SEMIOTEXT(E) INTERVENTION SERIES

Editions Suhrkamp, Frankfurt This translation 2013 by Semiotext(e)

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Speech delivered on the occasion of the I OOth 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

O f Suns and Humans 65

Notes 85

Introduction

Today, in the year 2000 , on the hundredth anniversary of his physical death at the dawn of the first of the 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 of authorial renown? Ought we to adopt his own judgment that he was not a man but dynamite? Ought we to emphasize, once again, the peculiarity of his "effective history": the fact that never before has an author insisted so much on distinction and yet attracted such vulgarity? Ought we to diagnose that it was with him that the era of narcissism began, first in evidence as the "insurrection of the masses," then as collectivist "great politics," and finally as the dictatorship of the

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 newevangelist constitutes an incision in old Europe's conditions of understanding. With Marshall McLuhan, 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

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communicating group-bodies. People possess language 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 selfenhancement. And even masochism works to announce the distinctiveness of the tortured individual. 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

!nlTJCUC l;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 of holy selfinterest [Selbstsucht] in the 1 9th, that of narcissism in the 20th, and that of self-design in the 2 1 st. Nietzsche was probably the only theoretician of language of modern times to have had this fundamental 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 of right and power; and in silence as an authorized quiet whose presuppositions require no defending.

Quite clearly, this rudimentary reference to a linguistics of jubilation or self-affirmation stands in sharp contrast to all that has been said and conceived 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 of the encounter or deconstruction. The first case set about unmasking all the misleading generalizations of the languages of the bourgeoisie; the second gave priority to turns of ordinary language 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 contents 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 conceived of as vectors of affirmations and prophecies. But when they are, it is to underscore the inauthentic and flawed character of all laudatory and promise-making sorts of tunes. Whoever speaks in the conditions permitted-whether from a bourgeois, 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 language, 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::

GO SPELS-REDACT IO NS

First we must take a step back and clarify the contrast 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 presuppositions 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

1 3

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 speechacts-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 of which 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,

/ 1 5

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 of praise insofar as he or she also participates in the glory of the 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 eulogistic 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 grammatical 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 compatible with the Gospel through poetic amendmentan 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 fo r a noble Franc. What the author instead seemed to deem worthy of justification was the articulation of his Gospel epic in five books:

These five of which I just spoke, if I have divided them thus, even though there are only four books of the 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-if we 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 of the German language played out about 1 0 1 0 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 complicated, 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 1 8 1 0 , 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 himself to rounding out the image of himself he 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 al l cultural inhibitions against the use of enhancing superlatives in a democratic selfreference. 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 efficacy with which, as we shall see, the Christian message is adapted to the needs of American 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 1 795. In all likelihood, however, the task was not completed until around 1820, after many years of interruption. The product of this cut-and-paste work, which Jefferson completed twice-over, was given the title The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, and has become known as The Jefferson Bible . In his sc i s sorwork, 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 exuberance, 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 of neo-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 of state 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 ambitions that he did not feel that this redaction of

Gospels-Redactions I 2 1

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 curator of the writings' true content, 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 transformation 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 selfenhancement 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 1 8 1 3 , Jefferson felt h e 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 of the 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 of forty-six pages, of pure 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 i s the innocence of His character, the purity and sublimity of His moral precepts, the eloquence 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 biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the loveliest benevolence; 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 Jefferson 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 neither an historical nor an intelligible Jesus but rather an object of eulogy, 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 of stories 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 Enlightenment winners, all the threatening and apocalyptic discourses of Jesus are forcibly absent, as are most of the stories about miraculous cures and resurrection-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 selfcelebration 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 depression. Twentieth-century mass culture would first designate a way out of this quandary by disconnecting 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 positions of privilege 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 likenessincreasingly 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

T HE F I F T H

On February 1 3 , 1 883 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 p rinted pages) , the title of which 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

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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 of the 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 t ime , it was the

Italian and the Swiss Postal Services that undertook to the " Good News."

Nietzsche's break with the old-European evangelic 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 comminations, 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 1888 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 universalism 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 subversion 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:--1e

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 inhibitions 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 overcome 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 theaterof this independence is the result of an insight that Nietzsche, ever since the days of Human, All too Human, had made during an aggressive spiritual 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 prevailed. Everything that for an epoch had been able

T'.lc / 33

to present itself as the moral world order bore its handwriting. All that had in his era claimed to be making a contribution to world improvement had drunk of its poison. Whence the catastrophic conclusion, which hit its thinker as a millenary insight: that all languages formed by metaphysics gravitate around a misological core. The classic teachings of wisdom, together with their modern connector-theories, are systems for maligning beings in their entirety. They serve those who have yet become fed up with defaming the world, power, and human beings, and have as their goal the abasement of the happy and powerful, and of self-praising attitudes. When all is said and done, all high cultures between Asia and Europe have consistently spoken the language of people who are out to take advantage of life itself What has hitherto been called morality is the universalism of vengeance. And whatever metaphysical discourse might carry by way of valid wisdom, science, and worldly sophistication: it is the first impulse toward maligning reality in the name of an overworld or an anti-world, which has been specifically approved for the sake of humiliating its contrary. Along with this , it is simultaneously to talk up the need for vengeance, with which the weak and the foolish vaunt their weakness and their foolishness. In metaphysical-religious discourse,

contemptuousness becomes an insidiously twisted self-praising force.

That, along with Socrates and Plato, Nietzsche above all identified Saint Paul as the genius of reversal needs no further elucidating; neither does the fact that from the numerous consequences of the Pauline intervention Nietzsche derives the criterion by which to define his amendment to the Good News as the axis for a history of the future. Against this background, the author of Zarathustra sets out to formulate the first link of a message chain designed to disenable all metaphysical falsetto. It is a manoeuvre by which he feels sure of his epochal stance; he knows that decoupling future linguistic currents from resentment and that rechanneling eulogistic energies is a "world historical" act. But he also understands that operations of such magnitude require a lot of time. He considers his being unable to observe the consequences of his keynote part of his martyrdom: "I require so much of myself," he wrote from Venice in May 1884 to Overbeck, with faint self-irony, "that I am ungrateful vis-a-vis the best work that I have done till now; and if I do not go to such an extreme that whole millennia will make their loftiest vows in my name, then in my own eyes I shall have achieved nothing." In September of the same year, he made

lhe / 35

this confession to Heinrich Koselitz: "Zarathustra has meanwhile only the wholly personal sense of being my book of devotion and encouragement-otherwise dark and veiled, and grotesque for everyone."

A "devotional book," a "holy book," a book of independence and overcoming, a "genuine mountain air book," a "testament," a " 'fifth' Gospel": Nietzsche's labels for his literary "son Zarathustra" draw, like the text itself, from a fund of religico-linguistic lore, which is converted for the new occasion. The essential reason for reprising this type of expression, however, is to be found beyond the sphere of rhetoric and parody. Nietzsche informs us that the term "Gospel" as such had been filled with false examples only, since in the Christian tradition what was issued as The Good News could, given its value and attitude in the pragmatics of language, achieve no more than a triumph of misology. In his view, the old Gospel in all its fourness is merely a handbook for maligning the world in order to benefit avengers and the indolent, a book drafted and interpreted by the power-hungry caste par excellence of the metaphysical ages, the priest-theologians, the advocates of nothingness, and their modern successors-journalists and idealist philosophers; its texts are resentment propaganda, rewriting

defeats as successes and revelling in inhibited vengeance as a way of subtly and disdainfully floating above texts and facts. Nietzsche's selfawareness hangs on the conviction that the role he has been left with involves interrupting the age-old continuum of misological propaganda. A remark from Ecce homo should be applied to the entire complex of metaphysical distortions:

All the "dark impulses" are at an end, "good people" had even less of an idea than anyone else of the right way . . . And in all seriousness, nobody before me knew the right way, the way up: only starting with me did hopes, tasks, prescribed paths for culture exist again-I am the bearer of these glad tidings. 7

Nietzsche's evangelism thus means : know oneself; take a stand against the millenaries-old forces of reversal, against everything that has been called Gospel to date. He saw his destiny in being a necessarily joyous messenger, such "as there has never been before." His mission was to destroy the communicative competences of the venomous. The fifth "gospel"-Nietzsche only puts the noun and not the numeral in inverted commas, and places the expressions "poetry" or "something for which there is no name" as variants next to it-

Trcc I 37

thus aims to be contrastive, its content being not negation as liberation from reality, but affirmation as liberation of the wholeness of life. It is a Gospel for those no-longer-needing-to-lie, a gospel of negentropy or of creativity and consequently-on the presupposition that few individuals would be creative and able to be improved-a minority gospel, further still : a gospel "for no one," a delivery to unidentifiable addressees, since there exists no minority regardless of how small that could accept it as a message addressed directly to it. Not for nothing did Nietzsche, in the months and years after the publication of the first three parts of Zarathustra, continuously point out, with the melancholy of a simultaneously fictive and authentic character, that he had not a single "disciple."

This statement is only seemingly contradicted by the fact that Nietzsche achieved his "vitalist'' turn of thought in a temporal milieu that all too willingly declared itself ready to assimilate the new languages of life affirmation; even the observation from "effective history" according to which Nietzsche's death was immediately followed by a wave of demands that began turning Zarathustra into a fashionable prophet and the "will to power" into a password for social climbers, does not repudiate the thesis that there was not and could not be any adequate addressee for this "gospel." The reason

38 I

for this is to be sought in the internal economy of the new message, which demands a disproportionate price for access to its privilege of proclamation, indeed an unpayable one. Recipients of the fifth "gospel" incur such high costs that, after a look at the balance sheet, it can be perceived only as bad news. It is no coincidence, then, that its first herald was already pushed to break away from past and present humanity. It demands of every potential disciple such radical abstinence with regard to traditional forms of life-serving illusion and bourgeois facilitation that, should this disciple seriously partake in the new message, the disciple would find himself alone with an unliveable disillusionment. The odd renewal of eulogistic energies in an alternative linguistic current first opens onto a proposition designed to transmit via speech an evangel propped up on a "dis-evangel"-the expression dates from Nietzsche himself, who thus denotes St Paul's "actual" teaching. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy also adopts this term to characterize the major interpreters of reality in the 1 9th century-Marx, Gobineau, Nietzsche and Freud-as the first "disevangelists" of modern dumbfoundedness : we will speak somewhat more soberly of them as the founders of discursive games about the real.

The fifth "gospel" sets out from a work of illusion-destruction for which there is no parallel. It is

oriented around the norm of the Gay Science, which, in truth, is the most desperate science ever to have been launched, since it presupposes a level of disenchantment that plunges to almost suicidal depths. It virtually corresponds to vagus death caused by disappointment. Nietzsche never doubted that there was an indissoluble relation of production between his chronic illness and his lucidity about things psychological and metaphysical. His own life was for him the "experiment of the discerning"; his suffering he understood as redemption for his cognitions. And the more he paid off, the further he was carried away by his thinking and states from existing human communities. He drifted further and further toward an inexorable exteriority with regard to the mendacious conditions of societies. He looked upon the idols of the tribe, the market, and the cave from a distance that did not cease to grow. His private mythos of the Hyperboreans was a way of describing his sojourn in the cold as a gay and voluntary exile. He had no right to believe that he possessed in this any shared point of departure with contemporary readers; still less could he permit himself the supposition that he might find followers wanting to learn their lessons in similar conditions. Hence the persistent reference to his fateful loneliness; hence his view of the world as "a

40 !

door to a thousand deserts, empty and cold." Hence, also, the mistrust he displayed toward anyone who might have dared to tap the author approvingly on the shoulder. In the chapter called "The Convalescent," Zarathustra illustrates the price of the new message when in encountering his "most abyssal thought" of disgust and disappointment he faints and, upon waking, hangs between life and death for seven days. The truth has "in truth" the form of an illness leading to death: it is an attack on the aletheiological immune system, which leaves people hanging at the geometrical place of lies and health. Whoever wants to resist the disruption of the hitherto known economy of illusions, has to be something other than what had been known as known human to date-a surviver vaccinated against the madness of the truth. The economic paradox of Nietzsche's good news consists in the indication that the primary, immeasurably bad news must be recompensed by an as yet unproven mobilization of creative counter-energies. The overman concept is a wager on the distant possibility of such compensation: "We have art so that we do not go to ground on the truth"-this means : we have the prospect of the overman in order that unbearable insights into the unveiled human condition may be endured. Such an offer appears as an advertisement for that which inspires

FiM1 I 41

terror. This is why the whole of Zarathustra had to take the form of an extended prelude: in its narrative parts, it deals with nothing other than the hesitation of the herald before the announcing of his own message.

However, if one wants to have cheaper access to the new privileges of the herald, regardless of effects of terror and experimental reservationsand this is the formula that practically characterizes the whole history of Nietzsche redaction in the anti-democratic movement, including its later revisions in democratic ideology critiquethen one has to split the newly won eulogistic functions from the necessary enlightenment prior to it and its work of destruction, and lift the quotation marks from the password "gospel," that is , erase its newness and its irony. Nietzsche was aware of the absurd costs of his undertaking and doubted often enough whether recovering an evangelic-eulogistic stance from perfect nihilism remained, existentially speaking, a sensible reckoning. In 1 884, he wrote to Malvida von Meysenbug:

42 /

I have things on my soul that are one hundred

times heavier to bear than la betise humaine. It is possible that I am a doom, the doom for all future people-and it is henceforth very possible

that one day I will become mute, out of love for humanity! ! !

Let's register the three exclamation marks after the suggested possibility of his falling silent. Every explanation of the Nietzschean message has above all to answer the question of how it is possible that the announcement won out over its internal inhibitions. This would be tantamount to explaining how the dis-angelic factors could prevail against the eulogistic motifs in the process of offsetting them. And in this revision it would be necessary to examine the calculation as such in its immanent correctness. Does not everything point to the idea that according to Nietzsche the bad news possesses an edge over the good news that cannot be compensated for, whereas all attempts to give primacy to the latter are based only on momentary vigor and temporary self-hypnosis? Yes , isn't Nietzsche thereby exactly the paradigmatic thinker of modernity insofar as it is defined by the impossibility of catching up with the real through counter-factual corrections? Is modernity not defined by a consciousness that runs ahead of the monstrousness of facts, for which discourses about art and human rights only ever consist in compensation and first aid. And for this reason is the contemporary world, forced to admit the superiority of the

dreadful, not precisely incapable of uttering high praise from then on.

As far as Nietzsche is concerned, he knew very well that he would, for the time being, be the sole reader of Zarathustra to be seized by it; his fifth "Gospel" is, as he almost rightly says, "dark and buried and grotesque for everyone," and this is so not only on account of its prematurity. It cannot be predicted how such a document, which necessarily renders anyone trying to spread it grotesque, could become the point of departure for a new eulogistic chain in which the spokesperson would stand to win. As, for the time being, anyone professing to want to cite a passage from the fifth "gospel," renders himself even more infeasible from a bourgeois and academic standpoint than would someone attempting to do so with the unabridged form of the first four. This can in no way be altered by the conspiracy of the infeasible, who improvised their "braggart empire" by appealing to a few heavily distorted and cut up fragments of Nietzsche, translated into banal and national-populist language. No pair of scissors can save the chants of Zarathustra for the language games of the stock-standard enlightenment. Nietzsche-uncut only opens up to those who are lost enough to be able to reinvent the notion of redemption for themselves. Assuming that Nietzsche

himself had known this from the start-and the biographical and literary evidence speaks in favor of this-what could still make him believe that a new era of discourse would begin with him? How did he propose to go from the ridiculous to the sublime, from the sublime to freedom-and who could have done it after him? To solve this enigma, we will have to examine in more detail Nietzsche's sketches for an ethics of generosity.

3

TOTAL SPO NSO R I NG

To learn more about Nietzsche's theory and praxis of generosity, it is also-or above all-necessary to address his "megalomania," supposing this an appropriate designation for this author's extraordinary talent to speak about himself, his mission, and his writings in the highest of tones. Perhaps this issue here is one for which the expression addressed to the publisher about the "good news,'' "something for which there is yet no name," is once again appropriate. The alternative designations used to encompass the first parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "Poem" and "Gospel," should also be kept in reserve as a way of qualifying Nietzsche's megalomaniacal remarks.

Megalomania, then, or poetry, or something for which there is yet no name: what follows is advisably approached with a provision of alternative

41

expressions, to avoid getting stuck with a designation reflex that is first best. The exposure value of Nietzsche's most conspicuous statements about himself are so excessive that even the most favorable, the most free-spirited reader, yes even those who are willingly dazed, will look away from these passages as though not wanting to have perceived, to have countersigned, what has been committed to paper and put into print. It is possible to stare fixedly neither at the sun nor at the self-praise of the mad-for this reason we read these unbearable outbursts of self-awareness with self-praise protective eye-wear. We tone down that which cannot penetrate unfiltered into a reader's eyes without his having to look away out of a sense of shame for the unbridled other, or else out of one of tact, which advises us not to use the moments in which an excited person bares himself against him. Among Nietzsche lovers it is a mark of decency not to cite this sort of thing, is it not? Today, however, we must deviate from the norm of the amateur.

The fact that a psychologist without equal is speaking in my works, this is perhaps the first

thing a good reader will realize-the sort of reader I deserve, who reads me as good old philologists read their Horace. 1

Does anyone at the end of the nineteenth cen

tury have a dear idea of what poets in strong ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it . . . . This is

my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that

you would need to go back thousands of years to find anyone who would say: "it is mine as well."2

My Zarathustra has a special place for me in my writings . With it, I have given humanity the greatest gift it has ever received. 3

Leaving aside the poets: perhaps nothing has ever been done with such an excess of energy. Here, my concept of the "Dionysian" became the highest deed; all the rest of human activity looks poor and limited in comparison. The fact that a

Goethe, a Shakespeare, would not know how to breathe for a second in this incredible passion and height . . . all this is the least that can be said, and does not give you any real idea of the distance, of the azure solitude this work lives in . . . The collective spirit and goodness of all great souls would not be capable of producing a single

one of Zarathustra's speeches . . . . Until then, you do not know what height, what depth really is;

you know even less what truth is . . . . Wisdom, investigations of the soul, the art of speakingnone of this existed before Zarathustra.4

. . . an old friend has just written to say that she is laughing at me . . . And this at a moment

T otai Sponsoring I 49

when an unspeakable responsibility rests on me-when no word can be too gentle, no look respectful enough for me. Because I am carrying the destiny of humanity on my shoulders . 5

When I measure myself by what I can do . . . I have better claims to the word "great" than any other mortal .6

My lot would have it that I am the first decent human being, that I know myself to be opposing the hypocrisy of millennia . . . I was the

first to discover the truth because I was the first to see-to smell-lies for what they are . . . I am

a bearer of glad tidings as no one ever was before . . . Starting with me, the earth will know great politics . . . 7

I would like t o suggest that w e dwell a little longer on these unbearable phrases and slowly remove the protective eye-wear that has for a century spared readers the need to engage with this eruptive, obscene profusion of self-praise and self-objectivization. I make this suggestion on the assumption that we are dealing not with some subjective disinhibition in the usual sense, or with a morbid way of letting oneself go, or even with traces of puerility, as commentators like Thomas Mann and Karl Jaspers have discerned in Nietzsche. Against the aforementioned background oflanguage

50 !

philosophy, it seems plausible to assume here that the dam behind which the self-eulogistic discursive energies had been accumulating in the most advanced civilizations finally burst, in a single individual. Today we enjoy a safe distance of one hundred years that enables us to see these detonations of self-awareness from sufficient distance. Added to this, we benefit from a large shift in mentality, a shift that traverses the 20th century toward a greater permissiveness in the expression of narcissistic affects. And, finally, Nietzsche's description of himself in Ecce Homo as a "buffoon" suggests the prospect of considering his Dionysian exaggerations from the aspect of voluntary grotesqueness. All this makes it easier to bracket the embarrassment and muster up a bit more courage.

I would also like to contend that Nietzsche's "narcissism" is less pertinent a phenomenon from the point of individual psychology than the marker of a cut in the linguistic history of old Europe. At bottom, it signifies the disclosure of the nature of authorship and literary discourse. The discursive event which bears the name Nietzsche is characterized by the infringement, within him, of the highculture separation between the Good News and self-celebration-which in addition unveils what it is that a modern author does : he posits the text

for himself The economy of eulogistic and misological discourse and its foundation in the taboo weighing on self-praise are simultaneously opened up to debate. The legitimization of this turn can be gleaned from Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics and morality. In it the order of lies, that in which indirect eulogy is grounded, becomes altogether transparent, laying bare the mechanisms of contortion that have materialized in phrases such as "One who is humble will be elevated," or servir et disparaitre. If it is true that this separation of praise from self is nothing other than a deferment effected through resentment, an everlasting adjournment of the moment in which an orator could say to his own existence, "linger a while so that I can praise you," one may thus understand Nietzsche's attacks against discretion as acts of revision that contradict the traditional morality of self-dispossession in an almost furious way. We must go back to late middle-age mysticism to be able, at least from afar, to encounter comparable phenomena. Spectacular and embarrassing as they are, they serve to restore the possibility of forging the most direct link between self and praise. What Nietzsche has in mind is not indistinctly to rejoice over oneself as bare existence: he deaves with all his might to the idea that existence must earn its exultation, or better: that it has to grow into its exultation. As no

other modern thinker, Nietzsche espouses the adaequatio iubilationis et intellectus. If there is any correspondence between its existence and good reputation, an existence must become enhanced to such an extent that the best may be said about it. Existence may well be an a priori chance for selfpraise; however, self-eulogistic discourse can only become legitimate a posteriori at the level of culture. Between the chance and its realization, the bridge is created by "egocentrism" -this long maligned dimension in which the best possibilities of humankind were arrested incognito. It is the selfish impulses, insofar as they are also work-obsessed, upon which Nietzsche bestows with a philosophical consecration. Belated self-praise condenses the premonition of one's own becoming and the consummation of egocentrism together in the image of self: how it is that one becomes what one is, grasping the randomness of being "me." The "full" self-image is "realized," perhaps , in a moment, when the most ambitious anticipations of one's own ability to become are confirmed with a review of life lived. This is the type of moment spoken of on the single page inserted at the start of Ecce Homo:

On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of

/ 53

the sun just fell upon my life; I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. (. . . ) How could I fail to be grateful to my whole lifa?8

If a life's elevated possibilities increase, self-praise can unfold in analogue fashion: once again the work praises the master, who is poised to disappear into the work. And it is precisely this correspondence that creates the scandal-this limitless talking up of manifest and squandered wealth, this jubilatory self-review after the deed done, this complete dissolution of life in luminous positings, which remain as works of language: they form the counter-offence to the offence of the cross , exclaimed by St Paul, with which the blockade against the connection between self and praise was solidified.

That Nietzsche fittingly assessed the implications for the politics of language of his belated embarrassment and interpreted them on a grand historical scale can in fact be seen in the vocabulary of his late texts, in which the expression "cynicism" comes conspicuously to the surface. Nietzsche, the philologist, was attentive to the fact that his philosophical battle-cry, the "re-evaluation of all values," harked back to a kynical fragment that describes the protest strategy of Diogenes of Sinope: "recoin

54 /

the money'' ; he was cognizant of the fact that the appearance he emitted in the texts of 1888 could necessarily seem to be a reemergence of "Socrates gone mad." But this is exactly what mattered to him: he pursued the reevaluation of all the source value of embarrassment, the revision of misological manners, the abolition of borders, which, for a whole age, had been drawn between creative life and its self-eulogizing force. So, on the 20th of November, 1 888, Nietzsche felt able to write to the Danish critic Brandes that:

I have talked about myself with a cynicism that will become world historical. The book is called

Ecce Homo . . . In the section of this book called Why I write

such good books Nietzsche makes the following remarks about his works:

they sometimes reach the highest elevation you will find anywhere on earth, cynicism.9

The expression "cynicism" used in these passages indicates two directions: the first is the elevation of questions of diet and health to a level that is quasievangelical-a turn which sums up a good part of the 1 9th and 20th centuries and already sketches the direction of the 2 1 st in its generality; and the second is the merging of the Good News

with self-eulogizing energies . That's why the meaning of the words "cynical" and "evangelical" is henceforth in this specific case the same. At the point where their meanings intersect they signify exactly what it is that a modern author does : exhibit oneself, transform oneself in writing, render oneself "infeasible." Nietzsche: "I have never taken a step in public that did not compromise me: that is my criterion for acting right."1 0 Singing-one's-own praise of a life which affirms and realizes itself as artistic composition is rightly seen as the only authentic discursive form still able to merit the qualification evangelical. As message this form is simply good, when and if it comprises the self-communication of the successful-and a sympathizing with it. It speaks the language of a life that not only has the right to make a promise but can also endorse it-and the bigger the resistance provoked by the affirmation, the more authentic its occurrence. One might call the language-traces of such a life Spinozist since they are "expressions" in the sense that they serve to announce a force of being. They breach the constraints of traditional bivalent logic, which had required for the speaker always to choose between one of two things-either vouch fo r god, which was unavoidably connected with the refusal of the hateful ego , or vouch for the Ego ,

56 /

which traditionally could be understood only as the satanic renunciation of god.

In the new language position Nietzsche presents himself not as a poetic redeemer, but instead as an enricher of a new type. One could label Nietzsche the first real sponsor, on the condition that we devote some time to explaining his art of giving gifts that exceed the common discourse of gifts and poisons. Nietzsche's sponsorship of humanity starts out with the assumption that, by giving individuals ordinary gifts, one implicates them in a base economy: in this economy, the enhancement of the giver inevitably goes hand-in-hand with the offence of the receiver. If anyone seeks to give a more distinguished gift, it can only involve the giving of an unreciprocable gift with no strings attached. The only gift measuring up to this ambition is the bestowal of a title of nobility, which excuses the new bearer from the obligation to refer to the bestower. With this in view, Nietzsche invents some take-and-run gifts that take the form of aphorisms, poems and arguments. After Nietzsche it is possible for anyone to become noble if he rises to the sponsor's challenge. But this discourse about titles of nobility is itself provocative : what the sponsor bestows is the opposite of a title that one could "bear." The nobility in question here cannot

be gleaned from any of the historical forms of aristocracy. This is Nietzsche's decision thesis, namely the idea that the history of humanity is yet to know real nobility-except perhaps in the mild idiocy of the figure of Jesus and the sovereign hygiene of Buddha. However, in his view the latter incarnate deficient forms of generosity, since both are grounded in a retreat from the vita activa. They are waiting to be outdone by world-affirming, creative attitudes toward life-whence arises the ethical mandate of art, for the entire dimension of future history. From then on, historical nobleness possessed as a good has no value, because what could be designated as noble in feudal times was scarcely anything other than power-protected meanness . "The rabble above, the rabble below"-the words by the voluntary beggars about the rich and powerful of the present moment, to be found in the fourth part of Zarathustra, apply retroactively to historical evidence. The qualifier noble can no longer be defended through convention, to the extent noble should be the title for the birth of a deed or a thought based on an unresentful, far aiming force. Nobility is a position with respect to the future. Nietzsche's innovative gift consists in provoking one to engage in a way of being in which the receiver would take up an active force as sponsor, that is to say, in the ability to open up

richer futures. Nietzsche is a teacher of generosity in the sense that he infects the recipients of his gifts with the idea of wealth, which is necessarily not worth acquiring unless with a view to being able to squander it.

Whoever gives the provocation of gift-giving has the right to consider himself as being at the start of a new moral functional chain. Thereby is time in its entirety newly interpreted: as a delay in the future proliferation of generosity, "history" acquires content in excess of the causality that had reigned till then. The future of humanity is a test of whether it is possible to supersede resentment as the foremost historical force. In the ascending line of gift-giving virtues , life praises itself as an immeasurable proliferation of chances to be given. It finds the reason for its thankful praise in its participation in events of generosity. History splits into the time of the economy of debt and the time of generosity. Whereas the former thinks of repayment and retaliation, the latter is interested only in forwards-donating. Wittingly or otherwise, every life will in future be dated in accordance with this criterion: " One lives before him, one lives after him ... "

It pays to take a closer look at the original act of the generosity-chain inaugurated by Nietzsche, since conditions of bonding can be seen in it, from

Tota! Sponsor-!nq I 59

which it is alone possible to draw the sole valid criterion for enabling us to divide legitimate from illegitimate references to Nietzsche. It is decisive that the new "loose" chain begins with an unconditional gesture of expenditure, since the giver can only breach the circle of a savings-rationality through pure self-expenditure. Only unbilled expenditure has sufficient spontaneity and centrifugal force to escape the gravitational field of avarice and its calculus. Savers and capitalists always expect to get more back than they stake, while the sponsor gets his satisfaction without any regard for "revenue." This applies to sentences as much as to donations. What Nietzsche calls the innocence of becoming is essentially the innocence of expenditure and eo ipso the innocence of enrichment, sought for the sake of the possibility to expend. The leap into generosity transpires through affirming the prosperity of oneself and others, since this is the necessary premise of generosity. If there is a leap [ Ursprung] into generosity, then it resides in the challenge that open generosity makes to concealed generosity. Part of Nietzsche's idea of the art of giving is that the giver-if he cannot remain concealed, which is a priori impossible for an author-cannot present himself in a false perfection, since he would thereby lie his way out of the world and continue simply

to fool the receiver, which is tantamount to a humiliation. Rather, when encouraging the receiver to accept the donation, he should also disclose his infirmities and idiosyncrasies, however without denying the level of the gift. Only this yields the "master-art of kindness."11 A little vanity, a little turning in the narcissistic circle must come into play. Integral self-affirmation encompasses the everyday things that the regime of metaphysical misology had talked down, and stands in gratitude to them for the gift of being able to give. In this exercise, Nietzsche, the enlightener, can abide by the 1 9th-century custom of explaining authors on the basis of their milieus. If the author is immortal, his tics will also be. If Zarathustra emerges with his language of self- and world-affirmation, this language must convey the pressure of provocation through its radically self-eulogistic and "wanton" form. The impact of Nietzsche's sayings and arrows, which take the form of pure dictates, become for easily provoked readers a therapeutic insult eliciting an immune reaction. This corresponds to a vaccination procedure at the moral level. Anyone who has become a sponsor some other way will perhaps know that it is possible to become one without Nietzsche. Those who are not yet sponsors, however, can experience how he infects them with the memory of the possibility of

Total Sponsoring I 61

generosity-a memory that the receiver cannot let sit, to the extent he is ready and able to enter into the noble space of resonance. That the nonreceivers pursue other dealings is, on another level, certainly also perfectly fine.

Erupting from the motive of "virtuous giving" is a spring of pluralism leading beyond all expectations of unity. The nature of provocative generosity is such that it is unable to be alone and wants even less to be so. The sponsor's generosity as such aims to generate dissensus, which is to say competition. It would consider itself to have failed were it to be said it had obtained a monopoly. To be as it would like to be, it must posit competition. It would prefer to lay itself open to rejection, than it would to subordinate imitations. The generous, then, stand in opposition to the good, who for Nietzsche are rightly called decadents, since they-as we have known since the Genealogy of MoratS-pursue the dream of monopolizing merely good sentiments. For them, bad is anything that expects that they prove their goodness; while anything which belabors their consensus with questions and exits their circle of blackmail strikes them as immediately devilish. In Nietzsche, decadence represents the epitome of conditions in which resentment is guaranteed it will always hit upon its ideal language situation. The relations bearing witness to

62 I Nietzsche Apcs1le

decadence are those in which "the yes-man [Mucker] is in charge"-to put it in Nietzsche's words. If the good are so good, it is only faute de mieux. The decadence ideal holds power only so long as, and because, "it has not had any competi-tion." 12 That is why if one wants to oppose the better to the good in questions of gospel, one must resolve to count to five.

