Drawing on Nietzsche's prolific early notebooks and correspondence,
this book challenges the polarized picture of Nietzsche as a
philosopher who abandoned classical philology. It traces the
contours of his earliest philological thinking and opens the way to
a fresh view of his later thinking. The book's primary aim is to
displace the developmental logic that has been a controlling factor
in Nietzsche's reception, namely the assumption that Nietzsche
passed from a precritical phase to an enlightened phase in which he
liberated himself from metaphysics. A subsidiary aim is to decenter
the view that fastens onto "The Birth of Tragedy" as a dramatic
turning point in Nietzsche's thought.
For Nietzsche, questions about the religion, art, and history of
the classical world are bound up with fundamental questions about
knowledge, culture, history, and the status of the subject. From
his early writings, Nietzsche finds it difficult to separate
questions about modernity from those about antiquity. Nor are the
problems of classical philology ever far from his mind, even toward
the end of his career. By showing how frequently the "later"
Nietzsche appears in the early writings, the author hopes to
provoke reflection on the adequacy of current characterizations of
Nietzsche, and not just to raise questions about the periodization
of his life and thought.
The book traces Nietzsche's efforts, throughout his career, to
determine the ways in which philosophy and philology are
symptomatic of modern cultural habits, ideologies, and imaginings.
In the form of a cultural anthropology, he may even have outlined
the most trenchant model still available for confronting the
ghostly specters that haunt Western society. Nietzsche's incessant
preoccupation with the symptomatology of the modern subject--its
ailments, its allusions, and the signs of its irrepressible
presence--unifies his oeuvre more than any other single question.
The author argues that Nietzsche arrived at this inquiry from a
philological perspective, according to which subjective identity is
viewed as part of a historical process. Embodied in practices,
habits, and institutions, these inheritances of culture--of which
classical antiquity is a crucial part--undergo the vicissitudes of
transmission, decipherment, reconstruction, reception, and
especially falsification (whether through unwilled or deliberate
misunderstanding). All of these factors are intimately bound up
with the ways in which subjects form themselves.
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