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Zarathustra and the Children of Abraham

by James Luchte


Endnotes

  1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin, 1978).

  2. Since its publication, the work itself has travelled a rather crooked path, being a cult classic for the likes of Stephen George, the ‘Nietzscheans’ of the Dreyfus Affair, a companion to German soldiers, a text of the death of god movement in theology, and a manifesto for post-structuralist philosophy. To this day, the work is still homeless as it sets in an uneasy relation to not only the dominant philosophy of our era, but also to religious, theological, and literary studies. Indeed, it could be suggested that its style and content exhibits an ambiguity that challenges our clear and distinct divisions of intellectual labor. Cf. Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before Sunrise for a volume of contemporary essays on the philosophical significance of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. J. Luchte (London: Continuum International Publishing, 2008).


  3. It is well-known that Nietzsche chose Zarathustra, in one instance, since, as a historical and mythological figure, the latter is attributed with the original articulation of the severance of good and evil. For even though we can retrospectively witness the ossification and nihility of his progeny, his act was that of a creator – even if only a creator of nothingness. We can begin to understand the significance of his choice if we consider, for instance, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J.Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1988): 18, or of the ranting of the madman, in the Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974) that “God is dead!” —these texts seek neither a mere repetition of the teachings of the “Old Wise Man”: C.G.Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988): 282, nor a project to resurrect or retrieve an originary oneness or unity prior to the beginning of duality.

  4. I have written eschaton(s) in the plural not only to underscore the divisions between the various monotheisms, but also to intimate the pluralising event of the ‘death of God’ which will no longer allow for a conception of a metaphysics of presence in terms of a universal notion of the divine witness or of a logic of a one that is other.

  5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1979). The old sin against the regime of guilt is pride, self-love – vanity. Yet, such brings light, it discloses the terrible truth of innocence. “God is a crude answer, a piece of indelicacy against us thinkers—fundamentally even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think!” (21)

  6. Zarathustra, Part Three, ‘The Other Dancing Song.”

  7. Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1994).

  8. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. by Lycette Nelson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).

  9. Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

  10. There is a long development from Nietzsche’s earliest writing to his latest which traces a poetic and artistic thread, that is, from his earliest poems to his last “mad” (is it as mad as Hugo Ball?) scribbling—and including all that emerged in-between. We can trace this thread from one of his first poems (1858) “Birthday”, through to “On Truth and Lying in the Extra-Moral Sense,” again through The Birth of Tragedy, and in light of the period of reflection and experimentation in Human All Too Human, Daybreak and the Gay Science, the emergence of Zarathustra as a work of philosophical (and historiographical) creativity in Zarathustra. It is noteworthy that Nietzsche to some extent seeks to hide the lowly origins of his work—his selection procedure is well known—as is the constructed character of his works. Nietzsche hides his own depth through a strategy of limited revelation. He does include poetry in his works—but not all of his poetry, some of which stands as a counterpoise to Nietzsche’s self-portraiture as a hard man—a radical aristocrat. For instance, there are many instances of grief and sadness, of tears and anguish, of suicidal despair, which rarely surface in the published works—or at least, only in Zarathustra. His poem about his father’s death, ‘The Homecoming’, while intimating the death of God, is far from the laughter and dancing of a festival celebrating a marriage of light and darkness. It resembles more closely the rantings of the Madman or the Soothsayer, of a passionate, anguished soul. At the same time, however, not all is hidden—even Nietzsche’s musical composition and song writing have always been well known—though seldom heard. Despite Nietzsche’s secretiveness, it is simple to apprehend that his poems, such as the ‘Dionysian Dithyrambs’ and ‘Wit, Tricks, and Revenge’, provide the lost horizons and contours—indeed, the birthplace of Nietzsche’s philosophy. For a complete English translation of Nietzsche’s poetry, cf. The Peacock and the Buffalo: the Poetry of Nietzsche; a bi-lingual edition is forthcoming from Continuum in 2010.

  11. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1968): 127. It is well known that Nietzsche also—or primarily, as some may contend—wrote poetry—and composed music. Indeed, with a reading of his poetry, we find that it is indeed a hidden garden, mountains and desert, of his entire work. While one could describe his aphoristic writings, as they were etched into notebooks during his wanderings, as a typology of poetic writing, Nietzsche has left a labial body of poetic work which lies far beyond the domain of contemporary philosophy. Never abandoning the original kinship of poetry and philosophy as offspring of poiesis, Nietzsche includes poetry in most of his major works—never however disclosing the wellspring of his hidden poetic enterprise. Indeed, it is his poetry which may provide the clues to his broader thematic directions and pre-occupations—his work is not organized according to logical and analytical criteria—but, as indicated, by a poetic topology.

  12. Cf. Mao Tse-Tung, On Protracted War (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1967).

  13. James Darmesteter, trans., The Zend-Avesta (Sacred Books of the East) (London: Routledge, 2001).

  14. Indeed, considered from the perspective of the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus, for a moment, it could be argued that evil is such a state of indeterminacy that it can never properly be designated a principle, and can never therefore be an alternative to the Good or the One. Zoroaster himself would be shoulder to shoulder with the Islamists, especially in the context of the question of evil, an assessment, in the context of the fundamental decision of one principle over the other, of the remembrance of the one over the other. Zoroaster seeks the re-integration of Ahura Mazda in a transcendence of the world. All things, as the story goes, will return to Allah.

