com
Speech delivered on the occasion ofthe IOOth anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche� Death, Weimar, 25 August 2000.
Speech delivered on the occasion ofthe IOOth anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche� Death, Weimar, 25 August 2000.
Sloterdijk - Nietzsche Apostle
SEMIOTEXT(E) INTERVENTION SERIES © Editions Suhrkamp, Frankfurt
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Speech delivered on the occasion ofthe IOOth anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche� Death, Weimar, 25 August 2000.
Thanks to John Ebert. Design: Hedi El Kholti
ISBN: 978-1-58435-099-6
Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England
Printed in the United States of America
Peter Sloterdijk
Nietzsche Apostle
Translated by Steven Corcoran
semiotext(e)
intervention series a 16
Contents
Introduction 7 Gospels-Redactions 13 The Fifth 29 Total Sponsoring 47 Of Sunsand Humans 65 Notes 85
Introduction
Today, in the year 2000, on the hundredth anniversary ofhis physical death at the dawn ofthe first ofthe millennia he said would have to be dated after him, how are we to speak about Friedrich Nietzsche? Ought we to say that he stands before us suffering and great, like the century to which he belonged with all his existence and out of which he erupted into the eternity ofauthorial renown? Ought we to adopt his own judgment that he was not a man but dynamite? Ought we to emphasize, once again, the peculiarity ofhis "effective history": the fact that never before has an author insisted so much on distinction and yet attracted such vul garity? Ought we to diagnose that it was with him that the era ofnarcissism began, first in evidence as the "insurrection ofthe masses," then as collectivist "great politics," and finally as the dictatorship ofthe
7
global market? Ought we to accept the claim that the history of academic philosophy ends with him and then history of the art of thinking begins? Or ought we to refrain from making commentaries and read Nietzsche and reread him?
I would like to describe the Nietzsche-event as a catastrophe in the history of language and put the argument that his intervention as a literary new evangelist constitutes an incision in old Europe's conditions of understanding. With Marshall Mc Luhan, I presuppose that understanding between people in societies-above all, what they are and achieve in general-has an autoplastic meaning. These conditions of communication provide groups
with a redundancy in which they can vibrate. They imprint on such groups the rhythms and models by which they are able to recognize themselves and by which they repeat themselves as almost the same. They produce a consensus in which they perform the eternal return of the same in the form of a spoken song. Languages are instruments of group narcissism, played so as to tune and retune the player; they make their speakers ring in singular tonalities of self-excitation. They are systems of melodies for recognition, which nearly always delineate the whole program as well. Languages are not primarily used for what is today called the passing on of information, but serve to form
81
communicating group-bodies. People possess lan guage so that they can speak of their own merits [Vorziigen]-and not least of the unsurpassable merit of being able to talk up these merits in their own language. First, and for the most part, people are not concerned to draw each other's attention to states of affairs, but aim instead to incorporate states of affairs into a glory. The different speaker-groups of history-all the various tribes and peoples-are self-praising entities that avail themselves of their own inimitable idiom as part of a psychosocial contest played to gain advantage for themselves. In this sense, before it becomes technical, all speaking serves to enhance and venerate the speaker; and even technical discourses are committed, albeit indirectly, to glorifying technicians. Languages of self-criticism are also borne by a function of self enhancement. And even masochism works to announce the distinctiveness of the tortured indi vidual. When used in accordance with its constitutive function of primary narcissism, language says one and the same thing over and again: that nothing better could have happened to the speaker than, precisely, to have been who he is, to have been who he is at this place and in this language, and to bear witness to the merit of his being in his own skin.
The fact that primary narcissism first became observable with ethnic groups and kingdoms before
! nlTJCUCl;o,l / 9
going on to become a feature of nations, bristling with weapons and classics at the dawn of modern times, is something I will consider from a historical viewpoint. As for the individual, the wait would be lengthier before self-affirmation could step out of the shadows of sin. It did this in the form of amour-propre in the 18th century, that ofholy self interest [Selbstsucht] in the 19th, that ofnarcissism in the 20th, and that of self-design in the 21st. Nietzsche was probably the only theoretician of language of modern times to have had this funda mental relation in mind. For, in deriving prayer from a people's exhilaration at its own self-assertion, he states: "it projects the pleasure it takes in itself (. . . ) into a being that it can thank for all of this. Man is grateful for himself: and this is why one needs a god. "1 And, in a more general way, we can read in an earlier text: "It is a beautiful folly, speaking: with it humans dance over all things. "2 In the reconstruction of religious affects from self-referential gratitude, language comes to be determined as a medium enabling those that speak to say out loud the reasons why they are on top. This is why the profession of faith in one's own modus vivendi is the most distinguished speech-act. It is the eulogistic gesture par excellence. With this derivation of distinction, speech and silence are defined as modes of exhilaration, which confess to
themselves. In both what is advanced is a voluntary declaration of success in the pursuit of Being: in speech as manifestation ofright and power; and in silence as an authorized quiet whose presuppositions require no defending.
Quite clearly, this rudimentary reference to a lin guistics of jubilation or self-affirmation stands in sharp contrast to all that has been said and con ceived about languages by the theorizing communis opinio of the last century, regardless of whether this took the form of ideology critique or analytic philosophy, discourse theory or psychoanalysis, a theory ofthe encounter or deconstruction. The first case set about unmasking all the misleading gener alizations of the languages of the bourgeoisie; the second gave priority to turns of ordinary lan guage over metaphysical inversions; the third, made a relation between the language games of knowledge and the routines of power; the fourth undermined signs through the unconscious con tents of expression; the penultimate case described the language event as a response that is provoked or refused by the call to me of the other-in-need; while the last case brought forward evidence to show that we always fail in attempts to impose the full presence of meaning on what is said. In all these cases language is understood as a medium of lack and distortion,
possibly also as the organ of over-sensitiveness and
compensation, of settling claims and therapy. Everywhere language and the spoken appear as symptoms and problems. Hardly ever are they con ceived of as vectors of affirmations and prophecies. But when they are, it is to underscore the inau thentic and flawed character of all laudatory and promise-making sorts of tunes. Whoever speaks in the conditions permitted-whether from a bour geois, political, academic, legal, or psychological perspective-will always be in the minus and run around in vain seeking the means by which to pay off and shift overdrawn assertions. Whoever speaks incurs debt; whoever speaks further, discourses in order to pay back. The ear is educated in order so as not to give away credit and to interpret its avarice as critical consciousness. In what follows I will endeavor to reprise the Nietzschean idea of lan guage, the beginnings of which Nietzsche only sketched, and to extend them into the future from a contemporary standpoint-whereby I hazard the ramification that Nietzsche's maxim, according to which "all our philosophy is the correction of linguistic usage," is charged with meanings that go beyond all criticist conceptions.
1 2 I N::<�c:cl·n /\. pustlu
GOSPELS-REDACTIONS
First we must take a step back and clarify the con trast between the conditions of modern language and those of pre-modern language. As cultures reached the level of monarchy-I say this having no particular belief in the dogmatic presupposi tions of sociological evolution theory-it went without saying that language's self-laudatory energies could no longer be aimed directly at orators who were specialized in function of public speech, such as the elder, the priest, the rhapsodist. Rather, they had to take a detour and praise the lords, heroes, gods, powers, and forces of virtue, from which a refracting ray came to fall on the orator. In feudal times, poets and rhetoricians were schooled in the grammar of indirect eulogy; their job was to be skilled at generating higher feelings, in which the extolled stood in the center
13
and the singers on the sidelines. Their discretion
required them to be humble, to do what was required for the mood of their own royal space. Precisely to the extent that high cultures in times gone by outlawed an orator's direct expressions of egotism, they showed, with the linguistic brio of primary narcissism, ways whereby dutifully manifesting an enthusiasm for the big other, one could place oneself close to the recipient of praise.
This can scarcely be more legibly studied than in Christian Evangelization and its encroachment on European societies' conditions of understanding in the early Middle Ages. Shown with particular clarity here is the way in which Evangelist speech acts-the preaching of salvation by God's son, and the swearing-in of an ethnic commune for a participation in this sphere that is as unequivocal as possible-put speakers and listeners alike into an oscillating circuit which was about nothing other than celebrating a shared privilege. In his book of the Gospels, Otfrid von WeiGenburg, Rhine Franconian poet-priest of the 9th century, justified his vernacular adaptation of the New Testament by arguing that the Franks, too, ought at last to be allowed access, via a poeticized bible, to the sweetness of the Good News, dulcedo evangeliorum.
As many persons undertake to write in their lan guage and as many strive with fervour to praise what they hold dear-
why should the Franks be the only ones to shrink from the attempt to proclaim the praise of God in the Franconian language. . .
. . . let the praise of God be sweet to you, then Franconian will also be determined by metrical feet, quantity and metrical rules; better, then God himself will speak through you. (Liber evangelorium I, 1, V 31-34; 41-42)
The sense of these reflections, unique for their time, lies in an ethno-narcissistic operation by means of which the Franks were to be formed, at the level of the linguistic techniques of the time, as a collective with higher feelings-with the claim to being equal or even superior to those great historical peoples, the Greeks and the Romans. Gospel verse in the German language is presented as an offensive, the aim ofwhich is to establish a politico-religious system of boasting that, by virtue of a catch-up lesson in rhyme and rhythm, plugs into the art of the poetically possible. The point thus being that, in future, in the image of the gloria Francorum, an effective link would no longer be missing between the veneration of God and the poetics of Empire. In the same spirit,
/15
Otfried attributes to Ludwig den Deutschen, in his dedication to him, a rank equal to King David. Moreover, in this speech act two eulogistic functions-praise of the King and glorification of the people-come together to form a single enhancement-effect. Otfrid was convinced he thus complied with the essence of language, inasmuch as language is per se an instrument of eulogy. This may be most convincingly proven in the case of praising God: "He, in effect (God), has given them (the people) the instrument of language (plectrum linguae) so that they cause him to sound in their praise" (Dedication to Luitberg). One
who praises becomes worthy ofpraise insofar as he or she also participates in the glory ofthe object of eulogy. The poet expresses the same idea in his introductory prayer to the Gospel epic.
You alone are the master of all the languages that exist. Your power has conferred language to all and they have come-o salvation! -to form words in their languages to recall Your memory for always, to praise You for eternity, recognize You and serve You. (Liber evangeliorum, I, 2, V33-38)1
Remarkable in this appeal is not only the fact that knowledge is also put at the service of the eulo gistic function; but also that the languages of
humanity as a whole are defined as media of God's narcissism, which passes via the detour of human idiom back to God himself in unending self-celebration. With God self-praise is a perfume. The meaning of language is to celebrate, and any language that might forget to celebrate would have taken leave of its senses. 2 The only awkward thing about this theo-linguistic arrangement is precisely that God must be celebrated in Old High German, in a lingua agrestis or peasant idiom that did not wholly conform to the gram matical and melodic norms of divine relations to themselves. Otfrid had to muster all his Franconian pride to find the courage to praise God in the South Rhine Franconian dialect. Even though it did not occur to him to improve the Gospel as such, he thus saw all the more clearly the need to render the teotisk3 vernacular compa tible with the Gospel through poetic amendment an idea from which would come one of the main linguistic creations prior to Luther's translation of the Bible. Let's note that in taking up the project Otfrid felt no need for justification in forming a continuous linear narrative of the canonical Gospels. In his time, in which a lay reading of the Holy Writings was not something open to debate, syncretistic-didactical forms such as the so-called Gospel harmonies were well introduced
and sufficiently legitimated as a sacred genre.
What was appropriate for Tatian the Assyrian was also apt for a noble Franc. What the author instead seemed to deem worthy ofjustification was the articulation of his Gospel epic in five books:
These five of which I j ust spoke, if I have divided them thus, even though there are only four books ofthe Gospel, this is because the holy rectitude of their numbering four sanctifies the irrectitude of our five senses and, transforming all that is immoderate in us . . . carries it off toward heaven.
Whatever it is that we miss via sight, odour, touch, taste, and hearing: via the remembrance of the texts of the Gospels (eorum lectionis memoria), we purify ourselves of our corruption. 4
Here again, what seemed to require improvement was naturally not the Gospel itself, but rather the readership and the listeners who approach the beatifying text as Franks and humans with their natural quintuplet sensuality, and who-ifwe are to believe the poet-thus require five books of Gospel poetry in German rather than the four original Gospels.
This episode in the history ofthe German language played out about 1010 years before Nietzsche's
own self-declaration, while the next example from the history of self-praise relations in western tradition refers to a case that is separated by a mere seventy or eighty years from the intervention of the teacher of the eternal return. The issue here still has to do with improving the Gospel-but this time the mode is considerably more compli cated, since what now enters the foreground, at the same time as collective self-praise, are concerns about individual self-enhancement. The scene of the experiment is the United States of America around 1810, and the Gospel redactor is none other than the redactor of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, who at this time was able to look back on several terms of office as minister to France and as vice president of the USA, as well as on two mandates as president. After his years of service in Washington, he returned home to his manor in Monticello, Virginia, and devoted himselfto rounding out the image ofhimselfhe intended to leave to posterity. These indications are enough to support the notion that what we bear witness to here is an eminent case of national-religious linguistic pragmatism, especially as we know that to this day the United States represents the most fertile collective of self-celebration of all the current political entities in the "concert of nations"; it
could also be said that it is the society whose founding conditions included dismantling as far as possible all cultural inhibitions against the use of enhancing superlatives in a democratic self reference. What is the USA if not the product of a Declaration of Independence-from humility (and doubtless not only from the British Crown)? There can be little wonder, then, about the effi cacy with which, as we shall see, the Christian message is adapted to the needs ofAmerican glory.
Already during his first presidential mandate in Washington, Jefferson would busy himself on his spare nights, using scissors to cut out extracts from a series of editions of the New Testament in Greek, Latin, French, and English, which he then pasted together into a scrap book to make a new arrangement of the Gospels. The aim was one he'd held for some time, and first emerged during his correspondence with Unitarian theologian and writer Joseph Priestly, in 1795. In all likelihood, however, the task was not completed until around 1820, aftermanyyears ofinterruption. The product of this cut-and-paste work, which Jefferson com pleted twice-over, was given the title The Life and Morals ofJesus ofNazareth, and has become known as The Jefferson Bible. In his scissor work, the redactor must have been convinced that he possessed the criteria by which to distinguish
20 I f\J1etzschc Apostc
the utilizable from the non-utilizable in the bequeathed text. As a representative of the American Enlightenment thinkers, with their decorative monotheism and Philadelphian exu berance, Jefferson testifies to the state of the Gospel problem at the apex of this current of thought. With this Christian-humanist gentleman, it becomes clear that the need for a self-enhancement using the classic reservoirs of meaning was as alive as ever, but could only be satisfied by expunging vast passages of the historical Gospels. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, anyone wanting still to play the language game of the Gospels to advantage had above all to be able to omit. This is the meaning ofneo-humanism: to be able to eliminate in the old Gospel that which has become incompatible with one's own glorification as a humanist and citizen. For this operation, no image is more impressive than that of an American head ofstate in his office at night, who, with scissors, cuts out pages from six copies of the New Testament in four different languages and pastes the extracts into a private copy of the Good News that is designed to conform to the demands of contemporary rationality and sentimentality for a citable, excerpted version of the Bible. It is characteristic of Jefferson's philosophical ambi tions that he did not feel that this redaction of
Gospels-Redactions I 21
the Gospel-or as he put it, this formulation of an abstract or syllabus-was a heresy in the original meaning of the term, insofar as hairesis refers to a choosy insolence applied to a totality of dogmas and traditions. Rather, he presented himself as the curatorofthewritings'truecontent,as re-establishing a pure text against the fudging performed by later additions. With energetic naivety, the enlightened redactor went about separating Jesus' unacceptable words from those that Jesus must have said, had he wanted to be approvingly cited by Jefferson; even better, from those that Jesus would have said had he foreseen the transforma tion of believers into sympathizers. In fact, the modern sympathizer ofJesus can be defined as the bearer of Euro-American Enlightenment, as one who places value, despite all the connections to the Christian tradition, on remaining within the continuum of worldly possibilities of self enhancement that were developed since the Renaissance. And this is precisely what Jefferson had in mind when he endeavored to cut out the valid residue, that which is citable even among humanists, from the embarrassing mass of New Testament phrases. As such, in October 1813, Jefferson felt he could send to John Adams the following report of success:
There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out ofthe printed book, and arranging, the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo offorty-six pages, ofpure and unsophisticated doctrines . . . 5
In a letter addressed to the erudite religious and Dutch Unitarian, Francis Adrian van der Kemp, Jefferson explained himself in a more detailed manner about his relationship with Jesus the man:
It is the innocence of His character, the purity and sublimity of His moral precepts, the elo quence of His inculcations, the beauty of the apologues in which He conveys them, that I so much admire; sometimes, indeed, needing indulgence to eastern hyperbolism. My eulogies, too, may be founded on a postulate which all may not be ready to grant. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to Him by His biogra phers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the loveliest benevo lence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism
I 23
and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples. 6
In view of this declaration it makes little sense to maintain, along with The Jefrson Bible's editor Forrester Church, that the wise man of Monticello merely sought the intelligible Jesus and necessarily missed the historical one. Jefferson was after nei ther an historical nor an intelligible Jesus but rather an object ofeulogy, which, by giving praise to it and thus having recourse to shared moral values, would enable the speaker to come out a sure-fire winner. Jefferson was after a spiritual master who could be cited to guarantee advantage, and who would permit the laudator to become a prestige shareholder by drawing on the holy source of values. After the mental caesura of the Enlightenment, an unabridged version of the New Testament could deliver no such expectations of symbolic profits, and for this reason any rational redactor had to expunge from the corpus ofstories and words of evangelical authority all that would compromise him in front of other rational beings and land him in the mire of sectarianism, or,
24 I r\Jietzsche Apostle
what amounts to the same thing, of cognitive loserdom. For absolutely similar motives, and with similar means, Leo Tolstoy would later put together a private version of the New Testament and present it as a sort of "Fifth Gospel": the Russian path toward the coexistence of evangelism and the Enlightenment. 7 The Moderns no longer know of evangelists; they know only of the classics. Citing a classic guarantees a sure, albeit modest, return; on the contrary, if, in society, you invoke the Redeemer, your credit will shrink. The Enlightenment is really a language game for cognitive winners, who continually deposit the premiums of knowledge and critique in their accounts, and exhibit their cultural funds, while faith gets increasingly hidden behind a barrier of embarrassment, to be crossed only when one is among like-minded others, and, moreover, is ready to give up the advanced boasting potential of the Enlightenment. But Jefferson was not a man to burden himself with embarrassment or with language games for losers. As a result, in his redaction of the Holy Scriptures for Enlighten ment winners, all the threatening and apocalyptic discourses ofJesus are forcibly absent, as are most of the stories about miraculous cures and resurrec tion-his purged Gospel ends when a few of Jesus's friends roll away the stone in front of the
tomb and go off on their way. As text-composer, Jefferson performs the literary imperative of Modernity: Where legend existed, the news must come! At stake now is to swap all sacred agents for terrestrial heroes. Jesus can only be the hero of a
novel or a participant in discourse.
In a general way, the modern tribute to heroes
necessarily faces a complicating factor, namely that eulogistic functions are increasingly dependent on scientific premises and must satisfy the dictates of political correctness. Nowadays you always have to have in view the side-effects of each tribute and to calculate the angle of refraction of indirect self-enhancement. But the main rule is that all eulogistic remarks have to be ontologically correct, and that no claims are made of actual interventions from transcendence into immanence. The leeway for boasting shrinks; the strategy of indirect self celebration in high culture hits the investor with ever greater costs and diminishing narcissistic returns. Summing up this state of affairs is the term humanism, such as ethicists use it today: to all speakers, it suggests the return to a carefully considered sort of self-affirmation that is only barely distinguishable from medium-level depres sion. Twentieth-century mass culture would first designate a way out of this quandary by discon necting self-praise from remarkable performance
26 I
and other things, admiration of which was based on superior criteria. This disconnection thus enabled primitive feelings of exhilaration to step onto the forestage where a public of accomplices in disinhibition awaited, intent on cheering. For Jefferson, these kinds of relief were not yet in sight. He had to continue to tie his eulogistic brio to the holy texts, and, by means of redemptive abstracts, to revert to elevated examples of the tradition in order to satisfy cultural demands for discourses about higher feelings. He could thus write to one of his correspondents: "I am a Christian, in the only sense He wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence. . . . "8 What speaks for Jefferson is that his hypocrisy is spontaneous and coherent. His grasping at the diamonds in the dunghill of tradition illustrates a growing American selectiveness as regards the heritage of old Europe. The importation of meaning from Jerusalem, Rome, Geneva, and Wittenberg also had to clear American customs.
Jefferson's redaction of the Gospels teaches us that the preconditions for winning avowable posi tions ofprivilege stemming from Christian tradition already became problematic nearly a century prior to Nietzsche's own intervention. What, in western culture for over one and a half millennia, had
Gospeis-Redactions ! 27
been the pure and simple, and often also profitable, Good News-the creed for admitting people into the other-worldly God's system of likeness increasingly proved to be a losing game for the messenger: the conditions of transmission for messages of this type had been transformed; the speaker of such news appeared too clearly as someone who had not yet properly learned the procedures of modernity to be able to take up the
word to advantage.
2
THE FIFTH
On February 13, 1883 in Rapallo, Friedrich Nietzsche, then aged 38, composed a tactically stylized letter to his editor, Ernst Schmeitzner in Chemnitz:
Dearest Herr Veleger,
. . . Today I have something good to announce:
I have made a decisive step-and I mean by the way, such a step as should also be useful to you. It is a matter of a small work (barely a hundred printed pages), the title ofwhich is
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A Book for All and None
It is a "poem," or a fifth "Gospel" or some
thing or other for which there is not yet a name: by far the most serious but also the most cheerful of my productions, and accessible to everyone. So I think that it will have an "immediate effect" . . . 1
29
On April 20 of the same year, Nietzsche wrote to Malvida von Meysenbug in Rome:
. . . it is a beautiful story: I have challenged all the religions and made a new "holy book"! And, said in all seriousness, it is as serious as any other, even though it incorporates laughter into religion. 2
On May 24 in a letter to Karl Hillebrand Nietzsche made the following remark about the first part of Zarathustra:
Everything that I had thought, suffered, and hoped for is in it and in a way that my life wants now to appear to me as justified. And then again I feel ashamed before myself: since I have hereby stretched out my hand for the highest garlands ever awarded to humanity . . . 3
A year later Nietzsche's ears were still ringing with this expression of reaching for the "highest garlands," which is henceforth attributed to the "use the foolish and false language ofthe ambitiosi. "4 All his correspondence from the Zarathustra period is shot through with micro-evangelic news about his concluding a work that had weighed heavily
on the mind of its author as something of incomparable value. At this time, it was the
Italian and the Swiss Postal Services that under took to the "Good News. "
Nietzsche's break with the old-European evan gelic tradition makes discernible how, from a certain degree of enlightenment, speech's functions of indirect eulogy can no longer be secured with the compromises of deism or cultivated Protestantism. Anyone seeking a language that secures the speaker the attribution of "every human excellence,'' or at least the guarantee of indirect participation in supreme advantages, has to develop strategies of expression that surpass the eclecticism of a Jefferson. As in communication among "the moderns" embarrassment is hardly avoided simply by cutting out compromising reports of miracles, it is no longer done. It is no longer enough to bypass all the maledicent apocalypses and prophetic com minations, the pronouncing of which will unmask absolutely anyone speaking before a secular or humanist-influenced public. Would anyone be able to refer, in society, to an authority such as the Jesus of Mark 9. 42, who thought it right to say: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he
were thrown into the sea. " A commentator writing in the year of 1 888 contented himself with saying: "How evangelical! "5 Scissors can no longer save a
Tho I 31
speaker's self-esteem when spreading the good news-all in all, gospel residue proves unable to withstand serious scrutiny. Not even the process of demythologization can set one straight on one's feet. Too dim, too suspect, too inferior are the sources from which the beautiful discourses issue. Expressions of discontent with its glowering uni versalism and its menace-laden benevolence can no longer be disguised in the long term. So, if "good news" remained possible and the conditions of spreading through a chain of winners could be realized, then it would have to be reconstituted. It would have to be new enough to avoid embarrassing similarities with texts that had become unacceptable, but similar enough so that it could be perceived at least as a formal extension of the stock-standard gospel. This is the reason why the new redaction of a discourse, one able to be proclaimed, and in which the speaker could bank on making a profit, could be first obtained only through the subver sion of earlier forms: the man who can promise anew is one who says something unheard-of with new words. But Nietzsche did not want to be a mere Gospel parodist; he did not want merely to synthesize Luther wirh rhe dirhyramb and swap Mosaic tablets for Zarathustrian ones. Rather, for him the point was that the conditions pertaining to professions of faith and the chains of citations
32 . 1 i\lj,='tzsc:-e
be given an entirely new order; better, that the distinction between a profession of faith and a citation be revised.
com
Speech delivered on the occasion ofthe IOOth anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche� Death, Weimar, 25 August 2000.
