Das ästhetische Kalkül von Friedrich Nietzsches "Also sprach Zarathustra." (review)

A thinker such as Nietzsche, in whose philosophy aesthetics played a major role from the beginning, cannot be approached properly with conventional philosophical reading strategies. This is also suggested by Nietzsche's characterization of his own style of writing in his autogenealogy, Ecce Homo. Nietzsche writes there: "To communicate a state, an inner tension of pathos, with signs, including the tempo of these signs—that is the meaning of every style; and considering that I have an extraordinary number of inner states, I also have a lot of stylistic possibilities—the most multifarious art of style that anyone has ever had at his disposal" (EH "Books" 4).

Such a style of writing demands that its interpreters create a method of reading that is appropriate to the respective research question(s) and the respective Nietzschean text. In the following I will present and discuss one of the exegeses that has set new standards for such a close reading of Nietzsche's self-proclaimed major work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Claus Zittel's Das ästhetische Kalkül von Friedrich Nietzsches "Also sprach Zarathustra." Zittel, who published a short monograph on Nietzsche in 1995 entitled Selbstaufhebungsfiguren bei Nietzsche, takes seriously the fact that the text he is analyzing is a poetic work (a work of literature), which consistently denies traditional forms of reading. On this occasion the somewhat astonishing lack of philological and hermeneutical knowledge of some researchers turns out to be extremely problematic. Zittel manages, however, to move beyond the bare observation that stereotypical interpretative attempts fail in this respect. By combining philosophical and literary-critical approaches, Zittel brings his own methodological reflections and the textual specifics of Z into a dialogue right from the start.

This approach also manifests itself in Zittel's central goal, to explicate the "aesthetic calculus" that constitutes Z. Zittel chooses this provocative term "to designate the meaning-constituting interactions and engagement of different but in themselves stringent and coherent aesthetic procedures" (10). The term underlines Zittel's attempt to relate the form and content of Z strictly to each other, thereby interpreting Nietzsche's philosophy out of its own aesthetic (self-)reflections.

The first part of Zittel's threefold study begins with a critical examination of current philological and hermeneutical practices in Nietzsche and Zarathustra scholarship. Following modern theories of intertextuality, and as a consequence of the previously mentioned claim that the sense of a text such as Z is not given per se but is, rather, constituted "by the contrary of intertextual referential structures and their respective manifestations" (30), Zittel criticizes selected practices of the by now almost institutionalized use of source research (Quellenforschung). By following Nietzsche's own rejection of an unambiguous origin (cf. GM II:12), Zittel reproaches source research's current procedures and also the historical-critical commentary of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe. He claims that they interfere with "the reception of the text's own structure of meaning by their limitation to a specific form of references" (34) and therefore determine future interpretations ideologically.¹ The specific form that Zittel has in mind here is the practice of "open quoting," that is, a direct quote out of another book. Such open quoting in the case of Nietzsche leads, in Zittel's opinion, to a problematic dependency that falsely reverses the relation between source and text: Instead of starting with Nietzsche's text and analyzing its own aesthetic treatment of its sources as sense-constituting, source research tends to impute to the actual text a noninterpretative dependency upon its sources.²

In contrast to this oversimplifying form of reading, Zittel suggests a disconcerting of the reader through an exact philological and hermeneutical reading and thereby a clarification of the high complexity of the text: So "the bad alternative between the autonomy or dissolution [of the single text] could be avoided as one tries to grasp the 'work' as a product, which is about to...