Dead Letters to Nietzsche, or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy. Joanne Faulkner
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Quickened and the Dead
Are our most violent poltergeists
Books?
gnashing their shelves
smashing things in the dark
they leave a greenish tombish
smell on our reading fingers
they make us musty
and bereft.
—Dorothy Porter[1]
More than most philosophers, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche commands a following of readers who attempt, each in his or her own manner, to perpetuate his legacy. Many of these thinkers have dedicated a great deal of their lives not only to reading and interpreting Nietzsche’s texts, but also attempting to actualize “the event” his writings only envisage: the revaluation of values, wherein philosophers forge their truths from strength, rather than in the spirit of life-negation. Nietzsche’s writings are attractive to contemporary philosophers for a number of reasons, each of which reflects a different interpretation of what it is to be a contemporary philosopher; or more specifically, a philosopher of Nietzsche’s future. Nietzsche is readily appropriated by conservative philosophers, who identify “the leveling” of culture with the attempt to improve access to education for women, ethnic minorities, and those who are otherwise systematically disadvantaged.[2] There is thus a conservative strain within Nietzsche’s work—for instance, his appeal to Greek culture and Roman Imperialism[3]—which clearly resonates with an intolerance for the ideal of “equality for all” that many contemporary academics, indeed, many Nietzscheans, would laud.
Nietzsche’s “perspectivism” attracts a different constituency of less-conservative readers, attempting to make room for a polyvalent conception of truth in the wake of the collapse of a singular (biblical) authority through which knowledge is grounded. Indeed, in the light of his truth perspectivism, Nietzsche is often remembered as the grandfather of postmodernism by both foes and advocates of this new creed. Thinkers of the Left (most notably the French philosophers Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault) have been assiduous scholars of Nietzsche, drawing from his critique of the metaphysics of presence—this in spite (or perhaps because) of the fact that Nietzsche roundly criticized Socialism, anarchism, and democracy, in favor of a new ”cosmopolitan” politics. Surprisingly, for many acquainted with Nietzsche, in recent years some feminists have also utilized his critique of Liberalism in order to promote a “Feminism of difference,”[4] which would operate beyond an essentializing discourse on “Woman,” or the assumption of a victim status.[5] In the background of the reader’s engagement with Nietzsche lurks the Nazi appropriation of his texts: the justification of anti-Semitism and a fascist style of government that, in the early part of the 20th century, drew upon Nietzsche as one of its key intellectual figures.[6]
Undoubtedly, each of these interpretations has a foundation in Nietzsche’s text, and so can be elaborated with reference to it. The question remains, How does Nietzsche appeal to so many, with such diverse—in some cases even opposed—interests? And (how) are his readers able to keep their own concerns separate from, and unpolluted by, the threads within Nietzsche’s writing that promote a view they would oppose? especially that “dark art” of Nietzschean scholarship, which—however easily it is now denounced—once used his thought to support National Socialism. Since his death over a century ago, Nietzsche has drawn a following that would be the envy of any philosopher, and renown that crosses disciplinary boundaries, extending even beyond the academy. Many of Nietzsche’s readers feel themselves sharing an intimacy with him through his writing; that his words appeal to them personally, even exclusively. What is it about Nietzsche’s philosophy that generates these effects upon his readers, and allows him to gain a purchase upon them? And how is his text able to attract such a diversity of interlocutors? Nietzsche’s philosophy must be read in the context of the profound effect it exerts upon his most committed readers: those who see themselves to fulfill a role that his text indicates, charged with responsibility for nurturing his philosophical and cultural project to its fruition.
This book seeks to examine precisely how Nietzsche’s reader comes to form an attachment to his texts, to the extent even of becoming his champion against “misinterpretation.” Significantly, in virtue of this connection with the reader, Nietzsche’s writing enacts what psychoanalytic theory attempts merely to explain: the subject’s assumption of its social function. Whereas a growing body of literature charts Sigmund Freud’s conceptual debt to Nietzsche,[7] little has been written about what this influence can tell us about Nietzsche’s philosophy. We can read therein precursors to Freud’s understanding of the unconscious, repression, sublimation, the superego, and the importance of dreams. Yet reading beyond this catalogue of concepts, we find that Nietzsche—always well aware of rhetorical strategy and his engagement with the reader—employed these insights in his writings and did not simply describe or prefigure them. Moreover, alongside his musings about will to power and its vicissitudes, Nietzsche also observed human relationships, albeit in quick aphorisms that are often treated as asides rather than as key to his philosophical approach and message. When he writes in Human, All Too Human, “Everyone bears within him a picture of woman derived from his mother,”[8] for instance, Nietzsche calls upon us to reflect not only upon his life or our own, but on the very conditions through which subjectivity comes to be. That the subject is not born of a vacuum, but rather has a prehistory and a relation to others (principally their parents) that characterizes how they are then able to engage with the world, is a knowledge that Nietzsche brings to the writing of his text: not only in terms of its content, but his mode of address to the various subjects who come to read his philosophy.
In the light of this, psychoanalytic theory will be drawn upon throughout this study in order to interrogate the relation Nietzsche devises between his text and its reader. Indeed, it will be argued that the relation to Nietzsche is often so pregnant with affect because Nietzsche recapitulates for the reader’s subjectivity a role initially played by one’s parents. Thinking through Nietzsche’s relation to the reader, functionally, as a parental relation allows us to account for the sense of ambivalence often felt by his readers. Who has not cringed upon hearing his or her father or mother speak out of turn, and struggled to establish a distance from these first objects of love? There are, likewise, moments for many of Nietzsche’s readers when—notwithstanding their attraction to his writing—he strikes a sour note: through an unkind word about feminists or Jews or vegetarians, for instance. Furthermore, a foremost goal for Nietzsche is to give birth to philosophers in whom he engenders, like any good parent, a range of values, truths, and affects. Reading Nietzsche in terms of the parental role thus helps to explain how the relation to his text comes to be so abiding and formative for the reader, and particularly where they would seem to have good reason to be repelled by him. Curiously, Nietzsche’s philosophy especially attracts those whom it expressly excludes: women and feminists, Jewish scholars, and theorists of the political Left. I will argue that such exclusion is in fact key to how Nietzsche’s text is able to include (or “interpellate”)[9] the reader within its terms. Psychoanalytic theory of the kind elaborated after Freud by Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and, in recent years, Slavoj Žižek, is especially pertinent to examining the intersubjective dynamics of exclusion and interpellation. Drawing upon this theory, then, I will argue that the psychodynamics of inclusion and exclusion—constitutive of subjectivity, and first enacted within the family—is masterfully reiterated by Nietzsche in crafting his address to the reader.
The work of exclusion in Nietzsche’s philosophy participates in a broader dynamic between readers