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218 14 Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” or Nietzsche and Hermeneutics in Gadamer, Lyotard, and Vattimo Babette Babich Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the real raw material of your being is, something quite ineducable , yet in any case accessible only with difficulty, bound, paralyzed : your educators can be only your liberators. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator Nietzsche and Hermeneutics I am not about to tell the story of Nietzsche’s incorporation, or the resistance to the same, into the texts and textures of hermeneutic discourse. Firstly this is because such readings have already and in fact been offered, in various ways, by a number of authors, and that for a very long time, in articles and even books in English and German, in French and Italian, and so on.1 Enacting a banal and utterly unerotic repetition of some version of the primal scene—the topic of Nietzsche and Zarathustra being a particularly “primal” example—it is far from uncommon that authors declare, again and again (this is what makes it a primal scene), that prior to their own uncanny insight, absolutely no one else had ever written on (or seen or noticed that) a particular problem or other deserved scholarly discussion until they themselves tendered their words to a waiting world. So writes the student. This is all so much Angfängerei, as Nietzsche calls it, alongside edle Kinderei; good old childishness and “tyronism,” as Reg Hollingdale renders the German.2 219 “ T H U S S P O K E Z A R A T H U S T R A ” This is also the movie trailer version of philosophy and scholarship in general, if it is also the breathless legacy of modern science: new, original , unheard of, cutting-edge, the latest thing. It ought to go without saying , but my point is that it does not, that this is a piece of auto-absorbed nonsense, the kind of nonsense that dependency on the Internet has only increased. And this can seem reasonable enough, but it is nonetheless wrong in the case of Nietzsche and hermeneutics. That is to say: it is inaccurate with respect to Hans-Georg Gadamer and it is absurd if we are speaking of Gianni Vattimo, just because each one writes on Nietzsche, more patently so in Vattimo’s case but not less decidedly so in Gadamer’s case. I am able to say this last on direct evidence because Gadamer was my teacher. If I have drunk wine with Vattimo (a very Gadamerian and Socratic and even a very Nietzschean thing to have done), I do not claim to know him well. I do know that Gadamer was proud to have been associated with Leipzig because of Nietzsche and proud to have defended Nietzsche’s legacy there, a legacy the Russians at the time were eager to ablate.3 Thus Gadamer includes in his own ecce homo, his “Selbstdarstellung ,” an explicit reference to Nietzsche.4 Nietzsche engages the art of interpretation and regards philology as such an art, and it matters that Gadamer himself was a philologist like Nietzsche. If Gadamer writes more about Plato and Aristotle, and indeed about Kierkegaard and Hegel, than did Nietzsche, this tells us only that Gadamer had other tastes than Nietzsche did. Beyond Gadamer we can find Nietzsche’s legacy in other hermeneutic voices, voices often named “postmodern” like Vattimo, but also like Jean-François Lyotard and Umberto Eco (where it should also be noted that the designation “postmodern ” often covers incomprehension and is in nearly every case a word for a failure of reading). And even here we recall that Nietzsche bears upon the postmodern not only because there have been book collections dedicated to tracing the constellation,5 but because he writes against metanarratives , against the “subject,” and above all for the very metonymically postmodern reason that Nietzsche would name a lack of philology which he found to characterize every branch of scholarship, from philology to physics.6 Apart from the problems of philology and meta-philology, the problem with Nietzsche (and no less the problem with Heidegger and rather less, but still for some, the problem with Gadamer) is National Socialism , thus we cite Nietzsche gingerly. Nevertheless, if still internal to this problematic dimension, in a constellation attending to Nietzsche’s style,7 it is essential to begin with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reminiscences upon the trend-setting importance of Nietzsche in the intellectual life [3.135.202.224] Project...

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