Beyond the real/apparent world: From signs to imaging in Nietzsche

Abstract

While partaking of nature’s nourishing play of light and shadows, an imaging comes to Nietzsche. It is not imagined, not a mere product of fancy, but comes as an imaging in the liberating space -time of light’s aimless play. With the imaging, Nietzsche’s solitary identity is altered-‘he’ becomes two. There are two sides to good and evil. On one side, there is authority, obedience, and the domination of established significations. Here the struggle that established the significations no longer images between signifier and signified. There is everywhere, on this side of good and evil, a terrible and swift violence maintaining the normalcy of signification. On the other side, there is the innocence of becoming. Two sides, without dialectical mediation-which is to say that the violence maintaining the normalcy of authority and obedience is powerless to appropriate the innocence of becoming. But within its dominion, the image of authority rules as the graven image of mastery. The good and the just reflect the graven image of mastery; they do the Lord’s work. They also make sure that the case of Nietzsche-Zarathrustra is understood as imaginative-schizophrenic, artistic fancy, or both. They work to insure that it is understood as Nietzsche’s Zarathrustra but never NietzscheZarathrustra. Normalization subjectifies, imposing its reflected image of mastery on all ‘things’. The master rules his subjects, who, as the good and the just, reflect and project this rule universally. Nietzsche-Zarathrustra normalized is Nietzsche the author of all ‘his’ voices. But even this imposition of authority does not effectively prevent the ‘author’s’ voices from becoming real beings: