From Friedrich Nietzsche’s 5 January 1889 letter to Jakob Burckhardt, in Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996), 347.
On the over-turn, see “Over-Turns” in my book (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film, revised and expanded edition (Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 2003; available for download as a PDF file at →), and “On Names: Letter to Lyn Hejinian” in my book Forthcoming (Berkeley, CA: Atelos, 2000), 179–194.
Friedrich Nietzsche: “The wisest men in every age have reached the same conclusion about life: it’s no good … Always and everywhere, you hear the same sound from their mouths,—a sound … full of exhaustion with life, full of resistance to life” (The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman; trans. Judith Norman [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 162).
One can go beyond Good and Evil in at least two other manners: by achieving the will, which eliminates one of the two terms, Evil (in the sense of what cannot be willed to recur eternally—even by the redeemer)—and eradicates death; and by having a Last Judgment. The Last Judgment is, paradoxically, God’s way of implementing Artaud’s program: to have done with the Judgment of God (pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu [the title of his cancelled, 1947 radio broadcast]), since beyond the Last Judgment there is no longer Good and Evil given that these would still be judgments. Since there can be Good and Evil until the Last Judgment but not beyond it, Heaven and Hell are beyond Good and Evil. There’s a General Judgment (aka Last Judgment) following the individual judgment, which is related to each of us as specific if not unique, because the General Judgment is one where everyone exclaims: “Every name in history is I.” The General Judgment is a sort of Buddhist complement to Islam and Christianity, their Zen moment.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, 162.
And if we go along with the Moslem accusation that the Gospels have altered and suppressed some of what Jesus Christ actually said and did, might it not be that Jesus Christ’s call to the physically dead Lazarus, “Lazarus, come out!” was preceded by these words that are absent from the New Testament: “Call not those who are slain in the way of Allâh ‘dead.’ Nay, they are living, only ye perceive not” (Qur’ân 3:169)?
“The world was made through him [the Son]” (John 1:10).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody, translated with an introduction and notes by Graham Parkes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 54.
That in the New Testament the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha is not asked what he saw to the other side of death indicates that the New Testament revolves around life.
Once the Holy Spirit gives him, who is then only alive and therefore really solely an animal, spirit, and God the world-creator creates a world and bestows it on him, the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha, in so far as he did not dream but always had a relationship to objects as such, was very different from animals.
Deleuze and Guattari comment: “You cannot go further in life than this sentence by James” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translation and foreword by Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 197. We are notified by Massumi in the corresponding note that the reported quote from James is actually his English translation of the French translation used by Deleuze and Guattari; the actual words in James’ text are: “She knew at last so much that she had quite lost her earlier sense of merely guessing. There were no different shades of distinctions—it all bounded out”). And indeed, who has gone “further in life” than the New Testament’s resurrected brother of Mary and Martha?
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, 35.
Jalal Toufic, Graziella: The Corrected Edition (Forthcoming Books, 2009; available for download as a PDF file at →), 67–68.
Those who consider that the Christ, the life, was resurrected must consider that his prior dying was his greatest miracle. Which is far more extraordinary in the era ushered in by the Christ, the life: dying or resurrection? In the case of a Christian, who is alive through Jesus Christ, the life and the resurrection, it is death, rather than resurrection, that should be accompanied by wonders. Indeed, according to the accounts of the Gospels, when Jesus was purportedly resurrected no signs and wonders appeared in the world, but when he died, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split” (Matthew 27:51).