nietzsche in italy - UCLA Department of Italian

JORGIO AGAMBEN GIANNI VATTIMO MICHEL SERRES RENÉ GIRAR» l o t
LVID WELLBERY ANACLETO VERRECCHIA MAZZINO MONTINARI AVITA
NIETZSCHE
IN ITALY
RBARA SPACKMAN DAVID MILLER GIORGIO COLLI THOMAS HARRISOP
.ABRIM I D'ANNUNZIO THOMAS SHEEHAN CLAUDIO MAGRLS ANGUS FLI
EDITED BY
HOMAS NORRIS BEVERLY ALLEN LOUIS MARIN AVITAL RONEI.I. GIORGI
THOMAS HARRISON
JAN-LUC NANCY JEFFREY SCHNAPP ANGUS FLETCHER GIANNI VATTIMO!
IENE GIRARD DAVID WELLBERY ANACLETO VERRECCHIA MAZZINO MOP
NIETZSCHE
IN ITALY
Edited by
THOMAS HARRISON
e
1988
ANMA LIBRI
DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN, STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Contents
Introduction
P A R T i: T O P I C S IN N I E T Z S C H E ' S L A T E R
THOUGHT
Giorgio Agamben, The Eternal Return and the Paradox
of Passion
9
Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche and Heidegger
19
Michel Serres, Corruption— The Antichrist: A Chemistry
of Sensations and Ideas
31
53
René Girard, Nietzsche and Contradiction
Louis Marin, Transfiguration in Raphael, Stendhal,
and Nietzsche
67
David E. Wellbery, Nietzsche —Art —Postmodernism:
A Reply to Jùrgen Habermas
77
PART II: THE COLLAPSE, SEXUALITY, THE BODY,
THE HORSE
Anacleto Verrecchia, Nietzsche's Breakdown in Turin
105
Mazzino Montinari, Nietzsche and Wagner
One Hundred Years Ago: 1980 Addendum
113
Avital Ronell, Hitting the Streets: Ecce Fama
119
Barbara Spackman, Nietzsche, D'Annunzio,
and the Scene of Convalescence
David L. Miller, Nietzsche's Horse and Other Tracings
141
PART III: THE TURINESE WRITINGS: MADNESS,
THE END, DIVINITY, SELF
Giorgio Colli, T h e P o s t h u m o u s F r a g m e n t s from the
B e g i n n i n g of 1888 to J a n u a r y 1889
Thomas Harrison,
H a v e I Been U n d e r s t o o d ? T h e Eterna l
N o w h e r e of Nietzschean Existence
Jean-Luc
Nancy, Dei Paralysis Progressiva
Milad Doueihi,
N i e t z s c h e , Dio a Torino
Robert P. Harrison,
175
Beyond the E n d : Nietzsche in T u r i n
David Farrell Krell, C o n s u l t a t i o n s with the P a t e r n a l Shadow:
G a s c h é , D e r r i d a , a n d Klossowski on Ecce Homo
181
199
209
219
229
PART IV : T H E ITALIAN HERITAGE
Jeffrey Schnapp, Nietzsche's Italian Style: Gabriele
D'Annunzio
Gabriele DAnnunzio,
T h e Beast W h o Wills
247
265
Thomas Sheehan, Diventare Dio: J u l i u s Evola
a n d t h e M e t a p h y s i c s of Fascism
279
Claudio Magris, T h i n g s N e a r a n d Far: Nietzsche
a n d the G r e a t T r i e s t i n e G e n e r a t i o n
of the Early T w e n t i e t h C e n t u r y
293
Angus Fletcher, M u s i c , V i s c o n t i , M a n n , Nietzsche;
Death in Venice
301
A.
