488395

research-article2013
PTX41410.1177/0090591713488395Political TheoryStrong

Article
Political Theory
41(4) 507­–532
In Defense of Rhetoric: © 2013 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permissions:
Or How Hard It Is to sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0090591713488395
Take a Writer Seriously: ptx.sagepub.com

The Case of Nietzsche

Tracy B. Strong1

Abstract
Interpretations of Nietzsche, particularly about politics, cover an exceptionally
wide range. Additionally, Nietzsche is often said to commit “rhetorical
excesses.” I argue and show that Nietzsche consciously crafted his published
works to allow this range of interpretations, that he did this for critical
purposes, and that his so-called rhetoric is there to serve this purpose.

Keywords
Nietzsche, politics, rhetoric, self-criticism

You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you stand between it and the mirror
of your imagination. You may not see your ears but they will be there.”
Mark Twain, A Fable (1909)

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to

the person to whom you speak.
R. W. Emerson, “Eloquence”

1University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:
Tracy B. Strong, University of California San Diego,
9500 Gilman Dr La Jolla, CA 92093-0521, USA.
Email: [email protected]
508 Political Theory 41(4)

There is an enormous range and diversity of readings of Nietzsche. Why? For

illustrative purposes, I shall start from the point of view of political alle-
giances. It is well known that those who claim to have learned from or been
influenced by Nietzsche have covered the widest possible range, and this
from the end of the nineteenth century. In Germany, Social Democrats such
as Kurt Eisner, murdered in January 1919 just after his defeat for reelection
as head of the Bavarian Republic, found Nietzsche to be a “diagnostician of
genius.” Additionally, anarchists, progressives hostile to laws oppressing
socialists, feminists, and youthful populist romantics of the Wandervogel
movement all found common ground in Nietzsche. And this is only on the
more-or-less left.1 The great social scientist Max Weber wrote to a student
that a modern scholar must, if he is honest, admit, “he could not have accom-
plished crucial parts of his own work without the contributions of Marx and
Nietzsche.”2 The political right—for instance those who made up the
Georgekreis, with its Hellenic inspired voluntarist protest against material-
ism and naturalism—read deeply into Nietzsche and sometimes became fer-
tile ground for sympathies to Nazism (even if the poet Stefan George himself
kept his distance until his death in late 1933).3 Geneviève Bianquis has dem-
onstrated that the range of those similarly affected in France was the same.4
A simple listing of those whose thought would not have been the same
includes, off the top of one’s head, Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers, and Martin
Heidegger in Germany; in France Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, Gilles
Deleuze, and Michel Foucault; as well as existentialism and deconstruction-
ism in general. Theologically, he crosses religions as one finds Paul Tillich,
Lev Shestov, along with Thomas J.J. Altizer, and Martin Buber (who trans-
lated the first part of Zarathustra into Polish). In psychology, Adler and Jung
were deeply influenced, as was Sigmund Freud, who said of Nietzsche that
he had “a more penetrating understanding of himself than any man who ever
lived or was ever likely to live.”5 Nor was his influence limited to Europe.
Early on he was of importance in Japan; Chinese intellectuals such as Lu Xun
and Guo Moro, both later to become prominent in the Chinese Communist
Party, were early readers of Nietzsche.6 Politically, Maurice Barrès, T.E. Lawrence,
as well as even less savory characters such as the members of the Cagoule
and the Croix de Feu come to mind. Novelists and literary figures include
Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, André Malraux, André Gide, George
Bernard Shaw, H.L. Mencken, Rainer Maria Rilke, and William Butler Yeats,
as well as John Gardner and John Banville among contemporaries. One could
even come down to Milos Forman and Arnold Schwartzenegger.7
In the political theory of the contemporary period, the range of readings
has remained as extensive. From various points of view and with many oth-
ers, scholars such as William Connolly, Mark Warren, Bonnie Honig, Dan
Strong 509

Conway, and Lawrence Hatab have, in different ways, claimed to find in

Nietzsche the grounding for a radical rethinking of the basis of a democratic
politics. They do not claim that he is a democrat (though Hatab says he should
have been) but that his thought permits and in fact requires a rethinking of the
bases of democratic politics. Others like James Conant and David Owen (and
on occasion myself) find in Nietzsche a perfectionism that is cousin to the
thought of Emerson and Stanley Cavell.
This “left-Nietzscheanism,” as Alasdair Macintyre dubbed it,8 has not
gone unopposed. Dom Dombowsky, Thomas Pangle, Peter Berkowitz,
Frederick Appel, Bruce Detwiler, and many others, have pointed to passages
where Nietzsche defends slavery, where he appears as an elitist calling for a
great man or great men, where he seems misogynist9—this is Nietzsche the
“aristocrat,” a “man of the right,” as Allan Bloom once claimed.10
This diversity raises a number of important questions. Nietzsche has pro-
vided inspiration for almost anyone who cared to seek or claim it. It is per-
haps the lot of any great thinker to be greater than the interpretations made of
him or her. In this sense, one might (almost) say that none of these interpreta-
tions is in itself wrong. But then, none would be right and this seems unsatis-
factory. Surely Nietzsche meant something or was trying to mean something:
how do we account for passages that appear simply to be incompatible one
with the other?
A number of answers have been given. Some have suggested that Nietzsche
is internally inconsistent, that he is simply confused or that he never under-
stood that various parts of his teaching (say the will to power and the doctrine
of eternal return) did not and could not go together. Thus Walter Kaufmann,
in a hugely influential book in English-speaking countries,11 found Nietzsche’s
doctrine of eternal return to be “of dubious value,” despite the fact that
Nietzsche seems to say that it is the centerpiece of his teaching. Others, such
as Karl Jaspers and in a different way Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, have allowed
that Nietzsche does contain contradictions but that these contradictions are
for a dialectical purpose. Thus, they argue that he writes in such a way as to
provide a negation to any assertion he might be understood as making. On the
other hand, Gilles Deleuze has argued that dialectic is precisely what
Nietzsche was opposed to.12
Others see all this as the result of an evolution in his thought. A still some-
what standard reading of Nietzsche divides him into three periods: a youthful
Wagner-intoxicated romantic phase; then a “positivist” or “naturalist” phase
lasting at least through the first four books of The Gay Science though pos-
sibly reappearing in portions of The Genealogy of Morals. Finally there
would be a “mature” phase—the writings of the 1880s after Gay Science, and
possibly even a final phase, that of his “collapse,” that would include some or
510 Political Theory 41(4)