Thanks to John Ebert. Design: Hedi El Kholti
ISBN: 978-1-58435-099-6
Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England
Printed in the United States of America
Peter Sloterdijk
Nietzsche Apostle
Translated by Steven Corcoran
semiotext(e)
intervention series a 16
Contents
Introduction 7 Gospels-Redactions 13 The Fifth 29 Total Sponsoring 47 Of Sunsand Humans 65 Notes 85
Introduction
Today, in the year 2000, on the hundredth anniversary ofhis physical death at the dawn ofthe first ofthe millennia he said would have to be dated after him, how are we to speak about Friedrich Nietzsche? Ought we to say that he stands before us suffering and great, like the century to which he belonged with all his existence and out of which he erupted into the eternity ofauthorial renown? Ought we to adopt his own judgment that he was not a man but dynamite? Ought we to emphasize, once again, the peculiarity ofhis "effective history": the fact that never before has an author insisted so much on distinction and yet attracted such vul garity? Ought we to diagnose that it was with him that the era ofnarcissism began, first in evidence as the "insurrection ofthe masses," then as collectivist "great politics," and finally as the dictatorship ofthe
7
global market? Ought we to accept the claim that the history of academic philosophy ends with him and then history of the art of thinking begins? Or ought we to refrain from making commentaries and read Nietzsche and reread him?
I would like to describe the Nietzsche-event as a catastrophe in the history of language and put the argument that his intervention as a literary new evangelist constitutes an incision in old Europe's conditions of understanding. With Marshall Mc Luhan, I presuppose that understanding between people in societies-above all, what they are and achieve in general-has an autoplastic meaning. These conditions of communication provide groups
with a redundancy in which they can vibrate. They imprint on such groups the rhythms and models by which they are able to recognize themselves and by which they repeat themselves as almost the same. They produce a consensus in which they perform the eternal return of the same in the form of a spoken song. Languages are instruments of group narcissism, played so as to tune and retune the player; they make their speakers ring in singular tonalities of self-excitation. They are systems of melodies for recognition, which nearly always delineate the whole program as well. Languages are not primarily used for what is today called the passing on of information, but serve to form
81
communicating group-bodies. People possess lan guage so that they can speak of their own merits [Vorziigen]-and not least of the unsurpassable merit of being able to talk up these merits in their own language. First, and for the most part, people are not concerned to draw each other's attention to states of affairs, but aim instead to incorporate states of affairs into a glory. The different speaker-groups of history-all the various tribes and peoples-are self-praising entities that avail themselves of their own inimitable idiom as part of a psychosocial contest played to gain advantage for themselves. In this sense, before it becomes technical, all speaking serves to enhance and venerate the speaker; and even technical discourses are committed, albeit indirectly, to glorifying technicians. Languages of self-criticism are also borne by a function of self enhancement. And even masochism works to announce the distinctiveness of the tortured indi vidual. When used in accordance with its constitutive function of primary narcissism, language says one and the same thing over and again: that nothing better could have happened to the speaker than, precisely, to have been who he is, to have been who he is at this place and in this language, and to bear witness to the merit of his being in his own skin.
The fact that primary narcissism first became observable with ethnic groups and kingdoms before
! nlTJCUCl;o,l / 9
going on to become a feature of nations, bristling with weapons and classics at the dawn of modern times, is something I will consider from a historical viewpoint. As for the individual, the wait would be lengthier before self-affirmation could step out of the shadows of sin. It did this in the form of amour-propre in the 18th century, that ofholy self interest [Selbstsucht] in the 19th, that ofnarcissism in the 20th, and that of self-design in the 21st. Nietzsche was probably the only theoretician of language of modern times to have had this funda mental relation in mind. For, in deriving prayer from a people's exhilaration at its own self-assertion, he states: "it projects the pleasure it takes in itself (. . . ) into a being that it can thank for all of this. Man is grateful for himself: and this is why one needs a god. "1 And, in a more general way, we can read in an earlier text: "It is a beautiful folly, speaking: with it humans dance over all things. "2 In the reconstruction of religious affects from self-referential gratitude, language comes to be determined as a medium enabling those that speak to say out loud the reasons why they are on top. This is why the profession of faith in one's own modus vivendi is the most distinguished speech-act. It is the eulogistic gesture par excellence. With this derivation of distinction, speech and silence are defined as modes of exhilaration, which confess to
themselves. In both what is advanced is a voluntary declaration of success in the pursuit of Being: in speech as manifestation ofright and power; and in silence as an authorized quiet whose presuppositions require no defending.
Quite clearly, this rudimentary reference to a lin guistics of jubilation or self-affirmation stands in sharp contrast to all that has been said and con ceived about languages by the theorizing communis opinio of the last century, regardless of whether this took the form of ideology critique or analytic philosophy, discourse theory or psychoanalysis, a theory ofthe encounter or deconstruction. The first case set about unmasking all the misleading gener alizations of the languages of the bourgeoisie; the second gave priority to turns of ordinary lan guage over metaphysical inversions; the third, made a relation between the language games of knowledge and the routines of power; the fourth undermined signs through the unconscious con tents of expression; the penultimate case described the language event as a response that is provoked or refused by the call to me of the other-in-need; while the last case brought forward evidence to show that we always fail in attempts to impose the full presence of meaning on what is said. In all these cases language is understood as a medium of lack and distortion,
possibly also as the organ of over-sensitiveness and
compensation, of settling claims and therapy. Everywhere language and the spoken appear as symptoms and problems. Hardly ever are they con ceived of as vectors of affirmations and prophecies. But when they are, it is to underscore the inau thentic and flawed character of all laudatory and promise-making sorts of tunes. Whoever speaks in the conditions permitted-whether from a bour geois, political, academic, legal, or psychological perspective-will always be in the minus and run around in vain seeking the means by which to pay off and shift overdrawn assertions. Whoever speaks incurs debt; whoever speaks further, discourses in order to pay back. The ear is educated in order so as not to give away credit and to interpret its avarice as critical consciousness. In what follows I will endeavor to reprise the Nietzschean idea of lan guage, the beginnings of which Nietzsche only sketched, and to extend them into the future from a contemporary standpoint-whereby I hazard the ramification that Nietzsche's maxim, according to which "all our philosophy is the correction of linguistic usage," is charged with meanings that go beyond all criticist conceptions.
1 2 I N::<�c:cl·n /\. pustlu
GOSPELS-REDACTIONS
First we must take a step back and clarify the con trast between the conditions of modern language and those of pre-modern language. As cultures reached the level of monarchy-I say this having no particular belief in the dogmatic presupposi tions of sociological evolution theory-it went without saying that language's self-laudatory energies could no longer be aimed directly at orators who were specialized in function of public speech, such as the elder, the priest, the rhapsodist. Rather, they had to take a detour and praise the lords, heroes, gods, powers, and forces of virtue, from which a refracting ray came to fall on the orator. In feudal times, poets and rhetoricians were schooled in the grammar of indirect eulogy; their job was to be skilled at generating higher feelings, in which the extolled stood in the center
13
and the singers on the sidelines. Their discretion
required them to be humble, to do what was required for the mood of their own royal space. Precisely to the extent that high cultures in times gone by outlawed an orator's direct expressions of egotism, they showed, with the linguistic brio of primary narcissism, ways whereby dutifully manifesting an enthusiasm for the big other, one could place oneself close to the recipient of praise.
This can scarcely be more legibly studied than in Christian Evangelization and its encroachment on European societies' conditions of understanding in the early Middle Ages. Shown with particular clarity here is the way in which Evangelist speech acts-the preaching of salvation by God's son, and the swearing-in of an ethnic commune for a participation in this sphere that is as unequivocal as possible-put speakers and listeners alike into an oscillating circuit which was about nothing other than celebrating a shared privilege. In his book of the Gospels, Otfrid von WeiGenburg, Rhine Franconian poet-priest of the 9th century, justified his vernacular adaptation of the New Testament by arguing that the Franks, too, ought at last to be allowed access, via a poeticized bible, to the sweetness of the Good News, dulcedo evangeliorum.
As many persons undertake to write in their lan guage and as many strive with fervour to praise what they hold dear-
why should the Franks be the only ones to shrink from the attempt to proclaim the praise of God in the Franconian language. . .
. . . let the praise of God be sweet to you, then Franconian will also be determined by metrical feet, quantity and metrical rules; better, then God himself will speak through you. (Liber evangelorium I, 1, V 31-34; 41-42)
The sense of these reflections, unique for their time, lies in an ethno-narcissistic operation by means of which the Franks were to be formed, at the level of the linguistic techniques of the time, as a collective with higher feelings-with the claim to being equal or even superior to those great historical peoples, the Greeks and the Romans. Gospel verse in the German language is presented as an offensive, the aim ofwhich is to establish a politico-religious system of boasting that, by virtue of a catch-up lesson in rhyme and rhythm, plugs into the art of the poetically possible. The point thus being that, in future, in the image of the gloria Francorum, an effective link would no longer be missing between the veneration of God and the poetics of Empire. In the same spirit,
/15
Otfried attributes to Ludwig den Deutschen, in his dedication to him, a rank equal to King David. Moreover, in this speech act two eulogistic functions-praise of the King and glorification of the people-come together to form a single enhancement-effect. Otfrid was convinced he thus complied with the essence of language, inasmuch as language is per se an instrument of eulogy. This may be most convincingly proven in the case of praising God: "He, in effect (God), has given them (the people) the instrument of language (plectrum linguae) so that they cause him to sound in their praise" (Dedication to Luitberg). One
who praises becomes worthy ofpraise insofar as he or she also participates in the glory ofthe object of eulogy. The poet expresses the same idea in his introductory prayer to the Gospel epic.
You alone are the master of all the languages that exist. Your power has conferred language to all and they have come-o salvation! -to form words in their languages to recall Your memory for always, to praise You for eternity, recognize You and serve You. (Liber evangeliorum, I, 2, V33-38)1
Remarkable in this appeal is not only the fact that knowledge is also put at the service of the eulo gistic function; but also that the languages of
humanity as a whole are defined as media of God's narcissism, which passes via the detour of human idiom back to God himself in unending self-celebration. With God self-praise is a perfume. The meaning of language is to celebrate, and any language that might forget to celebrate would have taken leave of its senses. 2 The only awkward thing about this theo-linguistic arrangement is precisely that God must be celebrated in Old High German, in a lingua agrestis or peasant idiom that did not wholly conform to the gram matical and melodic norms of divine relations to themselves. Otfrid had to muster all his Franconian pride to find the courage to praise God in the South Rhine Franconian dialect. Even though it did not occur to him to improve the Gospel as such, he thus saw all the more clearly the need to render the teotisk3 vernacular compa tible with the Gospel through poetic amendment an idea from which would come one of the main linguistic creations prior to Luther's translation of the Bible. Let's note that in taking up the project Otfrid felt no need for justification in forming a continuous linear narrative of the canonical Gospels. In his time, in which a lay reading of the Holy Writings was not something open to debate, syncretistic-didactical forms such as the so-called Gospel harmonies were well introduced
and sufficiently legitimated as a sacred genre.
What was appropriate for Tatian the Assyrian was also apt for a noble Franc. What the author instead seemed to deem worthy ofjustification was the articulation of his Gospel epic in five books:
These five of which I j ust spoke, if I have divided them thus, even though there are only four books ofthe Gospel, this is because the holy rectitude of their numbering four sanctifies the irrectitude of our five senses and, transforming all that is immoderate in us . . . carries it off toward heaven.
Whatever it is that we miss via sight, odour, touch, taste, and hearing: via the remembrance of the texts of the Gospels (eorum lectionis memoria), we purify ourselves of our corruption. 4
Here again, what seemed to require improvement was naturally not the Gospel itself, but rather the readership and the listeners who approach the beatifying text as Franks and humans with their natural quintuplet sensuality, and who-ifwe are to believe the poet-thus require five books of Gospel poetry in German rather than the four original Gospels.
This episode in the history ofthe German language played out about 1010 years before Nietzsche's
own self-declaration, while the next example from the history of self-praise relations in western tradition refers to a case that is separated by a mere seventy or eighty years from the intervention of the teacher of the eternal return. The issue here still has to do with improving the Gospel-but this time the mode is considerably more compli cated, since what now enters the foreground, at the same time as collective self-praise, are concerns about individual self-enhancement. The scene of the experiment is the United States of America around 1810, and the Gospel redactor is none other than the redactor of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, who at this time was able to look back on several terms of office as minister to France and as vice president of the USA, as well as on two mandates as president. After his years of service in Washington, he returned home to his manor in Monticello, Virginia, and devoted himselfto rounding out the image ofhimselfhe intended to leave to posterity. These indications are enough to support the notion that what we bear witness to here is an eminent case of national-religious linguistic pragmatism, especially as we know that to this day the United States represents the most fertile collective of self-celebration of all the current political entities in the "concert of nations"; it
could also be said that it is the society whose founding conditions included dismantling as far as possible all cultural inhibitions against the use of enhancing superlatives in a democratic self reference. What is the USA if not the product of a Declaration of Independence-from humility (and doubtless not only from the British Crown)? There can be little wonder, then, about the effi cacy with which, as we shall see, the Christian message is adapted to the needs ofAmerican glory.
Already during his first presidential mandate in Washington, Jefferson would busy himself on his spare nights, using scissors to cut out extracts from a series of editions of the New Testament in Greek, Latin, French, and English, which he then pasted together into a scrap book to make a new arrangement of the Gospels. The aim was one he'd held for some time, and first emerged during his correspondence with Unitarian theologian and writer Joseph Priestly, in 1795. In all likelihood, however, the task was not completed until around 1820, aftermanyyears ofinterruption. The product of this cut-and-paste work, which Jefferson com pleted twice-over, was given the title The Life and Morals ofJesus ofNazareth, and has become known as The Jefferson Bible. In his scissor work, the redactor must have been convinced that he possessed the criteria by which to distinguish
20 I f\J1etzschc Apostc
the utilizable from the non-utilizable in the bequeathed text. As a representative of the American Enlightenment thinkers, with their decorative monotheism and Philadelphian exu berance, Jefferson testifies to the state of the Gospel problem at the apex of this current of thought. With this Christian-humanist gentleman, it becomes clear that the need for a self-enhancement using the classic reservoirs of meaning was as alive as ever, but could only be satisfied by expunging vast passages of the historical Gospels. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, anyone wanting still to play the language game of the Gospels to advantage had above all to be able to omit. This is the meaning ofneo-humanism: to be able to eliminate in the old Gospel that which has become incompatible with one's own glorification as a humanist and citizen. For this operation, no image is more impressive than that of an American head ofstate in his office at night, who, with scissors, cuts out pages from six copies of the New Testament in four different languages and pastes the extracts into a private copy of the Good News that is designed to conform to the demands of contemporary rationality and sentimentality for a citable, excerpted version of the Bible. It is characteristic of Jefferson's philosophical ambi tions that he did not feel that this redaction of
Gospels-Redactions I 21
the Gospel-or as he put it, this formulation of an abstract or syllabus-was a heresy in the original meaning of the term, insofar as hairesis refers to a choosy insolence applied to a totality of dogmas and traditions. Rather, he presented himself as the curatorofthewritings'truecontent,as re-establishing a pure text against the fudging performed by later additions. With energetic naivety, the enlightened redactor went about separating Jesus' unacceptable words from those that Jesus must have said, had he wanted to be approvingly cited by Jefferson; even better, from those that Jesus would have said had he foreseen the transforma tion of believers into sympathizers. In fact, the modern sympathizer ofJesus can be defined as the bearer of Euro-American Enlightenment, as one who places value, despite all the connections to the Christian tradition, on remaining within the continuum of worldly possibilities of self enhancement that were developed since the Renaissance. And this is precisely what Jefferson had in mind when he endeavored to cut out the valid residue, that which is citable even among humanists, from the embarrassing mass of New Testament phrases. As such, in October 1813, Jefferson felt he could send to John Adams the following report of success:
There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out ofthe printed book, and arranging, the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo offorty-six pages, ofpure and unsophisticated doctrines . . . 5
In a letter addressed to the erudite religious and Dutch Unitarian, Francis Adrian van der Kemp, Jefferson explained himself in a more detailed manner about his relationship with Jesus the man:
It is the innocence of His character, the purity and sublimity of His moral precepts, the elo quence of His inculcations, the beauty of the apologues in which He conveys them, that I so much admire; sometimes, indeed, needing indulgence to eastern hyperbolism. My eulogies, too, may be founded on a postulate which all may not be ready to grant. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to Him by His biogra phers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the loveliest benevo lence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism
I 23
and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples. 6
In view of this declaration it makes little sense to maintain, along with The Jefrson Bible's editor Forrester Church, that the wise man of Monticello merely sought the intelligible Jesus and necessarily missed the historical one. Jefferson was after nei ther an historical nor an intelligible Jesus but rather an object ofeulogy, which, by giving praise to it and thus having recourse to shared moral values, would enable the speaker to come out a sure-fire winner. Jefferson was after a spiritual master who could be cited to guarantee advantage, and who would permit the laudator to become a prestige shareholder by drawing on the holy source of values. After the mental caesura of the Enlightenment, an unabridged version of the New Testament could deliver no such expectations of symbolic profits, and for this reason any rational redactor had to expunge from the corpus ofstories and words of evangelical authority all that would compromise him in front of other rational beings and land him in the mire of sectarianism, or,
24 I r\Jietzsche Apostle
what amounts to the same thing, of cognitive loserdom. For absolutely similar motives, and with similar means, Leo Tolstoy would later put together a private version of the New Testament and present it as a sort of "Fifth Gospel": the Russian path toward the coexistence of evangelism and the Enlightenment. 7 The Moderns no longer know of evangelists; they know only of the classics. Citing a classic guarantees a sure, albeit modest, return; on the contrary, if, in society, you invoke the Redeemer, your credit will shrink. The Enlightenment is really a language game for cognitive winners, who continually deposit the premiums of knowledge and critique in their accounts, and exhibit their cultural funds, while faith gets increasingly hidden behind a barrier of embarrassment, to be crossed only when one is among like-minded others, and, moreover, is ready to give up the advanced boasting potential of the Enlightenment. But Jefferson was not a man to burden himself with embarrassment or with language games for losers. As a result, in his redaction of the Holy Scriptures for Enlighten ment winners, all the threatening and apocalyptic discourses ofJesus are forcibly absent, as are most of the stories about miraculous cures and resurrec tion-his purged Gospel ends when a few of Jesus's friends roll away the stone in front of the
tomb and go off on their way. As text-composer, Jefferson performs the literary imperative of Modernity: Where legend existed, the news must come! At stake now is to swap all sacred agents for terrestrial heroes. Jesus can only be the hero of a
novel or a participant in discourse.
In a general way, the modern tribute to heroes
necessarily faces a complicating factor, namely that eulogistic functions are increasingly dependent on scientific premises and must satisfy the dictates of political correctness. Nowadays you always have to have in view the side-effects of each tribute and to calculate the angle of refraction of indirect self-enhancement. But the main rule is that all eulogistic remarks have to be ontologically correct, and that no claims are made of actual interventions from transcendence into immanence. The leeway for boasting shrinks; the strategy of indirect self celebration in high culture hits the investor with ever greater costs and diminishing narcissistic returns. Summing up this state of affairs is the term humanism, such as ethicists use it today: to all speakers, it suggests the return to a carefully considered sort of self-affirmation that is only barely distinguishable from medium-level depres sion. Twentieth-century mass culture would first designate a way out of this quandary by discon necting self-praise from remarkable performance
26 I
and other things, admiration of which was based on superior criteria. This disconnection thus enabled primitive feelings of exhilaration to step onto the forestage where a public of accomplices in disinhibition awaited, intent on cheering. For Jefferson, these kinds of relief were not yet in sight. He had to continue to tie his eulogistic brio to the holy texts, and, by means of redemptive abstracts, to revert to elevated examples of the tradition in order to satisfy cultural demands for discourses about higher feelings. He could thus write to one of his correspondents: "I am a Christian, in the only sense He wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence. . . . "8 What speaks for Jefferson is that his hypocrisy is spontaneous and coherent. His grasping at the diamonds in the dunghill of tradition illustrates a growing American selectiveness as regards the heritage of old Europe. The importation of meaning from Jerusalem, Rome, Geneva, and Wittenberg also had to clear American customs.
Jefferson's redaction of the Gospels teaches us that the preconditions for winning avowable posi tions ofprivilege stemming from Christian tradition already became problematic nearly a century prior to Nietzsche's own intervention. What, in western culture for over one and a half millennia, had
Gospeis-Redactions ! 27
been the pure and simple, and often also profitable, Good News-the creed for admitting people into the other-worldly God's system of likeness increasingly proved to be a losing game for the messenger: the conditions of transmission for messages of this type had been transformed; the speaker of such news appeared too clearly as someone who had not yet properly learned the procedures of modernity to be able to take up the
word to advantage.
2
THE FIFTH
On February 13, 1883 in Rapallo, Friedrich Nietzsche, then aged 38, composed a tactically stylized letter to his editor, Ernst Schmeitzner in Chemnitz:
Dearest Herr Veleger,
. . . Today I have something good to announce:
I have made a decisive step-and I mean by the way, such a step as should also be useful to you. It is a matter of a small work (barely a hundred printed pages), the title ofwhich is
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A Book for All and None
It is a "poem," or a fifth "Gospel" or some
thing or other for which there is not yet a name: by far the most serious but also the most cheerful of my productions, and accessible to everyone. So I think that it will have an "immediate effect" . . . 1
29
On April 20 of the same year, Nietzsche wrote to Malvida von Meysenbug in Rome:
. . . it is a beautiful story: I have challenged all the religions and made a new "holy book"! And, said in all seriousness, it is as serious as any other, even though it incorporates laughter into religion. 2
On May 24 in a letter to Karl Hillebrand Nietzsche made the following remark about the first part of Zarathustra:
Everything that I had thought, suffered, and hoped for is in it and in a way that my life wants now to appear to me as justified. And then again I feel ashamed before myself: since I have hereby stretched out my hand for the highest garlands ever awarded to humanity . . . 3
A year later Nietzsche's ears were still ringing with this expression of reaching for the "highest garlands," which is henceforth attributed to the "use the foolish and false language ofthe ambitiosi. "4 All his correspondence from the Zarathustra period is shot through with micro-evangelic news about his concluding a work that had weighed heavily
on the mind of its author as something of incomparable value. At this time, it was the
Italian and the Swiss Postal Services that under took to the "Good News. "
Nietzsche's break with the old-European evan gelic tradition makes discernible how, from a certain degree of enlightenment, speech's functions of indirect eulogy can no longer be secured with the compromises of deism or cultivated Protestantism. Anyone seeking a language that secures the speaker the attribution of "every human excellence,'' or at least the guarantee of indirect participation in supreme advantages, has to develop strategies of expression that surpass the eclecticism of a Jefferson. As in communication among "the moderns" embarrassment is hardly avoided simply by cutting out compromising reports of miracles, it is no longer done. It is no longer enough to bypass all the maledicent apocalypses and prophetic com minations, the pronouncing of which will unmask absolutely anyone speaking before a secular or humanist-influenced public. Would anyone be able to refer, in society, to an authority such as the Jesus of Mark 9. 42, who thought it right to say: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he
were thrown into the sea. " A commentator writing in the year of 1 888 contented himself with saying: "How evangelical! "5 Scissors can no longer save a
Tho I 31
speaker's self-esteem when spreading the good news-all in all, gospel residue proves unable to withstand serious scrutiny. Not even the process of demythologization can set one straight on one's feet. Too dim, too suspect, too inferior are the sources from which the beautiful discourses issue. Expressions of discontent with its glowering uni versalism and its menace-laden benevolence can no longer be disguised in the long term. So, if "good news" remained possible and the conditions of spreading through a chain of winners could be realized, then it would have to be reconstituted. It would have to be new enough to avoid embarrassing similarities with texts that had become unacceptable, but similar enough so that it could be perceived at least as a formal extension of the stock-standard gospel. This is the reason why the new redaction of a discourse, one able to be proclaimed, and in which the speaker could bank on making a profit, could be first obtained only through the subver sion of earlier forms: the man who can promise anew is one who says something unheard-of with new words. But Nietzsche did not want to be a mere Gospel parodist; he did not want merely to synthesize Luther wirh rhe dirhyramb and swap Mosaic tablets for Zarathustrian ones. Rather, for him the point was that the conditions pertaining to professions of faith and the chains of citations
32 . 1 i\lj,='tzsc:-e
be given an entirely new order; better, that the distinction between a profession of faith and a citation be revised. The author of Zarathustra wanted to lay bare the eulogistic force of language from the ground up, and to free it from the inhi bitions with which resentment, itself coded by metaphysics, had stamped it. This intention resonates in Nietzsche's seeking to assure his friend Franz Overbeck that "with this book I have over come everything that has been said in words. " And it is presupposed when he states, still addressing the same addressee: "I am now, very probably, the most independent man in Europe. "6
The height-or better: the operating theater of this independence is the result of an insight that Nietzsche, ever since the days of Human, All too Human, had made during an aggressive spiri tual exercise that he carried out on himself The author of The Gay Science was convinced that resentment is a mode of production of world, indeed one that is to date the most powerful and most harmful. The more keenly this discerning author contemplated the matter of this fact, the more comprehensively and monstrously it came into profile: in everything that had borne the name of high culture, religion, and morality, the resentment mode of world-building had pre
vailed. Everything that for an epoch had been able
T'.
This translation© 2013 by Semiotext(e)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, elec tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.
Published by Semiotext(e)
2007 Wilshire Blvd. , Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057 www. semiotexte. com
Speech delivered on the occasion ofthe IOOth anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche� Death, Weimar, 25 August 2000.
Thanks to John Ebert. Design: Hedi El Kholti
ISBN: 978-1-58435-099-6
Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England
Printed in the United States of America
Peter Sloterdijk
Nietzsche Apostle
Translated by Steven Corcoran
semiotext(e)
intervention series a 16
Contents
Introduction 7 Gospels-Redactions 13 The Fifth 29 Total Sponsoring 47 Of Sunsand Humans 65 Notes 85
Introduction
Today, in the year 2000, on the hundredth anniversary ofhis physical death at the dawn ofthe first ofthe millennia he said would have to be dated after him, how are we to speak about Friedrich Nietzsche? Ought we to say that he stands before us suffering and great, like the century to which he belonged with all his existence and out of which he erupted into the eternity ofauthorial renown? Ought we to adopt his own judgment that he was not a man but dynamite? Ought we to emphasize, once again, the peculiarity ofhis "effective history": the fact that never before has an author insisted so much on distinction and yet attracted such vul garity? Ought we to diagnose that it was with him that the era ofnarcissism began, first in evidence as the "insurrection ofthe masses," then as collectivist "great politics," and finally as the dictatorship ofthe
7
global market? Ought we to accept the claim that the history of academic philosophy ends with him and then history of the art of thinking begins? Or ought we to refrain from making commentaries and read Nietzsche and reread him?
I would like to describe the Nietzsche-event as a catastrophe in the history of language and put the argument that his intervention as a literary new evangelist constitutes an incision in old Europe's conditions of understanding. With Marshall Mc Luhan, I presuppose that understanding between people in societies-above all, what they are and achieve in general-has an autoplastic meaning. These conditions of communication provide groups
with a redundancy in which they can vibrate. They imprint on such groups the rhythms and models by which they are able to recognize themselves and by which they repeat themselves as almost the same. They produce a consensus in which they perform the eternal return of the same in the form of a spoken song. Languages are instruments of group narcissism, played so as to tune and retune the player; they make their speakers ring in singular tonalities of self-excitation. They are systems of melodies for recognition, which nearly always delineate the whole program as well. Languages are not primarily used for what is today called the passing on of information, but serve to form
81
communicating group-bodies. People possess lan guage so that they can speak of their own merits [Vorziigen]-and not least of the unsurpassable merit of being able to talk up these merits in their own language. First, and for the most part, people are not concerned to draw each other's attention to states of affairs, but aim instead to incorporate states of affairs into a glory. The different speaker-groups of history-all the various tribes and peoples-are self-praising entities that avail themselves of their own inimitable idiom as part of a psychosocial contest played to gain advantage for themselves. In this sense, before it becomes technical, all speaking serves to enhance and venerate the speaker; and even technical discourses are committed, albeit indirectly, to glorifying technicians. Languages of self-criticism are also borne by a function of self enhancement. And even masochism works to announce the distinctiveness of the tortured indi vidual. When used in accordance with its constitutive function of primary narcissism, language says one and the same thing over and again: that nothing better could have happened to the speaker than, precisely, to have been who he is, to have been who he is at this place and in this language, and to bear witness to the merit of his being in his own skin.
The fact that primary narcissism first became observable with ethnic groups and kingdoms before
! nlTJCUCl;o,l / 9
going on to become a feature of nations, bristling with weapons and classics at the dawn of modern times, is something I will consider from a historical viewpoint. As for the individual, the wait would be lengthier before self-affirmation could step out of the shadows of sin. It did this in the form of amour-propre in the 18th century, that ofholy self interest [Selbstsucht] in the 19th, that ofnarcissism in the 20th, and that of self-design in the 21st. Nietzsche was probably the only theoretician of language of modern times to have had this funda mental relation in mind. For, in deriving prayer from a people's exhilaration at its own self-assertion, he states: "it projects the pleasure it takes in itself (. . . ) into a being that it can thank for all of this. Man is grateful for himself: and this is why one needs a god. "1 And, in a more general way, we can read in an earlier text: "It is a beautiful folly, speaking: with it humans dance over all things. "2 In the reconstruction of religious affects from self-referential gratitude, language comes to be determined as a medium enabling those that speak to say out loud the reasons why they are on top. This is why the profession of faith in one's own modus vivendi is the most distinguished speech-act. It is the eulogistic gesture par excellence. With this derivation of distinction, speech and silence are defined as modes of exhilaration, which confess to
themselves. In both what is advanced is a voluntary declaration of success in the pursuit of Being: in speech as manifestation ofright and power; and in silence as an authorized quiet whose presuppositions require no defending.
Quite clearly, this rudimentary reference to a lin guistics of jubilation or self-affirmation stands in sharp contrast to all that has been said and con ceived about languages by the theorizing communis opinio of the last century, regardless of whether this took the form of ideology critique or analytic philosophy, discourse theory or psychoanalysis, a theory ofthe encounter or deconstruction. The first case set about unmasking all the misleading gener alizations of the languages of the bourgeoisie; the second gave priority to turns of ordinary lan guage over metaphysical inversions; the third, made a relation between the language games of knowledge and the routines of power; the fourth undermined signs through the unconscious con tents of expression; the penultimate case described the language event as a response that is provoked or refused by the call to me of the other-in-need; while the last case brought forward evidence to show that we always fail in attempts to impose the full presence of meaning on what is said. In all these cases language is understood as a medium of lack and distortion,
possibly also as the organ of over-sensitiveness and
compensation, of settling claims and therapy. Everywhere language and the spoken appear as symptoms and problems. Hardly ever are they con ceived of as vectors of affirmations and prophecies. But when they are, it is to underscore the inau thentic and flawed character of all laudatory and promise-making sorts of tunes. Whoever speaks in the conditions permitted-whether from a bour geois, political, academic, legal, or psychological perspective-will always be in the minus and run around in vain seeking the means by which to pay off and shift overdrawn assertions. Whoever speaks incurs debt; whoever speaks further, discourses in order to pay back. The ear is educated in order so as not to give away credit and to interpret its avarice as critical consciousness. In what follows I will endeavor to reprise the Nietzschean idea of lan guage, the beginnings of which Nietzsche only sketched, and to extend them into the future from a contemporary standpoint-whereby I hazard the ramification that Nietzsche's maxim, according to which "all our philosophy is the correction of linguistic usage," is charged with meanings that go beyond all criticist conceptions.
1 2 I N::<�c:cl·n /\. pustlu
GOSPELS-REDACTIONS
First we must take a step back and clarify the con trast between the conditions of modern language and those of pre-modern language. As cultures reached the level of monarchy-I say this having no particular belief in the dogmatic presupposi tions of sociological evolution theory-it went without saying that language's self-laudatory energies could no longer be aimed directly at orators who were specialized in function of public speech, such as the elder, the priest, the rhapsodist. Rather, they had to take a detour and praise the lords, heroes, gods, powers, and forces of virtue, from which a refracting ray came to fall on the orator. In feudal times, poets and rhetoricians were schooled in the grammar of indirect eulogy; their job was to be skilled at generating higher feelings, in which the extolled stood in the center
13
and the singers on the sidelines. Their discretion
required them to be humble, to do what was required for the mood of their own royal space. Precisely to the extent that high cultures in times gone by outlawed an orator's direct expressions of egotism, they showed, with the linguistic brio of primary narcissism, ways whereby dutifully manifesting an enthusiasm for the big other, one could place oneself close to the recipient of praise.
This can scarcely be more legibly studied than in Christian Evangelization and its encroachment on European societies' conditions of understanding in the early Middle Ages. Shown with particular clarity here is the way in which Evangelist speech acts-the preaching of salvation by God's son, and the swearing-in of an ethnic commune for a participation in this sphere that is as unequivocal as possible-put speakers and listeners alike into an oscillating circuit which was about nothing other than celebrating a shared privilege. In his book of the Gospels, Otfrid von WeiGenburg, Rhine Franconian poet-priest of the 9th century, justified his vernacular adaptation of the New Testament by arguing that the Franks, too, ought at last to be allowed access, via a poeticized bible, to the sweetness of the Good News, dulcedo evangeliorum.
As many persons undertake to write in their lan guage and as many strive with fervour to praise what they hold dear-
why should the Franks be the only ones to shrink from the attempt to proclaim the praise of God in the Franconian language. . .
. . . let the praise of God be sweet to you, then Franconian will also be determined by metrical feet, quantity and metrical rules; better, then God himself will speak through you. (Liber evangelorium I, 1, V 31-34; 41-42)
The sense of these reflections, unique for their time, lies in an ethno-narcissistic operation by means of which the Franks were to be formed, at the level of the linguistic techniques of the time, as a collective with higher feelings-with the claim to being equal or even superior to those great historical peoples, the Greeks and the Romans. Gospel verse in the German language is presented as an offensive, the aim ofwhich is to establish a politico-religious system of boasting that, by virtue of a catch-up lesson in rhyme and rhythm, plugs into the art of the poetically possible. The point thus being that, in future, in the image of the gloria Francorum, an effective link would no longer be missing between the veneration of God and the poetics of Empire. In the same spirit,
/15
Otfried attributes to Ludwig den Deutschen, in his dedication to him, a rank equal to King David. Moreover, in this speech act two eulogistic functions-praise of the King and glorification of the people-come together to form a single enhancement-effect. Otfrid was convinced he thus complied with the essence of language, inasmuch as language is per se an instrument of eulogy. This may be most convincingly proven in the case of praising God: "He, in effect (God), has given them (the people) the instrument of language (plectrum linguae) so that they cause him to sound in their praise" (Dedication to Luitberg). One
who praises becomes worthy ofpraise insofar as he or she also participates in the glory ofthe object of eulogy. The poet expresses the same idea in his introductory prayer to the Gospel epic.
You alone are the master of all the languages that exist. Your power has conferred language to all and they have come-o salvation! -to form words in their languages to recall Your memory for always, to praise You for eternity, recognize You and serve You. (Liber evangeliorum, I, 2, V33-38)1
Remarkable in this appeal is not only the fact that knowledge is also put at the service of the eulo gistic function; but also that the languages of
humanity as a whole are defined as media of God's narcissism, which passes via the detour of human idiom back to God himself in unending self-celebration. With God self-praise is a perfume. The meaning of language is to celebrate, and any language that might forget to celebrate would have taken leave of its senses. 2 The only awkward thing about this theo-linguistic arrangement is precisely that God must be celebrated in Old High German, in a lingua agrestis or peasant idiom that did not wholly conform to the gram matical and melodic norms of divine relations to themselves. Otfrid had to muster all his Franconian pride to find the courage to praise God in the South Rhine Franconian dialect. Even though it did not occur to him to improve the Gospel as such, he thus saw all the more clearly the need to render the teotisk3 vernacular compa tible with the Gospel through poetic amendment an idea from which would come one of the main linguistic creations prior to Luther's translation of the Bible. Let's note that in taking up the project Otfrid felt no need for justification in forming a continuous linear narrative of the canonical Gospels. In his time, in which a lay reading of the Holy Writings was not something open to debate, syncretistic-didactical forms such as the so-called Gospel harmonies were well introduced
and sufficiently legitimated as a sacred genre.
What was appropriate for Tatian the Assyrian was also apt for a noble Franc. What the author instead seemed to deem worthy ofjustification was the articulation of his Gospel epic in five books:
These five of which I j ust spoke, if I have divided them thus, even though there are only four books ofthe Gospel, this is because the holy rectitude of their numbering four sanctifies the irrectitude of our five senses and, transforming all that is immoderate in us . . . carries it off toward heaven.
Whatever it is that we miss via sight, odour, touch, taste, and hearing: via the remembrance of the texts of the Gospels (eorum lectionis memoria), we purify ourselves of our corruption. 4
Here again, what seemed to require improvement was naturally not the Gospel itself, but rather the readership and the listeners who approach the beatifying text as Franks and humans with their natural quintuplet sensuality, and who-ifwe are to believe the poet-thus require five books of Gospel poetry in German rather than the four original Gospels.
