When in spite of that fearful pressure of “morality of custom” under which all the communities of mankind have lived … new and deviate ideas, evaluations, drives again and again broke out, they did so accompanied by a dreadful attendant: almost everywhere it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1881
Did Nietzsche’s madness, that “dreadful attendant,”1 give birth to Foucault’s Madness? Or is Nietzsche a “dead man in the game of writing”:2 a stuttering ghost, a “murmur of dark insects” (M xxxiii) on “a sterile beach of words” (M xxxi)?
In late 1888 or early 1889 Nietzsche went mad. An incident often recounted to describe the first signs of Nietzsche’s illness occurred in January 1889, when Nietzsche caused a public disturbance at a piazza in Turin after witnessing the whipping of a horse. Nietzsche ran to the horse, threw his arms around its neck, then collapsed to the ground. Following the Turin incident, Nietzsche sent Wahnbriefe, or “madness letters,” to some of his friends. Alarmed by the letters, his friends and then his mother sent him to psychiatric clinics—first in Basel, then in Jena. The Jena clinic was directed by Otto Binswanger, the uncle of the existentialist psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger, for whom Foucault wrote the introduction to Dream and Existence in 1954. According to notes from the three-day medical examination at Jena, Nietzsche’s face was flushed, his tongue furred, and the pupil of his right eye wider than the left. During his stay at the clinic, he often seemed confused about his identity, calling himself the Kaiser, the Duke of Cumberland, or Friedrich Wilhelm IV. During the summer he smashed windowpanes and a drinking glass, wanting “to protect his approaches with glass splinters.”3 In March 1890 he was released from the asylum and went to live with his mother, who devoted virtually all her time to taking care of him until the end of her life. Her greatest fear was “losing him to Binswanger again” (Hayman 346).
In September 1895, Nietzsche’s oldest friend, Franz Overbeck, recorded Nietzsche’s condition in a letter:
I saw him only in his room, half-crouching like a wild animal mortally wounded and wanting only to be left in peace. He made literally not one sound while I was there. He did not appear to be suffering or in pain, except perhaps for the expression of profound distaste visible in his lifeless eyes…. He had been living for weeks in a state of alternation between days of dreadful excitability, rising to a pitch of roaring and shouting, and days of complete prostration. (348)
After the death of Nietzsche’s mother in 1897, Nietzsche’s opportunistic sister, Elisabeth, moved with Nietzsche and his archive, over which she had gained full legal control, to a villa on the outskirts of Weimar. One of the investors in Elisabeth’s lucrative Nietzsche project, Count Harry Kessler, recorded in his diary after visiting the Nietzsches in August 1897:
He was asleep on the sofa. His mighty head had sunk half-way down to the right as if it were too heavy for his neck. His forehead was truly colossal; his manelike hair is still dark brown, like his shaggy, protruding moustache…. In the lifeless, flabby face one can still see deep wrinkles dug by thought and willpower, but softened, as it were, and getting smoothed out. There is infinite weariness in his expression. His hands are waxen, with green and violet veins, and slightly swollen, as on a dead body. A table and a high-backed chair had been positioned at the edge of the sofa to prevent the heavy body from slipping down…. He looked less like a sick man or a lunatic than like a corpse. (349)
Following Nietzsche’s death from a stroke in August 1900, his sister laid out the corpse in the room that housed the Nietzsche archive. The body was displayed on white linen and damask in a heavy oak coffin framed by potted plants and flowers. After a lengthy funeral oration by an eminent art historian, one observer remarked: “The same sterile scholasticism Nietzsche had always fought followed him to his grave. If he could have arisen, he would have thrown the lecturer out of the window and chased the rest of us out of his temple” (350).
In Daybreak (1881) Nietzsche asks why it had to be madness that “prepared the way for the new idea.”4 Is it “something in the voice and bearing as uncanny and incalculable as the demonic moods of the weather and the sea and therefore worthy of similar awe and observation”? Or is it “something that bore so visibly the sign of total unfreedom as the convulsions and froth of the epileptic, that seemed to mark the madman as the mask and speaking-trumpet of a divinity”?5 Or is it, perhaps, something a bit more troubling? “Let us go a step further,” Nietzsche suggests. “All superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad—… even the innovator of poetical metre had to establish his credentials by madness.”6
And so we find Overbeck writing in 1890: “I cannot escape the ghastly suspicion … that [Nietzsche’s] madness is simulated. This impression can be explained only by the experiences I have had of Nietzsche’s self-concealments, of his spiritual masks.”7 Another friend, Gast, saw Nietzsche’s insanity as “no more than a heightening of [his] humorous antics.”8
In that impasse between Nietzsche slumped over and his humorous antics—between “actual” madness and “pretending” to be mad—we encounter Nietzsche’s “dreadful attendant.” In that impasse we also find Foucault, a poet, establishing his credentials. “We have no choice,” Nietzsche’s biographer writes, “but to follow him into [that] impasse…. He has left us to find our own way out.”9