Doch es kehret umsonst nicht
Unser Bogen, woher er kommt.
HOW LONG is it possible to resist the work of language? The madman may call in sick, the musicians may be on strike, but in the end—in the end—they will all be back on shift. To speak with Deleuze and Guattari, language may initially be a deterritorialization of the mouth, tongue, and teeth (which are meant to eat rather than speak),1 but invariably—as humans defined rationally (as those animals who possess logos)—our mouths water for the main course, if not for the postprandial conversation. The digestive system is but a metaphor for a working-through, for a reterritorialization in meaning. “Der deutsche Geist ist eine Indigestion, er wird mit Nichts fertig”—“German spirit is indigestion, it is never finished with anything” (NW 6.280/EH 86). Nietzsche’s accusation (like all his accusations) should be heard with the ambivalence of one who painfully tried to stay out of work by putting his life in the work.
Nietzsche’s case is therefore emblematic in the strongest sense of the word. His philosophy (that is, his life and work) begins and ends with music and madness. The ecstatic pages of the Geburt der Tragödie (1872), devoted to the shattering, form-breaking effect of Dionysiac music, find their fateful echo in the sheer abandon of the “Dionysos-Dithyramben” (1888), written in Turin on the eve of the writer’s collapse. The “Bacchic choirs” that disrupt and dissolve the principium individuationis in the early essay “Dionysische Weltanschauung” (1870) return in Nietzsche’s final work, Ecce Homo (1888), in the “Gondola-Lied” that accompanies the complete loss of rational control. These examples are simply end points of a life’s work replete with musical references and metaphors, with themes of madness and a series of mad figures.
What distinguishes the beginning and end from the rest of the philosophical œuvre, however, is the curious collocation of cognitive breakdown and aural art. It is as if the isolated topics of music and madness that are dispersed across the writings join together at either extreme, as origin and telos, thereby defining the philosophical project as an unfolding of what this pairing implies. The linking of music and madness, then, both at the start and finish of Nietzsche’s thought, could be taken as a summons and a retreat, an instigation and a renunciation, an expression of hope and a cry of despair.
For this reason especially, from the biographical point of view, one could say that music and madness come after the end of philosophy and before its beginning. While still a student of classical philology at Bonn, Nietzsche wrote to his mother and sister, informing them that he was still composing “with energetic fury [Wuth],” most recently “a song in the highest style of the future [“im höchsten Zukunftsstile”], with a natural scream and suchlike ingredients of a silent madness [Narrheit].”2 Nearly twenty-four years later, when Franz Overbeck arrived in Italy to rescue his deranged friend, he found him at the piano wildly improvising melodies, sublimely powerful and frighteningly disconcerting, “in brutally immediate attacks of raving madness.”3 The hagiographies that quickly emerged in the wake of Nietzsche’s death were fond of perpetuating the portrait of the mad musician, which inscribed the philosopher into the standard romantic tradition of coupling musical experience and mental illness. In this way, the erstwhile philologist and seething Antichrist could join the ranks of Wackenroder’s Berglinger or Hoffmann’s Kreisler; he could be understood as having succumbed to the fate of Kleist’s fraternal band of iconoclasts. Thus Nietzsche entered the space of high modernism that postdates him, particularly by way of Thomas Mann, either as Gustav von Aschenbach, whose faith in literary discipline was unworked by the Dionysiac “drum rattles” and the “deep, alluring tones of the flute” of his Venetian nightmare,4 or as Adrian Leverkühn, the protagonist of Mann’s “Nietzsche-Book,” whose final Umnachtung falls upon the composer as he sits on the piano stool.
Ernst Bertram’s Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie (1918), which Mann acknowledged as a key source for Doktor Faustus, suggests that the philosopher’s descent into musical madness was but a return. In an allusion to Hölderlin’s ode Lebenslauf, Bertram writes, “the arc of this strange life turned back to the point from which it came”:5 after the end of philosophy and before its beginning. The legend of Nietzsche’s madness therefore raises the same issues that have coursed through this study. Is his fall into insanity yet another instance of a romantic convention? Or does the legend itself, with all its implications, promise to articulate something crucial to philosophy itself, to the processes and consequences of thinking? How should we account for Nietzsche’s consistency, which brings together musical and mad experience at either end of a writing career, which indeed reveals music and madness to be there before and after philosophy, that is, before the beginning and after the end of thought in philosophical form—a consistency all the more noteworthy given Nietzsche’s notorious capacity and self-avowed proclivity to contradict himself, to break apart any formalizable identity for his thinking?
It is important to interrogate the persistent tendency in Nietzsche studies to confuse text and author. Certainly, Nietzsche’s writings, which insist that “there are no philosophies, only philosophers,” readily invite a conflation of the man and the work. Yet other comments seem explicitly to disparage such a method: “I am one thing, my writings are another” (NW 6.298/EH 99). Nonetheless, we read the chilling validations of derangement (for example, in section 14 of Morgenröthe: “Ah, give me but madness, you heavenly ones! Madness, that I may finally believe in myself!” [NW 3.26]), we observe the repeated flirtations with insanity, and we find it difficult to divorce such statements from the later image of the demented, godless prophet sitting in the Carignano Opera in Turin incapable of holding back his tears.
The idea that Nietzsche’s work could have induced his madness is further corroborated by his pervasive allusions to the danger of his thinking. Moreover, in the same aphorism from Die Morgenröthe, “The Significance of Madness in the History of Morality,” Nietzsche explains the indispensability of madness for thinking: “almost everywhere it is madness that blazes the path [“den Weg bahnt”] for new thoughts, that breaks the spell [den Bann] of venerated custom and superstition” (NW 3.26). As he famously proclaims toward the conclusion of Ecce Homo: “I know my lot. One day my name will be connected with the memory of something tremendous [“etwas Ungeheures”],—a crisis such as the earth has never seen, the deepest collision of conscience, a decision made against everything that has been believed, demanded, held sacred so far. I am not a human being, I am dynamite [“Ich bin kein Mensch, ich bin Dynamit”]” (NW 6.365/EH 143–44; emphasis in original).
The aural shock of Nietzsche’s detonations reaches back to the imperative “Listen to me!” that opens his autobiography. “Above all,” Nietzsche explains in reference to his Zarathustra, “you need to listen properly to the tone coming from this mouth, the halcyon tone, so as not to be miserably unfair to the meaning of its wisdom [“um dem Sinn seiner Weisheit nicht erbarmungswürdig Unrecht zu thun”]” (NW 6.259/EH 72–73). We recall that, since antiquity, music and acoustical phenomena have been regarded with suspicion by those eager for philosophical reflection. The ordered speeches regulated by Phaedrus in Plato’s Symposium proceed smoothly once the flute girls have been banished but are subsequently upset by disturbing sounds: first, mildly, by Aristophanes’ loud hiccups and then, crucially, by Alcibiades’ uncalculated intrusion, which leaves the door open for the seductive flautists’ return. Hence Kant’s distaste for music, which, like a strong odor, “extends its influence further … than is required.” In a brief essay from his Parerga und Paralipomena, Schopenhauer similarly complains against “noise” (Lärm), which “is the most impertinent of all interruptions, since it even interrupts our own thoughts, indeed destroys them.”6 Nietzsche’s philosophy does not merely face up to musical distraction and acoustic disturbance; it is itself an explosion—“dynamite”—whose deafening noise, far from destroying our capacity to think, urges us to think further.
Music, however, need not be shrill and abrasive like Zarathustra’s “halcyon tone.” The Italophilia that pervades Ecce Homo is also accompanied by a sweeter, more serene art that is not without a threat to subjective control: “I will say another word for the choicest of ears: what I really want from music. That it be cheerful and profound [“heiter und tief”], like an afternoon in October. That it be distinctive, exuberant, and tender [“eigen, ausgelassen, zärtlich”], a sweet little female, full of grace and dirty tricks…. I will never admit that a German could know what music is…. And when I say ‘beyond the Alps,’ I really am only saying Venice. When I look for another word for music, I only ever find the word ‘Venice.’ I cannot tell any difference between tears and music. I know the happiness of not being able to think of the South without a shudder of apprehension” (NW 6.290–91/EH 94–95). As I have reported, music’s propensity to relax the will, to induce hypersensitivity and cause sexual licentiousness, immorality, and even madness has, at least since the eighteenth century, posed a threat to those intent on maintaining rational sobriety. At the end of the nineteenth century, the agent most responsible for music’s harmful effects was Richard Wagner. Nietzsche’s contemporary Ferdinand von Saar expresses in his novella Geschichte eines Wienerkindes (1891) some of the fears that still made the gleeful Antichrist shudder. At a dinner party toward the story’s end, Elsa, the protagonist who has stumbled into a string of adulterous affairs, pleads with a musician guest to play the “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Despite the reservations voiced by the somewhat prudish Frau von Ramberg, the young man turns to the piano: “Thus again there arose a silence, full of expectation, and soon thereafter, out of evenly trembling waves of sound, in gradual, cruelly voluptuous crescendi, continually sinking back into themselves, there developed the most violent [gewaltsamste] attack on human nerves known to music…. Everyone, in their own way, felt gripped, overwhelmed, tortured, delighted, disheveled. Even Frau von Ramberg could not maintain her dignity; she began to writhe on her chair like a snake…. Elsa lay leaning back in the low fauteuil. She was pale, and quick, even tremors shook her body. Suddenly she uttered a piercing cry.”7 The irresistible, penetrating effect of Wagner’s music is a contagion that dissolves self-composure and decency; even the morally upright Frau von Ramberg undergoes a transformation into the very symbol of evil and sexuality. Contributing to the popular imagination was the fact that the tenor Ludwig Schnorr, who played the role of Tristan in the premiere performance, died soon thereafter, after suffering a violent bout of delirium; his wife, Malwina, who played Isolde, would experience wild, terrifying hallucinations for the remainder of her life.8 Nietzsche himself had promulgated such fantasies when he presented the Wagnerian example and asked “true musicians”
whether they can conceive of any person capable of perceiving the third act of Tristan und Isolde purely as a vast [ungeheuren] symphonic movement, with no assistance from words or images, and who would not then suffocate as their soul attempted, convulsively, to spread its wings. How could anyone fail to be shattered immediately, having once put their ear to the heart of the universal Will, so to speak, and felt the raving desire for existence [“das rasende Begehren zu Dasein”] pour forth into all the arteries of the world as a thundering torrent or as the finest spray of a stream? Is such a person, trapped within the miserable glass vessel of human individuality, supposed to be able to bear listening to countless calls of pleasure and woe re-echoing from the “wide space of the world’s night,” without fleeing, unstoppably, with the strains of this shepherd’s dance of metaphysics in his ears, towards his first and original home [Urheimat]?
(GEBURT DER TRAGÖDIE, NW 1.135–36)9
Somber or cheerful, violent or serenely seductive, the mad and musical content of Nietzsche’s thought may have driven the thinker out of his mind and may be striving to do the same for those of us who have the right ears. Indeed, once the line separating Nietzsche’s life and work has been breached, we are faced with the terrifying, or perhaps exhilarating, prospect of having his philosophy—his music and madness—explode or melt our own sanity. If Nietzsche’s mental state was truly a consequence of his philosophy—and not, say, merely the result of a syphilitic infection—then we are justified in considering what in fact this mad thought may possibly be. Can we suffer a philosophy—a love of knowledge—without a rational subjective ground? Thought without a thinker? Even if we were to allow the possibility of an obscure clarity or a lucid darkness, what kind of significance or truth could we grant it?
As throughout this study, all speculation on an author’s madness and on its possible link to musical experience must of course remain conjectural. Nonetheless, the line between life and work that critical interpretation invariably must draw can never be rigorous, at least in the case of Nietzsche. On the one hand, any attempt to give a strictly philosophical reading to his writings—and this is especially true of his autobiography, Ecce Homo—is compelled by the very content of the text to explode the border that would separate the author’s words from the living being that produced them. Nietzsche’s corpus is never easily distinguishable from his corpus, as his frequent references to his own health and physiology, to his headaches, his diet, and digestion, readily make clear. Here Nietzsche belongs to a long preidealist tradition, reaching back to Hamann and Herder, that refuses to separate thinking from sensuousness (Empfinden). As Herder expresses it in his essay “Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele” (1775): “Das Denken ist im Empfinden verwurzelt”—“Thinking is rooted in Sensing.” Along these lines, a rigorously immanent reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy would fail to respect the terms of that philosophy. This interpretive decision continues to shape Nietzsche studies. Christoph Türcke, for example, begins his analyses of the philosopher’s late works with a representative caveat, based on his author’s own methodology: “With philosophers, may one make a clean separation between the work and the person? … Nietzsche’s answer is: no.”10 On the other hand, however, a solely biographical approach, where the philosophical system is derived exclusively from psychological or even psychoanalytic investigations, cannot be adequate. The sheer rhetorical force of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo—the rampant metaphors, the plurality of personae, not to mention the blatant contradictions and reversals—reminds the reader of the textualized nature of all references to a living being and furthermore discourages the desire to consolidate and ground the autobiography in a single, identifiable, historical person. Nietzsche, and this name could be taken with or without its original bearer, is not a “Mensch”—neither measurable nor measured (mensus)—he is rather “Dynamit,” a power or a potential (dynamis) that blows to pieces all the philosophemes that are fragilely held together in the term “autobiography”: “autos,” “bios,” “graphein”: We read what Nietzsche is only by examining and questioning the rubble: What is writing? What is life? What is a self? How do they relate?
