ABSTRACT
The professor guiding the seminar was under no illusions about Friedrich Nietzsche’s anti-liberal ideas, but he was more interested in the aesthetic reaction against liberalism and Nietzsche’s influence on the creators of aesthetic-reactionary politics. The most generally useful part of the discussion of Zarathustra was the attempt to focus on the personality of the character Zarathustra and its relationship to Nietzsche’s personality. Turning away from Nietzsche for social and political reasons involved more than a rejection of the reactionary strain in his thought, however. Nietzsche’s discussion of his sickness and the role of his father’s death in his creativity seemed to suggest impressive self-knowledge. Rudolph Binion looks at Nietzsche’s involvement with Lou Salome in considerable detail. In the manuscript of the book, Nietzsche appears ambivalently as the last great exponent of the ideology of the genius and its first great critic.
