Nietzsche in Italy PDF
Nietzsche in Italy PDF
Nietzsche in Italy PDF
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IN ITALY
D OOUF.IHI ROBERT HARHISON l>A\'11> flARKt:u. KR•;u.jt:n1REV
EDITED BY
·IAS �ORRIS BF.\'F.Rl.V Al.1.1-:S LOUIS MARI!': A\'lTAI. RO.SELi. GIOR
THOMAS HARRISON
Edited by
THOMAS HARRISON
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1988
ANMA LIBRI
DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN, STANFORD UNIVERSITY
<!:> 1988 by ANMA Libri & Co.
P.O. Box 876, Saratoga, Calif. 95071 .
All rights reserved.
ISBN 0-915838-99-0
LC 87-7 1804
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction
'
PART I: T OPICS IN NIETZSCHE S LATER THOUGHT
THE HORSE
the Nietzschean formula die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen (the eternal
1
2 Nietzsche in Italy
body. DAVID MILLER tests the horse and other Zarathustrian animals
against Heidegger, the Stoics, and the Cartesian mach£nae an£matae
tradition.
Part III examines whether Nietzsche's final conceits and projects
from September 1888 to January 1889 bear any necessary and logical
relation to his work as a whole. GIO RGIO COLLI characterizes Nietzsche's
final tum to the body as the consequence of an exasperation with theory
and as a quest for new mystical wisdom. My own essay suggests that
Nietzsche's conflicting self-representations in these elated months
dramatize a fundamental ontology of existential transcendence which
has informed his philosophy all along.In what issues in a literal reading
of the statement "God is dead," JEAN-LUC NANCY links paralysis
progress£va- Nietzsche's diagnosed malady- to the philosopher's self
presentation as God. God has become paralyzed, and subjectivity
obliterated. Applying the same conceit of self-divinity to parables which
Nietzsche offers "theologically speaking," MILAD DOUEIHI proposes an
understanding of Nietzschean destiny as a hermeneutics of reading
and re-writing. ROBERT HARRISON uses the regenerative figures in Nietz
sche's final writings - -the phoenix, the Crucified, his delusions of at
tending his own funeral- to search out a topology of Nietzschean
philosophy beyond "the end," whether understood in the Heideggerian
sense of the end of metaphysics or in the sense of radical finitude.
In a variant standardized by the Colli-Montinari edition of Nietz
sche's works (the famous third section of the first chapter of Ecce Homo),
DAVID KRELL discerns an ambiguous filial agon which, when compared
9
10 Nietzsche in Italy
7 Umwertung 110.
8 Umwertung 88.
this way, gives itself to itself, suffers itself, undergoes passion , and thus,
and only thus, opens out to the world.
This paradox of potency - or, as we are now able to call it, of self
passion - is in truth even older than this and is inscribed at the very
origin of Western metaphysics. It is in precisely this way that Aristo
tle understands the dimension of pure subjectivity in his De Anima:
"The so-called nous of the soul," he writes,
does not identify in actuality with any of the entities before thinking
. . . and even when it has become in actuality each of the entities . . .
even then it remains to some extent in potentia . . . and can thus conceive
of itself, think itself. . . . But how can it think, if to think is to undergo
a certain passion? Since thought is potentially each one of the intellegibilia,
but in actuality is none of them before the act of thinking? It must
therefore be something like a writing tablet, on which nothing is ac
tually written . 1 2
This wax surface on which nothing is written, this inextinguishable
potency which unites in itself passivity and spontaneity, potentia and
act, dynamis and energeia, is by no means obvious. Some lines earlier,
Aristotle defines the crux of this self-passion in the following way:
Suffering is in no way simple; it is, on the one hand, a certain destruc
tion by its contrary and, on the other, a salvation (soteria) of what is
in potentia by that which is in act and which bears its resemblance, as
potency in relation to act. . . . And this is not a becoming other than itself,
but a giving to self and to act.13
A u fsiitze in 1954 (Pfullingen: Neske), Unterwegs zur Sprache in 1959 (Pfullingen: Neske) .
3 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2 vols. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961). The English edi
tion, translated by David Farell Krell and published by H arper & Row, New York ,
is organized as follows: Nietzsche 1: The Will to Power as Art ( 1979) , Nietzsche 4: Nihilism
( 1 982), Nietzsche 2: The Eternal Recu tTence ofthe Same ( 1 984), Nietzsche 3: Will to Power
as Knowledge and as Metaphysics ( 1987).
19
2 0 Nietzsche in Italy
terest in Nietzsche is not simply one aspect among others in his recollec
tion of the history of metaphysics. Nietzsche is for him a counter com
parable in importance only to the Presocratics or maybe Holderlin .
Although the Nietzsche renaissance is also related to philological studies
independent of the interpretive issues raised by Heidegger (the work
of Colli and Montinari in the critical edition remains extrinsic to
Heideggerian discussions, even where it confronts the task of a
philosophical "commentary" on Nietzsche's works), it is largely inter
woven with the fortune of the philosophy of the second Heidegger.
Whoever reads Nietzsche cannot help coming to terms with
Heidegger's interpretation and thus encounters (it happened even to
me, precisely at the beginning of the Sixties) the necessity of retrac
ing his entire philosophical itinerary; for Nietzsche is not, as it was
once thought, just a historiographical "theme" of marginal concern
to Heidegger.
At the same time Heidegger scholars find themselves going back
to Nietzsche's texts precisely on account of the decisive importance
that Heidegger assigns to them in the history of metaphysics . There
thus develops in much recent European philosophy a to and fro move
ment between Heidegger and Nietzsche which- and this will be my
,
thesis - is not limited, as one might expect, to understanding Nietz
sche by means of the interpretive work of Heidegger. There is also
an opposite movement: far beyond the explicit theses proposed by
Heidegger in his interpretation of Nietzsche, the significance of
Heidegger's philosophy itself tends to be approached through
Nietzsche . One may thus speak not only of Heidegger as an inter
preter of Nietzsche but also of Nietzsche as an interpreter of Heideg
ger. In the status of interpreter and not only of interpreted text, Nietz
sche does not at all coincide with the image of him proposed by Heideg
ger's work. Thus arises a paradoxical , though very diffused, situa
tion , especially in Italy and France. Many Heideggerians read Nietz
sche in a Heideggerian perspective, but in one which does not ac
cept, or only partially accepts, the explicit claims of Heidegger about
Nietzsche. I would like to show that this is not the consequence of
an incomplete or fragmented knowledge of Heidegger on the part of
his interpreters, but rather this: that, to be faithful to Heidegger's
most authentic intentions, one must to some extent "betray" his reading
of Nietzsche.
Testimony to this thesis is the fact-which I do not intend to docu
ment here analytically - that in much contemporary Heideggerianism
Vattimo: Nietzsche and Heidegger 21
the name of Nietzsche does not stand as one o f the authors o f the
metaphysical tradition which we must try to overcome (as would be
the case with Descartes and Hegel). The name rather indicates a
thinker who , like Heidegger, i� already on a philosophical path that
has left metaphysics behind it. It is obvious that this "privileged" posi
tion of Nietzsche is partially predicted by Heidegger himself, who ,
seeing his predecessor as the last metaphysical thinker, the one in
whom the oblivion of being reaches its culmination , locates him also
at a turning point: "Where danger·grows,".in Holderlin's verse so often
cited by Heidegger, "there also grows the saving power." Yet without
doubt Heidegger considers Nietzsche to be very distant from himself
in the degree to which Nietzsche still belongs to the history of
metaphysics and theorizes being as will to power. Now, it is precise
ly this distance between Heidegger and Nietzsche which tends to disap
pear in much contemporary Heideggerian thinking.
This is the case even with an author like Hans-Georg Gadamer ,
in whose work the Heideggerian thematic of overcoming metaphysics
nevertheless has a very limited development. In a subtle and central
p�ssage of Truth and Method4 dealing with the significance of the
Heideggerian renovation of the question of being, Gadamer speaks
of Nietzsche as a precursor of Heidegger, in preference to Dilthey
and Husserl. Remaining within the context of"classical" interpreters
of Heidegger - those of the first Heideggerian generation - one may
reasonably hypothesize that even Karl Lowith thinks of Heidegger
and Nietzsche as substantially parallel , or as moved by the same in
tentions. It is notable that Li:iwith interprets the Heideggerian Kehre,
or turn, of the Thirties as an essentially political concession without
real theoretical reasons . But when he describes Nietzsche as one who
tries to recuperate a Greek vision of being at the apex of modernity,
and who fails in the attempt, is he not also describing , in theoretical
and not merely political terms, Heidegger's effort to overcome
metaphysics, an effort which strikes Li:iwith as unsuccessful? Li:iwith's
position is quite particular and does not completely enter the frame
of our discourse, for one cannot really describe him as a
Heideggerian - even if, in light of the hypothesis I have proposed ,
one might rethink this issue too. It is nevertheless true that the closeness
of Heidegger and Nietzsche is more or less presupposed by all con
temporary hermeneutics, that is, by that philosophy which presents
4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. Garrett Barden and John Cumming
(New York: Continuum, 1975) 228.
22 Nietzsche in Italy
describing his relation with Nietzsche in terms that are different from
the ones in which he himself described it .
The shift that Heidegger effected on interpretations of Nietzsche ,
especially with his ample stud,es published in 1 96 1 , consisted in the
proposal to read Nietzsche in relation to Aristotle- that is, as a thinker
whose central theme was being, a metaphysical thinker and not simply
a moralist, "psychologist,'' or "critic of culture."5 On the basis of this
interpretive decision Heidegger gave preferential treatment to Nietz
sche's later writings, especially to the notes which were initially to serve
for the Will to Power, and tended to leave aside much of Nietzsche's
more "essayistic" production: works like Human, A l l Too Human,
Daybreak, and The Gay Science. These, together with aphoristic works
of the late period such as Beyond Good and Evil and Zarathustra's "poem,"
were the ones which had determined the prevailing conception of
Nietzsche during the first decades of the century, that conception which
Dilthey in his brief Essence of Philosophy ( 1 907) summarized by plac
ing Nietzsche next to "philosophical writers" like Carlyle, Emerson ,
Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Maeterlinck. Dilthey saw these figures as
emblematic of a situation in which philosophy, once the great epoch
of metaphysics was over, tended to become Lebensphilosophie- not in
that sense of "vitalistic metaphysics" which the word now has for us ,
but in the sense of a reflection on existence which no longer aims at
demonstrative cogency but rather assumes the characteristics _of sub
j ective expression , of poetry and literature . 6
Dilthey's description of Nietzsche is on many counts radically op
posed to Heidegger's . But on one fundamental point the two readers
agree. Both Dilthey and Heidegger consider the character of
N ietzsche's philosophy to be determined by its place at the end of
metaphysics . For Dilthey, then, this "final" or epigonic position
translates into the fact that what becomes dominant in Nietzsche is
a literary - though more amply we might say "essayistic" or "cultural
critical" - approach to philosophical problems. For Heidegger, on the
other hand, to see Nietzsche in relation to the history of metaphysics
means to seek his work above all for theses and statements on the
great themes of traditional metaphysics - being, God, freedom, the
5 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche 1 : The Will to Power as Art 65ff.
6 See for instance, the chapter entitled "The Connecting Links Between Philosophy
and Religion, Prose and Poetry," in Wilhelm Dilthey, The Essence of Philosophy, tr.
Stephen A. Emery and William T. Emery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1954) 27-33 .
24 Nietzsche in Italy
which they come to light, are not eternal . To it belongs also the pro
cess of dissolution which Nietzsche describes in Twilight ef the Idols
in the chapter entitled "How the Real World at Last Became a
Fable" - the dissolution, that is, 'of the archai and the presumed ob
jectivities characteristic of the development of Western philosophy.
This being which "evaporates," as Nietzsche writes in a passage often
quoted by Heidegger, is not only a false image of being which should
be substituted by a more solid and truer one . It is precisely that being
which, after Nietzsche, in post-metaphysical thinking, can "unveil
itself' as not identifiable with the object , the arche, or foundation
but with the "mittance" to which thought corresponds through An
denken and "festivals of memory."
31
32 Nietzsche in Italy
open, soon to be infected, wound with oil and wine . The days of the
Good Samaritan in the parable are over. Nietzsche, as one would
expect, is opposed to unctuous pre-scriptions: he first lances the pus
and pierces the abscess, before administering the unguent. As it turns
out, the anointed one is Christ himself.
Abruptly, bacteriology turns into religion. As always, the combat
t ant is taken with his own weapons, which turn against him. What
is the meaning of this asepsis or antisepsis? What are cleanliness ,
hygiene, health . . if not an expulsion, a purification, the practice
.
From its opening pages Human, All Too Human promises a Chemistry
of sensations and ideas. The form of the philosophical question has been
more or less constant for two thousand years: how can something arise
from its opposite? Reason from unreason , generosity from egoism,
sensation from death itself, truth from error, etc. I assume that the
question was first formulated by physicists, those presocratic physicists
of the Ionian coast. Metaphysics, in opposition to this physics, gets
rid of the opposition of things by positing the miracle of origin from
a nucleus, an essence, the thing-in-itself. Nietzsche puts forward an
historically based philosophy that borders closely on physical science,
the latest of all philosophical methods- the latest and thus, at the same
3 4 Nietzsche in Italy
time, the most ancient. This rapprochement, which is not a new one
and not unique to Nietzsche, must be taken seriously. The discourse
of the new philosophy proceeds as follows: such oppositions are no
more than customary exaggerations due to popular or metaphysical
points of view; an error of reason is at the bottom of every opposi
tion . There are neither generous actions nor entirely disinterested
points of view: both are no more than sublimations in which the fun
damental element has almost evaporated and can be discovered only
through the closest observation.
Baldly put, Nietzsche wants us to pass from an old alchemy or an
outdated chemistry to the most recent method. The moist and the
dry are opposites: how can the one arise from the other, as is so often
observed? The effect of fire on air and earth is to dry them in turn ;
water acting on earth and air makes them moist . . . and once again
these actions are opposed . One can, of course , escape the cycle of
what is physically observable - pass from the things themselves to the
thing-in-itself, evoke phlogiston and the like as the essence of fire or
of other elements. There is in all that a kind of history: the passage
from an elemental physics, from a chemistry of opposites , to a meta
physics , stricto sensu . The abstract idea of nature as the essence of
worldly things offered a one-word summary of this metaphysics -
the thinghood of things, the class of things-in-themselves. Then along
came a new physics, the new philosophical method: it demonstrated ,
with Black, for example, that solids and liquids, liquids and gases ,
are opposites only from a popular point of view or by metaphysical
reasoning. An error of reason is at the bottom of every opposition.
The law of fire, on the contrary, reads: there is no "naturally" vaporous
gas, nor is there an essentially gaseous water vapor. They are both
volatilizations in which the fundamental element can be discovered by
careful observation - whence the law of sublimation, namely, direct
passage from one limit state to the limit at its farthest remove, from
solid to gas without passage through a liquid intermediary. This leap
from the material (and perhaps abject) base to an exquisite perfume
would seem to be the acme of opposition: a transmutation of form,
fragrance, color. Where once there were three states and two phases,
there are now only two states and one phase - and you see nothing
more , deceived as if by an illusion. But if you are attentive to the
phase, you immediately pick out the fact that, under another ap
pearance, the fundamental element remains the same . The law of
transmutation is a law of heat, of fire, of energy, of power. Sublimation
Serres: The Antichrist 35
N ana the whore dies, decomposed . The Golden Fly and the
dungheap: infected by a like virus, her durable body disaggregates ,
rots and corrupts. The implacable worm has dissolved the marble .
A shadowy, invisible, innumerable population: atoms that make up
the marble, and others that unmake it. A corpse alive with millions
of helminths . You will return to dust, you are dust, born of dust .
The old terror returned- the plague of Athens, partition and putrefac
tion in the sun. Epicurus, Lucretius, Diderot: lions pitted against swell
ing clouds of the infinitesimal, pullulating, polluting. Insane anguish
at this multiplication in the proximity of the void. NO.vvo<;,
microscopically small: Nana dies of the virus, but she is the virus ,
whose unpredictable and ubiquitous circulation decomposes the body
politic. Cumbrous beast turned carcass by the whore virus; comely
beast turned carcass by the virus of this virus. The evil spreads , dirty
and small-invisible - everywhere.
that it is drowned in its own rubbish, forgets more and more - is the
acclimatization of decay. Milk delivered over to the hispid and hir
sute, to mire and filth, and thereby transmuted, transvalued into a
superior state . A lowly little fungus irrupts upon and maculates the
milk's whiteness. A culture - a culture broth - and from it the birth
of a culture . Segregating, driving out, and eliminating dirt leads to
the aseptic life, cordoned off from the circumambient filth . This filth
is the result of dichotomization- translucent bathrooms, dank streets
strewn with excrement. And the same holds true for the body: an
organism sheltered from miasmas is fragile and already diseased .
Nietzschean spaces, cities, bodies. We have completely misunderstood
the lesson of Pasteur and vaccination; hygiene is dangerous. With
p asteur Mithradates and his acclimatization to poison, cheese and
its noble corruption, become scientific. The dichotomy of filth and
spotlessness, taken up in the horror of pestilence and the high altitude
cure; the dichotomy of high and low: in short, partition itself is the
sickness. Hell is the separation of paradise and hell. Wisdom and scien
tific truth acclimatize the poisonous, the flaccid, the rotten, the cor
rupted, the malefic and the m alady itself, allowing these to work
themselves out in the underground of the invisible, in darkness, slime
and stench. Trusting in life, they draw from it this festive meal
health beyond asepsis, strength beyond coddling, cheese beyopd good
and evil. The abhorrence of cheese, of leavened bread, of fermented
wine: there you have decadence and disease , the dichotomous, ab
surd and archaic heritage of a badly understood science or a badly
read, or lost, religion . The horror- puritan, Victorian, ascetic ,
phantasmatic - of dirtying one's hands. Vomiting on the roots of the
tree . The breakdown of culture in all senses of the word (trenching,
gutting, cheesemaking, the sense of chemistry, and the global sense
of civilization) ; that is to say, pure abstraction, aseptic, intolerable ,
unhealthy. Only words are clean, only discourse i s not impure . At
this point, cheese takes its revenge, its services are needed: thyreo
thecium, the hairy shield of cheese; penicillin, scrapings from the sink.
Paradoxically, they kill microbes. The aseptic is not antiseptic and
the partitioning puritan is bested by these polluting agents. He must
have recourse to the old wisdom in which the dichotomy is crossed
out, reduced, denied almost, made circular. and in this way dominated.
If necrosis was truly caseous, it would have healed a long time ago ;
health, and life, are in the mould of cheese. New chemistry, old
agriculture. Primitive religions understood this feedback . . . . Cheese ,
Serres: The Antichrist 39
for what is the limit, if not death? The two will be said in one breath,
Serres: The Antichrist 4 1
philologists, etc. Indirect, marginal power: less visible than other types
but more efficacious and more real than many. He fattens on our ter
rors and creates the new gods. Evil is the virus, the microbe, bacteria,
pollen, all these invisibles of the air- and there are Zeuses command
ing new thunderbolts. The crusade against pollution disarms every
political gathering- a promising sign. The first evidence we have o f
this new state o f things are the writings o f Freud and Nietzsche .
Avoiding the swamp and its miasmas, he spoke from the moun
tain, he who overturned the old sermon on the mount wherein life's
values were themselves overturned. Our reading is frustrated -by the
passion for dichotomies, the atavistic Iranian passion for good and
evil, for health and sickness , for high and low, for hard solids and
loose dust, for anything in general and its contrary, the upside down
and the rightside up . The battle of the two mountains is too engag
ing from this side; it takes hold of the spectator, flatters him, keeping
him in suspense, like a contest of gladiators . The sword and the ham
mer. Witness the ending of the evangelical litany: Ye are the salt of
the earth . . . . Do not lose the savor of salt . . . . If the savor is lost, it
is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden
under foot . . . . Have salt in yourselves and live in peace one with
another. Salt is the operator of the transformation, of the transmuta
'
tion of rags to riches, calamity to consolation, hunger to satiety. Why?
Because it opposes fermentations, deteriorations , corruptions . It
preserves, it checks the plague of war. One must have salt to live in
peace. Nietzsche attacks Christianity on its own ground and the arena
of combat is not the space of reversals but that of disintegration, not
the dichotomy that eternally returns but the transvaluation of base
matter: how can the decomposition of a body give off a sweet smell?
Stercus suum bene olet- his are precisely the tidings of the New Testa
ment. The New Testament is the metamorphosis of organic elements .
The entire debate will turn upon a judgement of fermentation and
decomposition ; as it happens, the debate is closed - it was closed on
ly in the decade in which Nietzsche wrote his Antichrist. And that is
what is new.
This is my body, this is my blood. Bread and wine . Transubstan
tiated by the miracle of the Eucharist into the essentials of the living
body. Listen to the Antichrist : the foul blood of the theologians, the
body corrupted by the Pauline disease. Dionysian wine, dietetic bread.
Bread and wine are substances, matter- living or inert? No one is
entirely certain before the end of the nineteenth century, before the
44 Nietzsche in Italy
to the end of time . It follows, then, that there exists a ferment from
which inert water takes on a new life, then a proper name, and final
ly promises eternity; when it is taken away, corruption sets in - vinegar
and dregs to the dying.
And if your brother asked you for bread and you gave him a stone
instead? From inert stone to fermented bread; if the corn of wheat
should die; ye are the leaven of the dough; facing Cana, the miracle
of the loaves, abounding like life itself. This bread becomes the glorious
body of eternity, dead now, missing from the sepulchre whose stone
has been rolled away. The messenger within, seated upon a rock. Thou
art Peter and on this rock, I shall build a Church whereat the bread,
the old stone of the wicked brother, will be the living body, baptized
with a proper name . Peter, the rock, and the Stone Banquet, John,
wine and blood. Don Juan or love. From stone to stone, the cycle
is closed and begins again in the Church . In the presence of Christ,
it rose into life . The stone seals the sepulchre .
The cup circulates around the table . I drink, thou drinkest , he
drinks, we each drink in turn. Wine to the point of drunkenness, to
the point of rupturing the principium individuationis. From that mo
ment, upon the explosion of the subject, I am you, you are me, we
are unanimous . I am not the one who asserts this, it is Plautus, who ,
as far as I know, was not a Christian. The cup circulates still and
the subjects have disappeared. I am you , but you, you are who? The
one beside me, the other, the one opposite, or yet another? We, but
who is "we"? Who is the subject? None other than the circulation.
None other than the object of this circulation. None other than the
cup that circulates and the very object that is drunk. The wine, ob
ject, is the subject. The blood of the body's circulation has become ,
for one moment, unanimous, the blood o f a new subject - eternal ,
doubtless, like the bonds uniting the group. Through circulation and
the rupture of the principium individuationis the object becomes sub
ject, the wine becomes blood, personality becomes unanimity, and
death immortality. Constitution of a unanimous body. The facts are
plain: John saw them, Nietzsche very nearly saw them, but he turn
ed back to Peter, and to the rock, the solid hard ligature of the Roman
empire. Peter contra John, one is obliged to choose, always.
Once the body has become unanimous and solid, Judas leaves the
feast and dies. He casts down the pieces of silver, the price of the
blood, the blood, the price of the body, the body- all scattered, in
46 Nietzsche in Italy
bits and pieces, literally corrupted in petty cash. He is the old trickster
in disguise, gaining entrance by a ruse to the table of the Indo
European gods; the one to be driven away, the virus that converts wine
into vinegar, blood into gall, life into death, generation into corruption,
unanimity of the new subject into atomization of the malevolent suc
cessors, and, by his expulsion, atomization of the successors into social
consensus . Nietzsche did not fail to register the process: wine,
Dionysianism, the rupturing of the principium individuationis, hatred
for the one who atomizes into personal subjects. And hence the necessi
ty of driving out the corrupting virus, the virus of decadence, the virus
of decomposition. It changes its name as circumstances dictate :
Socrates, for whom the wine of Bacchus is transformed into hemlock;
and Christ, or rather Paul. Paul drools it, not spirits, but gall. Drool ,
gall, blood rotten with poison. The action is repetitive, repeating itself
in his work and repeating what the work treats. To preserve something
from infection and decay, from decadence and corruption, one must
drive out the virus- whence a Christianity cunningly propagating con
tamination, potently fractionating, a vector of infection. But as soon
as Nietzsche presents it in these terms he is defeated in his program :
he writes a holy book, a sacred text like any other. The antechrist: ante
has never, to my knowledge , meant "contrary to ," but, rather, "in
front of," "in face of " - repeating, as in a mirror, the action seen in
front, antisymmetrically. And there one finds again the usual
dichotomies and reversals of reversals - from one sacred to another,
and nothing more. The text begins: let us look one another in the
face. Question: who do I see facing me , in the mirror, when I look
at the Antichrist? An enantiomorphic crystal, as Pasteur would say?
We must, then, speak of chemistry and, more particularly, of
biochemistry, of biochemical therapeutics, to be precise. The operator
of corruption is the fundamental operator of The Antichrist. The issue
here is medical: there is a sickness, an incurable sickness, epidemic ,
spreading, assailing the vast majority, then society as a whole - the
plague at the heart of the imperium romanum, destroying it, pierre apres
pierre, until not a stone is left standing, mere dust. It works by cor
ruption, decay, dilapidation, contamination, degeneration, pollution ,
decomposition - by a luxuriant profusion of gangrene. Amid the night
and fog of ambiguities even granite wears away once the vermin has
penetrated . . . because there is a parasite , a pain infinitesimally small,
a mould, a worm in the venom, the poison, the mire , the drool, the
uncleanliness, the waste, the filth, the fetid odors and bad breath,
Serres: The Antichrist 47
mobilizes energies. The sirocco , the south wind, will unmake the
crystallized, frozen stone; it remobilizes power; the elements dance
haphazardly, go no matter where, without a yes , without a no, to the
labyrinth of perilous admixture- towards reaction, equalized energies,
decay.
The superman's goal: stone hard as ice . Christianity's goal: the reac
tion of corruption. Two chemical states in opposition : either the ad
mixture, or the deviation. Two thermodynamic states : either the abase
ment of power or its elevation, devaluation or transvaluation,
decadence or transmutation. Two initial results : either a prolifera
tion of vermin or the eternal return . The goal, in any case : to pro
duce, be it the sick or the healthy, but deliberately, free of the chance
factors involved in heat reactions. One then moves on to the applica
tion, that is, to preparations. In order to mount the reaction, Chris
tianity must first distill its poison, must distill whatever maliciousness
or evil it extracts from among the instincts of a superior type. Extrac
tion and distillation of elements in contradiction with a life of strength :
culpability, deception, seduction. The distillation, as is often the case,
is effected by sublimation . The element retained is exceptionally small,
almost nothing: nihilism . The microbe.
