Carlyle through Nietzsche: reading Sartor Resartus. (2024)

Carlyle's Sartor Resartus is given a new reading here in thelight of Nietzsche's brief but suggestive comments on Carlyle andhis dyspepsia. It is seen as a text fascinated by devouring and the fearof being devoured (as with The French Revolution). Carlyle'sRomantic investment in standing up as a man is read in the light of thisfear of obliteration, which, however, has as its other side the dangerthat Carlyle moves towards a fetishistic investment in manhood. There isalso a reading of Dickens, giving close attention especially to Dombeyand Son in the light of the vocabulary of Sartor Resartus, pursuing thetheme of what Dickens takes, consciously and unconsciously, fromCarlyle.

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I was reading the life of Thomas Carlyle, that unwitting,involuntary farce, that heroic-moral interpretation of dyspepticconditions.--Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetor outof need, constantly provoked by the longing for a strong faith and thefeeling of being incapable of it (--in which he is a typical Romantic!)The longing for a strong faith is no proof of a strong faith, rather theopposite. If you have faith, then you can allow yourself the fine luxuryof scepticism: you are secure enough, firm enough, fettered enough forit. Carlyle anaesthetizes something in himself by the fortissimo of hisadmiration for people with a strong faith, and by his rage against thosewho are less naive: he needs noise. A constant and passionate dishonestywith himself--that is his proprium, it is what makes and keeps himinteresting. Of course in England he is admired precisely for hishonesty [...] Now that is English--and considering that the English arethe nation of complete cant--even fair enough, and not merelyunderstandable. Basically Carlyle is an English atheist seeking to behonoured for not being so. (1)

It is fascinating to see Carlyle, author of the six volumes of theHistory of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great(1858-65), being commented on by Nietzsche, who was givenFriedrich's name since he was born on his name-day ('thisperfect day', as Nietzsche calls it in Ecce hom*o). (2) For thefirst writer, history, defined as 'the essence of innumerablebiographies', is the definitive subject, since 'what is allKnowledge [...] but recorded Experience, and a product of History?'(3) He is confronted by the philosophy which discusses the uses, butalso stresses the disadvantages, of history for life, and which,rejecting the idea of past knowledge as commanding for the present,writes: 'I teach to you the Overhuman. The human is something thatshall be overcome [...] All things so far have created something beyondthemselves.' (4) Nietzsche's 'overhuman' breaks theconfines of what has been defined as human thus far, including what hasbeen defined as worthy of hero-worship, and in that sense it is theantithesis of any of the right-wing appropriations that have been madeof him: as are his comments on Carlyle.

We should look at the detail of these comments. According to HillisMiller's paraphrase of Nietzsche, Carlyle's proprium, or hispropriety, what was proper to him, was 'the impropriety of aconstant passionate dishonesty against himself' (p. 7), anunconscious self-deception. While Nietzsche talks of England and'cant', Froude, Carlyle's biographer, comments onCarlyle's hatred of 'cant'--'organised hypocrisy,the art of making things seem what they were not; and art [...] carryingthem beyond the stage of conscious falsehood into a belief in their ownillusions, and reducing them to the wretchedest of possible conditions,that of being insincerely sincere'. (5) Yet the impossibility ofgetting out of 'illusions' is at the heart of what makesCarlyle 'interesting', as Nietzsche finds him to be. Later inTwilight of the Idols (IX. 44), he calls him a 'great man';while in Ecce hom*o he distinguishes the idea of the Ubermensch from'the "hero cult" of that great and involuntarycounterfeiter Carlyle' (p. 41). (6) 'Counterfeiter'suggests again self-deception at work, even if unconscious, but the wordalso implies that not only Carlyle's choice of great men or heroes,but the idea of heroes is a form of counterfeiting, producing a dudreading of history, comprising heroes who are counterfeits.

Nietzsche's comment on Carlyle pathologizes him, in seeing himas living in 'dyspeptic conditions' which are associated withhis repression and self-division. (7) Historically, the dyspepsia inCarlyle seems to have settled in from 1818 onwards. Nietzsche saysnothing about the relation between such self-division and the questionof Carlyle and his relationship to sexuality, which, however speculativethe material, can hardly be ignored by a latter-day commentator, butwhich would certainly not have lessened Carlyle's self-dividedstate. (8) For Nietzsche, dyspepsia relates to the impossibility offorgetting the past, being held by its past constructions, a conditionthat he sees as brought about within modernity. Forgetting in Nietzscheis not something that happens, it is something we actively do, and thefunction of 'active forgetfulness'

resembles that of a concierge preserving mental order, calm, anddecorum. On this basis, one may appreciate immediately to what extentthere could be no happiness, no serenity, no hope, no pride, no presentwithout forgetfulness. The man in whom this inhibiting apparatus isdamaged and out of order may be compared to a dyspectic (and not onlycompared)--he is never 'through' with anything. (9)

On this reading, Carlyle is marked by obsession about the past, andcannot find the insouciance (the serenity, the hope, the pride) to livein the present. Twilight of the Idols argues that his rhetoric exhibitsa desire for a great man, and for faith, both things of the past, andacts as a drug to keep him from the awareness that such a thing cannotexist in the present, that it can only be constitutive of thecounterfeit; that it is nihilistic to demand it. Further, the knowledgein Carlyle at some level of the futility of what he writes and of thecounterfeiting power of his rhetoric causes him to be in a state ofanger against others, those less 'naive' who do not requirethe illusions that he creates through his writing; this would account,partially, for the resentment of democracy in such a text as'Shooting Niagara: And After?' (1867). The greatness thatCarlyle values becomes inseparable from simple-mindedness; it is adesire for something unquestioned and unquestioning, as when, in theessay 'Characteristics' (1831), he says that 'the healthyUnderstanding is not the Logical, argumentative, but the Intuitive; forthe end of Understanding is not to prove and find reasons, but to knowand believe'. (10) The language implies, in its resistance todoubt, submission and simple certainty; but in Nietzsche's argumenttrue 'greatness', inseparable from an accompanying scepticism,is not at all simple. Carlyle, desiring greatness, is a split subject,and that shows in his anger. He admires the single-minded, but he cannotgrapple with greatness, because greatness is not single-minded.