all of the work of 1888.13 Those who adopt something like these divisions
argue not so much that he is inconsistent but that he changes his mind and that
this accounts for the wide range of those who find him important. For some
he changes his mind in 1874, for others in 1876, or perhaps in 1882, or per-
haps in 1887—it depends on what mind he is said to have, I suppose.
Sometimes these shifts are correlated to breaks with important friends, a first
one with Wagner and a second with Lou Salomé. I find that this division
allows one to take only the parts of Nietzsche that one finds acceptable, what-
ever the terms of that acceptance may be.14
Again, still others have argued that it is not so much a matter of the vari-
ous supposed doctrines being incompatible with each other, nor of his
thought having evolved, as it is the case that he was analytically confused
and offered unwittingly different versions of the same doctrines, some of
them sound, others not.15 A variant on this finds the confusions to derive
from the attribution of an overvalued status to the Nachlass, the extensive
series of notebooks in which Nietzsche jotted down ideas and sketched out
his writing. As it can be shown that much of the material in the notebooks
consists not only of material that Nietzsche later explicitly rejected, but also
of preliminary and revised drafts of work later published, often in very dif-
ferent forms, hence material corrected by Nietzsche as he got a particular
passage right, there is clearly something to this claim.16 On the other hand,
so important a reader as Heidegger claims that it is in the Nachlass that one
finds his central teaching.
What to make of all this? All of this seems to me to have as consequence
to permit the reader to pick and choose the parts of Nietzsche he or she likes
the best (or dislikes the most). Most of the above readings, different though
they are, refuse to see Nietzsche’s work as a whole. I think that they all also
pretty much fail to take seriously the impact and import of David Allison’s
claim that Nietzsche writes “for you.” Allison writes: “Nietzsche writes
exclusively for you. Not at you but for you. For you, the reader. Only you.”17
This would mean that when reading Nietzsche, I (or you or she) have at least
at some points the feeling that he is speaking directly to me. Here it seems to
me that in fact Nietzsche writes purposely such that any one (almost any-
one?) may respond to him or rather to some part of a given work.18 (Those
of us who have taught Nietzsche have perhaps had the experience I have
often had, of finding a student entranced with some aspect of Nietzsche—
and of being not a little worried about the enthusiasm of the student’s
reaction).
More importantly, it means that how Nietzsche writes and why he writes
as he does is of central importance. For if the work speaks to me, it also
speaks to you and you and you. How might one then take Nietzsche’s work
Strong 511

“as a whole”? Here the answer comes, I argue, in how Nietzsche writes.
Nietzsche, one should remember, was a student and teacher of classical rheto-
ric and to a depth that in our world has almost been lost: he knew it intimately
and used it.19 Classical rhetoric expected the speaker to pay particular atten-
tion to the specific audience—words and arguments were to be shaped by
whom they were aimed at: at you and at you and at you, as modified by the
circumstances.20 With Nietzsche, however, the particular quality of the man’s
work seems, as we have seen, to lend itself to every appropriation—and thus
to mis-appropriation also. This is true is ethics, in epistemology, and in aes-
thetics. Here our concern is with politics.
All of this raises a range of questions about the quality and nature of rheto-
ric in Nietzsche, about the role of style and rhetoric in philosophy, questions
that have lurked on the periphery of Anglo-American mainstream philosophy
for some time and only recently—most especially in work on Plato, on
Wittgenstein, and on Nietzsche—have begun to reassume the place that they
had in ancient times. If I raise the question of style on my way to a consider-
ation of Nietzsche’s thought overall, it is because the rhetorical quality of
what he says is prominent. It is the case that in recent years a number of
authors (several of whom are considered below) had turned their attention to
the question of rhetoric in Nietzsche. For the most part, however, this has
remained at the level of showing that he used rhetoric, not in what his rhetoric
does, and especially not what the political implications are.

The Philosophical and

Political Import of “Rhetoric”
Can one—or should one—take all of Nietzsche’s writings seriously? No one
can fail to recognize the rhetorical quality of his writing. He lectured about
rhetoric and related matters regularly21 and it is worth noting here in passing
that Nietzsche is explicit that this work on rhetoric forms a “background” to
the Birth of Tragedy, a book that might appear less “rhetorical”; he notes,
however, that he had consciously left out of that book all that was “meta-
physical, all that was deductive.”22
Some have argued that Nietzsche moves from a concern with music in the
Birth to a concern with rhetoric (Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense) and
that this move, as marked in the early seventies, is correlative to his break
with Wagner.23 This is a problematic position, as it assumes that the Birth has
a theory of language as related to music and that the later material on rhetoric
has no such theory. It also assumes that Nietzsche made no relation between
his early work on rhetoric and the understanding that he developed in the
512 Political Theory 41(4)

Birth.24 Nietzsche will insist to the end on the importance of his formation as
a philologist, as, that is, a scholar concerned with rhetoric and language. The
work on rhetoric is simultaneous with the work on music and informs all of
his work.
Some scholars have taken the matter of rhetoric very seriously and find
Nietzsche's style to be the source of political danger. In a recent book, Heinz
Schlaffer has argued that Nietzsche’s style has had the effect of hyperbolizing
contemporary political understandings. Thus, after Nietzsche, when one
speaks of leadership in a political context, one thinks of a “super”-leader, one
who is a leader of leaders. Nietzsche may have thought of such a person as a
philosopher (as Heidegger was shortly to do), but when that possibility fades
away, Schlaffer remarks, the “word is unbound” and that idea of what a leader
ought to be remains. And this can have, he argues, deleterious political con-
sequences.25 Max Weber’s “plebiscitarian Caesar”—whom some have also
blamed for providing the terms for a legitimation of fascism26—would be a
close cousin.
This is a serious argument and I will return to it—but it is notably not that
of most of those who take note of the Nietzsche’s rhetoric and style. Most of
those who pay political philosophical attention to his rhetoric generally avail
themselves of it to excuse Nietzsche from one or another claim or to point out
a philosophical “mistake,” an “unacceptable” political stance. This is often
phrased as his “rhetorical excesses.” The general form of such argument is
that behind or besides such rhetoric there is an argument that one can recon-
struct: an attempt to see what one can get “out” of Nietzsche—a tacit reproach
goes with such attempts. What this has led to, however, is a multitude of read-
ings that seek to excuse Nietzsche from some apparent implications of his
writings on the grounds that “Nietzsche certainly did not believe X”—it is a
bit as if one were trying to prevent his work from being taken as the platform
of a particular party. And of those who do consider his rhetoric, few relate it
to any political concerns.27
After the Second World War, Walter Kaufmann was the first great master
of the apology based on rhetoric (although Richard Schacht has availed him-
self of this approach on occasion, as have others.)28 Aside from interpretive
choices, there were political-historical reasons for this approach: not only had
the First World War been tagged by British journalists as “Nietzsche’s War,”
not only had a copy of Zarathustra been standard issue to each soldier in the
Wehrmacht,29 but the subsequent appropriation of Nietzsche by the Nazis
required a rehabilitation for him to be granted admission to a philosophical
host. “Though a professor,” Bertrand Russell had sniffed, he was a “literary
rather than academic philosopher” whose “basic outlook remained very close
to that of Wagner in the Ring.”30 Nietzsche could appear to be responsible (in
Strong 513

some sense of the term) for the military horrors of the century. To distance
him from these events, Kaufmann generally proceeded by suggesting that
when Nietzsche spoke of, for example, war, he really meant a war like the
Franco-Prussian war. To Nietzsche’s apparently derogatory remarks about
Jews,31 Kaufmann adduced counter anti-anti-Semitic quotations with the
explicit or latent assertion that any offending words elsewhere were conse-
quent to the spirit of the times or to Wagner’s baleful influence. (Thus,
Kaufmann casts ridicule on everything in the Birth of Tragedy after chapter
fifteen, even asserting that Nietzsche should have stopped there.)
This approach leads to much work that seeks to present what Nietzsche
would have said had he been writing in a manner aimed at publishing in a
contemporary philosophical journal. So we are given what would have/
should have been Nietzsche’s arguments, which are then subjected to the kind
of critical analysis that philosophers are good at. I should say that I do not
criticize this work in a blanket fashion. The material on Nietzsche in a book
like Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue strikes me as important as does the
work of Alexander Nehamas. James Conant, following a lead from Stanley
Cavell, helps us read or reread some of Nietzsche’s early work. David
Owen’s, Dan Conway’s and Aaron Ridley’s respective books on The
Genealogy of Morals provoke one in fruitful ways, whether or not one ulti-
mately agrees with the conclusions.
However, relatively few commentators have centered their political-
philosophical readings of Nietzsche around his rhetoric. Most of these work
in a vein that one might call “continental” and are often European.32 However,
those who deny that Nietzsche’s style and rhetoric are centrally important—
although he is far from the only one, exemplary here is Brian Leiter who
argues that Nietzsche’s “penchant for hyperbolic rhetoric and polemics often
leads him” to “overstate” his case33—to his philosophical teaching are, I
think, seriously wrong. 34
To start with, Nietzsche does not separate “rhetoric” from language itself.
In the lecture course he prepared for 1874 he writes: “There is obviously no
unrhetorical ‘naturalness’ of speech to which one might appeal: speech itself
is the result of nothing but [lauter] rhetorical arts [,] the power—which
Aristotle names rhetoric—to discover and make expressive [geltend] that
which works and makes an impression on each thing and this is at the same
time the essence of language [Sprache] . . . it does not wish to instruct but
rather to transmit a subjective arousal [Erregung] and acceptance to another
person.” 35 This tells us that language is ineluctably rhetoric: the question
then is what that means in terms of one’s inevitable use of language.
Nietzsche’s concern with rhetoric and style is continuous. In 1872, for
instance, he sketches an outline for a book “Considerations on Reading and
514 Political Theory 41(4)

