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A God Torn to Pieces
THE NIETZCHE CASE
By Giuseppe Fornari, Keith Buck Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2013 Michigan State University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-101-3
CHAPTER 1
The Hunt for the Whale
The drama's done. Why then here does anyone step forth?—Because one did survive the wreck.
—Ishmael in Moby Dick
The figure of Nietzsche is of fundamental importance for a better understanding of Christianity and its uniqueness; this is the conclusion that can be reached from a careful and objective examination of his writings. It is an unusual conclusion since, while the role of religion in Nietzsche's thought has been stressed by several commentators, as much cannot be said for the uniqueness that he attributes to Christianity. This uniqueness is certainly of a negative order in Nietzsche's view but it carries so much weight with him that he is compelled to return to it again and again with increased intensity, up to the illusory catharsis of The Antichrist, which will require our particular attention.
Nietzsche's absolutely extra-ordinary vision of Christianity was first stressed by René Girard, who also stresses the singular collective blindness—as in the case of Poe's Purloined Letter or rather of Andersen's naked emperor—that has afflicted nearly all of Nietzsche's interpreters. As always with Girard, his comments debunk and give a fresh direction, exploding so many commonplaces about Christianity and about Nietzsche that he has been largely ignored, and the situation at present can hardly be said to have entirely changed. Thus there is a double censorship—of the real Christian message and of the real significance of Nietzsche—and it is the more difficult to overcome because Nietzsche himself plays an active part in it in all respects.
Girard's interpretation is far from being complete or completely satisfactory, however it sets out along a highly arduous path but one of great fascination, a real challenge to exegesis that the present essay intends to take up in the hope that someone may notice its force, its pure and simple capacity to explain facts that have been systematically ignored because they are hard to deny. It is true that the entire corpus of Nietzsche's writings seems to oppose itself to any attempt of the kind, and to mock every effort to reduce it to an unambiguous message, to a real and recognizable content, the more so if the attempt is accompanied by something like cognitive and ethical motivation. And what is it that Nietzsche proposes if not to go beyond all ethics and every normative and objective vision of reality, expressed in a consciously scintillating style, a siren song that appeals to so many readers? The bewildering variety of guises and attitudes adopted by Nietzsche would seem to justify not only the definition given by Gianni Vattimo of "thinking of difference" [pensiero della differenza] but also the systematizing reaction of Martin Heidegger, who peremptorily declared that Nietzsche's philosophy was "no less consistent and rigorous than Aristotle's." The two positions are not in fact mutually exclusive; indeed, they are cross-referential, sharing a desire to remain in the philosophical sphere (no matter whether 'post-metaphysical' or 'postmodern'), and hold that the answers to the questions raised by Nietzsche cannot, in any case, be formulated in different language. The religious problem and the problem of the Christian anomaly that Nietzsche raises are passed over in silence.
The idea of an essential comparison of Nietzsche's work with religion and with Christianity is still further counter to the main stream if we apply it not only to his thinking but to his life as well. Despite, or rather because of, the masquerading, not to say histrionics, of the author of Zarathustra, few other thinkers reveal such a close and even catastrophic connection between their life and their ideas. The multiplying of disguises, posturings, and statements of intent are evidence of a systematic attempt to flee from identity rather than of having overcome any prejudice about identity. Disguises are adopted, above all, by people with something to hide.
Besides taking an author's texts as a whole or trying to fit them into the procrustean bed of a personal philosophy, there exists another possibility, supremely hermeneutic and well-known to real psychologists and real readers: to choose only those elements in a text or set of texts that appear as a sign or indication of what lies beneath. This is a more perilous strategy and requires having a nose for the hunt and long hours of searching but it is the only way to capture the richest prey. Once the tracks and signs have been found, the whole mass, which appeared to be settled and classified once and for all apart from some shadowy patches normally ignored or declared to be irrelevant, starts to move and come to life again: we begin to understand not only what the texts are saying but also, and at times it is the essence, what the texts do not say. I think we hold the key so that all those elements that at first seemed to confute the unorthodox interpretation come to confirm it, now that they are explained and set in a broader light, and take on a different even opposite meaning.
However, with an author like Nietzsche, things are by no means simple. He makes valiant efforts to put us off the scent. So we need to be determined if we are to capture Proteus, the Greek god of metamorphosis; we must not be distracted by his continual transformations but remain firmly convinced that they result not from strength but from fear, from a desperate desire to avoid capture. The metamorphosis, the performing, is really a way of escape.