This element ferments as energy drops , swells up , _swelling as in
a fall . It is straightforward science: multiplication understood as a
rise in entropy - the decadent flux of pity. Through pity the loss of
force increases and multiplies. The very form of the phrase is reveal
ing: the increase of a negative quantum. By way of confirmation, the
amount thus lost is incommensurable - irrational ratios are, after all,
(ab)surd - with the quantum of the cause. Hence its power of
multiplication. At one go, all of the new sciences: thermodynamics
and the increase in entropy, the biochemistry of contagions, the biology
of selections. The second law of thermodynamiq versus Darwin, the stum
bling block of evolutionism. The chemistry of corrupting reactions
is ascribed, with all due exactitude, to conditioning physics on the
one hand and to conditioned biochemistry on the other. Through it,
and through the swelling multiplication of misery, the decisive op
position of the turn of the century takes shape: how to comprehend
that life differentiates when the second law dedijferentiates? That life increases
and power decreases . Etan and retombee, to use Bergson's terminology
in which there are, precisely, two sources. People began to dream that
the secret of the contradiction could well lie in biochemistry. To dream,
Serres: The Antichrist 5 1
and to repeat the old language: might there not be a ferment o f fermen
tation, and a virus of corruption? Thus , the return of the old
medicaments, the search for a purgative to eliminate microbes, the
principles of sickness . Thu�, the return of the old phantasms: Aristo
tle's catharsis superimposed on the· knife of the surgeon lancinating
pus. Physics, chemistry, Darwinism, framed by Greek tragedy and
medical practice . The aphorism, at one blow, recovers the field of
discourse .
Evil is henceforth in the blood, multiplying itself and infecting the
organism . Christianity has distilled and then extracted the malefic
quasi nihil. The theologian has it in the blood; he is the vector of the
infection's infection, he poisons the world. Nana the Golden Fly has
the virus in her and she 'is the virus. First transmission : via heredity.
German philosophy has a Protestant pastor for grandfather. Not the
father, absent in passage, but the grandfather, as with Sartre . The
infection is transmitted genealogically, and from theologian to
philosopher, in whom it becomes universalized as a concept - gaunt,
pallid, pale . In universalizing itself it becomes cosmopolitan: from
the holy family to the universe as a whole, in the hollow of every private
virtue. The majority, half the earth. How it spreads and where it
spreads. Here is the parasite, and the parasitology. On this point,
reread La conquete de Plassans.
The microbe is anaerobic: in the nooks and crannies, amid the debris,
among the spiders, hidden in the dark places. Compare Buddhism ,
the positivist religion: it is aerobic, and thrives in the open air. Without
hypocrisy it has discovered the medical, therapeutic reality of things .
Dietetic even . Listen to Ecce Homo: the sin against the holy spirit is
ass-iduity. The impossibility of expunging uncleanliness, denominated
in its religious context; as sin, within its medical context of dietetic
hygiene. Conversely, Christianity prohibits the expulsion of filth - it
closes the public baths.
This evil must be designated and the transformations noted. The
rock becomes dust; and blood, likened to alcohol, becomes sludge ,
slobber, poison, venom . What makes these liquids dangerous are the
parasites , worms, germs, pains infinitesimally small. This is said at
once as metaphor and as positive discourse . Next, name the carrier,
the vector: the Jew, Paul, the priest, the Christian. To be expelled ,
to be banished, driven from the table, cast into the desert to starve .
52 Nietzsche in Italy
"The site of execration upon which Christianity has brooded its basilisk
eggs will be completely razed, as being the place of sacrilege on this
earth . It will be the terror of posterity, a place for raising venomous
serpents."
We can turn to Mircea Eliade for the reversal of space; to Rene
Girard for the functioning of expulsion. For the serpent's resounding
echo we must turn to chemistry- to the Pasteur Institute.
From this, the rest can be deduced.
Translated by Chris Bongie
Rene Girard
53
54 Nietzsche in Italy
who suffer from the oveifullness of life and want a Dionysian art as well
as a tragic insight and outlook on life - and then those who suffer from
the impoverishment of life and demand of art and philosophy, calm,
stillness, smooth seas, or, on the other hand , frenzy, convulsion and
anesthesia. Revenge against life itself- the most voluptuous kind of fren
zy for those so impoverished!
Wagner responds to this dual need of the latter no less than
Schopenhauer: they negate life, they slander it , hence they are my an
tipodes. He that is richest in the fullness of life, the Dionysian god and
man, can afford not only the sight of the terrible and the questionable,
but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposi
tion, and negation: in his case, what is evil, senseless and ugly seems ,
as it were, permissible, as it seems permissible in nature , because o f
an excess of procreating, restoring powers which can yet turn every
desert into luxurious farm land. Conversely, those who suffer most and
are poorest in life would need mildness, peacefulness, and goodness
most- what is today called humaneness - in thought as well as in deed,
and, if possible, a god that would be truly a god for the sick, a healer
and "savior" . . . 1
.
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, In The Portable Nietzsche, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Viking Press, 1967) 669-70.
Girard: Nietzsche and Contradiction 55
power of Wotan because she destroys the unanimity of the lethal cir
cle and she herself must become a victim. This is as quintessentially
Christian as the intervention of Elizabeth to save Tannhauser when
the knights form a violent circle around him .
But there are also many Christian elements in the early Wagner
that are quite explicit. You do not need very good eyes to see them
in Tannhauser, or in Lohengrin. Christian elements are everywhere in
Wagner, even from the beginning. Nietzsche is well aware of this fact
but he does not want to acknowledge it; to do so would be to em
phasize the significance of his past entanglement with a Wagner
already fascinated by Christian themes. Nietzsche is not quite truthful
in this version of his relationship with Wagner; yet there is another
version that is even more. deceptive.
In this second version, he goes even further in distorting Wagner's
e arly work. It is not enough for him to pretend that all Christian
elements in Wagner were only implicit before Parsifal; he does not
acknowledge their presence at all , and places the early Wagner squarely
on the side of Pagan tragedy in the Nietzschean sense, on his side ,
the so-called Dionysian side.
Why would Nietzsche do that sort of thing? He is not happy with
the interpretation of the Wagnerism that he gave in The Gay Science.
The idea that he might have mistaken Christian suffering in any form
for the tragic suffering that he espouses makes him look a little stupid,
or it undermines the sharpness of the difference between the two .
Perhaps he perceives the ambiguousness of the argument and thus
invents the myth of an early Wagner who is one hundred percent
D ionysian .
In order to lend some credibility to that thesis, Nietzsche must ex
aggerate the contrast between Parsifal and the early works; he must
persuade us and himself the Parsifal is not merely more Christian than
the previous works but that it is the only work of Wagner with Chris
t ian elements in it, the Christian work par excellence. Nietzsche wants
to exonerate himself from all blame in his relationship with Wagner.
He never made a mistake. He wants to justify, from his so-called
Dionysian standpoint, both his earlier admiration for and his later
hostility to Wagner.
-
Parsifal is made to play a crucial role in this demonstration . It is
the only work of Wagner that came after Nietzsche broke with his
former idol . Nietzsche exaggerates the discrepancy between this last
work and the earlier works. Nietzsche was appalled, he says, by the
56 Nietzsche in Italy
Prelude to Parsifal, the greatest gift I have received in a long time. The
power and rigor of the feeling. Indescribable ; I do not know anything
that apprehends Christianity at such a depth, and that generates com
passion so powerfully. I am completely transported and moved - no
painter ever managed to render as Wagner does a vision so indescribably
melancholy and tender.
His greatness in apprehending a dreadful certainty, from which
something like compassion emanates:
the greatest masterpiece of the sublime that I know, power and rigor
in apprehending a dreadful certainty, an indescribable expression of
greatness in the compassion towards it, whatever that means. No artist
has ever been able to express as magnificently as Wagner does such
a somber and melancholy vision. Not even Dante, not even Leonardo.
As if, after many years, someone finally addressed the problems that
truly concern me, not to echo once again the answers that I always
have ready at hand, but to provide the Christian answers, which have
been the answers of souls stronger than those produced by the last two
centuries. Yes, when this music is heard, we brush aside Protestant
ism as if it were a misunderstanding-
TRANSFIGURATION IN RAPHAEL ,
STENDHAL, AND NIETZSCHE
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche , tr. and ed. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1 968) 700.
67
68 Nietzsche in Italy
as Stendhal, because of what Italy was for both and perhaps because
of its name - it appears to me that Raphael's painting marked, cum
grano salis, the text of the origin and the origin of the text, in an
originary text that is at once an image and its end, a name: the
Trans.figuration .
A paradigm of the naive work of art, an appearance of appearance,
Raphael's painting, in its representation and composition, returns in
Nietzsche's text precisely forty years after having already appeared
as absent, as the irresistible and fortuitous association of its name to
the number 50, on the sixteenth of October, 183 2 , at San Pietro in
Montorio on Mount Janicolo in Rome. In Stendhal's dream or reverie,
in this appearance of appearance, this apparition or illumination
through which, in the count or dfcompte of a life, by writing its birth
as its death, its origin as its end, the initial and final question of self
identification is introduced: "Who was I? Who am I?" The represen
tation of appearance in the reappearance of the painting of Raphael,
the immortal naif, comes back at Riva sul Garcia in the winter of the
year 1880. It comes back in Daybreak, but to let break out through
itself a new transfiguration, which Raphael could have envisioned- if
he were now alive- beyond the contemplation of the work n.ine years
earlier in The Birth of Tragedy . 2 If, in 1 83 2 , the same painting
mysteriously introduced to Stendhal the question of autobiographical
writing and perhaps triggered the drive to write per se- "I sometimes
find much pleasure in writing, that's all" it is the same painting that
-
explicitly opens his secret book in 1 840, that is, Les ldees italiennes sur
quelques tableaux citebres, in its confession of the inspiration for that drive:
"Here is no excuse for writing. I saw the Trans.figuration." The Italian
chronicle Breatrice Cenci ends with the burial of the body of the young,
beheaded parricide crowned with flowers underneath the same pain
ting in San Pietro in Montorio, in a grave that, in May, 1835 , Stendhal
searched in vain for the absent inscription, in the choir under the ab
sent painting of Raphael which is buried in the depths of the Vatican.
2 The passage in Daybreak (8) reads: " Transfiguration . -Those that suffer helplessly,
those that dream confusedly, those that are entranced by things supernatural - these
are the three divisions into which Raphael divided mankind. This is no longer how
we see the world - and Raphael too would no longer be able to see it as he did: he
would behold a new transfiguration ." -Ed.
Raphael: The Tranifiguration.
Vatican Museums.
70 Nietzsche in Italy
this perfect day when everything is ripening and not only the grape
turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back,
I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at
once. It was not for nothing that I buried my forty-fourth year to
day; I had the right to bury it; whatever was life in it has been saved,
is immortal" (Ecce Homo 677) . And Nietzsche added that Stendhalian
sentence, "and so I tell life to myself." It is precisely here that we must
begin : to look at Raphael's painting in this way.
The Transfiguration , a painting interrupted by Raphael's death and
perhaps taken up by Giulio Romano, is a painting also interrupted
and taken up again by Raphael himself. It is a painting of synco
pation: an interrupted body in the suspension of gestures, movements,
and self-consciousness. Spatial syntax is interrupted by spacings which
representation, being representation, takes up again and erases . It
is the syncopation of a plastic song, of a visual music where an end
is heard at the same time that a beginning takes place, in order to
produce for the eye an effect of rhythm, an intensification of presence
and absence . The painting preserves the trace or accent of this syn
copation, like the obscure bar that cuts it horizontally into two halves
and the diagonal gap separating the figures on the left from those on
the right. Nocturnal zigzagging marks the canvas twice .
But the Trans.figuration is not only the painting of a formal, plastic,
or compositional syncopation; it is also the painting of a narrative
or, rather, an iconographical syncopation that is dissimulated and
taken up by the title of the painting, which designates it obliquely,
like every syncopation. The Transfiguration , in turn, designates a well
known episode in Jesus's life. As you can see, only the upper part
of the painting is named by the title Transfiguration . This is the part
which Raphael decided to syncopate (we shall see at what price), which
he decided to link, in the musical sense of the term, through the local
and temporal unity of action, to the scene of the possessed son who ,
when Jesus was on Mount Tabor, was brought to the Apostles, who
in their lack of faith refused to cure him miraculously. It is this sup ris
ing syncopation of those two unrelated scenes in the Gospel that Sten
dhal points to with a kind of surprise: "The big disadvantage of the
painting, the difficulty that the followers of Raphael would not be
caught admitting, is that the lower part of the painting is too far away
from the upper part ." It is precisely this difficulty, which we have
named iconographical syncopation, that Raphael chose to confront,
into which he threw himself for his last painting.
Marin : Transfiguration 73
"In his Transfiguration , the lower half of the picture . . . shows us the
reflection of suffering, primal and eternal, the sole ground of the world:
the 'mere appearance' here is the reflection of eternal contradiction,
the father of things. From this mere appearance arises, like ambrosial
vapor, a new visionary world of mere appearances , invisible to those
wrapped in the first appearance- a radiant floating in purest bliss ,
a serene contemplation beaming from wide-open eyes."3
In brief, Raphael, in his painting of the Transfiguration of Jesus on
Tabor, operated the transfiguration of the Christian subject into the
tragic myth.
"Art is not only an imitation of natural reality but a metaphysical
supplement of this reality which is placed next to it in order to sur
pass it. Inasmuch as it partakes in art, the tragic myth fully partakes
in this metaphysical transfiguration that constitutes pure art in
general ."
With the Transfiguration of Raphael, with his final painting and its
scandalous audacity, it is again Apollo who appears to Nietzsche,
Apollo in whom alone is accomplished deliverance through ap
pearance. The possessed son remains once more the mirror image
of the eternal originary pain . . . . Perhaps we have to wait for Daybreak,
or simply for the satyric chorus in The Birth of Tragedy, in order to
read that figure as the drunken and mad young companion of
Dionysus, the messenger of a wisdom springing from the depths of
Nature. Yes, we have to wait for Daybreak and perhaps even later,
if not too late, perhaps always too late, in order to understand ("Have
I been understood? Have I been understood well?") that God the
Celestial Father, whom Raphael had excluded from the representa
tion because of His luminous sublimity, returns from below, through
the shadow and the obscurity of the water, in the figure of the
disfigured son . Perhaps too late for us, we would perceive the new
transfiguration promised by Daybreak to the new Raphael and ac
complished in Nietzsche's Ecce Homo.
You will recall the admirable opening description of Rome in The
Life of Henry Brulard: "This morning, on the sixteenth of October, 1832,
I was in San Pietro in Montorio on Mount janicolo in Rome. It was
a magnificent sunny day. A light, barely noticeable sirocco breeze
made a few white clouds float. . . . I was happy to live." Between the
Memoirs ef a Tourist and the history of the City, appears the phantom
of the Eternal City, between the quest for the past in present ruin
or the return of the present through the writing of history from the
origin, a fantastic City in this locus of the Stendhalian text: here things
coexist in the space of the Memory-City instead of succeeding each
other. Everything is reserved, and to make them appear, one only
has to shift perspective. It is possible to grasp that fantasy in a fiction,
a fantasy which consists in writing one's life by beginning with this
inimaginable time, which is itself· a space which is not a place of suc
cessions but rather a time of metamorphoses and metaphors, where
everything is preserved in its annihilation , where everything returns
eternally if one accepts to write while dreaming. Inimaginable time,
a time of happiness where time-order disappears in becoming what
one is. Transparent, luminous space, morning space and not noon
space, the space of autumn, October, 183 2 . "Thus it is here," writes
Stendhal, "that the Transfiguration of Raphael was admired for two
and a half centuries." Raphael's painting is at once an emblem of Rome
and a figure of the subject, an emblem of that which the subject looks
at, and a figure of the eye that looks. But this emblematic and figural
image is invisible and absent in San Pietro . There is only its name.
The painting was here but is now there, "buried in the depths of the
Vatican, in the sad gallery of gray marble." Instead of and in place
of the subject is an invisible and absent painting, which is the syn
copation of this place and that one, of this time and that one, the syn
copation of happiness and despair, of life and death.
Raphael's painting does not provide an answer to the double ques
tion of the self-identification, "Who was I? Who am I?" Yet it is, in
itself, the place where the enunciation of this double question can oc
cur. Because it has this name, because it treats this subject and
displaces it by the supplement of a second son , Raphael's painting
would be the fiction typically and singularly modelling Stendhal's life .
By the same token, the contemplation of the painting gives rise to
the place of the "auto-bio-thanato-graphical" enunciation . But it also
offers the troubling image , the trembling im age of the essential enun
ciation, that of a life in its singular death. The same goes for Nietzsche,
but inversely. We read in Aubenque's Le Probleme de l'etre chez Aristote
this definition of essence: "The essence of a man is the transfigura
tion of a history into a legend, of a tragic because unforeseeable ex
istence into a fulfilled destiny, a transfiguration which can only be
accomplished at death."
76 Nietzsche in Italy
Leaving Rome and Stendhal for Turin and Nietzsche, I would like
to read these four lines of Ecce Homo echoing the Aristotelian defini
tion of essence: "The good fortune of my existence, its uniqueness
perhaps, lies in its fatality; I am, to express it in the form of a riddle,
already dead as my father, while as my mother I am still living and
becoming old . This dual descent, as it were, both from the highest
and the lowest rung on the ladder of life, at the same time a decadent
and a beginning- this, if anything, explains that neutrality, that freedom
from all partiality in relation to the total problem of life, that perhaps
distinguishes me" (Ecce 678) . It seems that with this summit and this
bottom of the scale of life , Nietzsche describes the composition and
distribution of Raphael's Transfiguration .
Text of the origin, origin of the text, originary text-image, I said
at the beginning. Reading Nietzsche and Stendhal, it seems in effect
that in the work of Raphael, in its image and name, the origin is at
stake in a chiasmus of whose structure the painting is almost a figure,
a chiasmus whose branches both Nietzsche and Stendhal follow in
an inverse way but with the same objective . In this chiasmus the self
identification is at one and the same time the transfiguration of the
self: "To become what one is," for Stendhal as well as for Nietzsche,
involves self- achievement through self-creation, self-generation, that
is to say, first of all, transcendence of all filiation and all alliance.
Stendhal's reading of the painting emphasizes the presence of the
Mother in her incestuous look. The mother is the sign and the erotic
figure of the infinite gap separating the two sons, the transfigured and
the disfigured one . Nietzsche's reading of the same painting puts in
to relief the possessed son and Apollo , the divinization of the prin
cipium individuationis. It is Apollo who by a sublime gesture shows us
and I may add, who shows the possessed son - that this world of pain
is entirely necessary if through it the individual, that is, the pos
sessed son, gives birth to Apollo, the appearance of appearance, or the
transfigured son. He is transfigured (he, the disfigured) in order that,
immersed in that appearance of appearance, in his contemplation ,
he might find calm and rest.
To be one's own father in his death but also his contrary, certainly
not the mother (unspeakable horror), but a woman like Cosima
Wagner, Nietzsche explains in Ecce Homo . Stendhal would answer to
Nietzsche: "To be one's own mother and her contrary, certainly not
the Father, but men like Napoleon or Count Daru ." The Trans.figura
tion of Raphael is the space of this exchange between Nietzsche and
Stendhal.
D avid E. Wellbery
1 . Habermas on Nietzsche
77
78 Nietzsche in Italy
evoke a mythic topography? Isn't the tool that is here being used to
condemn the mythic itself of the nature of myth? - the myth, precisely,
of a sphere of the archaic, a jungle of undifferentiation , an island of
Circe where, enchanted, we become beasts again . Paradoxically, the
accusation levelled against the mythic itself relies on myth, evoking
what it banishes, preserving what it negates . Freud's term for such
semiotic moves was Verneinung. Habermas's reading of Nietzsche is
a massive denegation in the technical psychoanalytic sense.
For this reason it would be insufficient merely to collect the
philological howlers that dot Habermas's text. To cite, for instance ,
in a gesture of disproof Nietzsche's sentence : " . . . eine Ruckbildung, eine
Umkehr in irgendwelchem Sinn und Grade ist gar nicht moglich."
And to point out that this assertion is shortly followed by the state
ment: "Es hilft nichts : man muss vorwarts , will sagen Schrittfur Schritt
weiter in der decadence . . " (the Nietzschean equivalent of "il faut etre ab
.
question reads: "Mit Nietzsches Eintritt in den Diskurs der Moderne veriindert sich
die Argumentation von Grund auf. Erst war die Vernunft als versohnende
Selbsterkenntnis, dann als befreiende Aneignung, schliesslich alsentschadigende Erin
nerung konzipiert worden, damit sie als Aquivalent fiir die vereinigende Macht der
Religion auftreten und die Entzweiungen der Moderne aus deren eigenen Antriebs
kraften iiberwinden konne . Dreimal ist dieser Versuch, den Vernunftbegriff auf das
Programm einer in sich dialektischen Aufklarung zuzuschneiden, misslungen. In
dieser Konstellation hatte Nietzsche nur die Wahl, entweder die subjektzentrierte
Vernunft noch einmal einer immanenten Kritik zu unterziehen - oder aber das Pro
gramm im ganzen aufzugeben. Nietzsche entscheidet sich fiir die zweite Alternative
er verzichtet auf eine erneute Revision des Vernunftbegriffs und verabschiedet die
Dialektik der Aufkliirung." The thesis is reformulated later: " . . . es geht nun um eine
totale Abkehr von der nihilistisch entleerten Moderne. Mit Nietzsche verzichtet die
Kritik der Moderne zum ersten Mal auf die Einbehaltung ihres emanzipatorischen
Gehaltes" ( 1 1 7). Another version of this alleged regression appears in the following
formulation: Nietzsche beniitzt die Leiter der historischen Vernunft, um sie am Ende
wegzuwerfen und im Mythos, als dem Anderen der Verunft , Fuss zu fassen" ( 1 07) .
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Samtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Banden, ed. Giorgio
N ein! Man komme mir nicht mit der Wissenschaft, wenn ich nach
dem natiirlichen Antagonisten des asketischen Ideals suche , . . . Ihr
V erhaltniss zum asketischen Id�al ist an sich durchaus nicht an
tagonistisch; sie stellt in der Hauptsache sogar eher noch die vorwarts
treibende Kraft in <lessen Ausgestaltung dar. Ihr Widerspruch und
Kampf bezieht sich, feiner gepriift , gar nicht auf das Ideal selbst ,
sondern nur auf <lessen Aussenwerke, Einkleidung, Maskenspiel , auf
<lessen zeitweilige Verhiirtung, Verholzung, Verdogmatisierung- sie
macht das Leben in ihm wieder frei, indem sie das Exoterische an ihm
verneint. ( V , 402)
Das asketische Ideal wurde ganz und gar nicht in ihnen [ the so-called
"Siege" of science] besiegt, es wurde eher damit starker, namlich um
fasslicher, geistiger, verfanglicher gemacht , class immer wieder eine
Mauer, ein Aussenwerk, das sich an dasselbe angebaut hatte und seinen
Aspekt vergroberte , seitens der Wissenschaft schonungslos abgelost,
abgebrochen warden ist . (V , 403-404)
selbst zwiespaltig will . " (V, 363) . On this problem of the Spaltung see the impor
. .
Krise. Zur Pathogenese der biirger{ichen Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1956). On the ex
tirpation of randomness in the eighteenth-century reconceptualization of history, see ,
by the same author, "Der Zufall als Motivationsrest in der Geschichtsschreibung,"
in Kosellek, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Sernantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1 979) 1 58- 1 7 5 .
9 In this sense, Nietzsche's work represents a n important challenge fot contemporary
What is the function here of the notion modem art? The first point
to note is that the argument in which the notion appears relies en
tirely on a crude geneticism. Apparently one has experiences of
something called modern art and these spontaneously generate a body
of thought . This same geneticism appears in another statement, in
which the sponsoring experience is diluted to a vague contemporaneity:
"Aber Nietzsche war nicht nur der Schuler Schopenhauers, er war
Zeitgenosse Mallarmes und der Symbolisten , ein Verfechter des !'art
pour l'art' ( 1 1 6) . Nietzsche's work seems to be the product of a Zeitgeist.
Again, it is not a question of the philological inaccuracy of Haber
mas' claims ,10 but rather of the operations which these claims per
form. The simplistic geistesgeschichtliche method of interpretation serves
here merely as a device to introduce into the text a certain phantasm ,
and once again the phantasm appears in the context of a denegation.
Consider the metaphors : an initial spatialization according to which
the production of teleology as a ruse of power (state power) in the remarkable essay
by Louis Marin: "Writing History with the Sun King: The Traps of Narrative,"
in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore: TheJohns Hopkins University Press,
1985) 267-88.
1 0 The inaccuracy is patent: Nietzsche explicitly repudiates l'art pour l'art. Cf. , for
example, XII, 300.
Wellbery: Nietzsche -Art - Postmodernism 85
and Society, I : 1 ( 1 978) 1 5-24. It is from Bersani that I borrow the example of Madame
Bovary.
Wellbery: Nietzsche-Art - Postmodemism 87
The music referred to here is, of course , that of Wagher and the
text itself can be said to constate the fact of a certain taste , or distaste,
which Der Fall Wagner at once enacts and analyzes. What I want to
focus on here is the beautiful word- much more unusual than its
88 Nietzsche in Italy
X - schmerzhaft-nachdenklich
1. Bizet's Musik- der Philosoph ironisch
2. SU.den, Heiterkeit, mau[rischer]
Tanz Liebe fremd-interessant
3. der "Erloser" - Schop[ enhauer]
4. der "Ring", Schopenhauer als
Erloser Wagners fremd-interessant
5. der decadent -grimmig! grimmig!
6. scherzhaft "Ahnen" "Umwerfen"
"Erheben" ironisch
7. "Hysterismus" "Stil" die kleinen
Kostbarkeiten fremd-interessant
8. "niederwerfende Wirkung" "der
V ictor Hugo der Sprache" "Talma''
"alla genovese" lobend-rasch
9. "Handlung" "Edda" "ewiger Gehalt"
"Madame Bovary" "kein Kind" ironisch
Wellbery: Nietzsche - Art - Postmodernism 89
3. Nietzsche on Art
the occupation of the aesthetic by morality: not in the sense that it con
veys moral messages, however true this might be, but in the far more
interesting sense that, as a system of symbolism and phantasmatic
effects, it institutes the moral organization of desire. Wagner performs
upon the energies of art preci�ely that operation which the ascetic priest
carries out vis-a-vis the energies of life.
This return of the ascetic priest in Wagner, or rather Wagner's
repetition of what I would call the ascetic gesture, takes us to the nerve
of Nietzsche's theory of art. As I remarked earlier, the act performed
by the ascetic priest consists in a movement of reflexive negation, the
implanting of a poison, the inscription of a Nein which organizes the
energies of the body. It is therefore simultaneously a corporeal and
a symbolic event, or rather: it is the assumption of mastery over the
body by a particular form, or perhaps law, of symbolism. This general
definition - the hypothesis of my reading - raises a number of ques
tions that bear on aesthetic issues: How does the moralizing opera
tion manifest itself in the domain of art? Is this movement constitutive
of artistic symbolization or is there an alternative form of art - a non
ascetic form in which the process of symbolization escapes the law
of the Negative? What terms can be used to conceptualize such an
affirmative, call it Dionysian, art? These questions shall serve as the
itinerary for the remainder of my reading.
