(19) Neither Casanova nor Don Juan may be said to love women (as some reconstructionist interpretations enthusiastically suggest) nor do they act in some Freudian sense out of a fear of or hatred of or whatever else of women in general or in particular—rather, both Don Juan and Casanova turn out to be more or less streamlined versions of the Platonic ideal, i.e., philosophasters of the imaginary erotic, like the ordinary fan of pornography and fashion photographs.

(20) The kind of love which the modern world might be said to “need more of, that is, again Tracy Strong’s somehow anemic reprise of the charmingly popular song of the sixties generation, is accordingly better understood as what Caygill (in the direct lineage and spirit of integrity of Rose’s complex and elusive Love’s Work) insightfully recasts in terms of the traditional concept of agape, renewed throughout the complex registers of its changing historic context, necessary because popular music is as full of love talk as ever and we are (from a physiological standpoint: quite beyond the possibility of noticing this, just because this is the way sensual or perceptual accommodation works) continually bombarded by images of sex.

(21) Denying God—the ideal of perfect being and constancy—we forswear blame, attributing guilt and responsibility neither to our intentions nor the world of natural determinate causes nor a supernatural God. Likewise, for love of the world of flux and becoming, “we deny accountability” and restore the passing of things to innocence. And by denying accountability in pure love “we redeem the world” (TI, “The Four Great Errors,” §8).

(22) Thus the casually ironic problem with women in the “love” that is supposed for them to be the whole of their lives (and only an incidental part of man’s life) is that “she nonetheless ‘poses’ even when she yields herself” (GS 361). I note that Jelinek’s Women as Lovers (1994), trans. Martin Chalmers (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1994), offers yet another ironic twist on this same insight, albeit not in Nietzsche’s name.

(23) This is, of course, an allusion to Jacques Lacan. I discuss Lacan and Nietzsche in “On the Order of the Real: Nietzsche and Lacan.” In: David Pettigrew and François Raffoul, eds., Disseminating Lacan (Albany. State University of New York Press. 1996) pp. 48–63 and more obliquely in Babich, “Nietzsche und Wagner: Sex,” in H. J. Brix, N. Knoepffler, S. L. Sorgner, Hg., Wagner und Nietzsche. Kultur—Werk—Wirkung. Ein Handbuch (Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2008).

(24) Addressing this theme, Bernd Magnus raises earnest and nuanced concerns such as those expressed in “The Deification of the Commonplace: Twilight of the Idols,” Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, eds., Reading Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 152–181. Magnus thus poses the deliberately provocative question: “Who could live, as some of us have had to do, in the midst of extermination camps, and love that unconditionally?” (p. 172). The more-than-merely-rhetorical force of this question leads Magnus to bow out of the commentators’ braying ass festival (detailing Kaufmann, Danto, and Schacht, Magnus notes his own conviction that this is indeed, for the right reader, the Zarathustran point of the image), averring that most of us those who cannot be counted as Übermenschen—as Magnus reads the ideal of perfectibility (and Magnus’s reading is to be distinguished from Cavell, et al.—simply cannot affirm or will the eternal return as Nietzsche requires but can merely “will our life and the world’s in an edited version, if we are honest with ourselves.” Magnus, p. 173. I take up the imperative force of this theme again, in connection with Alexander Nehamas, in Babich, “Nietzsche’s Imperative as a Friend’s Encomium: On Becoming the One You Are, Ethics, and Blessing.” Nietzsche-Studien, 33 (2003): 29–58.

(25) Julian Young shares Magnus’s conclusion without Magnus’s sense of its complexity in Nietzsche’s thought. In Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Young imagines the Nietzschean ideal of affirmation in terms of love on his way to get to sexual expression, where, of course, I am far from denying the erotic its decisive significance in Nietzsche’s thinking. Parenthetically, it should be noted that the erotic act is the same image Magnus invokes as a strong test case (which he ultimately abandons, like the despairing Faust in Nietzsche’s first book), and it is the note David Allison traces in his Reading the New Nietzsche, from the reflective height that is not the culmination of ecstasy (the best moment ever for Magnus)—which is the death of eros—but the keynote of consecration and love: that is, the blessing of the heart or memory looking back on life with gratitude and desire in Nietzsche’s epigraph/benediction to Ecce homo.

(26) Nietzsche’s solution to the Schopenhauerian riddle posed by absurd, meaningless suffering, ambitions what Young names a performative if also “atheistic theodicy.” Young, p. 109.

(27) Young, p. 109. Ignoring Nietzsche’s perspective (perhaps with the aid of a Cavellian lens), Young goes on to read even Wittgenstein with Emerson’s eyes: “ ‘The riddle … does not exist.’ ” (p. 109, and Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.5.) Yet as recent Wittgenstein scholarship has increasingly come to suggest, the declaration here is a riddle redeemed in the later Wittgenstein.

