Strategy

Strategy

Emily Dickinson on the spider: his strategy is physiognomy.
Baudrillard's the seducer's strategy--


ADDRESS FOLLOWING:

Strategies of Overcoming:
Nietzsche and the Will to Metaphor
Richard Deming
Yale University

Philosophy and Literature 28.1 (2004) 60-73
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Although it is not unique, it is certainly rare to find a writer like Nietzsche who is at once a philosopher to be reckoned with as well as a writer whose style can give the reader a great deal of aesthetic pleasure. Style was to a considerable degree important to Nietzsche, and so in order to pursue how it shapes not only his thinking, but the reader's reception of his writing as well, we would do well to think about what a marked attention to literary form afforded him. Beneath the play of argument and logic, there is a form at work that feeds into and shapes our understanding of the philosopher's claims. A text, generally speaking, performs in such a way as to create a kind of community out of the reader's ability to identify (and thus identify with) the kind of discourse a writer uses, which includes not only the kinds of claims being made, but the grounds for those claims as well. Of course, no less a factor are the literary devices that give rise to the fraught space of the author/reader relationship. We might well ask, what does the text do—how might it enact its own will to power—in its attempts to persuade us?

Some of the best readers of his work, from Walter Kaufmann to Gilles Deleuze, argue that Nietzsche's central project is the creation and dissemination of values via an action of critique, for critique sets beliefs, thoughts, and systems to task using their own complexities against them. These either adapt, survive, and evolve, or are shown to be incomplete, weak, and insufficient. If we take a literary approach, or, rather, approach the literary register of Nietzsche's thinking we see the ways that his philosophical discourse is structured, even driven by literary devices. Building on observations made by various philosophers, such as Sarah Kofman, Deleuze, and others, I will show how [End Page 60] Nietzsche's critique of a will to power and the literary devices he uses to construct and legitimize his authorial presence are actually at odds with one another. Ultimately, however, it is this very conflict, itself a kind of "textual overcoming," that, in making Nietzsche's texts open enough for endless interpretation, allows the author's will to power to be overcome, making it possible for the reader to enter into a conversation, a negotiation with the text, ideology, and cultural context. This interrogation of the text as a text is the hermeneutic process that gives rise to Nietzsche's and the reader's method of self-overcoming.

In a letter to his friend Henry Church, Wallace Stevens—an enthusiastic and sympathetic reader of Nietzsche—once wrote, "Perhaps [Nietzsche's] effect was merely the effect of the epatant."1 Of course, "epatant" is a word to which Stevens is partial, referring as it does to being shocking to the conventionally minded. The poet goes on to write that the philosopher is "as perfect a means of getting out of focus as a little bit too much to drink" (p. 432). Despite the perhaps wry tone, Stevens has condensed a great many implications into a few words and his loaded comment gives us a way of reading Nietzsche's project. Laying aside the implicit immorality of overindulging in wine (which Stevens evokes to illustrate Nietzsche's own gestures against constrictive and arbitrary conventionalities), too much alcohol creates a derangement of the senses. Stevens positions the force of Nietzsche's philosophy in the domain of performance when he talks about what effect it has. In other words, perhaps the most relevant question one can ask of Nietzsche's work is not "what does it say?" so much as, "what does it do?" Stevens's analogy about Nietzsche being as good a means for "getting out of focus" as too much to drink is particularly apt, for Nietzsche's philosophy is an action calculated to create a (necessary) derangement, not of the senses, but of our sense of the senses. By playing the epatant, the philosopher shows that the prevailing moralism, rationalism, and liberalism of his time had become so much a part of the grain of his cultural moment that it had been naturalized. He marshals his efforts to create a psychological tension through various performances—rhetorical, metaphorical, and otherwise—in order to lay bare the processes by which ideology had been made transparent. Nietzsche sought to move out of the tyranny of a metaphor/concept hierarchy into an awareness of "the mask of philosophy," a mask which is also the artifice of culture.

Much has been made of the fact that Nietzsche struggles against the strategies of philosophical discourse that he is heir to. Instead, he [End Page 61] weaves together parables, maxims, and apothegms, what Wittgenstein calls, in referring to his own work, "philosophical remarks." Wittgenstein comments in the preface to his Philosophical Investigations, "the philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings."2 For both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, philosophy is not doctrine but activity. Curiously, both philosophers describe their work using spatial tropes. "Philosophy . . . means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains," Nietzsche announces in the preface to Ecce Homo.3 The landscapes that he offers are those the aphorism affords—stark and isolated, requiring a determined and unflagging sense of survival. If anyone is to get anything from Nietzsche's remarks, they must earn it first. One could make the case that Nietzsche's writings amount to a series of manifestoes and polemics, and yet to leave things at that would mean not hearing Nietzsche, would mean not responding to what the texts do.

Both Wittgenstein and Nietzsche employ the brevity and potentiality of the aphorism in part because aphorisms move by a principle of assertions and are effectively modular. Because they are not dependent on discursivity or narrative, aphorisms can be reconfigured in any arrangement and lose none of their rhetorical effect. In the chapter, "On Reading and Writing," from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: "He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart."4 Here, Nietzsche foregrounds a self-consciousness that reading and the act of writing can activate (and make into an action of ongoingness). This self-consciousness is an idea that I'll return to. But in league with that lies Nietzsche's attempts to "de-naturalize" the reading process. By making his work anti-conventional he redresses what it means to read. Even if, or especially if, there's a dissonance in the reader when they experience this break from the traditional form of philosophy, he or she becomes aware of ideology via an epistemological gap. Nietzsche employs a discourse for which mere reaction (he speaks disparagingly, for example, of the scholars who do nothing but say "yes" or "no" to other people's ideas) will not suffice. His interpretative challenges necessitate action.

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze explains the impact of these particular formal elements in terms of Nietzsche's larger aims. "Understood formally," he writes, "an aphorism is present as a fragment; it is the form of pluralist thought; in its content it claims to articulate and formulate a sense. The sense of a being, an action, a thing—these are [End Page 62] the objects of the aphorism. . . . Only the aphorism is capable of articulating sense, the aphorism is interpretation and the art of interpreting."5 An aphorism's fragmentariness necessitates the participatory action of the reader, as the reader must decipher and negotiate context. I want to avoid saying that the context that obtains here "arises" as that would be a trope suggesting an ascending movement or appearance of some thing or condition. Context, or so Nietzsche's efforts imply, is no epistemological Brigadoon. Instead, context is relational, a matrix of inter-actions, a web of interpretation that includes the author, the reader, and the textual acts drawing these forces into interpretive negotiation. In this way, context is neither prefabricated nor idealist; instead the context made possible requires of the reader an investment of meaning.

Such an investment of hermeneutic capital is seen by Sarah Kofman (although she does not specifically use such a phrase) as "a task which requires one to elevate 'reading to the level of art'; there is no reading without interpretation, without commentary—in other words without a new writing which slightly displaces the meaning of the first, pushes the perspective of the aphorism in new directions and makes it come into its own."6 She goes on to describe such textual negotiations as being generative, even procreative: "Every reading gives birth to a different text, the expression of a system of forces, acts on the reader and 'cultivates' him, in other words again it makes him come into his own" (p. 116). Thinking of reading this way means seeing it as a transformative process by which one transfigures the text and the reader at the same time. Reading, then, becomes properly understood as action and not merely passive reception, in that a text in being interpreted is being both read and written. Such hermeneutic action is a means by which social capital is invested into communities of interpretation, and thus (various) discourse communities arise. And I am careful to call it an "action" rather than a "process" as the latter implies that there is a telic product insight. With "action" comes implied consequence or even result, but not a necessary resolution.