A general definition of moralization from the Genealogie offers itself
as a useful point of departure: "Die Sinnlosigkeit des Leidens , nicht
das Leiden, war der Fluch, der bisher uber der Menschheit
ausgebreitet iag, und das asketische Ideal bot ihr einen Sinn!" (V, 41 1)
Regretfully, I must leave aside here the tangle of issues this statement
contains : the notion of curse or destiny, the implications of the verb
b ieten , the question whether the syntagma asketisches Ideal isn't in fact
a pleonasm . For present purposes it suffices to remark that the ascetic
release from the curse spoken over life occurs when the sheer con
tingency of suffering is effaced in view of a meaning. This provides
a rather direct link to the Wagner essay, for it is precisely such an
act of meaning-endowment that frees Wagner to himself, that con
stitutes him as an artist . The narrative mise-en-scene of this Erlosung
occurs in chapter four, in a fictional account of the Ring's genesis .
The initial impetus of the work, Nietzsche asserts , was revolutionary
in character, a declaration of war against the "alten Vertragen," that
i s , against all the regulations on which the inherited world, the in
herited society, rests. Siegfried embodies this transgressive energy,
indeed his very origin is a violation of the primordial contract: "er
94 Nietzsche in Italy
kommt aus Ehebruch , aus Blutschande zur Welt . . . " (VI, 20) . H e
follows only and always "the first impulse," he doesn't honor the old
divinities but on the contrary runs them through, and the aim of his
desire is "to emancipate woman" from the circle of untouchability in
which the father/god has enclosed her. Such is the starting point of
Nietzsche's narrative: a desire, a first impulse that reaches out for the
forbidden female object, an endeavor to celebrate the godless "Sakra
ment der freien Liebe ."
Following this exposition, an abrupt shift takes place. Siegfried is
replaced in the role of narrative subject by Wagner himself and the
scenic figuration is transferred to a navigational register. Now the
narrative crisis and its resolution can unfold:
Wagner's Schiff lief lange Zeit lustig auf dieser Bahn. Kein Zweifel,
Wagner suchte auf ihr sein hochstes Ziel. - Was geschah? Ein Ungliick.
Das Schiff fuhr auf ein Riff; Wagner sass fest . Das Riff war die
Schopenhauerische Philosophic; Wagner sass auf einer contraren Weltan
sicht fest . (VI , 20)
The path of Lust, of the "ersten Impuls," cannot be followed out
to its end. An accident befalls the ship, a contrariety emerges to hold
it in check: the sheer contingency of a reef and a catastrophe, which
is also Schopenhauer's philosophy. What will be the solution to this
desperate situation?
Er besann sich lange, seine Lage schien verzweifelt . . . Endlich dam
merte ihm .ein Ausweg: das Riff, an dern er scheiterte, wie? wenn er
es als Ziel, als Hinterabsicht, als eigentlichen Sinn seiner Reise inter
pretirte? Hier zu scheitern- das war auch ein Ziel . . . . Und er iibersetz
te den "Ring'' in's Schopenhauerische. Alles Iauft schief, Alles geht zu
Grunde, die neue Welt ist so schlimm wie die alte: - das Nichts, die
indische Circe winkt. . . . Wagner war erlost . . . Allen Ernstes , dies war eine
Erlosung. Die Wohltat, die Wagner Schopenhauern verdankt, ist
unerrnesslich. Erst der Philosoph der decadence gab dem Kiinstler der
decadence sich selbst- (VI, 20- 2 1 )
Wagner hat das Weib erlost; das Weib hat ihm dafiir Bayreuth gebaut.
Ganz Opfer, ganz Hingebung: man hat Nichts, was man ihm nicht
geben wi.i.rde. Das Weib verarmt sich zu Gunsten des Meisters, es wird
ri.i.hrend, es steht nackt vor ihm. (VI, 44)
Standing naked before him, unprotected by any veil except that most
subtle one of nakedness itself, woman gives everything, that is: gives
Wellbery: Nietzsche -Art - Postmodemism 97
105
1 06 Nietzsche in Italy
Turin- he saw a group of people drawing near and in their midst were
two municipal guards accompanying "the professor." As soon as Nietz
sche saw Fino he threw himself into his arms, and Fino easily obtained
his release from the guards, who said that they found that foreigner
outside the university gates, clinging tightly to the neck of a horse and
refusing to let it go.
It was then that the Finos persuaded the professor to take to his bed
and sought the assistance of a mental therapist, Professor Turina. But
as soon as Nietzsche suspected a doctor was involved, he rebelled, ex
claiming, "Pas malade! Pas malade!" The doctor had to be introduced
as a family friend before Nietzsche would let himself be treated.
In this first period of his illness, Nietzsche oscillated between mad
seizures and long intervals of lucidity. During the latter, he would pas
sionately play music. Sometimes he would beg Irene [David Fino's
daughter] to play Wagner for him - only Wagner. Other times he
himself would sit for long hours at the piano playing in Wagner's
memory, occasionally adding a subdued song. He would take his meals
at home, usually ordering a cutlet, which he rarely ate, and a bottle
of Barbera wine. But after the first glasses the wine went to his head
and his face would flu sh, so thenceforth they forbade him drink. At
that time, noticing that Nietzsche sent frequent messages to a certain
Professor Overbeck- as it seems- the Fino family thought of
telegraphing Overbeck on their own, to inform him of their tenant's
illnes�. A few days later Overbeck arrived and w.ent up to Nietzsche's
room. It was nightfall and the philosopher was lying in bed. As soon
as the two friends saw each other they embraced and wept. Nietzsche
wished to get up, sat at the piano and played Wagner.
Two days later, with Overbeck leading him back to his country,
Nietzsche left Turin forever, seen off by the Finos, the doctor, and the
German consul. A while later a letter from the family informed the Finos
that Professor Nietzsche had in large part lost his reason and was in
a nursing home.
The article is accurate in substance and contains facts that are ex
tremely important for reconstructing Nietzsche's catastrophe . . . .
Among other things it contains the first mention of Nietzsche em-
and his final breakdown. In the abridged passage that follows ("La tragedia vista
di qua e di la dalle Alpi," pp. 205-22 1), Verrecchia examines various accounts of
the famous episode of Nietzsche embracing a horse in Turin . Verrecchia's thesis is
that Nietzsche's madness was long in the making (visible to those around him weeks
before this episode, which probably took place before the end of December). The sudden
collapse theory was propagated by Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth and his friend Franz
Overbeck who, if anything, were irresponsive to Nietzsch's final "appeals" and needs.
Ellipses within brackets belong to Verrecchia's original text .
Verrecchia: Nietzsche's Breakdown 107
The vegetable girl is all that was missing! I doubt that Nietzsche, so
anxious to avoid the mobs (see the notes in his journals) , ever went
into the chaos of Porta Palazzo where Lessing, a century earlier, had
made penetrating observations about the Turinese character. If at
all, he would have gone there in search of apples and oranges, not
of vegetable vending girls. Wasn't what Belmondo heard from an old
waitress in Ruta enough? Speaking of Nietzsche's stay in the Ligurian
town, the journalist adds,
An old cook who today still work� in the hotel gave me further details
about Nietzsche's stay in Ruta. As soon as the waitress, today an old
cook, but then young, of course, and not bad looking, it seems knocked
at the door, Nietzsche replied with a rude voice [ . . . J . "He didn't even
seem to realize that I was a woman!" the once young lady confessed
to me, almost with grief.
1 909.
7 Thovez, "L'anticristo."
1 1 0 Nietzsche in Italy
tine Park, Thovez may even have run across the Antichrist without
knowing who he was. Nor did the solitary and melancholy Thovez
know that he was being trailed by the police because of his ideas. The
prefect of Turin was indeed seeking information about him, as is clear
from an annotation in the private registers of the police office per
taining to 1 889 . 8
A s already mentioned, many sensational pieces about the madness
of Nietzsche appeared in Italian and Turinese newspapers . But when
not the fruit of pure fantasy they contain nothing new or of interest
for research. In the Gazetta del Popolo, for instance, there is an article
on April 1 2 , 1 906, which promises much and delivers nothing. The
title is "Nietzsche's Last Hours in Turin ," but the author then limits
himself to giving a summary of what Overbeck writes to Gast con
cerning his encounter with Nietzsche in Turin . In short, instead of
going to speak with David Fino, who was living in Turin and knew
more about it than anyone, these excellent journalists wrote commen
taries on news from abroad. Six years earlier another journalist ,
Gabriele Gabrielli, had written that Nietzsche "returned to Italy in
1889, but he was seized by apoplexy, and examining him, illustrious
doctors said that the strong doses of choral had cut into and destroyed
some parts of his brain ."9 This man apparently knew nothing and
was writing at random . Another example of scrupulous research is
offered by G. Deabate, who limits his work to a rewriting of the arti
cle of Nuova A ntologia, including its chronological errors . The only in
teresting thing is the confirmation that Overbeck was summoned by
Fino : "Soon , accompanied by professor Overbeck, whom the Finos
had summoned, Nietzsche left Turin forever."10
I will not cite other articles, for rather than shedding light on the
issue they only generate more confusion. The problem is that even
today people continue to write at random about Nietzsche's madness .
In an article entitled "Nietzsche's Horse," as if it were a matter of
Richard III or St . Martin, one reads,
In Turin , in Piazza Carlo Alberto , on the morning ofJanuary 3, 1 889,
Nietzsche leaves his hotel and sees a carriage driver violently thrashing
his horse . With a cry, Nietzsche crosses the square and throws his arms
8 Archives of the Stato di Torino, private registers of the Police Station, 1 889, dated
February 28, 1 889. Another bit of curiousity which I found in the private registers
of the Police Station of that year is a writing saying: "Fanfani, socialist : arrest him."
Who?
9 Guzzetta del Popolo della domenica , 14 October, 1 900 .
10 Gazzetta , 13 October, 1907 .
Verrecchia: Nietzsche's Breakdown 111
around the animal's neck. Then he loses consciousness and sinks to the
ground, still clutching the horse.
It would almost seem as if the author of the article had personally
witnessed the episode, in a position not only to hear the cry but also
to see Nietzsche running across the square. In almost identical words,
the same story has been repeated recently by a serious professor of
philosophy. A minor point: How could Nietzsche, who was nearly
blind, have seen the carriage driver and his whip across the huge piaz
za? But the greater mystery is another: "Then he loses consciousness
and sinks to the ground, still clutching the horse ." Perhaps the horse
and the carriage to which it was yoked fell to the ground as well? In
any event, in order to spare these two Nietzscheans such a fall, one
might entertain another hypothesis: the horse could have been a pony.
According to Gottfried Benn, on the other hand, Nietzsche embraced
not one horse but two horses . He, at least, has the excuse of being
a poet. . . .
Fortunately two grandchildren of David Fino are still alive in Turin .
They are Biance Fino in Majolino, daughter of Ernest, and Palmina
Perottelli, daughter of Giulia . After tracking them down through the
register's office, I went to find out what they knew. Mrs . Majolino ,
who was born in 1903 and lives on Via Bogino, remembers exactly
what her grandfather and father used to tell her about Nietzsche .
As far as the horse episode is concerned, Mrs. Majolino says that
her grandfather spoke of it often. And yet, decent Piemontese. as they
were , the Finos did not need that particular episode to understand
that Nietzsche was ill. They had noticed signs of strange behavior
well before his madness had clamorously manifested itself. "He was
very bizarre,'' the signora says, ''but also very austere and intimidating."
Nonetheless , he could also be very kind and sometimes offered can
dies to the Fino children . Giulia, above all, often observed him with
curiosity, for she found him strange. We have already mentioned that
in the house there were two pianos along which Nietzsche like to run
his fingers. According to the signora he had a "strange way of playing.
He mostly played chords, interspersed with long silences. He also
played in the darkness, but always intermittently.�' Once , intrigued
by the long pauses, Giulia wanted to see what on earth that strange
tenant might be doing. She quietly approached the door, but Nietz
sche heard her and, leaping around, cried, "Ugly beast!" It seems that
he was not very fond of Giulia, who was sixteen then; very fond, on
the other hand, of Irene. Indeed, he seemed to have true affection
for her. Mrs. Majolino said that she had heard it often repeated not
1 1 2 Nietzsche in Italy
only by her father but also by her grandfather, and adds that she herself
remembers it well. Sometimes Irene and Nietzsche played piano for
four hands.
What seriously alarmed the Finos, aside from Nietzsche's ever in
creasing eccentricities, was another fact: They found cash torn up
in the wastepaper basket. Their tenant tore everything to pieces,
sometimes even his correspondence, about which he had always been
very possessive. When they wished to notify someone about Nietz
sche's madness, the Finos had trouble finding an address. They did
not know whom to turn to. At this point the signora confirms that it
was her grandfather who notified Overbeck by telegram . Meanwhile,
in the throes of madness, Nietzsche used to "howl," as the signora
expresses it in Turinese dialect, that is, he shouted in such a way as
to fill the whole house. "And he also did other things." To come back
to the horse episode, David Fino used to relate that people had gone
to call him and that he had accompanied Nietzsche home. As soon
as he saw Fino, Nietzsche exclaimed, "Caro signor Fino!" This was,
in fact, his usual way of greeting his landlord.
But there is another, as yet unknown episode. Nietzsche absolute
ly did not want to leave Turin and his house at Via C arlo Alberto .
He was very attached to his landlords, particularly David. When at
last the latter succeeded in convincing Nietzsche to depart for Basel ,
Nietzsche wanted "caro signor Fino" at all costs to make a gift of his
papalina, his nightcap, as a pledge that they would soon be seeing each
other again . With that strange cap on his head, which no one was
able to remove , and frequently turning to the house that had hosted
him, he took up his way towards his sad destiny.
1 13
1 1 4 Nietzsche in Italy
had assured him that "he had never contracted syphilis." Whether he
m ay have been sick without knowing it is then another question . Eiser's
report of the coitum Nietzsche practiced in Sorrento (apparently with
prostitutes) clarifies another biographical detail, namely that the
fatuous legend of the "saint," espoused by Forster-Nietzsche, but also
by such friends of Nietzsche as Erwin Rhode and Paul Deussen (the
latter wrote about Nietzsche: "mulierem nunquam attigit": he never
touched a woman) , reeks of hypocrisy and - mental cruelty. I beg the
reader's pardon for having once again concerned myself with a pseudo
problem , sickness, sexual relations , chastity, etc . , which should no
longer interest anyone.
119
1 20 Nietzsche in Italy
profusion of books describing the state of the world today. They describe
what by its nature is indescribable, because it lends itself to being
thought about only in a thinking that is a kind of appeal, a call- and
therefore must at times become a scream. 3
Riddle upon riddle, Benjamin's messenger might be Nietzsche, "Nietz
sche, most quiet and shiest of men, knew of this necessity. He en
dured the agony of having to scream" ( Thinking 48) . From where does
the scream emanate within an understanding of post-Laokonian speech
acting? Does it arrive in that non-rhetorical moment that hesitates
between the fall (into chatter) and the lofty transagony of lucidity's
knowledge? And what renders Nietzsche, in Heidegger as in Ben
jamin, so vulnerable to falling at the border between small talking
and big thought? Can some sort of public opinion settle the issue,
for instance, the disputable sensus communis of Kant? Who negotiates
· what stays clear of idle chatter? And how to put a contract out on
that which threatens Nietzsche's commanding voice , the "threat of
this perversion?" Perhaps more imposingly, how can the thought of
the eternal return be taken for chatter? Is it not the case that the eter
nal return could be shown to be a rumor, launched by Nietzsche as
the thought of his thought but never articulated or demonstrated
philosophically, only pointed to by the innuendo of Zarathustra and
his animals, his readers?4 And what if Being were itself a rumor, the
murky rumbling of an unheard of ontology? The answers can be shown
· merely to reside within the form of these questions , whose construc
tions are only partially complete, hardly posed correctly or on reliably
firm ground. We are cruising the site mapped out by Benjamin's
"Destructive Character," a small passage through which he introduces
a certain rapport of rumor to suicide; we are at the intersection "be
tween the public and private zones that commingle demonically in
prattle ," as he puts it in another context.5 In other words- and we shall
speak only in other words- we want to address precisely that place
of circulation that would not be limited to a body whose remotest limbs
would be infused with writing's bloodlines, but which would be ex
tended to the circulation of a newspaper and most pressingly into street
3 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, tr. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper
and Row, 1 968) 49 .
4 A reading of the non-articulation of the eternal return has been promoted in the
writings of Bernard Pautrat .
5 Walter Benjamin, "The Destructive Character," in Reflections 301-03. The Ger
man text is in Gessammelte Schriften IV, 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1 980)
396-398.
1 22 Nietzsche in Italy
I will whip into submission two unruly movements that have per
mitted us to talk about Nietzsche's madness, training our focus on
the fragile intersection where two names cross over into one another
because there were always two names harnessed by Nietzsche's
charioteer of inscription, the one phantomizing the other, doubling
for the other, or enfolding itself in the other's mask. These names
e mbraced the masks of our history: Dionysus and Apollo , Wagner
and Cosima, Socrates and Christ, Dionysus and the Crucified, Paul
Ree and Lou Salome. It appears that essentially two moments have
permitted us to repeat a stutter in the painful archives of Nietzsche's
madness - which was never only Nietzsche's madness, never only a
broken contract, or even a fulfilled promise, between Nietzsche and
himself, or Nietzsche and Wagner, or Nietzsche and Lou. But Nietz
sche's madness (I am using shorthand) was more often than not made
to enter a contractual agreement with third parties, such as the Third
Reich, as if the collapse of Nietzsche could provide a hermeneutic
clarity, a kind of luminous capitulation to the great politics of inani
ty. Nietzsche's madness , in Thomas Mann, was not so much out of
reason's grasp, but to the contrary, it could be read as an historical
explication of sorts, a fevered lucidity within which Nietzsche figured
as a minotaurized self, contained, interred and eloquent - a system
of symptoms participating in the collapse of German spirituality :
history's own case study, as it were. Thus it would be Nietzsche's un
thought that promotes a genuine thinking of convulsive fascism, for
example. As if Nietzsche's madness had a history, or could render
history historical, readable in terms of a general archeology of pain .
Yet only that which has no history, wrote Nietzsche, can be discovered
("Nothing is definable unless it has no history") .
The route I'd like to take is less grand; it is not even a side-street
in the royal road to the unconscious. To this end, I have asked the
gods to lend me their wing'd Pegasus, perhaps the first horse to in
vent the concept of a rider with conviction, that is to say, from the
bestial perspective where distinctions are held between Hegelian
masters and predators, sadism and cruelty. A strong figuration of
rumor, not distantly related to Hermes, Pegasus arises as lord of the
air, flying wherever he would, envied of all . Above all, the rider behind
this corpus is a mere blemish on the back of a body propelled
mysteriously through space. Pegasus, as non-possessible gift , comes
with a particular driver's license : it points one, like Bellerophon (whose
father was devoured by horses) , beyond the Chimaera's fiery breath ,
or, in this case, it will permit us to leap over the Gorgon sisters , the
1 2 4 Nietzsche in Italy
terrible and unbearable gaping into the isle of madness from which
one might not recover. However, the serpented head already places
us face to face with Nietzsche's animals, if one considers the serpent
around Zarathustra's head, the mysterious embrace traced around
the neck of Nietzsche's anchorman, Zarathustra, who is destined to
announce that which is never said. The serpent offers the embrace,
forecasting how circle and ring are to be implicitly entwined in the
circling of the eagle and the winding of the snake . The embrace of
Turin, therefore, will be the first thing around which I coil my think
ing, asking very simply what it means for a Nietzsche to embrace
a horse , to wrap himself around the face of madness, collapsing in
the street at the command of a whip. What sort of inscription was
taking place when Nietzsche fell under the crack of a whip, a lash
destined for another? The first part of this reading, therefore , is to
be called:
A HORSE IS BEING BEATEN
even, to narrow the focus, what is the Italy of Freud, or more close
to home still, the piazza to which Freud returns, as if under hypnosis,
guided he suggests by a kind of horseshoe magnetism , in the text of
the unheimlich, the being-not-at-home of the uncanny. You may recall
the pull of that piazza, where p ainted girls decorated the windows ,
and Freud could only return, uncannily, to the labyrinth. Return to
what? One could say that for Freud, Goethe, and Nietzsche, goin g
to Italy implied picking someone o r something u p o n some level o f
conscious o r unconscious articulation, cruising for what w e call lues,
a syphilitic infection; but we shall r'eturn to this when hitting the streets .
For we need to consider the rumor that Freud and Jung helped prop
agate concerning the etiology of Nietzsche's degeneration . They
helped spread the rumor, and one wonders how they knew, of the
origin of his spreading syphilitic infection . Freud, who shared Lou
with Nietzsche , traced down the ostensible lues or luetic pathology
to Nietzsche's having visited as we all know a bordello ; but, Freud
adds , a male bordello and, more precisely still, Nietzsche is said to
have contracted syphilis in a Genoese male brothel. We shall treat these
and other rumors of Nietzsche's susceptibility to infection in "Ecce
Fama," Jama being the proper name of rumor. So the question remains:
what is called Italy?
Ever since Goethe's Italienische Reise, Italy was like a command post,
the other Lorelei of Germanic desire. Goethe picked up Christiane
Vulpius in Italy, and brought her back to Weimar. This scandalized
everyone . The only Weimarian ever to invite Vulpius over was Ar
thur Schopenhauer's mother, Weimar's most liberated woman .
(Nietzsche's eye doctor was also called Vulpius; this was before he
was turned over to the doctor of the Basel asylum, Dr. Wille. Overbeck
was afraid to tell Nietzsche that this was his doctor's name.) Elsewhere
I have tried to show that for Freud as for Goethe, Italy became bound
up in a notion of genitalia, an argument which I cannot reproduce
here , but for which I would like to open a credit account . The extent
to which Nietzsche might have borrowed a reading of the "genitalienische
R eist' can be inferred from the citational qualities of his madness, if
it is not presumptuous momentarily to accede to the suspicions o f
Overbeck and Gast . Their opinions become part o f a history in which
it is said that Nietzsche was feigning his madness, perhaps vampiriz
ing the style of others' state-of-the-art breakdowns. These breakdowns
of which Nietzsche repeated a certain number of dimensions , come
from Hamlet , for example, from the Greeks, for whom madness was
1 26 Nietzsche in Italy
N ietzsche was at Pforta when he wrote this. The next poein is in
cluded in the volume Kaufmann prepared for "la gaya scienza." Part
of the "Songs of Prince Vogelfrei ," it addresses the mistral wind of
the Mediterranean . These are fragments of the eleven-stanza poem
in which the Gay Science is evoked:
S ind wir zwei nicht eines Schosses
Erstlingsgabe , eines Loses
Vorbestitnmte ewiglich? . . .
10 Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1980) 334.
For details of the collapse, see the chapter on "Euphoria, Melancholia and Madness."
The exact location of the collapse seems to have shifted within different accounts:
it took place variously at the Piazza Carlo Alberto, the Piazza San Carlo or the Piazza
Carlina, leaving the "Carl" pretty much intact.
1 30 Nietzsche in Italy
horses running through the heavens' threshing basin, saw the carriage
which carries you, saw your hand tremble at you when upon the horses'
back lightning-like your whip descended. From the carriage of disaster,
leaping to bring you down yet faster, I saw you shortened to an arrow
vertically downward plunging]
The first time Nietzsche went to Italy, reports Ronald Hayman ( 1 56) ,
this is how things went : "He found that he wanted to be alone. He
started out for Italy, but, feeling ill en route , spent the first night at
a hotel . . . . Sitting, isolated, in the conductor's seat, high in the post
coach, he travelled for the first time along the Via Mala, the moun
tain road famous for its views. This is my nature, he wrote ." What
Nietzsche was doing in the conductor's seat, whom he was replacing ,
what he was driving at, still needs to be clarified, particularly if he
is en route to Italy, in which he recognizes his nature - again, a
reference to genitalia. We note in passing, moreover, that his father's
illness was referred to in Nietzsche's family as the petit mal. However,
backing up along the heterobiographical trail, one finds that Nietzsche
claimed to take more pride in his accomplishments on horseback than
in winning a prize in philosophy. In the immensely invested month
of October- Karl Ludwig Nietzsche had superstitiously fixated on
October, the month in which Ecce Homo came to be written and Nietz
sche was himself born - Nietzsche volunteered in 1 867 for military
service . Among the thirty recruits in the division there was only one
other volunteer. Nietzsche wrote: "The riding lessons give me the most
pleasure. I have a very pretty horse, and am s uppo sed to have a talent
for riding. When I hurtle out into the big exercise yard, I then feel
very satisfied with my lot" (Hayman 90) . Nietzsche - and I - was very
surprised to find he was the best horse-rider among the thirty recruits .
The officers predicted he would attain the rank of captain. But his
hopes were humiliatingly frustrated. Myopia, which was felt to be
Ronell: Hitting the Streets 131
inherited from his father, had made Nietzsche a bad judge of distances,
even at short range, and in the middle of March, jumping into the
s addle , he threw himself so hard against the pommel that he tore two
muscles in his chest . He felt a sharp, twitching pain on his left side ,
which did not stop him from riding on with determination. He fainted
twice that night, lay ten days in bed, paralyzed, and at the end of
ten days the doctor made incisions in his chest. He writes: "I am
understating it if I say that already four to five cupfuls of pus have
come out of each wound" (Hayman 93) . For another biographical
trace, we go to the "Memorabilia," which retain one image in the earlier
months of his routine military life . He writes: "At morning at winter
in a steaming horse stable." Peter Heller has commented that "this
setting, with the bespectacled intellectual as groom , brushing the
animals , cleaning the stables, recurs frequently in Nietzsche's letters
of the period. The steam'and smell of horse manure which he had
to carry out, made a strong and revolting impression on him though
he enjoyed his work with horses more than anything else ."11 Heller
links this up with Nietzsche's enormous capacity for radical compliance,
a point that certainly holds up under scrutiny if one considers the
extent to which he was driven by Wagner in the direction of abject
servility.
Wagner as conductor of Nietzsche's destiny has been linked in
psychobiographies to the paternal Nietzsche, whom he is said physical
ly to resemble. What interests me however is the double rapport of
repulsion and let us call it pleasure, which includes the carrying of
an excremental deposit. The double and oscillating movement be
tween repulsion and pleasure is best articulated in the book over which
Wagner blew up publically, Human, All Too Human : "Desire for deep
pain. When it has gone, passion leaves behind a dark longing for itself,
and in disappearing throws us one last seductive glance. There must
have been a kind of pleasure in being beaten with her whip ." There
exists nothing to prove that Nietzsche's infection did not in fact begin
with his military service , in a kind of primal embrace of the horse.
