Soziologische
Skizzen zur Anthropologie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1 980, pp.
Sloterdijk - Nietzsche Apostle
In both respects the teachings of the late Nietzsche point to an imitation solis.
The sun alone is heroic right to the moment of setting and remains generous until it goes down.
"Heroism is the good will to absolute self-demise," the author had once written for his young Russian girlfriend.
Only suns can be so profligate that they can be placed under the guardianship of rational heirs, when the economic ideas ofthe latter manage to prevail.
Only the sun has a giving virtue as first nature; only suns care nothing for the sym metry between giving and taking; only suns shine sovereignly over proponents and opponents; and only suns read no critiques.
On this last point the author Nietzsche did not totally succeed in his becoming-sun.
Moreover, there are also some other
78 I Nietzsche Apostle
respects that give ground for suspIC10n that Nietzsche's sun participates far more in humanity than the metaphor betrays. This begins with Zarathustra's first address to it: "You great star! What would your happiness be if you had not those for whom you shine? (. . . ) we. . . took your overflow from you and blessed you for it. "6 And it culminates in Zarathustra's prayer to his will:
That I may one day be ready and ripe in the great noon;
-ready for myself and for my most hidden will; a bow burning for its arrow, an arrow burning for its star-
-a star ready and ripe in its noon, glowing, skewered, blissful with annihilating arrows of the sun-
-a sun itself and an inexorable will of the sun. . . 7
One sees in these phrases that the author sympa thizes neither with philosophical hallucinations, which proclaim the flight into identity in the name of the "subject," nor with the philosophy of dia logue, in which subjects address each other face to face or accuse each other of turning away from dialogue. Nietzsche's interests are directed at a theory of the penetrated penetration, an ethics of
overflowing into and entering into others, a logic of absorption and of new-radiation. He does not know of symmetrical discussions, negotiation, of the middle-value between banalities, but instead of inter-solar relations, the traffic of rays from start to star, the penetration from viscera to viscera, being pregnant and making-pregnant. "In the belly ofthe whale I become the herald oflife. "8 His interest lies not in opinions but in emanations. On an intellec tual level he is a radical bisexual, a star which fevers to be penetrated, and a sun which penetrates and "prevails. " I am penetrated, therefore I am; I radiate in you, therefore you are. By sexualizing the sun, he reverses the direction of imitation and compels the sun to become the imitator ofpeople, provided that the individual is an author-that is, one who is penetrated by language, by music, a voice, which seeks ears and creates them.
From this point it is possible to give yet another twist to the interpretation of Nietzsche's work from within the critique oflanguage. IfNietzsche's evangelical operation liberates self-praise, then a transformed light falls on the self of this praise. In noting that Nietzsche's poetics abolishes the rules of indirect eulogy and substitutes praise of the foreigner with self-praise, we see only the outer layer of the turmoil created. On a deeper level, Nietzsche's affirmative language remains obliged to
80 I
praise the foreigner-better, it praises the non-self such as it has never been celebrated before. However, it devotes itself to a foreignness that is more than the otherness of another person. It exposes itself to a foreignness that traverses the speaker as it would a reverberant corridor, a foreign ness that penetrates him and makes him possible it is exposed to the foreigner's culture, language, educators, illnesses, contaminations, temptations, friends, indeed even the self which places paren theses it ostensibly owns around phenomena. It celebrates in itself a fullness of foreignness called the world. Whatever Nietzsche alleges about these magnitudes is transformed into praise of the foreigner in itself: ''As my father I am already dead and as my mother I am still alive. . . "9 Thus Nietzsche's selflessness must be sought beneath the level of apparent self-praise-in his opening to the inner foreignness, in his excessive mediality, in his indulgent curiosity for everything, and in his never totally compensated imbecility. This is why the author is no simple sun, but a resonance-body. As my mother I still speak, as my future friends I am still to be heard. Nietzsche could be described as the discoverer of hetero-narcissism: what he ulti mately affirms in himself are the othernesses which gather in him and make him up like a composi tion, which penetrate him, delight him, torture
I 81
him and surprise him. Without surprise life would
be a fallacy. There must be something in the world that is faster than causes. What comes to be dis cussed under the title of "the will to power" is the prelude to a composition qua theory of pure positings. The theory of the will was a detour on the way to the unwritten, complete teaching, to that critique of eulogistic reason which describes the world as an objection and its overcoming.
