This text differs slightly in formatting from its original publication date.

Presented as part of session honoring David B. Allison’s work in Halifax, Canada, at a 2003 meeting of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy and was published with the other texts in that session as “Reading David B. Allison’s Reading the New Nietzsche,” Symposium 8/1 (Spring 2004): 19–35.

Nietzsche’s Übermensch is derived from Lucian of Samosata’s term hyperanthropos. I argue that Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman acquires new resonances in the context of that terminological origination in Lucian’s Kataplous — literally: sailing into port — referring to the journey of the soul into the afterlife, as escorted by Hermes and ferried by Charon along with myriads of others facing the same fate. The Kataplous he tyrannos, a title usually rendered as the Downward Journey (or The Tyrant), is a Menippean satire telling the tale of the “overman” supposed superior to others of “lesser” station in this-worldly life and the very same tyrant after his (ludicrously recalcitrant) transposition to the underworld. Reflecting on the life (and the death) of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, this essay also explores the politics of kingship for Empedocles as reformer as a political model for Zarathustra in terms of Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles and Nietzsche’s unpublished drafts on the same. In his Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Nietzsche points to a perspective beyond the here and now, beyond the “values” of our all-too-worldly and all-too-human concerns, whether in terms of perceived political/economic advantage or the pursuit of more everyday enjoyments. In addition to Zarathustra’s literal death (The Adder’s Bite), the essay includes a discussion of Zarathustra’s golden fishing rod (which only makes sense in connection with Lucian’s references in another dialogue, Piscator), food (“with Zarathustra even a king may be a cook”), and Zarathustra’s flight into the volcano together with C.G. Jung’s invocation of Hölderlin’s admirer, the Swabian poet and ghost story teller, Justinius Kerner.

The initial focus of this essay, apart from important preliminary references to Leonard Cohen is on kd lang, not as composer (although she is one) but musical performer and not as guitarist (although she is one) but as a singer and although her live performances have to make all the difference, very specifically, for the sake of any analysis, specifically as her singing is available in video format on YouTube. Of course there are many readings of kd lang and popular music, and of course most of them focus on the way she dresses, others look at her sexuality, and here, just for a bit, I also consider her musicality.

Like Empedocles, Nietzsche's Zarathustra tells us that the human being is something that should be overcome. and thus it makes a difference that we hear Zarathustra proclaim this teaching as the tightrope walker begins his doomed dance over the marketplace and that Zarathustra's fate. at least immediately, concerns the downward fall of this overman overcome by the danger of his calling. This same teaching conjoined with Zarathustra's diagnosis of ubiquity of the will to power, especially among the weakest. also underlines an arch or parodic turn and even mockery.

Hence and in order to get to Empedocles, I argue that it is necessary to read Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra as an overtly Menippean satire as Nietzsche refers to this tradition. Inasmuch as the satires attributed to the cynic Menippus of Gadara happen to be lost, I read Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra via the second century AD Lucian's "high" or serious, i.e., truth-purposing (as the ancients described it) kind of parody 1where Lucian relates to Menippus, at least in some part, as Plato does to Socrates.

the value of the Barison/Ross documentary for both political theory and philosophy is its illustration of the technological incursions or assaults on the river itself, that is to say: its representation of the ‘uses’ and hence of the changing aspects of the Danube in Eastern Europe beginning with the geographically stark landscape of Istria as the videographers map the drab poverty of the old political world contrasted with new construction sites and the discarded-sandwich-wrapping and ‘new’ poverty of a world of consumers representing the globalized nationalism and eager capitalism (as well as that goes, and these days that is going less and less) of the post-socialist world order. Given the geographic contours of this journeying, this same vision of transition, along and with the river, also includes national conflicts and the mappings and re-mappings of war. Beyond the problem of politicizing Heidegger’s political comments on the politicizing of the polis, there is the problem of metaphysical thinking matched only by (and just because it is the same as) calculative thinking. Metaphysical thinking is techno-scientific thinking.

In Bezug auf die griechische Platik sowie Nietzsche’s Texte argumentiert die Autorin mit Nietzsche gegen eine damals und noch heute weit verbreitete Auffassung, wonach wir solche Statuen fast unvermeidlich aus einem jüdisch-christlichen Gesichtspunkt betrachten. Außerdem geht sie besonders ein auf Nietzsches Beschwörung der Skulptur in dem Zarathustra-Abschnitt Von den Erhabenen.