When we are called to take action, how we hear the call is often negotiated in the form of an agonistic challenge, an incitement to take part in a form of contest. Chapter Two, “Nietzsche’s Will-to-Power-Bottom,” interprets this agonistic mode of address queerly to press against reactionary readings of Friedrich Nietzsche that detect, in the seductive homoeroticism of his prose, an incitement to nihilistic domination. Instead, I argue that Nietzsche’s style of writing explicitly solicits a dynamic relation with readers, such that they are cultivated into becoming active interpreters not of traditional evil and not passive consumers. In Sarah Kofman’s felicitous turn of phrase, Nietzsche’s corpus extends an “invitation to dance.” I thus read the often-overlooked drama of the concluding satyrspiel of Thus Spake Zarathustra, Book IV, which climaxes in an “Ass Festival,” as hinging on a proverbial invitation to dance that debuts a cruising politics account of embodied receptivity to the unpredictable desire of strangers as an effect of affirming worldly plurality (amor fati). Ironically, Nietzsche’s protagonist, Zarathustra, is not the one to extend this invitation; rather, it is the ugliest man who extends to Zarathustra the invitation to undergo overcoming by becoming receptive to the assemblage of “Higher Men”: the ugliest man “reads” Zarathustra as lacking the courage of his desire and, by figuring him as the butt of his own joke, solicits him into affirming with them the eternal ring of the return of difference.

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Nietzsche’s Will-to-Power-Bottom

  • Sam Galloway

摘要

When we are called to take action, how we hear the call is often negotiated in the form of an agonistic challenge, an incitement to take part in a form of contest. Chapter Two, “Nietzsche’s Will-to-Power-Bottom,” interprets this agonistic mode of address queerly to press against reactionary readings of Friedrich Nietzsche that detect, in the seductive homoeroticism of his prose, an incitement to nihilistic domination. Instead, I argue that Nietzsche’s style of writing explicitly solicits a dynamic relation with readers, such that they are cultivated into becoming active interpreters not of traditional evil and not passive consumers. In Sarah Kofman’s felicitous turn of phrase, Nietzsche’s corpus extends an “invitation to dance.” I thus read the often-overlooked drama of the concluding satyrspiel of Thus Spake Zarathustra, Book IV, which climaxes in an “Ass Festival,” as hinging on a proverbial invitation to dance that debuts a cruising politics account of embodied receptivity to the unpredictable desire of strangers as an effect of affirming worldly plurality (amor fati). Ironically, Nietzsche’s protagonist, Zarathustra, is not the one to extend this invitation; rather, it is the ugliest man who extends to Zarathustra the invitation to undergo overcoming by becoming receptive to the assemblage of “Higher Men”: the ugliest man “reads” Zarathustra as lacking the courage of his desire and, by figuring him as the butt of his own joke, solicits him into affirming with them the eternal ring of the return of difference.