The Nietzsche Murder Case

Abstract

This confusion embodies much of the early reception of Nietzsche as the quintessential outsider, the madman whose insanity is infectious. This moment in the history of Nietzsche's is well documented, at least within the catalogue of Nietzsche's influence on the literary world.2 Seeing a only within such limited focus removes the intricate web of implications summed up by the very concept of reputation from the totality of the process of history. It treats the interaction of books as if this were a possibility without the instrument of man functioning in the historical process. Recently, social historians such as Eugen Weber have asked questions of texts which smack of heresy, such as, Does the structural alteration of concepts have any relationship to social and political realities?3 Or, can any text (and in this context a is indeed a text) be understood as an abstraction if it is not rooted in some sense in a specific perception of the world?4 In another context, I have attempted to explode the view that any discussion of an idea can be undertaken without specific reference to the world in which it is embedded, and that structural shifts in complexes of ideas may have their roots in basic alterations (or continuities) of our perception of the world, as articulated in the sign systems' in which the idea is clothed.5 In this present essay, I would like to offer another case study in which the problem of the reception of an idea, here Nietzsche as pathogen, functions not merely in the world of books, but in the total reality of a period of history. Indeed, the very existence of such an idea in the world of daily life does more to focus the implications of