Kofman contends that it is principally Nietzsche's use of the aphorism that signals this transfiguring. "The aphoristic form," she writes, "is the actual writing of an artistic force positing and imposing forms which are as new and numerous as there are readers to conquer and appropriate a text" (p. 116). Such redefining of the hermeneutic relationship is a liberatory act. As she describes it, "A new reading/writing destroys the traditional categories of the book as a closed [End Page 63] totality containing a definitive meaning, the author's; in such a way it deconstructs the idea of the author as master of the meaning of the work and immortalizing himself through it. The aphorism, by its discontinuous character, disseminates meaning and appeals to the pluralism of interpretations and their renewal; only movement is immortal" (p. 116). Kofman places the import of Nietzsche's project not in the content of his doctrine but in the performance of his text. If we consider his work as action we see that the aphorism is the philosopher's way of overcoming content via form. By foregrounding the formal apparatus of knowledge, Nietzsche makes it possible to apprehend the artifice of epistemology.

Nietzsche, Deleuze points out, believed that the will to power not only interprets but also evaluates. "To interpret," Deleuze writes in drawing a distinction between the two processes, "is to determine the force which gives sense to a thing. To evaluate is to determine the will to power which gives value to a thing" (NP, p. 54). But here we see Nietzsche's concern about the Eternal Return, for what is needed is a self-consciousness so that an interpretation does not reify and become exhausted (and thus the object, exhaustible). Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Every thought's a prison,"7 which I take to be expressing a fear that once a thought coalesces as the language by which it might be articulated, its potentiality is circumscribed and delimited by the problems of discourse. Put another way, thought tends towards its own naturalization. The Eternal Return creates—even necessitates—the conditions of a perpetual self-overcoming.

The "Eternal Return" is admittedly one of Nietzsche's most difficult concepts. Deleuze suggests that to think of it as "return of the same" would be misguided. Instead, he offers this description: "It is not being that returns but rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs. That is why the eternal return must be thought of as a synthesis . . . a synthesis of becoming and the being which is affirmed in becoming a synthesis of double affirmation" (NP, p. 49). Deleuze is perhaps no more clear than Nietzsche himself is in these comments, although he does bring to the fore that it is not the thing, the self, the subject which returns but the "happening" itself that constitutes the Eternal Return. The form and [End Page 64] the content are here inseparable and the hierarchy of concept over metaphor is undone as the "meaning" exists not as a spark arcing back and forth between the two, but radiates from their inexhaustible constellation. It is this constellation, and one's inability to fix where meaning resides in the metaphor/concept of the Eternal Return that suggests that this condition is at play throughout (and as) language. Meaning is perpetually an interaction of connotation and denotation at play in the field of culture. This groundlessness prompts an Eternal Return to the conversation, the dialogism of language.

If all is interpretation, then even interpretations need to be interpreted by the subject (or reader) herself. Nietzsche does just that in his constant referral and citation of his own texts, in Ecce Homo, in The Genealogy of Morals, and elsewhere, all in the pursuit of "telling his life to himself." This could, of course, be read as mere self-promotion or even self-aggrandizement, but overall even these gestures signal a condition of self-consciousness. If nothing else, Nietzsche's radical subjectivity posits the reading and re-reading of all things as a means of discovering the self. But if as Nietzsche writes, "Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word a mask,"8 then the "mask of philosophy" is the veil of subjectivity, a prosopopoeia of the unknowing self. "Ultimately," he tells us in Ecce Homo, "no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows" (p. 1). There is, of course, an irony inherent in this assertion, given its immediate context. The assertion makes a dogmatic claim, we suppose, for the edification of the reader. However, the proposition is that the reader "cannot extract more than he already knows." Thus, the book need not make such a claim, as it can do nothing more than tell the reader what he already knows. If the reader does not already know this, then he will not be able to understand the claim; it will be as if he (or she) cannot hear it. So, why make the claim at all? That is, why participate in the act of asserting when it can yield nothing but a tautology? On one hand, this sets up the conditions of its own self-overcoming. The text deconstructs the intent of the claimant. As response, we could say that our lives are the texts and that the books we read really read us. To this we might append Kofman's observation that "we can discover in a text only what we ourselves are but were unaware of" (NM, p. 116). An attention to our own listening (again tracing what our senses—aesthetically, haptically, ethically—respond to and cannot respond to) is the means by which we can discern our own values and limitations. We come to our selves from the outside in. Thus, man is not [End Page 65] a goal, but is himself a bridge from himself to himself. As the reader writes the text and the text in turn writes the reader, we become caught in a chiasmus of becoming generated by this hermeneutic tension.