While this paper will explore the implications of Carlyle'sdyspepsia through a reading of Sartor Resartus, his most interestingwork, to read Nietzsche on Carlyle will also have to note that what hewrites is symptomatic in that it was produced by the nineteenth-centurydiscourse he did so much to create, as with Dickens, who met him in1840, wanted him present in 1844 when he read The Chimes to his friends,used part of Latter-Day Pamphlets in David Copperfield, dedicated HardTimes to him, and spoke of his 'wonderful book', The FrenchRevolution (1837), in the Preface to A Tale of Two Cities. To readCarlyle is also to read Dickens. (11) And it must be noted that Carlyleconsidered his society to be in a pathological state, as the followingpassage suggests:

the whole Life of Society must now be carried on by drugs: doctorafter doctor appears with his nostrum, of Cooperative Societies,Universal Surage, Cottage-and-Cow systems, Repression of Population,Vote by Ballot. To such height has the dyspepsia of Society reached; asindeed the constant grinding internal pain, or from time to time the madspasmodic throes, of all Society do otherwise too mournfully indicate.('Characteristics', p. 83)

Carlyle's persistent dyspepsia must be read as being not asingular or personal state, but general, as part of the condition ofEngland: the condition of modernity, to follow Nietzsche. This wouldmodify the view of Rosemary Ashton, when she says that Carlyle's'frequent use of unpleasant smells as metaphors ornames--Teufelsdrockh means "devil's dung", the popularname for asafoetida, a strong-smelling herb used as anemetic--represents his striking way of giving vent in his social andpolitical criticism to a disgust which, as he well knew, had its rootsin his unfortunate physical condition'. (12) It is perhaps notpossible to say whether Carlyle's dyspepsia was rooted in socialcauses, a dyspepsia at work there, or whether its physical presencecaused a dyspeptic reading of society, or whether the distinctionbetween the two forms of dyspepsia cannot be maintained. Whatever istrue, how Carlyle pathologizes society turns out to be true of himself.Raymond Williams notes a similar problem: that 'Signs of theTimes' comments on 'veneration for the physicallystrongest' and on how 'we worship and follow afterpower', yet that this becomes true of Carlyle, who has noted it inothers, so that Williams is only following Nietzsche in finding inCarlyle 'impotence projecting itself as power'. (13)

Sartor Resartus ['The Tailor Patched'] appeared inFraser's Magazine, from November 1833 to August 1834, as a book inAmerica in 1836 and in Britain in 1838. It gives, in fragmented form,the opinions on clothes of the imagined Professor Teufelsdrockh ofWeissnichtwo [Know-not-where], fragments of thought put together andcommented on by the editor. Teufelsdrockh's work on clothesconcludes that 'whatever sensibly exists, whatever representsSpirit to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit of Raiment, put on fora season, and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject ofCLOTHES, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought,dreamed, done, and been: the whole external Universe and what it holdsis but Clothing, and the essence of all Science lies in the PHILOSOPHYOF CLOTHES'. (14) The argument has reached this conclusion bysaying that 'all visible things are emblems' while alllanguage is the 'Flesh-Garment, the Body, of thought' (pp.56-57), so that to follow Carlyle's thought would be to find thatthere was nothing existing that had not a supplementary character to it,nothing that was not the expression of something that also existed insupplementary form. This argument is accompanied by the editor'sexcerpts from the autobiography of Teufelsdrockh, who 'belongs tothat mystery, a Man' (p. 92). As G. B. Tennyson writes, the work'is studded with Carlyle's attempts at a definition ofman'. (15) In this, Carlyle is not different from the Utilitarianswhom he most attacks through Sartor Resartus, even if the Utilitarianattempt to form a science of man he finds mechanical, reductive. Thethird Book returns to Teufelsdrockh's opinions, and it is thesection where it is easiest to find Carlyle looking for a 'strongfaith' and a great man. There is discussion of those who areexceptional: George Fox, who 'stands on the adamantine basis of hisManhood, casting aside all props and shoars' (p. 160); and of thesymbol as another name for clothes: 'the Universe is but one vastSymbol of God; nay, if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but aSymbol of God?' (p. 166). The editor concludes with Teufelsdrockhas 'one of those who consider Society [...] to be as good asextinct' (p. 176), needing a new birth, like a Phoenix. Chapter 7,'Organic Filaments', discusses 'Mankind' as in'living movement' and finding 'Hero-Worship'obligatory: 'So cunningly hath Nature ordered it, that whatsoeverman ought to obey, he cannot but obey' (p. 190). The followingchapter, on 'Natural Supernaturalism', indicates what it mustaffirm, chief among these being the power of 'wonder', whichis dimmed by Custom: the emphasis leads into Mr Gradgrind in Hard Timestelling his daughter, 'Louisa, never wonder!' (16)

'Natural Supernaturalism', thinking of the power of'custom' to blunt wonder, adds:

still the new question comes upon us: What is Madness, what areNerves? Ever, as before, does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific,altogether infernal boiling up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through thisfair-painted Vision of Creation, which swims thereon, which we name theReal. Was Luther's Picture of the Devil less a Reality, whether itwere formed within the bodily eye, or without it? In every the wisestSoul, lies a whole world of internal Madness, an authentic Demon-Empire,out of which, indeed, his world of wisdom has been creatively puttogether, and now rests there, as on its dark foundations does ahabitable flowery Earth-rind. (pp. 196-97)

The passage reappears as an autocitation in The French Revolution,where Carlyle calls 'Habit'--which includes clothes--aprotection, not a prevention, against wonder. There is a completereversal of the direction of the argument, as if Carlyle was on bothsides at once, willing change and yet resisting it, anaesthetizinghimself against it, as Nietzsche would say:

Rash enthusiast of Change, beware! Hast thou well considered allthat Habit does in this life of ours; how all Knowledge and all Practicehang wondrous over infinite abysses of the Unknown, Impracticable; andour whole being is an infinite abyss, overarched by Habit, as by a thinearth-rind, laboriously built together?

