Gadamer's Repercussions "ss2.33"

NOTES

This essay is the second of a two-part essay on Radio Nietzsche originally written for this commemoration of Hans-Georg Gadamer and his repercussions. In the meantime, Yutaka Nagahara has translated part one in the Japanese journal Gendai shizo [Contemporary thought] 26, no. 14 (1998): 188–219. The two parts will be united in my forthcoming book, Traces of Communism in Capitalist Culture: Essays in the Pre-modern Postmodern. With the exception of what I now call its prologue (including notes) and unless otherwise remarked, the current essay is essentially the same as the one commented upon in this volume by Catherine H. Zuckert.

1. Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us [ca. 1962], trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 1999), 8. Le vide d'une distance prise is one of Althusser's several basic definitions of philosophy (which include the Platonic synoptihos). [BACK]

2. See Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). [BACK]

3. Although he refers several times to this differentiation, see especially Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Text und Interpretation” [1984] (GW2:330–60; here 334). For the original remark and context, see Gadamer and Leo Strauss, “Correspondence Concerning Wahrheit und Methode,” Independent Journal ofPhilosophy 2 (1978): 5–12. In his magnum opus Gadamer had analyzed Dilthey in detail and Nietzsche hardly at all, though he did make the following passing remark. “In raising the question of being and thus reversing the whole direction of Western metaphysics, the true predecessor of Heidegger was neither Dilthey nor Husserl … but rather Nietzsche. Heidegger may have realized this later; but in retrospect we can see that the aims already implicit in Being and Time were to raise Nietzsche's radical critique of ‘Platon-ism’ to the level of the tradition he criticizes, to confront Western metaphysics on its own level, and to recognize that transcendental inquiry is a consequence of modern subjectivity, and so overcome it.” Gadamer, TM 257–58. [BACK]

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4. On Nietzsche as having been in effect Strauss's “point of critical orientation,” see the anti-Straussian account by Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin's, 1988), and the pro-Straussian account by Lawrence Lam-pert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). [BACK]

5. Scholarly discussion of the Dilthey-Nietzsche contretemps (originally mediated by their mutual acquaintance, Heinrich von Stein) began around 1939 but reached its first important stage a decade later in two essays. Jan Kamerbeek's essay, “Dilthey versus Nietzsche,” Studio philosophica 10 (1950): 52–84 (favoring Nietzsche), was followed by Georg Misch's attempted rebuttal (favoring Dilthey), “Dilthey versus Nietzsche: Eine Stimme aus den Niederlanden, Randbemerkungen,” Die Sammlung 7 (1952): 378–95. (Misch, Dilthey's son in law, intended his title to be dismissive.) Several important analyses have appeared in the meantime. See Antonio Negri, Saggi sullo storicismo tedesco: Dilthey e Meinecke (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1959), 124–29; Helmut Pfotenhauer, “Mythos, Natur und historische Hermeneutik: Niet-zsches Stellung zu Dilthey und einigen ‘lebensphilosophischen’ Konzeptionen um die Jahrhundertwende,” Literaturmagazin 12 (1980): 329–72; Johann Figl, “Nietzsche und die philosophischen Hermeneutik des 20. Jahrhunderts: Mil besonderer Beriicksichtigung Diltheys, Heideggers und Gadamer s,” Nietzsche-Studien 10 (1980–81): 408–41; Ernst Wolfgang Orth, “Phanomenologie und spekulative Ontologie bei Dilthey und Nietzsche,” in Dilthey und der Wandel des Philosophiebegriffs seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth (Freiburg im Breisgau: Karl Alber, 1984), 80–120; and Alfredo Marini, Alle origini dellafilosofia contemporanea: Wilhelm Dilthey (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1984), esp. 163–94. [BACK]

6. Heidegger, Beitrage zur Philosophic (Vom Ereignis) [1936–38], ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), 65: 253, and Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), 2: 110. [BACK]

7. See Heidegger, “Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit” [1930–31; first published 1942], in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967), 109–44; here 109, and Nietzsche, i: 158. [BACK]

8. See Heidegger, Beitrdge zur Philosophic, in Gesamtausgabe, 65: 235. Heidegger was most explicit about Nietzsche and Holderlin in this regard in this self-described “esoteric” and “sigetic” text written during the Third Reich, but unpublished until 1989 (though some insiders had had prior access, including Otto Poggeler and perhaps Gadamer). But Heidegger had said much the same thing more publicly in his 1937–38 lecture course, Grundfragen derPhilosophie:Ausgewdhlte “Probleme” der “Logik” (Foundational questions of philosophy: selected “problems” of “logic”), first published in 1984 as volume 45 of the Gesamtausgabe. This publication must have put peculiar pressure on Heideggerians to practice their “damage control”—considerably before the scandal unleashed by Victor Farias and then Hugo Ott several years later. [BACK]