Writing.” In 1875 he prepares a document on style for two of his students.36

The most important elaboration, however, comes in “The Doctrine of Style,”
ten notes or commandments presented to Lou Salomé in 1882.37 Nietzsche
writes the following:

1 The first necessary matter is life: Style must live.

2 Style must in retrospect be appropriate for you in relation to precisely the

particular person with whom you wish to confide. (The law of double relation).

3 One must first be quite clear about this: thus and thus do I wish to speak and
express myself—before one has the right to write. Writing must be an emulation
(Nachahmung).

4 Because many of the means of those who speak (Vortragenden) are missing to
those who write, the person who writes must have an overall highly developed
expressive ability to present speech as a model: the presentation of that which is
written must necessarily turn out as much paler.

5 Wealth in life betrays itself as wealth in gestures (Gebärde). Everything, the

length and brevity of sentences, punctuation, the choice of words, pauses, the
sequence of arguments—must be learned to be understood as gestures.

6 Be careful about the use of periods [full stops—TBS]. Only those beings that
have a lengthy breath in speaking have the right to periods. For most, periodizing
is an affection.

7 Style should show (beweisen) that one believes in ones thoughts, and does not
only think them, but rather feels them.

8 The more abstract is the trust that one wishes to teach, the more must one bring
(verführen) sense (Sinne) to it.

9 In the choice of its means, the rhythm of a good writer of prose (Prosaiker)
approaches that of poetry, however without ever surpassing it.

10 It is neither proper nor intelligent to anticipate the small objections (leichteren

Einwände) for ones readers. It is very proper and very intelligent to leave it to ones
readers to express themselves the essential point of our wisdom.38

Let me pick out a few passages. “Style must in retrospect be appropriate

for you in relation precisely to the particular person with whom you wish to
confide (der du dich mitteilen willst).” He calls this the “law of the double
Strong 515

relation.” One must shape what one says according to the particular qualities
of the person or persons one is addressing and the circumstance. I repeat here
from my epigraph Emerson’s phrase: “Eloquence is the power to translate a
truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.”
At the end, he urges that it is the reader (in any particular case the person
for or with whom the writer wishes to confide) who must come to express for
himself or herself these claims; they must, that is, become part of the assess-
ment the reader has of the world. Earlier he had insisted: “Wealth in life
betrays itself in a wealth of gestures. Everything, the length and brevity of
sentences, punctuation, the choice of words, pauses, the sequence of
arguments—must be learned to be understood as gestures.” What “every-
thing” means is that Nietzsche crafted everything that he published with
great and purposive rhetorical care. If one takes this claim seriously it means
that everything in his published texts is there for a purpose, including that
which appears as “excessive.”39
This is a strong claim—it is a bit like saying that there is nothing in da
Vinci’s La Gioconda (the “Mona Lisa”) that is not essential to that painting
and that there is nothing that is not there that could have been part of that
painting.40 It is like saying that every word in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by the
Woods on a Snowy Evening” is exactly necessary to the poem. Or it is like
Schumann’s response when asked, upon finishing a piece, as to its meaning.
His response was to play it again, every note. Presumably not even Nietzsche
was able to attain perfection in all of his writing, but it is significant that this
is what he sought to do and this means that dismissing some aspect of his
writing as “overblown rhetoric” will most likely proceed from an unrecog-
nized prejudice.

Rhetoric and the Reader

In the Phaedrus (274e–275b), calling upon the story of the presentation of the
art of writing by the god Theuth to the Egyptian king Thamus, Socrates
instantiates Thamus’s distress with the written word: writing reminds but
does not remember; it gives the simulacrum but not the reality of wisdom. As
if responding to Plato, one reading of the commandments above indicates
that what Nietzsche is pressing on Lou Salomé is how to write in order that
your writing acquire the quality of speech—with all its hesitations, gestures,
embodiments and so forth.41 In analyzing Nietzsche’s work, one must then
proceed very carefully and slowly—one must listen to it—for writing is
always a temptation to conclude. Note for instance number six above: the
point about periods means that you have to have done a lot to be entitled to
put an end to a thought. As such his work is also meant to be a temptation and
516 Political Theory 41(4)

to be experienced as such: the rhetorical tropes are of utmost importance, of

a necessity embedded in our very use of language. In his “Presentation
[Darstellung] of Ancient Rhetoric,” the lecture course of 1874, he notes that
“there is in fact no unrhetorical ‘naturalness’ of speech to which one might
make appeal. . . . To sum up [in summa]: tropes do not attach themselves now
and then to words, but are their most particular nature.” Tropes are not a
“special meaning” applying only in special cases. “In fact all that is called
ordinary speech is figuration.”42 It is worth noting here that this does not
mean that Nietzsche thought that “everything is metaphor”—which would
make the idea of metaphor impossible—but that the concept of metaphor
gave him a way of dealing with what he would understand in an increasingly
complex manner as the relation between language, mind, the natural world,
and the body.43
Importantly rhetoric is what Nietzsche calls “an essentially republican
art.” It is such because one has to be “used to bearing the strangest opinions
and outlooks and even be able to feel a certain pleasure in their conflictual
play (Widerspiel).” He continues on, sounding almost like Hannah Arendt, to
indicate that rhetoric was the culmination of the education of the men of
antiquity: “the highest spiritual activity of a well-educated (gebildeten) polit-
ical man.” This is, he says, an “odd notion for us,” and proceeds to quote the
Critique of the Power of Judgment to the effect that “the speaker gives notice
of a matter to be considered and, in order to relate to (unterhalten) his listen-
ers, presents it as if it were a play with ideas.”44 The point is that rhetoric
permits thoughts to be addressed to a wide range of individuals, with differ-
ent formations and understandings.
What difference then does it make to pay attention to rhetoric and style?
Here is a preliminary example where a translator has paid insufficient atten-
tion to a rhetorical trope.45 If you have the Kaufmann edition of the Genealogy
of Morals, you will find that all of the sections in the first essay begin with a
capital letter. If, however, you go to the German edition (I have looked at the
Schlechta and the de Gruyter), you will find that sections 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13,
14, and 17 begin with a dash, what in German is called a Gedankenstrich—a
“thought-stroke.”46 Just to make matters more complex, Kaufmann does give
the dashes at the end of several paragraphs (one [section 8] has a double dash)
but does not give the two dots at the end of 6, nor the three at the end of 7, 10,
11, 12, and 16.
What to make of this? I remind you of his strictures to Lou von Salomé.
About the dots we can say that they indicate an ellipsis, the intentional omis-
sion of something from an original thought. I am unclear why there is an
ellipsis with only two dots. The dashes, however, mark an aposiopesis47—the
word means “becoming silent” and is a rhetorical device indicating that
Strong 517

something has not been made explicit, as in Darth Vader’s “I sense some-
thing, a presence I have not felt since—.”48 Here at the beginning of the sec-
tion, they seem to me to indicate that what follows is addressed to a particular
person, hence that the text that follows is a response by that person. (A clue
comes from the fact that sections 14 and to some degree 15 are in fact actual
dialogues.)
What difference does this make? Take the following passage from section
seven of the Genealogy of Morals, one in which Nietzsche appears, and is
often taken, to contrast the noble with the base. Larry Hatab, for instance,
speaks of it as providing the oppositional framework between the warrior and
the priestly.49 Brian Leiter reads it as the “marked” contrast of “the values of
‘the warrior caste’ with the ‘priestly caste.’”50
Nietzsche writes in the first part of the section:

—You will have already guessed how easily the priestly way of evaluating can
split from the knightly-aristocratic and then continue to develop into its opposite.
Such a development receives a special stimulus every time the priestly caste and
the warrior caste confront each other jealously and cannot be one with the other as
to the prize. The premise of the knightly-aristocratic value-judgments is a powerful
physicality, a radiant [blühende: Diethe (Cambridge University Press) gives
“blossoming”; Kaufmann, “flourishing”], rich, health that overflows the self
[selbst überschäumende: D, “even effervescent”; K, “even overflowing”], which
includes all that it needs to maintain itself, war, adventure, the hunt, the dance,
combat games [Kampfspiele: D, “jousting”; K, “war games”] and above all
contains in itself all that is strong, free, happy activity.

This sounds pretty much like the classic vision of Nietzsche’s master/
aristocrat. Yet what about that little dash (omitted from Kaufmann, unmen-
tioned in Hatab or Leiter)? One is, I think, entitled to take the passage as
addressed to someone. To whom? One answer would be to German Christian
anti-Semites. They might read the part of the section quoted in the passage
above and respond with something like: “Yeah! That’s us knights! Jüden
‘raus!” Yet what one finds later in the section is that these Jews give rise to
the Sermon on the Mount. Much of the last half of the section is in fact a
paraphrase of Matthew 5.13. “We know now,” says Nietzsche—who here is
the “we”?—”who became heir to this Jewish revaluation.” Those who
became heir to the “Jewish revaluation” are the Christian anti-Semites who
had been lapping up the first part of the section. So: even Christian anti-
Semitism is itself consequent to the “Jewish revaluation.” The next section
(eight) begins with another dash, now indicating presumably the voice of the
author of the above paragraph responding to the readers of the previous one.
518 Political Theory 41(4)

He writes there: “But don’t you understand that? You don’t have eyes for
something which needed two millennia to achieve victory?” “Two millen-
nia” and the “you” obviously orient the designation to contemporary
Christianity and Christians. One can and should continue through sections
eight and nine constantly asking who the interlocutor is. In anticipation of
and in an improvement on Sartre,51 Nietzsche is telling us that the distance
between anti-Semites and Jews is constructed by Christian anti-Semites to
serve to their advantage.
Nothing in Nietzsche (at least in what he published) can be read properly
without hearing the resonance that any section of a sentence sets up, both
with the rest of the sentence and with the rest of the entry of which it is a part,
and with those that are around it.52 Here is a more extensive example. Werner
Dannhauser, in an excellent book on Nietzsche’s relation to Socrates, prop-
erly points to the importance of the aphorism in Nietzsche’s thought. He
writes: “It is not easy to determine when he is being quoted out of context
because it is not easy to see whether there is context or what it is.” Dannhauser
continues on by (properly, I think) indicating that the aphorism is a counter to
the treatise as a form of philosophizing. Then he says that aphorisms “broach
problems rather than solve them” and indicates that aphorisms are “general-
izations [which] are to be taken as stimulating insights rather than as final
truths.” He gives as an example: “One aphorism declares ‘What doesn’t kill
me, makes me stronger.’”53
The citation is from Twilight of the Idols (Epigrams # 8). What Dannhauser
gives is indeed a generalization, to which, he properly notes, one could find
all sorts of counter-examples. To the degree that the sentence he cites would
be the aphorism, it is indeed a kind of stimulus, not a “final truth.” However,
for whatever reason, Dannhauser has not given us the aphorism that Nietzsche
wrote. Nietzsche rather wrote: “From the military school of life.—What
doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” The two parts of the aphorism resonate
with each other (as do the italics) and forbid a simple conclusiveness about
what Nietzsche “means.” What does it mean to speak from “the military
school of life”—especially as the aphorism now becomes part of a military
training, perhaps a training that is necessary to write a book like the Twilight,
one which Nietzsche says to be a “declaration of war”? And “war” is here,
Nietzsche says, a way of wounding oneself, so that one can heal from being
“too inward, too deep.”54
I leave these questions unanswered except to call attention to the fact that
they make the whole matter of reading anything in Nietzsche much more
complex than the conclusion that Nietzsche is a propagandist for Conan the
Barbarian. However, a few things can be noted. First, whatever an aphorism
is, it is all of its words. The sentence that Dannhauser gives (as Nietzsche’s)
Strong 519

is something very different than the sentences that Nietzsche gives. A sen-
tence does not an aphorism make; resonance between the parts of the whole
aphorism does. Second, Nietzsche’s sentences lend themselves to being
wanted to be remembered as Dannhauser gives them—without the shaping
tone that gives thickness to an otherwise bald assertion. Therefore part of
recovering the whole involves remembering that one did not want to remem-
ber it. Wanting to get it wrong is part of getting it right. As Babette Babich
has written:

The reader who falls short of the aphorism’s resonant or entire meaning, i.e. the
reader who misses its musical significance, not only fails to “get it,” as we say,
but this failure is ineluctable because it is a failure unawares, hence, and
effectively, incorrigible. Any aphorism, every Nietzschean text, has at least two
points, if not indeed many more, which excess permits most readers to come
away with at least a partial notion of the text. . . . Taking up the musical sense of
the aphorism, one keeps both its subject matter and its development as part of a
whole. Thus positions, statements at variance with one another are not simple
contradictions but contrapuntal.55

The aphorism—his writing—must thus, in a third manner, be read musi-

cally, concinnously, that is, as a musical unification of dissonant themes.56
This has two elements to it. First is the resonance that occurs within and
between sections, even within sentences themselves. Second, this is a text
that draws upon the classical style, while subverting its elements in terms of
the apparent relations of consonance and dissonance that it creates.
As a more extended example of the (“musical”) complexities of a rhetori-
cally conscious reading Nietzsche, let me take section five of “Morality as
Anti-Nature” of Twilight. Nietzsche begins (the emphases are mine):

Given that one has grasped the sacrilege of such a revolt against life, like the revolt
that has become nearly sacrosanct in Christian morality, one thus has, fortunately,
grasped something else as well: the uselessness, illusiveness, absurdity, and
mendacity of such a revolt.

