Table Of ContentLooking After Nietzsche
SUNY Series in Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory
Rodolphe Gasché and Mark C. Taylor
Page i
Nietzsche in 1899
WoodEngraving by Earl Nitschke
Page iii
Looking After Nietzsche
Edited by Laurence A. Rickels
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Page iv
All the translations in this book were funded by
the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 1990 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.
For information, address State University of New York
Press, State University Plaza, Albany, NY 12246
Library of Congress Catalogingin Publication Data
Looking after Nietzsche / edited by Laurence A. Rickels.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0791401561.—ISBN 079140157X (pbk.)
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. 2. Heidegger, Martin,
1889–1976. I. Rickels, Laurence A. II. Series: Intersections
(Albany, N.Y.)
B3317.L59 1990 193—dc20
894579 CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Page v
Contents
Preface vii
1. Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions 1
Jacques Derrida
2. The Promise of Interpretation: Reflections on the Hermeneutical Imperative in 19
Kant and Nietzsche
Werner Hamacher
3. Nietzsche's Thesis on Teleology 49
JeanLuc Nancy
4. "Our Probity!" On Truth in the Moral Sense in Nietzsche 67
JeanLuc Nancy
5. Metaphoric Architectures 89
Sarah Kofman
6. Ecce Homo or the Written Body 113
Rodolphe Gasché
7. Friedrich Nichte 137
Laurence Rickels
8. Nietzsche Medused 159
Bernard Pautrat
9. How the Fable Becomes a World 175
Peter Canning
10. The Mechanized Philosopher 195
Friedrich Kittler
Page vi
11. History and Mimesis 209
Philippe LacoueLabarthe
12. Namely, Eckermann 233
Avital Ronell
Index 259
Page vii
Preface
Prefaces, says Nietzsche, would be addressed only to the slowwitted if their readership did not count, instead, only the authors of other prefaces. Within this limited
range of reception, the author of a new preface cannot find but can only contrive a rapport with the other. The enemy or appetizer that draws the new preface out into
the open must be construed out of precursory prefaces. On this target range The New Nietzsche's star billing of Heidegger as "rediscoverer of Nietzsche" comes into
focus. 1 Looking After Nietzsche recalls the modality of care or Sorge—but only in order to transfer into the Nietzsche account the protection which The New
Nietzsche paid to Heidegger. The care taken on Heidegger's account would thus be returned to the side of ambivalence where its provenance becomes clear and
separable. The return that always follows and exceeds rediscovery now gives Nietzsche his turn to take care of Heidegger.
By naming Nietzsche the last metaphysician, Heidegger anchored the project of transvaluation in a ground which will always slip away from Nietzsche himself.2
Heidegger reinscribed transvaluation in the history of metaphysics as the unconscious fulfillment3 of the thought of value, that is, in a larger sense, of nihilism. Or as
Heidegger argued with regard to the Myth of the Cave,4 Nietzsche ought to be considered the greatest Platonist, for he pushed to its last consequences the philosophy
of agathon above being. Heidegger's reading attains heights which cannot be dismissed—nor reduced to a few motifs. But it nonetheless tends to supplant the abyssal
foundation of value (which, according to Nietzsche, governs the history of evaluations) with the abyss of the philosophy of being, from where Nietzsche's enterprise
can be envisaged in its entirety, that is, as a restricted one. According to Heidegger, Nietzsche will have repeated the great theses of the philosophical tradition to the
point of exhausting their senses. And this reading is produced, in Heidegger's camp, at the price of an interpretive resumption of the notion of Nichts and nihilism
which, by means of this repetition, acquires a new and vaster significance, and where things or forces now fall together where they tended to separate out.
Page viii
Heidegger thus determined that the issue of moral imperatives in Nietzsche would remain bound to Plato—or that it could be raised as problematic only by making a
move against Heidegger's Nietzsche. Heidegger's diagnosis of Nietzsche's dependency on morals or values has indeed attracted a relentless return of rereading which
can be characterized as precisely postHeideggerian. As Nancy demonstrates, the Nietzschean "supermoral" imperative (probity, to give his example) must not be
confused with traditionally conceived moral imperatives; these undetermined and extramoral imperatives (which are often of philological pedigree) in turn produce not
truth but truth just the same—truth in a nontraditional sense.
The reevaluation of moral imperatives in Nietzsche inevitably takes a detour via Kant, in fact the Heideggerian rereading of Kant, which is borrowed only to be
redirected towards another aim. Thus Nancy argues that Nietzsche's renunciation of Kant unknowingly repeats Kant—against Kant's commentators. Although the
recasting of imperatives can be found in Heidegger, it is outlawed from Heidegger's Nietzsche. It has proven necessary, in sum, to go beyond Heidegger's rediscovery
of Nietzsche by borrowing from another zone of rereading (Heidegger's Kant, for example) and then reapplying the loan towards the reassessment of moral
imperatives already under way in Nietzsche.
Hamacher shows that Nietzsche was in fact the first to follow Kant in the examination of precarious connections between ethics and hermeneutics. Nietzsche engaged
the Kantian inquiry into the structure of moral consciousness or free will—and hence the historical conditions of history. From the margins and ambivalences
surrounding free will, Nietzsche developed the other history of the will's passage from an eccentric position into the center of itself—a passage that does not run on will
power, since, as Hamacher makes clear, Nietzsche's genealogy of the will features a will without power over itself. Thus Nietzsche licensed a double reading of the
will that aims one barrel at tendencies in his own philosophy which collaborate with interpretations (such as Heidegger's) in which the will is hypostasized as
transcendental subject.
The will is also always testament: the metaphors of writing and language that crowd around Nietzsche's characterization of the constitution of acts of will shift the
genealogy of nihilism into a grammatological register. Because it never goes without saying, willing is always differentiated with each verbal expression into a will and a
separable act of willing. This causative or grammatical splitlevel construction—language's resentment towards the will—
