Hesitation and Irony in Nietzsche's “Woman and Child”

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Notes

notes

This research was made possible by the generous funding of the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain. I would like to thank Claire Colebrook, Arthur Bradley, Alison Stone and the late Paul Fletcher for their helpful and insightful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

1 for example, Sarah Kofman argues in “The Psychologist of the Eternal Feminine” that: … to consider Nietzsche a misogynist is to forget that he always emphasises: (1) there is no woman “as such,” woman as such is a historical creation; (2) there are only types of women, for which he tries to establish a differential table (these types themselves being not essences but historical “creations”) … ; (3) furthermore, he knows that he does not state “the truth” about “woman,” but expresses only “his” truths about them, recognising that these are closely bound up with the image of the mother which he bears within him. (189)

2 See, for example, critiques found in Oliver's Womanizing Nietzsche, or Feder and Zakin's “Flirting with the Truth.”

3 The child – or more specifically, childhood – is a recurrent thematic feature of Nietzsche's writing. There is a conflicting element within Nietzsche's representation of the child, perhaps most notably throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In “Of the Three Metamorphoses,” Nietzsche describes the third metamorphosis of the spirit as a child: “The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelled wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes” (TSZ 55). This figure of the child is clearly related to the notion of “play” and the challenge to the “seriousness” of dogmatic philosophy that runs throughout Nietzsche's corpus. Kofman comments that the “notion of play …  implies successive constructions and deconstructions of world without the need for a negative force” (NM 169 fn. 15). Hough notes that the “stock ending” of commentaries of Thus Spoke Zarathustra often alludes to the “hopeful, elusive metaphor of the child” as a creative affirmation (Hough 89 n. 7). While Kofman uses the metaphor of the child as a Dionysian figure (NM 75), Hough argues that the child as a metaphor encapsulates the dichotomy that he perceives in all of Nietzsche's major themes by merging, sometimes problematically, with the metaphor of the maternal: “The ‘child’, understood as a work of art, is separate from, as well as dependent on, all that constituted it” (Hough 140). Picart interprets the sense in which Zarathustra urges the creator to “give birth” and “feel the pangs of childbirth” (TSZ 87) as a “coherent master-myth” of a “phallic mother” (Picart 108). In “Woman and Child,” however, the identification of the authorial subject with the child precedes the arrival of the Free Spirit. Thus, I would argue that we should read this invocation of the child figure in terms of the more general tension in Nietzsche's work concerning, in its earlier stages, his position of authority in relation to the previous tradition of Schopenhauer, Wagner, et al. (the concern of this chapter here), and in its later stages (specifically Ecce Homo) his establishment of authority within the family triptych, in which he theorises “Nietzsche” from the position of the child caught in the struggle between the “father” and “mother” (see Kofman, “Explosion I”; Graybeal; Derrida, Ear of the Other).

4 Similarly to the motif of the “child” discussed above, “friendship” has several reverberations in Nietzsche's corpus as a whole. On this occasion, the operation of friendship seems to play on what Derrida terms the “Greco-Roman model” of friendship, which is, he argues, marked by “the value of reciprocity, by homological, immanentist, finitist, and politicist concord” (PF 644). The operation of friendship, as an opposition to love, is revisited in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knows only love.” Woman's capability of friendship is placed directly within Hegel's familial dialectic: “Are you a slave? If so, you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? If so, you cannot have friends … In woman, a slave and a tyrant have too long been concealed” (TSZ 83).

5 See, for example, Oppel; Higgins.

6 Jacob Golomb has argued for a distinction in Nietzsche's work between the “Free Spirit,” which depends upon its cultural heritage in order to overcome it, and the “Free Spirit Par Excellence,” which “does not need society for its cultivation and sustenance” (Golomb 24–26). While the former heralds the arrival of the latter, Golomb argues that, for Nietzsche, the Free Spirit par excellence is an impossible ideal that cannot be attained. I am not opposed to this view; my concern with the appearance of the Free Spirit at this point is its referential significance, or how its authority is established in relation to the possible referential frames preceding it.