Copyright 2002 Michaela Grey
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The Abyss of Light:
Reading, Writing, and Overcoming Nietzsche’s Textuality

Introduction: (Mis)Reading Nietzsche

An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather, one has then to begin its exegesis, for which is required an art of exegesis […] To be sure, one thing is necessary above all if one is to practice reading as an art in this way, something that has been unlearned most thoroughly nowadays—and therefore it will be some time before my writings are "readable"—something for which one has almost to be a cow and in any case not a "modern man": rumination. (Genealogy 23 - preface)

Something leaps up from the book and enters a region completely exterior to it. And this, I believe, is the warrant for legitimately misunderstanding the whole of Nietzsche’s work. An aphorism is an amalgam of forces that are always held apart from one another. (Deleuze, in Allison 145)

Scholarly readers are generally encouraged to focus more or less exclusively on the writer’s body of work, rather than on the details of his or her personal life. Students are warned to avoid psychoanalyzing the writer via the text or body of work, and specifically cautioned against an easy overidentification of the author with the narrative voice or fictional characters. The text exists, academically speaking, in its own realm, a realm from which "[h]e who writes the work is set aside; he who has written it is dismissed." (Blanchot 21) A reader’s task, then, is to engage directly with the text, discarding or at least setting aside any personal facts about the writer’s life or intentions in producing the work.

If this is true for readers of literature, it is surely even more true for readers of philosophy. While critiques of Descartes or Plato may include judicious reference to the sociocultural moment in which the work was developed, or undertake a comparative study of contemporary schools of thought, few scholars would seriously debate the extent to which venereal disease or family history influenced these thinkers’ works of philosophy. And how many casual readers are intimately familiar with Hegel’s dietary habits, or with Kant’s relationship to his family? Yet, when discussing Nietzsche’s philosophy, all of these historical factors have been taken into legitimate consideration; it seems virtually impossible to detach the man from his work, and even the most rigorous analyses of Nietzschean theory often all too easily devolve into attempts at analyzing the man himself.

The preface to the David B. Allison-edited The New Nietzsche states that "Nietzsche’s biography is uninspiring, to say the least. Nonetheless, this subject appears to have been the principle source of inspiration for the tiresome array of books that has followed him." Allison goes on to say that "the usual strategy for interpreting Nietzsche is to stress some particular incident in his life, to focus selectively on one or two issues such as ethics, morality, or religion, etc., or to try to impose a system on his work en bloc." (Allison 131) Examples of these means of accessing Nietzsche abound.

Laurence Rickel’s own contribution to the Nietzschean anthology he edited utilizes Nietzsche’s brief affair with Lou Andreas-Salome to underscore his points on Eternal Return (Rickels 146). Noting that Nietzsche failed to write a doctoral thesis (although he was granted a degree on the merits of his published work), and also neglected to live "an artist’s life," Jean-Luc Nancy explains the apparent lack of Nietzschean theoretical cohesiveness by asserting that "in the end, then, there would be, properly speaking, no thesis by Nietzsche."(Rickels 51) Friedrich Kittler muses on the effeminizing effect of Nietzsche’s use of a typewriter on his writing style and philosophy, stating that "writing women and writing machines sustain Nietzsche’s discourse." (Rickels 195) Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe finds it necessary to specifically state that "Nietzsche himself does not concern" him in the preface to his essay (Rickels 209), thereby confirming that "Nietzsche himself" is in fact a typical route of entry to Nietzsche’s thought.

The fascinating fact of Nietzsche’s madness holds an irresistible appeal to many who approach his work. Blanchot attributes Nietzsche’s madness to the "logical vertigo" of the Eternal Return that "Nietzsche himself could not escape" (Allison 125). Paul Valadier carries this notion further: "Dionysian self-sacrifice […] alone allows Nietzsche’s madness to be interpreted as the assent to unfathomable reality, an assent at first dreaded to the point of anguish, and then accepted ever more seriously." (Allison 252) Salomé’s in-depth psychoanalysis concludes that Nietzsche’s attempt to replace God with himself led inevitably to delirium . Nietzsche’s madness, then, is either held up as an inescapable condition resulting from his philosophy, as Blanchot or Salome assert, or more commonly it is used to undermine and discredit all (or selective parts) of the philosophy which came before the madness. While Nietzsche’s madness is almost certainly connected to his work—as this paper will also discuss—, not all artists and writers have found it necessary to defend the very validity of their work against the historical fact of madness or suicide (or, conversely, the validity of their madness against the fact or their work).

