Nietzsche: All the Names in History

Friedrich Nietzsche (2014) by Don Mirakl

deviantart.com

I.

Whether we describe Nietzsche's anti-Christian and transhumanist late philosophy as Dionysian or schizoanalytic, it all comes down to the same thing: the shattering of the ego.

For the sovereign individual is not one who narcissistically and solipsistically proclaims themselves the big I AM - as if they were the great be-all and end-all - but one happy to declare themselves all the names in history ...

A declaration which, at the molecular level of atoms, is literally true - even if, for some readers, it's also a clear indication of Nietzsche's leap into madness (that mask which hides the most fatal of all certainties).


II.

For Nietzsche, the question of identity is, then, of fundamental importance. Thus his obsession with masks and with the processes by which one becomes what one is (subjectivation).

Refusing any grammatical fiction or essential model of self, he stamps becoming with the character of being. Which is to say, Nietzsche thinks being in terms of a chaotic and competing diversity of elements; a primordial affectivity that he calls the will to power. 

Indeterminable as it is, Dasein is free to assume an infinite variety of forms - including that of a dancing star or a Caesar with the soul of Christ - once it has been given style; the latter being Nietzsche's term for the manner in which knowledge and art are able to harmonize forces without reactively seeking to repress or eliminate those that moralists find troubling or sinful (the pride of the peacock, the lust of the goat, etc).

For when affirmative and strong, the will to power takes upon itself not only difference and plurality, but evil. When negative and weak, however, it retreats behind an anaemic ideal of goodness as conceived by those who lack the ability to master their inner chaos and wish to speak but a single truth with one voice and in the name of one Love ...