Texturen des Denkens: Nietzsches Inszenierung der Philosophie in “Jenseits von Gut und Böse” ed. by Marcus Andreas Born, Axel Pichler (review)

It has become commonly accepted in Nietzsche scholarship that when examining and interpreting his writings, one has to pay close attention to their form and textuality: it is not only what is written that matters; of equal importance is how it is written. However, one might doubt whether this what and how can be reasonably distinguished at all. The collection, Texturen des Denkens: Nietzsches Inszenierung der Philosophie in “Jenseits von Gut und Böse,” focuses precisely on questions pertaining to the intertwinement of form and content in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. As the editors, Marcus Andreas Born and Axel Pichler, explain in their introduction, the word “textures [Texturen]” is intended to emphasize the materiality of Nietzsche’s philosophical writing, its formal aspects, and the role they play in his thinking in BGE, while the word “stagings [Inszenierungen]” refers to the processual and performative nature of this text.

Of course, the editors are well aware that questions related to the interconnection of form and content have already been considered quite extensively in Nietzsche scholarship. In the introduction, they mention a series of French commentators such as Bataille and Derrida, as well as David B. Allison, whose work the editors claim to be “of great importance” even today (3n4; translations are my own throughout). The reference to the French commentators is perhaps somewhat too cursory, given that they laid the foundation for a completely different understanding of a text in general, which itself motivated the need to read Nietzsche, among other authors, differently. However that may be, the volume inherits the French tradition’s dismissal of the Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche, which disregarded the formal and stylistic excesses of his texts. And as a more direct influence, the editors acknowledge a certain paradigmatic interpretation of Nietzsche that has developed in recent decades in Germany, bringing together genuine philosophical questioning and rigorous philological methods. It could be asked whether this paradigm really is qualitatively different from the French tradition, or whether it is rather a further development, and perhaps a refinement, of that tradition. Be that as it may and although the topic is by no means novel, the volume manages to bring together some very interesting and important contributions to Nietzsche scholarship, and it stands out for its concrete and direct focus on one of Nietzsche’s most complicated books. Most of the contributions manage to show quite directly and explicitly the rather complicated weavings, and hint at the possible patterns, of Nietzsche’s philosophical fabric in BGE.

Because the first essay of the volume, Born and Pichler’s “Text, Autor, Perspektive: Zur philosophischen Bedeutung von Textualität und literarischen Inszenierungen in Jenseits von Gut und Böse,” very much sets the tone for the whole collection, I will look at it more closely. The first part of the essay, written by Born, focuses on the performative aspects of Nietzsche’s writing. It does so by comparing BGE 246, which reflects on different writing styles, with its earlier unpublished versions. It turns out that precisely at the point at which the aphorism treats the problems of tempo and the accentuation of prose, Nietzsche had made a number of stylistic revisions. Born interprets the results of those revisions in the published version as the performative implementation of the what, of the content of the text. At the same time, the revisions also have direct philosophical consequences for the interpretation. Indeed, Born argues that some of these—such as the sentence “to listen to so much art and intention in language” (BGE 246)—might amount to general instructions for reading Nietzsche’s texts, allowing the reader to go beyond mere conventional understanding (cf. BGE 268). Hence, contra Heidegger, the materiality and textuality of Nietzsche’s philosophical writing are far from being mere decorations and accessories. Born...