But if 'every man', as it has been written, 'holdsconfined within him a mad-man', what must every Society do? [...]'Without such Earth-rind of habit', continues our Author,'call it system of Habits, in a word, fixed ways of acting and ofbelieving,--Society would not exist at all. [...] [L]et but, by illchance, in such ever-enduring struggle,--your 'thinEarth-rind' be once broken! The fountains of the great deep boilforth; fire fountains, enveloping, engulfing. Your'Earth-rind' is shattered, swallowed up; instead of a greenflowery world there is a waste wild-weltering chaos;--which has begun,with tumult and struggle, to make itself into a world. (17)

There is nothing to the human; only an abyss. Or, better, there isnothing but the power of madness, which has the capacity to blast whatseems 'Real' out of existence, and that is the motor-forcewithin history. (18) Such a power is outside the control of the human:'such a singular Somnambulism, of Conscious and Unconscious, ofVoluntary and Involuntary, is this life of man' (I, 410). Bothpassages which have been quoted from The French Revolution are behindLouisa Gradgrind's sense of the co*ketown chimneys, when she tellsher father: 'There seems to be nothing there but languid andmonotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire bursts out,father.' (19) Carlyle's 'custom' or'habit' has become in Dickens something more specific: themonotony of co*ketown. Louisa's awareness of energies beneath thesurface ready to burst out aligns her with what the editor callsTeufelsdrockh's 'deep Sansculottism' (p. 160; see alsopp. 13, 46, 49, 51, 181), a rebelliousness which Carlyle's textsimultaneously admires and dreads.

Carlyle's image of energies which cannot be contained insidebut which explode outwards contrasts with his other sense of a societyclogged by dyspepsia, but the phrase 'swallowed up' in thequotation from The French Revolution shows an alternative fear, which isexpanded in the statement 'the lowest, least blessed fact one knowsof, on which necessitous mortals have ever based themselves, seems to bethe primitive one of Cannibalism: That I can devour Thee' (FrenchRevolution, , 57). There is nothing there except the abyss, and yet, incontradiction, there is a fear of being devoured, which can be tracedthroughout Sartor Resartus. (20) 'Man' is inherently nothing,but at the same time he is in danger of being consumed. In the chapter'Getting under Way' the editor thinks that Teufelsdrockhsuffers from an 'afflictive derangement of head', since hereflects that:

Saturn, or Chronos, or what we call TIME, devours all his Children:only by incessant Working, may you (for some threescore and ten years)escape him; and you too, he devours at last. (p. 99)

Yet this pessimism is confronted by another attitude that discoversfrom the philosophy of clothes: 'Thus is the Law of Progresssecured, and in Clothes, as in all other external things whatsoever, nofashion will continue' (p. 37). The 'Progress' that meansthat time's improvements can never be negated is also destruction,Time as Saturn; again the text seems to put Carlyle on both sides of theargument at once. And that latter image is not isolated: it returns atthe end of the chapter 'The Twenty-Two' in The FrenchRevolution, commenting on the end of the Girondins. Carlyle concludeswith a quotation from their executed leader, P. V. Vergniaud: 'TheRevolution, like Saturn, is devouring its own children' (11, 329).Yet here there is something strange, which inclines to identify theRevolution not with the children, which would be expected (in relationto the ancien regime), but with the oppressive patriarchal force, asthough the revolutionary children were also the force of Saturn, theold, melancholic god. To read the image in a way that gave it sensewould mean that the Revolution must be understood, not as brought intoexistence in a moment of time, but as always there, as identifiable withthe forces of oppression that are normally thought to bring it on.Revolution and its opposite are to be identified, in Carlyle, likedevouring and progression. The Revolution is seen as a climax ofcannibalism, no sort so 'detestable' (11, 376), and the fearis that it is not yet over, and that it appears as the triumph of themadness that comes from below, as in the following passage, whichobjectifies the revolutionary force: 'O mad Sansculottism, hastthou risen, in thy mad darkness, in thy soot and rags, unexpectedly,like an Enceladus, living-buried, from under his Trinacria? They thatwould make grass be eaten, do now eat grass, in this manner?' (I,216). Yet, as said before, in Sartor Resartus such eating is not part ofrevolution, but of living: Teufelsdrockh blames the Time-Spirit whichhas imprisoned him within the 'Time-Element', so that:

Me, however, as a Son of Time, unhappier than some others, was Timethreatening to eat quite prematurely; for strive as I might, there wasno good Running, so obstructed was the path, so gyved were the feet.(pp. 99-100)

If Life is a continual process of devouring, the text identifies itwith both time and death. (21) And everything else takes on thatcharacter: even reading partakes of the model of devouring, when in'Characteristics' Carlyle finds that 'Literature' isbecoming 'one boundless, self-devouring Review'('Characteristics', p. 87). To write is to be consumed; whileeven friends in 'The Everlasting No' section of SartorResartus are said to have 'too-hungry souls' (p. 127).

Images of devouring run through 'The Everlasting No', thepart of Teufelsdrockh's autobiography where he undergoes a crisis.The editor comments in partly sympathetic, partly ironic mode uponTeufelsdrockh, whose life has a 'hot fever of anarchy and miseryraging within', while he is at the same time defining himself as'Man', and speaking of himself as 'whollyunreligious'. The editor reflects that such readers who have found,'in contradiction to much Profit-and-loss Philosophy [...] thatSoul is not synonymous with Stomach', and who understand, inTeufelsdrockh's words, 'that for man's well-being, Faithis properly the one thing needful; how, with it, Martyrs, otherwiseweak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross, and without it,worldlings puke-up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst ofluxury', will know that this loss means 'loss ofeverything' (p. 124). The 'one thing needful' quotes fromLuke 10. 42, and is quoted in turn in the opening chapter-title of HardTimes. The dyspepsia implicit within the word 'puking' will benoted, as well as its extremism; it seems that martyrdom or suicide andweakness or strength are the only choices, and because suicide is seenas a form of vomiting up life, and is posited as the likely result oflack of faith, and as happening in conditions of luxury, which are, bythis image, rendered conditions of decadence, there is also the sensethat life can only be vomited up; that the sick are not the'worldlings'--who seem to have the power to be sick, and tovomit up their lives--but 'existence' itself. The possiblechoices are, to be devoured or to vomit up, or to be vomited up.