4

O F SU NS A ND HU M A NS

If, today, one hundred years after Nietzsche's death, we look back at this author for authors and non-authors and grasp his place in his time, we become aware that Nietzsche-for all his claims to originality and despite his pride at being the first in essential things-was in many respects actually only a privileged medium for the execution of tendencies that in one way or another would have forged ahead without him. His achievement consists in knowing how to transform an accident of the name Friedrich Nietzsche into an event, provided that we understand by event the potentiation of the accidental into the destinal. Destiny might also be spoken of in the case where a designer latches onto that something that is going to happen in any event, impelling it further, and stamping his name on it. In this sense Nietzsche is

65

a destiny-or, as one would say today, a trend designer. The trend which he embodied and gave form to was the individualist wave, which, since the Industrial Revolution and its cultural projections in romanticism, had proceeded inexorably through modern civil society and has not ceased doing so. Individualism, then, is to be understood not as an accidental or avoidable current in the history of mentalities, but rather as an anthropological break which first made possible the emergence of a type of human being surrounded by enough media and means of discharge to be able to individualize counter to its "societal preconditions." In individualism is articulated the third post-historical insulation of "human beings"after the first, prehistorical in nature, led to its emancipation from nature, and the second, historical one, led to the "reign of man over man." 1 Individualism constantly forges changing alliances with all that has made up the modern world: with progress and reaction, with left-wing and right-wing political programs, with national and transnational motives, with masculinist, feminist and infantilist projects, with technophile and technophobe sentiments, with ascetic and hedonist moralities, with avant-gardist and conservative conceptions of art, with analytical and cathartic therapies, with sporty and non-sporty lifestyles,

with performance readiness and refusal of performance, with belief in success as well as unbelief in it, with still Christian as well as no-longer Christian forms of life, with ecumenical openings and local clos ings , with humanist and posthumanist ethics, with the ego necessarily able to accompany all my representations, as well as with the dissolved self, which exists only as the hall of mirrors of its masks . Individualism is capable of alliances with all sides, and Nietzsche is its designer, its prophet.

Nietzsche's pretention to be an artist and much more than an artist is grounded in his radical, modern concept of success : for him, at stake is not only to throw products on today's market, but instead to create the market wave itself, by which the work is belatedly carried to success . In this way he anticipated the strategies of the avant-garde, which Boris Groys has described in his already classic work on The Total Art of Stalinism. If one wants to be a market leader, one must first operate as a market maker. And to be successful as a market maker, one must anticipate and endorse what many will choose once they learn they are allowed to want. Nietzsche had understood that the phenomenon that would emerge irresistibly in tomorrow's culture was the need to distinguish oneself from the mass. It was immediately present to him that

CJt Suns

the stuff out of which the future would be made, could be found in individuals' demands to be better and other than the rest, and thereby precisely better than all others. The theme of the 20th century is self-referentiality, in the systemic as well as the psychological senses. Only: self-referential systems are autological and self-eulogistic systems. The author Nietzsche still has this knowledge in advance over contemporary theory. On his understanding, or rather intuition, he created, in his lifetime, the conditions for his twofold posthumous success : he inscribed his name in the list of classics, which throughout culture are handed down as reference points of approval and critique. This is what he described as his fulfilled need for immortality; in addition, however, through the detour of his first interpreters and intermediaries, he above all imposed his name as a brand name for a successful immaterial product, for a literarylifestyle-drug or an elevated way-of-life. This is the Nietzschean design of individualism: We free spirits! We who live dangerously! When the author identifies himself as author, the self-eulogistic melody appears; when the market-maker launches the brand, the advertisement appears . Nietzsche liberated modern language in associating eulogies with publicity. Only a j ester, only a poet, only a copywriter. This connection alone enables us to

understand how that most resolute proponent of high culture could have yielded effects on mass culture. It is undeniable that Nietzsche's second success, his seduction as brand, or as ethos and attitude, in the field of individualism, by far constitutes his greatest effect-and also contains his more distant future possibilities. Indeed, it is precisely because the Nietzsche life-style-brand, far more than the name of the author, still radiates an almost irresistible attraction, that, over the course of the last third of the 20th century, with the onset of the overtly individualist conjuncture of the post-May '68 period, it could recover from the incursions of fascist redactors and their copies. Doubtless, the author Nietzsche, even given the then dire state of editing, was unacceptable to national-socialist collectivism and that the brand Nietzsche alone-and indeed only in rare and particular aspects-suggested itself for reproduction in national pop culture. To understand this point, we have to factor in the fact that, procedurally, fascism is nothing other than the incursion of popand kitsch-procedures into politics. As Clement Greenberg already showed in 1 939-confronting the critical case-kitsch is the world language of triumphant mass culture. It depends on the mechanized forgery of success. Pop and kitsch are, culturally as politically, short-cut procedures to get

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to the apparent taste of the masses . With this they content themselves with copying success and, with copies of the successful in hand, with triumphing once again. Hitler's success strategy as pop and kitsch politician consisted in tying a pop-nationalism with an event-militarism, as the simplest way to have the narcissism of the masses effervesce. In doing so, radiophone acquisition techniques and open-air paramilitary liturgies played the key roles. Through them, the population learned that it shall be a people and that it had to listen to the rabblerousing voices of its projected self. In this sense, all fascism is an effect of redaction. It is deuterofascistic from the start, since it has no original; if a derivative can be insurrectionary, it is precisely by way of an insurrection of scissors, which always know what they must cut, how, and to what ends. From the energetic aspect, fascism is the eventculture of resentment-a definition, incidentally, which renders intelligible the shocking convertibility of leftwing affects into rightwing ones, and vice versa. So long as publicness functions as a director's theater of resentment, the ability to rape texts and to seduce the public as a "mass" is presupposed. Brand Nietzsche could play a role in the semantic advertising drives of the NS-Movement insofar as their imitations omitted his basic assessments, as implacably individualistic and avant-gardist as

they are, and retained only the "fast climber" attitudes, along with a martial decor of the dictum. Hitler's clique edited Nietzsche with scissors and pasted him into a collectivist gospel--shortly before, moreover, Nietzsche's sister had employed her scissors to prepare a ready-made of brand Nietzsche. To the shame of German academic philosophy after 1 933, one is forced to remark that it did exactly the same thing on its level, as did the anti-Nietzscheans, who are still today unable to do more than merely compile their self-pasted incrimination files-but how far must one reach back to find university philosophers who do not philosophize with scissors? The National Socialists, resolute editors of everything that guaranteed social and national success , were able to retain far less of Nietzsche than Jefferson could of Jesus-most of his writings were too inappropriate for their kitsch system, too anti-nationalist, too anti-German, too anti-philistine, too anti-revanchist, too anti-collectivist, too anti-militarist, too anti-antirationalist, too disdainful of every concept of "national self-interest" [ Volker-Selbstsucht] , 2 and, finally, to mention the decisive barrier, too incompatible with any politics of resentment, regardless of whether this presents itself as nationalist or socialist or as a multi-purpose form of vengeance politics; national/socialist. That there is no path leading from Nietzsche to the

