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January 5, 2004
Gary, your sustained attempt to get on top of On Nietzsche is commendable. Interpreting this book is one of the great feats of scholarship. Many just give up. Keith Ansell Pearson’s review of Klossowski’s book on Nietzsche is a good example. Pearson much prefers Klossowski’s book to Bataille’s. He says of Klossowski’s book that ‘It has a certain communion with Bataille’s writings, including his own text of Nietzsche, but on account of its trenchant insights, exacting rigor, and exquisite precision, it goes way beyond anything one encounters in Bataille’s book on Nietzsche… Where Bataille’s attempt to make Nietzsche impossible and unusable can often read like a series of unconvincing postures and poorly conceived riddles, in Klossowski’s text these aspects of Nietzsche are pursued with an absolute rigor and a sustained logic of disablement.’
I’ve read both these books so let me say what I feel. Despite the extremeness of its interpretation and the uniqueness of its style, Klossowski’s book is readily meaningful to academics because it proceeds in the established way. I’ve discussed this before. Like Pearson, the standard response is, ‘Wow! That puts Nietzsche in a different light.’ When you get through On Nietzsche you don’t know what to think.
What does this say? Bataille’s book is not a study of Nietzsche. If we approach it as a diary or a journal we might get closer to understanding what it is that we are reading. It was written during the war, when normal activities of society were in abeyance. And in any case, Bataille wasn’t an academic. He was a librarian who had been invalided out.
I think it would be wrong to regard it as a journal, all the same. A standard journal shows the progress of one’s thought. I’ve written a journal for several years – you’ve seen it, as have others. No reader of a real journal expects some unity of vision, a coherent thesis or a developed narrative. We don’t even expect consistency. Today I might think this, tomorrow something else. That’s the way it goes. That’s the stuff of diaries and journals.
On Nietzsche is different. It says, ‘here it is, to the best I can say it.’ It’s complete, even if it doesn’t satisfy its author and he returns to write more on the same topic. In fact, the book is part of a trilogy. It’s known as Summa Atheologica. Why? What does it suggest? The other volumes, Inner Experience and Guilty, are written in much the same way. The fact that they are a trilogy suggests some sort of completeness. What is atheology? Why does it need to be talked about in this way? Why can’t it be more like Klossowski’s book? These are the questions.
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If I reckon back to the evil whisper that propelled me along the oblique path, it is 1056 days, indeed 'about the year 2000... [Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche]' I mean to say I was the only man to ever be first in divining what, he was.