The preface to Ecce Homo declares it will inform those listening who “I, Friedrich Nietzsche, am.” “Listen to me! I am this one and this one”—“Ich bin der und der.” The text goes on to introduce chapters primarily organized around this “I am”: “Why I am so wise,” “Why I am so clever,” “Why I am a destiny.” The duplicity or multiplication, already signaled by the “ich bin der und der,” culminates in the doubled, antagonistic, and somewhat insane signature that concludes the book: “Dionysus versus the Crucified”—“Dionysus gegen den Gekreuzigten.” Throughout Ecce Homo, multiplicity pervades and intensifies the self-representations. Semiosis overloads any simple reading along the lines of a mimetically true life story. The philosopher’s self-styled doubled ancestry tears the self between the antithesis of life and death, between the father who is dead and the mother who survives, between the affirmative power of Bizet and the sickly decadence of Wagner. “Ich bin der und der”: I am alive and I am dead. As Jacques Derrida conjoins us: “Must one not take this unrepresentable scene into account each time one claims to identify any utterance signed by F. N.?”11 Clearly, the self, the writing, and the life fail to coincide but instead demand a particular kind of revaluation, an Umwertung that every reader with the right ears must perform. The reader, who would remain comfortably outside of the text, is by the very act of reading—or listening—already implicated in its action. Nietzsche indulges in an autocitation from the Zarathustra: “Now I call upon you to lose me and find yourselves; and only after you have all denied me will I want to return to you” (NW 6.261/EH 73).
The noncoincidence that is revealed by Nietzsche’s explosive text opens up a space outside but also constitutive of the philosophical project. This nonconceptualized, nonmoralized, nonindividuated space is in fact an obsessive theme that extends throughout Nietzsche’s writings—and, I should now add, his life. It is, moreover, consistently presented in metaphors of music. Already, in the passage on Wagner’s Tristan from the closing pages of the Geburt der Tragödie, the space is named as the “first and original home”—the Urheimat—of the soul, as that which comes before and after all (Apolline) form, including not only the form of thinking but also the form of individuality that authorizes the text. Earlier in the book, Nietzsche further legitimizes his position, which he borrowed almost entirely from Schopenhauer, by turning to the authority of Schiller, who explained: “In my case the feeling is initially without a definite and clear object; this does not take shape until later. It is preceded by a certain musical mood [“eine gewisse musikalische Gemüthsstimmung”], which is followed in my case by the poetic idea” (NW 1.43).12 The musical metaphor is apt for Schiller’s age, which developed the notion, positively or negatively, of music as a nonrepresentational art form. Filtered through Schopenhauer’s description of the Will, which underlies all representations, and of music’s privileged access to this Will, the nonrepresentational quality of music furnishes the young Nietzsche with an art that can articulate dimensions of existence that elude representation, aspects that play out an “unrepresentable scene.” Nietzsche, whose writing demanded to be heard rather than read, may be offering us a language beyond words, a language that is either musical or mad or both.
To musicalize or dement language, however, often enough means to demusicalize music or render madness sane. Nietzsche the writer faced this problem in an especially acute fashion. The expression of his thinking requires the adoption of a lexicon that necessarily harbors its own contradictions. Rational language, which is based on fixed identities and conventional agreement, belongs to the herd: “We no longer sufficiently value ourselves [“wir schätzen uns nicht genug mehr”], when we communicate. Our true experiences [Erlebnisse] are not garrulous [“nicht geschwätzig”]. They could not be communicated even if they wanted to be. This is because the right words for them do not exist. The things we have words for are also the things we have already left behind. There is a grain of contempt in all speech. Language, it seems, was invented only for average, mediocre, communicable things. People vulgarize themselves when they speak a language.—Excerpts from a morality for the deaf-mutes and other philosophers” (Götzen-Dämmerung, NW 6.128/EH 205; emphasis in original). Thus, along with Wackenroder and Kleist, Nietzsche perpetually tried to bring the power of music into language only to experience, painfully, the evanescence of music and the pathologization of madness.
Spontaneity, immediacy, prereflexivity—all these notions are implied by the romantic idea of music as a purely self-referential sign system. Semiotic, rather than semantic, musical significance rests on the indissociable (immediate) identity of what in discursive practice is divided into sign and referent. And it is precisely this immediacy that invariably characterizes the phenomenology of insanity. Historically, the nonrepresentational qualities of music have been held in a positive light, most notably by proponents of so-called absolute music, while the speech of madmen has been identified in general as a deficit or failure. The ineffable heights of musical experience seem to stand in starkest contrast to the piteous babblings of lunacy or the sorry delusions of delirium. For the romantic authors discussed above, however, both consistently enjoyed the privilege of transmitting something that resists appearance in and through words. From the nephew’s deracination of the self-identical subject to the anagrammatical interruptions of Wackenroder and Hoffmann, the machine of representation is sabotaged. But for how long? The disruptive semiotic play that permits the author’s name to become manifest within the discourse is always thereby reinscribed into another discourse, equally referential, equally mimetic. The recalcitrant, intractable aspects of life—beautifully troped in terms of music and madness—are eventually brought into line with a program. The mad and the musical may speak language’s silence, they may interrupt the work process, they may indeed be heard or seen, but only like Eurydice, at the very moment of vanishing, of being reabsorbed into text.