The parentheses thrown around these erotically invested whippings
or embracings give pause. For while the horse marks an important
moment in the history of photography, the photograph that we have
of Lou, Paul and Nietzsche wraps his pathogenic history around itself
in an odd and painful serenity, a photograph of the future of the
Nietzsche institution wherein Nietzsche, one of two horses, takes the
11 Peter Heller, Studies on Nietzsche (Bonn: Bouvier, 1 980) 204 .
1 32 Nietzsche in Italy
bridle and Lou's whip, leaving Paul Ree to be the only figure among
the three to be posing. In Nietzsche's madness , he will be said to have
taken on equine features, for one was tempted often to focus on his
manelike hair. Helene Cixous has made him undecidable, sharing
the features of a dog as well. 12
Or consider this letter from his student days, written by Nietzsche's
friend, Deussen:
Intoxicated with wine and camaraderie , we allowed ourselves, in spite
of having so little money, to be talked into hiring horses to ride up the
Drachenfels. It is the only time I have ever seen Nietzsche on horseback.
He was in a mood to interest himself less in the beauty of the scenery
than in the ears of his horse . He kept on trying to measure them, and
to make up his mind about whether he was riding a donkey or a horse .
In the evening we acted still more insanely. The three of us were
wandering through the streets of the little town making overtures t o
the girls we assumed t o b e behind the windows .
The labyrinth of the ear, the minotaur, the interstice between one
and the other: Nietzsche coupled with the donkey and a horse . In
Zarathustra the ass's repeated braying is spelled I-A, which means yes
in German. The adored ass is without question the most yes-saying
of all creatures. 13 But here Nietzsche cannot make up his mind whether
he was riding the one or the other. The other was in part born from
the womb of Shakespeare , in the melancholy violence of "Venus and
Adonis," a poem urged on by the libidinal whip of the neigh-saying :
with ears uppricked, he neighs, he bounds, he wounds the earth, "what
cares he now for curb or pricking spur ? " This steed, who raises ques
tions of mastery, is an uncanny horse who is not entirely alive , "as
if the dead the living should exceed."
Of course we shall never know what sort of recognition took place
when Nietzsche saw that a horse was being beaten; we know that h e
hallucinated his father's voice, suffered indeed from a kind o f auditory
psychosis since the age of five, listening to his father's telecommanding
but disarticulated utterances. There was a telephone to the beyond
installed within Nietzsche, but at times the voice would translate itself
into a near televisibility for the myopic child . Once, Nietzsche was
sure his father was crouched behind his chair as he was writing. But
the voice was mutilated, unintelligible. I am led to suppose, but I
12 Helene Cixous, "Le bon pied, le bon oeil," Cahiers Renaud Barrault 87 (1982) 47-75.
13 Rudolf E. Kuenzli, "Nietzsche's Zerography: Thus Spoke Zarathustra ," Boundary 2
( 1 978) 1 1 0 .
Ronell: Hitting the Streets 133
have not yet been able to verify this, that his father's casket was
horsedrawn. (Neither Janz's Biographic nor other sources produce a
description of the funeral which Nietzsche attended; Nietzsche himself
remembers the unforgettable music.) The only thing that we know
is that Carl Nietzsche - perhaps the Carlo Alberto Piazza resonates
with this - began the principal part of his seminary studies at a locality
that bore the name of Rossleben. This linkage of the horse with
coming-to , literally with "life ," and the many inscriptions of destinal
naming or even destinerring in and out of Nietzsche's writings, the
way the father lives on in Nietzsche- "! am dead as my father" -
persists continually in being carried by Nietzsche, the way Zarathustra
begins by carrying a corpse, this fundamental carriage of the other
whose inscription your back bears or under whose bruising flesh you
remain immobilized. All of this leads one to want to motivate the em
brace , to "try the reins," as Nietzsche would say, of an unbroken
thought. In his last letters to Strindberg, Nietzsche's praise for le Pere
was unflagging.
In the Birth of Tragedy, a text perverted from its course to honor
Wagner, Nietzsche "dares to acknowledge the truth" about the Greeks .
"The Greeks, as charioteers , hold in their hands the reins of our own
and every other culture, but almost always chariots and horses are
of inferior quality and not up to the glory of their leaders, who con
sider it sport to run such a team into an abyss which they themselves
clear with the leap of AchiUes."14 Someone will have cleared the abyss,
someone driving the horses, but not the horse itself. Because we find
ourselves in the streets of Turin pondering the Greeks, because it will
be appropriate shortly to leap into "Ecce Fama," which actually is defama,
we ask that Nietzsche ventrilocate with his double street register the
necessary intersection, perhaps with the aim of uncrossing inevitable
polarities: Socrates's wife , writes Nietzsche, "taught him to live in the
b ack streets, and anywhere where one could chatter and be idle, and
in that way formed him into Athens' greatest backstreet dialectician ,
who finally had to compare himself to a pesty horsefly, set by a god
on the neck of the beautiful horse Athens to keep it from coming to
rest."15 The street, the horse : this is a citation , a repetition. He was
set by a god on the neck of a beautiful horse to keep it from coming
14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth ef Tragedy, in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, tr. and
Your ancestors and mine . Let this tribute then be paid to memory,
which has caused us to enlarge it now, yearning for what we once
possessed. The tribute is cited from the Phaedrus, which we have begun
to relive in the form of Plato in Turin, the place where madness
("mania") besets the text, and this describes the soul in its emergence.
The soul of Plato will be membered by Lou, Ree and Nietzsche. Listen
to the soundtrack behind the photograph which Nietzsche staged in
Lucerne, 1 882 :
Yet it is troubled by the horses and only beholds Reality with much
difficulty. . . . As for the soul's immortality, enough has been said. But
about its form , the following must be stated . . . . Now all the gods' horses
and charioteers are good and of good descent , but those of other be
ings are mixed . In the case of the human soul, first of all , it is a pair
of horses that the charioteer dominates; one of them is noble and hand
some and of good breeding, while the other is the very opposite , so
that our charioteer necessarily has a difficult and troublesome task. 1 7
.
There are essentially two horses , therefore , under the command of
the charioteer. While one is good, the other needs to be beaten to
submission. The account of the training whereby the bad horse is
broken is of legendary cruelty, the whip being the finely attuned in
strument of higher education:
We divided every soul into three parts , two of which had the form of
horses, the third that of a charioteer. Let us retain this . As we said ,
one of the horses is good, the other not. But we did not define the
goodness of the one or the badness of the other, which we must now
do. The horse that holds the nobler position is upright and dean-limbed;
it carries its head high, its nose is aquiline, etc . , in other words, a
follower of true renown ; it needs no whip , but is driven by word of
16 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche 82.
17 Plato , Phaedrus (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1 983) 28.
Ronell: Hi.tting the Streets 135
Now it has been humbled and follows the driver's instructions; when
it catches sight of the beautiful, it is like to die of fear. So from this
time on the soul of the l over may follow the beloved with reverence
and awe . 18
Ecce Fama
The rumor that hit the streets when his sister returned from Paraguay,
assuming a double name, was that there was a Friedrich Nietzsche .
The extent to which his so-called oeuvre was whipped up by the
misguided Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche has been covered in great detail ,
suggesting that Nietzsche will always to a certain extent be the effect
of the hack work of a crude forester. Walter Kaufmann's restitutional
biography of Nietzsche produces a typology of gossip which it attempts
18 Plato 3 7-39.
19 Plato 39.
20 Plato 28.
1 36 Nietzsche in Italy
to tranquilize and master. You know some of the points that have
been beaten into the Nietzschean signatures. Lou Salome, says
Elisabeth, was a slut; Ree was Jewish, Nietzsche was not , Brandes
was (these observations by no means coincide with Nietzsche's opin
ions) . Furthermore, it is said that Nietzsche wrote that he loved his
sister, he wrote books, for example he wrote Wille zur Macht, his in
tentions were never really to repudiate Wagner, and so forth. Kauf
mann sometimes gets down into the gutter of Gerede, pulling
misogynistic switchblades on Elisabeth, the big mouth who wrote
Nietzsche's posthumous work. "One wonders how her success was
possible and why so many learned men who produced monographs on
various aspects of Nietzsche's thoughts deferred so humbly to this
woman ."21 Quoting Rudolf Steiner, he continues: "that Frau Forster
Nietzsche is a complete laywoman in all that concerns her brother's
doctrine, her thinking is void," etc. I do not dispute this, of course .
But figuring out Nietzsche's "Legend," as Betram was to call it , can
not be left to a war of the so-called sexes in which one side occupies
the seductive and unpinnable territory of gossip and the other, seriously
charted scholarship . Benjamin and others have suggested to what ex
tent criticism as Wissenschaft participates in what we might perceive
as a massively sustained gossip session, being a form of utterance that
has fallen from truth . Nonetheless, the legend of Nietzsche, from
wherever it may stem , began to develop, asserts Kaufmann, "shortly
after Nietzsche had become insane in january 1 889."22 In fact, Kauf
mann begins this particular work, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist,
A ntichrist, with the statement : " Nietzsche became a myth even before
he died in 1 900 , and today his ideas are overgrown and obscured by
rank fiction ." In a Holderlinian sense - Holderlin being a compatriot
in madness, and the poet whom Nietzsche discovered in his early
years - Nietzsche fell upward ("man kann auch in die Hohejallen"), if grow
ing into myth in one's living afterdeath can be considered an upward
fall. In any case, Nietzsche's great fall has left at least a double-tracked
imprint, suggesting for example a double origin or etiology for his
illness, neither of which has been definitively lifted from inferential
acts of reading or rescued from exiguous evidence . Dionysus issues
from a double origin, twice born, once from the Princess , Semele,
and once from the leg of Zeus. Is one not in imitation of an understand
ing of double origin as sexual difference when attributing the secret
21 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton Univer
23"Queens of the Night: Nietzsche's Antibodies," Genre, 16.4 (Winter 1983) 405- 2 1 .
24Letter from Otto Binswanger to Ida Overbeck dated June 7 , 1 905, i n Curt Paul
Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1979) 35 1 . The word forJama,
Gerucht, related as it is to the barely material sense of smell, constitutes a grand
thematics in Nietzsche's corpus.
Ronell: Hitting the Streets 139
once wounded chest for hours at a stretch . He would sit for hours
in the armchair facing the window, childishly exclaiming, over and
over again: "I am dead because I am stupid." Or, "I am stupid because
I am dead" ; or, "mehr Licht! " and "I do not like horses."
Correction . He would say "I do not like horses," though he persisted,
despite correction, in saying "ich bebe" - I tremble, I crack- or: I ,
baby. Anyway, he could not be corrected or trained to say it right.
He persisted in saying, for I do not like horses, I do not bebe instead
of "ich liebe ."
(Shame. - Here stands the handsome steed and paws the ground: it
snorts, longs for the gallop and loves him who usually rides him - but
oh shame! his rider cannot mount up on his back today, he is weary. -
This is the shame of the wearied philosopher before his own philosophy.
Daybreak, Book V, § 487)
Barbara Spackman
141
1 42 Nietzsche in Italy
[Art! Art! She is the faithful lover, forever young, immortal. . . . How
-
could his hands have lain idle and lascivious on the bodies of females
after having felt substantial form erupt from his fingers? How, finally,
could his senses have weakened and perverted themselves in base
lasciviousness after having been illuminated by a sensitivity that grasped
invisible lines in appearances ; that perceived the imperceptible, that
divined the hidden thoughts of Nature? ] 3
The lapsed aesthete returns to his true faith . Like St. Augustine,
Sperelli leaves behind him his nugae in order to devote himself to a
"purer'' contemplation: convalescence is a sort of secular conversion .
As Kenneth Burke has noted in his reading of Augustine, the rhetoric
of conversion inevitably evokes its dialectical counterpart- perversion. 4
Sperelli's dallyings - the perversion of his senses - are thus a prereq
uisite to his conversion to art. Yet Sperelli's devoted gaze soon drifts
from Art, the faithful lover, to Maria Ferres, turris ebumea: the ex
pelled woman returns in the sacralized guise of a mother Mary.
Dedication of poems to her similarly drifts towards an apparent ab
dication of poetic voice as the narrative shifts from the third person
to the "I" of Maria Ferres's diary.
This brief and already interpretative summary allows us to note
several characteristics of the convalescent narrative which I must pass
over in haste in order to arrive at the ventriloquist moment. First,
the convalescent is socially and topographically dislocated, and oc
cupies a liminal position even when, as in the case of Constantin Guys,
he is described as the "man of the crowd. " Second, a death of desire
and eviration are occasioned upon passage into the state of con
valescence. This is clearest in Des Esseintes's case where a dinner
mourning the death of his virility is given on the eve of his withdrawal
into solitude, and alluded to in descriptions of the convalescent as
child in Baudelaire and D'Annunzio. Third, woman is expelled from
the scene of convalescence. This expulsion is not, however, the ex
pulsion of her attributes. Indeed, woman is expelled in order to abstract
her qualities and reassign them to the evirated convalescent himself.
University of California Press, 1 970), as well as his article on Djuna Barnes, "Ver
sion, Con-, Per-, and In-: Thoughts on Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood," in Language
as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966) 240-53.
1 44 Nietzsche in Italy
We might say that the old woman is expelled in order that the new
woman be put on, that the converted convalescent assume a feminine
guise. Fourth, the physiological ambiguity of the convalescent opens
the way to figures of androgyny and hermaphroditism : in Baudelaire's
case, to a discussion of the androgyny of genius; in D'Annunzio and
Nietzsche, to the description of poetic and philosophic production as
giving birth.
An element not evident in the Dannunzian summary, but equally
important to the scene of convalescence is discussed by Paul de Man
in his essay on "Literary History and Literary Modernity." In that
essay de Man notes that the scene of convalescence enacts the double
movement of modernity whereby the past is cancelled as diachrony
in order that it become the present:
The human figures that epitomize modernity are defined by experiences
such as childhood or convalescence, a freshness of perception that results
from a slate wiped clear, from the absence of a past that has not yet
had time to tarnish the immediacy of perception (although what is
freshly discovered prefigures the end of this freshness) , of a past that ,
in the case of convalescence, is so threatening that it has to be forgotten. 5
All further references to this edition will appear in the text. Translation by Robert
B aldick, Against Nature ( 1 979; rpt . Middlesex: Penguin, 1959) 1 1 1 .
1 46 Nietzsche in Italy
muse's traditional role is to inspire the male poet, here it is the male
aesthete who would inspire the muse, breathe masculine thoughts into
her. His failure to do so generates the subsequent episode in which
success is grotesquely attained.
Images of other mistresses follow that of Miss Urania, but Des Es
seintes pauses upon the memory of a nameless women, "dont la
monstruosite l'avait tant satisfait pendant des mois" (A rebours 2 13)
("whose monstrous speciality had given him months of wonderful
satisfaction" [Baldick 1 1 3)). Her monstrosity lies in her side-show pro
fession as a ventriloquist, a talent which Des Esseintes is quick to ex
ploit. Intrigued by the erotic potential of such a gift , Des Esseintes
has her memorize a script which triples her monstrosity: the dialogue
between the Chimera and the Sphinx from Flaubert's Tentation de Saint
Antoine. Marble and terracotta statuettes representing the beasts are
placed in the bedchamber for the occasion; then, while the ventrilo
quist projects the carefully rehearsed dialogue into the stone figures,
Des Esseintes makes love to her. Through this ploy, Des Esseintes
does indeed succeed in "transmuting masculine thoughts into a female
body," for while the voice, the material support, is that of the un
named woman, the words are those of Flaubert. The result of this
transmutation is quite literally monstrous, for speech thus seems to
originate in the hybrid creatures. His attempt to invert poetic roles
had been a dismal failure with Miss Urania; now he succeeds vicarious
ly by substituting a stronger poetic voice for his own . Rather than
inspiring his own thoughts into the woman, he inspires the words of
a beloved author into her. Indeed, a doubling occurs in this scene
of ventriloquism so that Flaubert too appears to be a ventriloquist;
just as the woman projects her voice into and through the statuettes,
so Flaubert projects his poetic voice into and through the woman's
body.
For Des Esseintes, this coupling of Flaubert and the woman's body
is a source of erotic titillation, but for the reader it is suggestive in
another sense: ventriloquism, etymologically speech of the stomach
or body, may describe the feminized convalescent's relationship to his
"evirated body." As Baudelaire and D'Annunzio's choice of androgyny
as the poetic state suggests, the convalescent's feminization is not total,
but rather a mixture of masculine and feminine. What is monstrous
about this particular mixture is that its constituent parts are still iden
tifiable : the convalescent does not relinquish his voice . Indeed, pro
jected into and through "his" evirated/feminized body - the woman's
Spackman: The Scene ef Convalescence 1 47
L'etre qui est, pour la plupart des hommes , la source des plus vives,
et meme, disons-le a la honte des voluptes philosophiques, des plu s
durables jouissances; l'etre vers qui ou au profit de qui tendent tous
leurs efforts ; cet etre terrible et incommunicable comme Dieu (avec cette
difference que l'infini ne se communique pas parce qu'il aveuglerait et
ecraserait le fini, tandis que l'etre dont nous parlons n'est peut-etre in
comprehensible que parce qu'il n'a rien a communiquer), cet etre en
qui Joseph de M aistre voyait un bel animal dont les graces egayaient et
rendaient plus facile le jeu serieux de la politique; pour qui et par qui
se font et defont les fortunes; pour qui, mais surtout par qui les artistes
et les poetes composent leurs plus delicats bijoux; de qui derivent les
plaisirs les plus enervants et les douleurs les plus fecondantes, la femme,
en un mot, n'est pas seulement pour !'artiste en general, et pour M . G .
e n particulier, l a femelle de l'homme. (Le peintre 7 1 3)
[The being who, for the majority of men, is the source of the liveliest
and even - be it said to the shame of philosophic pleasures- of the most
lasting delights; the being towards whom , or on behalf of whom , all
their efforts are directed; that being as terrible and incommunicable
1 48 Nietzsche in Italy
as the Deity (with the difference that the Infinite does not communicate
because it would thereby blind and overwhelm the finite, whereas the
creature of whom we are speaking is perhaps only incomprehensible
because it has nothing to communicate); that being in whom Joseph
De Maistre saw a graceful animal whose beauty enlivened and made
easier the serious game of politics; for whom, and through whom, for
tunes are made and unmade; for whom, but above all through whom,
artists and poets create their most exquisite jewels; the source of the
most exhausting pleasures and the most productive pains - Woman,
in a word, for the artist in general and Monsieur G. in particular, is
far more than just the female of man. (Mayne 293)]
Baudelaire's emphases on "un bel animal" and "par qui" underline the
process we have been describing. Though the expulsion of woman
in Le peintre is less dramatic than in Itpiacere, it takes place nonetheless
as a denial of her existence as a subject or as an agent in the world
of art. The contrast between the two uses for "par qui" is striking:
fortunes may be made and unmade by the woman as an agent, but
works of art are composed by the artist who expresses himself through,
by means of, the woman. A denial of consciousness ("un bel animal")
is necessary in order that the woman become a vehicle , a body emp
tied of spiritual content. A creature who "perhaps" has nothing to com
municate becomes the artist's principal means of communication by
lending her attributes to one who, presumably, may render them con
scious. His poetic voice, his visual message is transmitted through
this body.
In the case of Constantin Guys, immersion in the mundus muliebris
is crucial for the attainment of his goal, the representation of modern
ity : "11 s'agit, pour lui, de degager de la mode ce qu'elle peut contenir
de poetique clans l'historique, de tirer l'eternel du transitoire" (Le peintre
694) ("He makes it his busirtess to extract from fashion whatever ele
ment it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from
the transitory" [Mayne 12]). As a concretization of "le transitoire, le
fugitif," fashion and clothing play an important role in Guys's proj
ect. Indeed, the absence of the transitory element is figured as an
absence of clothing, as a naked woman: "En le supprimant, vous
tombez forct�ment clans le vide d'une beaute abstraite et indefinissable,
comme celle de l'unique femme avant le premier peche" (Le peintre
695) ("By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss of
an abstract and indeterminable beauty, like that of the first woman
before the fall of man" [Mayne 13]). Constantin Guys, then, assumes
Spackman: The Scene of Convalescence 149
both a robe and role de femme, and appears not as an Achilles who
dramatically rips off his womanly disguise, as Michel Butor has sug
gested, but as a ventriloquist.9 The woman of"L'eloge du maquillage"
(section XI) is, like Guys, an expert in the art of painting; her can
vas is her body, her goal to use artifice to improve upon nature:
Ainsi, si je suis bien compris, la peinture du visage ne doit pas etre
employee clans le but vulgaire, inavouable, d'imiter la belle nature, et
de rivaliser avec la jeunesse . . . . Qui oserait assigner a l'art la fonction
sterile d'imiter la nature? (Le peintre 717)
[Thus, if you will understand me aright, face-painting should not be
used with the vulgar, unavowable object of imitating fair Nature and
of entering into competition with youth. . . . Who would assign to art
the sterile function of imitating nature? (Mayne 34)]
An artist in her own right, the cosmetician serves as a model for
Constantin Guys in two senses; her painting prescribes an aesthetic
at the same time as she and her painting pose for his contemplation.
But ifthe woman is already a work of art, has already improved upon
nature, then what aesthetic governs Guys's representation of her? To
which of the age-old camps- mimesis or cosmesis - does Guys belong?
Does he improve upon artifice as the woman improved upon nature,
or is he guided by an aesthetic of imitation which Baudelaire holds
in contempt? The text provides no answer, but it would seem that
Guys imitates artifice: "les artistes qui se sont particulierement appli
ques a fetude de cet etre enigmatique raffolent autant de tout le mun
dus muliebris que de la femme elle-meme" (Le peintre 7 1 4) ("Those ar
tists who have made a particular study of this enigmatic being dote
no less on all the details of the mundus muliebris than on Woman herself "
[Mayne 30]). While both Butor and Baudelaire seem to understand
mundus muliebris as "the woman's world," the expression may also refer,
as it does in the Book of Esther, to "the woman's cosmetics."10 It is,
9 See Michel Butor, Histoire extraordinaire: Essai SUT un reve de Baudelaire (Paris :
Gallimard, 1961) 86.
1 0 Baudelaire glosses the French monde as mundus: "Enfin, je veux dire que le gout
p recoce du monde feminin, mundi muliebris, de tout cet appareil ondoyant, scintillant
et parfume, fait des genies superieurs. . . " (le peintre 499). The biblical mundus muliebris,
instead, refers quite specifically to ointments: "His ita gestis, postquam regis Assueri
indignatio deferbuerant, recordatus est Vashti, et quae fecisset, vel quae esset: Dix
eruntque pueri regis, ac ministri eius: Quaerantur regi puellae virgines ac speciosae ,
et mittantur qui considerent per universas provincias puellas speciosas et virgines:
1 50 Nietzsche in Italy
subject of a number of recent essays. Those to which I am most indebted are: Eric
Spackman: The Scene of Convalescence 151
Blonde! , "Nietzsche: Life as Metaphor," The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of In
terpretation , ed. David B . Allison (New York: Dell, 1 977); Jacques Derrida, Eperons:
Les styles de Nietzsche (Paris : Flammarion, 1978); Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la scene
philosophique (Paris : Union Generale d'Editions, 1979); and Luce Irigaray, Amante
marine: De Friedrich Nietzsche (Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1 980).
13 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage Books, 1 974) 3 3 . All further references to this work (hereafter GS) will ap
pear in the text; Nietzsche's emphases.
1 52 Nietzsche in Italy
Thus, though the convalescent experiences a "hope for health ," the
term "summer" which might fulfill that hope and represent such a stable
state is absent. It is not health which is desirable , but the perpetua
tion of convalescence. A stable state of health would represent precisely
that which Nietzsche attacks- the immobilization of perspective and
consequent scleroticization of values:
You see that I do not want to take leave ungratefully from that time
of severe sickness whose profits I have not yet exhausted even today.
I am very conscious of the advantages that my fickle health gives me
over all robust squares. A philosopher who has traversed many kinds
of health , and keeps traversing them , has passed through an equal
number of philosophies; he simply cannot keep from transposing his states
every time into the most spiritual form and distance: this art of
transfiguration is philosophy. (GS 35)
Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1 969) 88. The genealogy of Nietzsche's
discourse on pregnancy can, of course, be traced to Plato's Symposium, where it is
Diotima (in yet another act of ventriloquism) who expounds upon the pregnancy
of the soul.
1 54 Nietzsche in Italy
and the new philosopher's truths. 16 So it is that at the end of the 1 886
preface, the philosopher ventriloquizes:
We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are
withdrawn ; we have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider
it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be
present at everything, or to understand everything.
"Is it true that God is present everywhere?" a little girl asked her
mother; "I think that's indecent" - a hint for philosophers! One should
have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden
behind riddles and uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has
reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is- to speak
Greek- Baubo? (GS 38)
abyssal de la verite, cette non-verite est la verite. Femme est un nom de cette non
verite de la verite "
.
Spackman: The Scene of Convalescence 155
80.
1 8 For a discussion of this episode as a "staged scene," see Paolo Valesio, "Genealogy
of a Staged Scene: Orlando furioso V," Yale Italian Studies 1 ( Spring 1980) 5-3 1 .
1 56 Nietzsche in Italy
voice which recounts, I suggest, the story of the amor sacra between
Andrea and Maria. The record of her stay at Schifanoia, Maria's diary
is also the account of her gradual surrender to Andrea's charms. What
at first seemed a change of focus in the narrative turns out to be a
sharpening of focus on Sperelli, for the Count's opinions, tastes , and
professions of love are so faithfully recorded that the diary is, for the
most part, a repetition of the narrative which precedes it. Maria , the
ivory tower, begins to lean when she admits to deriving pleasure from
this repetition: "Se ci fosse un mezzo, potrei riprodurre ogni modula
zione della sua voce" ("If there were a means, I could reproduce every
modulation of his voice") (Il piacere 2 14). What is added is corrobora
tion of the emotions already expressed by Andrea; when Maria notes
that "la sua voce e come l'eco dell'anima mia" ("his voice is like the
echo of my soul") (Il piacere 269), it is because her voice is, in fact,
the echo of his. Her diary is the fullfillment of Sperelli's goal:
These are exactly the terms in which the narrator presents Maria
Ferres's diary. The diary, then, bears witness to Maria's possession
by Andrea, a possession which, as the phrase suggests, verges on the
demonic. Possession is characterized as the repetition of the same
words, sentiments and desires which Andrea had used and expressed;
the more Maria's voice resembles Andrea's, the more complete
his possession of her. His occupation of her is total when she makes
it possible for him to say, "Io sono la vita della sua vita":
- Quando , sul limite del bosco , egli colse questo fiore e me l'offerse,
non lo chiamai Vita delta mia vita?
