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PARTISAN REVIEW
the present, whereas Siegfried is the man of the future. We want him,
and wish for his arrival, yet we cannot create him. He must create
himself by means of our annihilation."
To Nietzsche too it seemed that large-scale destruction must
supervene before the future he wanted could be born. "When truth
starts battling with the lies of millennia, we shall have convulsions, a
spasm of earthquakes, a displacement of mountain and valley such as
no-one has dreamed of." In
The Genealogy of Morals
(1887) he had
criticised Aquinas for taking pleasure in the idea that the world would
be destroyed by fire on the Day of Judgment, but here, in
Ecce Homo
he
is enjoying his own jeremiads, which have an accuracy that suggests
the wars of the twentieth century. "The concept of politics will be
assimilated wholly into ideological warfare, all the power structures of
the old society will be blown up ... There will be wars such as there
have never been on earth." In fact, unlike Aquinas, he is associating
himself personally with his apocalyptic prophecy. "One day my name
will be associated with something catastrophic-a crisis such as there
has never been on earth, the most profound collision of con–
science ... I am not a man , I am dynamite." By now he was mentally
unbalanced, but he is not saying much more than he had said in a letter
of February 1884LO Malwida von Meysenbug: " It is possible that I am a
fatality for all the coming generations of mankind, that I am their
doom. Consequently it is very possible that I will one day fall silent;
out of love for humanity!!! "
He did fall silent, but only after going mad. The relish for the
holocaust is almost reminiscent of de Sade: in
Justine
Madam Clairwil
dreams of committing a crime which will go on causing chaos even
after her death. As Gilles Deleuze argues, the apathy of the Sadean
libertine depends on the masochistic pleasure of "denying nature
within the self and outside the self, and denying the self itself. " As
an immoralist Nietzsche was incomparably more conscientious than
de Sade, but what they had in common was a profound fear of desire as
a destructive force: hence their fantasies of des truction on a massive
scale. And because he could never come to terms with the libido,
Nietzsche was bound to fail in his project of compensating for an
unsatisfactory life by means of satisfying work. It may have seemed to
him that it was only human mediocrity he was rejecting in his fantasy
of the Superman; in fact it was also human desire.
Was he aware of the extent to which he was denying and repress–
ing libidinous forces which were finding their way through into
vengeful predictions? His self-observation was merciless, but he tended