German's posing as masters must be obvious to anyone who's come into contact with his writingstoo incisive was Nietzsche's insight that Germans, whether they have graduated or not, have as their temptation not to feel good if they cannot belittle others-but what else is Nietzsche's moral philosophical oeuvre if not a single exercise in overcoming the need to disparage others ? That nationalist politics rests on the pathetic propensity to humiliate foreigners-who has brought this into sharper focus than Nietzsche, and who was able to trace hooliganism to Wilhelmina? Nietzsche, to be sure, is anti-egalitarian, but this is not in order to make common cause with revenge-hungry populists, as German moral philosophers, whose differences can no longer impress , avidly continue to assert in the wisdom of their years . Instead, it is in order to defend the freedom of self-enhancement against the consumerdom of the last men. From one perspective only is a concession to be made to those who disparage Nietzsche and attempt to guard against his influence. It is correct that Nietzsche, as the designer of a brand of "destiny," was obliged to ask himself whether his products should not have been endowed with better copy protection and whether the brand should even have been allowed to appear next to the authorial name. Could he not have known that from the riff-raff he repelled,

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his most tenacious clientele could emerge? Proof that these questions did not escape Nietzsche's consideration can be seen-that is, apart from Zarathustra's prophetic sayings, more or less critical of the Church, about the parasites of the noble soul3-in certain letters and work notes in which he pondered, in dread of the monstrousness of his insights, whether to abdicate from his authorship. However, even if he had done this, it would have been imperative to disclose why he gave up being an author-and the result would have been nearly the same. Perhaps Nietzsche knew the answer to such objections in advance, as he did for nearly everything else : "I am not on my guard for deceivers, I have to be without caution-my fate wants it so ."4

In order to gauge what was unique in Nietzsche's great success as individualism's trend designer, a comparison with alternative designs suggests itself There are only a few strong versions of his epoch-making expression "become what you are" and the corresponding "do what you will ." Ultimately the work of one single author can serve as a rival project and foil to Nietzsche's own, one who the author of The Gay Science himself incidentally named "a glorious, great nature," not without adding that to date the most ingenious philosophical writer of the 1 9th century had been

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an American, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson. If Nietzsche's design of life in self-creating individuality is presented under the title "Free spirits," Emerson brings his product on the market under the brand name "non-conformism." It is to this that the greatest of Emerson's early essays are devoted; the beacon with whom American philosophy yielded to its first astonished witnesses the proof of its existence. Not coincidentally, this was under the heading Self-Reliance, a prose piece of barely thirty pages, incomparable in its a-systemic density, the declaration of independence of the American essay and the revocation of American servitude to the European canon, and to every canon in general. What takes shape in him is an anti-humility program which, over the course of the next one hundred and fifty years, would reveal itself as the specific timbre of American freedoma color that dominated until the '70s of last century, before US academia dedicated itself to the import of European maso-theories. But in the year of 184 1 , the inundation of critical theory was still a ways off:

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men-that is genius . Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for

the inmost in due time becomes the outmostand our first thought is rendered back to us by

the trumpets of the Last Judgment. ( . . . ) Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for

us than this . They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility than most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say ( . . . ) precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

( . . . ) but God will not have his work made

manifest by cowards. ( . . . ) Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members .

Society is a j oint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at

last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world

Your goodness must have some edge to itelse it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of

love when that pules and whines . ( . . . ) I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. ( . . . ) we cannot spend the day in explanation.

Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

To be great is to be misunderstood. ( . . . ) Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.

The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul . . . history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

"To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the blessed Immortals are swift."5

Emerson possesses a temporal advance over Nietzsche, in addition to a psycho-political one. Since while Emerson's non-conformism seems as if it were made to unfold, against a certain resistance, toward an ambivalent narcissism of the mass, one

still balanced by democracy at the end of the day, Nietzsche's free spirit brand ran a greater risk of being imitated by a success-hungry movement of losers. Fascisms, past and future, are politically nothing other than insurrections of energy-charged losers, who, for a time of exception, change the rules in order to appear as victors. The Nietzsche brand was recuperated by losers and loser-redactors, because it promised to be the brand of winners. As this horrific episode did not and could not last, Emerson's project won out over Nietzsche's on the brand front. That's why most of us today are nonconformists, not free spirits. Our average thoughts and feelings are all made in the USA, not made in Sils-Maria.

The significance of this difference can be seen by returning again to Nietzsche, the author. When, in the euphoric productions of the first parts of Zarathustra, he undertook the most radical short circuit between self-praising discourse and evangelical discourse, his concept of "Dionysian" had necessarily; according to the author, become the "highest fact." In these colorful episodes of writing, Nietzsche, as never before or after, amended language use by producing a discourse that was a pure self-advert of creative ecstasy. Even so, he was not exactly correct in exclusively reserving the predicate "Dionysian" for his "highest deed." What

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came to light