Quando ripassammo pel viale delle fontane, d'innanzi a quella fon
tana, dove egli prima aveva parlato, non lo chiamai Vita delta mia vita?
Quando tolse la ghirlanda dall;Erma e la rese a mia figlia, non mi
fece intendere che la Donna inalzata ne' versi era gia decaduta, e che
io sola, io sola ero la sua speranza? Ed io non lo chiamai Vita delta mia
vita? (It piacere 209)
Spackman: The Scene of Convalescence 157
[ When, at the edge of the woods, he picked this flower and offered
-
Jung had been speaking about the gods, and in other moments ,
perhaps , the epigram should read, "The animals are the shadows of
the gods." But what we know, as did Holderlin , concerning our pres
ent vocation ofpoiesis, is that . bis Fehl Gottes hilft, "sometimes God's
. .
absence helps" ("Dichterberuf " 1 38), and that our task is to attend
the "traces" (die Spuren) of the gods that have deserted human attempts
to confine them within syntactic brackets (Heidegger, Holzwege 250f) .
The times are paratactic, gappy. We are left with the animals and
our poor pronouns (see Rasula). And these may well suffice.
That the animals may be more than sufficient was Heidegger's
testimony in his essay on "Zarathustra's Animals." On Heidegger's
view it is important, not orily not to inflate the animals by identify
ing them with divinities, but also not to "take them home with us [mor
tals] and proceed to d_omesticate them'' ( 4 7) . Heidegger gives reason:
1 This quotation i s from Memories, Dreams, Reflections 2 1 6 .
159
1 60 Nietzsche in Italy
"They are alien to all that is domesticated and usual, all that is 'familiar'
in the petty sense of the word. These . . . animals define for the first
time the loneliest loneliness . . . . Yet in our loneliest loneliness [vacated
by the gods] the most hair-raising and hazardous things are loosed
upon us and on our task . . . . To hold out in loneliest loneliness does
not mean to keep these . . . animals as company or as pleasant pastime;
it means to possess the force that will enable one to remain true to
oneself in their [the animals] proximity and to prevent them from
fleeing" (47f) .
H eidegger was tracing the eagle and the serpent of Zarathustra,
whereas we are attending the horse at Torino as a tracer of Nietzsche's
divine madness. But the strategy is not dissimilar. Heidegger senses
that "Zarathustra's animals are . . . saying from out of their essential
natures what is essential, and saying it with growing lucidity through
the palpable presence of sensuous imagery." "Sense images," Heidegger
notes, "speak only to those who possess the constructive energy to give
them shape, so that they make sense. As soon as the poetic force . . .
wanes, the emblems turn mute" (48) - like the coachman's horse! The
animal is present (and the god in the trace?) as long as the poetic is.
And the poetic is present so long as the animal is, so long as we can
embrace the horse , and prevent it from fleeing.2
But how shall we obtain the word of the horse concerning the crucial
event at Torino? How shall we obtain the horse's sense? Has not the
horse turned mute and fled?
The biographer's word is not helpful. It carries no trace of the divine
in its tale of the animal . Ronald H ayman - to give one typical and
certainly not irresponsible sample- reports : "On the morning of 3
January [ 1 889) Nietzsche had just left his lodgings when he saw a
cab-driver beating a horse in the Piazza Carlo Alberto . Tearfully, the
philosopher flung his arms around the animal's neck, and then col
lapsed" (334f) . It was the beginning of Nietzsche's insanity. As
Overbeck wrote: "His madness - and no one had closer experience
of his outbreak than I did - had been as abruptly catastrophic as I
2 See the remarkable essay on the relation of the bestial and the poetic by Patricia
Cox, "Adam Ate From The Animal Tree." This article and the chapter by James
Hillman, "The Animal Kingdom,'' have served the present writer as true "horses
of instruction" (Blake) . Compare also Rilke's saying: "Before one can write a single
verse, one must get to know the animals" (Notebo oks 26); and Norman 0. Brown's
aphorism: "Turning and turning in the animal belly . . . . The way out: the poem"
(Love's Body 56); and Denise Levertov, "Horses with Wings."
Miller: Nietzsche's Horse 161
If Nietzsche was apologizing to the horse, not merely for the coachman,
but for Descartes (who had the view of animals as machinae animatae,
which denies soul to animals), then, not only may the coachman have
been beating a dead horse, but Nietzsche's madness may have been
long in preparation and not so sudden as his friend and his biographer
may have thought. They, of course, were not viewing the incident
with horse-sense.
But how did the novelist know what Nietzsche said to the horse?
There were only two witnesses, and Nietzsche himself did not speak
about the incident. He joined the muteness of the animal and the
divine . Kundera must have gotten it from the horse's mouth, seeing
it with animal imagination, animated by the anima of the animal, from
whose perspective it is Descartes who is the "dead horse ," not even
worth beating. The coachman must not have heard of Owen Barfield's
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Dead Horses .
James Hillman has aroused suspicion that Nietzsche's Untergang may
be, not only not sudden, but also considerably longer in preparation
than just from tJi.e time of Descartes. Hillman indicts the Christian
Church Fathers and the Stoics in his case against the degradation of
the soul of the animal and the animal of the human soul ("The Animal
1 62 Nietzsche in Italy
(Marcus) : How rotten and spurious is the man who says: "I have decid
ed to be straightforward with you." What are you doing, fellow? You
"need not declare this beforehand; the facts speak for themselves. It need
not be stamped on the forehead. Honesty is at once clear from the tone
of voice and the look of the eyes , just as a loved one at once knows
all from the glance of his lovers . . . . The good, simple , kindly man looks
these qualities; they are seen at once. (Meditations 1 1 5)
with all kinds of things - investigating things below the earth, as the
saying goes - always looking for signs of what his neighbors are feel
ing and thinking. He does not realize that it is enough to be concerned
with the spirit within oneself and genuinely to serve it'' ( 1 5). In
fact, Marcus approaches Nietzsche's own diction on this matter of
another self when he writes: "The tantrums and toys of children . . .
make the story of visits to the underworld stike us more vividly" (90) .
In the Stoical passage on "honesty" (Redlichkeit) in Beyond Good and
Evil, Nietzsche had intuited that the way of crossing over by going
under may require that we "come to the assistance of our gods with
our devils" ( 1 55). But whether invoked by the name of daimones or
devils, deep self or overman, it is another self that is sought . How
can one know and experience this Other of the Untergang, these
Holzwege?
A nte mortem dei with Marcus or post mortem dei with Nietzsche, before
Christendom's hegemony or after, the answer is one and the same.
The topography of deepening is in the domain of the imaginal . The
daimon comes in image . 3 "God is a conjecture," says Nietzsche
(Zarathustra 86) , and he makes the case further with a parody of
Goethe's line, A lles Vergiingliches ist nur ein Gleichnis, by writing: "All
that is permanent [ Unvergiingliches] is also only parable" (86, 1 26) . But
this echoes what already had come to speech in Marcus' Meditations:
"Your doctrines live . . . [in] the mind's images [phantasiazl" (6 1 ) . As
Jung once remarked: "Everything of which we are conscious is an
image, and that image is psyche" (Alchemical Studies 50) . Freud's pa
tients, too, found fantasy to be the soulful locus of the traces of another
self. But, before contemporary depth psychology, Marcus and Nietz
sche were already mapping fantasia's terrain.
The contours of the terrain showed themselves to these depth
philosophers to be typical , even archetypical ( Unvergiingliche) . That
the images (Gleichnisse) are not, like egos, transitory, but rather are
perduring, urges Stoical (or is it Dionysian?) embrace . If it is to be
a matter in a life lived deeply of the "eternal return of the same," then
deep honesty calls for/forth amorfati (Zarathustra 2 1 7 , 220f, 324) . Nietz
sche acknowledges this notion to belong to the Stoics (Ecce Homo 3).
On this point, the animals say to Zarathustra: "Everything goes ,
everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything
dies, everything blossoms again; eternally rolls the year of being" ( 2 1 7) .
3 The allusion here is to Heraclitus: "The oracle at Delphi neither revealed nor con
In Marcus's words: "All things as they come round again have been
the same from eternity" (Meditations 1 6) . And so Nietzsche concludes:
"My formula for the greatness of human being is amorfati: that one
wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in eter
nity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it . . . but
love it" (Ecce Homo II: 10). And Marcus echoes beforehand: "There re
mains as characteristic of the good man that he loves and welcomes
whatever happens to him and whatever his fate may bring . . . . Sur
render yourself willingly to Clotho to help her spin whatever fate she
will" (Meditations 24, 33).
The Stoic is a horse. But - amorfati! - does the horse love its fate?
If the horse is a Stoic, or, at least, an animal-image of the Stoical
soul/self, then what is embraced when the horse at Torino is em
braced? And what is flogged when the horse is flogged? Is it another self
that is flogged/embraced? Is it the soulful/soulless animal? Is it the
animal of soul?
In the beginning, the saint in the forest had advised Zarathustra:
"Do not go to man . . . go rather . . . to the animals" ( 1 1) . But Zarathustra
( Nietzsche?) resisted . He asked the people rhetorically, "Do you want
to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather
than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or
a painful embarrassment. . . . You have made your way from worm
to man, and much in you is still worm" ( 1 2) .
But much later, Zarathustra himself notes: "Have I not changed?"
And he consults the animals for an answer: "What has happened to
me my animals?" (83) Further, when Zarathustra' s friends gibe, "Look
at Zarathustra! Does he not walk among us as if we were animals?"
he corrects them, saying that it would be more precise to say: "He
who has knowledge walks among men as among animals'' (88) .
So Zarathustra came to be able to say (after half the book) , "May
my animals lead me!" and "I found it more dangerous to be among
men than among animals!" ( 183)
He was indeed led by the animals, and at the peripeteia when
Zarathustra began to embrace the "eternal recurrence of the same"
( amor fati) , the text says simply: " . . . his animals walked about him
thoughtfully and at last stood still before him" (237), and Zarathustra
sees that "only now I know and feel how much I love you, my animals"
(296) .
So , at the end, "when he reached the door of his cave, behold, he
again felt a desire for the good air outside and for his animals" (303) .
1 66 Nietzsche in Italy
But who could embrace this horse of so many divine colors? "Tell
me," Zarathustra asks, "who will throw a yoke over the thousand necks
of this beast?" (50) Untergehen , indeed! Is Nietzsche's deeply felt senti
ment after all so different from Descartes' soulless thought or . from
the Coachman's flogging action when, in the truth of the madness,
Nietzsche said over and over again' "I do not like horses" (qtd. in
Hayman 344) .
Nor was this difficulty of animal-embrace without personal reason.
When he was twenty-three, Nietzsche had attempted to avoid induc
tion into the armed services with fake eye-glasses. It did not fool the
examiners, however, and, four days later, he discovered that he would
• The list is not exhaustive, albeit exhausting! The animal-images are listed in the
order of their first appearance in the text of the Zarathustrian dramatic agon .
Miller: Nietzsche's Horse 167
The tale finally belongs to the cunning of the horse . The dialectic
of this animal - the split-offness and one-sidedness of the embraces
of ego - carry intimations of immortality, tracings of the gods in
Nietzsche's parataxis. The horse at Torino may have more in its car
riage than we can imagine.
Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant have, nonetheless, made
the imaginal attempt to read the traces and to name the gods whose
shadows animals bear. The gods, they say, which "confront each other
through the intermediary of a concrete . . . horse either mounted or
harnessed to a chariot" are Athena and Poseidon ("The Live Bit'' 206).
And, in the particular case of the image of the horse, "far from merging
together with the vague , shared status of Master of Horses, each
(Athena and Poseidon) is distinguished from the other . . . " (206) . The
horse brings with it the split .
"All the [Greek mythological] evidence about Athena Hippia shows
that her province is that of control : control over the horse by means
of an effective instrument, control in the driving of the chariot, whether
by guiding the chariot straight along the track without veering off
course or by making the most of a favourable opportunity . . . " (De
tienne & Vernant 206) . Yet, it is well to remember that in the case
of Athena the "control" is worked, not through Cartesian rationality,
nor by post- Enlightenment technology, but rather by the intelligence
of cunning (metis, even polymetis, "many-wisdomed") and by the techne
of magic.
On the other side, "Poseidon is the Lord of the Horse and can at
will control his creature's fiery spirit or release its violence" (Detienne
& Vernant 206) . Poseidon is an "earthshaker."
Detienne and Vernant risk a thought: "These different situations
in which Athena and Poseidon appear as powers in competition pro
vide us with examples of the various ways in which religious thought
seeks to express the opposition and complementarity of two powers
intervening within the same domain but each with a distinctive mode
of operation" (204) . The schizophrenia is religious, as Plato told us
when he spoke of the "live bit," the dialectic of the bridle . The horse
is a theologian .
Athena seems to know this. "When she invents the instrument which
is to enable Bellerophon to control [ ? ! ] his mount, Athena reminds
her protege that he must first give homage to Poseidon Daimaios by
presenting to him the horse in harness and wearing the bit and by
offering him the sacrifice of a white bull." Detienne and Vernant note:
Miller: Nietzsche's Horse 169
Indeed, the gigantic horses take one, not merely to personal loneliness,
but to the larger loneliness of the gods. For, as Heidegger said, speak
ing post mortem dei, "animals define for the first time the loneliest
loneliness" (47): shades of amorfati, the recurrence of the eternal duplici
ty in the soul of the animal imago .
-
Just as the animal has soul, so Nietzsche's soul had an animal . Was
it the animal speaking when Nietzsche called Socrates "Athen's greatest
backstreet dialectician , who finally had to compare himself to a pesty
horsefly, set by a god on the neck of the beautiful horse Athens to
keep it from coming to rest" (Human, All Too Human § 433)?
Nietzsche: our Socrates , our gadfly, stung by the horse he himself
stung! But how can we embrace him? Did Athens embrace Socrates?
Does a horse embrace a fly? C an we embrace the vocation of the
loneliest loneliness?
Works Cited
Cox, Patricia L . "Adam Ate From The Animal Tree : A Bestial Poetry o f
Soul ." Dionysius, 5 : 1 65-80.
Detienne, Marcel and Vernant, Jean Pierre . Cunning Intelligence in Greek
Culture and Society . Tr. J . Lloyd. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press,
Inc. , 1978.
Hayman , Ronald . Nietzsche: A Cn'tical Life. New York: Oxford University
Press , 1980.
Heidegger, Martin . Holzwege. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972 .
---- · "Zarathustra's Animals." Nietzsche, Volume II: The Eternal Recur
rence of the Same. Tr. D . F . Krell . New York: Harper and Row, 1 984.
Hillman , James . "The Animal Kingdom in the Human Dream." Eranos
51-1982. Frankfurt : Insel Verlag, 1 983 . 279-334.
Holderlin, Friedrich . "Dichterberuf." Holderlin. Ed. Michael Hamburger.
Baltimore : Penguin Books, 1 96 1 . 1 3 5-38.
---- · "In lieblicher Blaue." Holderlin . Ed. Michael Hamburger .
Baltimore : Penguin Books, 1 96 1 . 245-49.
Hopper, Stanley R. "The Naming of the Gods in Holderlin and Rilke." Chris
tianity and the Existentialists. Ed. C . Michalson. New York: Charles Scribners
Sons, 1 956.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking, 1939.
Jung, C . G. Alchemical Studies . Tr. R . F . C . Hull. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 196 7 .
---- · Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. A. Jaffe, tr. R. Winston and
C . Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1 965 .
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Tr. M . H. Heim . New
York: Harper and Row, 1 984.
Krell, David F. "Descensional Reflection." Philosophy and Archaic Experience.
Ed. John Sallis . Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1 982. 3- 1 2 .
Levertov, Denise. "Horses with Wings." Spring 1985: 74-83.
Nietzsche , Friedrich . Beyond Good and Evil. Tr. W. Kaufmann. New York:
Vintage Books, 1 966.
---- · Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices ofMorality. Tr. R.J. Hollingdale.
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 1 982.
---- · Ecce Homo. Tr. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1 96 7 .
---- · Human, All Too Human. Tr. Marion Faber. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1 984.
---- · Thus Spoke Zarathustra . Tr. W. Kaufmann. New York: Viking,
1966.
Rasula, Jed . "Spicer's Orpheus and the Emancipation of Pronouns." Boun
dary 2, 6: 1 .
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies. Tr. J.B. Leishman and S . Spendor. New
York: Morton, 1 963.
Part III
Giorgio Colli
1 75
1 76 Nietzsche in Italy
If Peter Gast had not persuaded Nietzsche to change the title of one
of his manuscripts to Twilight of the Idols, five out of the six books
Nietzsche wrote in his last year of sanity would have been named after
himself: The Idleness ef a Psychologist, Nietzsche contra Wagner, The Anti
christ, Ecce Homo and Dionysus Dithyrambs.
After attacking the epitome of contemporary culture in The Case
of Wagner, Nietzsche advances himself as an alternative model: Nietz
sche contra Wagner. A bookshop browser in Leipzig would certainly have
been surprised to glimpse such a title in a shop window: a universal
ly acknowledged and pedigreed genius contested by the strange and
unknown name "Nietzsche"; an apparent nobody - as it turns out ,
a retired professor of philology- defying the apogee of the age. A
brilliantly pathetic coupling.
What was to have been the first book of The Transvaluation of A ll
Values also names the author of this "Curse on Christianity" instead
of the issues at stake: The Antichrist. More accurately, the title per
forms a deixis towards the author, for his identity has been displaced
in a figure. A book envisioning the possibility of new modes of human
181
1 82 Nietzsche in Italy
valuation advertises the provenance of the vision instead of its obj ect .
The title points not to a work but to a man, who in turn is concealed
in a figure . Friedrich Nietzsche : The Antichrist.
Friedrich Nietzsche : Ecce Homo. At least stylistically this particular
equation seems justified, for the book is indeed an autobiography.
But what of the appellative here? As with another book from the end
of 1 888, Dionysus Dithyrambs, no less than with The Antichrist and Thus
Spoke Zarathustra , the writer introduces himself as a universal type,
as an archetypical, mythological event. But there is another ambiguity
imbedded in this announcement: the object of the deictic ecce. What
does it indicate? Not the homo it announces but a book (a book about
books , about books that define a man) . While The A ntichrist promises
us a book but names a man, here the title promises a man but gives
us a book.
Even the notebooks from 1887 to 1 888 bear witness to Nietzsche's
concern with the nature of his identity. With compulsive obsession
he designs and redesigns title pages to works he had written or would
never write, continually repeating his name upon them and copying
them into his notebooks . 1 The same notebooks contain dozens of
autobiographical sketches. In his last months of sanity Nietzsche begins
to sign his letters with still other names: Fromentin , Dionysus, the
Monster, the Crucified, the Phoenix, etc. As Colli notes ( 1 8 1 ; 1 7 5
o f this volume) , the truly new problematic o f Nietzsche's work in this
final year of sanity is autobiography. Significantly , the last statement
to which Nietzsche applies his pen is not philosophical but lyrical :
Dionysus Dithyrambs. 2
In 1 888 Nietzsche becomes die Sache selbst of his work. What is this
Sache and what is the significance of the fact that it is the ultimate
concern of his writing?
According to Giorgio Colli, what is manifested by Nietzsche's final
year of sanity is not a psychological aberration but a new mystical
wisdom ( 183- 1 84 ; 1 77 of this volume) . For Franco Rella it would
seem as if Nietzsche "were trying to gather around the permanence
and resistance of the 'I' of writing the fragments of a reality which
on a historical and personal level he felt to be increasingly precarious
and fleeting' (68) . Surely the question about the significance of the
1 See Nietzsche, Samtliche Werke, XII; Janz I, 534-6 1 8 ; and Rella 68.
2 According to Verrecchia, on January 8 , 1 889, Franz Overbeck found Nietzsche
working not on the galley proofs of Nietzsche Contra Wagner (as Overbeck reports it) ,
but on Dionysus Dithrambs, "the last work he sent to press" (Colli 190) .
T. Harrison: The Eternal Nowhere 183
3 For an opposite assessment of Nietzsche's final work, that is, for a statement of
its unoriginality, see Janz II, 5-7 and 16, and Colli 195-202.
1 84 Nietzsche in Italy
This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps not one of them is living
yet . . . how could I mistake myself for one of those for whom there are
ears even now? - Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some
are born posthumously.
The conditions under which I am understood, and then of necessity - I
know them too well. One must be honest in matters of the spirit to
the point of hardness before one can even endure my seriousness and
my passion. One must be skilled in living on mountains - seeing the
wretched ephemeral babble of politics and national self-seeking beneath
oneself. One must have become indifferent; one must never ask if th e
truth is useful o r if i t may. prove our undoing . . . . The predilection of
strength for questions for which no one today has the courage ; the
courage for the forbidden; the predestination to the labyrinth. An ex
perience of seven solitudes. Ne.w ears for new music. New eyes for what
·
is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have so far remained
mute . And the will to the economy of the grand style: keeping our
strength, our enthusiasm in harness . . . . Reverence for oneself; love of
oneself; unconditional freedom before oneself.
Well then! Such men alone are my readers, my right readers , my
predestined readers: what matter the rest? - The rest are merely
m ankind. - One must be above mankind in strength, in loftiness of
soul - in contempt (568-569; translation slightly revised) .
5 This is one of the implications of a line in the "Second Postscript' to The Case of
Wagner (644) : "To be sure, the possibility cannot be excluded that somewhere in
Europe there are still remnants of stronger generations, of typically untimely human
beings . . . .
"
6 On the semantic aptness of Nietzsche's original title, see Doueihi's article in this
volume.
T. Harrison: The Eternal Nowhere 1 89
world. Existential untimeliness is now not only the necessary but also
the sufficient cause of timeless achievement.
The same interchangeability and mutual contamination of the public
and private, unique and universal, concrete and theoretical is inscribed
in the above quoted preface t? The Antichrist. ls it not curious that
Nietzsche conceives of the book as a transvaluation of all values and
yet as a book "for the very few"? (Zarathustra: A Bookfor All and None.)
Proposing objective arguments, he underscores their subjective origin .
"Well then! Such men alone are my readers . . . what matter the rest?
The rest are merely mankind" -that is, the species the book is designed
to change .
B ut the obvious place to look for this undialectical conjunction of
the particular and the general is Ecce Homo. The word ecce in the title -
literally an imperative see there! but idiomatically here is, as in the Italian
ecco and the French voila - prepares us for a pure, unnameable par
ticular: just this one here and now, not what is only conceivable or
abstract and could equally well be named by a universal category. 7
B ut in Nietzsche's usage, the ecce that one expects to reveal a singular
particular (F. N.) points to nothing less than the generic essence homo .
Behold, .the title wants to say, a concrete embodiment of an abstrac
tion, an existential locus of essence. Perhaps no more apt a gesture
could be found to begin an autobiography paradoxically subtitled How
O ne Becomes What One Is. The how is in service of the what, existence
in service of essence, becoming in service of being. The topic addressed
b y Ecce Homo is at once "this extremely singular and concrete man,
F. N . (whom I will describe in the most minute detail so that you will
not mistake him for what he is not)" and "Man as the realization of
his highest potential, as an improvement on the most divine instance
of himself that he has ever invented- namely Christ." And, like Christ,
this new man, or overman, is more than existent. He is textual ,
timeless, and eternal . If he is an irrepeatable particular, he is also ,
like Christ, an exemplary divinity transcending all accidents and con
tingencies . Ecce Homo is the story of a concrete particular miraculously
uplifted to an abstract universal.
According to Giorgio Colli, during this latter half of 1 888, Nietz
sche becomes incapable of separating his life and his work. As he em
b arks on a "desperate strategy to attain a state in which might flow
7 On the ontological and semantic implications of deictic gestures to the "here and
now" see Hegel 149-60, Wittgenstein 16- 2 1 et passim , Heidegger 14-26; Agamben
28-37 and 43-5 1 .
1 90 Nietzsche in Italy
from him that literary, stylistic miracle in which form and content
would no longer be separable," "the thought of Nietzsche is identified
with the person Nietzsche" ( 1 83 and 199; see 1 76 of this volume) .
Nietzsche would now find the locus of his spiritual genius in his physical
state . As we know, most of the weight of the how in the phrase "how
one becomes what one is" falls on the discipline of organic matters :
alimentation, climate, sickness, and the reply of health . "I, an oppo
nent of vegetarianism from experience . . . cannot advise all more spin"tual
natures earnestly enough to abstain from alcohol. Water is sufficient . . . .
No meals between meals, no coffee: coffee spreads darkness (verdU.stert) .
Tea is wholesome only in the morning. A little but strong . . . All preju
dices come from the intestines," and so on (Ecce 695-96) . Philosophy
is understood as the spiritualization of a physical state, as he de
scribed it in Beyond Good and Evil and in Philosophy in the Tragic Age
of the Greeks. What is uncommon about this autobiographical account
is that, as Hollingdale writes (8), it takes Nietzschean psychology "to its
predestined end in physiology, in a dialectic of sickness and recovery
as the principle of his own development, and in a revaluation of the
little everyday things in the 'psychical' economy of mankind (they are
'beyond all comparison more serious things than anything that has
been taken seriously hitherto')."
Now, for perhaps the first time in his life, Nietzsche considers it
important to report in his letters about what delicious food he is eating
in Turin, about how he looks like a man of the world as he walks
through the streets , about the respect and deference he is shown by
passers-by, about his fashionable and expensive new overcoat. In three
or four letters he describes with rapture the broccoli and ossobuco he
eats at dinner. Nietzsche nourishes the conceit that he has mastered
every detail of his daily existence, boasting that "there are no more
coincidences in my life ,"8 that all difficult things are coming easily
and that everything is invariably turning out well . "I have just seen
myself in a mirror," he writes at a time when he was known to grimace
uncontrollably in the theatre and streets, "never have I looked so well."9
Suddenly Nietzsche makes the mistake of thinking that his immediate
experience is of actual importance. He reinterprets his ill-timed ex
istence as an instance of vital perfection .
8 Letter t o August Strindberg, 7 December, 1888 (Middleton 329). Compare the
letter to Overbeck dated Christmas, 1 888: "there are no coincidences any more: I
need only to think of somebody and a letter from him comes politely through the
door" (338).
9 Letter to Peter Gast, 30 October, 1 888 (Middleton 3 18).
T. Harrison: The Eternal Nowhere 191
Four of The Gay Science (§ 342) is entitled "Incipit tragiidia ." It ends, "Thus Zarathustra
began to go under." Nietzsche's gloss on this aphorism in his second preface to The
Gay Science adds a twist :" 'Incipit tragodia' we read at the end of this awesomely aweless
book. Beware! Something downright wicked and malicious is announced here: in
cipit parodia, no doubt." Section 1 53 of the same work locates the spirit of comedy
T. Harrison: The Eternal Nowhere 193
12 "I am," Zarathustra confesses to himself in the words of his shadow, "a wanderer
. . . always on my way, but without any goal, also without any home . . . With you
I haunted the remotest, coldest worlds like a ghost . . . . With you I strove to penetrate
everything that is forbidden, worst, remotest. . I overthrew all boundary .stones and
. .
i mages . . . . Trying . . . to find my home . . . trying this was my trial, it consumes me.