Thomas Noms, Nietzsehe a n d Vico o n I r o n y
a n d C u l t u r a l Dissolution
313
Beverly Allen, Nietzsche's Italian Decline: T h e Poets
333
INTRODUCTION
Nietzsche in Italy: the reciprocal commerce between his work and
that of the peninsula (Raphael, Vico, Leopardi, D'Annunzio,
Marinetti, Campana, Evola, Visconti —the list could be extended indefinitely); readings and uses of Nietzsche in contemporary Italian
philosophy and literature; Nietzsche's final five works, written in Italy
in 1888; his breakdown, its possible causes and relation to his
philosophy as a whole; the nature of Nietzsche's experience in his
"proven place" south of Provence, especially Genova, Como, Sorrento,
and, of course, Torino, where he collapsed at the turn of the year
1889. The topic Nietzsche in Italy has generated a wide variety of
responses and treatments from these twenty-three contributors. What
has emerged is a double record of Nietzsche's effect on Italy and of
Italy on Nietzsche, of Italy, in other words, as subsoil and germination of Nietzschean seed. The conjunction of these moments —the
"third face" of this Doppelgàngerische relation— is visibly documented in
Nietzsche's final presence and work in Torino, in 1888, on the margin
of sanity, The many unanswered questions of this borderline experience and writing are taken up by six of the twenty-three contributors, the double relation by the remaining seventeen. And yet,
so many intersections and ramifications cross these essays that it has
been impossible to taxonomize them. What follows is a four-part
grouping governed almost exclusively by considerations of family
resemblance and narrative continuity.
The collection is launched by two of Italy's leading philosophers,
and GIANNI VATTIMO. Tracing the word Gleich in
the Nietzschean formula die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen (the eternal
GIORGIO AGAMBEN
1
2
Nietzsche in Italy
recurrence of the same) to its original meaning of likeness, Agamben
proposes a new interpretation of the will to power as self-affection,
or as the primal passion of Western metaphysics. Vattimo accounts
for contemporary European hermeneutics and deconstruction as a
"correction" of Heideggerian ontology by Nietzschean nihilism. Calling
Nietzsche back to his pre-Pasteurian age, MICHEL SERRES diagnoses
the philosopher's polemic against Christianity as symptomatic of a
very current, pre-antibiotic, microbic phobia. Cheese, not hygiene,
is the formula for health, RENE GIRARD speaks of a microbe within
Nietzsche himself, in the form of a compulsion toward Christianity
which the philosopher was unable to confess to in writing. Commenting on a fragment in which Nietzsche admits to his love for Parsifal,
Girard claims that scholars will never understand the philosopher until
they face up to contradiction as the condition of the very possibility
of his literary activity. This may be the kind of contradiction which
DAVID WELLBERY finds Jùrgen Habermas to ignore in his critique of
Nietzschean aesthetics. For Wellbery, Nietzschean artistic symbolization does not involve a defense of myth, primitivity, or taste, but rather
an asemantic, self-productive inscription of physiographical forces.
The essay of LOUIS MARIN measures the transfigurational thrust of these
forces against the work of two artists the philosopher greatly admired,
Stendhal and Raphael.
Part II moves from topics within Nietzsche's thought to topics
behind, beneath, or beside that thought. In pages from a much longer
study, ANACLETO VERRECCHIA weighs the legitimacy of those secondhand reports to the effect that Nietzsche's madness suddenly erupted
on the occasion of a coachman beating his horse. His verdict: much
was hidden by Franz Overbeck, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, and the
others responsible for this Dostoevskian tale. MAZZINO MONTINARI
reports on a letter from one of Nietzsche's physicians which divulges
yet other un assimilated information. As it turns out, the letter clarifies
not only the real reason for Nietzsche's break with Wagner but also
the conflicting legends of Nietzsche's syphilis and/or sexual abstinence.
Here too there is a verdict: it is unlikely that Nietzsche suffered from
either, AVITAL RONELL performs a reading of psycho-literary tropes
in Nietzsche's experience, including the horse, his chronically
triangular erotic relationships, his "chatter" and fame. In a study of
convalescence in Nietzsche, DAnnunzio, Huysmans, and Baudelaire,
BARBARA SPACKMAN joins Wellbery and Colli in attempting to make
sense of Nietzsche's declared obsession in his last year of sanity —the
Introduction
3
body, DAVID MILLER tests the horse a n d other Z a r a t h u s t r i a n animals
against H e i d e g g e r , the Stoics, a n d the C a r t e s i a n machinae animatae
tradition.
