Antichrist, " 45,
42.

p.

6. Selected Letters, op. cit., p . 223

(German edition, p.

497).

7. The Anti-Christ and Other Writings, op. cit. , p. 1 37.

3.

Total Sponsoring

1 . Ecce Homo,

Cambridge, p.

105.

2. Ibid, pp. 126-7.

3. Ibid,

p.

72.

4. Ibid,

pp.

1 29-30.

5 . Ibid, p. 1 43.
6. Ibid,

p.

98.

7. Ibid,

p.

1 44.

8.

"Ecce Homo" in

Basic Writings of Nietzsche,

translated and

edited, with Commentaries by Walter Kaufmann, New York: The

Modern Library,

86 !

1 968, p . 677.

A<Jcst!o

9. Ibid.,

p.

1 0 . Ibid.,

1 03.

p.

82.

1 1 . Thus Spoke Zarathustra, op. cit. , I V, p. 2 1 8 .

1 2 . Ecce Homo,

Cambridge, p .

1 36.

4. O f Suns and Humans

1.

On the concept of "insulation" as anthropological mecha

nism, see Dieter Classens,

Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte.

Soziologische Skizzen zur Anthropologie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1 980, pp. 60-92.

2 . The Antichrist, op. cit. ,

p.

3.

3 . Thus Spoke Zarathustra, op. cit. ,

1 9, p . 1 67ff.

I I I , O f O l d a n d New Tablets

4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, op. cit. ,

IV, The Magician,

5.

Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Essays, Vol. One,

2,

p.

207.

"Self-Reliance,"

accessed online at www. rwe . o rg/ complete/ complete-works/ii

essays-i/ii-self-reliance. html.

6. Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

7. Ibid,

p.

p.

3.

1 73 .

8. Nachgelassene Schriften, Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol., 1 0, p . 428.

9. Ecce Homo,
1 0 . Ibid,

p.

p.

74.

97.

1 1 . Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

p.

224.

! Bl