'Where is - my home?' I ask and search and have searched for it, but I have not
found it. 0 eternal everywhere, 0 eternal nowhere, 0 eternal - in vain!" (385-86)
C f. the aphorism with which Human, All Too Human originally ended (§ 638) :
"Whoever has attained intellectual freedom even to a small extent cannot feel but
as a wanderer . . . and not as a traveler toward some final destination; for that does
not exist . "
1 3 Cf. the essays o f Nancy and Ronell i n this volume .
T. Harrison: The Eternal Nowhere 195
Works Cited
199
200 Nietzsche in Ita(y
which the spirit knows how to confront and pass over with no less
absolute a power. Rather, death had become the very being of God.
In 1889 God is no longer simply dead, as he was or could have
seemed to be in The Gay Science. That is to say, the quality or state
of death are no longer simply attributed to his being, which would
bear them and perhaps ultimately even transmit to them in return
something of his divinity. Rather, death is in his being. (Nietzsche
had noted one day: "'Being' - we have no other representation of it
than 'living. ' - How, then, can something dead 'be'?")
In other words: the cry "God is dead" no longer allows itself to be
accompanied, in 1 889 , by that muffled and limiting echo , "At bot
tom, only the moral God has passed away." For this echo accused
the expression "God is dead" of being a metaphor, and authorized
the thought of another life of God or of another living God, beyond
morality. At present, however, God is truly dead, his being is abol
ished. And that is why there is no longer any voice to announce this
predication "God is dead," for there is no longer any subject to whom
a predicate can be attributed ("Who then would be the subject of whom
it is here predicated that he is now, here, dead?" - Adorno) . Rather,
there is God "himself," who does not say his own death (no one can) .
On the contrary, he proffers his own identity, with a mad, gaping,
and progressively paralyzed voice - for this identity no longer is. No
longer does one hear a sentence saying something (that God is dead),
one hears someone no longer able to say himself, for he no longer
is, and he disappears in his choked voice .
When the madman cried out, "God is dead!" one heard someone's
voice, with his tone and accent. It was the voice of Nietzsche, author
of The Gay Science- and, all told, it was also the poetic and embellished
voice of Prince Vogelfrei. But here one no longer hears the voice
of anyone. It is not an anonymous voice. It is still the voice of"Nietz
sche," but it pronounces nothing anymore but the effacement and
dispersion of this name, it pronounces nothing but the drift and
delirium of its own provenance and emission . It no longer speaks ,
it vainly shapes articulations (sounds, names) which might procure
for it the point from which a word can be spoken . It is too late, it
has lost the power of speech, even the possibility of exper:iencing it
as unattainable. No longer, by speaking, can it expose itself to the
test oflanguage and the word, nor, as a consequence, to that of silence.
It unravels a language beyond or behind language itself, where names
are infinitely interchanged, no longer naming anything or anyone,
Nancy: Dei Paralysis Progressiva 201
over the operation of the self-relation, which would therefore not oc
cur before him. In effect, it is nothing but the logic of the self-relation
taken to its most rigorous extreme. At this extreme it turns out that
the Subject is identical to the null moment required by its produc
tion, that necessary and impossible moment of self-production where
no "itself " is available, or ever w'ill be- that moment of pure and simple
death . "I am God'' means "I am dead,'' and this new statement does
not mean that the I has lost its living quality; it means that the I never
had this quality, and that it never will have it. It means that the self
constitution of the self-relation is identical to death, or that it does
not occur except as a death which does not occur unexpectedly to
something living, but is only death preceding itself infinitely. For on
ly death is really capable of such preceding. And yet at the same time
it reveals that this precession - the ontological self-precession con
stitutive of the Subject- is not and cannot be anything but a paralysis .
The Self is an ontological paralysis, the truth of which could be ar
ticulated in this way: on(y death is self-productive, but thus produces nothing.
This truth was already at work when Descartes understood that
the ego sum also belongs to madness. It was the tenebrous truth of
the blind evidence from which the cogito issues. It was perhaps on ac
count of this truth that Hegel once thought he was going mad. It was
through it that God, less than a century later, entered into the paralysis
progressiva of Nietzsche .
What Nietzsche would have become aware of in Turin, by a sort
of final implosion of the C artesian evidence, or by a last convulsion
of the "life that preserves itself in death itself," is that "one can die
of immortality," as he himself had written. In other words: the Sub
j ect is nothing but death, that is, nothing but his death . But this does
not involve a death of the Subject. It involves this: that, in the ab
solute constitution of the self-relation, subjectivity does not attain or
present anything but its own absence. Yet this absence is so much
its own that it is not an absence at all. That is to say, it is not the default
of the presence of something or someone who might have been there
before; it is the disappearance of a presence in the very process of
its presentation. The subject, says Hegel, is "the being . . . that does
not have mediation outside itself, but is this mediation itself." Now,
death is mediation. In death and as death, the subject actualizes and
presents itself: immobilized before having begun to budge; paralyzed;
its glance fixed, and fixed on nothing that is presented to it but
the unreality of its presence ("death," says Hegel again , "if that is the
2 06 Nietzsche in Italy
way we want to call such unreality . . ."). The subject attends its own
burial - and attends it twice, for in truth this blocked epiphany repeats
itself unendingly and vacuously.
"I am God" is the utterance of such knowledge, and the word "God"
operates the de-nomination of the Subject: it has no name, it traverses
history blowing all names, leading all the children of God , along with
itself, back to the abyss of the heavens. Paralysis freezes on Nietz.
sche's face the absent traits of him no longer inscribed by anything
anywhere, who leaves no trace (the last letters are only a way of cover
ing over, and then of effacing, the traces of the person named Nietz
sche), and who , instead of being taken away by death, takes away
from death, beforehand, its power of reaching him, for he is already
no longer. Death itself, eleven years later, will be insignificant. It will
not come to cut the course of Nietzsche's life . It will only confirm that
which is the case with God: the absolute and void knowledge of self
in the complete night in which the Subject produces itself, that is to
say, paralyzes itself.
It is impossible to imagine the cold horror that must have been,
for eleven years, the confrontation between the Self and the efface
ment of all inscription .
But nor is it possible to imagine a strange gaiety, and even a shim
mering joy, not in this night but next to it, as an infinitesimal gleam
in the corner of Nietzsche's eye. This is the gaiety which animates
most of the Turinese letters - for example, in the last one to Burck
hardt, after he has designated himself God the Creator: "I salute
the Immortals. M . Daudet belongs to the quarantd' - and this is the
joy of the note to Peter Gast:
To my maestro Pietro. Sing me a new song: the world is tranifigured and all
the heavens rt;foice. The Crucified.
Whence comes this joy, sung with the words and cheerfulness of
the psalmist? What reason have the heavens for rejoicing? Precisely
because God has abandoned them to fix himself in the thick darkness
of the Subject. The heavens with no Self, with no Supreme Being,
are the heavens delivered from the necessity of subjectivity, that is
to say, from the self-production and self-positing of being. Otherwise
put - and this is why the worldis transfigured - they are heavens opened
onto their new truth. No longer the abode of the world's support ,
they are the free spacing in which the world is cast without reason,
as if by the game of a child . This child is still a god - pais paizon - the
child-god of Heraclitus, "Zeus the big child of the worlds," as Nietz
sche called him.
Nancy: Dei Paralysis Progressiva 207
But the child-god is not God, not even a small god. He is the play
of the world, and being is not its subject. And this game is no game :
it is the mittance of the world in the space of a freedom that disengages
it from the paralyzing compulsion of the Self, but engages it at the
same time in an obligation: that of "singing a new song." Nietzsche
does not sing this song, he tells others to sing it. He says it laughing
beside his madness, laughing at it and at God paralyzed - a silent
laughter turned towards the rejoicing heavens .
To him the heavens are no longer the heaven one reaches after pass
ing through death. Here, too , death shrinks into insignificance, now
no longer because it precedes itself in paralysis, but because the life
which will attain it, which is always already in the process of attain
ing it, does not, in it, touch on the moment of its mediation. This
life does not have to mediq.te itself in order to appropriate its own
substance in the form of a subject. It simply exposes itself to its end,
just as it has been exposed to the space of the play of the world. Its
end is a part of this game; in its space it inscribes the trace of a name -
here, that of Friedrich Nietzsche - in the same way that each time,
with each name of history, a singular trace, a finitude whose limit
puts into play each time anew the whole spacing of the world, in
scribes itself. Each name, each time that its subject is progressively
paralyzed, discloses again, instantaneously, the whole space of the
world; or else it discloses, that is , inscribes, a new spacing. The spac
ing of a bountiful community, whose history does not consist in ac
complishing an end, but in letting new names, and new songs, arise
unendingly.
As Nietzsche wished to read it, against the Christian reading (and
perhaps against all possible readings of this text), in the Gospels, "death
is not a bridge, not a passage," for "the Kingdom of God" is not
something that one has to wait for; it has no yesterday and no day
after tomorrow. It does not arrive in a "thousand years'' - it is the
experience of a heart: it exists everywhere, it exists nowhere . . . . Death
therefore is indeed the end, and in this sense Nietzsche's jubilation pro
nounces nothing but his paralysis. But for this paralysis the end is
endless: it fixes the subject's regard on the eternity of its nothingness.
While Nietzsche's "heart" is filled with the cheer of this kingdom
delivered from God, where all beings, like children, are simply given
life.
209
2 10 Nietzsche in Italy
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The A ntichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, tr. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Penguin Books, 1983) 629-30. In this section Nietzsche develops and
comments on the fable of creation. He represents the creation of man as a form of
divertissement of God, a divertissement that is designed to liberate him from his boredom .
Man, however, turns out to be a threatening rival for the Creator; his rivalry
necessitates the Fall and subsequently, for Nietzsche, the original sin and the philology
it produces. This Nietzschean problematic of the Fall is close to the one developed
by Pascal in the Penstfes and especially in the fragments on the Divertissement. I treat
this question in a forthcoming essay, to appear in Diacritics.
2 12 Nietzsche in ltary
[ erholte] from being God . . . He had made everything too beautiful. The
devil is merely the leisure of God on that seventh day [Der Teufel ist
bloss der Mussiggang Gottes an Jenem siebentem Tage] . (3 1 1 )
This fable re-writes the story of Creation in terms of the transforma
tion and the transfiguration of the Creator into an actor, in terms
of the effect of the creation on the Creator. God is the paradigm of
the negative effects of creation-writing , for God returns, after having
observed and deciphered his masterpiece, in order to disturb the order
he has just established. God is transformed and transfigured into his
irreducible other by his own creation. It is precisely this transfigura
tion that sets the world in motion. God did not effectively create the
world until he initiated a displacement of his own nature, of his own
figure, an initiation that signifies his own death to the extent that
he had to take on the role of his other. Being God, being the Chris
tian God, in this Nietzschean perspective, means to become the devil
out of boredom , out of vanity . "How one becomes what one is," in
a theological context, is a maxim implying the necessity of misrecogni
tion and of defiguration. God has to overcome and to disturb the
beauty of his own creation in order for him to be God ; he has to sup
plement it with an element that would distinguish this beauty from
himself so that he may be recognized as God. This supplementarity
constitutive of God is introduced by Nietzsche in the form of reading,
in the form of contemplation of a written text.
In the Antichrist, where we find a more detailed version of this fable,
Nietzsche explains what he means by theology, what the theological
tone represents: "Another sign of the theologian is his incapacity for
philology. What is here meant by philology is, in a very broad sense,
the art of reading well - of reading facts without falsifying them by
interpretation, without losing caution, patience, delicacy, in the desire
to understand. Philology as ephexis in interpretation - whether it is a
matter of books, the news in a paper, destinies, or weather condi
tions, not to speak of the 'salvation of the soul .'"5 The theologian in
terprets the story of creation in the same way God interpreted it. He
5 The Portable Nietzsche 635. The philology of Christianity is the "art of reading bad
ly'' (Daybreak 49) . The philology that is demanded by Nietzsche is "that venerable
art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to
become still, to become slow - it is a goldsmith's art and connoisseurship of the word
which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does
not achieve it lento" (Daybreak 5). The whole question of the ternpo of reading and writing
in Nietzsche is closely related to that of tonality. Reading, in this perspective, is an
expansive operation that respects the word and its working. We will encounter one
version of this expansive nature of reading later on in this essay.
Doueihi: Nietzsche, Dio a Torin o 2 1 3
7 The choice of place and climate is included by Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, under
the heading of recuperation and leisure: "Now that the effects of climate and weather
are familiar to me from long experience and I take readings from myself as from
a very subtle and reliable instrument - and even during a very short journey, say,
from Turin to Milan, my system registers the change in humidity- I reflect with
horror on the dismal fact that my life, except for the last ten years, the years when
my life was in peril, was spent entirely in the wrong places that were nothing short
offorbidden to me" (24 1 ) . In his letters, Nietzsche constantly complains about the
unfavorfable effects of cities like Rome, . Nice, Genoa, etc.
Doueihi: Nietzsche, Dio a Torino 215
"The leisure of a god walking along the Po river'' - the i mage ry usec
by Nietzsche to describe the completion of the book which was to be
entitled A Psychologist's Idleness or Leisure (Milssiggang) - recalls th(
theological fable we discussed earlier.9 Writing and re-writing, as wel
as reading one's own books, replace here the creation of the work
and the transformation and transfiguration of God into the devil. Thi
8 In her biography of Nietzsche, his sister wrote: "During this period [ 1 888- 1 889
he [Nietzsche] wrote a few pages in which are mixed, in some strange fantasy, th•
legend of Dionysus Zagreus, the Gospel Passion and some of his contemporaries
the god, torn apart by his en�mies, wanders around, resuscitated, along the Pc
river. . . . " It is interesting to note here that Nietzsche's sister, in her description o
her brother, combines the vision of Dionysus torn into p ieces with the reference tc
- Nietzsche's own text in Ecce Homo.
9 It was at the suggestion of Peter Gast that Nietzsche changed the title of the boo]
to the Twilight of the Idols. In his letter to Nietzsche , Gast comments in the followin1
way on leisure: "The title , A Psychologist's Leisure, sounds too unassuming to me whe1
I think how it might impress other people: you have driven your artillery on th
highest mountains, you have such guns as have never yet existed, and you nee1
only shoot blindly to inspire terror all around. The stride [ Gang] of a giant, whicl
makes the mountains shake to their foundation, is no longer leisure [Mussiggang]
( The Portable Nietzsche 464) . Even though Nietzsche agreed to change the title, h
might have replied to Gast by saying: "The worst readers of aphorisms are the author'
friends if they are intent on guessing back from the general to the particular instanc
to which the aphorism owes its origin; for with such pot-peeking they reduce th
author's whole effort to nothing; so that they deservedly gain, not philosophic outloo
or instruction, but- at best, or at worst- nothing more than the satisfaction ofvulga
curiosity" ( The Portable Nietzsche 65). The original title, as my essay shows, was perhai:
a more appropriate one.
2 16 Nietzsche in Italy
t o make it possible for his gifted readers , for those who are armed
with the "most select ears" to detect his subterranean message. The
Deus absconditus of Pascal , and for Nietzsche , of all Christianity, is
necessarily hidden for he lacks the intelligence and the words to reveal
himself in all his glory. This opposition between two styles, between
a style and a plurality of styles, constitutes for Nietzsche the struc
ture of opposition between the Crucified and Dionysus, an opposi
tion that signs Ecce Homo.
The Crucified represents for Nietzsche a representation that negates
life in its most tragic manifestation. "The God on the cross is a curse
on life , a pointer to seek redemption from it; Dionysus cut to pieces
is a promise of life; it is eternally reborn and comes back from
destruction."12 We remember that Dionysus receives the fatal blow
at the moment he looks upon his own image , apparently distorted
by the surface of the mirror. Dionysus, at the moment of his death,
is caught in the trap of his own image, caught in the trap of a foggy
mirror, a mirror that fails to return a faithful image but that never
theless makes possible his destruction . In the Neoplatonic tradition ,
Dionysus is cut to pieces because he is attached to his own physical
appearance. For Nietzsche, however, Dionysus cut to pieces represents
an alternative to the Crucified and to the Eucharist that celebrates
his death and transfiguration. The plurality and the proliferation of
Dionysus are opposed to the unique repetition of the experience of
the Crucified. Nietzsche reproduces this opposition in a variety of
ways, most importantly for us here in terms of water and alcohol .
"I, an opponent of vegetarianism from experience, just like Richard
Wagner, who converted me, cannot advise all more spiritual natures
e arnestly enough to abstain entirely from alcohol. Water is sufficient.
I prefer towns in which opportunities abound for dipping from run
ning wells (Nizza, Turin , Sils) ; a small glass accompanies me like
a dog. In vino veritas. It seems that here, too , I am at odds with all
the world about the concept of 'truth' - in my case, the spirit moves
over water" (239) . 1 3 Water is sufficient because it designates a specific
method of reading that is appropriate to Nietzsche's styles :
12 The Portable Nietzsche 459.
13 In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche refers to himself and to his books in terms of water or
as sea animals: "Ultimately, I myself was this sea animal: almost every sentence in
this book [Daybreak] was first thought, caught among that jumble of rocks near Genoa
where I was alone and still had secrets with the sea"(290). In Zarathustra, man is defined
as a stream: a polluted stream without becoming unclean. "Behold, I teach you the
overman: he is this sea; in him your great contem p t can go under" ( The Portable Nietz
sche 1 25).
2 1 8 Nietzsche in Italy
mann (New York: Random House, 1967). Basic Writings (hereafter B WN) also in
cludes The Birth of Tragedy (B7); Beyond Good and Evil (BCE); On the Genealogy ofMorals
( GM); The Case of Wagner (CUI).
2 19
2 20 Nietzsche in Italy
stages, all of which unfold the course of Platonism until its final over
turning by Nietzsche himself. The last stage describes a cultural rebirth
after the completed trajectory of Western nihilism:
The true world- we have abolished. What world has remained? The
apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished
the apparent one! (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest
error; high point of humanity ; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA) . 3
The word incipit, which both ends this history of nihilism and over
comes its finality, marks the far edge of Nietzsche's thinking. At this
edge, or loco torinese, ends and end-points are transcended, transformed
into higher beginnings, metamorphosized into a child, to recall
Zarathustra's allegory. 4 We must look to the innermost logic of the
will to power to find the reasons for this metamorphoses of ends into
new initiations . Nietzsche often refers to that logic as the law of
overcommg:
And life itself confided this secret to me. "Behold ," it said, "I am that
which must always overcome itself! . . . Only where there is life is there also
will; not will to life - thus I teach you- but will to power. " (Zarathustra,
"On Self Overcoming," PN 2 27)
Viking Press, 1 967) 486 . The Portable Nietzsche, (hereafter PN) also includes Thus
Spoke Zarathustra (Z) ; Nietzsche Contra Wagner (NC W); selections from Nietsche's other
works and letters.
• "But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do? Why
must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting,
a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred 'Yes.'
For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred 'Yes' is needed: the spirit now wills
his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world"
(PN 1 39) .
R.P. Harrison: Nietzsche in Turin 221
ly, by such biographers as Podach, Verrecchia and Janz. Heidegger, in his customary
fashion, brackets altogether the biographical dimension of the thinker and chooses
to discuss those fragments which show the "remarkable lucidity" of Nietzsche short-
1 y before he goes mad. Derrida writes about la politique du nom propre but neglects
to analyze the famous mad letter to Burckhardt, in which Nietzsche declares, "at
bottom I am every name in history." Michel Foucault, another extreme reader of
Nietzsche, sets up a radical opposition between his creative thinking and his madness ,
R . P. Harrison: Nietzsche in Turin 223
Never have I known anything remotely like these months from the
beginning of September until now. The most amazing tasks as easy
as a game; my health , like the weather, coming up every day with
boundless brilliance and certainty. I cannot tell you how much has been
finished - everything!
The world will be standing on its head for the next few years; since
the old God has abdicated, I shall rule the world from now on. 7
At the time this letter was written, the funeral of Prince von Carignano
took place in Turin, an event Nietzsche refers to in other letters. As
we know, it was not the only funeral to attract his attention . There
was also the funeral of Count Robilant . In the letter written to
Burckhardt after the collapse , Nietzsche indicates that he imagined
his own burial in the solemn procession for Robilant that passed under
his window. In the letter to Fuchs quoted above he does not mention
funerals as such, except perhaps obliquely, where it is now God's
funeral ritualized by Nietzsche's personal triumph: "Since the old God
has abdicated, I shall rule the world from now on." But the incipit
Nietzsche which buries the old God seems actually to translate Nietz
sche's own finality when he writes to Fuchs: "I cannot tell you how
much has been finished- everything!" Nietzsche announces this con
summation in terms of a triumphant breakthrough beyond the finality
of that which is over. The end has been overcome and now gives way
to the ultimate: "I shall rule the world from now on." This utterance
comes from the realm of the posthumous, from the realm of Turin .
importantly, they are both gods whose death liberates the principle
of their rebirth or resurrection.
At the prophetic extremity of Ecce Homo Nietzsche declares that he
is already dead as his father, while as his mother he still lives on, on
his own credit, as perhaps a mere prejudice . Further on in the text
he calls Turin his "proven place." In what sense was it his proven place?
"I go everywhere in my student's coat, and here and there slap
somebody on the shoulder and say, Siamo contenti? Sono dio, io ho fatto
questa caricatura." This madness speaks Italian, assuredly, but it speaks
yet another language: "I have had C aiphas put in fetters. Also , last
year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn out man
ner." It also speaks an ultimate language: "This fall I was blinded as
little as possible when I twice witnessed my own funeral, first as Count
Robilant (no, that is my son, insofar as I am Carlo Alberto, unfaithful
to my nature) but Antonelli I was myself." But even the ultimate
language leaves something out: "The rest is for Frau Cosima -
Ariadne - from time to time there is magic" (PN 685).
The rest remains unproven in the proven place of Turin, where
Nietzsche sees signs everywhere that he has arisen from his own burial,
that he lives posthumously in this city of imperial funerals . Here is
the man, prophet, or culture critic who reads the signs with another
vision. "Signs and wonders ," he writes at the end of a letter to Peter
Gast on December 1 , 1888 , "Greetings from the Phoenix."
David Farrell Krell
the text. For example, the riddle of an entire section - the third sec
tion of Part One, "Why I Am So Wise" - that only recently has been
restored to the form that Nietzsche himself, on the eve of his collapse,
devised for it. My question. is whether this textual riddle (or confu
sion) affects three otherwise compelling interpretations of Ecce, Homo,
those of Rodolphe Gasche, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Klossowski. 1
O n December 2 9 , 1888 , from Turin , Nietzsche mailed to his
publisher G. C . Naumann a large packet of corrections for the
manuscript of Ecce Homo. Among them was an entirely recast section
3 of Part One, which Nietzsche instructed Naumann to insert in place
of the one then in his possession . The revised section came to light
in July of 1 969 among the papers of Heinrich Koselitz (Peter Gast)
in the Nietzsche collection of the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar.
• Copyright David Farrell Krell. We gratefully acknowledge David Wood and the
229
2 30 Nietzsche in Italy
3 See 6: 267-69; for further details on the textual history, see 1 4: 460-62 and 472-74.
Krell: Consultations with the Paternal Shadow 233
The fortune of my existence, perhaps its very singularity, lies in its fatali
ty: I have - to put it in the form of a riddle- as my father already died,
as my mother I am still alive and am growing old. This double prov
enance, from the highest and the lowest rungs on the ladder of life,
as it were, simultaneously &cadent and commencement - this , if anything,
accounts for that neutrality, that freedom from all bias in relation to
the entire problem of life , which perhaps distinguishes me . . . I know
both, I am both . (VI, 264)
Krell: Consultations with the Paternal Shadow 235
grave to fetch the young son back to his bosom, back to the origins
of all music. - But that is to anticipate. Indeed, nothing about the
p aternal shadow seems to follow in good order, generation upon
generation ; everything seems to anticipate and presuppose a long
lineage. On both sides.
To hear with a new ear the names of Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,
who is himself dead, and whose very signature is now a mark of death -
that is the task Jacques Derrida assigns himself in "La logique de la
v ivante." To read with a new eye the "thanatography" of Nietzsche's
"biography," to take up again the relation of the "I," writing and death
as developed in chapter seven of La voix et le phinomene. Yet the pres- .
ent investigations of the logic of the living are less a logic than a gloss
o n Glas, a logic of the knell, an obsequy. Derrida's is an essay on ob
sequence. It is Nietzsche's fatality to be both neutral (neither-nor) and
doubling (both-and) , to be between the dead and the living, between
le (pere) mort and la (mere) vivante, to be both death, la mort, and life,
la vie, during that stretch of time that he himself, Nietzsche, Friedrich,
is (was) alive, le vivant. Obsequence turns out to be an enigmatic sort
of sequentiality, not of generation upon generation , but of first-person
existences. Note in the following passage the variety of possible senses
and sequences of the je suis, "I am" and "I follow" :
En tant que je suis mon pere , je suis mort , je suis le mort et je suis la
mort. En tant que je suis ma mere, je suis la vie qui persevere , le vi
vant , la vivante. Je suis mon pere, ma mere et moi, mon fils et moi ,
l a mort et la vie, l e mort et l a vivante, etc. 4
Thus Derrida spins out the riddle into a complex fable of death
and living-on, survivance and ob-sequence. And yet there is a tendency
(at least , I believe there is, although I am unsure) in Derrida's fable
! In L 'oreille de l'autre 28; in Otobiographies 62.
2 38 Nietzsche in Italy
o f the large country house that looked out over the church and the
adj acent cemetery: !ch bin als P.ftanze nahe dem Gottesacker, als Mensch
in einem Pfarrhaus geboren another doubling here, except that if as a
-
I open the window and the tomb is opened: I open the tomb of my father,
who then looks for me in the church. My dead father searches me out
and carries me off because I am trying to see my dead father [or: try
ing to see my father dead - a voir mon pere mort] . I am dead, the father
of myself, I suppress my self in order to reawaken in the midst of music.
My dead father makes me hear the music . (257)
Seuil, 1972] 3 0 1 n . ) cites Freud's reference to such inversion in the Wolfman case :
"The phantasm of a second birth was thus here an abbreviated and bowdlerized ver
sion of phantasms involving homosexual desire. . . . The rending of the veil is analogous
t o the opening of the eyes, to the opening of the window . . . . To be born of his father,
. . . to give him a child at the cost of his own virility, . . . homosexuality here fim;ls
its supreme and most intimate expression ." See Freud, Studienausgabe (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, 1 982) VIII: 23 1 .
8 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France,
1962) 24 and 2 14 .