The operant subjectivity of the paragraph is not defined: it is “one.” This

realization is available in principle to anyone, at least any-one in our histori-
cal position. The sentence is a kind of invitation: “are you part of this ‘one’?
might you see yourself that way?” The whole entry is premised on a condi-
tional (“Given that . . . “), a conditional that already requires inverting one’s
normal understanding of the idea of sacrilege. The previous numbered para-
graph ends with the statement that “Life ends where the ‘kingdom of God’
begins.” This is the source of the “sacrilege.” The sacrilege is identified in the
520 Political Theory 41(4)

previous entry as the claim that God can in fact look into one’s heart. Now
this section takes up the theme that it is sacrilege to claim that God can in fact
look into one’s heart. We say we assume that God can look into one’s heart
(the traditional musical tonic chord, one might say). To claim this, however,
must appear as sacrilege, that is, as a profanation of God. The text appears
first to offer a stance towards life, but it does so precisely in terms (sacrilege)
which it takes over from that which it claims to criticize. The first move in
this paragraph requires, in other words, the use of religious language and
categories in an irreligious manner. So far one proceeds without much anxi-
ety: one might think that this constitutes a condemnation of religion by
Nietzsche. However, the initial resolution appears now to not resolve the mat-
ter but to call up something else. Nietzsche continues:

A condemnation of life by one who is alive remains, in the end, just a symptom of
a particular kind of life: this does not at all raise the question of whether the
condemnation is justified or unjustified.

Any condemnation of life as such is a manifestation of something possibly

profoundly wrong. A condemnation of life requires that one tacitly assume a
position outside life, or that is false to oneself, one that lies. So attacking God
is to still remain inside a framework that lies. It is to assume the stance of God
in the name of denying God—hardly an advance. Again, grasping this is
available to anyone—as shown by the persistent use of “man”—”one”—in
the first part of this entry. Nietzsche continues:

One would have to occupy a position outside life, and on the other hand to know
it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be allowed even to
touch upon the problem of the value of life:

To even raise the question of the value of life means to have placed one-
self in the position of being abstractly outside life. It means to adopt a
promiscuous stance all at once monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic
(one, many, all) and to claim exemption from the judgment that it makes of
and on the world. To understand in this way, however, would be to change
who is the subject. Nietzsche again, following the colon that ended the
previous excerpt:

these are the reasons enough to grasp that, for us, this problem is an inaccessible
problem. When we speak of values, we speak under the inspiration, under the
optics of life: life itself is forcing us to posit values, life itself is valuing by means
of us, if [and/or when: wenn] we posit values.
Strong 521

Note how the insistent “one” yields here to a “we.” A seductive new reso-
lution is proposed: that of “life.” Those who understand (“we”) that “life” is
the answer will realize that there is nothing to do but to succumb to the
realization that there is nothing to say, that the problem is “inaccessible.” (In
“How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fiction,” the capsule history of
Western philosophy Nietzsche has just given in the previous section he asso-
ciates this position with positivism.) Again the reader is tempted to feel a
part of the apparent fraternity of insight. With this move the subject-reader
(if she or he has joined this “we”) finds itself particular, nonuniversal,
implicitly an elite. It makes a difference who is asking—the passage leads
the reader to accept this by implicitly offering the reader a resting space with
the new “we.”

It follows from this that even that anti-natural morality that takes God to be the
antithesis and condemnation of life is only one of life’s value judgments.—a
judgment made by which life? Which kind of life?

This is what “morality as it has been understood up to now” is—a con-

demnation by the condemned, and this includes even the judgment that God
is the antithesis to life. When the reader started this section, “Morality as
Anti-Nature,” there seemed to be an expectation that morality would be
opposed to “nature.” Now it appears that, as Nietzsche says in the next para-
graph, that the problem comes when morality “condemns on its own grounds,”
that is, when morality moralizes itself. Notice that an example of morality’s
self-moralization is the judgment that God is the antithesis to life. The ques-
tion (“ . . . which life? Which kind of life?”) is raised therefore about the kind
of life that makes such a judgment, that requires such a judgment. Who is it
that says there is nothing to be said about “life”?57 This question itself suc-
cumbs to a temptation to think that consonance has been achieved. Thus
Nietzsche will immediately undermine the apparent finality of this “we” by
subtracting himself from it—but then who and what is left of the “we”? We
had associated ourselves with what we thought to be Nietzsche’s position but
now he tells us this was wrong.

—I already gave the answer: declining, weakened, tired, and condemned life.

The sudden intrusion from the “I” announces that there is no help from
Nietzsche here: what he has to say he has already said; the reader did not
grasp it but thought that she or he did and should now realize that she or he
was wrong, mistaken. The answer is what it has always been and has been
here since before we started the paragraph. It is as if we missed the tonic
522 Political Theory 41(4)

when it went by. In effect we have to start over: we are back at the beginning,
knowing it, however, perhaps for a first time.58 In wanting to agree with
Nietzsche on this I have shown myself to be declining, weak, tired: I have
condemned my life.
Nietzsche’s writing thus calls up (or can call up) a critical relation between
what the reader wants and what the text makes available and requires of the
reader. The effect is to call into question precisely the desire to give resolu-
tion and to bring consonance to the experience. Nietzsche has reversed the
traditional picture of the reader and the text: it is as if the text has become the
analyst and the reader the analysand. (Heidegger will do the same with lan-
guage.) We are not to interpret the text but to allow ourselves to be available
to the text. Nothing should stand between the two of us. (In a like manner,
Tyndale and other early Protestants urged a direct [literal] engagement with
Scripture.)59 In reading Nietzsche or any (philosophical?) text, one should/
can come to call into question precisely what one wants to make of
Nietzsche—and that teaches one something about oneself. The text is
intended to produce a “self-critique”—the basis of a (perhaps non-Kantian)
autonomy. This critique is what Nietzsche in his preface to Twilight calls
“sounding out idols,” idols which function here as “eternal truths,” that is, as
truths that claim for themselves a permanent moral standing. To “sound out
an idol” means rather to produce a dissonance, the contrast between the tun-
ing fork and the sound the idol makes when struck. This is why Nietzsche
says that the human being is a dissonance.

Producing Self-Criticality: Where Is Authority?

(Almost) all of Nietzsche can and should be read like this.60 Even the Birth of
Tragedy presents itself as a test for the reader—can you respond to this?61 In
reading Nietzsche, and especially in reading Nietzsche about politics, this
means the following. When one thinks that one understands Nietzsche
(whether affirmatively or negatively) the first thing one should do is ask one-
self “why is it that I want to think that this is what Nietzsche means?”
Typically, one will find, as with my analysis of the aphorism above, that one
has left something out, and a conclusion about which one was confident finds
itself undercut. This requires a self-examination as why it is that one was
drawn to find one’s initial conclusion correct. Nietzsche’s writing would thus
generate a self-critical relationship of the reader to the conclusions that he or
she wishes to draw. In this way, it has a therapeutic aim—it requires the
reader to be (self-)critical. It also means that what Nietzsche writes does not
spring from a position in which Nietzsche has assumed the position of a final
arbiter, something he avoids, paradoxically, most often by writing in such a
Strong 523

way that you think that this is precisely what he is doing.62 At his best, which
is often, Nietzsche forces the reader to come to grips with his or her own
unexamined needs and desires: to be self-critical and thus to become his or
her own authority. Such is autonomy; thus a truth is translated for me—
Emerson’s understanding of rhetoric (see the epigraph). The multiple under-
standings of Nietzsche all start (shall I say “almost all”?), to some degree,
with the understandings of those who have not adequately turned their under-
standing back on themselves.63
I am not arguing that each of us has his or her “own” Nietzsche. I am argu-
ing that Nietzsche purposively writes in such a manner as to make many of
those whose read him think that they have understood Nietzsche, only to find,
on further careful or more careful reading or rereading—Nietzsche tells us he
is a proponent of the lento in reading—that they have made something out of
Nietzsche after their own image, an image or an idol that they must now call
into question. In a section of Ecce Homo that echoes in my epigraph from
Mark Twain, he explains why he writes such good books. He says:

Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already
knows. For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear. Now
let us imagine an extreme case: that a book speaks of nothing but events that lie
altogether beyond the possibility of any frequent or even also a rare experience—
that it is a first language for a new series of experiences. . . . This is in the end my
average experience and, if you will, the originality of my experience. Whoever
thought he had understood something of me, had made up something out of me,
after his own image.64