9. To take on Dilthey as your “point of critical orientation” hardly entails rejecting esotericism, even when done to distance yourself from more explicit esotericists like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss. As is well known and discussed at length in Wahrheit und Methode, a crucial text for Heidegger in developing the analytic of historicity in Sein und Zeit was the correspondence between Dilthey and Count Yorck von Wartenburg, then just recently published. Gadamer does not mention that the very first letter contains Yorck's stern caveat that he and Dilthey never divulge themselves

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fully even in this ostensibly private medium because the deepest thoughts must remain unwritten, at most orally transmitted. After all, “what is of superior rank wears superior garb, pearls are worthless to fatten swine.” Paul Yorck von Warten-burg to Dilthey, November 23, 1877, in Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck v. Wartenburg 1877–1897, ed. Sigrid von der Schulenburg (Halle [Saale]: Max Niemeyer, 1923), 1–2; here i. Their entire exchange remained under that caution flag. [BACK]

10. Gadamer, “Destruktion und Dekonstruktion” [1985] (GW2:36i-72; here 368, 372). For the original contretemps between Derrida and Gadamer, see Text und Interpretation: Deutsch-franzosische Debatte, ed. Philippe Forget (Munich: Fink, 1984). If I may be allowed a personal reminiscence, I was privy to some of the thoughts that went into “Destruktion und Dekonstruktion” (which I was later to translate). Gadamer told me that he considered it to be one of his most compressed and important interventions into current philosophical debates. [BACK]

11. See Gadamer, “Nietzsche—der Antipode” [1984] (GW4:448–62). On the importance of Zarathustra's animals, compare Heidegger, “Wer ist Nietzsches Zara-thustra?” [1953], in VortrdgeundAufsdtze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), i: 101–26. This is a compressed version of the argument in Was heijlt Denhen? [Freiburg winter semester 1951–52 and summer semester 1952] (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1954). [BACK]

12. Leo Strauss, On Plato's Symposium [Chicago fall semester 1959], ed. Seth Be-nardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 8, 9. [BACK]

13. Jean Grondin, “Gadamer's Basic Understanding of Understanding,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 36–51, here 49. [BACK]

14. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 294. Compare Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (GWi: 300). [BACK]

15. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (GWi: 3OO, n. 224). Despite its revisions of the execrable first translation, the currently official English text often remains unusable, as it does here: “There is one exception to this anticipation of completeness, namely the case of writing that is presenting something in disguise, e.g., a roman a clef. This presents one of the most difficult hermeneutical problems.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 295–96, n. 22. [BACK]

16. Friedrich Schleiermacher, “General Hermeneutics” [1909], in Hermeneutics and Criticism, And Other Writings, ed. and trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 225–68; here 266; emphasis added. This dictum (no. 45) follows immediately from Schleiermacher's more familiar one (no. 44), a bone of contention between Strauss and Gadamer: “Complete understanding grasped in its highest form is an understanding of the utterer better than he understands himself” (ibid.). [BACK]

17. See especially Gadamer, “Hermeneutik und Historismus” [1961] (GW2: 386–424), as well as Ernest L. Fortin's interview with Gadamer in 1981, published as “Gadamer on Strauss: An Interview,”Interpretation 12, no. i (1984): 1–13. This interview is particularly disappointing (innocuous and mutually congratulatory), particularly given the venue in which it was eventually published. [BACK]

18. See Aristotle, Physics 209b14; also Plato, Second Letter 314b-c; Seventh Letter 34ib, 344c-d; and Phcedrus 264b-c, 275c-276b; also Leo Strauss, The City and Man [1962–64] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 52–62. In addition

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to Gadamer's references or allusions to the unwritten philosophy in Wahrheit und Methode and the many other places where he privileges the spoken over the written (though not normally in the sense meant by Derrida's “logocentricity”), see especially “Dialektik und Sophistik im siebenten Platonischen Brief” [1964] (GW6: 90–115) (where he is particularly adroit in sidestepping some of the most important structures and implications of esotericism, however). Gadamer's interpretation (and indeed embrace) of the “unwritten” essence of philosophy is less radical than the additional stress placed by the most influential modern practitioners of esotericism-Nietzsche and Heidegger-on the “unsaid.” They follow the ancient definition of philosophy as the capacity to be silent. See, for example, Boethius, Philosophic consolationis 2: 74–77, and Nietzsche, Human-All-Too-Human, preface, section 8. For Heidegger, “the capacity to be silent [Schweigenkonnen] is the very origin of language” and “to be silent [Schweigen] is the specific, excellent way and means of the capacity to speak [des Redenkonnens].” Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit [Freiburg winter semester 1933–34], in Sem und Wahrheit, ed. Hartmut Tietjen, in Gesamtaus-gabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001), 36/37: 81–264, here 107, 109. In a particularly sibylline phrase, “What is merely not spoken does not preserve the unspoken.” Heidegger, “‘Germanien’: Das Unausgesprochene” [1943], in Zu Holderlin [und] Griechenlandreise, ed. Curd Ochwadt, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 75: 279–86; here 279. Gadamer selected as epigraph for his Philosophical Apprenticeships the Baconian de nobis ispsis silemus, which is remarkable not least because this text contains one of his few extended discussions of his activities during the Third Reich. The significance of this epigraph as a traditional index of the presence esotericism has gone unnoticed or has been trivialized by Gadamer's minions, as for example by Robert J. Dostal in “Gadamer: The Man and His Work,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, 13–35; here 28–29. Of course, at stake in all our discussions must not (only) be speaking or saying perse but (also) writing. Although his full reasons for saying so remained unclear, Strauss said that “writing on the highest level is higher than nonwriting on the highest level.” Strauss, On Plato's Symposium, 250. In Stendhal's words, so dear to Nietzsche and thus likely Heidegger, “Une croyance presque instinctive chez moi c'est que tout homme puissant ment quand il parle, et a plus forte raison quand il ecrit” (as cited by Nietzsche in his unpublished notebook 11 [33], used in the years 1887–88). Nietzsche's affirmation of Stendhal's remark, which Socrates could well have uttered, makes risible most attempts to read Nietzsche, but especially all those dragged behind the pious hope that by placing him in “his nineteenth-century context… we have a better opportunity of engaging in a meaningful dialogue with his multivalent thought.” Robert C. Holub, “Understanding Perspectivism: Nietzsche's Dialogue with His Contemporaries,” in Gadamer's Century, 111–33; here 131. Historicism has nothing to say to or about a project incepted from the proposition that “the context of a body of thought cannot be appropriately understood so long its unifying center has not been disclosed and pondered.” Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue [1988], trans. J. Harvey Lomax, preface to the American edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), xiii-vii; here xiii-iv. [BACK]

19. Note the symptomatic tension—to the point of implosion—between the subject of the utterance (enonce) and the subject of the enunciation (enonciation) in the last sentence of Gadamer's postmortem (or postpartum) response to Derrida:

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“Whoever wants me to take deconstruction to heart and insists on difference, stands at the beginning of a conversation, not at its end [nicht an seinem Ziele].” Gadamer, “Destruktion und Dekonstruktion” (GWa: 372). According to Derrida's standpoint, however, that conversation can't begin, in part because there is reason to doubt Gadamerian “good will.” See Jacques Derrida, “Guter Wille zur Macht (II),” in Text und Interpretation, 62–77. This may help explain the flustered and even aggressive tone of Gadamer's conclusion. The subject about which the subject is speaking is dialogue and opening, but the subject who is speaking sounds as if he is prescriptively foreclosing all but his terms of approach to that other, distant subject. [BACK]

20. John Cage, Silence [ 1961] (Hanover, NH:Wesleyan University Press: 1973),xi. [BACK]

21. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit [1927], 7th edition (Tubingen: Max Nie-meyer), 150. Recall Heidegger's later defense of interpretive “force”: because the great thought of great thinkers is “unsaid,” authentic “Auseinandersetzung with them operates on the ground of an interpretation that is already decided and removed from any debate.” (A lot of nonsense has been written about Heidegger's “turn” and thus about his student Gadamer's response to it and his own turn. For the violence required to read the unwritten there has never yet been a sufficiently radical turn. Communists take particular note.) In my next sentence, I have taken the notion of “vindicating the positive function of prejudice” from Vattimo, though he seems to assume that this is more unproblematic than I am convinced it is. See Gianni Vattimo, “Gadamer and the Problem of Ontology,” trans. Stefano Franchi, in Gadamer's Century, 299–306; here 303. [BACK]

22. Alasdair Maclntyre, “On Not Having the Last Word: Thoughts on Our Debts to Gadamer,” in Gadamer's Century, 157–72; here 169. [BACK]

23. Hans Albert, “Critical Rationalism and Universal Hermeneutics,” trans. Michael Isenberg, in Gadamer's Century, 15–24; here 18. The first of these apt phrases, “urbanization of the Heideggerian province,” was notoriously coined by Habermas. [BACK]

24. See Everett L. Wheeler, Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery (Leiden: Brill, 1997). [BACK]

25. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 382. Indeed, one of the only readers of Sein und Zeit who has taken this kind of articulation seriously is Johannes Fritsche, “On Brinks and Bridges in Heidegger,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 18, no. i (1995): 111–86, and Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), esp. 1–28. [BACK]

26. See Albert, Kritik der reinen Hermeneutik: Der Antirealismus und das Problem des Verstehens (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1994), 36–77. This chapter on Gadamer is entitled “Im Banne Heideggers.” To be in somebody's Bonne is to be under his or her “spell” and thus “spellbound,” often with an effect that is “baneful” (Old Norse bani, “destruction” or “death”). If Heidegger and Gadamer and we all remain im Banne of any one thing, I suppose it to be Radio Nietzsche or some cognate. [BACK]