2 42 Nietzsche in Italy
sign in Nietzsche's destiny; the sign of Chaos, the shadow of the mourn
ing mother, mourning her spouse, mourning Little Joseph, mourning
Friedrich, is finally dispersed in what Klossowski calls "automater
nity" : "Yet in order to rediscover life itself, Nietzsche, insofar as he
is his own mother, becomes the child anew (s'enfante a nouveau) and
becomes his own creature" (260). Hence "the necessity to be born to
himself from himself and thereby his tendency to restore himself to
a double presence, feminine and virile . . ." (274) .
And yet this elevation of the paternal shadow and expulsion of the
living mother ought to give us pause. Such "automaternity," such
taking-oneself-in-hand: Wie? Und dies ware nicht - circulus vitiosus deus?9
The apparent restoration of what Klossowski here calls a "double
presence" and "double affirmation" (after Deleuze) may well be no
more than the dream of the "perfect object," the dream of the
metaphysics (and morals) of presence. Such restoration would forget
what it most needs to remember: that Nietzsche's great good luck is
his fatality. Automaternity fares no better than autobiography.
Ecce Homo - an autobiography? automaternity? shadow?
Autobiography doubles up with absences, not presences, and i s
thanatography. I f Nietzsche, Friedrich, i s once again with child, is
once again himself a child, that child will turn out to be otherwise .
It will be Little Joseph. Doubling up. In the end there will be nothing
left for that child -J osephchen, Herzensfritz - but fatal consultation
with the paternal shadow, fatal embrace of the mother: the riddle of
an origin that never stops doubling, sundering, receding into the
infinite distance of all music.
9 jenseits von Gut and Bose 56 (V, 75).
Part IV
The Italian Heritage
Jejfrey Schnapp
247
2 48 Nietzsche in Italy
going up past pines with a magnificent view of the sea; in the afternoon, whenever
my health permitted it, I walked around the whole bay from Santa Margherita all
the way to Portofino . . . . It was on these two walks that the whole of Zarathustra I
occurred to me, and especially Zarathustra himself as a type: rather, he overtook me"
(Ecce Homo Z . 1 ; [Basic Writings 753-54]).
• "To Georg Brandes," Turin , 20 November, 1888. Cited from Nietzsche: A Seif-portrait
from His Letters, ed. and tr. Peter Fuss and Henry Shapiro (Cambridge, Mass . : Har
vard University Press, 1 97 1 ) 1 3 2 .
Schnapp: Nietzsche's Italian Style 249
5 "Whoever has a soul that craves to have experienced the whole range of values
and desiderata to date , and to have sailed around the coasts of this ideal 'mediterra
nean' . . . needs one thing above everything else: the great health - that one does not
merely have but also acquires continually . . . . And now, after we have long been on
our way in this manner, we argonauts of the ideal . . . - it will seem to us as if, as
a reward, we now confronted an as yet undiscovered country whose boundaries
nobody has surveyed yet" ( The Gay Science 38,2). Cited from The Gay Science, ed. and
tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974) 346 .
6 "To Malwida von Meysenbug," Sils-Maria, 24 September, 1886 (Nietzsche: A Seif
Portrait from His Letters 92).
1 Ecce Homo W. 1 (Basic Writings 773); The Case of Wagner 5 (Basic Writings 622) and
In all likelihood we are dealing here with a madman who shall not leave
a lasting mark. He is perhaps a philosopher in fashion , but it is worth
recalling that "fashion is the sister of Death." The positive science o f
the Marxs, Spencers and Novicovs finds i n the majestic progress of the
great river of humanity the vision of a future which bears no
resemblance whatsoever to that imagined by Friedrich Nietzsche. I I
" On D'Annunzio's transformation of Nietzsche's text see Paolo Valesio's essay "The
Beautiful Lie: Heroic Individuality and Fascism," in Reconstructing Individualism, eds.
Thomas A. Heller, Morton Sosna, David E. Wellbery ( Stanford: Stanford Univer
sity Press, 1986) 163- 1 8 3 .
9 L a Divina Commedia: Paradiso 25. 7 .
durevole impronta; sara forse un filosofo alla moda, la quale non bisogna dimen
ticarlo , e sorella della morte; la scienza positiva coi Marx, cogli Spencer, coi Novicow
scorge nel grandioso procedere dell'immenso fiume dell'umanita ben altro avvenire
che quello immaginato <la F. Nietzsche." From "II pensiero italiano," Gazzetta Let
teraria (February 1894); quoted from Piga, Il mito del superuomo 77; (an identical ver
sion of Morselli's article had appeared somewhat earlier in the 1 894 issue of Pensiero
Italiano) . In his identification of fashion with death , Morselli alludes to Giacomo
Leopardi's "Dialogo della moda e della morte," which figures among the Operette moralz).
12 " Noi tendiamo l'orecchio alla voce del magnanimo Zarathustra, o Cenobiarca;
e prepariamo nell'arte con sicura fede l'avvento dell' Ubermensch , de! Superuomo" (Il
triorifo delta morte [Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1983] 54).
252 Nietzsche in Italy
quillo rigore l'artefice della ·decadenza e di sceverare gli innumerevoli elementi che
concorrono a farlo si complesso , gli sl lancia addosso con tanta ira e gli rimprovera
cos! aspramente la 'corruzione' di cui quegli e irresponsabile?
Accuse, rampogne, ironie di ta! genere sono omai vanissime e indegne, specialmente
d'un filosofo, anche se il filosofo s'e messo 'fuori de! suo tempo' " (Pagine dispers.e
585-86) .
1 8 " [In D'Annunzio] il drama nicciano si capovolge, si svirilizza e s'immeschinisce"
(Carlo Salinari, Miti e coscienza del decadentismo italiano: D'Annunzio, Pascoli, Fogazzaro
e Pirandello [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960] 81).
2 54 Nietzsche in Italy
gravitas of the grand style, disrupting the decent and comely order
of thought and feeling.
In addition to the disfiguring and excessively Germanic character
of this rhetorical figure, D'Annunzio would also seem to suggest that
its repeated and injudicious use ends up reversing the intended
rhetorical effect. Although it p�etends to interpose a distance between
speaker and interlocutor, elevating the status of the former while lower
ing that of the latter, sarcasm, in D'Annunzio's view, readily becomes
a trope of engagement and even of an engagement on the verge of hysteria.
So adopting sarcasm's logic of verbal violence and revenge, the
philosopher - even a philosopher who , like Nietzsche, has "raised
himself out of our time" - is likely to find himself not elevated but
lowered, dragged down into the undignified business of our time : the
business of ressentiment. The critic of corruption is thus himself cor
rupted, and even the philosopher's style is not spared. D'Annunzio
writes: "there is something frenetic about this strange libel ( The Case
of Wagner) : in the disordered succession of its ideas, the syntactical
incoherence of its sentences , the fury of its invective . "22
In place of the "descending'' movement of sarcasm, D'Annunzio
will institute the "ascensional" movement of allegory. Not the didac
tic and parabolic allegory of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra; rather,
something at once more Platonizing and Dantean. Dannunzian
allegory, as displayed, for instance, in an avowedly Nietzschean text
like Le vergini delle rocce (or The Maidens of the Rocks) , published in 1 895,
functions as a kind of literary dream-work: aiming at the elaboration
of conscious dreams by means of the intensification (or condensation)
and expansion (or displacement) of the narrative or historical present.
It operates on the "temporal" plane by projecting the narrative or
historical present forward in time, like the gaze of the far-sighted
Zarathustra, towards an apocalyptic future , a silence, which lies just
beyond the confines of the text . And, reciprocally, it makes it possi
ble for certain heroic moments and texts from the Italian and ancient
p ast to be reinscribed and reinvested with meaning in the historical
or narrative present.
Dannunzian allegory functions instead as a principle of poesis in
asmuch as it provides the mechanism for raising up the commonplace
into a transfigured poetic realm: a superior linguistic and physical
2 2 " C'e qualcosa di frenetico in questo bizzarro libello : nella successione disordinata
delle idee, nella incoerenza sintattica delle frasi, nella furia dell'invettiva" (Pagine disperse
585) .
2 56 Nietzsche in Italy
order inhabited by superior beings, where Beauty and the Ideal are
j oined in a corporeal wedlock. Beyond irony and laughter , beyond
the rhetorical ruses of ressentiment, this transfigured and liminal world
is at once lyrical, heroic and oneiric. It is made up of extreme, even
h ypertrophic, sensual states; states in which the will - projected out
into the temporal unfurling of syntax- continuously expands or con
tracts in dialogue with the imperatives of nature and biology.
In The Maidens of the Rocks, the first of the three projected novels
which were to make up the Romanzi del Giglio (or Romances of the Lily),
the above description applies on both the text's molar and molecular
levels. The narrative, closely modeled after the Nietzschean scheme
of"The Beast Who Wills," is best described as a "drama of progenera
tion" in which the protagonist and narrator , Claudio Cantelmo , is
called upon to determine the future trajectory of a race of Renaissance
heroes of which he is the sole nineteenth century inheritor. Claudio,
called "lo Sposo" (in order to evoke the husband of the Song of Songs) ,
must select as his bride one of three virgin princesses, the last bearers
of the . decaying seed of another aristocratic family, the Capece
Montagas . Each of the three represents for him a separate universe
of physical and supraphysical possibilities. Massimilla, the eldest of
the sisters, unveils the temptations of an otherworldly eros and of
mystical ascent . Anatolia, an Antigone figure, promises this-worldly
potency and life-force , a life projecting itself beyond the illusion of
death into a superior realm of existence . And Violante, the youngest,
shadows forth "the ideal beauty which all earthly peoples have sought
confusedly from the beginning of time, and which artificers have in
voked in poems , in symphonies, in canvas and in clay. Everything
in her and about her is a sign."23
Much of D'Annunzio's text consists of Claudio's exploration of the
alternative universes opened up by the three princesses. The choice
is urgent because of a doubly imminent threat (which is none other
than that defined in "The Beast Who Wills") : the threat posed by a
"wind" of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois "barbarism" sweeping the city
of Rome, and the threat that a magnificent race of heroes may soon
be extinguished - the aristocratic race of the Cantelmos and Capece
Montagas. To the first corresponds the decadent backdrop against
which Claudio's mission is first proclaimed: a contemporary Rome
of "the pickaxe , the trowel and bad faith ," of "enormous and empty
cages, riddled with rectangul� holes, surmounted by artificial cor
nices, encrusted with opprobrious stucco and . . [built] upon rubbish
.
filled foundations ."24 Stripped of all genuine style , artifice and art,
this city is populated by an undifferentiated Medusa-like mob which
threatens at every moment to engulf the "ancient and legitimate regal
lineages" within its muddy egalitarian vortex. 25 In the absence of a
king, a rightful heir to sit upon its throne, the city is ruled by a master
class of money-lenders and merchants:
Such, in fact, were the new. masters of that Rome which dreamers and
prophets, intoxicated with the ardent exaltation of so much spilled Latin
blood, had likened to the bow of Ulysses . . . . They busied themselves
with selling, barratry, lawmaking and setting traps, no one making any
more allusion to the murderous bow. And in truth it did not seem likely
that the cry might rise which should cast them suddenly into fe ar "O ,
Strange Life of an Epithet (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979).
Schnapp: Nietzsche's Italian Style 259
who will drive the herd of suitors out of Ithaca, the legitimate heir
to Rome's empty throne .
Despite this future promise, however, the enclosed garden is not
gone beyond. Like every one of D'Annunzio's Nietzschean texts, The
Maidens ef the Rocks ends in an aporia; a blockage which leaves us with
but a foretaste of the garden's inseminative and disseminative fruit
fulness . The drama of progeneration is interrupted, concluding as
it began : in an oneiric freeze-frame, a tableau vivant, with Claudio's
selection of Anatolia having provisionally been postponed. (Accord
ing to the original plan of the Romanzi del Giglio , Violante was to
have been Claudio's final choice. ) So, instead of representing the new
o rder instituted by "He who must come," D' Annunzio's text functions
e ssentially as a pre-text: as a preparation, a praeparatio in the evangelical
sense of the word. This is to say that, as is the case of Nietzsche's
own Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the new order is instituted only by prolep
sis. It can only be modelled in and through the text's narrator and
protagonist, Claudio Cantelmo, whose role is to clear the aesthetic
and moral slate for "He who roust coroe . "28
Accordingly, this mission , as announced by Claudio's ancestor ,
Alessandro Cantelmo , a Renaissance commander and the military
architect of Cesare Borgia, conflates genealogical and aesthetic im
peratives, while at the same time confusing present creation with the
creation of future values . Appearing through his portrait painted by
none other than Leonardo da Vinci, Alessandro speaks as the living
i mage of a living image:
Your task is three-fold: to conduct your being with upright method to
the perfect integrity of the Latin type, to bring together the purest
essence of your spirit and reproduce the most profound vision of your
universe in a sole and supreme work of art; to preserve the ideal riches
of your race and your own conquests in a son, who under the paternal
teaching, recognizes them and sets them in good order in himself so
as to become worthy of aspiring to the realization of possibilities ever
more elevated. 29
28 C f. Lucia Re, "Gabriele D'Annunzio's Novel Le vergini delle rocce: 'Una cosa naturale
vista in un grande specchio,"' Stanford Italian Review 3 . 2 , (Fall 1983) 241-7 1 , which
argues that, in a deliberate fashion, D'Annunzio "systematically undermines the
(Nietzschean) expectations which the novel sets up so hyperbolically" (25 7 ) .
29 "Triplice e ii tuo compito: - condurre con diritto metodo ii tuo essere alla perfet
ta integrita de! tipo latino; adunare la piu pura essenza del tuo spirito e riprodurre
la piu profonda visione del tuo universo in una sola e suprema opera d'arte ; preser
vare le ricchezze ideali della tua stirpe e le tue proprie conquiste in un figliuolo che,
260 Nietzsche in Italy
3 1 The Fiume episode is described in detail by Michael A. Ledeen in The First Duce:
D'Annunzio at Fiume (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)
esp. 58- 1 1 4 . According to Ledeen (104) the "sacred entrance" of the legionnaires
into the City of the Holocaust was even captured on film .
262 Nietzsche in Italy
265
2 66 Nietzsche in Italy
but also , considerable portions of "The Beast Who Wills" are written
into the novella word for word. D'Annunzio's repetition of Jean de
N ethy' s repetition of Nietzsche is thus repeated once again in Le vergini
delle rocce, but within the last of these embedded Chinese boxes some
of the most resplendent jewels of decadent prose shine forth.
Part I
delle rocce : "Chiedevano intanto i poeti scoraggiati e smarriti, dopo aver esausto la
dovizia delle rime nell'evocare imagini d'altri tempi, nel piangere le loro illusioni
morte e nel numerare i colori delle foglie caduche; chiedevano, alcuni con ironia,
altri pur senza: 'Qual puo essere oggi ii nostro officio? Dobbiamo noi esaltare in
senarii doppii ii suffragio universale? Dobbiamo noi affrettar con Yansia dei decasillabi
la caduta dei Re, Y avvento delle Repubbliche, l'accesso delle plebi al potere? . . . '
"
( Vergini 45).
2 The reference would seem to be to Ruggero Bonghi ( 1 826-1 895), the eminent
classicist, historian and philosopher, a frequent contributor to such reviews as Nuova
Antologia , and one of the leading and most cosmopolitan figures of the Cavourian
right. Bonghi served in the Camera dei Deputati for nearly three decades.
D'Annunzio: The Beast Who Wills 269
non si sia gia partito dal mondo trascinato dal volo delle sue chimere" ( Vergini 1 5 1 -52).
5 Archduke of Austria, Rudolph (1858- 1 889) was the son of Franz-Joseph I and
Elisabeth of Bavaria. The incident referred to is the apparent double suicide of
Rudolph and his lover, Marie Vetsera.
6 "Johann Orth" was the pseudonym adopted by the Archduke Giovanni Nepomuceno
S alvatore of Austria ( 1 852- 1 89 1 ?), son of Leopold II, the Granduke of Tuscany. In
1 890 he renounced his title and princely prerogatives and embarked as captain of
the ship Santa Margherita, which vanished at sea.
7 Cf. . . . poiche non si chiama Re un uomo ii quale, essendosi sottomesso alla volonta
"
con la diligenza di un publico scriba che la tema d'esser licenziato aguzzi senza tregua"
( Vergini 1 50); "All'ombra di troni posticci vedrete falsi monarchi compiere con esatezza
le loro funzioni publiche in aspetto di automi o attendere a coltivar le loro manie
puerili e i loro vizii mediocri" ( Vergini 1 5 1 ) .
8 D'Annunzio's reference i s t o the extravagant series of excursions embarked upon
by William ( 1 859- 1 94 1 ) in 1 888, right after his coronation as King of Prussia and
Emperor of Germany. In less than seven months, William made official visits to
Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Greece and Turkey, as well as traversing
much of Germany.
9 The allusion is to Czar Alexander III ( 1 845-1 894), described in Le vergini as: "II
piu potente, ii padrone di piu vaste turbe, corroso nei suoi muscoli erculei dal tarlo
de! sospetto, si consuma solo in una cupa misantropia, non avendo nemmeno il gusto
di contraporre alle piccole formule chimiche dei suoi rebelli una qualche magnifica
strage ad arme bianca per irrigare e concimare le sue terre isterilite" ( Vergini 1 5 1 ) .
The phrase "formule chimiche" had already appeared with reference t o the power
of the poetic verbum: "un ordine di parole puo vincere d'efficacia micidiale una for
mula chimica" ( Vergini 46) .
D'Annunzio: The Beast Who Wills 271
to him that the grace of God had reserved for his final years quite
a different sort of comfort . 10 It is already widely known that, to the
great jubilation of the archduchesses and other ladies of the court ,
negotiations with an Italian impressario are underway to arrange for
the transfer to the Imperial Gou� of the prodigous melodramatist
and the additional transfer (for a modest price) of Metastasio
Daspuro . 1 1 But, bad news at the last minute! The latest telegrams
threaten a visit by William II to Vienna. And William, a man of primal
impulses and an authoritarian, is more than capable of having the
maestro kidnapped and carted off to Berlin in order that all the military
regulations governing the use of arms on foot and on horseback, as
well as accounting procedures and ambulances, be put to music .
And yet others? Queen Victoria, in her lucid moments , busies
herself with rearranging the museum of her dolls and the dolls of
her daughters and grand-daughters, in a touching return to childhood
innocence. The Prince of Wales, now bald and graying but, as always,
the perfect clubman, may very well die as the crown prince, content,
perhaps, never to have inherited the crown. Every year, in order to
accommodate his slowly expanding Epicurean girth, he is forced to
loosen his belt an additional loop, overcoming his gentlemanly
repugnance for all ridiculous masquerades whenever obliged to repre
sent his aged Mother at an official ceremony. The Russian Grandukes
leave Saint Petersburg from time to time to go shake hands with the
engineer Sadi Carnot, renewing thus the illusion of an alliance for
the obliging French populace and in return obtaining certain advan
tages from the Republic in the pursuit of their favorite pastimes . 1 2
As regards pretenders: Victor Napoleon, having lost any hope of
artificially stirring up a renewed heroic frenzy in the blood of the First
Consul, which in him stagnates, limits his political interventions to
the occasional modest epistle , which, filled with regret, he writes from
1 0 D'Annunzio seems to be alluding to the numerous tragedies that beset Franz
Joseph I ( 1 830- 1 9 1 6) before 1 892 : the death of his son Rudolph of Hapsburg, the
1 867 execution of his brother Maximilian in Mexico , and the suicide of his mad
cousin, Ludwig II, in 1886.
1 1 The "prodigious melodrammatist" is perhaps identical to the unnamed "doggerel
Part II
crucis in the patristic tradition, with the "Trees of Liberty" or "Liberty Poles" which
were planted throughout revolutionary France between 1 790 and 1 793 as symbols
of the revolution. These bore a placard with the inscription "liberte, fraternite, egaiite"
as well as a red pileus cap (standing for emancipation from slavery) upon their summit.
18 Jacques Clement, Balthasar Gerard and Franc;:ois Ravaillac were the assassins
of, respectively, Henry III ( 1 589), William of Orange (1 584) and Henry IV ( 16 1 0) .
All three murders were motivated by religious zealotry.
1 9 Cf. "Le plebi restano sempre schiave, avendo un nativo bisogno di tendere i polsi
ai vincoli. Esse non avranno dentro di loro giammai, lino al termine dei secoli, il
sentimento della liberta" ( Vergini 47).
2 o Cleon was an Athenian political and military leader in the fifth century B. C . D'An
nunzio's characterization of him would appear to be dependent upon Thucydides
and Aristophanes. Compare the corresponding passage in Le vergini: "Non e in Roma,
come gia fu in Atene, un qualche demagogo Cleofonte fabbricante di lire? Noi potrem
mo, per modesta mercede, con i suoi stessi strumenti accordati da lui, persuadere
gli increduli che nel gregge e la forza, il diritto, il pensiero , la saggezza, la luce . . .
"
( Vergini 45).
2 74 Nietzsche in Italy
Part III
su ciascuna anima un marchio esatto come su un utensile sociale e fare le teste umane
tutte simili come le teste dei chiodi sotto la percussione dei chiodaiuoli" ( Vergini 45) .
22 Cf. "Per fortuna lo Stato eretto su le basi de! suffragio popolare e dell'inugualian
za, cementato dalla paura, non e soltanto una costruzione ignobile ma e anche
precaria . . . . Su l'uguaglianza economica e politica, a cui aspira la democrazia, voi
andrete dunque formando una oligarchia nuova, un nuovo reame della forza; e
riuscirete in pochi, o prima o poi, a riprendere le redini per domar le moltitudini
a vostro profitto" ( Vergini 4 7) .
D'Annunzio: The Beast Who Wills 275
do non puo essere constituito se non su la forza, tanto nei secoli di civilta quanta
nelle epoche di barbarie" ( Vergini 46).
2 4 Cf. "Se fossero distrutte da un altro diluvio deucalionico tutte le razze terrestri
e sorgessero nuove generazicini dalle pietre, come nell'antica favola, gli uomini si
batterebbero tra loro appena espressi dalla Terra generatrice, finche uno, ii piu valido,
non riuscisse ad imperar su gli altri" ( Vergini 46-47).
2 5 The allusion is to Giosue Carducci, who, after publishing the third edition of his
Ode barbari in 1889 , had begun to compose a series of bellic odes, later collected in
the volume Rime e ritmi ( 1 889). The precise ode that D'Annunzio has in mind is pro
bably "La guerra" (composed in November of 1 89 1 ) .
2 7 6 Nietzsche in Italy
2 9 Thus Spoke Zarathustra 2 "On the Herd." This retreat is of course none other than
that of Prince Luzio (and Claudio Cantelmo): "Piuttosto che rinunziare al privilegio
e prendere un'attitudine disconveniente al vostro orgoglio legittimo, piuttosto che
apparire il superstite di voi medesimo, vi siete ritratto dal mondo . . . e siete venuto
in solitudine ad aspettar I' evento che il Destino riserba alla vostra Casa" ( Vergini 1 49).
Thomas Sheehan
279
280 Nietzsche in Italy
at all" and, as regards the telos, " We have invented the concept of end.
In reality there is no end."2
Or do these antipodes need each other in order to speak? Do they
shadow each other, like the Wanderer and his Shadow, allowing each
other to speak? You will recall that the Shadow speaks first :
Shadow: Since it has been so long since I have heard you speak, I thought
I would give you an opportunity.
Wanderer: Someone is speaking - but where? and who? It is almost as
if l were hearing myself speak, but in a weaker voice . . . . By God (and
other things I do not believe in) it is my shadow speaking. I hear it
but I do not believe it .
And so they dialogue, almost like St. Augustine and his God in the
Soliloquia:
Wanderer: I thought a man's shadow was his emptiness.
Shadow: A man's emptiness, as far as I know , does not ask permission
to speak , as I have done. It always speaks .
Wanderer: My dear shadow, how happy I am to hear as well as see you .
. . .I love the shadows as much as I love the light . . . . Light and shadow
are not opponents but hold hands like lovers . And when the Light disap
pears, the Shadow slips after him.3
5 On Evola see my " Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain
de Benoit," Social Research 48 (Spring, 1981) 45-7 3 . The citation from Heidegger is
from his The Question ofBeing, tr. William Kluback andJean T. Wilde (New Haven :
College and University Publishers , 1958) 106.
6 Renzo De Felice, Mussolini it duce, IL· Lo stato totalitario 1 936-1940 (Turin: Einaudi,
1 98 1 ) 63 n . , 248 n . , 297, 3 1 6 and n . , and 7 1 5 n. Julius Evola, ll mito del sangue:
Genesi del razzismo (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1937); Sintesi di dottrina delta razza (Milan:
Ulrico Hoepli, 1941); for the text cited here: Sintesi 1 25 . See also Evola's lndirizzi
per una educazione razziale (Naples: Conte, 194 1 ) .
282 Nietzsche in Italy
issuing the 1 929 encyclical Divini illius magistri, devoted to the topic
of Catholic education . In 1 928 Evola had published his book Im
pen'alismo pagano (Todi, Rome: Atanor). It was a typical Evolian treatise
that condemned the leveling process of modern statecraft, both liberal
and conservative, and argued for a hierarchical corporate state derived
by necessity from the metaphysical structure of the universe as an
"ontological imperialism . " In this work Evola could have been seen
to be simply spelling out the traditional Catholic justification of the
divine right of kings and the absolutism of monarchy, both in Church
and state, from the vertical structure of the Aristotelico-Thomistic
cosmos. But in fact Evola excoriated Christianity for not having the
courage of its imperialistic convictions insofar as it watered down its
ontologically based political theory with such teachings as compas
sion for the poor (derived from Jesus) and distributive justice (de
rived from a less metaphysical Aristotle) .
In fact a few months later the journal of the Gioventu Fascista in
Bologna carried an article by Evola that proclaimed the incompatibility
of Catholic and Fascist education. The former, he said, was dedicated
to "the exaltation of the weak and disinherited" and to the "praise of
humility and charity," whereas the latter advocated "Roman and virile
values of courage, valor, aristocracy, wisdom, and power." The
Vatican, in its eternal wisdom, responded with Divini illius magistri,
attacking, as Tracy H . Koon puts it, "coeducation and public gym
nastic displays for girls, labeling them 'contrary to the very instincts
of human nature ."'7
All of this is to say that as far as the Italian Fascist regime went,
Julius Evola was a minor intellectual with minimum political effect .
And yet nowadays, when virtually no one reads the Fascist philosopher
Giovanni Gentile anymore (and even fewer people understand him
or are bothered by the fact that they do not understand hini) , Evola,
who has been dead for over a decade, is probably the single most
popular and influential Fascist philosopher in Italy today.
As I have suggested elsewhere, Evola's philosophical and mythico
metaphysical writings have had and continue to have considerable
impact on the demi-monde of the Italian Far Right. The influence
spans the spectrum that runs from the intellectuals and the parliamen
tarians of the Movimento Sociale Italiano and the Destra Nazionale, like
Pino Rauti, through the more radical theoreticians of the "disintegra
tion of the system," like Giorgio Freda, and on to members of the
1 Tracy H. Koon , Believe, Obey, Fight: The Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Ita
ly, 1 922-1943(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1 985) 1 3 2 .
