We, Nietzsche's readers

I believe that in the course of life of every philosophy student Nietzsche plays an outstanding role. His wild use of antireligious rhetorics, reproaches to platonism and "destruction of all values" makes him a voice that easily attracts many a youngster, who perceives himself one way or another exceptional.

But the most important of elements of his writting is his common and highly sophisticated usage of the term "we". He is the only philosopher that, in his texts, builds some sort of a partnership, or better, alliance with his reader. If we, while reading his late works (such as the Twilight of Idols or Genealogy of Morals), pay attention to his style, we notice that he never addresses himself to the subject of his critique or his contemporaries, but only to a secret communion (or a pact), formed by himself and his readers. But who are these readers? They (or "we") are nothing but a rhetorical function in his texts. "We" that Nietzsche speaks about when he says "we, the nihilists", "we, the moderns", "we, the lovers of the fresh air" or "we, the hyperboreans", is an internal function of his writing, or even better, one of the psychological types that Nietzsche is so fond of producing. His "antichrist", "priest", "donkey", "the spirit of weight" are all figures of a play that his philosophy stages. And among these roles one also finds the "we", the pact of Nietzsche and his reader, the secret and conspirative, the "supramoral", the "suprareligious" figure that lurks on the borders of the stage of his "philosophical plays". It is an textual entity in which we cannot separate a figure, a playwriter and the spectator. Nietzsche's "we" signifies a knot of himself (the "playwriter"), his reader (a "spectator") and a specific personification of a concept (a "figure") of his philosophy.

Aleš Bunta, a young Slovenian philosopher, recenty wrote some remarkable things concerning Nietzsche's usage of the term "we", one of his thesis being that Nietzsche's "we" must be understood in connection with his "deconstruction" of subjectivity. Nietzsche's short remark, "subject as multiple", is quite telling regarding this point. In his critique of subjectivity (see especially Will to Power), Nietzsche states that subject is not a selfclosed, selfreffering, spiritual and undivisible entity, but a compromise of a struggle of man's instincts. In La verite et les formes juridiques (see Dits et ecrits) Foucault observes that this kind of subjectivity is deeply political - it is not a harmonious and stable entity, but a resultant of a certain struggle, of a certain relations of powers. Here the second dimension of Nietzsche's "we" is disclosed: that of a tension, a struggle and a fight. When Nietzsche says "we", he does not simply means himself, an indivisible point of autorship, nor a homogenous and conspirative community of his readers, but a certain state that is barely holding its homeostasis. Nietzsche's "we" thus points to a certain multiplicity of authors, a certain struggle within Nietzsche's philosophy itself, to a certain polyphony of his style, to a battle, internal to his philosophy. That is also what is singular in Nietzsche's work: we can never totalize it, we can never fully know "on which side" is Nietzsche really on, we can never fully identify the figure/concept that truly inscribes Nietzsche into his writing.

This tension of the two "we" - the one of the community of his reader and himself, and the one of a sign of struggles and multiplicity, of an undecidedness of his texts - is one of the reasons why Nietzsche's philosophy can claim such an intimate position in a student's life and work. It is as if Nietzsche can become a part of one's life by offering a place in his texts, where one can examine or read oneself, laugh with Nietzsche, witness his philosophical struggle, and most importantly, breathe fresh air with him.