From this we can see why both the “aristocratic” and “democratic” read-
ings of Nietzsche are possible and why they are incomplete without each
other. Aristocracies are about elites. There are, however, two ways of think-
ing about the question of an “elite,” a conception that Nietzsche clearly has.
The first consists in holding the position that some individuals are, by the
nature or their endowments, simply superior to the others. These are by their
order or rank, entitled to whatever is theirs, perhaps to rule. At times, for
instance in the early text The Greek State, Nietzsche sounds like he shares
this position. The other way of thinking about an “elite” consists in asking
why is it that most humans are content to, as Thoreau put it, “live lives of
quiet desperation,” that they are not more than they are. Here one would look
the way in which a sense of possibility and transformation has been slowly
erased from human capacities. (This is the source of Nietzsche’s distress with
the consequences of Socratic rationalism and Pauline Christianity). This
more critical reading, to which I generally subscribe, also shows how
524 Political Theory 41(4)

“critical theorists,” such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, could

think to draw upon Nietzsche. This reading raises the question of the possibil-
ity of human excellence in an age that tends to make human mediocrity seem
all there is or can be.65
A final discord: What this means—to speak too briefly here—is that
Nietzsche would have seen fascism as a possible outcome of Western slave
morality (an outcome that includes and has and will generate Geisterkriege as
well as absurdly acquiescent attitudes towards the authority of science). But
it also means that any reading of Nietzsche that excludes a priori the reading(s)
that the Nazis made of him is wrong. This in turn raises a very complex ques-
tion of the degree to which one can hold someone responsible for what is
made of their thought, which is the question raised by Schlaffer in his book
mentioned above. Here the question of whether or not “Nietzsche would have
been a Nazi” is not of primary importance. (I think that it is obvious he would
have not, just as figures like Oswald Spengler, Hermann Rauschning, Stefan
George—I pick very conservative people whom one might have thought
potentially sympathetic—were not). If, however, what I have said above is
true—that Nietzsche writes for each of us—then he also writes for a Nazi. If
he wishes or expects or hopes that such an appeal—this is my reading—will
be engaged by the dissonance of self-criticism, the political question becomes
how long should—how long must—one allow for such a move to happen?

Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the participants at a meeting of the Conference for the
Study of Political Thought, Jane Bennett, and two anonymous reviewers for their
comments.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.

Notes
1. See Seth Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheanism: The Politics of German
Expressionism, 1910-1920 (Berlin: Gruyter, 1990).
2. Cited in Eduard Baumgarten, ed., Max Weber: Werk und Person (Tübingen:
Mohr, 1964), 554.
Strong 525

3. See Kurt Rudolf Fischer, “Nazism as Nietzschean Experiment,” in Tracy B.

Strong, ed., Nietzsche (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 27–34.
4. Geneviève Bianquis, Nietzsche devant ses contemporains (Monaco: Du Rocher,
1954); On Germany, see R. Thomas and R. Hinton, Nietzsche in German Politics
and Society, 1890-1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); Ernst
Behler, “Nietzsche in der marxistische Kritik Osteuropas,” Nietzsche-Studien 10,
no. 11 (1981–1982): 80–110.
5. My list to here draws on one formulated by Bernd Magnus—it is the obvious one
and nonetheless important for that.
6. Hans-Joachim Becker, Die Fruhe Nietzsche-Rezeption in Japan (1893-1903):
Ein Beitrag zur Individualismusproblematik im Modernisierungsprozess
(Wiesbaden: Harrasowicz, 1983); Graham Parkes, ed., Nietzsche and Asian
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), as well as several works
by Chiu-Yee Cheung, including Lu Xun: The Chinese “Gentle” Nietzsche
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), as well as his Nietzsche in China: An
Annotated Bibliography 1904-1992, Faculty of Asian Studies Monographs New
Series No. 19 (Canberra: The Australian National University, 1992). See Parkes,
Nietzsche and Asian Thought, as well as his essay in Bernd Magnus and Kathleen
Higgins, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
7. I cannot resist recalling that Conan the Barbarian has as epigraph a truncated
quote—to be considered below—from Nietzsche (“Whatever does not kill me
makes me stronger”).
8. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press,
1981), where the present author is labeled such.
9. See the texts collected in Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall, eds., Feminist
Interpretations of Nietzsche (State Farm: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1988), which cut, however, in many directions.
10. In conversation with the author some twenty years ago.
11. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher Psychologist Antichrist, 4th ed.
(1950; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
12. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1962).
13. The tripartite division is very widespread. Erich F. Podach, Friedrich
Nietzsches Werke der Zusammenbruchs (Heidelberg: Rothe, 1961), adds the
fourth division.
14. For a fuller discussion, see my “The Optics of Science, Art and life: How
Tragedy Begins,” forthcoming in Vanessa Lemm, ed., Nietzsche and Life and
my Nietzsche, Wagner and the Case of the Advance Scout, forthcoming in
New Nietzsche Studies. See also Alan Schrift, “Language, Metaphor, Rhetoric:
Nietzsche’s Deconstruction of Epistemology,” Journal of the History of
Philosophy 23, no. 3 (1985): 372.
15. Alexander Nehamas in his early work is the most sophisticated exemplar of this
approach. See his Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1987).
526 Political Theory 41(4)

16. See Bernd Magnus, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in 1988: The Will to Power and the
Übermensch,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 24, no. 1 (1986): 78–100.
17. David Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2001), vii.
18. See Tracy B. Strong, “Nietzsche's Political Aesthetics,” in Towards New Seas:
Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics in Nietzsche, ed. M. Gillespie and T. Strong
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Tracy B. Strong, “The
Political Misappropriation of Nietzsche,” Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche,
ed. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995). A politically complex version (a combination of Louis Althusser,
Mao Zedong, and Leo Strauss) of this has been given in Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s
Corps/e. Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of
Everyday Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
19. See Babette E. Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry,
Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, SUNY Series in
Contemporary Continental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2006), 19–36: “Philology and Aphoristic Style: Rhetoric, Sources and
Writing in Blood.”
20. Cicero in De invention and other texts (ca. 50 bce) and Quinitilian in Institutuo
Oratoria (ca. 96 ce) formulate the basic five canons of rhetoric. [Invention;
Arrangement; Style; Memory; Delivery]. But the canons predate their formula-
tion. See the discussion in Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), concentrating on rhetoric in poli-
tics, and in Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), who shows its close relation to poetry.
21. These lectures are in the second set of volumes from Werke Kritische
Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966), henceforth WKG (and are not in the
paperback Studienausgabe).
22. Nietzsche to Rohde, middle February 1872, Nietzsche Sämtliche Briefe:
Kritische Studienausgabe, 8 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1986 [henceforth NSB]),
3.293. On August 4, 1871 (NSB 3.215), he had written to Rohde indicating that
with the publication of BT, much of the “purple darkness” (to which Rohde had
apparently referred) of his earlier work would become clearer.
23. Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Le détour,” in Poétique 5 (1971), 53–76 [translated in
The Subject of Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993):
14–36]; Ernst Behler, Confrontations: Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press), 10. Lacoue-Labarthe’s claim that Nietzsche
abandons rhetoric after 1875 (p. 15, English edition) is incorrect: see the discus-
sion of “the doctrine of style” below. See in support of the Lacoue-Labarthe/
Behler position the book by Hans Gerald Hödl, Nietzsche’s frühe Sprachkritik.
Lekturen zu ‘Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne’ (Vienna:
WUV Universitätsverlag, 1997), and against it the very convincing review by
Holger Schmidt in New Nietzsche Studies 5, no. 1/2 (2005):179–85, and Babette
Babich’s footnotes to that review. The Lacour-Labarthe position is repeated in
Strong 527

Deman, Allegories of Reading, 104–6, working directly from the original article.
See also Schrift, “Language, Metaphor, Rhetoric,” 381.
24. Nietzsche is clear that there is such a relation. See my “Nietzsche, Wagner and
the Case of the Advance Scout,” New Nietzsche Studies (forthcoming).
25. Heinz Schlaffer, Das entfesselte Wort: Nietzsches Stil und seine Folgen (Munich:
Hanser Verlag, 2007), esp 142ff. Thanks to Babette Babich for calling this book
to my attention.
26. See Hans Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik, 1st ed. (Tübingen:
Mohr, 1959; 2nd ed., 1974); and Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human
Interests (Boston: Beacon, 1972).
27. A partial exception is Bradford Vivian, “Freedom, Naming, Nobility: The
Confluence of Rhetorical and Political Theory in Nietzsche’s Philosophy,”
Philosophy & Rhetoric 40, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 372–73. Vivian, however,
tends to read the rhetoric as reinforcing the “aristocratic” or “right” reading of
Nietzsche. See the discussion below.
28. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist and Antichrist (New
York: Meridian, 1950, 1st ed.; now in its fourth edition at Princeton University
Press); Richard Schacht, Nietzsche: The Arguments of the Philosophers (London:
Routledge, 1985).
29. See the discussion in William Salter, “Nietzsche and the War,” International
Journal of Ethics 27, no. 3 (November 1917): 357–79 [reprinted in Strong,
Nietzsche]; the link is made also by W. W. Willoughby, “The Prussian Theory of
the State,” American Journal of International Law 12, no. 2 (April 1918): 257.
30. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 687.
31. On the general question of Nietzsche and the Jews, see Sarah Kofman, Le mépris
des Juifs (Paris: Galilée, 19xx) [translation by Tracy B. Strong in New Nietzsche
Studies 7, no. 3/4 (2007/2008), as well as the other articles in this issue];
Jacob Golomb and Robert Wistrich, Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? (2002);
Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).
32. Aside from those mentioned here, one might note Babette Babich, Angèle
Kremer-Marietti, Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Peter Sloterdyck, and a num-
ber of others
33. See, e.g., his contribution of “Nietzsche” to the online Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
34. A number of works are important partial exceptions here. In addition to the work
by Lacoue-Labarthe (discussed above, footnote 23) and Paul DeMan, Allegories
of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 79–134; see Claudia Crawford, The
Beginning of Nietzsche's Theory of Language (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988); and
Douglas Thomas, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically (New York: Guilford Press,
1998). Both Crawford and Thomas argue (in Crawford’s words) that for
Nietzsche “the deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in lan-
guage,” although Thomas (an erstwhile student of Crawford) appears to modify
528 Political Theory 41(4)

that position by apparently claiming that rhetoric is “something other than philo-
sophical” (156)—true, only if one has a narrow understanding of what philoso-
phy is.
35. “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik” [WKG II-4.413–4.502], 425–26. A translation
has appeared in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. Sander L.
Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
36. WKG III-4. 330—at one point, this was to be a book that would be one of the
Untimely Meditations; WKG IV-1. 205.
37. Nietzsche to Lou, August 24, 1882 NSB 6: 243–45. To a considerable extent,
these ten commandments represent a condensation of the main subjects of his
lecture course “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik.” Extended considerations in
the secondary literature are few. See the Studienarbeit paper by Tania Straniello,
Stilistische Verpflichtung? Nietzsches “Lehre vom Stil” und der Stil in “Also
sprach Zarathustra” (Berlin: Grin, 2012). There are brief remarks in Karl Heckel,
Nietzsche; sein Leben und seine Lehre (Lepzig: Phillip, 1933), 125–26. Compare
the entry on “The Best Style,” in Human-All-Too Human II—Wanderer and His
Shadow, 88 WKG IV-3. 231. See also by Hans-Martin Gauger, “Nietzsche: Zur
Genealogie der Sprache,” in Theorien Vom Ursprung Der Sprache, Bd I, ed.
Joachum Gessinger and Wolfert von Rahden (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 585–
606, at 587–88; ÜberSprache und Stil (Munich: Beck, 1995); “Nietzsches Stil
im Beispiel von ‘Ecce Homo,’” Nietzsche Studien 13 (1984): 332–56; and Linda
Simonis, “Der Stil als Verführer: Nietzsche und die Sprache des Performativen,”
Nietzsche Studien 31 (2002): 57–74.
38. WKG VII-1. 34: He signs this: “A good morning to you, my dear Lou, F.N.” See
the discussion in Simonis, “Der Stil als Verführer,” 59–60. Simonis emphasizes
the seductive (“VerfÏhrer”) aspect of these commandments.
Zur Lehre vom Stil.
1.
Das Erste, was noth thut, ist Leben: der Stil soll leben.
2.
Der Stil soll dir angemessen sein in Hinsicht auf eine ganz bestimmte Person, der
du dich mittheilen willst. (Gesetz der doppelten Relation.)
3.
Man muß erst genau wissen: “so und so würde ich dies sprechen und vortragen”
— bevor man schreiben darf. Schreiben muß eine Nachahmung sein.
4.
Weil dem Schreibenden viele Mittel des Vortragenden fehlen, so muß er im
Allgemeinen eine sehr ausdrucksvolle Art von Vortrage zum Vorbild haben:
das Abbild davon, das Geschriebene, wird schon nothwendig viel blässer
ausfallen.
5.
Der Reichthum an Leben verräth sich durch Reichthum an Gebärden. Man muß
Alles, Länge und Kürze der Sätze, die Interpunktionen, die Wahl der Worte,
die Pausen, die Reihenfolge der Argumente — als Gebärden empfinden lernen.
Strong 529

6.
Vorsicht vor der Periode! Zur Periode haben nur die Menschen ein Recht, die
einen langen Athem auch im Sprechen haben. Bei den Meisten ist die
Periode eine Affektation.
7.
Der Stil soll beweisen, daß man an seine Gedanken glaubt, und sie nicht nur
denkt, sondern empfindet.
8.
Je abstrakter die Wahrheit ist, die man lehren will, um so mehr muß man erst die
Sinne zu ihr verführen.
9.
Der Takt des guten Prosaikers in der Wahl seiner Mittel besteht darin, dicht an
die Poesie heranzutreten, aber niemals zu ihr überzutreten.
10.
Es ist nicht artig und klug, seinem Leser die leichteren Einwände vorwegzune-
hmen. Es ist sehr artig und sehr klug, seinem Leser zu überlassen, die letzte
Quintessenz unsrer Weisheit selber auszusprechen.
39. It also means that to a certain extent Heidegger’s insistence on the Nachlass as
Nietzsche’s “true philosophy” means that he may tend to underplay the impor-
tance of rhetoric.
40. This is Freud’s conclusion in his analysis of the Moses statue of Michelangelo
and is the assumption that permits his analysis. See Tracy B. Strong, Politics
without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012), chap. 4. It is to counter this understand-
ing that Salvador Dali adds a moustache (his) to the woman’s face in his Self-
Portrait as Mona Lisa—the success of which seems to me mostly de scandale.
41. Here is an opening for an extended comparative analysis of Nietzsche and
Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Disseminations (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), 63–171, esp. 84–94.
42. Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik 1, WKG ii-4.425, 427; see ibid., 449. See
the discussion in the excellent Christian Emden, “Metapher, Wahrnehmung,
Bewusstsein: Niezsches Verschränkung von Rhetorik und Neurophysiologie,”
in Text und Wissen, ed. Renate Lachmann and Stefan Rieger (Tübingen: Gunter
Narr, 2003), 134. [Translated in Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness and
the Body (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005, 88–123), at 91; see also
importantly 45–46.] The middle passage from Nietzsche is also cited in Schrift,
“Language, Metaphor, Rhetoric,” 379, from the Musarion edition. Nietzsche
notes (ibid., 425) that we call a book, an author, a style “rhetorical” when there is
a conscious turning to the artistic means of speech, but that we always do so with
a slight tone of censure. This is what he wishes to reject. The same point is made
in Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1979), 130.
Much of Nietzsche’s discussion of metaphor draws upon but recasts Gustav
Gerber’s Die Sprache als Kunst, 2nd ed (Berlin: Gärtner, 1885). See the
530 Political Theory 41(4)

