Nietzsche Knows no Noumenon

It has become a virtual postulate in recent criticism that any competent reading of Nietzsche must attend to a perceived loss of sense, of semantic evacuation, incompleteness, and inconsistency in the Nietzschean text. Some critics even insist on axiomatic void at the very heart of his texts. In the most general terms, it would appear that two considerations compel this caution: a renewed awareness of Nietzsche's rhetorical resources-certainly, his almost profligate use of irony, metaphor, metonomy, and repetition-and a perplexity concerning his various epistemological formulations. To compound matters, Nietzsche's epistemological accounts often seem to confuse two traditionally distinct spheres, that of a proper knowledge claim and the language through which the claim may be articulated. Acutely aware of the constraints governing the possibility of comprehension, Paul de Man, for example, concludes his analysis on a note of obdurate pessimism; namely, that the reader is condemned by a war of rhetoric to an apparently endless process of deconstruction, a veritable cancellation or destruction of the Nietzschean text itself.1 Less eristically, perhaps, Carol Jacobs claims that the Nietzschean text is nonetheless defeated and rendered dumb by the defect of a congenital stammering, a rhetorical agency which menaces the definitive distinction between iden

Epistemology · Noumenon · German Literature and Culture Studies · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

• Nietzsche and drawing near to the personalities of the pre-Platonic Greeks

  Open Access•Sean D Kirkland•Man and World•2011

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