The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two

189 Pages·2003·1.08 MB·english

by  Alenka Zupancic

The Shortest Shadow
Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two
Alenka Zupancˇicˇ
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
© 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying,recording,or infor-
mation storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Joanna MT & Copperplate 33bc by Graphic Composition,
Inc.,and was printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zupancˇicˇ,Alenka.
The shortest shadow :Nietzsche’s philosophy of the two / Alenka Zupancˇicˇ
p.cm.— (Short circuits)
Includes bibliographical references (p.).
ISBN 0-262-74026-5 (pbk.:alk.paper)
1.Nietzsche,Friedrich Wilhelm,1844–1900. I.Title.II.Series.
B3317.Z86 2003
193—dc21
2003056162
Contents
Series Foreword vii
Introduction:The Event “Nietzsche” 2
I Nietzsche the Metapsychologist 30
“God Is Dead” 34
The Ascetic Ideal 46
Nihilism ... 62
...as a “Crisis of Sublimation”? 72
II Noon 86
Troubles with Truth 90
From Nothingness Incorporated ... 124
...via Double Affirmation ... 132
...to Nothingness as Minimal Difference 150
Addendum:On Love as Comedy 164
Notes 183
Introduction
The Event “Nietzsche”
At many points,the reading of Nietzsche’s texts is—or should be—
accompanied by an affect of astonishment.This is all the more true
if we are not looking,in his writings,for some extraordinary opin-
ions that could help us to form or support our own Weltanschauung—
that is to say,precisely,if we do not consider these extraordinary
statements as opinions. To read things like “Dante: or the hyena
which poetizes on graves,”“George Sand:or the milch cow with the
‘fine style,’”or to have Kant described as the “typical idiot”(not to
mention the even more notorious “idiot on the cross”),can indeed
produce an amazement,a kind of jolt—this being one of the funda-
mental elements that makes Nietzsche Nietzsche.One should stress,
however,that Nietzsche knew how to administer such “jolts”selec-
tively and sparingly,in the right amounts;they are not all that nu-
merous.1It is amazing,nonetheless,how little amazement shocking
statements like these arouse in contemporary academics (and their
writings on Nietzsche).At first sight,it might seem that this is be-
cause, in our postmodern condition, nothing can shock us any
longer:we have either habituated or numbed ourselves to practically
everything.Moreover,Nietzsche’s “style”is recognized and valued
as an essential point of his revolution in philosophy—everybody
agrees on that. Therefore, it seems to go without saying that he
should be allowed to enjoy the privilege of a certain degree of poetic
license.Yet one simple question should be enough to draw our at-
tention to the fact that there is something rather fishy in this attitude:
Why is it absolutely unimaginable (among contemporary Nietz-
scheans themselves) that someone would use this kind of “style”
and write,for instance,“XY,the well-known professor of cultural
studies,is a fat cow with a fine style”? This is absolutely forbidden,
and there is no poetic license that could make it acceptable to pres-
ent-day academia.If Nietzsche’s style is esteemed within academia,
it is in no way accepted by it.Its “jolts”are either swept under the
carpet or treated as curious,rather exotic objects.
If the jolts of Nietzsche’s style are not shocking today,it is because
they have been subjected to a definite reduction—in short,they have
been reduced to the level of opinions. This allows us to say that
3
n
o
i
t
c Nietzsche employs his characteristically extravagant style in order to
u
d express a low personal opinion of George Sand.Yet this stance com-
o
pletely misses one of the central points that makes Nietzsche Nietz-
r
t
sche,thus betraying the very essence of the “event Nietzsche.”One
n
i further thing should be said in this context, also concerning the
question of Nietzsche’s “style”: the latter is usually described as
rather sophisticated,but also as often pompous and pathetic.How-
ever,is it not,rather,that the style of most of Nietzsche’s writings is,
in fact,extraordinarily direct and—why not use this term—naive?
At the level of what Friedrich Schiller describes as the difference be-
tween the “naive”and the “sentimental”style (recognizing in the
second the style of modernity),is it not,in fact,the case that Nietz-
sche is a definite example of the “naive”style withinmodernity? And
is this not precisely what makes his style so powerful,and gives it its
edge?
What accounts for the apparent paradox that leads us to find
Nietzsche’s statements pompous or bombastic yet,at the same time,
already operating on a second register involving ironic self-distance?
Does this indeed indicate that the very naive directness of his style is
somehow too embarrassing for our delicate and sophisticated post-
modern taste? Or,to use Nietzsche’s own words,isn’t it as if our
“conscience were trained to twitch and feel something like a pang at
every ‘No’and even at a decisive,harsh ‘Yes.’Yes! And No!—that goes
against [our] morality”? The word “embarrassing”should be taken
quite literally here,since this is precisely the point:there is probably
no other philosopher who,by virtue of his “style,”exposes himself
in his work as much as Nietzsche does.And the pathos of his writ-
ings springs precisely from this, rather than from the Wagnerian
pathos of heroic mythology;it is the pathos of life.This is also the
source of the comic component of Nietzsche’s style—it arises not
from a reflective distance towardlife (viewed as if from above,where
only the Greatest things matter),but from life reflecting upon itself
in an entirely immanent way.Another,related point concerns the
question of irony.Of course,Nietzsche sometimes uses irony.Yet,on
the whole,he is far from being an ironic writer.He is,rather,as he
himself likes to stress from time to time,a “buffoon”of a writer;and
in this respect his admiration for Aristophanes is no coincidence.
Rather than being a sophisticated ironist (or “knave”),he is an hon-
est clown (or “fool”),in the most positive sense of this term.
The astonishment that accompanies (or should accompany) the
reading of Nietzsche’s texts is not confined solely to statements of
the kind quoted above.It is also (and perhaps above all) related to an-
other refrain of Nietzsche’s “bombastic”statements:he,Nietzsche,
will break the history of mankind in two;he is no man,but “dyna-
mite”;he is “destiny”;with Zarathustra, he has given mankind the
profoundest book it possesses.
Instead of immediately embracing facile diagnoses concerning
the ironic intentions of these statements,or the megalomania asso-
ciated with Nietzsche’s delirious states,we should,on the contrary,
take them seriously and quite literally,and proceed to ask a simple
question:what,exactly,is going on in this discourse,and what is it
comparable to? Is there not a striking parallel between this aspect of
Nietzschean discourse and the discourse that takes place in the break
introduced by modern art or, more precisely, by the avant-garde
movement in art? Even though this kind of suggestion would prob-
ably make Nietzsche turn over in his grave,it might nevertheless
beilluminating to consider for a moment movements such as Fu-
turism,Cubism,and,perhaps above all,Suprematism.Do we not
find in all these movements a “megalomania”of a very similar kind
to that of Nietzsche? They certainly launch a very “hammering”crit-
icism of classical art,2accompanied by a belief in the possibility of a
radical break whose actors are precisely those who proclaim its ad-
vent as well as its (aesthetic or ethical) necessity.Considering Nietz-
sche’s explicitly stated attitude toward modern art,which had just
started to appear in his time (and in which Nietzsche saw nothing
more than yet another expression of decadence),the above compar-
isons may,in fact,sound somewhat absurd.Nietzsche’s taste in art
isgenerally rather conservative,3although,as Matthew Ramply has
shown,his analysis of Wagner is surprisingly close to the analysis of
the great modernist Adorno.4Still,if we leave aside the question of
5
”
e
h
c
Nietzsche’s aesthetic preferences (without trying to deny this ques-
s
z
t tion’s pertinence),and consider the style of his texts,this style cer-
e
tainly tends to strike us as quite modernistic or, rather, as quite
i
n
“ avant-garde. It would not be hard to find a lot of “philosophical

