This study, first published in 1998, makes a lively and welcome contribution to the critical analysis of Nietzsche's seminal classic This Spoke Zarathustra. Through a close textual reading of the neglected and ill-understood part four of the text, the author seeks to show that Nietzsche's project of self-overcoming is a failure. Offering herself as a philosopher-priestess of the wisdom of pessimism, Francesca Cauchi invokes a complex of responses in the reader, providing a necessary challenge to any and all advocates of life.

This study, first published in 1998, makes a lively and welcome contribution to the critical analysis of Nietzsche's seminal classic This Spoke Zarathustra. Through a close textual reading of the neglected and ill-understood part four of the text, the author seeks to show that Nietzsche's project of self-overcoming is a failure. Offering herself as a philosopher-priestess of the wisdom of pessimism, Francesca Cauchi invokes a complex of responses in the reader, providing a necessary challenge to any and all advocates of life.

By way of a sustained interrogation of Zarathustra's doctrine of self-overcoming, Francesca Cauchi lays bare the asceticism underlying the prescriptive injunctions set forth in the first two parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These injunctions fall under three heads: self-legislation, self-denial and self-sacrifice, which are shown to bear striking affinities with concepts first formulated by Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach. In Cauchi's new reading, the Kantian rational will, the Hegelian 'labour of the negative' and Feuerbach's indivisible trinity of love, sacrifice and suffering are seen to resurface in Zarathustra as the agents of a ferocious and self-eviscerating doctrine of self-overcoming that exhibits all the attributes of a moral tyranny.