But that which we would use to get beyond (or "strike through") the mask of ideology and social construction (to use the parlance of the day) is language. And yet words are themselves "masks" and do not deliver us from paradox. Instead, they deliver us unto paradox yet again. There is no end, it would seem, to the unveiling of the world. Nietzsche's suggestion is that we become aware of the fictive necessities of conceptual ordering:

One should guard against confusion through psychological contiguity . . . 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. . . . 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 that then he may well attempt what is most forbidden him, to lay hold of actuality, for once actually to be. With what success? That is easy to guess.9
This is to suggest that all of philosophy, at least all of epistemology, is an act of metaphor making, of masking or displacing that which cannot be directly apprehended. "The motive for metaphor, shrinking from / The weight of primary noon, / the A B C of being" writes Stevens.10 Nietzsche has articulated a foredoomed will to truth that finds only metaphor—and the necessity of metaphorical deferrals—as it shrinks from the "A B C of being."

Thus, we confront the Sphinx at the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil: "The problem of the value of truth came before us—or was it we who came before the problem? Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks" (p. 9). This will to truth is a mirage, a paradox that dislocates the subject and the object because it masks its multi-refractions with a dream of a unified field. Such a dream is (and can be) no more than a momentary stay against confusion.

When we look back at Kofman's comments we notice perhaps the clear theme of the metaphors she depends on in her claims that the aphorism "disseminates" meaning and that the reading of such work "gives birth to a new text." One would assume that this new text also [End Page 66] disseminates work that gives birth. In light of these procreative tropes we see that the process of the Eternal Return is latent in such textual strategies as Nietzsche employs, and that the overcoming of his authorial self creates the conditions for a new self which also produces (or reproduces) its own self-overcoming. Nietzsche describes the philosopher as "a being that often runs away from itself, often is afraid of itself—but too inquisitive not to 'come to' again—always back to himself" (BGE, p. 230). Textuality is itself not only the vehicle and performance of the Eternal Return, but the means by which we can distinguish its canon by inversions. But here the emphasis of the re-production shows that in the calculus of the Eternal Return, the variables are incidental to the operation—with each re-production the action is the same even though the participants are not. Once again the form of the action displaces the content (or the actual participants).

To turn to particulars, I have in mind an aphorism appearing in the middle section of Beyond Good and Evil that manifests many of Nietzsche's sometimes contradictory movements. In this book, Nietzsche again writes primarily in an aphoristic mode, but this section is a compendium of brief philosophical "one-liners," among which is the following: "The devil has the broadest perspectives for God; therefore he keeps so far away from God—the devil being the most ancient friend of wisdom" (p. 87). In the most obvious sense, in the economical space of this aphorism Nietzsche addresses the fundamental binary in the Christian mythos, God and the devil, and simply—but tellingly—inverts the two poles of Good and Evil. One result of this is that the devil obtains a positive valence, that is to say, the devil is not only a "friend of wisdom," but he has "the broadest perspectives for God." Since the devil is by definition the moral opposite of God, in this reversal God becomes coded negatively—God ought to be avoided, or evaded. Traditionally, or at least according to orthodoxy, God would be what one tries to move toward. Moreover, since God is omnipotent, He is knowledge itself. Here, however, Nietzsche tells us that the devil has the most extensive perspective for God—the implication being that his perspectives must be more extensive than God's are (at least where God himself is concerned). By saying that the devil is the most ancient friend of wisdom, Nietzsche closes the gap between the two poles (to be "friends" implies an equal footing in terms of power and circumstance—God needs the devil, at least to be defined via differánce). He also makes it clear what Adam and Eve discovered in biting the apple: self-consciousness. They gain no knowledge that they did not have before, [End Page 67] except a consciousness of self, which affords them a perspective of radical subjectivity. They leave Eden because they can discern themselves as distinct from the rest of Creation.