Alternately, strictly "impersonal" treatments of Nietzsche’s work often focus less on what the text actually says than on what it appears to say, on what it fails to say, on where it seems to contradict itself, on absences, traps or voids in the text, or on the ways in which Nietzsche’s writing confounds or misleads his readers. Bernard Pautrat’s essay on the Eternal Return begins with the assertion that he will concentrate on gaps and holes in Nietzsche’s truth, and so locate similar gaps in the very possibility of truth. (Rickels 159) Rodolphe Gasché seizes upon a metaphor in Ecce Homo and, comparing Nietzsche to a "divine lizard" whose tail breaks off allowing him to escape being grasped, theorizes that "the sea animal and the book, like Nietzsche’s body, are thus nothing more than a set of broken tails, of lost tails, of dead tails."(Rickels 115-6) Avital Ronell speaks of the Nietzschean body of work as one "peculiarly riddled with holes, cuts and enigmatic openings" and questions the consequential tendency to read into Nietzsche a "feminine element." (Rickels 235) While it is most appropriate to anti-interpret the (anti)writing of the self-professed antichrist, this oblique approach still calls forth the spectre of madness and silence—Nietzsche’s problematic presence haunts even those who actively seek his absence.

Even Nietzsche’s precise authorial genre is difficult to grasp and often questioned, straddling as it does prose, poetry, and philosophy. Nancy, for example, suggests that Nietzsche "came to philosophy via some other route or at the end of another road, and that he even came to it more by chance than by design." He further notes Nietzsche’s absence or "departure" from philosophy(Rickels 50), thus diagnosing an absence or gap not only in the work, but also in the very genre/s inhabited by these absence-infected texts.

Derrida muses that he "will never know for sure what Nietzsche wanted to say" (123) when he wrote "I have forgotten my umbrella" in his unpublished manuscripts. This reflects another curiosity of Nietzschean scholarship: there is no true agreement as to what constitutes his actual body of work. As Kaufmann records in his introduction to Ecce Homo, written by Nietzsche just prior to his collapse and subsequently suppressed by his sister for several years, "Nietzsche’s voice was drowned out as misinterpretations that he had explicitly repudiated with much wit and malice were accepted and repeated, and repeated and accepted, until most readers knew what to expect before they read Nietzsche, and so read nothing but what they had long expected."(204)

The fact that his works have been repeatedly and selectively mistranslated or misquoted (Genealogy 4-12, Ecce Homo 201-215, Zarathustra xix-xxvii) by those who have wished to use a part, but not the whole, of Nietzsche’s thought, have contributed to the confusion. Are, for example, the manuscripts doctored by his sister or by Nazi scholars excluded from the body of work, although they represent much of the work’s history? Do his unpublished aphorisms, unfinished chapter drafts, and random "umbrella" scribblings fit somehow into the corpus, or are we again faced with the decision to forcibly divide Nietzsche into digestible, comprehensible morsels? From the evidence, then, it appears that much of Nietzschean scholarship is concerned not with an attempt to read or synthesize his actual ideas, but with some effort to explain or apprehend him, to attach him to an era or system, to define or delimit him and/or his work in some fashion. We tend to become caught up, as it were, in the labyrinth of Nietzsche’s interiority, and need to locate some defining features in the landscape.

This tendency is certainly encouraged by Nietzsche himself, whose writing style is extraordinarily circular, contradictory, and self-referential, who in relevant ways experientially embodied his own philosophies, and who confessed in a letter to Lou Salome, "After every journey, should I not return to myself?" (Salome 22) Of Zarathustra, Kaufmann admits "the book comes close to being untranslatable" (Zarathustra xxv) owing to the innumerable puns, plays on words, bad and brilliant jokes, and, above all, to Nietzsche’s "prankish" tendency to use words with opposing dual meanings. Nietzsche’s writing style actively, gleefully discourages easy comprehension, even after several close readings, which could tempt one to seek a foothold in his biography, or in some detail of his physiology. But, as Salome cautions, "[w]hoever wishes to […] view Nietzsche’s exterior experiences to grasp the inner, would at best hold only the empty shell from which the spirit has escaped. "(Salome 5) It is unlikely, then, that Nietzsche’s personal history will fill the deliberately crafted gaps and breaks in his text, that some single aspect of his work will produce a key to his entire work, or that we will somehow academically redeem him from—or calmly deliver him up to—his madness.

