Dead Letters to Nietzsche, or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy. Joanne Faulkner
Читать онлайн книгу.
of California Press, 1992), 232–307. For contemporary reflections upon this aspect of Nietzschean scholarship, see the edited collection Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? See also the chapter in Mazzino Montinari, Reading Nietzsche. Trans. Greg Whitlock (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), entitled “Nietzsche between Alfred Bäumler and Georg Lukács,” 141–69.
[7]. In particular, see Paul-Laurent Assoun, Freud and Nietzsche. Trans. Richard L. Collier Jr. (London and New Brunswick, New Jersey: Athlone, 2000); Ronald Lehrer, Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought: The Origins of a Psychology of Dynamic Unconscious Mental Functioning (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995); and Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ronald L. Lehrer, (eds.), Nietzsche and Depth Psychology (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999).
[8]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), “Woman and Child,” §380, 150.
[9]. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1971). In this seminal essay, Althusser sets out to demonstrate a relation between relations of production, ideology (the way that material relations of production are “imagined,” or the meaning that we give to them), and subjection:
[I]deology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals . . . or “transforms” the individuals into subjects . . . by the very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey you there!” (162–63)
If ideology is supervenient upon the existence of subjects who (re)enact it, then, in terms of reading Nietzsche, his philosophy (ideology) is reproduced by means of the reader, who is subjected to his text, and so takes on a role in relation to it.
[10]. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image–Music–Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 142–48.
[11]. Michel Foucault “What Is an Author?,” Twentieth-century Literary Theory, Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller, (eds.) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 124–42.
[12]. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
[13]. Plato, Phaedrus, Trans. Tom Griffith (New York: Knopf, 2000).
CHAPTER 1
...................................
Ontology for Philologists: Nietzsche, Body, Subject
Philologist 1648. 1. One devoted to learning or literature; a scholar, esp. a classical scholar. Now rare. 2. A person versed in the science of language; a student of language 1716.
—The Oxford English Dictionary
It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading:— in the end I also write slowly [. . .] For philology 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 [. . .] this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers [. . .]
—Friedrich Nietzsche[1]
Everything Nietzsche published, he intended to be read. This may seem a banal observation, yet commentators frequently deem as extraneous and impertinent Nietzsche’s more “stylish” prose: whereby he sets a scene for his philosophy, or instructs his reader in the art of reading his books—as in the passage quoted above. As a philosopher who also self-identified as a philologist, Nietzsche was acutely aware of his dependence upon his readers: not only in terms of his reputation, but also the meaning of his philosophy. Nietzsche’s writings thus enact a grand seduction of his audience. If they are to be charged with responsibility for the meaning of his works, then they must love Nietzsche—the better to approximate a fidelity to his purpose.
But the reader’s love was not enough for Nietzsche: he wanted to possess them, body and soul. Nietzsche needed the reader to identify with his philosophy, in their very subjectivity. For this reason, he could not take the reader just as she or he is: Nietzsche’s texts demand of readers that they apply themselves to it—to the extent even of rearranging their “order of drives,” or constitution. Accordingly, a principal element of his writing is not only to communicate his ideas, but also to communicate a way of being through which his reader is subjected to, and subjected by, his thought. In this way, Nietzsche’s theory of the subject does more than simply explain how the subject comes into being: it also galvanizes a particular mode of subjectivity. Furthermore, other currents of his philosophy contribute to this experiment, whereby his writing exerts a formative force upon its readership. Let us, then, foreground Nietzsche’s account of the subject with a consideration of his appeal to the reader’s subjectivity, before turning to what are considered to be more “proper” components of his philosophy: his concepts of perspectivism and will to power.
“Be Your Self!”: Nietzsche as Educator
“Be your self!” Nietzsche offers this sage—yet, today, relatively commonplace—advice at the beginning of “Schopenhauer as Educator.” We can be sure, however, that the meaning of this adage is anything but commonplace for Nietzsche. He is not reassuring his reader that they should take it easy. We cannot draw closer to this self by consulting a life coach. Still less does he appeal here to an immutable kernel of being that we might call the self, resting like a seed at the core of one’s everyday experience. For Nietzsche there is no soul-atom, no unitary monad to which we refer when we speak of the self.[2] Rather, this self would be the end result of a difficult labor. Nietzsche’s advice is issued as a challenge to the reader to differentiate self from others, and actively to create them-selves in the light of this difference:
The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: “Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.”[3]
Nietzsche’s call to his reader “to be your self,” as well as his later directive “to become what you are,”[4] are fascinating not only because they gesture toward the more-often neglected (by traditional philosophers) lived experience of the reader, but also to the extent that these commands are completely empty of normative content. One may say that this is precisely the point: that Nietzsche was not one to prescribe how one ought to live, and that, anyway, one does not “become who one is” by following the dictates of others. Perhaps more significantly, however, by leaving a gaping chasm at the site of the reader’s self—that is, by abstaining from telling the reader who they should be—isn’t it possible that Nietzsche thus primes his reader for a more radical subjection to his will? More precisely, we could read this content-free imperative “to be your self” as initiating the disarticulation