Sheehan: Diventare Dio 283
8 See Furia Jesi, Cultura di destra (Milan: Gatzanti, 1979); also "Myth and Violence"
( cf. note 5 , above); and F. Giorgio Freda, La disintegrazione del sistema, 3rd ed. (Padua:
Ar, 1 980) .
9 Giovanni Gentile, The Theory ofMind as Pure Act, tr. H. Wildon Carr (New York:
Macmillan, 1 922).
1 0 Evola, Teoria dell'individuo assoluto, 2nd. ed. (Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1973
that can be found in his Rivolta contro ii mondo moderno and his later
writings. 14
Evola often refers to the realm of nous as "transcendent" and even
as "supernatural ," but most surely he does not mean to indicate a
hypostasized, separate, supra-sensible realm or a personal God (un
dio persona), even though he will speak of the "divine" character of this
realm . Evola is absolutely committed to Nietzsche's assertion of the
death of God; but he is just as entirely committed to what he calls
"the principle of quality,'' an impersonal power (numen) or law (themis,
but to be distinguished from arbitrary human nomoi) , which in and
through the individual's enactment of the will to power "reacts on the
world of quantity by impressing upon it a form and quality,'' thereby
bestowing ontological rank, hierarchy, and organicity as the basis for
social and political rank and hierarchical order.15
A person's resonance with this non-hypostasizable principle of quali
ty is called "fidelity,'' and it issues in what Evola calls "spiritual virili
ty." The word "virility'' is not accidental. A woman, according to Evola,
can participate in such fidelity and spirituality and thus enter the
hierarchical order of the cosmos "only mediately, by her relation to
a man" - who, of course , represents the formal, qualitative element.
Such virile fidelity is best manifested, Evola says , in the priest-king
of ancient cultures, the heroic warrior oflater societies, and the knight
of medieval chivalry. These three archetypes (as well as others such
as the shaman, the philosopher-sage, and so on) function as symbolic
instantiations of authentic correspondence with one's true nature , in
accordance with Pindar's protreptic, Genoi hoios essi: "Become what
you [already, i . e . , essentially] are . " Evola is asserting no more or less
than what Aristotle meant when he wrote: Man is- more than
anything else - nous, and striving for anything short of nous, i . e . ,
pretending that desire wants anything less than eternity, would be
atopos, out-of- place or off-center, a denaturing of the self, whereas "life
in accordance with nous is, for human beings, their fate-fulfillment
and-happiness, their eudaimonia" (Nicomachean Ethics, K, 7 , 1 1 78 a 8) . 1 6
1• For Evola's characterization of the stages of his career, see the "Premessa" to the
1 973 edition of Teoria 1 5-23.
1 5 Rivolta 2 1 1 (principle of quality). For "dio-persona" see Cavalcare 57.
16
On "fidelity" and "spiritual virility" see Rivolta 49, 65, 69, 145- 1 65 , 1 32f. , 227f.
The text on woman is at p. 203; cf. further pp. 200- 2 1 5 . The text from Pindar is
from "Pythian Odes," II, 72, in The Works of Pindar, ed. Lewis Richard Parnell, 3
vols. (London: Macmillan , 1932), The Text, vol . 3 : 56 .
Sheehan: Diventare Dio 287
column 93 1).
2 ° Clement of Alexandria, Logos protreptikos; Archaia . . . koinonia, and emphytos,
Patrologia Graeca, VIII, column 93; archaiozomen , ibid. , column 6 1 . On panta pos,
see De A nima G, 8, 43 1b 21 (he psyche ta onta pos esti panta) and G, 5, 430a 1 4f.
2 90 Nietzsche in Italy
Too many years , a whole middle age, will have to pass, wrote Saba
in his Scorciatoie, before men cease to misunderstand, i .e . , to malign,
Nietzsche. The "middle age" Saba has in mind as he writes these words
in the Forties is that cultural season of the twentieth century "re
acting'' to modernity and its crisis. This culture lives the schism as a
sickness, and responds with fury, exasperating it, proposing remedies
and medication which are often no more than the opposite : extreme
and pathological symptoms of the crisis itself. Fascism is the most
clamorous manifestation of this reaction to modernity, an aberrant
and degenerate expression of the very modernity which it believes
it is combatting or even curing. The Fascist negation of democracy,
mass culture , and progress is a violent discharge in the process of
massification itself. The incapacity to perceive the positive and
liberating charge of that massification results in a forced and visceral
reaction. The great intellectuals and writers who let themselves be
blinded by Fascist radicalism - Hamsun, Celine , Pirandello , and
Mishima - saw and lived through to the end the contradictions of the
contemporary age . They suffered from and cleverly unmasked its
unresolved problems while remaining prisoners of those same con
tradictions , experiencing them to be absolute existential reality and
thus failing to recognize the real dialectic of history.
293
294 Nietzsche in Italy
S aba, on the other hand, loved above all another Nietzsche, whose
saying he paraphrased often: "We are deep, let us again become
transparent." Saba's poetry tends toward this pure and indifferent
grace, toward a terse and merciless clarity which lets appear wholly
without attenuation the obscm;e bottom of pulsating life in the lim
pid surface of things as they are. Saba had learned from Nietzsche
the innocence involved in accepting life in its entirety, in its mildness
and ferocity, like the birds of his lyrics which sing while ferociously
snatching at food. For Saba, innocence also signifies that inextricable
vortex of surrender and avidity, that "silent longing" - as one of his
verses has it - which the poet lived and fully incarnated with a desire
that was never sublimated or placated, in which the impulse of love
intertwined with the most raving egocentrism. The poet was truly
beyond good and evil; the philosopher instead was an exemplary vic
tim of that discontent of civilization which he had intrepidly unmasked,
incapable as he was of delivering himself to his coveted sea of pulsa
tions and will to power. In Saba's words , "He was an extreme case
of the almost complete sublimation of eros ." But Saba himself felt the
need to add, "He was also something else , I am sure ."
301
302 Nietzsche in Italy
to the very end of the book, and similarly to the end of the film , giv
ing us one mode of originating source: the giving of a name to some
effect in the world.
As leitmotif it introduces a set of ideas. "Hetaira (Mann says in
C hapter 3 of the Faustus) had on her wings only a dark spot of violet
and rose ; one could see nothing else of her, and when she flew she
was like a petal blown by the wind." What could seem more magical
ly innocent, we say, than this wind-borne spot of violet and rose? But
what more dangerous, in the event? At first the child Adrian responds
to such creatures with what Mann calls "infectious mirth," thus link
ing contagion to the idea and fact of uncontrollable laughter - the
Zarathustran theme. It is only a short, ironic step to the ominous ex
perience of Adrian Leverkiilm, now a young man, who writes to his
friend Zeitblom as follows, with characteristic defensive archaism: in
the brothel he had seen "your nymphs and daughters of the wilderness,
ribaudes, laced muttons all , six or seven , morphos , clear-wings ,
esm�raldas, etc ." He tells Zeitblom that having struck a chord or two
on the piano (chords relating to some "brightening semitone" which
then preoccupied him) , he met the young woman who , perhaps not
then, but perhaps later, would infect him. "A brown wench puts herself
nigh me, in a little Spanish jacket, with a big gam, snub nose , al
mond eyes, an Esmeralda, she brushed my cheek with her arm ."
(Almost all these details Visconti used.) Horrified, Leverkiilm rushed
from her, flinging himself "back through the lust-hell," out into
the street.
Zeitblom, whose narrative is itself veined like a systemic disease,
takes immediate and hardly restrained pedantic delight in the musical
import of this scene and its precursor scenes . He notes that from the
name Hetaira Esmeralda the composer was to extract a musical anagram,
the notes B (German: H) , E, A, E, E Flat . Leverki.ihn labels this
anagram or series of notes "a word, a key word, stamped on everything
in the song." This "word" is a determining source . Wherever it appears,
it controls the musical composition so that "there would no longer
be a free note." The series includes a half-hidden tritone, the interval
A - E Flat, which medieval music always called diabolus in musica ,
because of its forbidden, ambiguating effect for harmony. Yet the series
controls musical development; "there would no longer be a free note."
Mann, with hundreds of discursive pages available to him, weaves
an immense and everstronger web from his three-termed idea
Esmeralda the spotted butterfly, Esmeralda the brown wench ,
306 Nietzsche in Italy
Esmeralda the truncated tone-row, the "key-word ." These evolve into
a motivic subsystem, which Zeitblom finally labels for convenience
"the Hetaira Esmeralda figure." This figure recurs wherever
Leverkiihn's music is most tragic and most Faustian . Its serial prin
ciple also generalizes to become the method of Leverkiihn's whole
musical output, one way or another. Its harmonically ambiguous idea
underlies what in the film Aschenbach's friend Alfred (his Nietzschean
daimon) calls a "science of ambiguities." Fixed series implies its op
posite , ambiguity, and hence the idea of series gets tied here to a ran
domized modern notion of fate.
Other associations are at work . Esmeralda is the emerald, the sea
green stone of oceanic depths, contrasting with the strings of orient
pearl worn by the mother, who in effect is a Dionysian priestess
Venice , Queen of the Sea, Serenissima, who wears the pearls "that were
his eyes."
More powerful is the Viscontian structure of bodily gestures, of
pose. Esmeralda is seen in two poses. First, reclining as odalisque ,
her posture exactly doubles that of a photograph we do not see in
the film, that of the great dancer Kchessinska as she starred in and
created Petipa's version of the once famous ballet, Esmeralda.. But when
Visconti's Aschenbach leaves her, abruptly, she sits open-thighed on
the edge of her bed. Now her pose shockingly doubles another
photograph, which we have already seen, that of the composer's little
daughter. Aschenbach had stooped to kiss the photo of his scowling,
open-thighed little girl, before descending in full evening dress to eat
dinner on his first night at the Grand Hotel des Bains, on the Lido .
Such image-play, such pictorial juxtapositions gradually develop
into a symbolic optics. On one level, image is called upon to substitute
for the heavy verbal texture of the novella and the Faustus.
There seems to be a limit, within this optics, to the degree to which
image can reach for the depths normal in the overtoning oflanguage.
Image focusses; it frames; it disconnects; and when film sets image
in apparent motion, it tends to produce fragments of a life experienced
by the viewer as the severed pieces of a broken continuity. Despite
Visconti's languorous slow panning shots and almost possessed in
trospective use of the zoom lens, visual discontinuities shove their way
into the foreground, especially with his sudden flashbacks. Something
else is required to reconnect, to produce the illusion of cause and
effect - the illusion of the wholeness of a flow of events . This must
be an illusion, because flow is a process, not a closed productive form
Fletcher: Music, Visconti, Mann, Nietzsche 307
Scarcely a note in this song from the Venetian passage in Ecce Homo
is unfamiliar: the words belong to High Romanticism. But Nietz
sche attaches the theme of longing for a met aphysical response to the
physics of actual musical experience, and thus he hardens and
strengthens the logic of his nostalgia. The hands of the instrument
soul are "invisible hands ." Always the theme of the invisible.
It remained for a later author, Italo Calvino, to elaborate this V ene
tian theme to its most precise form , the idea of the "invisible city."
Throughout Invisible Cities, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan weave a
dialogue of interpretation , as they try to share the question: where
h as Polo "come from" and "where is he going?" It turns out that he
comes from a city which he can never describe , even fabuluously,
because it must remain (as Marco Polo says to the Khan) an "im
plicit city." Venice is a fictive, logical entity, of which one could never
s ay for sure whether it is subject or predicate, premise or consequence.
Hence Kublai Khan craves each fabled account to begin again with
an ever more complete description of Venice , Polo's "source ." But this
would lead to infinity: "You should then begin each tale of your travels
from the departure , describing Venice as it is, all of it, not o mitti ng
anything you remember of it."
"Memory's images , once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo
says . "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak o f
i t . O r perhaps, speaking o f other cities , I have already lost it, little
by little ."
Their dialogue ends there . We turn the page. There follows , for
the first time in the book, a fabulous description of the actual Venice,
t he fifth of the Trading Cities . The description begins:
1 This paper had its origins in a seminar led by Professor Robert Harrison, to whom
the author is indebted for much valuable advice and, indeed, for the very idea of
a comparison between Vico and Nietzsche. I should also thank Professor Thomas
Harrison for substantial editorial help.
313
314 Nietzsche in Italy
ture of the New Science. "2 Vico of course posits an "ideal eternal history
of nations," a theory that all pagan nations or peoples (he excludes
the Hebrew and Christian nations from the scope of his principle
because he says they have been guided by revealed truth) naturally
pass through "divine,'' "heroic," and "human" stages, terms which
characterize the languages, laws, religions, and other institutions
distinctive of each period . White focuses attention on Vico's highly
original correlation of the transition into each of these three periods
with the inception of one of the poetic tropes Vico considers fundamen
tal: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and the final negative linguistic
technique of irony. These four uses of language arise gradually, in
succession across the three ages, with the effects on consciousness of
the rise of each trope catalyzing the transformation of social institu
tions into those of the next age. According to Vico , men are first
elevated from the level of beasts when certain "more robust giants"
exercise metaphorical misinterpretation of natural events as the in
tentional actions of gods. This begins the animistic religion
characteristic of the divine age, in which men metaphorically project
their own spirits and passions onto all aspects of nature, ascribing
all agency to some deity. The rise of the trope of metonymy causes
the belief that powerful men, the "heroes," are the descendents of gods
and that they must enjoy a natural ascendancy over other men. This
state of affairs , emblematic of the heroic age, seems related to the
"metonymy of subject for form and accident" (§ 406). 3 With the begin
ning of synecdoche, the figure of speech in which a whole object is
referred to by one of its parts, or a general class by a particular feature
common to that class- hence with the beginning of relatively abstract
thought - the human age also has its origins. In this third and most
advanced period, the piety of earlier ages evaporates in light of in
creasing levels of abstraction and a growing awareness and sensitivity
toward truth and falsity. The subjugated classes of men, through their
and Truth, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J . : Humanities Press, 1979)
79-9 1 . Hereafter OTL.
3 1 8 Nietzsche in Italy
6 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy efMorals and Ecce Homo, ed. tr. Walter Kauf
historical world in such a way that they can know it, and I think we
may see that Nietzsche proposes something akin to this. The world
of history and of human institutions can, according to Vico, be
recreated out of the determinate modifications of our own minds, which
work according to principles shared with the minds that produced
the institutions in the past, by virtue of what Vico calls the "common
sense" - "judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an
entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race'' (§ 142) . The
linkage between minds of the present and the past produced by this
common sense thus permits the study of history via axioms as cer
tain as those of geometry.
Vico maintains, for example, that there are three customs which
are common to men of all nations and cultures, of any period of
history: practice of religion , contraction of solemn marriages, and
burial of the dead (§ 333). The form of these universal social adapta
tions apparently arises necessarily from basic shared features of human
consciousness. Consequently, the history of these institutions can be
known insofar as the minds that produce them in any past age operate
in certain eternal patterns, which are shared as a "common sense"
by historians of the present. Looking beyond these three fundamen
tal customs, Vico thinks it possible to construct a "mental dictionary"
(§ 1 45) which would allow the ideal eternal history of nations to be
conceived in greater detail. "There must in the nature of human in
stitutions," he writes, "be a mental language common to all nations,
which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social
life and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same
things may have diverse aspects" (§ 161). The mental dictionary will
reveal this common mental language by correlating the etymologies
of words for the same concept in many different languages. Not any
hodgepodge of institutions is feasible in a human society. Certain
features are necessary. By reasoning from these constraints upon
history, Vico asserts, we may substantially reconstruct the human past :
Hence this Science comes at the same time to describe an ideal eternal
history, traversed in time by the histories of all nations, in their birth ,
growth, perfection , decline and fall. Indeed, we venture to affirm that
since this world has certainly been made by men (which is our first in
dubitable principle laid down above) and since its mode must therefore
,
[to be thus]' ; for when it happens that he who makes the things also
narrates them, then history cannot be more certain. Thus this Science
proceeds exactly like geometry, which, as it contemplates the world of
dimensions or constructs it from its elements, makes that world for itself,
but the reality of our science is �s much greater [than that of geometryJ
as is that of the orders which p ertain to the affairs of men than that
o f points, lines, planes and shapes. (§ 349 , Pompa's translation)
The signpost to the right road was for me the question : what was the
real etymological significance of the designations for "good" coined-in
the various languages? I found that they all led back to the same con
ceptual transformation - that everywhere "noble," "aristocratic" in the social
sense, is the basic concept from which "good" in the sense of "with
aristocratic soul," "noble," "with a soul of higher order," "with a privileged
soul" necessarily developed: a development which always runs parallel
with that other in which "common," "plebian," "low" are finally
transformed into the concept bad " (Genealogy 28)
" .
322 Nietzsche in Italy
But if the peoples are rotting in that ultimate civil disease and cannot
agree on a monarch from within, and are not conquered and preserved
by better nations from without, then providence for their extreme ill
has its extreme remedy at hand. For such peoples, like so many beasts,
have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only ef his own private in
terests and have reached the ext�me of delicacy, or better of pride, in
which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest
displeasure. Thus no matter how great the throng and press of their
bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude ef spirit and will, scarcely
any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or
caprice. By reason of all this, providence decrees that, through obstinate
factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests
and the forests into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long
centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties
of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman
by the barbarism of refT.ection than thefirst men had been made by the barbarism
of sense. (§ 1 1 06, italics added)
The first of these dangers, the "contrast between inner and outer,"
arises, according to Nietzsche, when an influx of historical "knowledge
. . . no longer acts as an agent for transforming the outside world but
remains concealed within a chaotic inner world which modern man
describes with a curious pride as his uniquely characteristic 'subjec
tivity"' (78) . This inward content, this burden of multiple and con
tradictory truths and values of past ages, he claims, makes men "walk
ing encyclopaedias," but is no longer real cuture since it is not
manifested outwardly, as traditions openly shared by a society,
"as unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people"
(79). Among a people wretchedly torn apart "into inner and outer,
content and form" (79), any outward form of culture is disdained as
social convention and pretense. And so Nietzsche says something
Norris: Nietzsche and Vico 329
almost exactly like what Vico had said about the barbarism of reflec
tion; he also speaks of the negation of reality of which Kierkagaard
wrote in connection with irony:
This antithesis of inner and outer . . . makes the exterior even more bar
·
baric than it would be if a rude riation were only to develop out of itself in accor
dance with its own uncouth needs. For what means are available to nature
for overcoming that which presses upon it in too great abundance? One
alone, to embrace it as lightly as possible so as quickly to expel it again
and have done with it. From this comes the habit of no longer taking real
things seriously , from this arises the 'weak personality' by virtue of which
the real and existent makes only a slight impression . . . one finally widens
the dubious gulf between content and form to the point of complet.e
insensibility to barbarism. (79; italics added)
With respect to the "second danger," the false sense ofjustice which
historical knowledge may lead an age to possess, Nietzsche notes that
historical verification always brings to light so much that is false, crude,
inhuman, absurd, violent that the mood of pious illusion in which alone
anything that wants to live can live necessarily crumbles away . . . . (95)
Here we see precisely the problem of an advanced reflective awareness
that is implicit in Vico . Without the benefit of Vico's science, men
are unable to separate the eternal truths of human society which
underlie the barbarities of past institutions from all the falsehqods ,
errors and illusions which these same institutions contain. An inference
is naturally drawn against the "truth" of present institutions, which
start to be viewed ironically. Although illusions per se may be of little
intrinsic worth, naturally evolved illusions often contain principles
indispensible for life and are true in the Vichian sense of il vero . Now
as for Nietzsche's "third danger," he says that for any nation or in
dividual to attain maturity, such an enveloping illusion is also required.
Exposure too early in life to all of the strangeness and violence in
history can lead only to "intentional stupidity" or to a sense of
"disgust"(98) . The "fourth peril,'' that of the sense of the "old age" of
mankind, arises not suprisingly from this disgust with the past and
despair for the future . And here Nietzsche displays � rather Vichian
sense of the eternal in human nature, of the necessity of certain in
stitutions (religion, marriage, burial) in spite of important but more
superficial changes in modes of consciousness and institutions: "But
the human race is a tough and persistent thing and will not permit
its progress - forwards or backwards - to be viewed in terms of
3 30 Nietzsche in Italy
important things."
1 Georges Bataille, Sur Nietzsche, in Oeuvres completes, VI, Tome II (Paris : Gallimard,
1 973); tr. Andrea Zanzotto as Nietzsche, il cu/mine e il possibile, with an introduction
by Maurice Blanchot (Milan: Rizwli, 1976). Translations of Bataille mine.
333
3 34 Nietzsche in Italy
"And yet they used to praise you for your poetic genius . You really
should take up poetry again . . . .
"
I rest now for the last time in the forest's solitude. Dante his poetry
of movement it all comes back in my memory. Oh pilgrim, oh pilgrims
who go thoughtfully! Catrina, strange daughter of the barbarous moun
tain, of the winds' rocky hollow, how sweet is your cry: how sweet when
you were there at the scene of your mother's mourning, of your mother
whose last son had died. One of the pious women near her, kneeling,
sought to console her: but she did not wish to be consoled, but she,
casting herself down upon the ground, wanted to cry out all her grief.
Ghirlandaio figure, last daughter of the Tuscan poetry that was, you
then descended from your horse you then were watching: you who arose
in the waving flood of your hair, you arose with your companions, as
in the fables of ancient poetry: and you had already forgotten the poet's
love. (39)
For C ampana, the poet of return, a patrilineally-defined tradition
of poetry has come to an end. The last son is dead, and the noble
ordeals of the original cavalieri of the lyric are over. There are no male
heirs left to imitate their struggles or to take up the rivalry lying at
the heart of such imitation. With changed lineaments, poetry's future
is gendered as female . It survives in its "last daughter," who chooses
walking over horseback riding. Having other things to do , she neglects
the poet's love and, with it, the proprieties of chivalric tradition .
Poetry also survives, in Campana, as speech, in the everyday noise
of conversation in a Tuscan piazza, as we read in "Stia, 20 settem-
. bre . " This prose poem is one of the Canti 01:fici 's most economic
statements of Campana's projective poetic genealogy, for it includes
in one representative anecdote two ideas central to that genealogy:
one, the survival of poetry in the communicative function of language ,
and the other, the end of chivalric rivalry. Here, after a day's climb
3 36 Nietzsche in Italy
Nietzsche descends the Alps and comes to Turin, and Turin is Italy,
and Italy, for Nietzsche, is , like poetry, the aperture onto that which
cannot be communicated in prose. Nietzsche's own poetry always ap
pears as a break in or an appendage to the inevitable but undesired
teleology of his prose and brings to it, by contrast, a language that
does not know its own end. Poetry is, in Nietzsche's writings, a mise
en-abyme of what even Zarathustra strives for but cannot attain in
language . It is the sign of an anti-narrative , Dionysian art, the sur
charging of the parts at the expense of the misleading whole, the ap
pearance of disorderly excess within linear order. It literally makes
of the prose an opera aperta, an invitation to eternal, willful revision .
Nietzsche comes to Italy, and Italy gives him fatherly predecessors
in Vico's rincorsi, in Tasso's madness. These figures take their places
in a genealogy whose origins are traceable in the chivalric lyric of
a thirteenth-century Sicilian court. As we have already seen,
Campana's twentieth-century web of metaphors re-presents those
origins as the place where eros and disgregation found speech in the
verse of Italy's medieval horsemen of the courtly lyric. While Nietz
sche's mad embrace of the horse in Turin may be apocryphal, his
A llen: Nietzsche's Italian Decline 337
the summit is finally nothing more than the inaccessible. It reveals itself
to us, at least to the extent that we do not cease to be human: to the
extent , that is, that we do not ce ase to speak . (57)
8 See also, for example, the poems "considera che ii moto" and "sfondo d'osso
four years earlier in What's Hecuba To Him Or He To Hecuba? (New York: Out of
A llen: Nietzsche's Italian Decline 339
B y o ppo s ing " gelatin" to funeral rituals and their cindery residues,
Zanzotto s u gge st s a po e tic s which de rive s more from the everyday
events of biology and biography than from the "mo st dismal of castra
tions," the non- e vent of de ath . In so doing, he opts for the impulse
to constant communication in spite of everything, and he relinquishes
any figure-head authority the "H eideggerean" poets might wish to give
·
him.
From this perspective, as s o c i atio n s of the "Germ an" I t ali an poets
with Zanzotto - or with the stilnovisti , for that matter - appear to con
tradict those poets' own po etic s of noncommunication or "silence ."
If we look inste ad at the "French" I talian poets, those emblematized
by Bataille's rather than by Heidegger's Nietzs che , that i s , we find
a contr a stin g situation . Such diverse poetics as those of Mario Luz i ,
For all this, we may see this particular eros as an emblem of a wealth
of poetry now flourishing in Italy which has not cut itself off in an
elite solitude but has chosen Zanzotto's nutritious, if messy, "gelatin"
over a poetics based on thanatography. Its disregard for a post
metaphysics of ontology and reference that informs the serious efforts
of its brothers may simply be a choice of Sappho over Plato. It has,
in the "archeological" Pasolini, a precedent for a transgressive rewriting
of the past, but its "reading'' of Nietzsche, like Pasolini's, is generally
negligent, emblematized by, but not necessarily historically traceable
to, Bataille. The poetry, from Luzi to Lamarque, which the com
municative impulse of this erotic discourse in part represents has, in
any case , a more "French" than "German" tinge to it. Of course, like
most heuristic devices, this is too rough a distinction. But, to mix
Campana's metaphoric realms with those of Bataille , it may just be
in this lightness that comes from continual speech, in this impulse
to communication, that we find the "last daughter of the Tuscan poetry
that was."
CONTRIBUTORS
Einaudi, 1 978).
MAZZINO MONTINARI was the coeditor of the Walter de Gruyter edition of
sity. He is the author of The New PolytheiSm ( 1 98 1), Gods and Games: Toward
a TheolOgy ef Play ( 1 970), and Three Faces ef God: Traces ef the Trinity in Literature
and Life ( 1 986) .
GIORGIO COLLI was the coeditor of the Walter de Gruyter edition of Nietzsche's
works and the author of many philosophical studies, including Dopo Nietzsche
and La sapienza greca .
THOMAS HARRISON, Assistant Professor ofltalian at Louisiana State Univer
sity, is the editor of The Favorite Malice: Ontology and Reference in Contemporary
Italian Poetry (New York: Out of London Press, 1 983).
JEAN-LUG NANCY is Professor at the University of Strasbourg and the Univer
sity of California at San Diego. He is the author of Ego Sum, La Communaute
desouvree, and , with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, of Le titre de la lettre, and
L 'absolu litteraire.
Hopkins. University.
ROB'ERT P. HARRISON received his Ph. D. in Romance Studies from Cornell