A speech from Teufelsdrockh follows on, attacking the 'foolishWord-monger and Motive-grinder, who in [his] Logic-mill hast an earthlymechanism for the Godlike itself, and wouldst fain grind me out Virtuefrom the husks of pleasure' (p. 124). The passage may be comparedwith two others:

That process of Science, which is to destroy Wonder, and in itsstead substitute Mensuration and Numeration, finds small favour withTeufelsdrockh ... 'Shall your Science', says he, 'proceedin the small chink-lighted, or even oil-lighted, underground workshop ofLogic alone, and man's mind become an Arithmetical Mill, whereofMemory is the Hopper, and mere Tables of Sines and Tangents,Codification, and Treatises of what you call Political Economy, are theMeal? (p. 53)

The section refers also to 'Logic-choppers, and professedEnemies to Wonder, who, in these days, so numerously patrol asnight-constables about the Mechanics' Institute of Science'(p. 53): it is suggestive for the classroom scenes in Hard Times, whichare also based on the Mechanics' Institutes of the 1820s. (22)Starr's annotations to Sartor Resartus (pp. 293, 349) find inCarlyle's rhetorical 'Logic-mill' and 'ArithmeticalMill' a pun on James Mill. In keeping with Carlyle'santi-Utilitarianism, these passages, which include an almost hystericalsense of the deliberate abolition of wonder, seem to have provided thename Gradgrind. But not just him. In Dombey and Son the son of PollyToodle is patronized by Mr Dombey, who sends himo off to the'Charitable Grinders' school, where the number of the son is'one hundred and forty-seven'. (23) This charitable schoolgrinds out charity, making its pupil 'Rob the Grinder'.

Related images and puns on Mill appear in 'Symbols' inBook Third, where, in the present, which is run by'Motive-Millwrights',

Mechanisms mothers [Man] worse than any Nightmare did; till theSoul is nigh choked out of him, and only a kind of Digestive, Mechaniclife remains [...] the world would indeed grind him to pieces. (p. 167)

The 'mill' here is one in which the soul--as opposed tofacts--is processed, chewed over, and produced as fragmentary, ground topieces. In 'The Everlasting No' the context is that of thosewho would make the idea of Happiness 'our true aim': itcritiques Bentham. In the earlier essay 'Signs of the Times'(1829) the Utilitarian philosopher was seen as 'not creat[ing]anything, but [...] [is] a sort of logic-mills, to grind out the truecauses and effects of all that is done and created'. (24) Theabsence of creation, and the sense of Utilitarianism crushing what hasbeen created, seems basic.

This part of Sartor Resartus makes two further accusations againstthe Utilitarian: one, that he attempts to substitute for the absent'Godlike', his 'earthly mechanism' being a desire toproduce absolute reality, denying the temporary nature of all forms ofreality (their nature as mere 'clothes'). The second is thatBenthamism argues that virtue, or duty, can emerge out of pleasure, thatpleasure comes first, and that when that is consumed (leaving husks: asin the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15)), there is the possibilityof Virtue, but the image makes pleasure never more than empty husks. Yetbesides this, there seems the unstated fear that the Utilitarian may beright, that Virtue has no reality; that the heroic Prometheus (whoseliver was consumed by eagles) was wasting his time, that the onlydiseases are not those of 'Conscience' but 'the diseasesof the Liver'--signs of dyspepsia, which the passage wills to be aspiritual condition, the dread being that it could be cured. And theidea of pleasure has been deliberately reduced to the most material:Utilitarians say that 'man's Soul is indeed [...] a kind ofStomach' (p. 91). The stomach, which recalls the parable of thebelly in Coriolanus, has become, by association, like a mill,'digestive, mechanic', undiscriminating but still'grind[ing]' and 'chop[ping]' everything that itreceives since it must be satisfied. In this mill motives arefragmented, made into things conducive to pleasure by a machine whichimposes a constant demand, and is satisfied only in the dissection ofmotives. Hence Teufelsdrockh feels he is being devoured, whilemeditating on the 'Infinite nature of Duty' which was'still present to me: living without God in the world, ofGod's light I was not utterly bereft [...] in spite of allMotive-grinders, and Mechanical Profit-and-Loss Philosophies' (p.126).

The Utilitarian mill grinds things, and devours life; but alsoinduces dyspepsia in Carlyle and in Teufelsdrockh: what'Characteristics' called 'a constant grinding pain'.The opposition of Carlyle to the Utilitarian can be read as that of thedyspeptic (who can neither digest nor devour) against the person who cando both. But, in another reading, the quotation from'Characteristics' implies that dyspepsia producesUtilitarianism, which becomes, therefore, a dyspeptic state. In whichcase the stomach, the devourer, the mill, a Utilitarian object initself, is marked out by 'constant grinding pain'. Carlyle(like Teufelsdrockh) suffers from grinding taking place both within (inhis own stomach) and without (from the mechanical age). His stomach,turned into the mechanism that he so resists, becomes the image of lifeitself, whether as in the mechanical philosophy of Utilitarianism, or inrevolution. Further, the passage in 'Characteristics', sinceit continues with the 'mad spasmodic throes of all Society',adds the implication that society as a stomach suffers the spasms thatare associated with vomiting. So society either devours or vomits,produces dung or vomit, the two possibilities inherent inTeufelsdrockh's name and its herbal association. Devouring andvomiting are equivalent forms bringing about destruction.

Yet that devouring image must be placed alongside the weak, ornostalgic, sense that Teufelsdrockh gives of having the sense of God('in my heart He was present' (p. 126)) even while goingthrough the crisis. In Nietzsche's terms, he cannot admit his'atheism'; he remains on the side of right, beingnon-transgressive, passive, in the midst of fears of the devouring powerof the mechanical age. Since he assumes the rightness of his theismwithout question, he never fully confronts the challenge of themechanical age, which means that he simplifies both his own position andthat of Benthamism.

Perception of being devoured returns in a longer passage whichbegins by quoting Satan, from Paradise Lost (I. 157-58), that 'tobe weak is the true misery'; yet Teufelsdrockh lacks the heroism ofthe rebel, and the argument about weakness turns into another argument:

yet of your Strength there is and can be no clear feeling, save bywhat you have prospered in, by what you have done. [...] A certaininarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimly in us; which only our Workscan render articulate and decisively discernible. Our Works are themirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too,the folly of that impossible Precept, Know thyself; till it betranslated into this partially possible one, Know what thou canstwork-at. (p. 126)

As life is sickness, inducing suicide, so it is attended byself-consciousness, which is also summarily rejected; the self cannot belooked at except through works, which act as its mirror. The note thatsuggests that self-knowledge--equated with self-consciousness--wouldproduce self-hatred is apparent; hence the inadmissibility of theSocratic teaching 'Know thyself'. Instead, there must be anobjectification of the self through its works; the self is not known,save through action, which, by the conclusion of 'The EverlastingYea' has become production ('Produce! Produce!' (p.149)). And that indicates how much Teufelsdrockh is part of the beliefin progress, with the implications of enforcing demands on labour;making himself part of the Utilitarian philosophy he so forcefullyrejects. The passage defines 'man' through the ethos ofproductivity; its denial of the privilege of introspection, which isblocked off as a possibility, allows the dishonesty towards the selfthat Nietzsche comments on. But Teufelsdrockh feels he has produced'Nothing'. Hence the sense of guilt: 'In midst of theircrowded streets, and assemblages, I walked solitary; and (excepting asit was my own heart, not another's, that I kept devouring) savagealso, as the tiger in his jungle' (p. 127).

In this period of unbelief, it is not the absentee God that hefears, but the absentee Devil:

you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe wasall void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was onehuge, dead, immeasurable Steamengine, rolling on, in its deadindifference, to grind me limb from limb. O, the vast, gloomy, solitaryGolgotha, and Mill of Death! (p. 127)

How potent this image is, of a mill which 'grinds' andconsumes, whose wheels roll on in an indifference which is said to be'dead', appears when it is taken over by Dickens in Dombey andSon, in a different context, when Carker, on the run from Dombey, iskilled--if not consumed--by the train:

[He] felt the earth tremble--knew in a moment that the rush wascome--uttered a shriek--looked round--saw the red eyes, bleared and dim,in the daylight, close upon him--was beaten down, caught up, and whirledaway upon a jagged mill, that spun him round and round, and struck himlimb from limb, and licked his life up with its fiery heat, and cast hismutilated fragments in the air.

When the traveler [Dombey], who had been recognized, recovered froma swoon, he saw them bringing from a distance something covered, thatlay heavy and still, upon a board, between four men, and saw that othersdrove some dogs away that sniffed upon the road, and soaked his bloodup, with a train of ashes. (25)

The chapter is significantly called 'Rob the Grinder Loses hisPlace'. The boy, produced by the 'Charitable Grinders',has gone into work for the equally mechanical Carker, the modernmanager; and here the employer of the Grinder is ground down. The trainis animate, alive, with red--as if bloodshot--eyes that hunt down theirobject, but it is also the mechanistic mill, and this contradictoryquality in it that gives it the character of the nineteenth-centuryfetish will need to be discussed further, at the end. It is the'jagged' mill, that which cuts its own script on the body, asit cuts a jagged line through towns and country, both breaking it andimprinting the body with the signs of its own automaticwriting-processes. Dickens has identified Carlyle's'steam-engine', patented by James Watts in 1769, with thelocomotive engine (first called a 'steam-engine' in 1825), andhe has identified both with the mill: the train as the mill, and assymbol of the Benthamite machine age, and more intense in form than themachine-like Carker, consuming his life-blood in a way that the dogswould like to do. The dual image of licking up the blood (devouring) andcasting the fragments into the air (vomiting up the body) followsCarlyle. The last image, the 'train of ashes', puns on thetrain as an industrial mill, a factory--productive of ashes--and asdelivering death, and requiring ashes to be laid in its'train'; its trace, its track, being ashes, like husks,markers of death, like Carlyle's reference to 'Golgotha'.

Carlyle's 'dead indifference' passage has as sequelthe editor referring to Teufelsdrockh's 'sickness of thechronic sort' and quoting from his autobiography about thetemptation to suicide:

How beautiful to die of broken heart, on Paper! Quite another thingin Practice; every window of your Feeling, even of your Intellect, as itwere, begrimed and mud-bespattered, so that no pure ray can enter; awhole Drugshop in your inwards; the foredone soul drowning slowly inquagmires of Disgust! (p. 127)

The passage concludes with the fear of being consumed (of drowning)and with disgust at the body (which, via the French degout, wouldinclude dyspepsia). But the body has been identified with'disgust' itself; as though it makes filthy the intellect;suicide bringing that out further. There is a shift of intensity from'mud' to 'quagmire', which increases the sense ofabjection. The state of 'smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consumingfire' persists into this sense of the self about to disappear:

I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining Fear, tremulous,pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as if allthings in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath would hurt me; as ifthe heavens and the Earth were but boundless Jaws of a devouringMonster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured. (p. 128)

The crisis climaxes in the dog-days (the time of madness) in anepisode in the Rue Saint Thomas de l'Enfer, when a'Thought' suddenly rises in him, making him ask himself whathe is afraid of, and whether he cannot '"trample Tophet itself[...] while it consumes thee?" [...] And as I so thought, thererushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul' (p. 129). Thepassage seems integral to that quoted from Dombey and Son; it is as ifthe stream of fire is both that of Tophet, the burning power of hell,and the energy of the self which responds. It enables a reading of thestreet-name, which is both the place of hell, where the subject mustwalk, the urban landscape of Paris, or Edinburgh, and also, because itis the place of Thomas Carlyle, it gives the sense that Carlyle musthimself be of hell: that he can take no other position, that he wants tobe Thomas of Hell. Suddenly losing fear, his 'whole Me' has'stood up'--like the Sansculottes--in reply to the'Everlasting No' which had said:

Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (theDevil's), to which my whole Me now made answer, 'I am notthine, but Free, and forever hate thee!' It is from this hour thatI incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism;perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man. (p. 129)

The response wishes to be diabolical, transgressive, as the imageof the Baphomet implies. The language of hatred is loaded, yet the moveis not towards heterogeneity, or otherness, but towards conformity tothe centre, standing up as a 'Man'. The repeated phrase the'whole Me' shows a will towards being thought of as a single,unified subject, with no Nietzschean scepticism, while being 'aMan' allows neither self-doubt nor self-consciousness. (26) Yet thepassage cannot allow such simplicity, for the 'whole Me'simplifies and objectifies the self, since there remains, outside it,the 'I' who uses that term. Becoming a 'Man' cannotbe a single state; there is something supplementary, outside that stateand naming it; no more than the Utilitarian can define Man can Carlyledo that. At the cost of such self-simplification he ceases to 'eathis own heart' (p. 130), which recalls how he declared he wasdevouring himself when he was like a tiger in the jungle (p. 127). Hehas not been separate from the forces of life, and time, and revolution,and mechanism, that have eaten him; he has been sad*stic towardshimself. Now he has ceased to be of the 'inward Satanicschool' (p. 130) but only through 'Annihilation of Self'(p. 142). There is a language of hatred when the self is self-accusinglycalled 'nothing other than a Vulture [...] that fliest through theUniverse seeking after somewhat to eat; and shrieking dolefully becausecarrion enough is not given thee' (p. 146). This image of a deadworld precedes words intended to put self-consciousness behind, openingup the way to purposive action and work: 'Close thy Byron; open thyGoethe'. (27) So: 'the self in thee needed to be annihilated.By benignant fever-paroxysms is Life rooting out the deep-seated chronicDisease, and triumphs over Death.' That annihilation of self,through sickness destroying sickness, is 'the EVERLASTINGYEA'. The 'chronic disease' implies the enduring, ongoingsickness or fever described in 'The Everlasting No', but italso implies sickness caused by time, or by modern times. Annihilatingthe self and the modern age seems to be the same thing, part of thesoul's 'internecine warfare with the Time-spirit' (p.148). Annihilation of self seems to relate to its unfulfillable desirefor happiness. Two ideas come together: a critique of Utilitarianism, asthe principle behind the modern age which endorses the idea of pleasure,and rejection of the idea that the soul can ever think of itself interms of happiness. The appropriate response must be'renunciation' (p. 145). The second Book ends withTeufelsdrockh gaining 'the spirit and the clear aims of aman', everything illustrating 'indomitable Defiance' and'boundless Reverence' (p. 155).

Nietzsche sees Carlyle as producing a 'counterfeit'solution, in what can be seen as this pumped-up self, described as a'Man' in reaction to fear of being devoured. Another word for'counterfeit' would be 'fetish': that which has, inNietzsche's terms, no 'proprium'. Carlyle uses the word'fetish' in the satire on dandies, the aristocracy, and the'silver fork' novel, in 'The Dandiacal Body', whichmakes fun of those who live by clothes, whose 'Life-devotedness toCloth' shows a 'willing sacrifice of the Immortal to thePerishable' (p. 207):

To the psychologic eye [dandyism's] devotional and evensacrificial character plainly enough reveals itself. Whether it belongsto the class of Fetish-worships, or of Hero-worships or Polytheisms, may[...] remain undecided. A certain touch of Manicheism [...] isdiscernible enough [...] To my own surmise, it appears as if thisDandaical Sect were but a new modification, adapted to the new time, ofthat primeval Superstition, Self-Worship, which Zerdusht, Quangfoutchee,Mohamed, and others strove rather to subordinate and restrain than toeradicate; and which only in the purer forms of Religion has beenaltogether rejected. Wherefore, if any one chooses to name it revivedAhrimanism, or a new figure of Demon-Worship, I have, so far as is yetvisible, no objection. (p. 209) (28)

The passage makes an implicit alliance of'fetish-worship'--worship of clothes as having magic,animistic powers--to hero-worship. Worship of clothes is worship ofsymbols, and 'Man' is no more than a symbol of God--but doesCarlyle believe in God? A question that Nietzsche answers in thenegative, saying that he is an 'English atheist seeking to behonoured for not being so'; but it may be said that the language offetishism is precisely that which allows for the question to be avoided,not to be answered finally, and for the text to be on both sides of theargument, to be for illusion or the counterfeit, and against it. (29)This, in Nietzsche's terms, is Carlyle's 'constant andpassionate dishonesty with himself', and is an instance of whatFreud's essay on fetishism calls 'disavowal'(Verleugnung): where something is both known and yet the knowledgedenied at the same time. (30) The passage conjoins fetish-worship andhero-worship, and, surprisingly, since it associates the first of thesewith polytheism, puts them both together with 'self-worship',the ultimate monotheism. The latter term associates with Utilitarian andmechanical selfishness, and appears in the phrase 'self-love'in a context also to do with fetishes. The chapter 'Symbols',which discusses their temporality, says that 'a day comes when theRunic Thor, with his Eddas, must withdraw into dimness [as an immediate,powerful symbol]; and many an African Mumbo-Jumbo, and Indian Wau-Wau beutterly abolished'. Similarly, the Royal Sceptre and the Pyx havebecome no more than wood. Hence:

wouldst thou plant for Eternity, then plant into the deep infinitefaculties of man [...] plant into his shallow, superficial faculties,his Self-love and Arithmetical Understanding, what will grow there. AHierarch [...] and Pontiff of the World will we call him, the Poet andinspired Maker, who, Prometheus-like, can shape new Symbols, and bringnew Fire from Heaven to fix it there. (p. 170)

