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Nietzsche Apostle by Peter Sloterdijk (review)

Far from discouraged by the proliferation of controversies over the last half-century of Nietzsche scholarship, Peter Sloterdijk considers Nietzsche’s ability to elude definitive interpretation to be evidence of his status as a classic (Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989], 3). Consequently, Sloterdijk does not attempt to resolve exegetical difficulties within Nietzsche’s thought, but argues that such Nietzschean impasses remain relevant today. To this end, his most recent work, Nietzsche Apostle, draws from Nietzsche’s critiques of the bad conscience and ressentiment underpinning Christian metaphysics and morality to propose an understanding of language as intrinsically narcissistic. For Sloterdijk, Nietzsche’s view of language as self-laudatory by nature, as well as his belief that this eulogistic function should celebrate rather than diminish the individual, is expressed in his grandiloquent style. Far from being inconsequential, these moments of self-praise express a renewed individualism central to Nietzsche’s legacy. Enthymematic reliance on his earlier account of subjectivity as torn between Apollonian and Dionysian drives allows Sloterdijk to conclude his book by gesturing beyond egoism toward “hetero-narcissism”—that is, a passionate pursuit of what is other within the self. However, how “hetero-narcissism” informs our approach to Nietzsche’s texts and what it means for Nietzsche’s philosophy of language remain unaddressed. In his introduction, Sloterdijk describes “the event-Nietzsche as a catastrophe in the history of language” (9). Overturning the Christian approach to “the Word,” Nietzsche reveals the narcissism intrinsic to discourse. This is central to Sloterdijk’s account: whether we translate the Gospel or criticize ourselves, “language says one and the same thing over and again: that nothing better could have happened to the speaker than, precisely, to have been who he is . . . at this place and in this language” (9). Herein lies Nietzsche’s distinctiveness. From ideological critique to analytic philosophy, from discourse theory and psychoanalysis to deconstruction and theories of encounter, contemporary examinations of discourse often understand language as a distortive medium signifying a symptomatic lack (11–12). For Nietzsche, by contrast, language is inescapably affirmative and creative vis-à-vis the self. The book’s first chapter sketches an evolution of narcissistic discourse within Christianity. Initially, languages are media for God’s unending self-praise. With the rise of monarchies, this self-laudatory function is redirected so that national languages express the crown’s divine right. For example, the ninth-century poet-priest Otfrid von Weißenburg translates the Good News into French, securing “an effective link . . . between the veneration of God and the poetics of Empire” (15). Similarly, Thomas Jefferson later undertakes Gospel-redaction to clarify the divine heritage of neo-humanism. Regardless of dialect, every use of language affirms the speaker, albeit to different degrees based on the speaker’s philosophical presuppositions. Under humanist notions of equality, for example, “the strategy of indirect self-celebration in high culture hits the investor with ever greater costs and diminishing narcissistic returns” (26). Opposing such humanism, Sloterdijk returns to Nietzsche’s treatment of language. In chapter 2, Sloterdijk reads Zarathustra as a fifth gospel, aimed at preserving the link between the speaking subject and language’s eulogistic function against the threat of Enlightenment humanism and cultivated Protestantism to sever this link by insisting on self-depreciation. By critiquing the insidious self-praise of Christianity, poisoned by the metaphysical outlook born of ressentiment, Nietzsche lays bare language’s eulogistic function. The cost of this evangelism favoring the self is a repudiation of all life-serving illusions to the point of “unlivable disillusionment” (39). If Nietzsche’s self-praise is not an individual pathology, but the mark of a historical rupture, the same holds for his descent into madness, which Sloterdijk views as an unavoidable risk posed by such a disillusioned life. Although the Übermensch represents someone capable of enduring Nietzsche’s challenge without profound despair, Sloterdijk considers this a fool’s wager (41–43)—a pessimism that extends to Sloterdijk’s broader view of the contemporary world, as he considers Nietzsche “the paradigmatic thinker of modernity” (43).