This episode in the history ofthe German language played out about 1010 years before Nietzsche's
own self-declaration, while the next example from the history of self-praise relations in western tradition refers to a case that is separated by a mere seventy or eighty years from the intervention of the teacher of the eternal return. The issue here still has to do with improving the Gospel-but this time the mode is considerably more compli cated, since what now enters the foreground, at the same time as collective self-praise, are concerns about individual self-enhancement. The scene of the experiment is the United States of America around 1810, and the Gospel redactor is none other than the redactor of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, who at this time was able to look back on several terms of office as minister to France and as vice president of the USA, as well as on two mandates as president. After his years of service in Washington, he returned home to his manor in Monticello, Virginia, and devoted himselfto rounding out the image ofhimselfhe intended to leave to posterity. These indications are enough to support the notion that what we bear witness to here is an eminent case of national-religious linguistic pragmatism, especially as we know that to this day the United States represents the most fertile collective of self-celebration of all the current political entities in the "concert of nations"; it
could also be said that it is the society whose founding conditions included dismantling as far as possible all cultural inhibitions against the use of enhancing superlatives in a democratic self reference. What is the USA if not the product of a Declaration of Independence-from humility (and doubtless not only from the British Crown)? There can be little wonder, then, about the effi cacy with which, as we shall see, the Christian message is adapted to the needs ofAmerican glory.
Already during his first presidential mandate in Washington, Jefferson would busy himself on his spare nights, using scissors to cut out extracts from a series of editions of the New Testament in Greek, Latin, French, and English, which he then pasted together into a scrap book to make a new arrangement of the Gospels. The aim was one he'd held for some time, and first emerged during his correspondence with Unitarian theologian and writer Joseph Priestly, in 1795. In all likelihood, however, the task was not completed until around 1820, aftermanyyears ofinterruption. The product of this cut-and-paste work, which Jefferson com pleted twice-over, was given the title The Life and Morals ofJesus ofNazareth, and has become known as The Jefferson Bible. In his scissor work, the redactor must have been convinced that he possessed the criteria by which to distinguish
20 I f\J1etzschc Apostc
the utilizable from the non-utilizable in the bequeathed text. As a representative of the American Enlightenment thinkers, with their decorative monotheism and Philadelphian exu berance, Jefferson testifies to the state of the Gospel problem at the apex of this current of thought. With this Christian-humanist gentleman, it becomes clear that the need for a self-enhancement using the classic reservoirs of meaning was as alive as ever, but could only be satisfied by expunging vast passages of the historical Gospels. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, anyone wanting still to play the language game of the Gospels to advantage had above all to be able to omit. This is the meaning ofneo-humanism: to be able to eliminate in the old Gospel that which has become incompatible with one's own glorification as a humanist and citizen. For this operation, no image is more impressive than that of an American head ofstate in his office at night, who, with scissors, cuts out pages from six copies of the New Testament in four different languages and pastes the extracts into a private copy of the Good News that is designed to conform to the demands of contemporary rationality and sentimentality for a citable, excerpted version of the Bible. It is characteristic of Jefferson's philosophical ambi tions that he did not feel that this redaction of
Gospels-Redactions I 21
the Gospel-or as he put it, this formulation of an abstract or syllabus-was a heresy in the original meaning of the term, insofar as hairesis refers to a choosy insolence applied to a totality of dogmas and traditions. Rather, he presented himself as the curatorofthewritings'truecontent,as re-establishing a pure text against the fudging performed by later additions. With energetic naivety, the enlightened redactor went about separating Jesus' unacceptable words from those that Jesus must have said, had he wanted to be approvingly cited by Jefferson; even better, from those that Jesus would have said had he foreseen the transforma tion of believers into sympathizers. In fact, the modern sympathizer ofJesus can be defined as the bearer of Euro-American Enlightenment, as one who places value, despite all the connections to the Christian tradition, on remaining within the continuum of worldly possibilities of self enhancement that were developed since the Renaissance. And this is precisely what Jefferson had in mind when he endeavored to cut out the valid residue, that which is citable even among humanists, from the embarrassing mass of New Testament phrases. As such, in October 1813, Jefferson felt he could send to John Adams the following report of success:
There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out ofthe printed book, and arranging, the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo offorty-six pages, ofpure and unsophisticated doctrines . . . 5
In a letter addressed to the erudite religious and Dutch Unitarian, Francis Adrian van der Kemp, Jefferson explained himself in a more detailed manner about his relationship with Jesus the man:
It is the innocence of His character, the purity and sublimity of His moral precepts, the elo quence of His inculcations, the beauty of the apologues in which He conveys them, that I so much admire; sometimes, indeed, needing indulgence to eastern hyperbolism. My eulogies, too, may be founded on a postulate which all may not be ready to grant. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to Him by His biogra phers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the loveliest benevo lence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism
I 23
and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples. 6
In view of this declaration it makes little sense to maintain, along with The Jefrson Bible's editor Forrester Church, that the wise man of Monticello merely sought the intelligible Jesus and necessarily missed the historical one. Jefferson was after nei ther an historical nor an intelligible Jesus but rather an object ofeulogy, which, by giving praise to it and thus having recourse to shared moral values, would enable the speaker to come out a sure-fire winner. Jefferson was after a spiritual master who could be cited to guarantee advantage, and who would permit the laudator to become a prestige shareholder by drawing on the holy source of values. After the mental caesura of the Enlightenment, an unabridged version of the New Testament could deliver no such expectations of symbolic profits, and for this reason any rational redactor had to expunge from the corpus ofstories and words of evangelical authority all that would compromise him in front of other rational beings and land him in the mire of sectarianism, or,
24 I r\Jietzsche Apostle
what amounts to the same thing, of cognitive loserdom. For absolutely similar motives, and with similar means, Leo Tolstoy would later put together a private version of the New Testament and present it as a sort of "Fifth Gospel": the Russian path toward the coexistence of evangelism and the Enlightenment. 7 The Moderns no longer know of evangelists; they know only of the classics. Citing a classic guarantees a sure, albeit modest, return; on the contrary, if, in society, you invoke the Redeemer, your credit will shrink. The Enlightenment is really a language game for cognitive winners, who continually deposit the premiums of knowledge and critique in their accounts, and exhibit their cultural funds, while faith gets increasingly hidden behind a barrier of embarrassment, to be crossed only when one is among like-minded others, and, moreover, is ready to give up the advanced boasting potential of the Enlightenment. But Jefferson was not a man to burden himself with embarrassment or with language games for losers. As a result, in his redaction of the Holy Scriptures for Enlighten ment winners, all the threatening and apocalyptic discourses ofJesus are forcibly absent, as are most of the stories about miraculous cures and resurrec tion-his purged Gospel ends when a few of Jesus's friends roll away the stone in front of the
tomb and go off on their way. As text-composer, Jefferson performs the literary imperative of Modernity: Where legend existed, the news must come! At stake now is to swap all sacred agents for terrestrial heroes. Jesus can only be the hero of a
novel or a participant in discourse.
In a general way, the modern tribute to heroes
necessarily faces a complicating factor, namely that eulogistic functions are increasingly dependent on scientific premises and must satisfy the dictates of political correctness. Nowadays you always have to have in view the side-effects of each tribute and to calculate the angle of refraction of indirect self-enhancement. But the main rule is that all eulogistic remarks have to be ontologically correct, and that no claims are made of actual interventions from transcendence into immanence. The leeway for boasting shrinks; the strategy of indirect self celebration in high culture hits the investor with ever greater costs and diminishing narcissistic returns. Summing up this state of affairs is the term humanism, such as ethicists use it today: to all speakers, it suggests the return to a carefully considered sort of self-affirmation that is only barely distinguishable from medium-level depres sion. Twentieth-century mass culture would first designate a way out of this quandary by discon necting self-praise from remarkable performance
26 I
and other things, admiration of which was based on superior criteria. This disconnection thus enabled primitive feelings of exhilaration to step onto the forestage where a public of accomplices in disinhibition awaited, intent on cheering. For Jefferson, these kinds of relief were not yet in sight. He had to continue to tie his eulogistic brio to the holy texts, and, by means of redemptive abstracts, to revert to elevated examples of the tradition in order to satisfy cultural demands for discourses about higher feelings. He could thus write to one of his correspondents: "I am a Christian, in the only sense He wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence. . . . "8 What speaks for Jefferson is that his hypocrisy is spontaneous and coherent. His grasping at the diamonds in the dunghill of tradition illustrates a growing American selectiveness as regards the heritage of old Europe. The importation of meaning from Jerusalem, Rome, Geneva, and Wittenberg also had to clear American customs.
Jefferson's redaction of the Gospels teaches us that the preconditions for winning avowable posi tions ofprivilege stemming from Christian tradition already became problematic nearly a century prior to Nietzsche's own intervention. What, in western culture for over one and a half millennia, had
Gospeis-Redactions ! 27
been the pure and simple, and often also profitable, Good News-the creed for admitting people into the other-worldly God's system of likeness increasingly proved to be a losing game for the messenger: the conditions of transmission for messages of this type had been transformed; the speaker of such news appeared too clearly as someone who had not yet properly learned the procedures of modernity to be able to take up the
word to advantage.
2
THE FIFTH
On February 13, 1883 in Rapallo, Friedrich Nietzsche, then aged 38, composed a tactically stylized letter to his editor, Ernst Schmeitzner in Chemnitz:
Dearest Herr Veleger,
. . . Today I have something good to announce:
I have made a decisive step-and I mean by the way, such a step as should also be useful to you. It is a matter of a small work (barely a hundred printed pages), the title ofwhich is
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A Book for All and None
It is a "poem," or a fifth "Gospel" or some
thing or other for which there is not yet a name: by far the most serious but also the most cheerful of my productions, and accessible to everyone. So I think that it will have an "immediate effect" . . . 1
29
On April 20 of the same year, Nietzsche wrote to Malvida von Meysenbug in Rome:
. . . it is a beautiful story: I have challenged all the religions and made a new "holy book"! And, said in all seriousness, it is as serious as any other, even though it incorporates laughter into religion. 2
On May 24 in a letter to Karl Hillebrand Nietzsche made the following remark about the first part of Zarathustra:
Everything that I had thought, suffered, and hoped for is in it and in a way that my life wants now to appear to me as justified. And then again I feel ashamed before myself: since I have hereby stretched out my hand for the highest garlands ever awarded to humanity . . . 3
A year later Nietzsche's ears were still ringing with this expression of reaching for the "highest garlands," which is henceforth attributed to the "use the foolish and false language ofthe ambitiosi. "4 All his correspondence from the Zarathustra period is shot through with micro-evangelic news about his concluding a work that had weighed heavily
on the mind of its author as something of incomparable value. At this time, it was the
Italian and the Swiss Postal Services that under took to the "Good News. "
Nietzsche's break with the old-European evan gelic tradition makes discernible how, from a certain degree of enlightenment, speech's functions of indirect eulogy can no longer be secured with the compromises of deism or cultivated Protestantism. Anyone seeking a language that secures the speaker the attribution of "every human excellence,'' or at least the guarantee of indirect participation in supreme advantages, has to develop strategies of expression that surpass the eclecticism of a Jefferson. As in communication among "the moderns" embarrassment is hardly avoided simply by cutting out compromising reports of miracles, it is no longer done. It is no longer enough to bypass all the maledicent apocalypses and prophetic com minations, the pronouncing of which will unmask absolutely anyone speaking before a secular or humanist-influenced public. Would anyone be able to refer, in society, to an authority such as the Jesus of Mark 9. 42, who thought it right to say: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he
were thrown into the sea. " A commentator writing in the year of 1 888 contented himself with saying: "How evangelical! "5 Scissors can no longer save a
Tho I 31
speaker's self-esteem when spreading the good news-all in all, gospel residue proves unable to withstand serious scrutiny. Not even the process of demythologization can set one straight on one's feet. Too dim, too suspect, too inferior are the sources from which the beautiful discourses issue. Expressions of discontent with its glowering uni versalism and its menace-laden benevolence can no longer be disguised in the long term. So, if "good news" remained possible and the conditions of spreading through a chain of winners could be realized, then it would have to be reconstituted. It would have to be new enough to avoid embarrassing similarities with texts that had become unacceptable, but similar enough so that it could be perceived at least as a formal extension of the stock-standard gospel. This is the reason why the new redaction of a discourse, one able to be proclaimed, and in which the speaker could bank on making a profit, could be first obtained only through the subver sion of earlier forms: the man who can promise anew is one who says something unheard-of with new words. But Nietzsche did not want to be a mere Gospel parodist; he did not want merely to synthesize Luther wirh rhe dirhyramb and swap Mosaic tablets for Zarathustrian ones. Rather, for him the point was that the conditions pertaining to professions of faith and the chains of citations
32 . 1 i\lj,='tzsc:-e
be given an entirely new order; better, that the distinction between a profession of faith and a citation be revised.
com
Speech delivered on the occasion ofthe IOOth anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche� Death, Weimar, 25 August 2000.