But what if we approach Nietzsche—and here I mean not Nietzsche the man, nor Nietzsche the author, nor even Nietzsche’s body of work, but rather the conceptual gestalt of Nietzsche—as a kind of text? Works of literature, after all, present multiple truths and metaphors that cannot always be replicated in life; literary gaps often represent a series of metonymies that eventually lead to a satisfyingly total, metaphorical conclusion. What if Nietzsche’s life and work alike reflect an agonized awareness of the power of language to shape both the interior and exterior worlds? What if Nietzsche’s obsessive writing was itself ultimately a metaphor for his private struggle toward self-authorship?

If Nietzsche is not his text, is not the writings which he produced, but is in certain key ways very definitely a text in his own right—an acutely self-conscious text, waging stylistic guerilla warfare against his readers/authors and against/toward his fate as text; a fate he anticipated as his very method of writing "itself manifests a deeply rooted repugnance toward any and all systemization" (Michael Haar, Allison 7)—then the many efforts to apprehend his work through his personal life or through the gaps in his text or through some specific aspect of the work are not at all misguided, although they may be incomplete or fragmented. Perhaps Nietzsche himself should best be read as he asked us to read his aphorisms— which must be unpacked and read minutely, repeatedly, ironically, and in short bursts—if he is to be read at all.

Nietzsche’s Selective Text

One should guard against confusion through psychological contiguity, to use a British term, a confusion to which an artist himself is only too prone: as if he himself were what he is able to represent, conceive, and express. The fact is that if he were it, he would not represent, conceive, and express it: a Homer would not have created an Achilles nor a Goethe a Faust if Homer had been an Achilles or Goethe a Faust. Whoever is completely and wholly an artist is to all eternity separated from the "real," the actual; on the other hand, one can understand how he may sometimes weary to the point of desperation of the eternal "unreality" and falsity of his innermost existence—and then he may well attempt what is most forbidden to him, to lay hold of actuality, for once actually to be. (Genealogy 101)

In proposing to interpret Nietzsche in terms of his textuality, it is not at all my intent to imply that he saw himself as a literary or fictional character (specifically, as Zarathustra), or that he wished others to read him as such. In fact, he would scoff at such a suggestion:
"I am one thing, my writings are another matter. – Before I discuss them, one by one, let me touch on the question of their being understood or not understood. I’ll do it as casually as decency permits; for the time for this question certainly hasn’t come yet. The time for me hasn’t come yet: some are born posthumously."(Ecce Homo 259)

However much he outwardly denies it, a clear assertion of textuality is embedded within this statement. As firmly as Nietzsche may make intellectual distinctions between himself and his writings, the "me" of this statement implicitly identifies the author with his texts, and sites this identification squarely before the judging eyes of the readers; he clearly hopes that he/his work will be readable to someone, or he would hardly have bothered to write at all. A text arguably does not exist without a reader, and those who write presumably do so with the expectation of their writings being read.

Nietzsche explicitly associates himself with his writings in several passages. He asks, plaintively, "Have I been understood? – I have not said one word here that I did not say five years ago through the mouth of Zarathustra." (Ecce Homo 333) He claims to have discovered "what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.[…] (Good & Evil 13) Nietzsche viewed all philosophies, his own included, as autobiographical accounts of an individual’s struggle with his individual truth, as confessions. But if his work is confessional, to whom is Nietzsche confessing? If Nietzsche thus identifies himself with his writing and finds it so necessary to write that he does so against the specific orders of his physicians —who is the intended reader of his texts?

