This summer Hayley and I have been low on funds because of our travels to Europe (which sounds like we could afford it in the first place, rest assured, we could not). Usually I buy books like some people buy sex and since I assume most people who frequent prostitutes don't have the money for it often that would put my book buying schedule at 1-3 books per month. Sometimes, during the more overpowering urges, I would buy 5 book at a time and those usually take quite a bit of time to catch up on. As it stands I have 5 books on my shelf that stand between me and being caught up and I should have read them this summer (some are quite promising, a Zizek, that Hegel-thing by Kojeve, even that really famous Arendt book). I didn't read them though and I don't really understand why - something about the heat is my guess. In the eyes of eternity it may have been virtuous to re-read all the philosophy books I was charged with for my philosophy history sequence but who wants to re-read Leibniz or Descartes without a really, really good material reason. I lacked such a reason.

Instead I used the library to check out Radical Orthodoxy: A new theology which was a book I'd been meaning to read since I was a first-year at Olivet. It was ok. Then I finished Works of Love, which was good since it has been sitting on my shelf for two years now in anticipation of a Craig Keen class I was never able to take. After that I tried to read some Levinas from my Levinas Reader, but something about the lack of a steady narrative throughout so-called readers made me stop. It was like two evangelical kids having sex for the first time and after one of them got off, they felt guilty and stopped, leaving the other one guilty but unfulfilled. What I needed was fulfillment, not guilt, and no one has less guilt than my old stand by on the bookshelf, Nietzsche. What I had forgotten was that Nietzsche is neither fulfilling nor easy. Sure, once you get him going it's a great time but all that foreplay!

Obviously if you have read Nietzsche you know it's not his writing that is difficult and indeed it seems that most people find him a pleasure to read. The trouble is that his thought is so condensed within each paragraph. Most of his works are short and thus readers, decieved by the length, approach them as if they were a short essay. This, it seems to me, is partly to blame for why he is so badly read: by the Straussians, by the Evangelicals and, likely, even by those like myself who have fallen in love with his thought. If one has the unfortunate and costly inkling to actually read a Nietzsche book, and do so as if that book mattered, they must approach it as if it were scripture. I don't mean to say that they must approach it as if it were reading something 'holy', that would mean we were reading poorly again, but rather I want to suggest that Nietzsche's texts hide within themselves, cover over and generally evade ascribing simple, singular meanings. In other words Nietzsche would never say something like, "I want to suggest..."

It seems that this scriptural aspect is most evident in his later works of Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo (though there are certainly traces throught the entire ouvre). I know what many of you who are vaguely familiar with Nietzsche are thinking but it wasn't his mental illness that created these beautifully inconsistent and thoroughly rich texts; it was his madness. Whenever I read these late works, as opposed to the early, I feel as if there is a certain religious madness at work. It isn't an obvious aspect, but if you read his nuances one can see little words of faith and little acts of love throughout. Though he seems (everything with Nietzsche is always a certain kind of "seeming") to want to move away from the pious stance of working for the glory of the truth and of loving life as life itself, it still seems as is if he is possessed like the followers of Bacchus in the midst of their revels. I think that may be the source of his good conscience, that his acts of faith, repugnant to his philological constitution, are never owned by him but always come as possession. This moment of irreligious destruction of all that is idolatry stands at noon and 'unites', or systematizes (stands together), the many moods of Nietzsche into something like a pseudo-whole that is shown only along the split/s of the self (as Alenka Zupancic has shown in The Shortest Shadow in her theory of a duality and Gilles Deleuze has shown in Nietzsche and Philosophy in his theory of the multiplicity of Nietzsche's thought). His rationality and his religious desire come together as antagonistic partners, even strange friends. Perhaps this should become part of our liturgy, if the Church were actually strong enough to allow for what Adam does, as a kind of prayer.

One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions; one remains young only on condition the soul does not relax, does not long for peace...