Thanks to John Ebert. Design: Hedi El Kholti
ISBN: 978-1-58435-099-6
Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England
Printed in the United States of America
Peter Sloterdijk
Nietzsche Apostle
Translated by Steven Corcoran
semiotext(e)
intervention series a 16
Contents
Introduction 7 Gospels-Redactions 13 The Fifth 29 Total Sponsoring 47 Of Sunsand Humans 65 Notes 85
Introduction
Today, in the year 2000, on the hundredth anniversary ofhis physical death at the dawn ofthe first ofthe millennia he said would have to be dated after him, how are we to speak about Friedrich Nietzsche? Ought we to say that he stands before us suffering and great, like the century to which he belonged with all his existence and out of which he erupted into the eternity ofauthorial renown? Ought we to adopt his own judgment that he was not a man but dynamite? Ought we to emphasize, once again, the peculiarity ofhis "effective history": the fact that never before has an author insisted so much on distinction and yet attracted such vul garity? Ought we to diagnose that it was with him that the era ofnarcissism began, first in evidence as the "insurrection ofthe masses," then as collectivist "great politics," and finally as the dictatorship ofthe
7
global market? Ought we to accept the claim that the history of academic philosophy ends with him and then history of the art of thinking begins? Or ought we to refrain from making commentaries and read Nietzsche and reread him?
I would like to describe the Nietzsche-event as a catastrophe in the history of language and put the argument that his intervention as a literary new evangelist constitutes an incision in old Europe's conditions of understanding. With Marshall Mc Luhan, I presuppose that understanding between people in societies-above all, what they are and achieve in general-has an autoplastic meaning. These conditions of communication provide groups
with a redundancy in which they can vibrate. They imprint on such groups the rhythms and models by which they are able to recognize themselves and by which they repeat themselves as almost the same. They produce a consensus in which they perform the eternal return of the same in the form of a spoken song. Languages are instruments of group narcissism, played so as to tune and retune the player; they make their speakers ring in singular tonalities of self-excitation. They are systems of melodies for recognition, which nearly always delineate the whole program as well. Languages are not primarily used for what is today called the passing on of information, but serve to form
81
communicating group-bodies. People possess lan guage so that they can speak of their own merits [Vorziigen]-and not least of the unsurpassable merit of being able to talk up these merits in their own language. First, and for the most part, people are not concerned to draw each other's attention to states of affairs, but aim instead to incorporate states of affairs into a glory. The different speaker-groups of history-all the various tribes and peoples-are self-praising entities that avail themselves of their own inimitable idiom as part of a psychosocial contest played to gain advantage for themselves. In this sense, before it becomes technical, all speaking serves to enhance and venerate the speaker; and even technical discourses are committed, albeit indirectly, to glorifying technicians. Languages of self-criticism are also borne by a function of self enhancement. And even masochism works to announce the distinctiveness of the tortured indi vidual. When used in accordance with its constitutive function of primary narcissism, language says one and the same thing over and again: that nothing better could have happened to the speaker than, precisely, to have been who he is, to have been who he is at this place and in this language, and to bear witness to the merit of his being in his own skin.
The fact that primary narcissism first became observable with ethnic groups and kingdoms before
! nlTJCUCl;o,l / 9
going on to become a feature of nations, bristling with weapons and classics at the dawn of modern times, is something I will consider from a historical viewpoint. As for the individual, the wait would be lengthier before self-affirmation could step out of the shadows of sin. It did this in the form of amour-propre in the 18th century, that ofholy self interest [Selbstsucht] in the 19th, that ofnarcissism in the 20th, and that of self-design in the 21st. Nietzsche was probably the only theoretician of language of modern times to have had this funda mental relation in mind. For, in deriving prayer from a people's exhilaration at its own self-assertion, he states: "it projects the pleasure it takes in itself (. . . ) into a being that it can thank for all of this. Man is grateful for himself: and this is why one needs a god. "1 And, in a more general way, we can read in an earlier text: "It is a beautiful folly, speaking: with it humans dance over all things. "2 In the reconstruction of religious affects from self-referential gratitude, language comes to be determined as a medium enabling those that speak to say out loud the reasons why they are on top. This is why the profession of faith in one's own modus vivendi is the most distinguished speech-act. It is the eulogistic gesture par excellence. With this derivation of distinction, speech and silence are defined as modes of exhilaration, which confess to
themselves. In both what is advanced is a voluntary declaration of success in the pursuit of Being: in speech as manifestation ofright and power; and in silence as an authorized quiet whose presuppositions require no defending.
Quite clearly, this rudimentary reference to a lin guistics of jubilation or self-affirmation stands in sharp contrast to all that has been said and con ceived about languages by the theorizing communis opinio of the last century, regardless of whether this took the form of ideology critique or analytic philosophy, discourse theory or psychoanalysis, a theory ofthe encounter or deconstruction. The first case set about unmasking all the misleading gener alizations of the languages of the bourgeoisie; the second gave priority to turns of ordinary lan guage over metaphysical inversions; the third, made a relation between the language games of knowledge and the routines of power; the fourth undermined signs through the unconscious con tents of expression; the penultimate case described the language event as a response that is provoked or refused by the call to me of the other-in-need; while the last case brought forward evidence to show that we always fail in attempts to impose the full presence of meaning on what is said. In all these cases language is understood as a medium of lack and distortion,
possibly also as the organ of over-sensitiveness and
compensation, of settling claims and therapy. Everywhere language and the spoken appear as symptoms and problems. Hardly ever are they con ceived of as vectors of affirmations and prophecies. But when they are, it is to underscore the inau thentic and flawed character of all laudatory and promise-making sorts of tunes. Whoever speaks in the conditions permitted-whether from a bour geois, political, academic, legal, or psychological perspective-will always be in the minus and run around in vain seeking the means by which to pay off and shift overdrawn assertions. Whoever speaks incurs debt; whoever speaks further, discourses in order to pay back. The ear is educated in order so as not to give away credit and to interpret its avarice as critical consciousness. In what follows I will endeavor to reprise the Nietzschean idea of lan guage, the beginnings of which Nietzsche only sketched, and to extend them into the future from a contemporary standpoint-whereby I hazard the ramification that Nietzsche's maxim, according to which "all our philosophy is the correction of linguistic usage," is charged with meanings that go beyond all criticist conceptions.
1 2 I N::<�c:cl·n /\. pustlu
GOSPELS-REDACTIONS
First we must take a step back and clarify the con trast between the conditions of modern language and those of pre-modern language. As cultures reached the level of monarchy-I say this having no particular belief in the dogmatic presupposi tions of sociological evolution theory-it went without saying that language's self-laudatory energies could no longer be aimed directly at orators who were specialized in function of public speech, such as the elder, the priest, the rhapsodist. Rather, they had to take a detour and praise the lords, heroes, gods, powers, and forces of virtue, from which a refracting ray came to fall on the orator. In feudal times, poets and rhetoricians were schooled in the grammar of indirect eulogy; their job was to be skilled at generating higher feelings, in which the extolled stood in the center
13
and the singers on the sidelines. Their discretion
required them to be humble, to do what was required for the mood of their own royal space. Precisely to the extent that high cultures in times gone by outlawed an orator's direct expressions of egotism, they showed, with the linguistic brio of primary narcissism, ways whereby dutifully manifesting an enthusiasm for the big other, one could place oneself close to the recipient of praise.
This can scarcely be more legibly studied than in Christian Evangelization and its encroachment on European societies' conditions of understanding in the early Middle Ages. Shown with particular clarity here is the way in which Evangelist speech acts-the preaching of salvation by God's son, and the swearing-in of an ethnic commune for a participation in this sphere that is as unequivocal as possible-put speakers and listeners alike into an oscillating circuit which was about nothing other than celebrating a shared privilege. In his book of the Gospels, Otfrid von WeiGenburg, Rhine Franconian poet-priest of the 9th century, justified his vernacular adaptation of the New Testament by arguing that the Franks, too, ought at last to be allowed access, via a poeticized bible, to the sweetness of the Good News, dulcedo evangeliorum.
As many persons undertake to write in their lan guage and as many strive with fervour to praise what they hold dear-
why should the Franks be the only ones to shrink from the attempt to proclaim the praise of God in the Franconian language. . .
. . . let the praise of God be sweet to you, then Franconian will also be determined by metrical feet, quantity and metrical rules; better, then God himself will speak through you. (Liber evangelorium I, 1, V 31-34; 41-42)
The sense of these reflections, unique for their time, lies in an ethno-narcissistic operation by means of which the Franks were to be formed, at the level of the linguistic techniques of the time, as a collective with higher feelings-with the claim to being equal or even superior to those great historical peoples, the Greeks and the Romans. Gospel verse in the German language is presented as an offensive, the aim ofwhich is to establish a politico-religious system of boasting that, by virtue of a catch-up lesson in rhyme and rhythm, plugs into the art of the poetically possible. The point thus being that, in future, in the image of the gloria Francorum, an effective link would no longer be missing between the veneration of God and the poetics of Empire. In the same spirit,
/15
Otfried attributes to Ludwig den Deutschen, in his dedication to him, a rank equal to King David. Moreover, in this speech act two eulogistic functions-praise of the King and glorification of the people-come together to form a single enhancement-effect. Otfrid was convinced he thus complied with the essence of language, inasmuch as language is per se an instrument of eulogy. This may be most convincingly proven in the case of praising God: "He, in effect (God), has given them (the people) the instrument of language (plectrum linguae) so that they cause him to sound in their praise" (Dedication to Luitberg). One
who praises becomes worthy ofpraise insofar as he or she also participates in the glory ofthe object of eulogy. The poet expresses the same idea in his introductory prayer to the Gospel epic.
You alone are the master of all the languages that exist. Your power has conferred language to all and they have come-o salvation! -to form words in their languages to recall Your memory for always, to praise You for eternity, recognize You and serve You. (Liber evangeliorum, I, 2, V33-38)1
Remarkable in this appeal is not only the fact that knowledge is also put at the service of the eulo gistic function; but also that the languages of
humanity as a whole are defined as media of God's narcissism, which passes via the detour of human idiom back to God himself in unending self-celebration. With God self-praise is a perfume. The meaning of language is to celebrate, and any language that might forget to celebrate would have taken leave of its senses. 2 The only awkward thing about this theo-linguistic arrangement is precisely that God must be celebrated in Old High German, in a lingua agrestis or peasant idiom that did not wholly conform to the gram matical and melodic norms of divine relations to themselves. Otfrid had to muster all his Franconian pride to find the courage to praise God in the South Rhine Franconian dialect. Even though it did not occur to him to improve the Gospel as such, he thus saw all the more clearly the need to render the teotisk3 vernacular compa tible with the Gospel through poetic amendment an idea from which would come one of the main linguistic creations prior to Luther's translation of the Bible. Let's note that in taking up the project Otfrid felt no need for justification in forming a continuous linear narrative of the canonical Gospels. In his time, in which a lay reading of the Holy Writings was not something open to debate, syncretistic-didactical forms such as the so-called Gospel harmonies were well introduced
and sufficiently legitimated as a sacred genre.
What was appropriate for Tatian the Assyrian was also apt for a noble Franc. What the author instead seemed to deem worthy ofjustification was the articulation of his Gospel epic in five books:
These five of which I j ust spoke, if I have divided them thus, even though there are only four books ofthe Gospel, this is because the holy rectitude of their numbering four sanctifies the irrectitude of our five senses and, transforming all that is immoderate in us . . . carries it off toward heaven.
Whatever it is that we miss via sight, odour, touch, taste, and hearing: via the remembrance of the texts of the Gospels (eorum lectionis memoria), we purify ourselves of our corruption. 4
Here again, what seemed to require improvement was naturally not the Gospel itself, but rather the readership and the listeners who approach the beatifying text as Franks and humans with their natural quintuplet sensuality, and who-ifwe are to believe the poet-thus require five books of Gospel poetry in German rather than the four original Gospels.
This episode in the history ofthe German language played out about 1010 years before Nietzsche's
own self-declaration, while the next example from the history of self-praise relations in western tradition refers to a case that is separated by a mere seventy or eighty years from the intervention of the teacher of the eternal return. The issue here still has to do with improving the Gospel-but this time the mode is considerably more compli cated, since what now enters the foreground, at the same time as collective self-praise, are concerns about individual self-enhancement. The scene of the experiment is the United States of America around 1810, and the Gospel redactor is none other than the redactor of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, who at this time was able to look back on several terms of office as minister to France and as vice president of the USA, as well as on two mandates as president. After his years of service in Washington, he returned home to his manor in Monticello, Virginia, and devoted himselfto rounding out the image ofhimselfhe intended to leave to posterity. These indications are enough to support the notion that what we bear witness to here is an eminent case of national-religious linguistic pragmatism, especially as we know that to this day the United States represents the most fertile collective of self-celebration of all the current political entities in the "concert of nations"; it
could also be said that it is the society whose founding conditions included dismantling as far as possible all cultural inhibitions against the use of enhancing superlatives in a democratic self reference. What is the USA if not the product of a Declaration of Independence-from humility (and doubtless not only from the British Crown)? There can be little wonder, then, about the effi cacy with which, as we shall see, the Christian message is adapted to the needs ofAmerican glory.
