A God Torn to Pieces: The Nietzsche Case

Introduction. A Strange Debt to Europe

vii INTRODUCTION A Strange Debt to Europe . . . this time I shall come as victorious Dionysus, who will make this world a holiday . . . Not that I have much time . . . [. . .] I have been hanged on the cross, too . . . —Nietzsche to Cosima Wagner, January 3, 18891 . . . e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. [. . . and thence we came forth to see again the stars.] —Dante Alighieri, Inferno, xxxiv, 1392 I feel a certain emotion now at seeing this study on Nietzsche, written several years ago, finally published in the United States, while I am quite curious to discover how it will fare in a cultural context very different from the Italian intellectual environment in which I first became acquainted with his works, in the late seventies. However, my emotion has also a more direct connection. As a matter of fact, the initial impulse to write this essay came to me in America, on my summer visits to Stanford University in the nineties for study and discussion sessions with René Girard, certainly some of the most fruitful encounters in my life, both intellectually and spiritually. viii Introduction So, it is fair to say that the genesis of this book, which I regard as not the least important of my works in spite of its brevity, is closely bound up with the United States. A God Torn to Pieces: The Nietzsche Case is the final result of an initial project, conceived around 1997 and 1998, to publish a collection of Girard’s essays on Nietzsche, both in English and Italian, with a general introduction of mine to set out the particular problems raised by Nietzsche’s philosophy and the far-reaching consequences of Girard’s interpretation. For me this marked the point of deepest interaction and dialogue with Girard, and my work soon outgrew the bounds of a simple introduction. In view of its expansion and the relevance of the points I was exploring there, Girard generously suggested that we should co-author a work on Nietzsche for publication in English and Italian. This resulted in Il caso Nietzsche, which appeared in Italian in 2002,3 while the English edition met several obstacles: the first was ideological prejudice from some American university publishers to whom I had submitted the project4; the second and more objective obstacle was the fact that most of Girard’s essays on Nietzsche had already been published and re-published in America, as in the important anthology edited by James G. Williams, The Girard Reader.5 Anyway, in order to make clear how I came to the present form of publication I should explain the path of research I followed in the late nineties. To a degree that I had not expected, I discovered that the mimeticosacri ficial interpretation of Nietzsche interacted profoundly with my own grounding in philosophy, in which he had been a major influence. As I looked at Nietzsche through the mimetic lens, Girard’s insights seemed to reveal their full interpretative power, not only for Nietzsche’s writings but also for the striking evidence concerning his mental illness and final madness . Indeed, I found this so impressive that I decided to emphasize this aspect from the outset while analyzing his ideas (an act of sacrilege for any devotee of Nietzsche6). Girard’s general thesis was significantly confirmed, and further proof given of his ability to grasp the essential both in texts and in human experience, but the subject itself and my approach to it involved something more than the demonstration of mimetic theory that I had had in mind in a period of my intellectual life still characterized to some extent by ‘Girardian orthodoxy.’ This is the main reason why I have now decided to let my research stand alone. In this way the accent falls on the independent line A Strange Debt to Europe ix that I actually began to trace out in the nineties, following from my interaction with Girard’s interpretation of Nietzsche. We already partly differed in regard to method. It was not out of simple curiosity that I felt the need to start from the clinical reports of Nietzsche’s madness, but because I aimed to glean relevant information from the very doublescrisiswhichdrovehimoutofhismind.Whatstruckmemoststrongly was the individual tragedy of this lonely man, for which I could feel nothing but sympathy, within the difficult situation of nineteenth century Europe, confronted by new dramatic collective experiences, and rightly defined in a book devoted to its decline in the following century...