And here I again touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet I know of no friend): what meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem? (Genealogy 161)

Nietzsche spent much of his life searching for his "friends," those astute, amoral and brave enough to truly apprehend his work. His friendships with other thinkers of the time, including Rée, Salome, and Wagner, ended in disappointment. His family members were forever alien, even antithetical, to his inner life; Rudolph Steiner attempted to teach Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche the basics of her brother’s philosophy, but quickly "gave her up as being simply incapable of understanding Nietzsche" (Ecce Homo 204). Nietzsche spent the great majority of his time alone, not merely in body but in spirit, feeling he would never be understood by anyone of his era. At times he throws up his hands completely: "When one is misunderstood as a whole, it is impossible to remove completely a single misunderstanding. One has to realize this lest one waste superfluous energy on one’s defense." (Genealogy 178)

So he turns his attentions inward, and speaks to himself. But he recognizes the danger inherent in such division of the self, and thus requires at least the idea of a reader who is not himself: "I and me are always too deep in conversation: how could one stand it if there were no friend? For the hermit the friend is always the third person: the third is the cork that prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depths." (Zarathustra 55-6) Without the "cork" of a reader, Nietzsche cannot survive the perilous journey he has undertaken.

This inability to suffice as the reader of himself is quite consistent with a reading of Nietzsche as text. Blanchot affirms that "[…] the writer never reads his work. It is, for him, illegible, a secret. He cannot linger in its presence. It is a secret because he is separated from it."(Blanchot 23) Without a fellow seeker with whom to share his problematic will to truth, is there any purpose to seeking at all, can he possibly know himself without being read by another? When Zarathustra looks in the mirror, he sees only a devil’s mocking grin—but when he talks to the sky, or to the dancing yellow-haired women (Life and Truth), or to his animals, he gains a measure of self-understanding through their eyes.

Nietzsche’s struggle to find a reader, a fellow seeker of truth, was a desperate temptation to one so deeply lonely. That is why Zarathustra keeps returning to the world of men after his long solitudes, and why Zarathustra’s last temptation is pity of the higher men. Pity arises from a feeling of fellowship, a fellowship Nietzsche craved desperately even as he rejected its possibility. This loneliness itself inspired the sort of pity expressed by Kaufmann in his introduction to Zarathustra, which work he describes, along with Nietzsche’s letters, as "the work of a thoroughly lonely man […] really less letters than fantastic fragments out of the soul’s dialogue with itself […] a few times he was desperate enough to grasp at any possibility at all of rescue from the sea of his solitude. " (Zarathustra xx-xxi) But was Nietzsche driven to write by the same loneliness which drove him to occasional marriage propositions to strange young women, or did he write more consciously, toward a more profound loneliness?

Of course, intrinsic to Nietzsche’s philosophy is the idea of empowerment in solitude, in exclusivity. The nausea induced by those "so-called educated people" who callously expose Nietzsche to the "comfortable insolence of their eyes and hands with which they touch, lick, and finger everything" (Good & Evil 213) is echoed by Zarathustra’s repeated bouts with existential nausea, and, naturally, in Nietzsche’s own delicate physiology. The idea of exposure to the eyes of others appears in many of his writings as explorations of shame, of guilt, and of bad conscience ; he likens the "bite of conscience" to "a kind of ‘evil eye’" (Ecce Homo 236).

When one is seen by another, when comparisons and judgments are made, falseness, self-censorship and self-adulteration inevitably ensue, and with them the imprisoning ressentiment that Nietzsche so loathes . Anticipating Freud, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault and similar others who would follow his lead, Nietzsche recognized that exterior forces always overwrite the interior— if they do not, in fact, create the interior from nothing:

All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward—this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his "soul." The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited. Those fearful bulwarks with which the political organization protected itself against the old instincts of freedom—punishments belong among these bulwarks—brought about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself. Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction—all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of "bad conscience." (Genealogy 84-5)

When Zarathustra describes man as "a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss" (Zarathustra 17), it is man’s interiority to which he refers, an interiority wholly ruled by the directives of a dead God. Although God has died, and we need no longer fear his wrath, we yet continue to watch and judge each other and ourselves. on his behalf. All Nietzsche asks is that we stop watching, stop reading, and start being: "As long as one lives through an experience, one must surrender to the experience and shut one’s eyes instead of becoming an observer immediately. For that would disturb the good digestion of the experience: instead of wisdom one would acquire indigestion." (Genealogy 184) However, our interiority is defined by our exteriority, specifically by our language, and "there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything." (Genealogy 45) The notion of truly "being" or "becoming," although the necessary next step in Nietzsche’s psychic progress, is horrifying since it requires the death of the ego—the death of the exteriorly originary self.

So, Nietzsche does not wish to be read by those who will not or cannot understand his proposition, for that would mean only another layer of exteriority: "For these men of today I do not wish to be light, or to be called light. These I wish to blind. Lightning of my wisdom! Put out their eyes!" (Zarathustra 289) Zarathustra further observes, "Nobody tells me anything new: so I tell myself – myself (Zarathustra 196)". As Nietzsche was so profoundly aware of the dangers in being read , it is logical that, however desperate he was to find a "true" reader, he carefully protected his interiority from further contamination by a careless or undeserving observer.

Every more noble spirit and taste selects its audience when it wishes to communicate itself; and choosing them, it at the same time erects barriers against ‘the others.’ All the more subtle laws of any style have their origin at this point: they at the same time keep away, create a distance, forbid ‘entrance,’ understanding, as said above—while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours. (Genealogy 197)

Thus Nietzsche himself is suspended over the abyss, stretched tightly between beast and overman, since he "strives instinctively for a citadel and a secrecy where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the great majority" even as he is "pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a seeker after knowledge in the great and exceptional sense." (Good & Evil 37) His interiority does not exist, cannot be validated, without a third party to his inner dialogue, yet he seeks an interiority that belongs to himself and to himself alone . His ego, his "soul," was created by the very men from whom he now flees in horror. This is a paradox from which neither he nor his text can escape.

The Interior’s Distance: Writing Nietzsche

The work is solitary; this does not mean that it remains uncommunicable, that it has no reader. But whoever reads it enters into the affirmation of the work's solitude, just as he who writes it belongs to the risk of this solitude. (Blanchot 22)

It is clear, then, how Nietzsche could consider himself/his work a book for all and none." A poor reader is worse than no reader at all: "The worst readers are those who proceed like plundering soldiers: they pick up a few things they can use, soil and confuse the rest, and blaspheme the whole." (Genealogy 175) But a text is not only read; it also speaks. And, in important ways, it also listens. Might Nietzsche be speaking to himself, then, when he writes "Say what you see, man of the most perilous kind of inquisitiveness—now I am the one who is listening" (Genealogy 46)? The question of why Nietzsche wrote at all may now be asked. In producing a body of work, particularly one as uncategorizably tricky and ungraspable as his, was Nietzsche creating for himself a "cork," the "third party" his sanity required? Or—I ask again— did he write toward a more profound loneliness?

It could be that he hoped to gain some mastery over his own text by scribbling through what was previously overwritten by others. He does acknowledge that "The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers: they say ‘this is this and this,’ they seal every thing and event with a sound and, as it were, take possession of it." (Genealogy 26) Perhaps in renaming himself Zarathustra, and then tearing even that identity down, he sought liberation without obliteration. But the process of writing, of naming, carries its own dangers.

Blanchot writes eloquently of the space of literature, a space in which solitude—the profoundest solitude—speaks to and in those who encounter the work. Nietzsche concludes that his "triumph is precisely the opposite of Schopenhauer’s: I say, "non legor, non legar." (Ecce Homo 259)." If he cannot be read, he will be as unreadable as possible, but he cannot exclude himself from this proscription. If Nietzsche chose writing as a means of staving off his solitude by introducing a third party (the work itself, or its anticipated future reader), he chose a "friend" who can, in the end, only drop him over the abyss. The theme of circularity and return which inhabit Nietzsche’s work affirm his excruciatingly self-conscious choice of such a path.

He says, with grim good nature, "From this moment forward all my writings are fish hooks: perhaps I know how to fish as well as anyone? —If nothing was caught, I was not to blame. There were no fish." (Ecce Homo 310) If there are no possible readers of his interiority— and he knows this must be so— Nietzsche is left only with the choice of reading himself, writing for himself, writing himself deeper into the depths of his own labyrinth . The hooks with which a lesser intellect would hope to catch a bit of praise are sharpened and reserved to be plunged deeply into his own flesh . Salome also notes Nietzsche’s methodology in her analysis of his madness:

To confront all of life as a meaningless, random totality, and to view it thoughtfully, means something different from only having to repeat it individually and senselessly, without ever being able to escape from it. Here, a purely abstract way of viewing acquires a personal direction, and philosophical theory is pressed into the sensitive, living flesh, like a pain-inflicting spur which is intended to create, at all cost, a new hope, a new sense of life and its goal. (Salome 135)

But did Nietzsche write so painfully to produce for himself a sense of hope? Despite the humor, wit, self-deprecation, and even joy one encounters in Nietzsche’s writings, he could only have been writing himself toward—an admittedly potentially hopeful—obliteration. As the "teacher of the eternal recurrence", Zarathustra’s animals assure him that his solitude and self-destruction are not only his great destiny, but his "greatest danger and sickness too". (Zarathustra 220) The profound insight that there is no one truth, no linear progression to existence, no "true" unwritten self in spite of the deep sense of having one, is liberating, yes, but it is also terrifying. As Zarathustra is seeks his "way to greatness" he recognizes that he must walk alone, and that his "own foot has effaced the path behind" him, overwriting what was there with the word: "impossibility." (Zarathustra 153)

By witnessing "this movement of infinite negation, which withdraws every solid foundation from us, the opening onto a suddenly boundless space of knowledge", (Blanchot in Allison 121) Nietzsche has, in effect, freed himself from the text at the expense of his ability to write or read. If this kind of truth brings joy, it is the chaotic joy of no longer having to tremble at the thought of the abyss, having already leapt off the edge. Zarathustra is asked by time itself to choose his fate: "This speech is for delicate ears, for your ears: What does the deep midnight declare?" (Zarathustra 320) Past this point, Nietzsche can only choose the deafening silence that awaits him in the overbright depths of his own textual labyrinth.

The Abyssal Gift

Whoever fights monsters should see to it in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (Good & Evil 89)

Blanchot speaks of the writer’s fascination with his own text and its promise of infinite self-understanding as "light which is also the abyss, a light one sinks into, both terrifying and tantalizing." (Blanchot 32-3) Zarathustra writes of this same abyss, praising the man who "knows fear but conquers fear, who sees the abyss, but with pride. Who sees the abyss but with the eyes of an eagle; who grasps the abyss with the talons on an eagle—that man has courage." (Zarathustra 288). Both writers address the deathlike abyss of literature itself, and also its echo-chamber, the unimaginable, unreadable solitude of death itself. Nietzsche, writing of his body of work, binds death and literature most succinctly: "One pays dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive." (Ecce Homo 303) The act of writing simultaneously constructs and exposes the impossibility of truth, of knowledge, of self, and, like a web, is constructed primarily of gaps and absences . In writing, Nietzsche courted the abyss. In constructing himself as a text, he became the abyss.

Students of Nietzsche often seek some elusive, overarching metaphor through which they can access his work, apprehend his text, give some sense of totality to his experience. Nietzsche, too, often asks us to read him aphoristically. What does this aphorism of a life lived as a text tell us?
If Nietzsche had indeed meant to say something, might it not be just that limit to the will to mean, which, much as a necessarily differential will to power, is forever divided; folded and manifolded. To whatever lengths one might carry a conscientious interpretation, the hypothesis that the totality of Nietzsche's text, in some monstrous way, might well be of the type <<I have forgotten my umbrella>> cannot be denied. Which is tantamount to saying that there is no <<totality to Nietzsche's text,>> not even a fragmentary or aphoristic one. There is evidence here to expose one, roofless and unprotected by a lightning rod as he is, to the thunder and lightning of an enormous clap of laughter. (Derrida 135)

At the crisis of Nietzsche’s text, then, one can only find metonymy. Aphorisms and parables break apart in the crushing space of an unspeakable truth, the same multiplying spaces which destroy the (willing? joyful?) Nietzsche . Of course, he foresaw even this inevitability: "Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet: as long as the melody has not reached its end, it also hasn’t reached its goal. A parable."(Genealogy 183) The moral of this parable cannot be spoken. And so, as a seeker of truth , he ceased to speak.