Already during his first presidential mandate in Washington, Jefferson would busy himself on his spare nights, using scissors to cut out extracts from a series of editions of the New Testament in Greek, Latin, French, and English, which he then pasted together into a scrap book to make a new arrangement of the Gospels. The aim was one he'd held for some time, and first emerged during his correspondence with Unitarian theologian and writer Joseph Priestly, in 1795. In all likelihood, however, the task was not completed until around 1820, aftermanyyears ofinterruption. The product of this cut-and-paste work, which Jefferson com pleted twice-over, was given the title The Life and Morals ofJesus ofNazareth, and has become known as The Jefferson Bible. In his scissor work, the redactor must have been convinced that he possessed the criteria by which to distinguish
20 I f\J1etzschc Apostc
the utilizable from the non-utilizable in the bequeathed text. As a representative of the American Enlightenment thinkers, with their decorative monotheism and Philadelphian exu berance, Jefferson testifies to the state of the Gospel problem at the apex of this current of thought. With this Christian-humanist gentleman, it becomes clear that the need for a self-enhancement using the classic reservoirs of meaning was as alive as ever, but could only be satisfied by expunging vast passages of the historical Gospels. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, anyone wanting still to play the language game of the Gospels to advantage had above all to be able to omit. This is the meaning ofneo-humanism: to be able to eliminate in the old Gospel that which has become incompatible with one's own glorification as a humanist and citizen. For this operation, no image is more impressive than that of an American head ofstate in his office at night, who, with scissors, cuts out pages from six copies of the New Testament in four different languages and pastes the extracts into a private copy of the Good News that is designed to conform to the demands of contemporary rationality and sentimentality for a citable, excerpted version of the Bible. It is characteristic of Jefferson's philosophical ambi tions that he did not feel that this redaction of
Gospels-Redactions I 21
the Gospel-or as he put it, this formulation of an abstract or syllabus-was a heresy in the original meaning of the term, insofar as hairesis refers to a choosy insolence applied to a totality of dogmas and traditions. Rather, he presented himself as the curatorofthewritings'truecontent,as re-establishing a pure text against the fudging performed by later additions. With energetic naivety, the enlightened redactor went about separating Jesus' unacceptable words from those that Jesus must have said, had he wanted to be approvingly cited by Jefferson; even better, from those that Jesus would have said had he foreseen the transforma tion of believers into sympathizers. In fact, the modern sympathizer ofJesus can be defined as the bearer of Euro-American Enlightenment, as one who places value, despite all the connections to the Christian tradition, on remaining within the continuum of worldly possibilities of self enhancement that were developed since the Renaissance. And this is precisely what Jefferson had in mind when he endeavored to cut out the valid residue, that which is citable even among humanists, from the embarrassing mass of New Testament phrases. As such, in October 1813, Jefferson felt he could send to John Adams the following report of success:
There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out ofthe printed book, and arranging, the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo offorty-six pages, ofpure and unsophisticated doctrines . . . 5
In a letter addressed to the erudite religious and Dutch Unitarian, Francis Adrian van der Kemp, Jefferson explained himself in a more detailed manner about his relationship with Jesus the man:
It is the innocence of His character, the purity and sublimity of His moral precepts, the elo quence of His inculcations, the beauty of the apologues in which He conveys them, that I so much admire; sometimes, indeed, needing indulgence to eastern hyperbolism. My eulogies, too, may be founded on a postulate which all may not be ready to grant. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to Him by His biogra phers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the loveliest benevo lence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism
I 23
and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples. 6
In view of this declaration it makes little sense to maintain, along with The Jefrson Bible's editor Forrester Church, that the wise man of Monticello merely sought the intelligible Jesus and necessarily missed the historical one. Jefferson was after nei ther an historical nor an intelligible Jesus but rather an object ofeulogy, which, by giving praise to it and thus having recourse to shared moral values, would enable the speaker to come out a sure-fire winner. Jefferson was after a spiritual master who could be cited to guarantee advantage, and who would permit the laudator to become a prestige shareholder by drawing on the holy source of values. After the mental caesura of the Enlightenment, an unabridged version of the New Testament could deliver no such expectations of symbolic profits, and for this reason any rational redactor had to expunge from the corpus ofstories and words of evangelical authority all that would compromise him in front of other rational beings and land him in the mire of sectarianism, or,
24 I r\Jietzsche Apostle
what amounts to the same thing, of cognitive loserdom. For absolutely similar motives, and with similar means, Leo Tolstoy would later put together a private version of the New Testament and present it as a sort of "Fifth Gospel": the Russian path toward the coexistence of evangelism and the Enlightenment. 7 The Moderns no longer know of evangelists; they know only of the classics. Citing a classic guarantees a sure, albeit modest, return; on the contrary, if, in society, you invoke the Redeemer, your credit will shrink. The Enlightenment is really a language game for cognitive winners, who continually deposit the premiums of knowledge and critique in their accounts, and exhibit their cultural funds, while faith gets increasingly hidden behind a barrier of embarrassment, to be crossed only when one is among like-minded others, and, moreover, is ready to give up the advanced boasting potential of the Enlightenment. But Jefferson was not a man to burden himself with embarrassment or with language games for losers. As a result, in his redaction of the Holy Scriptures for Enlighten ment winners, all the threatening and apocalyptic discourses ofJesus are forcibly absent, as are most of the stories about miraculous cures and resurrec tion-his purged Gospel ends when a few of Jesus's friends roll away the stone in front of the
tomb and go off on their way. As text-composer, Jefferson performs the literary imperative of Modernity: Where legend existed, the news must come! At stake now is to swap all sacred agents for terrestrial heroes. Jesus can only be the hero of a
novel or a participant in discourse.
In a general way, the modern tribute to heroes
necessarily faces a complicating factor, namely that eulogistic functions are increasingly dependent on scientific premises and must satisfy the dictates of political correctness. Nowadays you always have to have in view the side-effects of each tribute and to calculate the angle of refraction of indirect self-enhancement. But the main rule is that all eulogistic remarks have to be ontologically correct, and that no claims are made of actual interventions from transcendence into immanence. The leeway for boasting shrinks; the strategy of indirect self celebration in high culture hits the investor with ever greater costs and diminishing narcissistic returns. Summing up this state of affairs is the term humanism, such as ethicists use it today: to all speakers, it suggests the return to a carefully considered sort of self-affirmation that is only barely distinguishable from medium-level depres sion. Twentieth-century mass culture would first designate a way out of this quandary by discon necting self-praise from remarkable performance
26 I
and other things, admiration of which was based on superior criteria. This disconnection thus enabled primitive feelings of exhilaration to step onto the forestage where a public of accomplices in disinhibition awaited, intent on cheering. For Jefferson, these kinds of relief were not yet in sight. He had to continue to tie his eulogistic brio to the holy texts, and, by means of redemptive abstracts, to revert to elevated examples of the tradition in order to satisfy cultural demands for discourses about higher feelings. He could thus write to one of his correspondents: "I am a Christian, in the only sense He wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence. . . . "8 What speaks for Jefferson is that his hypocrisy is spontaneous and coherent. His grasping at the diamonds in the dunghill of tradition illustrates a growing American selectiveness as regards the heritage of old Europe. The importation of meaning from Jerusalem, Rome, Geneva, and Wittenberg also had to clear American customs.
Jefferson's redaction of the Gospels teaches us that the preconditions for winning avowable posi tions ofprivilege stemming from Christian tradition already became problematic nearly a century prior to Nietzsche's own intervention. What, in western culture for over one and a half millennia, had
Gospeis-Redactions ! 27
been the pure and simple, and often also profitable, Good News-the creed for admitting people into the other-worldly God's system of likeness increasingly proved to be a losing game for the messenger: the conditions of transmission for messages of this type had been transformed; the speaker of such news appeared too clearly as someone who had not yet properly learned the procedures of modernity to be able to take up the
word to advantage.
2
THE FIFTH
On February 13, 1883 in Rapallo, Friedrich Nietzsche, then aged 38, composed a tactically stylized letter to his editor, Ernst Schmeitzner in Chemnitz:
Dearest Herr Veleger,
. . . Today I have something good to announce:
I have made a decisive step-and I mean by the way, such a step as should also be useful to you. It is a matter of a small work (barely a hundred printed pages), the title ofwhich is
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A Book for All and None
It is a "poem," or a fifth "Gospel" or some
thing or other for which there is not yet a name: by far the most serious but also the most cheerful of my productions, and accessible to everyone. So I think that it will have an "immediate effect" . . . 1
29
On April 20 of the same year, Nietzsche wrote to Malvida von Meysenbug in Rome:
. . . it is a beautiful story: I have challenged all the religions and made a new "holy book"! And, said in all seriousness, it is as serious as any other, even though it incorporates laughter into religion. 2
On May 24 in a letter to Karl Hillebrand Nietzsche made the following remark about the first part of Zarathustra:
Everything that I had thought, suffered, and hoped for is in it and in a way that my life wants now to appear to me as justified. And then again I feel ashamed before myself: since I have hereby stretched out my hand for the highest garlands ever awarded to humanity . . . 3
A year later Nietzsche's ears were still ringing with this expression of reaching for the "highest garlands," which is henceforth attributed to the "use the foolish and false language ofthe ambitiosi. "4 All his correspondence from the Zarathustra period is shot through with micro-evangelic news about his concluding a work that had weighed heavily
on the mind of its author as something of incomparable value. At this time, it was the
Italian and the Swiss Postal Services that under took to the "Good News. "
Nietzsche's break with the old-European evan gelic tradition makes discernible how, from a certain degree of enlightenment, speech's functions of indirect eulogy can no longer be secured with the compromises of deism or cultivated Protestantism. Anyone seeking a language that secures the speaker the attribution of "every human excellence,'' or at least the guarantee of indirect participation in supreme advantages, has to develop strategies of expression that surpass the eclecticism of a Jefferson. As in communication among "the moderns" embarrassment is hardly avoided simply by cutting out compromising reports of miracles, it is no longer done. It is no longer enough to bypass all the maledicent apocalypses and prophetic com minations, the pronouncing of which will unmask absolutely anyone speaking before a secular or humanist-influenced public. Would anyone be able to refer, in society, to an authority such as the Jesus of Mark 9. 42, who thought it right to say: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he
were thrown into the sea. " A commentator writing in the year of 1 888 contented himself with saying: "How evangelical! "5 Scissors can no longer save a
Tho I 31
speaker's self-esteem when spreading the good news-all in all, gospel residue proves unable to withstand serious scrutiny. Not even the process of demythologization can set one straight on one's feet. Too dim, too suspect, too inferior are the sources from which the beautiful discourses issue. Expressions of discontent with its glowering uni versalism and its menace-laden benevolence can no longer be disguised in the long term. So, if "good news" remained possible and the conditions of spreading through a chain of winners could be realized, then it would have to be reconstituted. It would have to be new enough to avoid embarrassing similarities with texts that had become unacceptable, but similar enough so that it could be perceived at least as a formal extension of the stock-standard gospel. This is the reason why the new redaction of a discourse, one able to be proclaimed, and in which the speaker could bank on making a profit, could be first obtained only through the subver sion of earlier forms: the man who can promise anew is one who says something unheard-of with new words. But Nietzsche did not want to be a mere Gospel parodist; he did not want merely to synthesize Luther wirh rhe dirhyramb and swap Mosaic tablets for Zarathustrian ones. Rather, for him the point was that the conditions pertaining to professions of faith and the chains of citations
32 . 1 i\lj,='tzsc:-e
be given an entirely new order; better, that the distinction between a profession of faith and a citation be revised. The author of Zarathustra wanted to lay bare the eulogistic force of language from the ground up, and to free it from the inhi bitions with which resentment, itself coded by metaphysics, had stamped it. This intention resonates in Nietzsche's seeking to assure his friend Franz Overbeck that "with this book I have over come everything that has been said in words. " And it is presupposed when he states, still addressing the same addressee: "I am now, very probably, the most independent man in Europe. "6
The height-or better: the operating theater of this independence is the result of an insight that Nietzsche, ever since the days of Human, All too Human, had made during an aggressive spiri tual exercise that he carried out on himself The author of The Gay Science was convinced that resentment is a mode of production of world, indeed one that is to date the most powerful and most harmful. The more keenly this discerning author contemplated the matter of this fact, the more comprehensively and monstrously it came into profile: in everything that had borne the name of high culture, religion, and morality, the resentment mode of world-building had pre
vailed. Everything that for an epoch had been able
T'.
