In this chapter I turn to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, under the heading of his call of “incipit tragoedia,” to further explicate the thought of the tragic as bound to a fictioning and displacing power of language, which opens a question between the domains of philosophy and literature. Like the sounding note to which the orchestra tunes itself to commence its performance, “incipit tragoedia” is not only the call to begin, but to attune and direct ourselves to the origin. This Latin phrase, recited by Nietzsche as the title of the closing aphorism of the original 1882 version of his book Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Joyful Science), signals at once the opening of the metaphorical “play” of Zarathustra, as well as Zarathustra’s Untergang, his “down-going,” “going under,” or “descent.” The origin is thus signaled not merely as an opening, but also as a call to catastrophe, in the Greek sense of katastrephein (a downturn or overturning). Origin and end are overturned and suspended as they overlap. Birth and death are displaced under the mark of the tragic, each doubling the other by a double movement of appearance and dissimulation concealing a retreat. This interplay of doubles and their figuration, as will be shown in the following two chapters, is central to Nietzsche’s thought of the tragic, expressed by the double figures of Apollo and Dionysus. It is from the interplay of these figures that tragedy is born, according to Nietzsche. His first published work, of 1872, Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy; hereafter BT)—this title itself echoing the “incipit tragoedia”—turns around these duplicitous figures.