(28) To begin where Michael Theunissen (or Adorno) would teach us to begin is not a simple matter of adverting to the other and more will be required than the moralizing efforts so often attached to a Levinasian enthusiasm in order to begin to pose the question/to do justice to the question of suffering. See my “Philosophy of Science and the Politics of Style: Beyond Making Sense,” New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture. 30/31 (Summer 1994): 99–114 but see also for a different and more difficult approach to the same question, “The Essence of Questioning after Technology: Techne as Constraint and Saving Power.” British Journal of Phenomenology. 30/1 (January 1999): 106–124 and “Heidegger’s Silence: Towards a Post-Modern Topology,” in Charles Scott and Arleen Dallery, eds., Ethics and Danger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 83–106.

(29) This is the black pearl of Hölderlin’s Sophocles, “Viele versuchten umsonst das Freudigste freudig zu sagen/Hier spricht endlich es mir, hier in der Trauer sich aus.” [“Many have tried, but in vain, with joy to express the most joyful;/Here at last, in grave sadness, wholly 1 find it expressed.” (Michael Hamburger’s translation.)]

(30) Young with his focus on love (not the reason the world might require transfiguration) ranged Nietzsche in parallel with Oscar Wilde: all image, all show. Young might have done better to have drawn the parallel more cleanly: (leaving Nietzsche out of the equation)—between Wagner and Wilde. For Nietzsche, Wagner (like Wilde, whose art was his life) was “a first rate actor.” Thus Nietzsche names Wagner in the same associative connection which runs explicitly from actor to artist and genius to Jew (in this case: the genius as Wandering Jew) to woman as “an incomparable histrio, the greatest mime, the most amazing genius of the theatre ever among Germans, our scenic artist par excellence.” Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, in The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), section 8. Cited below as CW.

(31) Nietzsche’s call, “Du sollst der werden der du bist” (GS §270) which recurs as the subtitle to his auto-bibliography, Ecce homo: Wie man wird was man ist, derives from Pindar’s second Pythian ode: “gevnoi oivoz essi maqwvn.” Contra Stanley Rosen’s philosophically inadequate interpretation of Pindar, Nietzsche’s insight is that it is redundant to translate the mathematical measure of being oneself. This is the arched bow in Hölderlin; it is collapsed to the mystery of becoming in Nietzsche. It should be noted that while quietly resolving many of the philosophical debates that grew up in the wake of Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), as well as a few incidental ones for good measure, Nehamas also offers a finely lapidary rendering of Pindar in his recent book: The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1998): “Having learned, become who you are” p. 128). See for further discussion, including the role of this saying in Nietzsche’s understanding of the friend, Chapter 2, “Philology and Artistic Style: Rhetoric, Sources, and Writing in Blood” and other references in my Words in Blood, Like Flowers.

(32) Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), section 4, p. 213.

(33) Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), section 240. I discuss this point further in my “Nietzsche und Wagner: Sex” (cited above).

(34) The problem of the artist is the problem of the artist’s culture. And for a good many cultures there is simply no difference between the artist or genius and the criminal.

(35) The problem of the actor is the problem of the theatre itself, here as in the Case of Wagner: for as we “know the masses, we know the theater” (CW §6).

(36) In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche reminds us that existence can only be “justified” as an “aesthetic phenomenon.” Many commentators feel sure that this claim can only be a juvenile exercise in pessimistic or Schopenhaurian bad taste. But, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche explains that it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon [that] existence is still bearable for us (GS §107). It is (at least to this reader) quite unclear how much may reasonably be made of the difference between what may be justified and what one can stand—aesthetically—conceived.

(37) I owe the impetus for the following reflections to Tracy Strong and a catenna of e-mail exchanges on this issue. This however is an acknowledgement of deeper recollections than any one name can afford just because the substance predates this impetus.

(38) See Alasdair MacIntyre’s crucial contrast in After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 174f. and 184.

(39) The question of transfiguration here is exactly (importantly with reference to both Strong’s subtly opposed reading and MacIntyre’s more concordant reading) not a Christian question just because Nietzsche’s question is not how to love the unlovable, i.e., what MacIntyre names as the love for the sinner (see his key emphasis in After Virtue [loc. cit., note above]) but rather—and here Nietzsche is strangely, more pragmatically Aristotelian than either Aristotle or MacIntyre, how to make the unlovable lovable. This is also the “work” in Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work.

(40) In this context, Nietzsche refers to the best men of his own era, to name Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendahl, Heine—and also Wagner. And it is relevant that Nietzsche includes in this list an exception among exceptions, the quintessentially modern guise of the conquering hero, the world-spirit on horseback. Napoleon captured the Machiavellian aesthetic political ideal, and was, at least as we read the historian’s tale, loved and feared. Any other tyrant has had to settle for terror alone, and at the end of power: revulsion. If Napoleon was different it was only because he was, as Nietzsche suggests, himself an artist of his own ideal. For Niezsche, “all of them were fanatics of expression ‘at any price’ . . . all of them great discovers in the realm of the sublime . . . still greater discoverers concerning effects, display, and the art of display windows” (BGE §256). Thus although such tyrants represented “on the whole, an audaciously daring, magnificently violent typology of higher human beings who soaring, tore others along, to the heights,” their century, as our own, remains “the century of the crowd.”