Of course, in one sense this reversal is one that Nietzsche inherits from William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a book of "diabolic" proverbs wherein the poet writes with an irony Nietzsche would no doubt identify with, "Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy."11 Still, we need to say more about what Nietzsche makes available via his troping. The devil's being "a friend of wisdom" alludes clearly to the fall of man, which is the result of Adam and Eve partaking of fruit from the tree of knowledge. But there is another possible allusion inherent in this trope. Prometheus, too, was "a friend of knowledge" who brought fire to humankind according to Greek mythology. In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a sympathetic character as opposed to the Christian devil who is evil, who tempted and seduced Eve. By inverting the evil/good binary, Nietzsche makes available a reading of Genesis (a revision really) through Pagan religion. In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche links the Pagan with "master morality" and says that it affirms, whereas Christianity is a slave morality that negates.12 Moreover, the master morality transfigures, which is what Nietzsche explicitly does here by recontextualizing familiar mythological tropes. Doing so, he makes possible a reworking of the cultural apparatus of Judeo-Christianity. And what is God (pace Kant) but, of course, the ultimate in systems? This act of revising foundational myths is itself a kind of return that allows for interpretation rather than a tacit assent. Such a move as Nietzsche makes in this "revising" also supports the view that Nietzsche's critique is aimed at "clearing space" in order for new possibilities of experiencing and being to open up. At the very least, by conflating the Pagan and the Christian mythology, Nietzsche shows that systems of belief are negotiable and can be chosen, or at least one can navigate one's way among them, picking and choosing as one goes. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he writes, "All names of good and evil are images: they do not speak out, they only hint. He is a fool who seeks knowledge from them" (p. 1). Belief is not an unproblematic transmission of values; it is above all else, consciously or unconsciously, an action, a choice.

But what occurs in this aphorism at the level of the language? God is usually the embodiment of all good, the devil all evil. By flipping these terms, Nietzsche has disinterred the words from their traditional foundations. In this new situation, the devil is good and God bad, [End Page 68] oppressive—in short, evil. But this doesn't simply realign the same system of classification, for by destabilizing these terms (which cannot simply shrug off hundreds of years of cultural weight) Nietzsche shows that language is merely a momentary stay against confusion, not an unbreachable or unassailable system. In short, the devil is "positive" but still chaotic in that he evades and resists being systematized. In this case the antithesis of chaos is not order, but "control," at least in terms of Nietzsche's contrasting master morality and slave morality. Because this can occur, he shows language itself to be fluxional, as opposed to lapidary. This awareness of language's contingency can only come from a perspective that allows one to see that contingency; such perspective can only occur outside of that system. Hence, being "outside of the system" gives one the broadest perspective of the system. Being outside of the system is to be outside of its constituent binaries, and thus in this case being "beyond good and evil."

Nietzsche's use of the aphorism may act against (that is respond to, critique) conventions of philosophical discourse, which were stifling in their doggedly prosaic ratiocination but it also parodies the authoritative texts of morality and religious belief in both the Bible and the Tao Te Ching by using these sparse austere forms of proverbs towards heretical and amoral ends. In that sense, they satirize the Book of Proverbs. In fact, looking randomly (but not arbitrarily) at the Book of Proverbs, I come across these: "A man shall not be established by wickedness: but the root of the righteous shall not be moved." And later, "The wicked are overthrown, and are not: but the house of the righteous shall stand." In these two verses (12:3 and 12:7), tropes of fixity are used to describe "the righteous." But Nietzsche has already shown that language itself is not to be fixed; to believe it so is merely an illusion. What was considered a "foundation" is now seen as a shackle, a limitation. Nietzsche specifically uses a traditional form of discourse (traditional for the language game of religious texts, if not for secular philosophical treatises)that conventionally suggests wisdom and moral authority and by switching the terms uses the rhetoric of morality against itself. This makes amorality and immorality available to a discourse of ethics and an ethics of discourse. The aphorism is as such not merely satirical, but rather works to subvert the very system of rhetoric on which these are based.

