Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

introducing autobiographical frames for their discourses, conversational intimacies, historical
locales, and so forth. In modern times, Nietzsche, more than any other philosopher, has been
keenly aware of these problems. The autobiographical in his text, his eccentric and highly
personalised divagations and detours work against the philosophical ideal of lofty
disinterestedness. 103 More-over, Nietzsche did not just apply this strategy to his own texts, but
sought to disillude the transcendental anonymity of philosophical discourse by opposing the
personality and prejudices of the philosophical author to the ostensible objectivity of his system:
What makes one regard philosophers half mistrustfully and half mockingly is . . . that they
display altogether insufficient honesty, while making a mighty and virtuous noise as soon as the
problem of truthfulness is even remotely touched on. They pose as having discovered and
attained their real opinions through the self-evolution of a cold, pure, divinely unperturbed
dialectic . . . while what happens at bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an 'inspiration', generally
a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the
event—they are one and all advocates who do not want to be regarded as such, and for the most
part no better than cunning pleaders for their prejudices which they baptise 'truths' . . . 104
Of course it is inconceivable that the philosophical labour could get underway without some
attempt at disinterestedness. How indeed could a groundwork of the metaphysic of morals
proceed along conative lines and still possess value and credibility as a contribution to the
discipline of moral philosophy? But this is not Nietzsche's point. Philosophers present their
conclusions as the outcome of strictly disinterested inquiries into the problems of truth, knowledge
and morality, as consequences absolutely necessitated by purely rational procedures. In
Nietzsche's view, however, this bourne is established from the outset. The text is written
backwards; the philosopher reasons from conclusions to premises. Schopenhauer is by nature
moribund and misanthropic, thereafter he weaves that wonderful vindication of pessimism and
resignation known to us as The World as Will and Representation; Kant is a religious moralist,
therefore he seeks to prove the existence of the 'starry heavens above and the moral law within'.
For the critic of philosophical disinterestedness, the art of reading becomes that of retracing this
primordial itinerary over and against the manifest structures of the text. To utilise such a strategy,
to reread the author, his desires, prejudices, and drives, into the philosophical text, so far from
consolidating the idea of the philosopher as the suzerain subject of his text, works rather to
dismantle any such privilege. This insistence on the inescapably autobiographical element in any
philosophy leads Nietzsche directly to the anti-transcendental theories of will-to-power and
genealogy:
It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession
on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; moreover, that the
moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy have every time constituted the real germ of life
out of which the entire plant has grown. To explain how a philosopher's most remote
metaphysical assertions have actually been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to ask oneself
first: what morality does this (does he —) aim at? I accordingly do not believe a 'drive to
knowledge' to be the father of philosophy, but that another drive has, here as elsewhere, only
employed knowledge (and false knowledge!) as a tool. But anyone who looks at the basic drives
of mankind to see what extent they may in precisely this connection have come into play as
inspirational spirits . . . will discover that they have all at some time or other practised philosophy
—and that each one of them would be only too glad to present itself as the ultimate goal of
existence and as the legitimate master of all the other drives . . . In the philosopher . . . there is
nothing whatever impersonal; and, above all, his morality
bears decided and decisive testimony to who he is—that is to say, to the order of rank the
innermost drives of his nature stand in relative to one another. 105
As Nietzsche understood, perhaps better than any other, to affirm the impersonality of a
philosophical system is the first step toward ascribing that system a transcendental value and
vice versa. Consequently, Nietzsche rigorously inscribed the authorial subject within the system.
Any criticism, and any theory which seeks to challenge the transcendence of a discourse will thus
eventually find itself drawn to a form of retrospective inference 'from the work to its author, from
the deed to its doer, from the ideal to him who needs it, from every mode of thinking and valuing
to the imperative want behind it'.106 So far from endorsing one another, from belonging to one
another as aspects of the same subject, the transcendental subjectivity of philosophical systems,