c.8 Linguistic Readings

If it is, in Foucault’s view, anthropology that ceases to breathe in Nietzsche, it is “radical reflection upon language” that commences. With Nietzsche, so Foucault, philosophy is united with philology “as the analysis of what is said in the depths of discourse”. This is the modern form of criticism. Concisely, whereas Marx’s Das Kapital is an exegesis of value and Freud’s writings add up to an exegesis of what is not said, Nietzsche’s work embodies an exegesis of certain Greek words.⁸⁴³

Hannes Böhringer insists that the “metonymia of language” interested Nietzsche who wished to turn “all cosmology and theology to anthropology”. As he argues, “Nietzsche’ whole philosophy of value can be understood as philosophico-speculative etymology of the Sanskrit root ma / man”. This root is the source for a family of concepts, such as thought, remembrance, sensation, lie, cure, mind, man. It has its

correlative in the Greek root µεν / µαν that, in turn, resources such notions as remembrance, learning, animation, inspiritedness, manic rage, muse, music. Böhringer refers to the etymological studies of Georg Curtius, one of Nietzsche ’s professors in Leipzig, who held that the root is “the last meaningful sound complex”. Böhringer goes through Nietzsche’s early notes and shows how the considerations of knowing as measuring and the music drama as animated measuredness figure prominently: etymology was seriously taken as the radical search of radixes. Böhringer concludes: ”Not only his early

philosophical work, but Nietzsche’s whole philosophy is an example of the philosophical potential of the nineteenth-century historico-philological science.”⁸⁴⁴

Daniel Bell is interested in “Nietzsche’s theorizing as a philosophical philologist”. According to him,

“the development of the Geisteswissenschaften, historical and hermeneutic, became the occasion and indeed condition for a rethinking by Nietzsche of the general forms of our knowing, and for a freeing of philosophy from the ecological constraints of classical epistemology”. Bell’s view could be seen as mediating between the readings of Foucault and Böhringer, since he takes Nietzsche’s epistemological insights and interpretative practice to be “more indebted to the historicist and hermeneutic traditions of the Geisteswissenschaften than to Darwinism despite his reservations about the former’s metaphysics of

’man’.”⁸⁴⁵

“Linguistic” readings may encompass very different approaches from the standpoint of, loosely termed, philosophy of language, hermeneutics, discourse analytics, semiology/semiotics, narratology, intertextual research, rhetoric, deconstruction and so on. A special case would be the study on the nature of

Nietzsche’s philological work, a study that can be seen as feeding the other “linguistic” alternatives. One recent assessment tells that the interruption, in his philological career, was particularly dramatic, since Nietzsche’s methodological renewal in investigating Theognis can still be held as revolutionary and that many of his attributions of anonymous ancient texts have later been confirmed⁸⁴⁶.

Nietzsche conducted philological investigations and lectured on rhetoric. It has been said that, as a philosopher, he continued to think that rhetoric is not at all about something “empty, hollow,

phraseological”⁸⁴⁷. Indeed, Hans Blumenberg has even said that “rhetoric is the essence of Nietzsche’s philosophy”⁸⁴⁸. Be that as it may, a student of Isocrates said, recently, that even though Nietzsche was not very interested in this particular, it is “the Nietzschean mediation” that still appears as the “only access toward another reading” of his texts other than the platonicizing one⁸⁴⁹.

As Josef Kopperschmidt writes, the new and original in Nietzsche is to be found in “the stringency with which he, as a classical philologist and especially as a connoisseur and translator of Aristotle’s Rhetoric that he highly valued, inherited its central categories” and “used them methodically” in a critique of

impure reason⁸⁵⁰. With the shared emphasis on Nietzsche’s acquaintance of rhetorical theory and practice, Angèle Kremer-Marietti holds that “Nietzsche’s critical positions rest on his fundamental critique of language”⁸⁵¹.

This critique has been seen to involve sensitivity to the constraints of language on all thinking, the prison of the syntax⁸⁵². It involves recognizing “deep-rooted thinking habits” that, for instance, make one see

“sentences [as] basically predications in which properties are attributed to some substances or the substances are related to one another”⁸⁵³. Yet, Harry Redner has contested this opinion. According to him, Nietzsche’s understanding of language is “shallow” and “naive”, on the grounds that, as Redner sees it, he cannot appreciate the transformation process of language and thinks himself able to totally recode the obsolete, fetishist instrument⁸⁵⁴. Another recent critical reaction amounts to the claim that Nietzsche embraces a paradox by striving for “post-linguistic perspective on the world”, after “casting off the spell of language”, while being doomed to use language to convey his points⁸⁵⁵.

“Linguistic” readings can enter in an exchange with other kinds of readings. Staten’s “psychodialectic”, that was mentioned above, is based on the insight that “libidinal forces too are textual”⁸⁵⁶. This might be related to the view that Claudia Crawford has distilled from Nietzsche’s early writings, to the effect that unconscious drives and urges have a language of their own⁸⁵⁷. The prime example of applying a

psychoanalytically inspired interpretation on Nietzsche’s writings is Luce Irigaray’s Amante marine. De Friedrich Nietzsche (1980) where the latter’s imagery of water, earth and sexuality is critically and creatively extended and countered⁸⁵⁸. As for the alternative of opting for the “uniformity of forms of thought and language”, for the schemes that are both cognitive and linguistic, Stack has proposed a reading of Nietzsche as structuralist, while remarking that Nietzsche would probably not tolerate the scienticist aspects in the structuralist anthropology⁸⁵⁹.

It was seen, in previous sections, that such makers of modern hermeneutics as Gadamer (see I.b) and Ricoeur (see II.b.2) have acknowledged Nietzsche’s importance. Surprisingly, in the light of these acknowledgements, Nietzsche was not often mentioned by hermeneuticians as their forerunner⁸⁶⁰. However, Gadamer has said that “the career” of interpretation began with Nietzsche⁸⁶¹ and the same thing has been the lead for a number of writers on philosophical hermeneutics⁸⁶². Among Nietzsche experts, it is Jean Granier who has forcefully endorsed the view of Nietzsche as the key figure in thought in terms of world as a text, or l’être-interprété⁸⁶³. He has been followed by, notably, Alan D. Schrift, who sees, in the Nietzschean perspectivism and the Nietzschean philology, “the horns” of modern hermeneutics. Both Granier and Schrift emphasize the attempt to steer between, or beyond, dogmatism and relativism.⁸⁶⁴ Yon Quiniou, for his part, argues that Nietzsche has two very different conceptions of interpretation. One is objectivistic sharing the explanatory ambitions of science and is used by Nietzsche

in coming to terms with factual “moral phenomena”. The other mode of interpretation is characterized by practical “prudence” towards, and against, science.⁸⁶⁵

Hans Lenk, who refers to Dilthey’s recognition of Nietzsche’s work in hermeneutics, has recently discussed the latter’s views of the “interpretativity of all world constitution”. Lenk emphasizes that “it is not so much language” that is exalted in Nietzsche’s model but the more general and more

comprehensive “perspectivist forms of interpretation”.⁸⁶⁶

Along with those of Paul de Man, Derrida’s contributions have been especially significant in shaping the linguistically informed Nietzsche interpretation⁸⁶⁷. Even the very notions of ’reading’, ’writing’ and ’text’

have a Derridean flavor to them⁸⁶⁸. Saying that Heidegger shared the Nietzschean problem of liberating language from the metaphysical slavery and admits that Nietzsche leans on the tradition he is opposing, Derrida explains: ”This is not an inconsistency, for which one is to search a logical solution, but a textual strategy and stratification, which is to be analyzed in practice.”⁸⁶⁹ What counts the most is Nietzsche’s specific type of writing, since it remains that whatever he has written, he has done it by writing it. For Derrida, Nietzschean writing is the one not subjected to the truth and logos.⁸⁷⁰

In his différance lecture of 1968 - about which Vattimo jokes that it might have seemed as the manifest of the philosophy of difference but became more like its epitaph or necrology⁸⁷¹ - Derrida writes about the play of differences as the condition of all conceptuality. Nietzsche’s poison against the “system of metaphysical grammar” as “guiding culture, philosophy and science” is the unstoppable and untamable activism of “forces and differences of force”.⁸⁷² In Grammatologie, Derrida had already written that Nietzsche radicalized “the concepts of interpretation, perspective, evaluation and difference”⁸⁷³.