A God Torn to Pieces: The Nietzsche Case

Notes

119 Notes Introduction. A Strange Debt to Europe 1. F. NIETZSCHE, Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, De Gruyter, Berlin-New York 1975–1984 (hereafter NSB), vol. 8, 573. 2. Translation by Charles Eliot Norton. 3. R. GIRARD, G. FORNARI, Il caso Nietzsche. La ribellione fallita dell’Anticristo [The Nietzsche Case. The Failed Rebellion of the Antichrist], Marietti: Genova-Milano 2002. 4. I remember well the manager of a university press exclaiming, after my explanation of the content of the book: “I don’t believe one word of what you say!” It was September 2, 2001, at a political science convention in San Francisco, a few days before 9/11. I could not avoid a symbolic association afterward. 5. This anthology rightly includes the most important essay by Girard on Nietzsche: “Dionysus versus the Crucified,” published in Modern Language Notes 99 (1984), 816–835, and re-published with the modified title “Nietzsche versus the Crucified” in The Girard Reader, ed. J. G. Williams, Crossroad, New York 1996, 243–261. 6. On this see chapter 2, note 14. 7. M. SILVESTRI, La decadenza dell’Europa occidentale, vol. 1, Anni di trionfo 1890–1914, Einaudi, Torino 1977, V. 8. Acéphale was a magazine founded by Bataille in the late ’30s as a manifesto for La conjuration sacrée [The Sacred Conspiracy], a secret society inspired by Nietzsche and the idea of human sacrifice (this finally became, for Bataille, the idea of sacrificing himself, fortunately avoided at the last moment). 9. See R. GIRARD, Achever Clausewitz. Entretiens avec Benoît Chantre, Carnets Nord, Paris 2007, 120 Notes to Pages xi–2 particularly 308–327; R.GIRARD, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, transl. by Mary Baker, Michigan State University Press: East Lansing 2010, 181–193. 10. On Kultur (Cultur) and Zivilisation (Civilisation) in Nietzsche see, e.g., F. NIETZSCHE, Kritische Studienausgabe. Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, De Gruyter, Berlin-New York 1999 (hereafter NKS, with the title of the quoted text); vol. 12, Nachlaß 1885–1887, 9[142], 416; and vol. 13, Nachlaß 1887–1889, 15[67], 451, and 16[10], 485–486. 11. See chapter 4, note 2, and chapter 5, note 35. 12. See chapter 5. 13. I began stressing this point in my subsequent interpretations of Nietzsche contained in G. FORNARI, Da Dioniso a Cristo. Conoscenza e sacrificio nel mondo greco e nella civiltà occidentale [From Dionysus to Christ: Knowledge and Sacrifice in the Greek World and the Western Civilization], Marietti, Genova-Milano 2006 (shortly to be published in English by Michigan State University Press) and Filosofia di passione. Vittima e storicità radicale [Philosophy of Passion: Victim and Radical Historicity], Transeuropa, Ancona-Massa 2006. 14. She excluded any “scapegoat theory” to explain the totalitarian persecution of the Jews, refusing to give them a priori a collective label of completely innocent victims, which would have precluded an objective analysis of the phenomenon (H. ARENDT, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harvest Books, San Diego-New York-London 1976, 5–7); paradoxically, Arendt’s inquiry proves to be useful precisely because it rejects an abstract, ideological scapegoat theory. 15. See G. FORNARI, “Figures of the Antichrist: The Apocalypse and Its Restraints in Contemporary Political Thought,” in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, 2010 (17), 66–83. 16. It is interesting that the dilemma between Kultur and Zivilisation can be recognized today, at the level of international politics, in the contradiction between the traditional sovereignty of the nation State and the new idea of a global ‘regime’ based on the affirmation of human rights: both the alternatives have proved disastrous if we consider the old nationalism and the recent ‘humanitarian’ wars exploiting human rights as a moral pretext for the particular interests of single great powers. 17. F. NIETZSCHE, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe begründet von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, weitergeführt von Volker Gerhardt, Norbert Miller, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter und Karl Pestalozzi, De Gruyter, Berlin-New York 1999 (hereafter NW), I, 1, 1[71Z], 95. Chapter 1. The Hunt for the Whale 1. H. MELVILLE, The Works. Standard Edition, vol. 7, Moby Dick or, The Whale, Russell & Russell, New York 1963, 2, 368. 2. [“Uniqueness” is not to be intended in rivalrous opposition to the other religions, beginning with Judaism from which Christianity arose.] 3. [See G. VATTIMO, Le avventure della differenza. Che cosa significa pensare dopo Nietzsche e Heidegger, Garzanti...