(In)Conclusion:Overcoming

If, as Nietzsche says, "every word is a prejudice," and if grammar will always be re-establishing an indefinite multitude of substitutes for the God who is dead, what more precious does he bequeath to us than that which, throughout the derailed syntax of these destroyed words and the astonishing distribution of the terms (i.e. the limits) of this discredited language, will never cease to awaken in us the infinite carefulness of a "great distrust" that can return language to its proper course? (Haar, in Allison 35)

If there is any totality to be found in Nietzsche’s work, it is surely the "great distrust" of language to which Haar refers. The puns and word games, the duplicitous word choices, the apparent contradictions, and the very choice of aphorisms— dip as briefly as possible in the toxic pool of words— as Nietzsche’s ideal method to transfer philosophy—all underscore the ideas themselves, which are unvaryingly ideas of being, of becoming, of overcoming, and of chaos. Metonymy can be the only possible conclusion to such a body of work, since metaphor is too easily used in the service of God and his shadows. Where metaphor erects masks, makes the abyss imaginable and even familiar, metonymy such as Nietzsche’s exposes the unspeakable, senseless, fragmentary, exquisite horror of truth. Nietzsche’s truth "finds it necessary to stifle her yawns when she is expected to give answers. In the end she is a woman: she should not be violated." (Good & Evil 148-9) Nietzsche’s truth is beyond words, which, like the man constructed by words, must be overcome.

The word overcome is one of the words poetry needs. To overcome means to outdo [dépasser], but to outdo what outdoes us by undergoing it, without turning away from it or aiming at anything beyond. Perhaps it is in this sense that Nietzsche intends Zarathustra's formula: "Man is something that must be overcome." It is not that man must attain something beyond man; he has nothing to attain, and if he is what exceeds him, this excess is not anything he can possess, or be. To overcome, then, is also very different from to master. (Blanchot 120)

Have we reached the end of Nietzsche’s text? The anti-moral of Nietzsche’s parable is against Language; Language the jealous keeper of our dead God, our ressentiment, and our shame; Language the maker of masks and obstacle to being. Although a work of literature paradoxically creates the only space in which being is possible in a world defined by words, it is the being of the work, and not of the people who encounter it:

However, the work—the work of art, the literary work—is neither finished nor unfinished: it is. What it says is exclusively this: that it is—and nothing more. Beyond that it is nothing. Whoever wants to make it express more finds nothing, finds that it expresses nothing. He whose life depends upon the work, either because he is a writer or because he is a reader, belongs to the solitude of that which expresses nothing except the word being: the word which language shelters by hiding it, or causes to appear when language itself disappears into the silent void of the work. (Blanchot 22)

If Nietzsche recognized the nihilistic power of words, deconstructed himself with them and was subsequently destroyed— and if he did so consciously, so that others might read his parable and find a way to overcome— we can, with Salomé, read hope into the conclusion of the fable. Although Salomé concludes that Nietzsche’s universalizing of his interior struggles were naïvely self-absorbed, his relationship to the solitudes in language surely hold up an exaggerated, yet accurate, mirror of (im)possibility to all professed readers and writers—and in this era especially, we are nothing if not supreme readers.

Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit. It is not easily possible to understand the blood of another: I hate reading idlers. Whoever knows the reader will henceforth do nothing for the reader. Another century of readers –and the spirit itself will stink […] Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but to be learned by heart. (Zarathustra 40)

I have attempted in this paper to read the phenomenon of Nietzsche as a text, composed and edited by circumstance and written by the readers. Blanchot describes the "sick hand" that writes compulsively while the "healthy hand" prudently determines that the work is finished, and presently ceases writing. Zarathustra returns compassionately/compulsively to the world of men to stay the hand that writes and to beg us not to become texts at all, to fight and overcome the prison of textuality. But while Nietzsche's madness and death finally ended his writing, he is still unable to resist being read, a fate he craved and dreaded with equal desperation. He surely has the eyes of at least another century of readers to forbear; the compulsion to read may not be overcome.

Works Cited or Referenced

Allison, David B., Ed.. The New Nietzsche. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1995.
Blanchot, Maurice (Ann Smock, Trans). The Space of Literature. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
Derrida, Jacques (Barbara Harlowe, Trans.). Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.).Beyond Good & Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. New York: Random House Modern Library,1995
Nietzsche, Friedrich (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.).On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Rickels, Laurence A., Ed. Looking After Nietzsche. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
Salomé, Lou (Siegfried Mandel, Ed, Trans.). Nietzsche. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988.