In this familiar argument, where several things have beenunexpectedly aligned--the fetish and the symbol, hero-worship andself-worship--the mechanical principle prevents anything else fromhaving an effect, and the hero of the future must be a Prometheus,transgressive, rebellious, revolutionary. Dickens's perception ofthe train in Dombey and Son does not separate these things: the train, arevolutionary force in the novel, is the mechanical mill, yet its redeyes mean that it is seen as animistic, with a fetish-like reality.Carlyle's sense of the fetish belongs with the Mumbo-Jumbo and theWau-Wau as instances of the primitive symbol, destined to be seen as nomore than 'gilt wood', 'foolish boxes', 'woodentools'. Yet worshipping the hero may also be a form of fetishizing,even self-worship. If so, what emerges has significance forCarlyle's proposition that everything partakes in symbolism, eventhe category of 'Man' as that which, as animated, 'standsup' to the dead universe. To 'the psychologic eye' such afetish seems specifically masculine, and, as in Freud, who theorizes thefetish as that which disavows the male fear of castration, its sexualreference is that it defends 'throne and altar'--masculinefetishistic images of security--against the feminine('Fetishism', p. 352). Here, apart from Freud, the authorityis Dickens, who annotates 'Mumbo-Jumbo' as that which keepsthe woman in awe, and protects male illusions:

I observe, reading that wonderful book The French Revolution again,for the 500th time, that Carlyle, who knows everything, don't knowwhat Mumbo Jumbo is. It is not an idol. It is a secret preserved amongthe men of certain African tribes, and never revealed by any of them,for the punishment of their women. Mumbo Jumbo comes in hideous form outof the forest, or the mud, or the river, or where not, and flogs thewoman who had been backbiting, or scolding [...] Carlyle seems toconfound him with the common Fetish, but he is quite another thing. Heis a disguised man, and all about him is a freemasons' secret amongthe men. (31)

It seems that a 'disguised man'--this invokes, again, thepower of clothes--supplements the visible power of masculinity bysomething else, and the need for that declares the inadequacy of thatvisible power without it. Carlyle's and Dickens's interest infetishism associates with Carlyle's fear, in Latter-Day Pamphlets,of 'phallus-worship'. (32) This associates withfetish-worship, and with what should be its notional opposite,'hero-worship', but perhaps the willingness to define'Man' in terms of greatness and heroism contains as muchphallus-worship in it as Carlyle attacks in those others whom heperceives as living by the power of fetishism.

Carlyle claims Zarathustra as a figure who tried to eradicateself-worship, which is now 'revived Ahrimanism, or a new figure ofDemon-Worship'. But this attempt to make Zarathustra a figure whomakes a sharp separation between self-worship (yet this is butfetish-worship) and the self that stands up in its manhood asindependent of that does not relate to Nietzsche's Zarathustra,whom Nietzsche revived in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to undo precisely whatCarlyle endorses, that which Nietzsche considers Zarathustra'sprimary error. According to Nietzsche, the Zarathustra of Zoroastrianismsaw 'in the struggle between good and evil the actual wheel in theworking of things: the translation of morality into the realm ofmetaphysics, as force, cause, end-in-itself, is his work. [...]Zarathustra created this most fateful of errors, morality.' (33)Hence the reification in Zarathustra of the demonic figure of Ahrimanes.Nietzsche's Zarathustra must be brought back to undo his error ofseeing good and evil as objective, inherent in the world-order. Theargument by which he does so moves very complexly towards undoing thevery concept of stable identity. That associates with the point thatNietzsche finds the idea of a substantial and enduring 'doer'behind any deed an instance of fetishism at work. (34) It is a productof the dyspeptic thinking that holds on to valuations established in thepast as though they could define and control the present moment.

Carlyle's 'interest' shows, then, in the way he cansee and not see these contradictions, and is caught within theillusionism that fetishism implies. His rhetoric makes'fetish-worship' illusory, counterfeit, just as much as theworship of other symbols. Yet, as if he is held by the rhetoric whichsays, in the teeth of the evidence, that the fetish has magic powers, itremains not quite illusory for him; something else within him and withinthe discourse around him, which Nietzsche calls 'dyspepticconditions', continues to believe in its power. The result is that,'passionately dishonest' to himself, he must define'Man' in single and simplifying terms of masculinity, andheroism, and power, and make an absolute of all those things whose valuehe also knows is only as the fetish.

JEREMY TAMBLING

UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

(1) Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. by Duncan Large(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 49. The passage is quoted byJ. Hillis Miller, '"Hieroglyphical Truth" in SartorResartus', in Victorian Perspectives, ed. by John Clubbe and JeromeMeckier (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 1-20 (p. 7); Miller assumesNietzsche was reading a German translation of James HurrellFroude's two-volume Life of Carlyle (1882 and 1884), published inGerman in 1887, one year before Twilight of the Idols. His essay drawsout Nietzsche's debt to Emerson, much influenced, of course, byCarlyle. For Hillis Miller, the deconstructive properties of languagemade it inevitable that Carlyle's writing should be unable toexpress a fundamental honesty: the point is interesting, but not theargument adopted here.

(2) Nietzsche, Ecce hom*o, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 7.

(3) Carlyle, 'On History' (1830), in A Carlyle Reader:Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, ed. by G. B. Tennyson(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 57, 56.

(4) Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by Graham Parkes(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 11.

(5) J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London,2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1891), 11, 18.

(6) G. B. Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Structureand Style of Thomas Carlyle's First Major Work (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 317, simplifies when he says that'Nietzsche himself felt only contempt for Carlyle's search forfaith, and dispensed with him as an "atheist who makes it a pointof honor not to be so".'

(7) On Carlyle's continual dyspepsia, and his hypochondria,see Simon Heffer, Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle (London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), pp. 46-47, 54-55. For a review of Hefferand a comparison with Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), see Mark Cumming's review inVictorian Studies, 40 (1997), 661-63.

(8) The absence of the sexual in Carlyle's marriage (seeHeffer, pp. 88-90) was discussed by J. A. Froude, My Relations withCarlyle (1903; repr. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971): hesaid 'that their marriage was not a real marriage, and was onlycompanionship' (p. 4); and the book discusses GeraldineJewsbury's comments to Froude, based on her relations with JaneWelsh Carlyle (pp. 20-23).