We will look immediately at some concrete applications of this kind of interpretative key. In one of his last works, Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche puts some important questions in the form of aphorisms:
37 Do you precede the others in the race?—Are you like a shepherd? or an exception? A third possibility is that you are fleeing ... First case of conscience.
38 Are you serious? or only acting? Someone who represents something? or the thing itself that is represented? In the final analysis you are only the imitation of an actor ... Second case of conscience.
In the two aphorisms, the desired alternatives are mixed with the feared (the "shepherd" and being "serious" with fleeing and the fiction of theatre) as well as the disturbing intermediate "exception"; lastly comes the image that describes Nietzsche's game here, "the imitation of an actor," that is to say, not simply masquerading but its inner principle: the performance of a performance, a formula multipliable to infinity, which is also suggested by numbering the 'cases of conscience.' We are already told the essential as long as we distinguish the projections (the "shepherd," being "serious") from what are authentic descriptions ("fleeing," "acting") and provided that, through the ambiguous role of "an exception," we discern the will to confuse the two, the illusion of confusing them ("the imitation of an actor").
Two other images that are just as important in Nietzsche's writings are the clown or the tightrope walker. In Ecce Homo, in the chapter entitled Why I Am a Destiny, he even goes so far as to say: "Perhaps I am a buffoon ...," however—he adds—for that very reason, a buff oon in whom the truth itself speaks. This paradox is put more directly in the preparatory outline for the chapter: "God or clown—this is involuntary in me, this is me." "This is me" indicates that the imitator of an actor is neither of the alternatives of the dilemma but their simultaneous possibility, their paradoxical co-presence that is not consciously decided ("this is the involuntary part in me"), yet expresses the force at the origin of Nietzsche's will, a lacerating, divided force that is ineluctable: the imitator would like to be God but he sees himself cast in the debased role of a buffoon. In the conclusive version the feared alternative is preceded by a "perhaps" ("Perhaps I am a buffoon ...") and immediately afterwards provocatively proclaimed with an absolute affirmation of identity, of truth: "... my truth is tremendous: because until today lies have been called truth." This crazy claim to identity is the last act of simulation; the long struggle between the God and the clown reaches the stage at which the two identities are set spinning around, substitute one another and merge to form a tragic caricature of a divinized clown, of a clown-God.
The texts quoted above should already indicate the strategies and stratagems resorted to by their author. If we are to seize Nietzsche as he rotates faster and faster in his roles and identities, we must take him absolutely literally at some points, at certain key moments in his works, that is, surprise and capture him in the literal expression of his thoughts, if it is true, as Roberto Calasso observes in talking about Nietzsche's later works, "genius is also the capacity to take oneself literally." Such a statement should not discourage but indicate that the chase is bearing fruit. The presence of direct traces that can be distinguished from everything else is a clear sign that the prey is close at hand. What must the fugitive do? If he cannot erase his tracks completely (and how can he, since he wants to act a part, to demonstrate something?), he must contrive matters in such a way that the real tracks are taken to be false ones, and the false tracks real. Nietzsche is exemplary here, and the majority of his readers have fallen into the trap. He is to be interpreted metaphorically where he ought first to be taken literally, and interpreted literally where he ought not to be. The systematic nature of the deception rules out any factor of chance.
All this demonstrates that what is at issue here is not merely textual. It would be hopeless if it were just a question of formal elements set side by side. But the textual method equal to the task, going beyond Girard thanks to Girard, can be defined as supremely hermeneutical because it draws on the pre-interpretative foundations of any authentic interpretation, that is, on the reality that generates the text, while the text follows or obstructs this reality according to how it reacts, according to the position, the vital needs, and the fatal contradiction at the origin of the text. Nietzsche's theatrical metaphors should never be taken as an end in themselves but as a development of the archaic metaphors of combat, hunting, and pursuit, of what the exegete must do if he wants to capture his textual prey. And, in the end, the chase is not a metaphor but real action that presupposes the existence of real prey; and the more important the chase, the more dangerous the prey becomes and as well-armed as the hunter. Taken to its extreme, the fight becomes an aut aut: either the prey is captured or it captures the hunter. There is nothing academic, nothing ornamental, in great texts, in great authors. Our relationship to them is one of life or death, of winning or losing, and if you have anything to do with them you can suffer the most bitter and humiliating of defeats, which is to be made captive without knowing it, imprisoned in a cage that we mistake for the truth, in a fiction that we mistake for reality. Whatever applause we might receive from this cage can only intensify the silence of our disillusion when it becomes clear that the enigma has not been revealed at all, that the enigma itself has caged and swallowed up the unwitting interpreter.
Between the two solutions of capturing or being captured, of devouring or being devoured (and of controlling the representation or being controlled by it) there can be a thousand intermediate points in the course of the pursuit, and Nietzsche has the habit of settling on any one of these intermediate points, but not without rapid feints in either direction. The author who defined himself as "the imitation of an actor" is the most difficult kind of prey, a predator familiar with all the mimetic tricks to avoid being made a prey himself, and who knows that attack is the best defense at certain moments; this is a prey marvelously well-equipped to catch the unwary hunter. But, leaving aside for a moment the images of the chase and the theatre, what are the actual extremes between which this strange hunter-actor struggles to climb, trying to hit and run as he goes? Is there really a dramatic dilemma between devouring and being devoured, between acting and being 'acted,' being played by one's own role?
We have seen that Nietzsche would like to be God rather than a clown but we have also seen that he is unable to divorce the hoped-for alternative (God) from the one he fears (clown), and resorts to confusing the roles in an attempt to pass off his fiction as the truth. The dilemma is more than psychological or theatrical, it is religious. Nietzsche has an acute perception of the ambivalence within what we call religion, and he tries to resolve it in one final opposition, for him conclusive. The term 'religion' actually describes two things that could not be more opposite, more irreconcilably hostile in Nietzsche's view: the god that he invokes more than any other, Dionysus, and the god that he detests more than any other, the biblical God, especially the God of the Gospels. It would not appear to be good hermeneutics to reduce to a single generic common denominator principles that, for Nietzsche, were infinitely opposed, and this applies to those interpreters like Heidegger—and their number is legion—who have chosen to ignore the opposition as irrelevant from a speculative viewpoint. Nietzsche's contraposition can be overcome only by demonstrating the lack of any objective grounds for it, but it is precisely this that his interpreters usually fail to do; they usually take the matter to be already decided one way or the other, with no need for any particular justification. One thing is never done: to raise the query of whether by chance, at this very point, Nietzsche was not right, at least in part. But to answer that question, we need to investigate what lies behind these opposites, that remain irreducible for Nietzsche, and it is here that Girard with characteristic intuition enters the investigation.
One aspect is at once clear: Nietzsche is the mirror image of Girard in many respects. It is no exaggeration to say that Nietzsche explicitly denies or turns upside down the value of everything that Girard has investigated, from imitative or mimetic desire to Christianity, but one should add that the way in which Nietzsche does it is quite unique, and could not fail to elicit a response from Girard in the form of his stealthy, tenacious pursuit. The strategy adopted by Girard to confront Nietzsche might be compared to a whale hunt: long interminable periods of waiting, relentless exclusion of details that occupy so many other scholars and few but well-placed pitches of the harpoon, in other words, a few studies spread over the years together with a lengthy series of allusions and references in other works. But once again metaphors from hunting can be usefully developed, transformed and set in motion: the image of a whale hunt is well-suited to Nietzsche himself in the first place, and at this point the symbolism of the most metaphysical hunt in modern literature, which occurs in Melville's Moby Dick, comes to our assistance, perhaps not perfectly suited to Girard's attitude, but well-suited to describe the voyage I want to undertake starting from his approach to Nietzsche.
Ahab's whole life is obsessed with the white whale; tormented and yet filled with admiration, he pursues Moby Dick to the ends of the earth until it finally drags him down to the bottom of the sea. The hunter and the hunted are the two poles between which Nietzsche oscillates but their contraposition is ultimately an illusion, that is, it is reversible, transitory: in the course of a chase that divides and unites them indissolubly Ahab and Moby Dick come to coincide. The union of the diptych that they have always formed reveals an abyss of evil, the self-destruction of the spirit of antagonism and revenge. Nietzsche also moves between these two extremes, and in the end they unite fatally against him. Is this then the sense of the contraposition made between Dionysus and Christ? Certainly it is the interpretation that Nietzsche wanted to give of the opposition that summed up all others for him, but if this were a completely correct interpretation, Nietzsche would not have reacted to the Christian message so angrily like someone whose sport is being spoiled. Evidently Christ disturbs, breaking into the game of the killer who is killed, of the hunter who becomes hunted, of the God who is at the same time a clown, and for this reason Nietzsche was to try to attach to Christ the second term of the alternative in Ecce Homo ("God or a clown"), with truly fearful results.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A God Torn to Pieces by Giuseppe Fornari, Keith Buck. Copyright © 2013 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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