(41) “Bist du echt? oder nur ein Schauspieler, ein Vertreter, oder das Vertretene selbst?” Nietzsche asks in Twlight of the Idols, “Mixed Maxims and Arrows.”

(42) I discuss this further in Babich, “On the Order of the Real: Nietzsche and Lacan.”

(43) See for a discussion of Nietzsche’s metaphor of the erotically charged, bronzed or brown night, Babich, “Between Hölderlin and Heidegger: Nietzsche’s Transfiguration of Philosophy.” Nietzsche-Studien. 29 (2000): 267–301 as well as in a different dimensionality, Holger Schmid, “Nietzsche’s Philosophical Nocturne,” New Nietzsche Studies, 1, 1/2 (1996): 57–63.

(44) That this is not the same as a pure naïveté is plain. Nietzsche distinguishes monological art from an art that plays to the crowd, as he distinguishes an esoteric irony. For Nietzsche the innocent Greek as an ancient warrior never did anything except for appearance’s sake, that is: all bravery requires a witness. Yet the Greek still “never ‘knew’ what it did.” The difference is a noble pathos.

(45) The difference between vulgar theatricality and artistic style reflects the chasm between taste and creative power. By adverting to this distinction, Nietzsche does not merely offer a new canon of taste. Rather the ground condition par excellence for all genuine creation is the consciousness of creative limit and impotence. For human beings, the creative accomplishment grows out of and at the same time confirms a keen reverence for “the interconnectedness of all things” (KSA 11, 341). I hear this (along with E. Heller) in Nietzsche’s note from 1884–85 where he declares that “die Ehrfurcht vor Gott ist die Ehrfurcht vor dem Zusammenhang aller Dinge und Überzeugung von höheren Wesen als der der Mensch ist . . . Der Künstler ist Götter-Bildner . . .” (KSA 11, 341). Reflecting the knotted interpenetration of everything that is, where “nothing is self-sufficient, neither ourselves nor things,” Nietzsche notes that the “first question is by no means whether we are satisfied with ourselves, but whether we are satisfied with anything at all. Assuming we affirm a single moment, we affirm not only ourselves but all existence” (KSA 12, 307)

(46) Thus Nietzsche asks whether “falsity, indifference to truth and utility may be signs of youth” in an artist by which he means “their habitual manner, their unreasonableness, their ignorance about themselves, their indifference to ‘eternal values,’ their seriousness in ‘play’—their lack of dignity; buffoon and god side by side; saint and canaille —” (KSA 13, 264).

(47) Nietzsche emphasizes this by posing the rhetorical question whether “Aufgangs-Künstler” (ascendent artists) and Niedergangs-Künstler (decadent artists) do not belong to every phase,” and supplying the inevitably counter-rhetorical reply, “Yes” (KSA 13, 264).

(48) From this perspective on the importance of the entirety of the artist’s being, life, and history as condition for what can be worked as the artist’s work, as the work of art, I need (as promised earlier) to oppose Nehamas’s otherwise admirable egalitarianism as well as the recently celebrated or declared appreciation for the “other,” following not only in the wake of Levinas but contra the ascendency of formerly Eastern European critical socialist sensibilities. Nietzsche’s broadly nuanced conditionality does not mean that “anyone” can be an artist of life and the “art of living,” even taken in a Foucaultian wise, even as an ethical stylist of one’s own, ownmost individual life. But see, for a nuanced and new elaboration of the contrary, Nehamas’s The Art of Living (cited above).

(49) NB: not, of course, contra Deleuze.

(50) By the same token, the talk need not be read as Nietzsche’s “becoming” female, even if Nietzsche’s metaphoric language has seduced so many readers into infectious readings of this kind, although it remains significant that in such accounts, Nietzsche never ends up female, not even metaphorically, but always either a homosexual or transgendered, moping elephant and I have never seen the interpretive advantage of this account over the ordinariness of heterosexual (male and/or female) desire with its pretensions, demands, disappointments, and concommitant loneliness. The overfullness of which he speaks has been outlined by more than one reader as a phallic metaphor, and so on.

(51) The Dionysian instinct which Nietzsche employs as a cipher for the “older Hellenic instinct,” is also, Nietzsche writes in praise of Burckhardt, “explicable only as an excess of energy.” In the “orgy,” Nietzsche writes—meaning to propose a stumbling block for Winckelmann and Goethe—in “the mysteries of sexuality,” eros expresses a will to life—“exactly as the triumphant Yes to life beyond death and change.”

(52) Yet what remains the unadverted obstacle in all such arts of living and writing the self is the need for love. That is the need to learn love, which is also to say to learn to see that things are good, the necessary art or science of joy, in order to love life itself, that is, with respect to one’s own life, “here and now and in little things” as Heidegger expresses it in his essay on technology.