A God Torn to Pieces: The Nietzsche Case

Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture (SVMC)

by Giuseppe Fornari

Giuseppe Fornari’s groundbreaking inquiry shows that Friedrich Nietzsche’s neglected importance as a religious thinker and his “untimeliness” place him at the forefront of modern thought. Capable of exploiting his own failures as a cognitive tool to discover what other philosophers never wanted to see, Nietzsche ultimately drove himself to mental collapse. Fornari analyzes the tragic reports of Nietzsche’s madness and seeks out the cause of this self-destructive destiny, which, he argues, began earlier than his rivalry with the composer and polemicist Richard Wagner, dating back to the premature loss of Nietzsche’s father. Dramatic experience enabled Nietzsche to detect a more general tendency of European culture, leading to his archaeological and prophetic discovery of the death of God, which he understood as a primordial assassination from which all humankind took its origin. Fornari concludes that Nietzsche’s fatal rebellion against a Christian awareness, which he identified as the greatest threat to his plan, led him to become one and the same not only with Dionysus but also with the crucified Christ. His effort, Fornari argues, was a dramatic way to recognize the silent, inner meaning of Christ’s figure, and perhaps to be forgiven.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology

162 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2013

Reviews

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a post-Girardian psychoanalysis of Nietzsche in which Fornari proposes that Nietzsche’s mental breakdown was not the result of syphilis, as first insinuated by Thomas Mann, but was instead a kind of spiritual suicide that sprung directly from the trajectory of his thought. The death of Nietzsche’s father during his early childhood inaugurated a series of destructive relationships between the philosopher and various surrogate father figures, whom he both idolized and sought to displace in mimetic rivalry. The most notable such figure, of course, was Wagner; and the withering ridicule Nietzsche received for his own attempts at musical acclaim revealed him to be a timid soul who faced real social ostracism, but who, rather than coming to terms with his own vulnerability, pursued a project of ruthless self-divinization that entailed the sacrifice of the weak and marginalized (which included Nietzsche himself, though he refused to acknowledge it) for the aggrandizement of an Olympian elite.

Nietzsche’s realization of the sacrificial foundation of social order prompted both his psychic transmogrification into Dionysus-Zarathustra and brought into clearer focus his inveterate hatred for Christianity. The Dionysian Sparagmos, which for Nietzsche exemplified the sacrificial ethos of pagan antiquity, was Titanic or Maenadic in orientation: it represented the scapegoating phenomenon from the illusionary perspective of its perpetrators. Christianity, by contrast, had decisively revealed the innocence of all scapegoats and illuminated for all time the true nature of the sacrificial mechanism. Nietzsche sought consciously to reinstitute the pagan model of sacrifice in a great cultural dechristianization, but his entire project—trying to consciously reassert what was, in the pagan world, an unconscious social dynamic—was only conceivable in light of Christian revelation. The Dionysus-Christ mimesis was thus the final—and fatal—double bind from which Nietzsche could not emerge with his sanity intact. He hated Christ and launched furious attacks on what he considered to be a symbol of idiocy and ressentiment, but the Cross of Christ was fated to become his own.

Fornari concludes by suggesting, after presenting certain tantalizing quotes from Nietzsche’s late writings and the comments of those who knew him, that in the very culmination of his madness, through the very disintegration of his mental life and the shattering of his personality, Nietzsche came at last to recognize and embrace his identity with the true, perfect, and lifegiving victim-God: the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

[Andrew Marr · Rating 5 out of 5]

The opening chapters are hard to take as Fornari gives us the sordid details of Nietzsche's insanity. This, however, is an important antidote to the romanticization N.'s insanity often receives from those who present it as heroic. Fornari then builds on René Girard's critique of N. which zeroes in on N.'s acutely accurate understanding of Christianity which he nevertheless willfully rejects in favor of a revival of Dionysian sacrifice. Fornari details the deep scandalization on N.'s part at the life and death of Christ, a scandalization that he cannot overcome. In this respect, Alberg's discussion of scandal in "Beneath the Veil of Strange Verses" reinforces Foranri's insights and vice versa. Just as N.'s insanity has been romanticized, so has N.'s rejection of Christ been romanticized as an heroic act. Fornari suggests that Dostoevsky's novel "The Demons" is a more accurate portrayal of where this "heroism" ends up. The collective difficulty in the intellectual community with even seeing the centrality of N.'s discussions on Christianity and how N. sees how high the stakes are is astounding. This book gives us an opportunity to really see.

[Tika · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In order to realize his will to power, to claim a monopoly for his divine difference, Nietzsche had to unmask the resentment of others, and demystify society and human history as a whole. However, his self-transfiguration with an anthropological background was only half successful, that is to say, it was not successful, for the obvious reason that he applied his genealogy only to the desire of others and not to his own, since if he had applied it to him-self it would have destroyed the whole enterprise."

[Luke Nichol · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very brave piece of work on Nietzsche, which argues most of his philosophy was conducted whilst he was falling into insanity, compared to the usual understanding which views Nietzsche as falling into insanity, after the completion of his final book, his autobiography, 'Ecce Homo'. Nietzsche was not making his arguments from clinical illness, but a system of thought which he thought was needed and important to use.

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun Easter read.

[Burke Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read if interested in N