Nietzsche ‘s Madness

Abstract At first glance, a psychobiographical study of Nietzsche might appear inherently naive. After all, weren ‘t Nietzsche ‘s writings partly responsible for what literary theorists call the “death of the author, “ the current tendency of many scholars to dismiss any connection between an author ‘s subjectivity and his or her work? Doesn ‘t this imply that Nietzsche ‘s work also announced the “death “ of psychobiography (Sarup, 1993)? Perhaps. Yet as we so often find when examining Nietzsche ‘s texts, these strands of thought are interwoven with their polar opposites. Nietzsche ‘s apparent flight from the notion of alldetermining authorship is coupled with a desire to reconnect text with author, to use the lived experience of authors in rescuing their texts from what he saw as the thin, unbreathable air of impersonal and bloodless intellectuality. Philosophical ideas, for instance, are envisaged as “hav[ing] always lived on the ‘blood ‘ of the philosopher, they always consumed his senses and even, if you will believe us, his ‘heart.