Would it be perverse to suggest the ways that these Nietzschean inversions intuitively make use of Austin's ideas of illocutionary and perlocutionary utterances? We could say that Nietzsche's use of the [End Page 69] aphorism to attack such terms as "wisdom," "morality," and "conventionalism" makes clear that proverbs are perlocutionary acts (in that they persuade and even threaten by their authority) in the guise of illocutionary acts (illocutionary, as they seem to be creating a system in their utterance and are only as efficacious as their use of conventions allows for). At the very least they are performatives rather than constative utterance. Neither simply true nor false, they are performed by an often nebulous social authority. By using the form of the aphorism Nietzsche reaches an apotheosis—or at the very least establishes his authority simply by employing the rhetoric of moral authority. His efforts go a long way towards destabilizing (or at least subverting) a more general and non-locatable moral authority. The destabilization allows the metaphors, allegories even, to continue resonating across various systems and contexts of valuation. Hence, the aphorism, inasmuch as it stands apart from a clear narrative or teleology, remains an open text that resists being merely ideological.

In this aphorism that I have been discussing, Nietzsche attempts a justification of his whole project in Beyond Good and Evil. In fact, one could make a case that this aphorism is the basso continuo underlying a great deal of his work, even serving as a sort of précis for Thus Spoke Zarathustra (especially in light of the specific modes that Nietzsche employs in the later book—Paganism, the use of the "rhetoric of wisdom," etc.). But there is a self reflexively liberatory element to this particular aphorism. Nietzsche's creation of a means of identifying with the devil in Beyond Good and Evil would be characterized by an (either religious or philosophical) orthodoxy as heretical, immoral, subversive, and chaotic. Certainly, these in themselves are traits he, as an "immoralist," would share with the devil, and yet these disruptions and subversions are directed towards greater possibilities of self-knowledge and, thus, increasing agency. As he has established, the devil is the "oldest friend of knowledge." Nietzsche's efforts are not marshaled simply to attack Christianity or normative systems of morality. Instead, Nietzsche's larger aim is to make possible a broadening of perspectives, perspectives which can only come from outside the cultural and moral systems that society is working both as and within. Both the motivation and the justification for his project exists as a whole in this aphorism, as well as his means of slipping out of the systems that he is critiquing. Only by creating this analogous or at least homologous link with the devil is Nietzsche able to authorize if not legitimize his perspective. So, we can say that Nietzsche is positing himself as the oldest friend of [End Page 70] knowledge. To make such a claim—the very ne plus ultra of chutzpah—is representative, or at least indicative of a particularly strong will to power.

Nietzsche's apotheosis is further elaborated when he writes, "It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things—maybe even with them in essence. Maybe" (BGE, p. 10). Clearly, Nietzsche's inquiry all throughout his oeuvre points to him being the one to investigate such entanglement. He goes on to herald the arrival of those who can investigate these "dangerous 'maybes'": "For that, one really has to wait for the advent of a new species of philosophers, such as have somehow another and converse taste and propensity from those we have known so far. . . . And to speak in all seriousness: I see such new philosophers coming up" (p. 11). He sees them appear because he himself is that new order of philosopher. Thus, he meets himself at the beginning of this "investigation" from a perspective well ahead of himself—the past and the present and the future all conflate here as Nietzsche, writing in the present tense, foretells of a future that is his own arrival, an arrival which has already happened. In other words, these efforts are his own becoming. He has performed, or at least made visible at the level of his rhetoric, the Eternal Return.

