Dead Letters to Nietzsche, or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy. Joanne Faulkner
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СКАЧАТЬ engagement with my ideas, pastoral support, rigorous interrogations, and continuing friendship have sustained this project. I am indebted to George Vassilocopoulos for reading and commenting on an early draft of the entire manuscript, and Matthew Sharpe and Ashley Woodward for their valuable feedback on drafts of chapters. Thanks also to David McNeill for allowing me to access some of his unpublished writing, and for provoking a revision of my thinking about the relation between “master” and “slave” morality in Nietzsche’s work; and to Daniel Smith, for providing me with an advance copy of his Diacritics article, and prior to that with speaking notes for a paper he delivered in Sydney in 1998, which were invaluable to me while working through Klossowski’s somatic vocabulary. Thank you to the postgraduate community in Philosophy and Gender, Sexuality and Diversity Studies, at La Trobe University, to whom versions of chapters were presented as papers for their colloquia. I am also grateful to Daniel Conway, Rosalyn Diprose, and David Pettigrew for their generous support of this work in doctoral-thesis form, as its examiners, and later as mentors.

      Finally, I would like to thank my husband, best friend, and tireless reader and supporter of my work, Peter Chen, without whose love, forbearance, and dependable parenting to our children, this book would not have seen its way to completion.

      INTRODUCTION

      ...................................

      The Quickened and the Dead

      Are our most violent poltergeists

      Books?

      gnashing their shelves

      smashing things in the dark

      they leave a greenish tombish

      smell on our reading fingers

      they make us musty

      and bereft.

      Undoubtedly, each of these interpretations has a foundation in Nietzsche’s text, and so can be elaborated with reference to it. The question remains, How does Nietzsche appeal to so many, with such diverse—in some cases even opposed—interests? And (how) are his readers able to keep their own concerns separate from, and unpolluted by, the threads within Nietzsche’s writing that promote a view they would oppose? especially that “dark art” of Nietzschean scholarship, which—however easily it is now denounced—once used his thought to support National Socialism. Since his death over a century ago, Nietzsche has drawn a following that would be the envy of any philosopher, and renown that crosses disciplinary boundaries, extending even beyond the academy. Many of Nietzsche’s readers feel themselves sharing an intimacy with him through his writing; that his words appeal to them personally, even exclusively. What is it about Nietzsche’s philosophy that generates these effects upon his readers, and allows him to gain a purchase upon them? And how is his text able to attract such a diversity of interlocutors? Nietzsche’s philosophy must be read in the context of the profound effect it exerts upon his most committed readers: those who see themselves to fulfill a role that his text indicates, charged with responsibility for nurturing his philosophical and cultural project to its fruition.