Perhaps we ought to permit ourselves to remark that, as an author of German language and European syntax:, Nietzsche reached the pinnacle. In his culminations as thinker-singer, he could feel himself to be an organon of the universe, creating sites of self-affirmation in individuals. As a philosopher, he would have rejoiced too early, had he assembled the sketches ofhis theory ofwill into a work and published it himself But we know that the exploiters, recyclers, and accelerators did this for him, using his authorial name as a brand. They did this rather unbeknownst to the author, who often came to the point in his research at which the alleged system, the supposed fundamental theory, cancelled itself out: there is no will, and therefore no will to power. Will is only an idiom. There is only a multiplicity of forces, speech, gestures, and their being composed under the direction of an ego, which gets affirmed, lost, and transformed.
On this precise point the author contradicts his own brand, and his statements on this are explicit. Perhaps we can do no better, then, on the hun dredth anniversary of his death, than to repeat these statements, in the hope that no future redac tion can excise them:
The whole surface of consciousness-conscious ness is a surface-has to be kept free from all of the great imperatives. Be careful even of great words, great attitudes . . . . I have no memory of ever having made an effort-you will not detect any trace of struggle in my life, I am the opposite of a heroic nature. To "will" anything, to "strive" after anything, to have a "goal," a "wish" in mind I have never experienced this. Right now I am still looking out over my future-an immense future! -as if it were a calm sea: there is not a ripple of longing. I do not have the slightest wish for anything to be different from how it is; I do not want to become anything other than what I am. But this is how my life has always been. 10
This idyll ofthe author responds once again to the Zarathustra idyll of noon, the recumbent ovation on the perfect earth. Here the earth seems to answer in advance to the question ofwhom it takes itself for.
Like such a weary ship in the stillest bay, thus I too rest now close to the earth, faithfully, trusting, waiting, bound to it with the lightest threads. Oh happiness, oh happiness! Do you want to sing, oh my soul? You lie in the grass. But this is the secret solemn hour when no shepherd plays his flute. Stand back! Hot noon sleeps on the meadows. Do not sing! Still! The world is perfect. 1 1
Here the author himself is called upon to stop being an author. Where the world has become everything that may not be awakened, the writer is no more. Let's leave him in his old noon. We must picture the author who ceases a happy person.
NOTES
Introduction
1 . Friedrich Nietzsche, TheAnti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight ofthe Idols, and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, No. 16, p. 13. [translation modified]
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "The Conva lescent," edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, translated by Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 173.
1. Gospels-Redactions
1. Otfried von Weissenburg, Evangelienbuch (extracts), ed. , translated into modern German and commented by Gisela Vollmann-Profe, Stuttgart 1987, p. 37.
2. Translator's note: in German "feiern," to celebrate, can also mean "to take holidays. " Cf. Wittgenstein's phrase "die Sprachefeiert. "
3. Translator's note: oldest known form of the word deutsch (i. e. , German) .
4. Dedication to Luitbert, Archbishop ofMainz, op. cit. , pp. 19-21.
5 . The Jefferson Bible, with a n introduction b y F. Forrester Church and an afterword by Jaroslav Pelikan, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, p. 17.
85
6. Ibid. , p. 28.
7. Cf. The Gospel According to Tolstoy, translated and edited by
David Patterson, London and Tuscaloosa, 1 992. 8. Ibid. , p. 30.
2. The Fifth
1 . Friedrich Nietzsche, Sdmtliche Briefe, Kritischen Studienausgabe,
Vol. 6, Munich, 1986, p. 327. 2. Ibid. , p. 363.
3. Ibid. , p. 380.
4. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, edited and translated by Christopher Middleton, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Indianapolis/Cambridge 1996, p. 223 (German original, p. 497).
5. TheAnti-ChristandOtherWritings, op. cit. , "TheAntichrist,"45, p. 42.
6. SelectedLetters, op. cit. , p. 223 (German edition, p. 497). 7. TheAnti-ChristandOtherWritings,op. cit. ,p. 137.
3. Total Sponsoring
1 . Ecce Homo, Cambridge, p. 105. 2. Ibid, pp. 126-7.
3. Ibid, p. 72.
4. Ibid, pp. 129-30.
5. Ibid, p. 143.
6. Ibid, p. 98.
7. Ibid, p. 144.
8. "Ecce Homo" in Basic Writings ofNietzsche, translated and edited, with Commentaries by Walter Kaufmann, New York: The Modern Library, 1968, p. 677.
86 ! A<Jcst! o
9. Ibid. , p. 103.
10. Ibid. , p. 82.
1 1 . Th u s Sp o k e Za r a t h u s t r a , o p . c i t . , I V, p . 2 1 8 . 12. EcceHomo,Cambridge,p. 136.
4. OfSuns and Humans
1. On the concept of "insulation" as anthropological mecha nism, see Dieter Classens, Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte.
Soziologische Skizzen zur Anthropologie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1 980, pp. 60-92.
2. TheAntichrist, op. cit. , p. 3.
3. ThusSpokeZarathustra,op. cit. ,III, OfOldandNewTablets
19,p. 167ff.
4 . Th u s Sp o k e Za r a t h u s t r a , op . c i t . , I V, T h e M a g i c i a n , 2 , p . 2 0 7 .
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, Vol. One, "Self-Reliance," accessed online at www. rwe. org/complete/complete-works/ii essays-i/ii-self-reliance. html.
6. ThusSpokeZarathustra,p. 3.
7. Ibid, p. 173.
8. NachgelasseneSchriften, Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. , 10, p. 428. 9. EcceHomo, p. 74.
10. Ibid, p. 97.
11. ThusSpokeZarathustra,p. 224.
!
78 I Nietzsche Apostle
respects that give ground for suspIC10n that Nietzsche's sun participates far more in humanity than the metaphor betrays. This begins with Zarathustra's first address to it: "You great star! What would your happiness be if you had not those for whom you shine? (. . . ) we. . . took your overflow from you and blessed you for it. "6 And it culminates in Zarathustra's prayer to his will:
That I may one day be ready and ripe in the great noon;
-ready for myself and for my most hidden will; a bow burning for its arrow, an arrow burning for its star-
-a star ready and ripe in its noon, glowing, skewered, blissful with annihilating arrows of the sun-
-a sun itself and an inexorable will of the sun. . . 7
One sees in these phrases that the author sympa thizes neither with philosophical hallucinations, which proclaim the flight into identity in the name of the "subject," nor with the philosophy of dia logue, in which subjects address each other face to face or accuse each other of turning away from dialogue. Nietzsche's interests are directed at a theory of the penetrated penetration, an ethics of
overflowing into and entering into others, a logic of absorption and of new-radiation. He does not know of symmetrical discussions, negotiation, of the middle-value between banalities, but instead of inter-solar relations, the traffic of rays from start to star, the penetration from viscera to viscera, being pregnant and making-pregnant. "In the belly ofthe whale I become the herald oflife. "8 His interest lies not in opinions but in emanations. On an intellec tual level he is a radical bisexual, a star which fevers to be penetrated, and a sun which penetrates and "prevails. " I am penetrated, therefore I am; I radiate in you, therefore you are. By sexualizing the sun, he reverses the direction of imitation and compels the sun to become the imitator ofpeople, provided that the individual is an author-that is, one who is penetrated by language, by music, a voice, which seeks ears and creates them.