27. Let me stress, here at the outset, that there is little “new” about Nietzsche's project, as I understand it. Indeed, what I call “Radio Nietzsche” (as I think Nietzsche himself must have conceived it, given his social and psychological formation) is exceptionally “old”—in its intended aftereffect in our ostensibly “postmodern” or “postcontemporary” era. His intention was to keep alive the premodern concept of “order of rank” by employing an updated version of a principle of esoteric communication

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that predates Plato and the pre-Socratics. In “hermeneutic” terms, Radio Nietzsche remains the most exemplary current version—on behalf of what I regard as an objectionable politico-philosophical agenda—of the archaic (Greek) concept of kledon. “The God Hermes is the patron of thieves, merchants, and travelers; of heralds and what heralds pronounce, their herygma. He also has to do with oracles, including a dubious sort known as kledon, which at the moment of its announcement may seem trivial or irrelevant, the secret sense declaring itself only after long delay, and in circumstances not originally foreseeable. Hermes is cunning, and occasionally violent: a trickster, a robber…. Such operations may require the professional exercise of stealth or violence.” Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (ig'j‘j/‘jS) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), i. My analysis of Radio Nietzsche is intended, therefore, to be a form of countervio-lence to Nietzsche's “hermeneutic” violence, his “esoterrorism.” Finally, I strongly suspect, but am not completely certain, that Hans-Georg Gadamer and philosophical hermeneutics generally are part of the problem of this entire problematic, not the solution to it. In related terms, Nietzsche (like Heidegger) wrote as a maitre de verite, that is, as a modern practitioner of the archaic art of “assertoric truth” or “efficacious speech” (Greek krainein), in Detienne's seminal sense, which is also attuned to the esoteric problematic. See Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece [ 1967], trans. Janet Lloyd [New York: Zone Books, 1996]). For a useful introduction to Nietzsche's appropriation of important elements of krainein (though the author does not take adequate account of the esoteric dimension), see Beatrice Han, “Nietzsche and the ‘Masters of Truth’: The pre-Socratics and Christ,” in Nietzsche and the Divine, ed. John Lippitt and Jim Urpeth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 115–36. My own analysis of Radio Nietzsche is intended as an act of counter-violence to Nietzsche's consequent “hermeneutic violence” and “esoterrorism,” so to speak. (N.B.: This note was not in the original version of this essay, to which Catherine H. Zuckert responds in this festschrift for Gadamer. Yet I doubt that her response would have been substantially different had she read this note's attempted clarification earlier, if one assumes, as I do, that in both this note and in the essay I am only “making the obvious obvious,” to paraphrase the Platonic Socrates.) [BACK]

28. Some readers will recognize that certain phrases and concepts in this sentence, as well as in the immediately following ones, have been appropriated-sometimes verbatim and without quotation marks—from a key passage in Leo Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing” [1941], m Persecution and the Art of'Writing (New York: Free Press, 1952), 22–37; here 24 They may also notice that I am turning these phrases and concepts against the Straussian tradition, but not necessarily against its controversial methodology and deep insight into Nietzsche. [BACK]

29. Nietzsche to Paul Deussen, January 3, 1888, in Nietzsche, Kritische Gesam-tausgabe, Briefwechsel, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1975 ff), 3/5: 221–23; here 222; emphasis added. Henceforth I will cite this edition as KGB, followed by volume, section, and page numbers. (One year to the date of this letter Nietzsche was to suffer his irrevocable breakdown in Turin.) Deussen (1845–1919) had been a friend of Nietzsche's during their university days, going on to become one of the first preeminent scholars of so-called Eastern philosophy, in particular the Indie Vedanta. Deussen was a crucial source

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(more so than Schopenhauer) of Nietzsche's interest in the ancient international tradition of esotericism and in the caste system based on the “Laws of Manu.” [BACK]

30. Louis Althusser as cited in Olivier Corpet and Francois Matheron, “Presentation,” Ecrits sur la psychanalyse: Freud et Lacan, ed. Olivier Corpet and Francois Matheron (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1993), 7–14; here 12. [BACK]

31. Robert Pfaller, “Negation and Its Reliabilities: An Empty Subject for Ideology?” in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Zizek (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 223–46; here 232. See further Pfaller's extended treatment of this problem in Althusser: Das Schweigen im Text; Epistemologie, Psychoanalyse und Nominal-ismus in Louis Althussers Theorie derLehture (Munich: Fink, 1997). [BACK]

32. Pfaller, “Negation and Its Reliabilities,” 233. [BACK]

33. Were my terminology not ungainly enough already, it would be more precise to replace the term “exo/esoteric” with “aesoteric” (a-esoteric). In mind is homol-ogy with Heidegger's seminal interpretive translation of Greek aletheia not (“positively”) as “truth” (Wahrheit) but (“negatively”) as “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit). In all cases (the epistemological and/or ontological and/or discursive), the alpha privative emphasizes that one can never access truth or the (in any case “unwritten”) esoteric except by various forms of indirection-not least (or most) by deception and encryption. And, I add, we must access Truth by our decisions. (N.B.: This note was not in the original version of my essay.) [BACK]