discussion in Martin Stingelin, “Nietzsche’s Wortspiel als poet(olog)ische

Verfahrung,” Nietzsche-Studien 17 (1988): 336–49, and especially Anthonie
Meijers, “Gustav Gerber und Friedrich Nietzsche: Zum historischen Hintergrund
der sprachphilosophischen Auffassungen des frühen Nietzsche,” ibid., 369–90.
One must be careful, however, not to fall too easily prey to Quellenforschung.
43. See the fine discussion in Emden, “Metapher, Wahrnehmung, Bewusstsein,”
61–86.
44. Ibid., 415–16. The cite is from the Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), section 51 (p. 198). Translation extensively
modified (The English edition gives “imagination” for “Ideen”). So much, by
the way, for the canard that Nietzsche knew little Kant. I resist the translation
of unterhalten in Gilman et al. as “entertain,” which, while not wrong, carries a
trivializing note. The Cambridge translation simply leaves it out.
45. I borrow and extend this example from Babette Babich, “The Genealogy of
Morals and Right Reading: On the Nietzschean Aphorism,” inNietzsche’s On
the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Christa Davis Acampora (Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2006), 163–76.
46. For those counting, that is nine out of seventeen, one more than half. I note that
Strich also means “street-walking” or “prostitution.”
47. See Babette Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1994), 290; see Adrian del Caro, Grounding the Nietzsche
Rhetoric of Earth (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004), 9. See the discussion (cited also
in part by Caro) by David Allison, “Have I Been Understood,” in Nietzsche,
Genealogy and Morality, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994), 460–66.
48. Isidorus, Orig 2. 21.35: aposiopesis est, cum id, quod dicturi videbamur, silentia
intercipimus, cited in David Orton and R. Dean Anderson, eds., Handbook of
Literary Rhetoric (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 395 and ff. I have appropriated the Star
Wars example from somewhere I have forgotten.
49. Larry Hatab, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: An Introduction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 41.
50. Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002), 219.
51. Jean Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate
(New York: Schocken, 1995).
52. The material in the next few pages draws upon my “Preface” to Nietzsche’s
Twilight of the Idols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995).
53. Werner Dannhauser, Nietzsche’s View of Socrates (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1974), 195, 197, 203–4.
54. Twilight of the Idols, Foreword, WKG VI-3, 51.
55. Babette E. Babich, “Mousike techne: The Philosophical Praxis of Music in Plato,
Nietzsche, Heidegger,” in Gesture and Word: Thinking between Philosophy and
Poetry, ed. Robert Burch and Massimo Verdicchio (London: Continuum, 2002), 178.
56. The word derives from the Latin concinnitas meaning “skillfully put together.
The term and the argument for it can be found in Babette Babich, “On Nietzsche’s
Strong 531

Concinnity: An Analysis of Style,” Nietzsche-Studien 19 (1990): 59–80. Her foot-

note 17 gives a good summary of various commentators who have read Nietzsche
as musical. Note that such considerations mean that the material in Nietzsche’s
notebooks, the so-called Nachlass, is by and large not a “Nietzschean” text. It
comprises the elements that become a composition, but not a composition. Babich
makes the same point. The concept itself has its origins in Cicero (Orator, xxiii)
and Alberti, De re aedificataria [On the Art of Building], book 9. All of this in
great part confirms Bernd Magnus’ argument for “splitters” over “lumpers” (of
the published work with the Nachlass) in Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and
Jean-Pierre Mileur et al., Nietzsche’s Case (London: Routledge, 1993).
57. One is taken back here to what Nietzsche in the 1886 “Attempt at a Self-Critique”
says is the subject of The Birth of Tragedy: to see “science through the optic of
the artist, but also to see art through optic of life,” Birth of Tragedy Attempt 2
WKG III-1.12—his italics.
58. Cf. the opening lines of “Peoples and Fatherlands,” in Beyond Good and Evil: “I
hear it again for the first time—the overture to Die Meistersinger.”
59. See the discussion in the chapter on Tyndale in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance
Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Samuel Beckett
once spoke of “the power of the text to claw” and this is what he meant.
60. For another example, see the excellent passage on the rhetoric of Beyond Good
and Evil 2 in Thomas, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically, 64–69.
61. See my “Philosophy and the Politics of Cultural Revolution,” Philosophical
Topics 33, no. 2 (2008). Reprinted in Strong, ed., Nietzsche.
62. See the extended discussion in my “Texts, Pretexts and the Subject: Perspectivism
in Nietzsche,” chapter ten of Strong (2000), esp. 308. An earlier version
appeared in my “Texts and Pretexts: Reflections on Nietzsche's Doctrines of
Perspectivism,” in Political Theory (May 1985).
63. DeMan comes close to this position when he writes: “If we read Nietzsche with
the rhetorical awareness provided by his own theory of rhetoric we find that the
general structure of his work resembles the endlessly repeated gesture of the
artist “who does not learn from experience and always falls again into the same
trap.” What seems the most difficult to admit is that this allegory of errors is the
very model of philosophical rigor” (Allegories of Reading, 118).
64. Ecce Homo Why I Write such Good Books 1 WKG VI-3, 296: Zuletzt kann Niemand
aus den Dingen, die Bücher eingerechnet, mehr heraushören, als er bereits weiss.
Wofür man vom Erlebnisse her keinen Zugang hat, dafür hat man kein Ohr. Denken
wir uns nun einen äussersten Fall, dass ein Buch von lauter Erlebnissen redet,
die gänzlich ausserhalb der Möglichkeit einer häufigen oder auch nur seltneren
Erfahrung liegen, —dass es die erste Sprache für eine neue Reihe von Erfahrungen
ist. . . . Dies ist zuletzt meine durchschnittliche Erfahrung und, wenn man will, die
Originalität meiner Erfahrung. Wer Etwas von mir verstanden zu haben glaubte, hat
sich Etwas aus mir zurecht gemacht, nach seinem Bilde.
65. See here the discussion of “becoming hard” in my Politics without Vision,
393–96.
532 Political Theory 41(4)

Author Biography
Tracy B. Strong has broad interests in political theory and in related fields in political
science, aesthetics, literature, and other areas. He is the author of several books
including Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (currently in its
third edition); The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time
and Space; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary (second edi-
tion), as well as the editor or coeditor of Nietzsche’s New Seas, The Self and the
Political Order, Public Space and Democracy, and The One and the Many: Ethical
Pluralism in Contemporary Perspectives. His most recent book is Politics without
Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century (Chicago). He has writ-
ten numerous articles and essays in a variety of journals. He is currently working on
music, language, and politics in the period that extends from Rousseau to Nietzsche.
He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation, has been Visiting Professor at the Juan
March Instituto in Spain and Warwick University in England, and was a Fellow at the
Center for Human Values, Princeton University (2002–2003). From 1990 until 2000
he was editor of Political Theory.