Volume XI, Issue II, Spring 2018

THE AGONIST
which his books themselves attest to. A book is a building, thus it is to be
entered through its front door, not a window on the third floor. Similarly, in his
study of Human, All Too Human, Jonathan R. Cohen outlines how, despite its
‘aphoristic’ style, the book “has a unified literary structure and integrity, which
are central to the communication of the book’s philosophical message.” 24 As
Camelia Elias has observed though, the aphorism is strictly not a fragment, thus
it isn’t Nietzsche’s use of aphorisms that would make the book fragmentary; in
fact, as Benjamin recognized much earlier, writing aphorisms is hardly proof
against systematic structures. “In terms of understanding the fragment as a
performative concept, rather than as a genre,” Elias explains, “the aphorism is
not close to the fragment at all.” Elucidating further, she states that theorists of
the aphorism “make a distinction between the form and content of the
aphorism at the expense of wit which figures in a subordinate relation to both
the semantic and syntactic structures identified in the aphorism. […] Insofar as
the aphorism thus shows a preference for form, it does not possess the same
potential as the fragment to be performative.” 25 This is a crucial distinction that
I do not believe Nietzsche scholars such as Danto have made. When seriously
considered, it will change how we read Nietzsche. Manuscript copies of
Nietzsche’s books also reveal that he deliberated over the order of their
numbered sections, and that he arranged them with painstaking care, often
changing their placement until finally settling on what he thought was the
perfect arrangement, a question not only of content, but of rhythm, pace, and
tempo. 26 The music of his architecture, the compositional aspect of his work, its
symphonic or orchestral structure.
There is an acute subtlety here that must be tended to, for if the tempo of
even a sentence is misunderstood as Nietzsche stresses, a sentence itself is
misunderstood. And if even syllables are rhythmically decisive and affect a
work’s symmetry, as series of vowels and diphthongs color and recolor each
other, how can we ignore the intricate structure of Nietzsche’s works? Further,
24 Science, Culture, and Free Spirits: A Study of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human (Amherst:
Prometheus Books, 2009).
25 Camelia Elias, The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre (Bern;
Berlin: Peter Lang, 2004), 9.
26 Aside from reading Nietzsche in his native — Saxon — German as Babette Babich
has implored, or rather, hearing him recited in Saxon-inflected German, as Paolo D’Iorio
has recently emphasized, what is also of utmost importance for our interpretive efforts
is returning to Nietzsche’s manuscripts themselves, for they offer illuminating insights even
the published books cannot. See Paolo d’Iorio, “The Eternal Return: Genesis and
Interpretation,” tr. by Frank Chouraqui, The Agonist, Vol. III, Issue 2 (winter 2010).
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