THE SPOILSPORTS
Introduction

In July 1964 at Royaumont, a former Cistercian abbey located north of Paris, a German–French summit meeting took place. The year prior, de Gaulle and Adenauer had signed the Élysée Treaty. As though feeling an obligation to the spirit of that friendship accord, the two nations’ leading expositors of Nietzsche were now meeting to discuss the correct interpretive reading of his works. In hindsight, Royaumont is considered one of the events that inaugurated the postmodern era in French philosophy. The participants could not have foreseen, however, that their convention would one day be thought of as the germinal moment of a new Zeitgeist. During his lifetime, Nietzsche himself had wanted to be regarded as an “unfashionable” thinker, but only in the second postwar era following his death did this wish seem finally to come true. To be sure, he had been acquitted of the charge of National Socialism by Georges Bataille, and he had appeared in Camus and Sartre as a kind of remote precursor to existentialism. But the next big thing in France was structuralism. In the two German states, prospects looked even worse for the author of Zarathustra. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), he officially rated as a “pioneer of fascism,” and in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), too, his reputation had plunged to a historic nadir. If those diagnosing the times are to be believed, he had lost his core audience, the so-called “youth of today.” The skeptical generation no longer had any use for his pathos. As late as 1968, Jürgen Habermas wrote, with palpable relief, that “nothing contagious” now emanated from Nietzsche.1

It is fitting that the majority of the speakers at Royaumont were Nietzsche veterans from the first half of the century: Boris de Schlözer, for instance, the eighty-three-year-old scion of the Russian branch of a German noble family, who spoke about the transfiguration of evil in Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Or Jean Wahl, the Jewish Sorbonne professor who had been incarcerated during the German occupation and who at Royaumont, as honorary chairman of the Société française d’études nietzschéennes, played the role of a convivial figurehead. Or Karl Löwith, who, unlike anyone else, managed to personify the Nietzsche enthusiasm from the first half of the century, for he had, after all, experienced it first-hand; from the youth movement, to the euphoria around the world war and his studies with Heidegger, to the day the National Socialist racist laws put an end to his academic career in Germany, Nietzsche had been the lodestar of his own radical school of thought. Without this “last German philosopher,” Löwith later wrote in his autobiography, drafted in Japanese exile, “the development of Germany” could not be understood – and in a turn of phrase redolent of the mood of many a scholar of the humanities today, he added with remorse that he heedlessly “contributed to the destruction.”2

At Royaumont, the erstwhile avant-gardist had transformed into a white-haired stoic who was no longer intrigued by Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power, but rather by his thought of the eternal return. Löwith argued for exiting the disastrous upheaval of modernism and returning to a classical equanimity that viewed humankind as part of the forever-immutable cosmos.3

Nothing could be more anathema to the French Young Nietzscheans comprising the other half of the conference attendees than this loftily standoffish conservatism. While Löwith showed the balance of an epochal disenchantment, they were already rehearsing the themes of a future philosophy of transgression. For Gilles Deleuze, attaché de recherches at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and organizer of the colloquium, what the eternal return called to mind was in no way the contemplation of the ever-constant cosmos, but a Dionysian principle of upheaval that guaranteed the world never remained identical with itself.4

One of these young Frenchmen was Michel Foucault, who at the time, just like Deleuze, did not yet enjoy considerable renown. The fact that his lecture on “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” is the only one still read today might be because he assumes the perspective of a second-order observer. Indeed, instead of adding another interpretation to those by the Nietzsche expositors, he made his object of inquiry interpretation as such. Well into the nineteenth century, Foucault argued, the practices of textual exegesis were limited by the regulative notion of an authentic source text. It was Nietzsche – and Freud and Marx – who cut this comforting ground from under hermeneutics with their writings. By replacing the idea of the original text with an abyss of interpretations nested inside one another, Nietzsche, in particular, transformed for his successors the business of interpretation into an infinite task no longer backed by an originary truth.5

The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s first book, which appeared in print in 1872 and simultaneously heralded the beginning of the end of his academic career, has an unusual dramatic structure. Readers must first follow the dialectic of the Apollonian and Dionysian for twelve chapters before – halfway through the text – Socrates, the actual protagonist, finally enters onto the narrative stage. Or more precisely: he does not enter the stage where the god of dreams and the god of ecstasy celebrate their tension-filled unification in the form of ancient tragedy, but instead sits inconspicuously among the audience, where, together with his sympathetic comrade, the poet Euripides, he eyes what transpires, full of misgivings. The worldview that underlies tragedy remains incomprehensible to him. Unlike the others present, Socrates embodies “theoretical optimism,” the ethos of Enlightenment science, the belief that it was possible “to separate true knowledge from semblance and fallacy” and to escape the tragic hero’s fate with existential slyness. The real drama Nietzsche unfolds in the second half of his book is not between Dionysian and Apollonian principles, but between Dionysian and Socratic ones.6

It was with the same skepticism and the same unobtrusiveness as Socrates and Euripides that Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari must have sat among the philosophers assembled at Royaumont. They have left virtually no trace among the records of the conference’s discussions. Aside from the short lecture Montinari delivered on the morning of the second day, not one query, not one hypothesis, not so much as a single marginal comment of theirs has survived. And yet they must have lodged their objection after Foucault’s lecture on unregulated interpretation at the very latest. As their correspondence in the run-up to the conference reveals, however, they felt out of place among the Nietzsche experts. Colli, who in his mid-forties taught ancient philosophy as an adjunct professor at the University of Pisa, normally gave academic functions a wide berth, and Montinari, who in his time as an operative of the Italian Communist Party had grown accustomed to dividing the world into friends and foes, was afraid the “bigwigs of Western Nietzscheology” wanted to make an example of him. Even on the bus from Paris to Royaumont, they chanced to overhear a French professor inquiring of an Italian colleague about the identity of the two unknown Italians whose names appeared in the program. They belonged to none of the camps represented at the colloquium, they felt no affinity for either the German Apollonians or the French Dionysians, and in the coffee breaks, which are inescapable at such events, they surely stood around largely by themselves. “The many, and among them the best individuals, had only a wary smile for him,” Nietzsche writes about Euripides the skeptic, and the pair of Italians may have fared similarly.7 In the eyes of the Nietzscheologists, to be sure, they played an ignominious role; they had come to Royaumont as spoilsports.

What one must also bear in mind is that this German–French exchange of ideas was burdened with a troubling legacy. In the late 1950s, as a result of publications by Darmstadt philosophy professor Karl Schlechta and French Germanist Richard Roos, it had come to light in both Germany and France in quick succession that the respective Nietzsche editions issued by the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar under the aegis of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche contained posthumous interventions and manipulations, even falsifications. There had not been a solid textual foundation since that time.8

The body of research on what is perhaps the most famous scandal in more recent philosophical history now fills a small library unto itself. Erich Podach, one of the many Nietzsche scholars to weigh in on the debate then, wrote that Nietzsche was the “most severely distorted figure in modern literary and intellectual history with respect to his life and works.” And while one may, with good reason, cast doubt on this assertion, it is true that there may hardly be another instance of literary and philosophical inheritance in which this suspicion plays so crucial a role.9

For reasons subject to continual speculation, Nietzsche had suffered a mental breakdown in Turin toward the beginning of 1889 and spent the following decade until his death in 1900 largely under...