t traditionalists”who would gladly characterize Nietzsche’s texts as
n
e “decadent”and philosophically “atonal.”Moreover,there is also a
v
e noticeable manifesto-style ring to numerous Nietzschean passages.

e
h One analogy that seems particularly striking could be drawn be-
t tween Nietzsche and Kazimir Malevich.Indeed,I am tempted to sug-
gest that,at least to a certain extent,Nietzsche is to philosophy what
Malevich is to art.“So far,artists have only been portraying,or rep-
resenting,the world and its objects in different ways,but the time
has come for us to create something in this world”—this is how one
could express Malevich’s motto.He declares his Black Squareto be the
first new form that was ever created,the first artistic creation in the
strong meaning of the word:it is nothing less than the “birth of
thepainting-surface.”A painting-surface or a “plane”is not an ob-
ject that could be found anywhere in the world (and then repro-
duced or represented in a painting);it exists only as a painting.This
is not to say that the painting represents some imaginary fantasy-
object that exists nowhere in reality,only in the fictive domain of the
painting.On the contrary,Black Squareintroduces a new object in real-
ity,this new object being precisely the painting-surface as object.A
painting such as Black Squareis the very materiality of the painting-
surface. Therefore,“any painting-surface is more alive than any
face from which a pair of eyes and a grin jut out,”5and Suprema-
tismis “the beginning of a new culture.”6In relation to Malevich,
one should stress that his project was far from being simply ab-
stractionist; it was not about purifying the world of images or
representations up to the point where nothing is left but its pure
form.Rather,his project was to create a form that could count as
thefirst “content”or object created by painting from within its own
practice—the “painting-surface”or “plane”being,according to Ma-
levich,precisely this:namely,a painterly object par excellence.
A very similar conviction,concerning the necessity that an event
be immanent to what it revolutionizes or subverts,is one of the es-
sential components of Nietzsche’s philosophy. For instance, what
Alain Badiou refers to as Nietzsche’s “archi-politics”(the conviction
that,in philosophy,the event is intrinsic,not external,to the thought
itself,as well as the belief in the possibility of a “philosophical act”)7
could be seen as an expression of precisely this point.Another sin-
gularity shared by Nietzsche and Malevich is related to their use of
the term “life,”which should be distinguished from all types of vi-
talistic obscurantism. In Malevich, we read, for example, “In at-
tempting to reproduce the living form, they reproduced its dead
image in the picture.... Everything was taken alive and pinned
quivering to the canvas,like insects in a collection.”8In Nietzsche,
we find an almost identical metaphor:“All that philosophers have
handled for millennia have been conceptual mummies; nothing
actual has escaped from their hands alive.”9 If we relate this to
Malevich’s previous statement concerning the “birth of the
painting-surface”(as being more alive than any [human] face with
a pair of eyes and a grin),it is clear that the words “life”and “alive”
refer here to something very specific:to the capacity of a given practice to
produce its own object(and not merely to represent,duplicate,or display
other,already existing objects).
The parallel I am drawing here between Nietzsche and Malevich,
however,does not primarily concern the proximity of their ideas
apropos of their content (a proximity that,undoubtedly,can indeed
be asserted in various ways).I am interested mainly in what consti-
tutes the affinity between Nietzsche’s conception of a possible
“philosophical act”(one could also say:of philosophy as act),and
Malevich’s conception of a possible “artistic act”(of art as act).Ad-
mittedly, it is quite possible to say that Nietzsche was an “anti-
philosopher,”10and Malevich an “anti-painter.”However,the prefix
“anti”is not to be taken in the sense of an opposition to philosophy
(or to painting) in the name of something else.Nietzsche did not
oppose himself to philosophy,for instance,in the name of a more
7