Nietzsche, Revelation, and the Materiality of Metaphor

I. Introduction

Nietzsche is probably one of the last people that you would expect to offer a political theology of metaphor (much less a political theology of anything else for that matter).¹ And yet, in Ecce Homo, he offers us precisely that. More accurately, in that book he reflects on an earlier one, his masterpiece Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where he considers the relationship between himself, his Zarathustra (a prophet), and the material world through an engagement with metaphor. The main question that he plumbs in the parts of Ecce Homo devoted to his earlier text has to do with the way that Zarathustra came to him, the way that something was revealed to him that did not exist before (at least as far as he is concerned) and what specific linguistic form that revelation took.

For Nietzsche such a revelation does not seem to have anything to do with God or gods (indeed, he famously tells us in Zarathustra that God is dead).² Rather, the prophetic revelation of Zarathustra occurs entirely and only within the material realm. In this way, Nietzsche's own version of revelation is very different from what we ordinarily think of with that term. Usually, revelation has a distinctly transcendental meaning; something from another realm comes into our world to order and determine it. This theological vision becomes secularized by thinkers like Descartes and Kant so that the other realm becomes the abstract and the noumenal. Either way, the ordinary and material world is held as inferior and we human beings, whose own fleshy and mortal bodies are very much part of that world, come to hate ourselves; promised a higher realm, we desire to be transcended from ourselves as a way to escape materiality itself. For this reason, from a Nietzschean perspective, it is not himself but Descartes and Kant who are the nihilists. They privilege what does not exist over what does and, in so doing, worship nothingness.

The term that I would use that unites both the openly theological and secular (which is nonetheless a form of theology as well) versions of transcendentalism is archism. Archism is a system based on hierarchy and determination. It is born out of the hatred of the material and the nihilistic desire for transcendence and salvation. It seeks to control and dominate a world that it inherently despises.

Nietzsche's concept of revelation serves as an antidote to archism and for that reason I consider him to be an anarchist in a very profound way. Nietzsche's understanding of revelation does not come from some transcendent place, somewhere considered higher and superior that reorders (and dominates) the world according to its other-worldly—and archist—content. Rather, it comes from within the world itself, bringing the subject back to the material reality that she is always surrounded by and is actually and actively part of, despite the subject's desperate wish, owing to its Cartesian/Kantian roots, to transcend precisely that form of being.

Just as critically, this act of revelation for Nietzsche takes place entirely within the frame of language. The idea that language and materiality can be one and the same (insofar as language is not some kind of abstract or transcendent object)—or more, accurately, the idea that language is itself a subset of materiality—is a complete refutation of the Cartesian division between the world that we live in (the material world that is) and the world that we are said to create with our minds (of which language is a necessary, and bridging, part).

In this way, by stealing language away from the realm of metaphysics and transcendence, Nietzsche's own version of political theology looks at what might be called the descendent, or material realm. Accordingly, when Nietzsche uses theological language including terms like prophecy, revelation and redemption, he is not using them in their conventional Christian sense but rather has re-appropriated these terms, turning the most basic tools of transcendence against their would-be wielders.

Nietzsche's matterphoricality (to use a word that unites the various essays in this colloquium) offers that metaphor, far...