(9) Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Section 1,trans. by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 39.

(10) Carlyle, 'Characteristics', in A Carlyle Reader, ed.by Tennyson, p. 71. Further references in the text.

(11) I discuss The French Revolution in relation to A Tale of TwoCities in my Dickens, Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of theScaffold (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 129-54, and Carlyle and Dickensin relation to Latter-Day Pamphlets in 'Carlyle in Prison: ReadingLatter-Day Pamphlets', Dickens Studies Annual, 26 (1998), 311-34;see also my comments on Chapter 58 of David Copperfield in my editionfor Penguin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004). See also William Oddie,Dickens and Carlyle: The Question of Influence (London: Centenary Press,1972), pp. 41-60; Michael Goldberg, Carlyle and Dickens (Athens:University of Georgia Press, 1972), pp. 78-99; and George H. Ford,'Stern Hebrews Who Laugh: Further Thoughts on Carlyle andDickens', in Carlyle Past and Present: A Collection of New Essays,ed. by K. J. Fielding and Rodger L. Tarr (London: Vision, 1976), pp.112-26.

(12) Rosemary Ashton, Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of aMarriage (London: Pimlico, 2003), p. 36.

(13) Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1850(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 90, quoting 'Signs of theTimes' (1829) from A Carlyle Reader, ed. by Tennyson, p. 50.

(14) Sartor Resartus, ed. by Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 57-58; furtherpage-references are given in the text. See also this edition forbibliography of writings on Sartor Resartus. Use has also been made ofthe edition by Mark Engel and Rodger L. Tarr (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2000), given as 'Tarr' plus page reference.In addition to Tennyson, see Gerry H. Brookes, The Rhetorical Work ofCarlyle's 'Sartor Resartus' (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1972).

(15) Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus, p. 320; see examples on pp.320-22. This fits with the work of Foucault on Bentham in Discipline andPunish, finding the Panopticon a means by which a science of man isdeveloped: I refer to my Dickens, Violence and the Modern State, Chapter1, for this. To read Carlyle's Romanticism as complicit with thisis to see the power of a discourse which is intent on defining'man'.

(16) Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. by Paul Schlicke (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 64.

(17) Carlyle, The French Revolution, ed. by K. J. Fielding andDavid Sorensen, 2 vols in 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1,40.

(18) See on these passages John D. Rosenberg, Carlyle and theBurden of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 13-14.

(19) Dickens, Hard Times, ed. by Schlicke, p. 132.

(20) On this see Lee Sterrenberg, 'Psychoanalysis and theIconography of Revolution', Victorian Studies, 19 (1975), 241-64.

(21) Philip Rosenberg, The Seventh Hero: Thomas Carlyle and theTheory of Radical Activism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1974), relates this to what he quotes from Carlyle: 'the perpetualContradiction [that] dwells in us', the 'diseased mixture andconflict of life and death' (pp. 26, 43).

(22) See on these Robin Gilmour, 'The Gradgrind School:Political Economy in the Classroom', Victorian Studies, 11 (1967),207-24.

(23) Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. by Alan Horsman and Dennis Walder(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 65.

(24) Carlyle, 'Signs of the Times', in A Carlyle Reader,ed. by Tennyson, p. 47.

(25) Dickens, Dombey and Son, p. 823. For the connection betweenthe passages, see Oddie, Dickens and Carlyle, pp. 117-18.

(26) Rosenberg writes: 'more ardent Freudians than I mightmake much of the bold-faced "my whole ME stood up [...] I directlythereupon began to be a Man"' (p. 12).

(27) The passage is referred to in Mill's Autobiography (1873)as relating to 1826-27: Mill 'had not heard of theanti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle [...] But I now thought that[happiness]was only to be obtained by not making it the direct end.[...] Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. Theonly chance is, to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, asthe purpose of life' (J. S. Mill, Autobiography (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1963), pp. 120-21).

(28) Here, Zerdusht is Zoroaster, the Greek name for Zarathustra,Quangfoutchee is Confucius; and Ahriman is a demonic figure fromZoroastrianism. 'Fetishism' appeared earlier in SartorResartus, where in the 'Sorrows of Teufelsdrockh' chapterTeufelsdrockh comes out with the aphorism 'that I had my Living toseek saved me from Dying--by suicide' and adds that 'in ourbusy Europe, is there not an everlasting demand for Intellect, in thechemical, mechanical, political, religious, commercial departments? InPagan countries cannot one write Fetishes?' (p. 121).

(29) In Marxism, the word associated with fetishism is the'phantasmagoria'; cf. Teufelsdrockh's sense of living inillusion: 'we sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and DreamGrotto' (p. 42).

(30) Freud, 'Fetishism', in On Sexuality: Three Essays onthe Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, ed. by Angela Richards, ThePenguin Freud Library, 7 (London: Penguin, 1977), pp. 351-57 (p. 353).

(31) To Forster, summer 1851, in The Pilgrim Edition of the Lettersof Charles Dickens, ed. by Madeline House and others, 12 vols (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1965-2002), VI: 1850-1852, ed. by Graham Storey,Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis (1988), pp. 452-53. The editorsrefer to French Revolution, I. 1. 1 and III. 6. 4. OED cites FrancisMoore, Travels to the Inland Parts of Africa [i.e. West Africa] (1738),for Mumbo Jumbo as idol, as bugbear to keep women in awe, and aslanguage.

(32) See my 'Carlyle in Prison', pp. 321-24. OED creditsCarlyle with the first use of 'phallus-worship'.

(33) Nietzsche, 'Why I am A Destiny', in Ecce hom*o, pp.97-98; see also Parkes's introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra,pp. xi-xii.

(34) 'We become involved in a crude fetishism when we makeourselves conscious of the basic premises of the metaphysics of language[...] this is what sees doer and deed everywhere; it believes in thewill as cause in general, it believes in the "I"'(Twilight of the Idols, p. 18). For the reading of eternalrecurrence--the central idea in Thus Spoke Zarathustra--as the undoingof a concept of the 'same' and of identity, see my BecomingPosthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, 2001).