  15. On the historical interaction and possible influence of Zoroastrianism upon Judaism, see Charles David Isbell. “Zoroastrianism and Biblical Religion,” The Jewish Bible Quarterly, Vol. 34, Number 3 (July-September, 2006), Jamsheed K. Choksy, ‘Hagiography and Monotheism in History: Doctrinal Encounters between Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Christianity,’ Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations. Vol. 14, No. 4 (Carfax Publishing, October 2003).

  16. Conversely, it could be suggested that Wittgenstein may have borrowed this phrase from Nietzsche as he speaks of the ‘spell of definite grammatical functions’ in Beyond Good and Evil, Part 1, Section 20:

    The singular family resemblance between all Indian, Greek and German philosophizing is easy enough to explain. Where there exists a language affinity it is quite impossible, thanks to the common philosophy of grammar—I mean thanks to unconscious domination and directing by similar grammatical functions —to avoid everything being prepared in advance for a similar evolution and succession of philosophical systems: just as the road seems to be barred to certain other possibilities of world interpretation.


  17. I mean the word ‘comedy’ in the ‘minor’ sense of that which seeks an escape from the tragic double bind, or in the ancient sense, as that which ends a narrative with a happy ending.

  18. I have placed the term 'origin' in brackets, in the manner of Husserl, so as to underline the problematic character of the term—and in the present context, to intimate the violence inherent in the founding act of an authoritative truth regime. For a detailed discussion of the violence of the founding act of law, see Derrida, Jacques (1992) "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority'" in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson. For a complementary discussion of the murderous intent and religiosity of Abraham in relation to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, see Derrida, J. (1995) The Gift of Death, trans. by David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

  19. José Porfirio Miranda, Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, trans. John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1974). Indeed, this pattern of trauma and repetition intimates a deep narrative logic not only for Genesis, and on throughout the Hebrew Torah and the Christian Old Testament, the Christian New Testament and the Muslim Qūran. Moreover, it is the triune of transgression, punishment, and atonement, established in Genesis, which lays out the modus operandi of the fragmented monotheistic dispensations.

  20. Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993).

  21. Alberto Savinio, ‘Psyche’, in The Lives of the Gods, trans. James Brooks and Susan Etlinger (London: Atlas Books, 1995).

  22. Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, ed. Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 1994).

  23. Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Indiana University Press, 1987). He writes: “When questions are raised about principles, the network of exchange that they have opened becomes confused, and the order that they have founded declines. A principle has its rise, a period of reign, and its ruin. Its death usually takes disproportionately more time than its reign.” (29)

  24. Zarathustra: 300.

  25. Ibid.: 115.

  26. On the distinction between homogeneous and heterogeneous forces, see Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism,’ Visions of Excess (University of Minneapolis Press, 1992).

  27. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967): 550.

  28. Zarathustra: 17.

  29. Ibid.: 42

  30. This tentative formulation arises out of exchanges with Deirdre Daly and Graham Parkes at the Conference on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra at the University of Wales, Lampeter on 14-16 November 2008. The intent behind this suggestion is the inscription of the narrative of Jesus into the mythological tapestry of Dionysus, in light of not only the affirmation of all that was and is implicit in the notion of eternal recurrence, but also, the poetic freedom unleashed in the notion of a creative future.

  31. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Penguin, 1959): 79.

  32. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, pp. 11ff. There is much to be praised in The Step Not Beyond which could contribute to an exploration of creativity as a multi-voiced phenomenon. At the same time, however, it is precisely such a ‘temporality of return’, of repetition, that is, following Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (London and New York: Continuum, 2005): 55, unmasked as a mere parody, simulacrum, ape, of the dominant narratives of the eschaton. In this way, it could be argued that Blanchot remains upon the seductive surface of paradox. Eugen Fink, in his Nietzsche’s Philosophy (London: Continuum International Publishing, 2003), also seems to remain on the surface as he seeks a theory of time in Nietzsche’s doctrine. The difficulty is that neither he nor Blanchot (and others) seem to understand that phenomenologically, the ecstasis of the future is not annulled for the questioner, regardless of the seeming necessity of a future that has always already been dissolved at the level of the surface, of the exoteric. In this way, creativity or the novel is not annulled by the eternal recurrence, even if that of a mere fluctuation of impulses, if considered from the perspective of its esoteric depth.

  33. In her insightful article, ‘Sensing the Overhuman’ (JNS, 30, Autumn 2005: 102-114), Jill Marsden questions whether anyone can ever become the übermensch, but instead suggests that which we can achieve is the experience of the übermenschlich, of that which she translates as the overhuman, an ecstatic (though disinterested) experience which she likens to Kant’s aesthetic discourse upon the sublime. While this comparison is illuminating, it may be a limited perspective as it would seem that Zarathustra is seeking, as a Dionysian, other humans with which to share his transfigured state of being, and thus to achieve a way of life that falls prey to neither the Last Man (technology), nor to the recurrence of those seeking an escape (religiosity). In this way, as with Schopenhauer’s revisionary consideration of the sublime in The World, the body and our way of life becomes the site for a very interested hermeneutics of existence, and thus, in Nietzsche’s dissident sense, for an affirmation of a new body and an ethos that, as a way of being for a community, remains true to the earth.

  34. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).



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