P a r t III e x a m i n e s w h e t h e r Nietzsche's final conceits and projects
from S e p t e m b er 1888 to J a n u a r y 1889 bear any necessary a n d logical
relation to his work as a whole. GIORGIO COLLI characterizes Nietzsche's
final turn to the body as the consequence of an exasperation with theory
a n d as a quest for new mystical w i s d o m . M y own essay suggests that
Nietzsche's conflicting self-representations in these elated m o n t h s
d r a m a t i z e a f u n d a m e n t a l ontology of existential transcendenc e which
has informed his philosophy all along.In what issues in a literal reading
of the statement "God is dead," JEAN-LUC NANCY links paralysis
progressiva — Nietzsche's diagnosed m a l a d y — t o the philosopher's selfpresentation as G o d . G o d h as b e c o m e p a r a l y z e d , and subjectivity
obliterated. Applying the same conceit of self-divinity to parables which
Nietzsche offers "theologically speaking," MILAD DOUEIHI proposes an
u n d e r s t a n d i n g of N i e t z s c h e a n destiny as a h e r m e n e u t i c s of r e a d i n g
and re-writing. ROBERT HARRISON uses the regenerative figures in Nietzsche's final writings —the p h o e n i x , the Crucified, his delusions of att e n d i n g his own funeral —to search out a topology of Nietzschea n
philosophy beyond "the end," whether understood in the Heideggerian
sense of t h e e n d of metaphysics or in the sense of radical finitude.
In a v a r i a n t s t a n d a r d i z ed by the C o l l i - M o n t i n a r i edition of Nietzsche's works (the famous third section of the first chapter of Ecce Homo),
DAVID KRELL discerns an a m b i g u o u s filial agon which, when compared
to other Nietzschea n s t a t e m e n t s and d r e a m s , m a r k s out a place for
the p a t e r n a l in distinction to the views of D e r r i d a , Klossowski, and
Gasché.
O n Nietzsche and his Italian h e r i t a g e , Part I V opens with JEFFREY
SCHNAPP'S analysis of the stylistic transformation of Nietzsche t h r o u gh
his first Italian reception in Gabriele D ' A n n u n z i o . Schnapp's is also
the first translation-edition of the earliest Italian article on Nietzsche,
D ' A n n u n z i o ' s " T h e Beast W h o Wills" of 1892, which finally a p p e a r s
in its entirety. T h e question of the early influence of Nietzsche on
Italian letters is also the occasion for THOMAS SHEEHAN'S philosophical
study of the i m m a n e n t relation between Nietzsche and J u l i u s Evola,
or between appropriative will to power and fascistic metaphysics. Even
H e i d e g g e r , writes S h e e h a n , is unable to help us with the task t h a t
still lies before us — the r e t h i n k i n g of the notion of p r o p e r t y . CLAUDIO
MAGRIS outlines the responses to Nietzsche of Saba, Svevo, Slataper,
4
Nietzsche in Italy
M i c h e l s t a e d t e r , a n d o t h e r T r i e s t i ne writers at the b e g i n n i n g of the
c e n t u r y , ANGUS FLETCHER offers a critical r e a d i n g of Nietzsche's role
in the complex e x c h a n ge between Visconti a n d M a n n in the movie
Death in Venice. Another exchange, this time between irony and cultural
d e c a d e n c e , is r e c o u n t e d in THOMAS NORRIS'S study of Vico a n d Nietzsche. Finally, the collection ends with a glance at those others who
a d m i r e Nietzsche in Italy today, n a m e l y , the poets. H e r e BEVERLY
ALLEN takes a stance n o less decisive t h a n others t a k en t h r o u g h o u t
this v o l u m e as she defends the "French Nietzsche" of feminine, erotic
poets against the " H e i d e g g e r i a n Nietzsche" of their m o r e malicious,
theoretical c o u n t e r p a r t s .
T. H.
Salt Lake City
I November 1987