34. For a discussion of this concept and problem, see Geoff Waite, Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996). The overhasty, but very influential, depiction of Nietzsche as anti-Hegelian was classically established by Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche et la Philosophic (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). [BACK]

35. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967 ff), 7/3: 206. Henceforth I will cite this edition as KGW, followed by volume, section, and page numbers. [BACK]

36. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? [1991], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 6. If one wanted to put it this way, part of my project is to dislocate what I regard as Deleuze's superior earlier work from that produced after his association with Guattari (e.g., Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus). This is not to say, however, that I wish to denigrate all of Guattari's overwork, most notably his collaboration with Antonio Negri in their coauthored Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance [1985], with a “Postscript, 1990” by Toni Negri, trans. Michael Ryan et al. (New York: Semiotext[e], 1990). [BACK]

37. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 5–6. [BACK]

38. Nietzsche, KGW, 7/3: 207. [BACK]

39. That Nietzsche, and after him Heidegger, remains entangled to various degrees and at various times in a Platonic and post-Platonic philosophical problematic should hardly be news. I am thinking first and foremost of Stanley Rosen's ongoing reflections on the complex Platonism of Nietzsche and Heidegger (see especially The Mash of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995]). For another quasi-Straussian perspective on Nietzsche's Platonism, see Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), and Leo Strauss and Nietzsche

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(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). And, for a “left-wing” perspective on Nietzsche's Platonism, though not esotericism, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Apocryphal Nietzsche” [1972], trans. Timothy D. Bent, in The Subject of Philosophy, ed. Thomas Trezise, trans. Thomas Trezise et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 37–56. Finally, for “left-wing” analyses of the problem of esotericism and modern Platonic political philosophy, see Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin's, 1988), esp. ch. 9, “Post-Modernity: Plato or Nietzsche?” and Teresa Orozco, Platonische Gewalt: Gadamerspolitische Hermmeutik derNS-Zeit (Hamburg: Argument, 1995), and “The Art of Allusion: Hans-Gadamer's Philosophical Interventions under National Socialism,” trans. Jason Gaiger, Radical Philosophy 78 (July/Aug. 1996): 17–26 (reprinted in this volume). [BACK]

40. Kleist refers to the recent invention of the electrical telegraph by physician and physicist Samuel Thomas Sommering (1755–1830). See Heinrich von Kleist, “Entwurf einer Bombenpost” [181 o], in Sdmtliche Werhe und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sem-bdner (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), 2: 385–86; here 385. I'm grateful to Rachel Magshamhrain for directing my attention to Kleist's extraordinary text-Wittgenstein's source, as the continuation of the passage I cite makes clearer. If there is an earlier reference in literature to the concept and even technology of the letter bomb, I don't know it. (N.B.: This epigraph and the following one from Kleist were not in the original version of my essay.) [BACK]

41. See, for instance, Christopher Schiff, “Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in Early Surrealism,” and Frances Dyson, “The Ear that Would Hear Sounds in Themselves: John Cage 1935–1965,” both in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and theAvant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 139–89 and 373–407, respectively. [BACK]

42. Charles Grivel, “The Phonograph's Horned Mouth,” trans. Stephen Sarta-relli, in Wireless Imagination, 33–61; here 33. [BACK]

43. Allen S. Weiss, “Radio, Death, and the Devil: Artaud's Pour enfinir avec lejuge-ment deDieu,” in Wireless Imagination, 269–307; here 293. [BACK]

44. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Booh XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsycho-Analysis 1964 [1973], ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W W Norton, 1981), 59. [BACK]

45. Le seminaire deJacques Lacan, Livre VII: L'ethique de la psychanalyse 7959–7960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: du Seuil, 1986), 212. [BACK]

46. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 5. [BACK]

47. Nietzsche, KGW, 6/1: 185. [BACK]

48. On Nietzsche and these issues, see Waite, “The Politics of Reading Formations: The Case of Nietzsche in Imperial Germany, 1870–1919,” New German Critique 29 (Spring/Summer 1983): 185–209, and “Nietzsche's Baudelaire, or, The Sublime Proleptic Spin of His Politico-Economic Thought,” Representations 50 (Spring 1995): 14–52. [BACK]

49. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio, 3. [BACK]

50. Ibid. [BACK]

51. Ibid., 6. [BACK]

52. Nietzsche, KGW, 7/1: 9. [BACK]

53. Ibid., 195. [BACK]

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54. In his Spiegel interview, Heidegger remarked that his thinking is “not for everyone”; that “National Socialism had gone in the direction” (correctly, in his opinion still) of using thinking to “assist technology to find its proper limits,” even if individual Nazis “were much too inexpert in thinking” to succeed; that the intervening years following the Third Reich had “failed to convince” him about the value of “democracy” or of public access to thinking at its deepest levels; that true thinking can occur only in the German and Greek languages; and that “another thinking” can still “change the world,” but only through “indirect influence.” This, then, was the context in which he noted of his own work that “It can also be that the way of thinking today leads to silence in order to preserve it from being sold dirt cheap [ver-ramscht] within a year. It can also be that it needs 300 years to have its ‘effect.’” “Spiegel-Gesprach mil Martin Heidegger,” in Antwort: Martin Heidegger im Gesprach, ed. Giinther Neske and Emil Kettering (Pfullingen: Neske, 1988), 81–114; here 96, 103, 105, 109, 107–8, and 101, respectively. The interview took place September 23, 1966, but was published posthumously, as per prior agreement with Heidegger, in Der Spiegel on May 31, 1976, under the heading “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten” (only a god can save us). Compare Heraclitus's Fragment B 92 (Diels-Kranz): “The Sibyl-who with raving voice [|amvo|a.evq> oTO|a.aTi] utters through the god what cannot be ridiculed, embellished, or beautified—reaches out over thousands of years [xiXtoov errov]. [BACK]

55. Nietzsche, KGW, 5/2: 406. [BACK]

56. Contrast Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 302. [BACK]

57. See Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124–28. [BACK]

58. By contrast, Nietzsche's objection—most thoroughly in David Friedrich Strauss as Confessor and Writer (1873)—that the great alternative kind of writing and thinking in his time, the newspaper, was necessarily democratizing may appear rather less prescient. Critics of the newspaper on the right, center, and left—including Karl Kraus, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin—have tended to conclude that its power is anything but democratic, that is, that it has rendered the newspaper reader “increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around him by way of experience,” that “the linguistic usage of newspapers [has] paralyzed the imagination of their readers,” and that “the principles of journalistic information (freshness of the news, brevity, comprehensibility, and, above all, lack of connection between the individual news items)” only serve “to isolate what happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of the reader.” Walter Benjamin, “Uber einige Motive bei Baudelaire” [1939], in GesammelteSchriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 1/2: 605–53; here 610–11. To give the critique another leftist spin, the newspaper prevents the formations of a geopolitical consciousness of the kind necessary to produce authentic communism and with which Nietzsche has been in competition. Similarly, all “experiential” criticisms of the newspaper, e-mail, and the ostensibly “interactive” internet, which often imagine themselves to be Nietzschean, can really appeal only to Nietzsche's many exoteric attacks on newsprint. From his esoteric perspective, all such baneful effects are actively desired by him for a huge slice of humanity, in order to increase

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the mechanisms of social and intellectual hierarchization. And this exo/eso-teric problematic can be expected to carry over mutatis mutandis into his proleptic critique of more current forms of mass-cultural spectacle and technoculture. [BACK]

59. Nietzsche, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Karl Schlechta et al. (Munich: Beck, 1933–42), 2: 71. [BACK]

60. Nietzsche, KGW, 8/2: 159. [BACK]

61. Some of these remarks are conveniently assembled for the English-speaking reader as Book 4 (“Discipline and Breeding”) of Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968). [BACK]

62. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio, 22 [BACK]

63. The German title of Nietzsche's later workjenseits von Gut und Base: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future) plays aggressively both with Wagner's slogan of the “artwork of the future” (Zukunftsmusik) and with the classical philologist Ulrich Wilamowitz-Moellendorff ‘s parodic ridicule of Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), as “philology of the future” (Zukunftsphilologie). Rohde in turn ridiculed Wilamowitz-Moellendorff's detailed and hostile criticisms as Afterphilologie: meaning not only post or pseudo-philology but also an ass-backwards philology of anality for assholes, “anal-philology” (German After, “anus,” “backwards,” “second-hand,” “fake”—with the homophobic and/or homosexual associations being rather more closeted than open). For the facsimile reprint of this entire confrontation, see Der Streit um Nietzsches “GeburtderTragodie”:DieSchriftenvonE. Rohde, R. Wagner, U. v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, ed. Karlfried Griinder (Hildesheim: Olms, 1969). The abusive term Afterphilosophie had enjoyed a rather long history in German thought, significantly predating the contretemps between Nietzsche and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. [BACK]

64. Friedrich A Kittler, Discourse Networks: i8oo/i<)oo [ 1985], trans. Michael Met-teer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 181. [BACK]

65. On Nietzsche's encounter with the typewriter in 1882, though not on the more sinister dimensions of Nietzschean logographia, see Kittler, Discourse Networks, 177–205. [BACK]

66. Ibid., 193; citing Friedrich Herbertz, “Zur Psychologic des Machinenschrei-bens,” Zeitschriftfur angewandtePsychologie 2 (1909): 551–61; here 560. [BACK]

67. Heidegger, Parmenides [Freiburg winter semester 1942–43], ed. Manfred S. Frings, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), 54: 119–20. It is small surprise that current discussions of technologies like hypertext, virtual reality, and cyberspace take their point of departure from an appreciative embrace of such passages in Heidegger (see, e.g., Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, 55–72; here especially 63). [BACK]

68. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 191. [BACK]

69. Nietzsche, KGW, 6/3: 324; also Kittler, Discourse Networks, 191. [BACK]

70. Nietzsche, KGB, 3/6: 309–10. [BACK]

71. Nietzsche, KGB, 3/5:482–83. [BACK]

72. Nietzsche, KGB, 7/3: 363. [BACK]

73. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 21. [BACK]

74. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction” [1844], in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International, 1976), 3: 175–87; here 182. [BACK]

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75. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic [1 7705 and 17805], trans, and ed. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 241. [BACK]

76. Althusser, “SurFeuerbach” [i()6>j],mEcritsphilosophiquesetpolitiques, TomeII, ed. Francois Matheron (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1995), 169–251; here 227. [BACK]

77. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject” [1979], trans. Barbar Harlow, in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 138–207; here 159. [BACK]

78. Ibid., 162. [BACK]

79. For an astute analysis of aesthetic aspects of “mood” in Nietzsche with some mention of the combative project, see Stanley Corngold, “Nietzsche's Moods,” Studies in Romanticism 29 (Spring 1990): 67–90; for a similar analysis of Heidegger, see Corngold, “Heidegger's Being and Time: Implications for Poetics” [1976], in The Fate of the Self, 197–218. Heidegger is most responsible for elevating mood into its properly philosophical dimension in Sein und Zeit but especially in his 1929–30 lecture course Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit, where philosophy itself is defined as nothing less than the capacity to create authentic mood. It was Nietzsche, however, who eventually gave Heidegger his mature notion of the concept of mood as physical embodiment. As Heidegger put it in his 1936–37 lectures on Nietzsche (punningly, in the untranslatable German), “every feeling is a bodying tuned in a certain way, a mood that bodies in a certain way.” Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), i: 119. There are worse formal descriptions of the desired effect of Radio Nietzsche on us “listeners.” (N.B.: This note augments one in the original version of my essay.) [BACK]

80. Georges Bataille, La part maudite [1950–54], in CEuvres completes, ed. Denis Hollieretal. (Paris: Gallimard, 1970–88), 8: 405. [BACK]

81. Gottfried Benn, “Nietzsche—nach funfzig Jahren” [1950], in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1968), 4: 1046–57; here 1048. [BACK]

82. See Benn, “Der Radardenker” [1949], in Gesammelte Werke, 6: 1435–51 [BACK]

83. The original program was first broadcast from Frankfurt am Main on July 31, 1950, and subsequently rebroadcast (after the unification of Germany) on the same Hessischer Rundfunk, September 19, 1991, as “Gesprach iiber Nietzsche” (Conversation about Nietzsche). Transcripts have subsequently been printed. See, for example, Max Horkheimer (with Theodor W. Adorno and Hans-Georg Gadamer), “Uber Nietzsche und uns: Zum 50. Todestag des Philosophen,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1989), 13: 111–20. Obviously what is crucial to radio is missing from the transcript: the modulations of voice and mood (what Adorno might call the “punctuation marks”), in short, the link to oral-aural tradition. I will cite in my translation from the original broadcast. [BACK]

84. Herbert Schnadelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933 [1982], trans. Eric Mathews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), i. [BACK]

85. For preliminary remarks on the constitutive influence of Nietzsche on Horkheimer and Adorno, seejiirgen Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Rereading Dialectic of Enlightenment,” New German Critique 26 (Spring/Summer 1982): 13–30. But on this issue Habermas places too exclusive a focus on their early Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) as their “blackest, most nihilistic book” (p. 13). I have argued elsewhere that Habermas himself, in whom the Frankfurt School is arguably

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most alive today (along with Axel Honneth), is hardly immune from Nietzsche's influence (see Waite, “The Politics of Reading Formations: The Case of Nietzsche in Imperial Germany, 1870–1919,” 201–3). It is evident from Horkheimer's drafts for Dialectic of Enlightenment that he was particularly under Nietzsche's influence, and had much to do with pushing Adorno in a Nietzschean direction to become yet another “leftist” corps/e. [BACK]

86. For a discussion of this powerful trope of German political thought with particular focus on Heidegger's updated variant, see Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 79–81 (though this is ultimately a superficial book on Heidegger himself, unaware as it is of even the question of exo/esotericism). [BACK]

87. In the broadcast Adorno also alludes to Hegel's first and most basic definition of Socratic irony, namely, as a subcategory of the dialectic, insofar as irony “grants force to what should be granted force, as if it had force, but only in order to allow it inherent destruction to develop itself: the universal irony of the world.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werhe in zwanzig Banden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 12: 460. But rather more to the point for Adorno's argument would be Hegel's technical definition elsewhere of “parody” as “the use of forms in the era of their impossibility” in order to “demonstrate this impossibility and thereby altering the forms.” Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 303. But note also that, for Hegel, “Hypocrisy is the truest irony,” since it allows us wantonly to contradict ourselves for subjective motives (Werhe, 12: 461). [BACK]

88. Althusser, “Philosophy,” in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, 97. [BACK]

89. In hermeneutic terms, developed by Gadamer through Heidegger, a main technique of exo/esotericism is “giving-to-understand” (Zu-verstehen-geben), and what in a different tradition Michel Pecheux, following Althusser and semiotic theory, calls transdiscours (see, e.g., Analyseautomatiquedu discours [Paris: Dunod, 1969]). Gadamer's 1934 lecture on Plato's Republic, and on the reason why the foundation of the State apparently requires the expulsion of poets, rigorously refused to give his audience what they most expected, namely, the connection between this detailed philosophical, historical question to the just recent instauration of the National Socialist state. Gadamer was thus employing a form of sigetics whereby the speaker tells his audience everything except what they fervently desire to hear, so that they are given the illusion of having produced this meaning themselves. Which in this case was the bridge between Plato to Hitler. For a discussion of Gadamer in this regard, see Orozco, Pla-tonische Gewalt, although Nietzsche is not a main exhibit in her argument. Orozco has made a good circumstantial case that Gadamer's philosophical writings and professional activities during the Third Reich suggest that he was working, quite selfconsciously, within the esoteric “oral” tradition of philosophy extending, or so he held, back to Plato, and that his success in concealing his own deepest political agenda (in tune with what I would call Heideggerian political ontology) explains Gadamer's speedy rehabilitation as a (if not indeed the) philosopher of postwar West Germany. Yet Orozco does not really tackle the problem of the perlocutionary implementation of Gadamer's project, nor does she grasp the full dimensions of philosophical esotericism. (Orozco is not alone in this regard; a similar problem informs

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the account of Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996]; and those of us who have been touched at all positively by Gadamer, his person or works, must read Orozco's study with particular sadness.) In any case and whatever the deficiencies of their extensive appropriation of Nietzsche may be, there is no fully comparable problematic in Adorno and Horkheimer, whose conscious grasp of philosophical es-otericism was as inadequate as that of the various left-wing French tendencies had been. To begin to grasp properly Nietzschean esotericism, however, we have to turn from the “left” to the “right” — but not to Gadamer, who is prudently silent about the matter, but to Leo Strauss and Stanley Rosen. [BACK]

90. Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, ed. Michael Speaks, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995), 187. [BACK]

91. See ibid., xx, 8–9. In the Japanese version of this essay I go into this difference in detail. [BACK]

92. Ibid., 188. Note that in the German idealist tradition (in which Marx is to be included here), Idee (idea) is defined, roughly, as “an ideal that is realized, concretized,” and that Schein plays simultaneously with two senses, “appearance” and “illumination”; in other terms, it is phenomenal appearance of something thus rendered im /perceptible and exo/esoteric. [BACK]

93. Paul A Cantor, “Leo Strauss and Contemporary Hermeneutics,” in Leo Strauss's Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement, ed. Alan Udoff (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991), 267–314; here 277. [BACK]

94. Nietzsche, KGW, 7/3: 234–35. Again, the long dashes indicate illegibility. The passage then concludes: “Preparation for becoming Masters of the Earth: The Legislators of the Future. At least out of our children. Basic attention to marriages.” [BACK]

95. For by far the best account, see Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment. [BACK]

96. Contrast Jacques Derrida, Otobiographies: L'enseignement de Nietzsche et la poli-tique du nompropre (Paris: Galilee, 1984). [BACK]

97. Antonio Gramsci, “Concept of the ‘National Popular’” [1930], in Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, trans. William Boelhower (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 206–12; here 211. See further Gramsci's remarks entitled “Father Bresciani's Progeny,” including the editors' comments (pp. 298–341). “Brescianism”—from the Jesuit priest and novelist Antonio Bresciani—was one of Gramsci's code terms for ‘Jesuitism,” a tendency he tried to combat also within his own Communist Party. [BACK]

98. Nietzsche, KGW, 8/1: 116–17. [BACK]

99. “Zarathustra gliicklich dariiber, dass der Kampf der Stande voruber ist, und jetzt endlich Zeit ist fur sein Rangordnung der Individuen Hass auf das demokratis-che Nivellirungs-System ist nur im Vordergrund: eigentlich ist er sehr froh, dass dies so weit ist. Nun kann er seine Aufgabe losen.—” Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Fritz Koegel (Leipzig: Naumann, 1899), 12: 325. [BACK]

101. Deleuze, “Letter to a Harsh Critic” [1 973], in Negotiations [Pourparles, 1972–1990, 1990], trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 3–12; here 6. [BACK]

102. Ibid. See also the translator's note on page 184. [BACK]