From this point it is possible to give yet another twist to the interpretation of Nietzsche's work from within the critique oflanguage. IfNietzsche's evangelical operation liberates self-praise, then a transformed light falls on the self of this praise. In noting that Nietzsche's poetics abolishes the rules of indirect eulogy and substitutes praise of the foreigner with self-praise, we see only the outer layer of the turmoil created. On a deeper level, Nietzsche's affirmative language remains obliged to
80 I
praise the foreigner-better, it praises the non-self such as it has never been celebrated before. However, it devotes itself to a foreignness that is more than the otherness of another person. It exposes itself to a foreignness that traverses the speaker as it would a reverberant corridor, a foreign ness that penetrates him and makes him possible it is exposed to the foreigner's culture, language, educators, illnesses, contaminations, temptations, friends, indeed even the self which places paren theses it ostensibly owns around phenomena. It celebrates in itself a fullness of foreignness called the world. Whatever Nietzsche alleges about these magnitudes is transformed into praise of the foreigner in itself: ''As my father I am already dead and as my mother I am still alive. . . "9 Thus Nietzsche's selflessness must be sought beneath the level of apparent self-praise-in his opening to the inner foreignness, in his excessive mediality, in his indulgent curiosity for everything, and in his never totally compensated imbecility. This is why the author is no simple sun, but a resonance-body. As my mother I still speak, as my future friends I am still to be heard. Nietzsche could be described as the discoverer of hetero-narcissism: what he ulti mately affirms in himself are the othernesses which gather in him and make him up like a composi tion, which penetrate him, delight him, torture
I 81
him and surprise him. Without surprise life would
be a fallacy. There must be something in the world that is faster than causes. What comes to be dis cussed under the title of "the will to power" is the prelude to a composition qua theory of pure positings. The theory of the will was a detour on the way to the unwritten, complete teaching, to that critique of eulogistic reason which describes the world as an objection and its overcoming.
Perhaps we ought to permit ourselves to remark that, as an author of German language and European syntax:, Nietzsche reached the pinnacle. In his culminations as thinker-singer, he could feel himself to be an organon of the universe, creating sites of self-affirmation in individuals. As a philosopher, he would have rejoiced too early, had he assembled the sketches ofhis theory ofwill into a work and published it himself But we know that the exploiters, recyclers, and accelerators did this for him, using his authorial name as a brand. They did this rather unbeknownst to the author, who often came to the point in his research at which the alleged system, the supposed fundamental theory, cancelled itself out: there is no will, and therefore no will to power. Will is only an idiom. There is only a multiplicity of forces, speech, gestures, and their being composed under the direction of an ego, which gets affirmed, lost, and transformed.
On this precise point the author contradicts his own brand, and his statements on this are explicit. Perhaps we can do no better, then, on the hun dredth anniversary of his death, than to repeat these statements, in the hope that no future redac tion can excise them:
The whole surface of consciousness-conscious ness is a surface-has to be kept free from all of the great imperatives. Be careful even of great words, great attitudes . . . . I have no memory of ever having made an effort-you will not detect any trace of struggle in my life, I am the opposite of a heroic nature. To "will" anything, to "strive" after anything, to have a "goal," a "wish" in mind I have never experienced this. Right now I am still looking out over my future-an immense future! -as if it were a calm sea: there is not a ripple of longing. I do not have the slightest wish for anything to be different from how it is; I do not want to become anything other than what I am. But this is how my life has always been. 10
This idyll ofthe author responds once again to the Zarathustra idyll of noon, the recumbent ovation on the perfect earth. Here the earth seems to answer in advance to the question ofwhom it takes itself for.
Like such a weary ship in the stillest bay, thus I too rest now close to the earth, faithfully, trusting, waiting, bound to it with the lightest threads. Oh happiness, oh happiness! Do you want to sing, oh my soul? You lie in the grass. But this is the secret solemn hour when no shepherd plays his flute. Stand back! Hot noon sleeps on the meadows. Do not sing! Still! The world is perfect. 1 1
Here the author himself is called upon to stop being an author. Where the world has become everything that may not be awakened, the writer is no more. Let's leave him in his old noon. We must picture the author who ceases a happy person.
NOTES
Introduction
1 . Friedrich Nietzsche, TheAnti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight ofthe Idols, and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, No. 16, p. 13. [translation modified]
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "The Conva lescent," edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, translated by Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 173.
1. Gospels-Redactions
1. Otfried von Weissenburg, Evangelienbuch (extracts), ed. , translated into modern German and commented by Gisela Vollmann-Profe, Stuttgart 1987, p. 37.
2. Translator's note: in German "feiern," to celebrate, can also mean "to take holidays. " Cf. Wittgenstein's phrase "die Sprachefeiert. "
3. Translator's note: oldest known form of the word deutsch (i. e. , German) .
4. Dedication to Luitbert, Archbishop ofMainz, op. cit. , pp. 19-21.
5 . The Jefferson Bible, with a n introduction b y F. Forrester Church and an afterword by Jaroslav Pelikan, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, p. 17.
85
6. Ibid. , p. 28.
7. Cf. The Gospel According to Tolstoy, translated and edited by
David Patterson, London and Tuscaloosa, 1 992. 8. Ibid. , p. 30.
2. The Fifth
1 . Friedrich Nietzsche, Sdmtliche Briefe, Kritischen Studienausgabe,
Vol. 6, Munich, 1986, p. 327. 2. Ibid. , p. 363.
3. Ibid. , p. 380.
4. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, edited and translated by Christopher Middleton, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Indianapolis/Cambridge 1996, p. 223 (German original, p. 497).
5. TheAnti-ChristandOtherWritings, op. cit. , "TheAntichrist,"45, p. 42.
6. SelectedLetters, op. cit. , p. 223 (German edition, p. 497). 7. TheAnti-ChristandOtherWritings,op. cit. ,p. 137.
3. Total Sponsoring
1 . Ecce Homo, Cambridge, p. 105. 2. Ibid, pp. 126-7.
3. Ibid, p. 72.
4. Ibid, pp. 129-30.
5. Ibid, p. 143.
6. Ibid, p. 98.
7. Ibid, p. 144.
8. "Ecce Homo" in Basic Writings ofNietzsche, translated and edited, with Commentaries by Walter Kaufmann, New York: The Modern Library, 1968, p. 677.
86 ! A<Jcst! o
9. Ibid. , p. 103.
10. Ibid. , p. 82.
1 1 . Th u s Sp o k e Za r a t h u s t r a , o p . c i t . , I V, p . 2 1 8 . 12. EcceHomo,Cambridge,p. 136.
4. OfSuns and Humans
1. On the concept of "insulation" as anthropological mecha nism, see Dieter Classens, Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte.
Soziologische Skizzen zur Anthropologie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1 980, pp. 60-92.
2. TheAntichrist, op. cit. , p. 3.
3. ThusSpokeZarathustra,op. cit. ,III, OfOldandNewTablets
19,p. 167ff.
4 . Th u s Sp o k e Za r a t h u s t r a , op . c i t . , I V, T h e M a g i c i a n , 2 , p . 2 0 7 .
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, Vol. One, "Self-Reliance," accessed online at www. rwe. org/complete/complete-works/ii essays-i/ii-self-reliance. html.
6. ThusSpokeZarathustra,p. 3.
7. Ibid, p. 173.
8. NachgelasseneSchriften, Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. , 10, p. 428. 9. EcceHomo, p. 74.
10. Ibid, p. 97.
11. ThusSpokeZarathustra,p. 224.
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