Since Professor Nietzsche’s ultima verba turned into aphasia, it is easy for doctors to see this as a confirmation of their own reality principle: Nietzsche w e d beyond the limits, he lapsed into incoherence, he ceased to speak, he howled or remained silent. No one sees that science itself is aphasic, and that if it admitted it had no foundation, no reality would subsist — from which it derives a power that induces it to calculate: it is this decision that invents reality. It calculates so as not to have to speak, for fear of falling back into nothingness.

Culture (the sum total of knowledge) — that is, the intention to teach and learn — is the obverse of the soul’s tonality, its intensity, which can be neither taught nor learnt. The more culture accumulates, however, the more it becomes enslaved to itself — and the more its obverse, the mute intensity of the tonality of the soul, grows. The soul’s tonality catches the teacher by surprise, and finally breaks with the intention to teach: the servitude of culture thus breaks forth at the moment it collides with the muteness of Nietzsche’s discourse.

We must not overlook two essential points that have hitherto remained veiled, if not passed over in silence, in the study of his thought. The first is that, as Nietzsche’s thought unfolded, it abandoned the strictly speculative realm in order to adopt, if not simulate, the preliminary elements of a conspiracy. It thereby made our own era the object of a tacit accusation. The indictment had been handed down by the Marxist exegesis, which had at least exposed the intention of the conspiracy, since every individual thought of bourgeois origin necessarily reveals its complicity in a class ’conspiracy’. But there is a Nietzschean conspiracy which is not that of a class but that of an isolated individual (like Sade), who uses the means of this class not only against his own class, but also against the existing forms of the human species as a whole.

Pessimism, anger, worthless secrecy, returning as little money as possible into any economy (mainstream, alternative or sub-cultural), information theft, used clothing, shopping in garbage cans, and product recycling rooted in economic necessity more than ecological concerns.... Economic and social isolation from the reified body of consumer culture by witnessing but not following trends (which inevitably means becoming distanced from loved ones who value community, fashion, comfort, stability, etc.), all the while living neck deep in dominant culture feces (whatever one's culture) with no Waldenesque dreams of social transcendence or escaping to an Eden lost.... Admitting an aversion to family structures, making a conscious effort to leave no DNA progeny behind, and being unforgiving of the egomaniacle presumptiveness of birthing in a world overpopulated with abused, neglected and orphaned children.... Life devoid of authenticity. These means are the closest I can come to consciously connecting with the processes of abstraction and alienation inherent in our era of capitalist globalization. They cannot result in personal or social transformation, despite unavoidable dreams of transformation. They absolutely cannot be collective, despite unavoidable longings to overcome loneliness and isolation. They do not bring happiness. They are my continued undoing in a world in which I am already undone. A colleague emails, "Yes, okay, but what is next?" to which I do not respond because I know she knows that there is no next step, only plodding and meandering toward nothing in the middle of everything, like shopping in a crowded Tokyo department store, until we drop. The flow of the crowd may at times give a sense of direction, but it is motion within a non-transcendental meaninglessness that has zero zen potential. (Of course, I am only interested in the idea of zero, and not of zen.)