Beyond that, we can see that Nietzsche has written himself into—and out of—his various texts. His books are aimed at describing a philosopher who will perform the very philosophical acts that occur as the very discourse he himself is employing. In this way, Nietzsche contextualizes himself and arrives at his own transfigurement. "Behold, I am that which must overcome itself again and again," Life, speaking as allegory, announces to Zarathustra (p. 138). Metaphorically, the author here overcomes himself in this textual negotiation of selfhood. At the same time, he urges the reader to experience his or her own process and so he works towards a prose that avoids imprisoning the author in the role of necessary dogmatist, or consigning the reader to the predestination of an author's singular conclusion.

Nietzsche's efforts are directed towards overcoming his own authority as authorizing context of his books. Such a conflict as this (the contrary motions of a self-apotheosis which attempts to overcome itself) makes evident the heterogeneity rather than the homogeneity of the ego. Ego is equated with willing, grammatically presupposing a singular subject (the "I"). But Nietzsche argues against perceiving the "I" as [End Page 71] simply an analytical proposition. The first person singular pronoun is instead a synthetic proposition. A more radical reading would be to suggest that the "I," in its capacity as an extended metaphor, is an allegory—a figure that tropes a subject's compendium of experiences without resolving them. Thus, Nietzsche moves out of doxa via paradox to disrupt the naturalized grammatical position of the subject, to revise the "I" as metaphor. If each word is a mask, then the "I" is both the most insidious and the most transparent of masks. In light of Nietzsche's efforts, it is clear that the "I" is the mask of the mask of philosophy, for the "I" as veil does not efface us, it effaces the world.

In tracing the movements Nietzsche's texts make, we see that the self is a topology of resistances. Cultural forms become objective expressions of the way in which the self gives itself shape as palpable actuality. Formally, ethically, and epistemologically, Nietzsche makes cultural mores and naturalized ideology visible via the matrix of interactions and confrontations of his rhetoric. In Act and Quality, Charles Altieri tells us that "If poets are not legislators of the race, they may still be considered its educators. . . . Our passage into a fully adult understanding depends in large part on our effort to meet the demands on our grammar imposed by the complex perspicuous samples which poets and philosophers create."13 Although we don't remember Nietzsche primarily for his lyric poems, we can think of him as a "strong poet," along the lines that Harold Bloom or Richard Rorty would suggest—as one who attempts a new vocabulary and increases flexibility for the discourses at hand. This creation of "newness," built as it must be of the materials of the past, presents challenges to understanding because its mechanisms have not yet been naturalized; their difficulties have not yet been assimilated. Perhaps his great break with the philosophical tradition was that he in no way fetishized knowledge. This is not to say he didn't have his own obsessions. At the same time, Nietzsche saw that what philosophy had become was a single-minded pursuit of a dead metaphor. Philosophy's true benefit lies not in the way that it might add to knowledge so much as in the way it might question what knowledge could make possible.

Nietzsche's apotheosis via (and as) his texts create that most selfish (or at least self-interested) of conditions, it is true. However, the semantic, cultural, and ethical difficulties he raises forces his reader to "mature"; that is, one must work to grasp on to the concepts and metaphors that exist as his texts, deepening their mastery of language, culture, and figuration. Perhaps all along Nietzsche's aim is just that: to [End Page 72] create a condition in which the reader must overcome his or her self in order to engage the texts. Finally, we see that by affirming "only his own existence"—"pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam!"14 he announces (GM, p. 108)—Nietzsche, paradoxically, gives us the opportunity to affirm our own.


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Endnotes
1. Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 432.

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1958), p. v.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 3. Hereafter abbreviated EH.

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1961), p. 67. Hereafter abbreviated Z.

5. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 31. Hereafter abbreviated NP.

6. Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 116. Hereafter abbreviated NM.

7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 233.

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 229. Hereafter abbreviated BGE.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 101. Hereafter abbreviated GM.

10. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1982), p. 288.

11. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor, 1988), p. 34.

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 191.

13. Charles Altieri, Act and Quality (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), p. 68.

14. Kaufmann translates the Latin as "Let the world perish, but let there be philosophy, the philosopher, me!"