M. Saverio Clemente - misReading Nietzsche

How to Avoid Reading:On Nietzsches Apophatic Philosophy

John Panteleimon Manoussakis

H ow to read Nietzsche? Should we even read Nietzsche? That is, are Nietzsches works to be read or, as their idiosyncratic character might suggest, are they works of a different literary genre than that of discursive and expository philosophy, and perhaps even of a different art altogether than literature? Is it possible that we have misread Nietzsche all along by mistaking the identity of his philosophy? Is it possible perhaps that we have misread Nietzsche simply because we have read Nietzsche?

These questions prompt an inquiry into what it means to read and how one reads. From the outset, then, a phenomenology of reading will be required before we can raise the questions that occupy this volumequestions that seek to organize, evaluate, decide among Nietzsches many readings and misreadings. Unfortunately, the task of undertaking such a phenomenology of reading goes well beyond the limitations of the present foreword.

How, then, are we to read Nietzsche (and, by extension, all philosophy) if we are to avoid misreading him?

To the extent that Nietzsches polyphonic style both welcomes and resists misreadings , that is, first and foremost philosophys own attempts to inscribe Nietzsches words (for, to speak of Nietzsches thought would be to commit and repeat such an attempt) within some ideology or, to organize them under some ideological concept, even into a system, all misreadings of Nietzschepast, present, and futureare idolatrous. Once more, God is dead. But in this case, it is Nietzsches crucified Dionysus that dies when Nietzsche is taught and by being taught in our academic amphitheaters. For within the amphitheater, that is to say, within the limits of reason alone, both Christ and Dionysusif Christ follows Dionysus,/Phallic and ambrosial (to recall Ezra Pounds Hugh Selwyn Mauberley )have to die if philosophy is to livefor so too does philosophy live and thrive... by the death of God.

Fauns flesh is not to us,

Nor the saints vision.

We have the press for wafer;

Franchise for circumcision.

This, in fact, was the very accusation brought against philosophy (and philosophers) by Nietzsche who, in his work appropriately named Twilight of the Idols , writes:

All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies [ Begriffs-Mumien ]; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honorable idolaters of concepts [ diese Herren Begriffs-Gtzendiener ] worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship (TI, Reason in Philosophy, ).

It is important to pay attention to Nietzsches language. He speaks of a worship to which philosophers have dedicated themselves for thousands of years; but this is not the worship of the living God, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, to use Pascals terms, but, as one might indeed expect, the God of the philosophers. Nietzsche is more accurate in his description: it is an idol , that is, a dead or counterfeit god.

But how could a god die, as the madman of Nietzsches Gay Science in so powerful a way declares (GS, , )? Religion, pagan and Abrahamic alike, has taught us that if man were to see god, man would die. You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live, Yahweh says to Moses (Exodus :). In philosophy this principle becomes reversed: when man sees god, god dies. And he dies by means of this very seeing, by means, in other words, of what we know in Greek as the idea , and in German as Begriff . It is, at once, the crime and the means of that crime that Nietzsche identified by calling the philosopher an idolater of concepts. Far from being a criticism of a religion not credible any more, as it is often assumed, Nietzsches proclamation of the death of God is a powerful condemnation of philosophy and the risk of philosophys aspirations to name (and, by means of naming, to understand, to know ) the unnamable, unknowable God.

Once again we ask: How are we to avoid misreading Nietzsche if even reading amounts to a misreading? How to avoid reading? The root of the problem lies with the question, even before one attempts to give an answer, for such a question assumes that Nietzsche is to be read. The problem is an old one. How can we speak of God by avoiding the inevitable conceptual idolatry about which the madman has issued that stern warning? In his famous essay How to Avoid Speaking, Jacques Derridas sustained reading of Dionysian apophaticism reaches the same aporia: